The Keepers (2 page)

And then Horace stepped around the woman and jumped out of the bus. He landed heavily on the sidewalk. The old
lady squawked at him and yanked her foot back. “'Scuse me,” Horace mumbled.

He trotted away, feeling as startled as the old lady looked. He was not ordinarily impulsive, not the kind of person who simply did things without thinking them through ahead of time. But sometimes his inquisitiveness pulled him places he wouldn't ordinarily go. And that sign . . . those words and his name together like that. . . .

The May air was cool but held a hint of thickness that spoke of summer—of freedom, and possibilities. Horace's internal clock, always accurate, told him it was 3:16. This time of day, the 77 eastbound ran every fourteen minutes. He could investigate the sign and then catch the next bus, still getting home before his mother. He hurried on down the sidewalk, searching.

Just as he thought he was drawing nearer to the alleyway, an enormous shape swept across his path, colliding with him hard and knocking the breath from his chest. Horace staggered back, almost tumbling into the gutter.

“Goodness,” said a musical voice from high above.

Horace looked up—and up—into the face of the tallest man he'd ever seen. The man was so tall that he hardly looked like a man at all . . . ten feet tall or more. And thin, almost as impossibly thin as he was impossibly tall, with spidery limbs and a torso that seemed too narrow to hold organs. He had hands the size of rakes, with long, skinny fingers. He stank of something chemical and foul. Horace drew back as
the man leaned over him.

“Are we all right?” the man asked, not unkindly. Again that singsongy voice. The man—if it even was a man—wore a black suit and dark, round sunglasses. A thick shock of black hair topped his head, out of place on his pale, skeletal body.

Horace tried to catch his breath. “I'm fine,” he wheezed. “Sorry.”

“Perfectly understandable. I believe you were distracted.”

“I'm sorry, really. Just . . . looking for something.”

“Ah. Do you know what it is you're looking for?” The man's teeth were slightly bared, as if he were trying to give a friendly grin but didn't know how.

“It's nothing, really,” Horace said, faint threads of alarm tingling in his bones.

“Oh, come now. Tell me what you're looking for. You can't know how intrigued I am.”

“I'm just looking around. Thanks, though.” Horace began backing away.

“Perhaps I can be of some assistance. You
do
need assistance.” He said it like a command.

“No, that's okay. I'm okay.” Horace skirted wide around the strange man and hustled off, trying to hunker his big frame down beneath his backpack. He was all too aware that the man's eyes were still on him, but when he looked back, he was relieved to find that the thin man was not following. In
fact, he had disappeared. Completely. How could someone so large simply drop out of sight? And how could someone be so large in the first place?

But it wasn't just the man who'd disappeared. The sign, too, was nowhere to be found. Horace went almost three full blocks without spotting it. He turned and began to methodically retrace his steps. The Horace F. Andrews sign was nowhere.

Abruptly, a looming shape stepped out of the shadows in front of him. Horace stumbled to a stop. The thin man gazed down at him, still trying that gruesome smile.

“Didn't find what you're looking for?” the man sang sadly.

Panic blooming, Horace tried to catch the eyes of people passing by, hoping to draw their attention. No one even slowed. Several people sat at tables outside a deli nearby, but no one so much as glanced at the thin man. Couldn't they see him? Horace was tall for his age, and he barely came up to the man's waist. Why was no one staring?

“I did, actually,” Horace said at last, desperate, with no idea what he was going to say next. But then the words came to him. “That deli right there. My parents are inside, waiting for me.”

The man's awful grin cracked open wide. “Of course they are,” he said, gazing at the deli. “And I wouldn't think of keeping you from them. But first, a bit of advice.” The man bent over, folding like a giant crane. He held a gaunt hand
right in front of Horace's face, lifting a single long finger. The smell that came off him was burning and sour and rotten. And the man's finger was
wrong
. It was almost as if . . . did he have an extra knuckle? Horace's own terrified face curved back at him in the man's glasses.

“Watch where you roam, Tinker,” the man sneered. “Curiosity is a walk fraught with peril.” And with that he shot up, straightening to his full, unreasonable height. He snapped his head to the right, as if hearing some far-off sound, and then he left as swiftly as he had come, stepping out into the street. Six great strides took him across all four busy lanes, and then he effortlessly hurdled the hood of a parked car onto the opposite sidewalk. He sped down Wexler and a moment later vanished around a corner.

Horace stood there for another ten seconds and then, his limbs coming back to life, broke into a run. Whoever—whatever—this man was, Horace wanted to get far away. He made it exactly twenty-seven steps before he was halted in his tracks again. He stood in front of an alleyway, mouth gaping open. He'd passed this alley already and seen nothing—he was sure there had been nothing
to
see—but now here it was, plain as his own hands.

The Horace F. Andrews sign.

Or rather, not exactly.

Horace stared. He forgot all about catching the bus. He even forgot about the thin man. He read the sign from top to bottom again and again.

Oddments

Heirlooms

Fortunes

Misfortunes

Artifacts

Arcana

Curiosities

Miseries

Mysteries

and more at the

HOUSE OF
ANSWERS

HOUSE OF ANSWERS
. T
HAT
'
S WHAT HE HAD SEEN, NOT
HORACE F
.
ANDREWS
. Similar-looking words seen from the dirty windows of a bus. “Mistaken identity,” Horace said aloud, his words echoing down the alley. The discovery disappointed him at first, but he quickly decided that the sign in reality was more intriguing than the sign he'd imagined. “House of Answers” was a name just begging to be investigated, wasn't it? And Horace—being Horace—definitely had questions.

There were tall buildings on either side of the alley: an electronics store on the right and a Laundromat on the left that looked closed for good. The floors above both obviously held apartments. The alley itself appeared to dead-end at another tall building about fifty feet back.

“I don't see any answers,” Horace mumbled. He headed down the alley. It got darker and gloomier the deeper he went,
and the sounds of the street faded away. He was just beginning to think he should turn around—he wasn't crazy about how narrow and high the alley was getting—when he was struck with a sense of vertigo. The back wall suddenly, dizzyingly, looked much farther away than it had. Then the alleyway seemed to open up at his feet, and Horace almost pitched down a steep flight of crumbling brick steps that he hadn't seen until he was on top of them. He caught himself, blinking. At the bottom of the staircase, barely visible in the shadows of the three buildings towering overhead, was an arched blue door. On the door was a round sign encircled with yellow lettering, too small to read—but the colors were exactly the same as the House of Answers sign.

“Holy jeez,” Horace said.

He glanced around. No one was in sight. Slowly he eased himself down the dilapidated steps. The air grew cool. He reached the small wooden door and read the little round sign.

There were no other signs. No
OPEN
sign, no
PUSH
or
PULL
, no
HOURS OF OPERATION
. No windows. But this had to be the place. He tugged on the rusty handle. The door held fast.

State your name. “Horace?” he said aloud, feeling foolish.
Nothing happened. “Horace F. Andrews,” he tried again. Still nothing.

Horace looked again at the circle of words. “Wait. State your name or . . . name your state?” But that was ridiculous. Why would anyone want him to name his state? The door was here in Chicago, and Chicago was obviously in Illinois. “Illinois,” he blurted out anyway, just to see. He tried the door again—nothing, of course. “State your name your state your name your state,” Horace whispered, until the words started to make no sense to him whatsoever. And then he remembered the thin man's parting words: “
Curiosity is a walk fraught with peril
.”

“My state. My state is . . . curious. That's the state I'm in.” Horace reached out for the handle again, pulling harder. “Curious and confused and a little bit p—” With a jarring
squawk
, the door flew open. Horace stumbled, his backpack dragging him to the ground.

A rich cloud of smells bloomed out of the opening—dust and wood and cloth and animal—old, thick, damp smells. And another thing, too: a wavering, high river of sound, almost like music. But the passageway was dark and cramped. Horace got to his feet warily. Tunnels were not something he handled well. He had a deep fear of small spaces—claustrophobia, technically, though he didn't like the word. He leaned cautiously in through the doorway.

“Hello?” he called. The strange chattering music seemed to swell briefly. Horace hefted his backpack onto his shoulders
and stepped into the passageway.

The door swung closed behind him. His chest went tight as the unforgiving weight of the darkness crushed in from all sides. A panicky voice ribboned up in his thoughts, telling him to go back, to get out, get clear.

But his curiosity wouldn't let him turn back. He swallowed and closed his eyes, and forced himself forward. Ten feet, twenty. He pushed on until he sensed a faint golden glow against his eyelids and, opening them, found himself at the top of another dark stairway. The strange music drifted up from below. Small, busy shadows flickered in a dim amber light. His curiosity doubled, and his heart grew calmer. He descended the stairs, and as the rich sound swelled around him, he realized what it was.

Birdsong.

At the bottom of the stairs, the tunnel widened and the light grew brighter, and he began to catch flitters of movement all around. He realized the walls were filled with birdcages—no,
made of
birdcages, all kinds, wire and wicker, boxes and domes, from tiny cubes to grand bird palaces. Inside them, there were too many tiny darting shapes to count. The walls and ceiling flickered as the birds pattered about, all of them singing, so that the whole mass was in constant motion.

Horace walked through, wonderingly, and emerged from the tunnel of birds into a long and high stone room, hazy and golden. The birdsong faded. The room stretched back into darkness along a line of stone columns that rose high into wooden rafters. The golden haze came from curious
amber lamps affixed to the columns, small stone containers from which drifting swirls of glittering light lazily rose. A long row of tables ran down the center of the room, and wooden shelves stretched along the walls. Shelves and tables both were piled high and crammed with bins and boxes and containers of all shapes and sizes and colors. The room was deserted.

Horace slid out from under his backpack and let it drop. He walked over to a table, his shoes scuffing loudly on the stones. He eyed the first bin he came to, trying to identify some of the strange objects it contained. A three-barbed hook hung over the side—a kind of fishing hook, but this one was two feet wide, with barbs as long as his hand. Beside it, the tip of a miniature scarlet pyramid poked into the air, and an accordion arm with a large spiky wheel on the end dangled limply. A rabbit head peeked out of the next bin over, motionless; a unicorn horn sprouted between its ears. If this was a store, it was like none he'd ever seen.