The Keepers (4 page)

Horace fidgeted. Loki twined himself around his legs. “Not
all
this time.”

“Did you lose your house key again?”

“I just can't find it. I'll look for it again. It's not lost. It's somewhere.”

His father closed his eyes and tapped the spoon against his forehead. “I agree that it's definitely
somewhere
,” he said, still tapping. Horace waited, nervous and impatient. His dad was generally a good guy, but certain things threw him into lecture mode. Horace losing his house key—
repeatedly
losing his house key, as his father liked to repeatedly say—was one
of those things. “Here's the deal, Horace,” his father said. “Every time we have this conversation—”

“It resurrects every other time we've already had this conversation,” Horace finished. His father frowned and sighed. “Those are my exact words. You saying my exact words just proves my point. Do you like having this conversation over and over again?”

Horace shook his head vigorously. “Definitely not.”

“Then,” his mother said, “I guess you know what to do to avoid it. The key is the key.”

Horace glanced back and forth between his parents, nodding. “Gotcha. So . . . can I go?” At a faint nod from his mother, he hurried up to his room.

Horace would worry about the key later. Right now he had research to do. He got on his computer and started looking up words. He checked every spelling of
Vora
he could think of, but found nothing. Another search revealed that there was no such thing as a
leestone
.
Tinker
was a real word; one of its definitions was
a clumsy worker
—but that made no sense. And then Horace looked up the word
arcana
, from the House of Answers sign, a word he'd heard before but didn't really know. The first definition he found was mildly interesting, but not a surprise:
secrets or mysteries
. Another definition was juicier:
special knowledge revealed only to the initiate
. But what was an
initiate
? He looked it up, and faint goosebumps sprouted down his arms. An initiate was
a new member of a secret society or group
. He chewed on that thought all afternoon
and evening, even through dinner, feeling antsy and troubled.

After dinner Horace sat at his desk, trying to do his homework. Or sort of trying. Mostly he just rolled the leestone—still warm!—back and forth across his social studies worksheet. Back and forth, back and forth. He'd been mechanically counting each roll, and was now up to eighteen hundred and twenty-three. About a thousand rolls ago, he'd determined that the leestone's color was fading. Black at first, the leestone now was a deep glimmering violet—though hard as he tried, he couldn't actually see the color draining away. He could only see that it had changed, slow as the sun.

When he got to two thousand and one rolls, Horace shoved the leestone back into his pocket. He flopped onto his bed. He tried to concentrate on the spread of glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, picking out the constellations he'd re-created there—weird ones hardly anyone knew about, like Aquila the eagle and Ophiuchus the serpent bearer and Monoceros the unicorn. He had been trying to memorize them by sight, but now he couldn't even remember just where they were in the sky. His mind wouldn't stick to them. Aquila only reminded him of the tunnel of birds, and the sight of Monoceros brought back the stuffed rabbit with the horn and all the other strange sights he'd glimpsed at the House of Answers. Tomorrow, he thought, couldn't come quick enough.

“Hey,” came a soft voice from the door. His mother stood in the doorway, rattling the small wooden chess set. “Ready?”

“Oh, right. I forgot.”

“Friday night. I never forget.” She came to the bed. She held him for a moment with an easy, open look. “Anything wrong? You seemed distracted at dinner.”

“Not really. I guess just school stuff? Nothing much.”

His mother—unlike his father—always seemed to know when not to push. “Well, let's take our minds off whatever else they've been on. God knows I could use it. And if you're still worried about the key, you've worried long enough. Sometimes things get lost.” Smiling, she handed him the box. “The honors, sir.”

Maybe chess was the distraction he needed, after all. He opened the box, exposing the green velvet lining and the thirty-two tiny wooden pieces, sixteen black and sixteen white, each piece in its own special compartment, each set a mirror image of the other—very orderly and pleasing to the eye. He poured the pieces out, then flipped the open box over, revealing the chessboard on the back side. Horace loved this chess set; he was fond of clever little boxes. Horace took white, as always. Loki leapt onto the bed and took his usual spot at the corner, his long black tail lashing contentedly. Horace began setting up his pawns.

“Have you thought about going back to chess club?” his mother asked.

“Not really.”

“You liked it last fall.”

“Alex and Martin were in it last fall.” Alex and Martin, twins who had been his best friends since first grade, had
moved to Maine just before Christmas. Maine was a long way from Chicago, and chess club was mostly full of freaks without them. Actually, the whole school was. “The year's almost over anyway.”

“Will you do me a favor and think about it next year?”

“I'm thinking about it.” Horace placed his queen and then said, casually as he could, “Hey, Mom, what's a tinker?”

“A tinker? Oh, someone who likes to fiddle with things. They like to try to build things or fix things, but they're not very serious about it. Like when your dad tries to get the mower to run better. That's tinkering.” She put a hand to her mouth and went on in a stage whisper, “Because he doesn't really know what he's doing.”

Horace laughed. This was pretty much in line with what he had already read, but it didn't clear anything up. “Is there any other reason why someone would call somebody a tinker?”

She flicked him a look. She fussed with her king. “Did someone call you that?”

Horace shrugged. “I heard some kid at school say it.”

“A friend of yours?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, I don't know. People say some strange things, don't they?”

“I guess.”

The board was ready. His mother waved across the pieces. “After you.”

They began, and soon things grew serious and silent. Horace had never beaten his mother at chess. She was not the type of parent who would ever just let him win, and that was exactly the way Horace liked it. But he was getting closer. What he liked about chess—and his mother said this was an indication of a good chess mind—was that the board and the pieces presented themselves in terms of lines and angles. As he considered his moves, these lines and angles shifted, the possibilities transforming. The effects of each move rippled forward to affect the outcome of the game in measurable, predictable ways, if only you could pay enough attention and think it through. Chess was logical and geometrical, absolute and knowable—unlike everything that had happened to him this afternoon.

They played on. Long minutes passed. One by one, pieces fell. Horace moved his remaining knight into a promising position. But his mother immediately moved a pawn that Horace had been ignoring, and now the entire geometry of play shifted. “Check,” she said. Horace examined the board. She was going to checkmate him on the next move, and he couldn't stop her.

“You have me.”

“Let's play it out,” she said, like always. She said it whether there was any hope for Horace or not.

Horace took his time, determined not to miss anything. His mother toyed with the pile of captured pieces, making a pawn leap onto Loki's head. “So I've been wondering how
awesome the thing you got me for Mother's Day is,” she said.

“The thing I got you for Mother's Day,” Horace repeated, not really listening.

“Mother's Day. This Sunday. You forgot, didn't you?” She sighed dramatically and shook her head sadly at Loki. Loki squinted back, purring.

“Maybe,” Horace said slowly. “Or I guess I did, but don't worry. I'll get you something.” He turned his attention back to the board. He pushed a rook to protect his king, but they both knew the rook was doomed.

His mother made a little explosion sound as she toppled his rook with her queen, checkmating him. She smiled. “Very nice,” she said. “That wasn't your present, was it? Letting me win?”

“Very funny.”

“Because I already have a bunch of those. Victories, I mean.”

“I'm not laughing.”

“Okay, sorry. Look, about the present, I don't really care what you get me.”

“You don't?”

She shook her head, seeming to search for words. “No offense, Horace—you know I respect you—but when people are young they're generally terrible at buying presents. Like . . . when you were like six, you bought me that bat. Not a baseball bat.” She bared her upper teeth and fluttered her hands like little wings to clarify. “A bat. It was a wooden
cutout, wings all spread, and it had this creepy, cartoony face . . . fangs and everything.” She shuddered.

“You hate bats.”

“Exactly.
You
love them, though. Your favorite animal, at the time.”

True. In fact, bats were still his favorite animal, which was kind of strange since he didn't like caves. “But . . . you liked that bat anyway, because it was from me.”

“
Like
is a strong word. Put it this way: it's in the attic somewhere—hopefully the only bat in the attic. But the present itself doesn't matter, because it's watching you make the attempt that's so interesting. It's a pleasure seeing you become the person that you are, that you will be. And sometimes that means watching you make careless decisions—like buying a bat for a woman who is mortally terrified of bats.”

One of the things Horace liked very much about his mother was that she didn't treat him like a child. Not that she pretended he was an adult—it was just that she was honest about the differences between them. Once, when he'd given up on their weekly chess after losing too many games, she'd sent him a card in the mail. He still had it. Inside, she'd written:

If smarts were a race, you would have no hope of having caught up to me yet. Not because you're slow, or because I'm fast, but because I happen to have a huge head start.
It's not fair or unfair; it's just the way it works. One day, you will be where I am now—and beyond.

Please let me know when you're over it. I do miss playing with you.

They'd played again that very night, and she'd beaten him. Badly. They'd been playing ever since. And now Horace found himself seized by a desire to buy his mother the best Mother's Day present ever. He cleared the chessboard and began to pack away the pieces. His mother joined him, the two of them working quietly.

“You like turtles,” Horace said after a while.

“I do.”

“I guess I need to go shopping tomorrow.”

His mother slipped the last pawn into the velvet-lined box and latched it closed. She stood, gazing up at the star-covered ceiling. Loki hopped down and rubbed against her legs. “That's not really the point, Horace.” She sighed. “You know what I really want for Mother's Day, right? Far beyond any present? I want to see you continuing to become the person I know you are. Keep thinking. Keep considering. Be smart. Be happy. Be safe.”

“I am happy. And safe.” The thin man rose up in Horace's mind, along with Mrs. Hapsteade's final words:
“Fear is the stone we push.”

“You would tell me if you were in any trouble.”

Ordinarily he would. But today he didn't even know how to begin. “What kind of trouble?” he asked.

“I don't know. Trouble doesn't always have an easy name, does it?” She dropped her eyes to Horace's and smiled.

“I guess not.”

She held his gaze for a moment longer. “I love you.”

“Love you too,” Horace said automatically.

She left then, Loki slipping out with her. The moment the door closed, Horace let out a long breath. He flopped face forward onto the cool covers of his bed.

The leestone's stubborn heat seemed to pulse slowly into his leg. He swam through images from the day: the House of Answers sign, though in his thoughts it sometimes still read Horace F. Andrews; the tunnel of birds, like a blanket of song; Mrs. Hapsteade grasping his shoulders; the burn of the leestone in his pocket.
Trouble
. He saw the thin man's carnival shape, smelled the thin man's sickly scent, heard the thin man's voice, felt his bizarre fingers taking hold. The man was hunting him for an object he did not yet possess. What did that mean?

Horace fought his fears back as best he could, but he lay on the bed for a long time and lost that battle, over and over. Images of the thin man rose again and again, deep into the night, crooked and looming in his thoughts like grinning scarecrows, like ghouls, like devils.