The Keepers (9 page)

“Close it up,” his father said. “For my own sanity, I need to see it safe inside.”

Horace did so, slowly, his face burning. He watched the gleam of the silver key as he slid the lid closed over it. The latch snicked. His hands went tingly and numb.

“What is wrong with you?” his father asked. “You okay?”

“Yes. Nothing's wrong.”

His father pointed at the box. “Remember, next key isn't free.”

“I got it, I got it.”
Leave, just leave now
, he thought.

But his father lingered. Horace turned away. “You know, Horace,” his father said, “I don't like having these talks. This isn't the kind of conversation I'd like to be having.”

“It's fine,” Horace said. He just needed him to go. He needed to get the box open again, take out the key.

“Okay. Well. Dinner in half an hour,” his father said, and left. As soon as he was down the stairs, Horace leapt up and closed the door, desperate to get the key out, out, out.

He flicked the box open.

He blinked—once, twice.

The key was gone.

H
ORACE TORE HIS ROOM APART
.

He searched for the key high and low, under and over, all around where he and his father had been standing. He groped through the carpet inch by inch. He looked in completely impossible places—beneath his mattress, inside his marble chests, in his own pockets. He checked the box itself about a dozen times. No key, anywhere. But then he didn't really expect to find it.

He didn't expect to find it because as he searched, Mr. Meister's words came back to him. Comprehension dawned on Horace so fully and so blindingly that he felt stupid for not having figured it out sooner.

“
You cannot keep anything inside the box
.”

Not a warning.

A simple fact.

At dinner, Horace ate voraciously, feeling hungry for the first time in nearly a week. Afterward he returned to his room and laid the box on his bedside table. He waited, planning. He wanted complete privacy for what had to come next. After good nights and lights out at ten, he spent the next hour watching the ceiling's glowing stars slowly lose their luminescence, fading eventually to black. He heard his parents getting into bed, saw their own light wink out beneath his door. Fifteen minutes later, at 11:03, he got up. He turned on his lamp.

The box gleamed in the lamplight, the twelve-spoked star alight. It seemed like the only true object in the room, alive with potential. There was no doubt that the box had made the key disappear. Horace had acted at last—or rather, his father had; a funny thought—and now the box was ready to talk. This, he understood at last, was the Find.

Horace slid the box open. Inside, the blue bottom glinted. He lifted the box to look through it, as if he would be able to see where the key had gone, even though he knew that was not how it worked. He looked around the dim room—
the crisp mess of the desk; stars on the ceiling sharp and alight; the bedside lamp, strangely dark; the glowing numbers of the clock, reading 11:04 now; everything thick and textured, shifting and keen
. Horace rose to look out the window:
darkness revealed, clouds low and sculpted, trees thick and rustling, the old red canoe beside the toolshed like a half-closed eye, and there!—a quick dart of movement
.

Horace lowered the box and squinted into the night, but
saw nothing. He raised the box once more, and with that extra clarity, saw again—
a stealthy black shape along the side of the canoe, small and swift and sure; a disappearance behind the shed
. He was startled at first but then realized it had to be Loki. Somehow the cat had gotten out. He would be at the back door in the morning, mewing to be let in. “Done being dangerous?” his mother would ask.

Horace closed the box and put his plan into motion. He quietly gathered up a few small items from around the room—an eraser, a couple of expendable marbles, a plastic D&D figurine—and knelt beside his bed.
“You cannot keep anything in the box.”
Right. But that didn't mean he couldn't
put
anything in the box. And now that he understood that, it was time to experiment.

He chose the eraser first. It seemed like a harmless thing. He opened the box, eraser in hand, and said softly, “Okay?” But he felt no hesitation from the box—no resistance, no alarm. Just a kind of quiet patience, maybe. He put the eraser inside. Nothing happened. Horace swallowed. It was 11:10. He thought he would wait until 11:11, a suitably memorable time for such a momentous occasion. He watched his clock, unblinking, and as soon as the zero blinked to a one he closed the lid. He felt a faint tingle in his hands, a strange living pulse.

“I felt that,” he said. “I felt that before.”

He opened the lid. The eraser was gone.

As he sat gazing into the empty box, Horace knew he
should be feeling shock, or wonder, but more than either of these things, he felt regret. He was disappointed in himself for having taken so long to discover what the box could do. Maybe he'd simply been too afraid to let the box speak to him clearly. He'd believed all along that the box had to remain empty—and it turned out to be true! Just not at all in the way he'd imagined.

Horace placed the D&D figurine in the box—an elven archer—and threw in the two marbles for good measure. He held the box over his head, looking up at it. The archer's form and the two marbles were just visible—smeary silhouettes through the glass. Horace slid the lid into place, hoping he'd be able to see what was happening inside, but as soon as it closed, he could see nothing. There was no flash of light or anything—just the tingle, and then: no more archer, no more marbles.

Horace leaned back against his bed, the box beside him. He knew that objects could not be completely destroyed, leaving nothing behind. Plus, it just didn't make sense that the box would work that way—what would be the point? No, the only reasonable hypothesis was that the box was sending these objects somewhere else, a tantalizing thought. “Teleportation,” Horace whispered aloud. But if that's what was happening, where were these objects going?

It was time to put the next part of his plan into motion. He crept to his desk, opened a notebook, and began to write in his neatest handwriting.

My name is Horace Andrews. If you are the finder of this message, please contact me immediately.

He thought hard about what to say next. He had never before written a note to be delivered by teleportation. He needed to convince the finders of this message to tell him where they were—to tell him where the box was sending things. He tried to think what sort of message would make him, Horace, respond to a strange note that appeared out of nowhere.

This note has gotten to you by a power I can't control and don't understand. It is a mystery I am desperate to solve. I can only solve it with your help. Please believe me, I am 100 percent serious. Here is my address:

Horace Andrews

3318 N. Bromley Street

Chicago, IL 60634

He read over what he'd written. He crossed out
can't control
and wrote
haven't mastered
. After the address, he added:

USA

He considered it one last time, and then added a final line. After all, you just never knew:

Earth

Horace read the note over about twenty more times and decided it would do. If there was anyone—or anything—on the other side, surely this would get a response. He folded the note it until it was small enough to fit inside the box. On one side he wrote
PLEASE READ
, and on the other
NOT GARBAGE
. He put the note inside the box.

Just then, a soft scratch at the door yanked Horace's heart into his throat. It came again, and Horace realized with a sigh of relief—it was only Loki. Horace leaned over and cracked the door. The cat sauntered in out of the shadows, brushing awkwardly against Horace's leg.

“You're just in time,” Horace whispered, latching the door. He gripped the box firmly. He closed the lid. He felt that prickly vibration in his fingertips again—the note had been delivered. Now all he had to do was . . .

Horace frowned. Now he had to wait. It was 11:59; the new day was about to begin. How many more days would he have to wait before he got any answers? He realized now that he should have listed his phone number on the note, or his email—not his address. Addresses were too slow. And speaking of addresses, what had he been thinking?
Earth?
Logically speaking, that was a pointless thing to say . . . wasn't it?

Frustrated, he rummaged through some of his stuff. Idly he picked up a blue pencil sharpener and sent it through the box—a tingle, and it was gone. The act was so satisfying—the
box was actually
doing
something—that he did it again, this time sending a plastic golden coin. And he kept on going: a broken toy dragster, a dried-out chunk of modeling clay, a probably-dead battery. The top half of a toy dragon head, a poker chip, an entire handful of pushpins. Loki jumped up onto the desk to watch, and Horace kept going absentmindedly, not really sure of the reasons but caught up in the sheer momentum of the act—bit by bit, the mass of his room was shrinking. It was vanishing slowly, like a pool down a drain. Or not even like that, it was just . . . ceasing to be here. In theory, if he could break the whole room down into small-enough pieces, he could send it all through the box, right? The whole house, even, sent away—wherever
away
was. He imagined a fuzzy, tentacled alien cautiously examining an unknown artifact: a toy dragster with a missing wheel. He imagined a boy in a distant room playing with a small plastic elf. He saw his note, untranslatable, encased in glass in some extraterrestrial museum.

Eventually, most of what remained on his desk was too big or too important to send: a calculator, a postcard from Alex and Martin in Maine, a stopwatch that was once his father's, a pair of scissors. Loki, of course. Horace spotted a Super Ball lurking beneath an old workbook, let the cat sniff it, and sent it on through last of all. He pictured it falling out of thin air under a stormy sky, dropping unseen into a broad blue sea.

He opened the box one more time and let Loki look inside. “See?” he said. “Gone. Disappeared into the night like—”

He stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said, remembering. Just an hour ago he'd caught a quick glimpse of the cat, disappearing behind the toolshed.

Outside.

After everyone had gone to bed.

Goosebumps swept down Horace's arms as he stared at the cat. “Loki . . . who let you in?”

H
ORACE DID NOT SLEEP WELL THAT NIGHT
. H
E LAY CURLED
under his covers, the box on one side and Loki on the other, trying not to imagine how the cat had gotten inside, or—worse—what might've come in with him. He knew it was silly, but it wasn't easy to keep Dr. Jericho from creeping into his thoughts. He tried to tell himself that Mr. Meister's leestone was working just as it was supposed to. Logically speaking, the cat he'd seen in the backyard must not have been Loki after all. Or maybe his mother had slipped down sometime between eleven and midnight and let Loki in.

What other explanation could there be?

The night passed slowly, the minutes creeping by. The carefully plotted constellations on his ceiling gradually faded from sight, but not before they started to take on new shapes in Horace's eyes—leering faces and tall, stooped figures. At
some point, however, Horace must have fallen asleep. He woke to his father's voice—and sunshine. He rolled over and felt Loki's fur against his face. The cat stretched and yawned.

“Loki's home,” Horace slurred.

“So I see,” his father said drily. “Let's go. Time for school.”

Horace got up and got ready. He watched Loki sleep as he dressed, trying to shake loose the cobwebs of the night before. But all day at school he was extra muddled, not really waking up until the final bell rang, when he abruptly remembered he didn't have his house key. The key had disappeared to wherever the box sent it. He'd have to tell his parents that he had lost the key again, even though this was the first time it
really and truly
wasn't his fault. He couldn't stand the thought of waiting on the porch for his mother two days in a row, so he hung around on the school steps for a while and caught a later bus that would get him home after his mother arrived. The bus was back on its regular route now, but when it cruised past Wexler Street he found himself staring out the window, still feeling lost.