Ghost Letters (17 page)

Slowly, Gil stepped out into the hall and made his way to the landing. The house was in darkness, though he could see a dim glow from his grandfather's office downstairs. The sound of typing continued, pausing for a few seconds, then resuming, as if the words were emerging slowly from the poet's mind.

The stone steps didn't creak but Gil held the banister as he went down. He could see a crack of light under Prescott's office
door, which was slightly ajar. No other lights were on in the house. Gil almost expected Kipling to come padding up behind him, but then he remembered …

Without knocking, he pushed open the door, then stopped abruptly. The desk lamp was on, but his grandfather's chair was empty. Gil heard the clicking of the typewriter keys, but nobody seemed to be in the room. Then he smelled a familiar odor and, at the same moment, saw something that made him clench his teeth. The skeletal hand was poised above the typewriter keys and one of its bony fingers tapped a couple of letters.
Tdhik
…
Tdhik
…

All at once the hand must have sensed Gil's presence. It jumped like a grotesque grasshopper, off the desk and through the open window. From where he stood, rigid with fear, Gil could just make out the spectral shape of the hand disappearing across the moonlit lawn. A lingering stench of perfumed decay filled the room.

When he finally got up the courage to go near the typewriter, Gil found a poem typed on the page:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“ 'T is some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

Only this and nothing more.”

Immediately, he recognized the first stanza of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, which his teacher had assigned in English class last fall. Typed beneath the stanza was a separate line:

Ponder no more! These Keys unlock a scrambled Alphabet …

He shuddered at the memory of the ticking sounds. The spinster's hand was trying to leave him a message, Gil felt sure of that, but there didn't seem to be any meaning in the words.

The circular keys on Prescott's typewriter were in the same order as on a computer keyboard, though several of the letters had been worn off from years of use. The dented surfaces fit Gil's fingertips, and when he gently pressed them, he could feel the springs and levers poised to write. Remembering the bony fingers picking out the letters, Gil abruptly pulled back both hands and glanced up at the portrait of Camellia Stubbs on the wall. In the picture, she was touching the black lace collar of her blouse with four long, pale fingers and a thumb. Gil tried to imagine how this woman had lived her whole life alone after Ezekiel sailed away. It seemed so pointless that she had wasted all those years, just because of a lost letter.

Gil couldn't understand why anyone would ruin their life like that, but as he looked at Camellia's face, he could see the tragic
determination in her eyes. Lowering his own eyes to the typed lines on the page, Gil tried to figure out again what the words meant. He wondered if he should show it to Prescott, though he knew his grandfather would think it was another practical joke, like the mailbox, the gripe-water bottle and the genie. He certainly wasn't going to believe that the spinster's hand had typed these words in the middle of the night.

Pulling the paper out of the typewriter, Gil folded it in half and headed back up to his room. The stone floors and steps felt colder underfoot, and he kept looking behind him in the shadows until he was safely back in bed. Lying under the covers with the light still on, Gil read the stanza of poetry over and over again, followed by the cryptic line. “Ponder no more! These Keys unlock a scrambled Alphabet …” Maybe, if he hadn't interrupted the hand, it would have left a more complete message. Eventually, the repetition made Gil fall asleep, but even in his dreams the riddle circled through his mind, as he saw himself sitting at the typewriter, fingers flying over the keys as he typed and typed, unable to stop. After a while, when he looked down at the keys, Gil realized it wasn't a typewriter but a skeleton on which his fingers were drumming, the keys like knuckles and the levers like ivory bones radiating out of a severed wrist.

AA military academy! Mom, you've got to be kidding!”

“Your father and I have decided, this is the best school for you …”

“No, it isn't. I don't want to learn how to march and salute and shoot a gun. I just want to go back to seventh grade like everybody else. The last thing I'm planning to do is join the army.” Gil let out his breath in exasperation.

“Howitzer Academy is a very prestigious school. A lot of their students get accepted at the best universities. It doesn't mean you have to join the army, but it might teach you some discipline.”

“Yeah, like boot camp. You know I quit Cub Scouts after three days.”

Still holding the phone to his ear, Gil gently pounded his forehead against the wall.

“Gilbert! We had a lot of trouble getting you admitted to
Howitzer. I had to go and personally meet the commandant. They don't usually take students midway through a semester, but he's made an exception.”

This time Gil knocked his head a little harder.

“Commandant! It sounds like I'm going to be a prisoner of war. I can't believe this! It's worse than McCauley. How could you do this to me? Where is this place?”

“It's in Michigan,” his mother said, her voice strained. “On the Upper Peninsula, a beautiful campus surrounded by woods, on the shores of Lake Superior.”

“Michigan? The Upper Peninsula?” Gil groaned. “That's worse than Alaska. It's winter eight months of the year.”

“This is for your own good, Gil. Remember, you brought it upon yourself.”

Now he threw himself back on his bed.

“Yeah, right. I'm guilty as charged, but that doesn't mean I have to face a court-martial. Forget it, Mom! I'll have to wear a uniform!”

“I think you'll look very nice. When I was there the cadets were all lined up on the parade ground, and it made me so proud just thinking you'd be one of them.”

“No way! There's no way I'm going to a school like that. I'd rather just drop out and work at Happy Sundae for the rest of my life.”

“Gilbert! Now listen to me. It's all been decided. Your father and I are coming up on Friday and we'll drive you home, then fly to Michigan on Saturday. Make sure you've got everything
packed. No arguments. No complaints. This is the best thing that could happen to you.”

• • •

After Gil hung up, it took him several minutes before he could think straight. In his worst nightmares, he hadn't imagined that this was going to happen.
How could his parents do this to him?
Howitzer Academy. It sounded like the sort of place where they lined you up and shot you at dawn.
Yes, sir! No, sir! Ready, aim, fire, sir!

As soon as he calmed down enough to call Nargis, Gil began to try to figure out how he was going to get out of this mess. Fortunately, Nargis was at home, and by the time he reached her house, she already had the Web site for Howitzer Academy pulled up on her computer screen. Nargis saluted and grinned at him as he came into her room.

“It's not funny!” he said.

“I think you'll look great with red stripes down your pants. And I can't wait to see the haircut …”

“Shut up!” he said. “You may think it's a big joke, but somehow I've got to figure some way out of this.”

Nargis's expression turned serious.

“Why don't you just go to school here in Carville?” she said. “You can keep on living with your grandfather.”

“Yeah, I know, but my parents don't want me going to a public school. They think it's beneath them.”

“But Carville has a good school. You'll like my teacher, Mrs. Ballantine. Why don't we go and speak to the principal
tomorrow? I'm sure it will be fine and your grandfather will probably agree.”

“Yeah. But once my parents get an idea in their heads, they never back down. They're coming to get me on Friday.”

Nargis glanced over at the computer screen, which had pictures of Howitzer Academy. The main building looked like a prison with high walls and barred windows. There were two cannons out front. Instead of dorms they had barracks. Scrolling down the site, Nargis clicked on the daily schedule, which began with reveille at six each morning, a three-mile run, shoe polishing for half an hour and classes from eight to four, with only fifteen minutes for lunch. After school there were obstacle courses and drills at the firing range. Dinner was at five thirty sharp, followed by two hours of homework and lights out at eight.

“You have to go to bed at eight o'clock!” said Nargis.

“Yeah, and you have to wake up at six!” Gil added.

“And no girls allowed!” Nargis winked at him.

For a moment, Gil didn't answer. Then he put his head in his hand. “This sounds worse and worse.”

“Wait,” said Nargis. “Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, what are we going to do about the letters?”

“I don't know,” said Gil in despair. “I don't care what Lenore says, I'm not some sort of messenger!”

Tapping the keys on her computer, Nargis entered the search word
Ajeebgarh
. For the past few days she'd been surfing the Internet, trying to find some explanation or answer to what was going on. Ajeebgarh brought up all kinds of articles and references, from a PhD dissertation by a history professor at
the University of Wisconsin to a Web site called Ajeebgarh .com, which had a couple of old photographs of the town in 1898, with British troops occupying the palace. There was even a reference to Ajeebgarh in a rap song by a British boy band, that didn't seem to have anything to do with anything at all. Though the computer gave them random bits of information, none of it seemed as if it would help solve their problem.

The blue bottle stood empty next to the computer, its scuffed glass catching the light from the screen. Sikander's last message lay unfolded beside it, along with the letters.

“What are you going to write back?” asked Nargis.

“What can I say?” Gil said. “I mean, ‘Sorry to hear about your war' sounds kind of pathetic.”

Placing his fingers on the keyboard of the computer, Gil remembered the typewriter keys, the round steel rims and dented surfaces. He looked down at the letters and typed in “A. K. Jaddoowalla's Gripe Water,” then clicked on
search
. The computer took a few seconds to digest the phrase but all that came up on the screen was the message

UNABLE TO LOCATE THIS TERM. TRY ANOTHER KEYWORD.

It was almost as if the genie were inside the computer, frustrating all of their attempts to solve the problem.

“I still can't figure out what this letter means,” said Gil, picking up the envelope containing the false moustache.

“It's obviously some kind of code,” said Nargis. “Maybe if you type it into the computer …”

Gil stared at the garbled letters for a moment—ZGH LTEKTZ—then glanced down at the keyboard on the computer.

“Hey! Wait a minute,” he said. “I've got an idea. Look at what was typed by the spinster's hand. ‘Ponder no more! These Keys unlock a scrambled Alphabet.' “

Nargis peered over his shoulder, not sure what he meant. “I don't get it,” she said.

“This message is written in a scrambled alphabet,” said Gil. “The key is the typewriter keyboard.”

“Okay …,” said Nargis, still uncertain.

“If you replace the letters on the keys with the letters of the alphabet in the correct order, it gives us the code. Instead of
Q
it's
A
. And
W
is
B
. Take the first word of the message:
Z
is
T
,
G
is
O
and
H
is
P
.” With each letter, he pointed at the keys. “That spells
TOP
.”

They did the same with the second word.

“Secret,” said Nargis. “TOP SECRET.”

After that, they wrote down the letters on the keyboard and underneath they wrote the alphabet:

Q W E R T Y U I O P
A S D F G H J K L
Z X C V B N M

A B C D E F G H I J
K L M N O P Q R S
T U V W X Y Z

Using the keys they quickly unscrambled the message.

TOP SECRET
I HAVE MET WITH VILLANOV. HE ASSURES ME
RUSSIA HAS NO INTEREST IN AJEEBGARH TEA.
NO NEED TO DECLARE WAR.
REGARDS, HERMES

When they were finished, Nargis read the words aloud.

“I bet this message never got sent,” said Gil. “That's why there was a war. If it had reached whoever was supposed to get it, they would never have attacked Ajeebgarh.”

Grandpa, how can I become a conscientious objector?”

Prescott looked up from the stamps he was studying under a magnifying glass and blinked at Gil, baffled by his grandson's question.

“Why would you want to do that?” he asked.

“My parents are going to put me in a military school—Howitzer Academy,” Gil explained.

His grandfather frowned. “When did you hear this?”

“Mom called this afternoon,” said Gil. “They're coming to get me on Friday. Grandpa, I really don't want to go! Maybe I could just stay here with you … if you'll let me … and I can go to school in Carville.”

“Well, let's see …,” his grandfather started to say, but before he could finish, Gil interrupted.