The Chestnut King: Book 3 of the 100 Cupboards (2 page)

Zeke looked at him, his face blank.

Henry shrugged. “If you don’t, I’ll just be stuck with Richard and a bunch of girls.”

Zeke half-smiled. “Mom says we’ll go. I’ll get you a calculator. But what’s wrong with Richard?”

Henry puffed out his cheeks. “What’s right with him?” He ripped out a clump of grass and dropped it on his glove. “Actually, I like him just fine. Or I was starting to, I mean, I did. But he’s way too good at this awful math. My mom actually asked him to tutor me.” Henry clambered to his knees, found his hat and then his feet. “I can’t stand him right now.”

Zeke’s smile was wide. Henry sighed. “I mean, he used to be pretty bad. Now I think he’d be willing to die if he thought it would make me better at geometry. But there is one good thing.”

Henry grinned. Zeke waited.

“He’s tutoring Henrietta, too. And she’s way worse than I am.”

“Zeke Johnson!” The voice was big. Both boys jerked in
surprise. “Who you with back there? Can’t you read or don’t you know what trespassin’ means?”

Henry grabbed his glove, ducked over to the barn, and pressed his back against the flaking paint. Zeke glanced at him and stepped around the corner.

“Sorry, officer,” Zeke said. “I was a friend of the family. I didn’t think it was trespassing.”

The voice was growing closer. “Don’t you know what happened here?”

“Does anyone?” Zeke asked.

Henry crept to the opposite corner and waited. He wanted to make sure the cop was beside the barn before he made his dash for the kitchen doorway.

“A whole house disappeared, and a car owned by the Kansas Highway Patrol along with its sergeant, and now there’s nothing left but a hole full of salt water.”

“Didn’t the sergeant come back?” Zeke sounded confused.

“With amnesia, some burns, and a bullet hole in his foot. Would you like amnesia?”

“No, sir.”

“Burns?”

“No, sir.”

“A bullet hole? Or maybe you’d like to be sucked away by a mystery twister, or swallowed by a mystery sinkhole, or abducted by some space weirdies in their saucer.”

He sounded close now.

“No, sir.”

“How about just a ride in my car?”

Henry took a deep breath, clutched his glove, and slipped quickly around the corner of the barn.

His head collided with a startled police officer’s chin, and then, with eyes blurry, he was flat on his back.

Henry didn’t have time to think. He rolled onto his belly and tried to stand. Hands were grabbing at him. Long fingers gripped his shirt and then his right arm. The cop was yelling. Henry’s glove was gone. He lunged, kicked, and tore free, scrambling back behind the barn. Another officer stood, potbellied, beside Zeke.

Henry turned, jumped the irrigation ditch, and ran into the black field, kicking up ash as he went.

“Hold it, son!” the fat one yelled. “Nothin’ out that way!”

Henry glanced back and slowed. Then he pulled the bill of his hat low to shade his face and turned around. He didn’t stand tall. He crouched. He didn’t want anything about him to be memorable.

The lanky cop picked up Henry’s glove and waved it. “You want this back? Come on over.” He beckoned with a long arm. His own trooper’s hat was on the ground. The fat one still had his on.

“What’s your name?” the fat one asked. His hand was on Zeke’s shoulder.

“Don’t tell ‘em, Gil!” Zeke yelled. Both officers looked surprised.

The fat one snorted. “Do you think we’re stupid?” He shoved Zeke to his partner and grabbed the glove. “Well,”
he said, “you’re a lefty. And your name is …” He rolled the glove around, scanning for ink.

Henry’s heart sank. His name was on it. Sort of. Richard had tried to label all of Henry’s things in his most important handwriting. He’d started with schoolbooks and ended with Henry’s baseball and his glove. Henry had caught him before he’d finished.

“What kind of writing is this? You should do wedding invitations.” The officer looked up and squinted at Henry. “Henry Yo. Henry Yo?” His eyes widened. “Don’t tell me you’re Henry York?”

Henry didn’t have many options. Running farther away from the house and the little doors in the attic wouldn’t help him get home. Waiting until they came after him wouldn’t do much, either. The chase had to happen sometime.

Henry came out of his crouch and ran straight at them. The ground was too rough for real speed, but he pushed as hard as he could. The tall officer let go of Zeke, and both men stepped toward the ditch, surprised, bracing themselves for an impact. Henry veered to the fat one’s outside shoulder, and he jumped.

Zeke stuck out his leg.

Henry broke through the arm tackle as the policeman fell. He staggered, kept his feet, and plowed through the tall grass beside the barn, past the sleeping, mud-colored truck and into the dandelion jungle that had once been the backyard. He turned toward the hole, surrounded by tattered police tape. A thin slice of doorway hung in thin air,
propped open by his bat. His hands found the invisible knob, and he pushed through into a tired, out-of-place kitchen and skidded across the linoleum floor.

Zeke heard a door slam. The officers were yelling, and he followed them as they searched, tromping through the tall grass, peering into the hole, testing the barn doors. He could have run away, but running wouldn’t help. They knew where he lived. At least this way they could give him a ride home. But he’d need a good story. At least a good enough story. Maybe no story would be better.

He looked over at the hole, at the space that had once held a house. And he saw a shimmer. The kitchen doorway was becoming slightly visible, just a crack.

Henry stared at the two cops, at the lanky one, who kept rubbing his chin, at the fat one, who was carrying Henry’s glove. Henry wanted that glove. He needed it. He could explode out of nowhere and attack. He might be able to get it. He might be able to get it and still make it back through the doorway. Not likely.

Henry sighed and glanced down at the watch on his left wrist, the watch set to Hylfing time. He would already be late, and he didn’t want to have to explain all this. Not even to his mother. Zeke was looking at him. He nodded. Henry nodded back at his friend, at Kansas, at his glove, at that other world where he had spent most of his life, where the people he had called parents still lived and worried.
Where the two policemen were wondering if they’d just seen the missing boy. Where they were probably wondering exactly how much Zeke knew.

Henry shut the door. He would see it all again. Right now, he had to hurry. Outside the gapped and shattered kitchen windows, a flat and empty world sprawled to the horizon. Grass, thin and still green, shifted slowly beneath a breeze.

Henry hurried into the dining room, scattering a group of fat gerbils. He hurried through the living room, past the carpet of shriveled mushrooms. And then he was on the stairs, climbing two at a time, up to the room that had been his, up to a wall full of doors.

Henry
stood in the doorway of the small attic room. His old bed, filthy and disheveled, angled awkwardly away from the wall of doors. Salt crust, a reminder of the strange sea that had poured into the house, ground under Henry’s feet like sand. He sniffed nervously and checked his watch. The time wouldn’t be exactly right, the watch always got a little confused shifting worlds, but it was right enough.

This was the hard part.

Standing in front of the cupboard wall had always been unnerving. Now that Henry could see, really see, what was going on, it was worse. Each door was like a drain. Swirling threads of life, strands connected to the walls, to the air and the wood in the floor, spun slowly around the open mouths and disappeared. Dozens of open mouths sucking in whatever would come to them. Not always sucking. At times the swirling would stop, and things, scents, flavors, traces, influences, would burble into the room followed by wind or voices, even living things—snails, insects, mice.

“Witches,” Henry said out loud. “Or babies.”

The door to Badon Hill wobbled on its one remaining hinge, letting in a cold sea breeze. His door. The door that
had been his first entrance to Kansas. The compass locks in the central door were still set to Badon Hill. That would be the way that Caleb had come. It had been the only way, at least at first. But Henry had something new, his own door arrangement. For now, he was the only one who knew about it.

On the left side of the wall, there had been two doors that connected to each other. Numbers 24 and 49. Henry still remembered the numbers, even though Grandfather’s journal was at the bottom of the harbor, at least if it hadn’t washed out to sea. And he remembered what they had been called. Cleave. That had been their only name, one word for both of them. Number 24 was open above his bed. Number 49 was gone. He had torn it out.

With a deep breath, Henry stepped closer to the wall. An angry voice trickled out of a door near the top. Somewhere else, somewhere distant, a woman screamed. A barrage of smells, good and bad, surrounded him. Henry’s throat tightened. This was a much faster way to get home than traveling to Badon Hill and then hopping through faerie mounds, but it still made his head throb, and he always ended up with a bloody nose.

Where Number 49 had been, there was only a hole in the wall. The wood was splintered around it, and the rusted crowbar Henry had used was on the floor, pushed halfway under the bed. The ninety-nine cupboards had been reduced to ninety-eight.

Henry knelt on his bed and relaxed the focus in his eyes, letting the wall swirl in front of him, watching only
the motion, the drain and burble of gaping mouths. Staring straight ahead, he lifted his right hand. The scar was heating up on his palm, but he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see past the bright, writhing dandelion fire between his wrist and his fingers. The room brightened. The swirlings shifted. Trails and strands moved toward his hand.

Tears ran down Henry’s cheeks. His pulse beat painfully in his temples. He couldn’t let himself blink. He lost everything when he blinked. Henry flattened his hand on the edge of Number 24 and moved it around the cupboard mouth in a slow circle. The swirl grew. It swallowed the cupboards next to it, and Henry moved his hand a little faster. His mind groped around for help, for strength in the old plank floors, in the rock and sand of concrete plaster, and in the cool air outside the attic roof. It all flowed out of his hand.

The current thickened, mixing elements. Colors changed, and smells blended, but all of it was tinted gold. All of it answered to the dandelion. The wall had found a single motion. The other cupboard doors had been forgotten.

Henry could feel the pull now. He was going to flush himself.

Ignoring the physical wall, the wood of the doors, and the metal of the knobs, ignoring his own size, Henry shut his eyes, held his breath, and leaned into the funnel.

His ribs popped and compressed. His teeth ground together, and something warm ran down his lip. His fingers found cool stone, and he fell into fading daylight. Blinking,
Henry lay on his back, a small gapped roof above him. The view was cut off by a face, dark and serious, and two eyes looked down at him from around a blunt horn. A coarse tongue licked Henry’s nose and swabbed his lip.

“Sick,” Henry said, and both his calves cramped. “Ow!” He jerked up, banged into a rickety wall, knocked over a heavy clay pot, and grabbed his toes. The raggant staggered and bellowed, offended. Then the fat animal flared its wings, restoring its dignity, and walked away.

When his calves relented, Henry climbed to his feet. He was standing in a tiny shed, smaller than an outhouse. Old pots leaned in stacked towers in one corner. A spade with a cracked handle leaned in another. Behind him, a rotten bench hunkered over Number 49, the simple-looking cupboard that Henry had freed from the old farmhouse. Its door was open. Henry kicked it shut and wobbled out of the shed, onto the upper roof of his mother’s house. Hylfing, pale in places with new cut stone, charred in others, spread out beneath him. He could see the walls, framed up with scaffolding. He could see the bridge, straddling the river where Eli FitzFaeren had died to save him. Where Darius, the tall, insecure wizard of Byzanthamum, the witch’s pawn, had fallen with the Arrow of Chance in his throat. He could see the harbor, purpled in the early twilight, and he could hear the pounding sea beyond it.

Henry hurried to the little stairs that would take him down to the lower roof, and then down again into the upper sun rooms of the house. But at the top of the stairs he stopped, suddenly dizzy. Leaning against the parapet,
breathing slowly, he tried to calm the storm in his body. His stomach was churning from the violent world shift, and his joints felt loose. His left eyelid twitched spastically.

“Henry?”

Henry turned and blinked, trying to focus. But his eyes felt abused, and they refused to cooperate. The world was nothing but purple, and then a shape walked up the stairs toward him.

“Henry?” The voice was his cousin’s. “Where did you come from?” Henrietta asked. “I was just up there, and then I heard something break when I was going back inside. Your nose is bleeding. It’s smeared all over your cheek. What happened?”

“Is my dad back?” Henry asked. “Have they started?”

“No. But Uncle Caleb is. He said your dad would be late. Something about Franklin Fat-Faerie. And—” Henrietta stopped. She was slowly blinking into focus. Her curls were loose around her shoulders, held back by some kind of band. She was wearing a white linen shirt, or maybe a dress, all embroidered and gathered at her waist. Not a dress. There were tan trousers underneath.

Henry normally would have smiled and made some kind of comment about becoming a lady, or looking lovely, but he wasn’t interested in getting a reaction right now. Or in getting slapped. Henrietta grabbed Henry’s hands and pulled him to his feet.

“You need to clean up.”

Henry nodded and began working his way down the stairs. “And?” he asked.

“And what?” Henrietta was following behind him.

“You said
and
. And?”

“Oh. Right.” Henry heard her sniff. She was trying to be casual. “And your brother’s here. That’s his ship in the harbor. That huge galley.”