The Tell-Tale Start (14 page)

WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW…

A LETTER DELIVERED TO THE AUTHENTIC GALE FARM

AND OZITORIUM TWO DAYS BEFORE:

ALLAN
looked through the doorway and into the small secret chamber he’d uncovered by flushing the old toilet in the rubble of the Gale house. The walls were painted a crisp white, and the floor was tiled in a checkerboard pattern of black and red. At the center of the room, on a small metal table, was an old-fashioned desktop computer, its heavy, glowing monitor as deep as it was wide. Otherwise the place was empty—no chair, no lighting fixtures, no pictures on the walls, nothing.

As secret lairs go, this one was more like a basement than a Bat Cave.

Allan stepped inside, glancing back at the door, hoping it wouldn’t slam shut behind him (as he knew secret doors had a tendency to do). He moved toward the computer, confident that his hacking skills would be useful.
But the computer was so old, slow, and weak that even Allan was unable to make it do what he wanted. Dating from the early nineties, it offered little more networking options than a portable TV set. Allan groaned at the cruel irony of being defeated not by high tech but by low tech. Was this professor some sort of outmoded fool? Or was he an unexpectedly clever adversary?

So Edgar did the only thing he could do: he watched the screen.

It showed a live black-and-white image of the front entrance to the Gale Farm and OZitorium. Not much happening there. If all this was just an ordinary security camera setup, then why hide it in a secret room?

After a few seconds, the image shifted to a view from another camera—this time a shot of the parking lot. Cars, buses, nothing of note…. Next, the OZitorium, outside of which a pair of burly security guards paced. Allan was about to turn away when the next image caught his attention.

It was the exterior of the Poe family house back in Baltimore.

“Our
house
?”

Next, the screen switched to a live, hidden-camera shot of the Poe family’s backyard.

“What?”
This was creepy.

And last, a feed from behind the heating grate of the twins’ own bedroom!

Who’s been spying on us
? Allan wondered.

Of course, he knew the answer. What he didn’t know was why. Or how. Had that repairman who’d rewired their house last year been working secretly for the professor? Or the plumber who’d put in the new upstairs bathroom over the summer? Or the carpet layers who’d replaced the old shag in the basement after the boys’ Halloween prank ruined it? Or someone else from the crew who’d built Aunt Judith’s classroom? Had one of them secretly installed cameras?

Meantime, Edgar had entered the secret room he’d uncovered in the ruins of the barn. This room was outfitted with sufficient survival supplies to sustain a man for months—for example, a full pantry of canned food and bottled water. In the corner was a toilet. Against one wall was a cot and against another was a shelf of books. Edgar examined the titles of the books, all of which were about either quantum physics or the lives of infamous men—Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible.

What sort of man builds himself such a hideout?

A madman,
Edgar thought.

Then he noticed a scrawled note on the edge of the bookshelf, perhaps forgotten by its distracted author.

Edgar grabbed the note and raced from the room.

Allan was waiting for him outside.

Neither boy had to explain to the other what he’d found, because both already knew.

“How creepy is that video stuff?” Allan said.

Edgar agreed. “And why would he rename our cat ‘Asparagus’?”

“Sounds familiar.”

“Isn’t it from a poem?” Edgar asked.

The air inside the boys’ headpieces once again grew warmer as their minds began to whir.

“Of course! It’s from T. S. Eliot’s
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
!” Allan exclaimed.

Naturally, the twins considered Eliot an inferior poet to their great-great-great-great granduncle; nonetheless, they were familiar with his light verse.

“And in the poem, Asparagus the cat is also known as—”

“Gus the theatre cat!” Allan finished.

“Looks like it’s showtime.”

Allan nodded his furry head. “Handy that we’re already in our costumes.”

Having slipped unnoticed through the backstage door of the OZitorium, Edgar and Allan mixed with the other flying monkeys, all of whom were gathered in the wings awaiting their next cue. The boys looked out onto the stage.

A bank of spotlights cast sections in different colors: emerald green for the glittering city of Oz; a mysterious gray with hints of purple and blue where the dark forest loomed; stark, silvery white with heavy shadows for the Wicked Witch’s castle. Then the scene went dark and the boys could see into the audience, where maybe a hundred tourists, almost all of them over age sixty, sat on folding chairs.

Flying Monkey Number One—aka Mr. Archer—whispered to his charges, “OK, everybody, time to hook up.”

Hook up
? Edgar and Allan looked around, confused.

The other flying monkeys all grabbed at ropes that hung from the distant rafters, fastening the hooks at the ends onto a small loop at the back of their costumes.

Edgar and Allan were not inclined to hook themselves onto anything. It seemed too much like being tied up. No way.

“You’re on, everybody. Go, go!”

And just like that Allan and Edgar were swept onstage and into the re-lit spotlights with their flying monkey companions. The boys hesitated at center stage, looking around; after a moment, they began doing as the other monkeys did, hopping in tiny circles. No sense drawing attention to themselves….

Meantime, the Wicked Witch, whose thick stage makeup was the color of lime Jell-O, gazed into a giant crystal ball and shrieked: “Bring me that girl and her dog!” Her cackling filled the auditorium.

The boys looked out beyond the stage, hoping to catch sight of their aunt and uncle, but against the glare of the spotlights they couldn’t pick them out. However, they noted that all the exits to the OZitorium were now guarded by security.

The Wicked Witch looked up from her crystal ball as Edgar, Allan, and the other flying monkeys hopped
around her. Her eyes blazed with dramatized malice as she turned to her squadron of furry henchmen. “Now fly! Fly!” she cried.

At her cue, the flying monkeys—all but two, of course—rose off the stage floor, pulled toward the rafters by the ropes hooked to their backs. One foot above the ground, then two, five, eight…The boys looked up as a matrix of pulleys, rotating arms, and levers pulled their furry compatriots high into the air and then began to swing them in widening arcs. Some of the monkeys even glided out over the audience.

Edgar and Allan couldn’t help but be a little envious.

The Wicked Witch turned angrily to the two grounded monkeys at her side. “What’s wrong with you two?” she whispered, her non-actress voice betraying an un-witchlike Brooklyn accent. “Get your butts up in the air,” she hissed. “The professor’s in the house today. Get it right.”

The professor was in the audience?

“Where is he?” the boys hissed back.

“Where he always is,” she answered. Huffily, she turned back to the audience, ad-libbing: “I keep these two smelly apes with me as my personal bodyguards.”

Ordinarily, the boys would have come back with a
cutting remark of their own—perhaps something about
her
being the smelly one, seeing as witches who are melted by water must never bathe or shower—but they didn’t want to call attention to themselves, not even for a laugh.

Meantime, the other winged monkeys swung and swooped about the stage, distracting the audience. The boys backed away from the witch, crossing their furry fingers in hopes that the spotlight wouldn’t follow them. To their relief, they made it into the shadows upstage, unnoticed.

But what now?

They still needed to find Roderick Usher, rejoin their aunt and uncle, and then escape without Mr. Archer catching them. But was Mr. Archer really their most fearsome threat? The boys suspected it was actually the unseen professor who was pulling the strings.

The boys were right.

However, at that moment the professor was pulling a rope, not a string. A rope that was connected to one of the two dozen trapdoors on the stage—specifically, the door upon which the boys now stood.

For a moment, Edgar and Allan felt weightless.

Before they could say “Isaac Newton,” they plummeted into darkness.

The fall through the trapdoor—from the brightly lit stage of the OZitorium to the darkness beneath—was only twelve feet, but it felt farther to Edgar and Allan. Fortunately, they landed in a heap atop a pile of dusty stage curtains that was thick enough to spare them broken heads (though not thick enough to prevent them from seeing stars). By the time their vision cleared, the trapdoor had snapped shut. The ruckus of the play above was audible now only as a dim rattle, as if it were miles away.

“Hello, boys,” came a raspy voice.

A gas lantern flared in a corner of the room.

In the flickering light, the boys could make out a man about their uncle’s age seated in an electric wheelchair. Clamped to the arm of the chair was a small video monitor. Beside him was a low wooden panel with a dozen foot-long handles connected to a matrix of ropes that radiated up to the stage floor and farther up into the invisible rafters of the theater.