Beyond the Doors Page 10

  Miss Guacaladilla reached out and gently patted Zack’s cheek. “Oh, my sorrowful young man, I wish it were that simple. Alas, fate seems determined to extract its pound of flesh from the four of you. You see, if I don’t turn in these papers, signed by your aunt, by noon tomorrow, then she is not legally allowed to take you in. I’m so very afraid that I will be forced to scoop up your unfortunate souls and find proper foster homes for you all.”

  Janice’s heart sank. Foster homes? “But Dad—” she began.

  “Your father is in no condition to properly look after you,” lamented Miss Guacaladilla.

  “We’ll have to leave Aunt Gladys?” Alexa asked with a sniffle.

  “Worse! You’ll be separated! Sent to the four corners of the earth!” Miss Guacaladilla let loose a torrent of tears, and the children waited patiently for her emotional storm to subside.

  Finally, Zack said, “You can’t separate us. We’re family.”

  “I would never dream of separating you dear, sweet, defenseless children,” moaned Miss Guacaladilla. “However, rules and regulations are cruel taskmasters that refuse to be ignored. I do so wish it were otherwise! How much better the world would be if the human race could throw off the yoke of bureaucracy and dance freely in the sunshine, each to the beat of her own drummer!”

  Janice half expected the woman to burst into song. Instead, the social worker took a deep breath, sighed it out in a very nonmusical way, and returned her attention to the matter at hand. “Alas, it is not to be. Chop, chop. Pack your things. It’s time to go.”

  The children sat, stunned. Janice looked to Zack, certain he’d come up with something to save them, but her brother was stone-faced.

  “This is so wrong,” spat Sydney. She kicked the leg of the kitchen table to emphasize her point.

  “Life can be so horribly wrong sometimes,” agreed Miss Guacaladilla. “When we return to my office, we will find you all permanent homes with proper, decent, incomplete families willing to open their doors to four total strangers in exchange for an inadequate amount of money. I believe the Uzbekistanian family with the pool is still available!”

  Janice looked around, lost. Even though she was terrified of the strange world Aunt Gladys had introduced to them, she didn’t want to leave. She especially didn’t want to be pulled apart from her brother and sisters. There had to be some way to stay together. She looked at her siblings, each dark with resignation and defeat. She looked at her aunt, wary of everyone and everything around her. She looked at Dimitri in the next room, gazing down at his feet in an obvious attempt to ignore what was happening in the kitchen.

  And she got an idea.

  “Couldn’t her husband sign the papers?” she asked.

  “Husband?” asked Miss Guacaladilla.

  “Husband?” asked Zack.

  “Husband?” asked Sydney.

  “Husband?” asked Alexa.

  “Is there more cereal?” asked Aunt Gladys.

  “Uncle Dimitri,” stated Janice, as calmly and as matter-of-fact as possible. “I know he’s not a blood relative, but he is family.”

  Upon hearing his name, Dimitri looked up, confused.

  “You want doors now?” he asked.

  “Yes! Uncle Dimitri!” said Zack.

  “I…I…I wasn’t aware…,” stammered Miss Guacaladilla. Janice was pleased to see the woman so obviously thrown for a loop.

  “It’s pretty recent,” said Sydney, diving into the lie headfirst. “She told us about him last night. That’s why he’s here this morning. She wanted to introduce us to him.”

  “Well!” exclaimed Miss Guacaladilla, who obviously wanted to cry but couldn’t find a reason. “I had no idea.”

  Janice rushed to Dimitri’s side and dragged him into the room. “He’s very shy, and obviously crushed to find his new wife suffering from amnesia. But we think he’s great. Right?”

  The other children all heartily agreed. Dimitri, for his part, continued to look dazed and confused. Miss Guacaladilla collected herself and turned to the befuddled man. “I am sorry, sir. How long have you been married to Gladys Tulving?”

  Dimitri opened his mouth to say something, but Janice quickly pinched his lips closed. “Uncle Dimitri doesn’t speak English,” she explained. “He’s from…Slokavaniastan. Where they only speak…Slokavaniastanese.”

  Dimitri promptly shut his mouth.

  “Didn’t he just say something about doors?” asked Miss Guacaladilla.

  “It’s all he knows,” argued Zack lamely.

  “They met at a door convention,” said Sydney with what Janice felt was a nifty save.

  “It was love at first sight,” added Alexa.

  “Well! This is wonderful! I think…I mean, I believe…” Unused to good news, Miss Guacaladilla fumbled for her words. “Yes. Yes, your uncle could sign the papers.”

  The children cheered.

  “I just need to see the marriage certificate.”

  The children stopped cheering.

  “Well, the thing is—” began Zack.

  “They got married in Slokavaniastan,” finished Janice. “They don’t do marriage certificates there. It’s against their religion.”

  “Oh? Oh dear. Oh dear, dear, dear.” The waterworks opened up as Miss Guacaladilla was once again able to deliver bad news. “I’m so terribly afraid that without a certificate—”

  “He really is our uncle,” lied Zack. “Please, Miss Guacaladilla.”

  The misery-prone social worker hemmed and hawed, but in the end, she agreed to go back to her office and put the conundrum to her superiors. She would be back later that evening with the answer, but she warned that if her superiors said no (and she strongly-if-sadly suspected they would), the children would ride back to town with her at once to be placed in four separate foster homes with four separate families, quite possibly on four separate continents.

  After shaking the new groom’s hand in congratulations and shying away from the new bride, who was jealously guarding her cereal bowl, Miss Guacaladilla walked back across the drawbridge, squeezed into her car, and drove away. The children stood and waved until the car disappeared around the bend.

  “Great job, Janice!” cheered Sydney as soon as Miss Guacaladilla’s car had gone.

  “I agree,” said Zack. “Quick thinking, sis!”

  “Way to go!” exclaimed Alexa, adding a joyful fist pump in the air for good measure.

  “You take doors now?” asked Dimitri.

  Janice glowed from the praise but quickly got down to business. “Not yet, Uncle,” she said.

  “Uncle?” repeated Dimitri. “Oooooo­ooooo­okay.”

  Janice turned to her siblings. “I got us a few hours—that’s it. We need to get cracking.”

  “What do you suggest, Janice?” asked Zack.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she answered with a shiver, dreading what she was about to say. “Someone has to go back into Memoryland and fix Aunt Gladys.”

  “I am too going,” Sydney stated defiantly, placing her hands on her hips and leveling her best glare at her brother.

  “It’s too dangerous,” argued Zack. “We don’t know what’s on the other side of that door.” He pointed emphatically at the rather dull-looking wooden door that the children (along with Dimitri and a rather confused Aunt Gladys) had found strapped into the brass doorframe when they entered the central room of the house. It had been taken as a given that this was the last door Aunt Gladys had ventured through before heading to bed the night before. They figured whatever had happened to erase her memory must lie waiting on the other side.

  “You’re right. We don’t know,” agreed Sydney. “Which is why going in alone is stupid.”

  Zack frowned. Sydney knew she’d scored a point and inflated with confidence. Normally, she’d just rely on her stubbornness and the threat of a violent outburst to get her way, but in this case she was further buoyed by the fact that, near as she could tell, she was actually right.

  “She has a
point,” confirmed Janice. “Going in alone might not be the best idea.”

  “Aunt Gladys has been going in alone for years,” Zack pointed out.

  “And look how well that turned out,” snapped Sydney. “Look, Aunt Gladys can’t go, Alexa can’t go, Janice doesn’t want to go, and you need Dimitri here.”

  Dimitri gave a hesitant wave from his seat at the controls. It had come as somewhat of a shock to the children when the happy-go-lucky door delivery man had confessed to having worked as Marcus Tulving’s assistant a number of years previously. It was not quite clear exactly when he’d stopped working for their grandfather—Dimitri wasn’t saying and Aunt Gladys no longer had a clue—but he knew how to work the memory machine. Sydney found it odd that the only clearheaded adult in the room was letting the kids take charge, but the quirky strongman was proving almost disappointingly timid and was more than happy to follow the children’s lead.

  “Fine,” relented Zack. “Come with me. But stay close and don’t run off. Deal?”

  Sydney stuck out her hand. “Deal.” She smiled as Zack groaned and met her hand with his own, obviously finding the act overly dramatic.

  Preparations were quickly made, limited though they were. Sydney picked a doorknob out of the drawer—a particularly girlish one just to annoy her brother—and they each grabbed a pair of rubber gloves from a basket Janice had discovered against the wall. Sydney tried to think of what else they might need but came up empty.

  Finally, she stood next to Zack at the foot of the platform. Although no one had said anything, there was an unspoken agreement to remain on the floor until Dimitri had the memory machine up and running.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Dimitri,” said Zack.

  “Yes. Am working on it,” said an obviously stressed Dimitri. He frantically twisted dials back and forth, pulled levers, and pressed buttons seemingly at random while Janice hovered over his shoulder. “Has been while. Am bit rusty.”

  “You already pressed that button,” mentioned Janice, obsessively following his every movement.

  “Is good button!” snapped Dimitri.

  “I don’t understand,” complained Aunt Gladys for the umpteenth time. “The door’s just…shouldn’t it…you know…? Be on a wall?”

  Sydney was surprised to find herself deeply saddened by her aunt’s comment. She became more determined than ever to walk through the door and make things right.

  “When will we know if it works?” asked Alexa. “Will Aunt Gladys be back to normal as soon as you leave?”

  “Good question,” agreed Zack. “Do you know, Dimitri?”

  “Yes?” he asked, looking up from the computer bank. “Sorry, am concentrating. You have question?”

  “He asked how it works,” repeated Janice. “They’re going into a memory of the past, right? So as soon as they go in, they’ll be who knows how many years before now. So anything they change then would change instantly now, no matter how long it took them to change it then. Right?”

  Everyone just looked at Janice.

  “Did I say that right?” she asked.

  “Not a clue,” admitted Sydney.

  “Does not work that way,” said Dimitri. “Is not then. Is there. You spend hour there, is hour here. See?”

  “I’m confused. Where is there?” asked Aunt Gladys.

  “What I think Dimitri is trying to say—” started Zack.

  “I remember!” interrupted Dimitri, swiveling back around to the computers. “Is this one!”

  He twisted a dial that looked like any other dial, and the machine sprang to life with a mechanical cough, followed by an electric sizzle, followed by an unidentifiable sound from somewhere below. In a flash, bright blue sparks of energy wrapped themselves around the door. The entire frame buzzed excitedly for a moment before settling into a quiet drone so soft as to suggest a return to silence.

  The moment past, Sydney embarrassingly removed her hand from Zack’s, where it had unconsciously gone an instant before. What are big brothers for, anyway? she reasoned.

  “Oh my,” murmured Aunt Gladys in awe.

  “Is good! You go now!” announced Dimitri, rather unnecessarily.

  Zack looked down at Sydney. “You ready for this?” he asked.

  “Quit stalling,” she replied with a wicked gleam in her eye.

  They stepped up onto the platform. Zack reached his gloved hand out and gingerly touched the doorknob amid the sea of crackling blue energy. When his hand wasn’t zapped into cinders, he shrugged, grabbed the knob, and pulled the door open.

  They walked unflinchingly into the white.

  “Huh,” said Sydney.

  “Huh,” agreed Zack.

  Brother and sister emerged from the whitewash of tingling fuzzy-headedness and found themselves in a dingy, dusty, dimly lit room packed with rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves as far as the eye could see. Each shelf was filled to bursting with all manner of objects, papers, boxes, and assorted knickknacks—each tagged and labeled and evidently shelved according to some chaotic system wholly incomprehensible to the naked eye. So tightly packed were they that an overabundance of seemingly useless junk littered the floor, clogging the aisles. Through the insufficient level of light coming from the sparsely placed lightbulbs high above, Sydney was again able to make out a faint yellowish film covering the world.

  “It’s a warehouse of some kind,” said Zack, or as Sydney liked to think of him at times like these, Captain Obvious.

  “A warehouse of useless, boring junk,” specified Sydney.

  She was surprised when her brother snickered in response. “Looks like it,” he said. “Come on. Let’s find Aunt Gladys.”

  Sydney let him lead the way through the minefield of garage sale rejects, taking care to avoid stepping on anything breakable. “What do you think she was doing here?” she asked quietly, skirting around a stack of important-looking papers. “You know, to make her forget everything?”

  “I don’t know,” Zack admitted, stepping over a ceramic bowl. “Hopefully we’ll find out.”

  Hopefully we won’t make the same mistake, thought Sydney, ducking under a long spear sticking out across the aisle from the shelf next to her. The thought of losing her memory terrified her. She couldn’t imagine not knowing her sisters and brother, forgetting her old home, her old friends.

  Forgetting Dad.

  Her father’s face appeared in her mind’s eye, smiling in that hapless, reassuring way he had, and she had a sudden, urgent need to run up and bury her face in his arms. Zack did the best he could, but when things were really bad—like, say, now—nobody could compare to Dad in his ability to make everything okay. Without him, she didn’t see how things would ever be okay again.

  Sydney was jolted out of these morbid thoughts when she stumbled into a suddenly frozen Zack. “Hey! What are—”

  Her brother quickly shushed her and pointed. At first, all she could see were endless aisles of junk, but then she spotted two figures up ahead. Standing as silent as possible, she was able to make out voices.

  “—truly remarkable discovery!” said a small, young man in an excited, high-pitched tone. “I am aghast to think it was down here all this time!”

  “Yeeeeeees. Old Stickwell will be beside himself,” agreed an older, more disheveled man in an equally excited voice, rubbing his hands together like a greedy miser.

  Four or five aisles away, two men in tweed were hunched over a large, wooden crate, fawning at something within. Bits of straw and splinters of wood littered the ground at their feet.

  “This will make our careers!” exclaimed the young man.

  “What are they talking about?” whispered Sydney, but Zack just shrugged.

  “Yeeeeeees. We get to name it, of course,” said the older man.

  His colleague lit up. “My parents will be so proud! Let’s call it a Wicklesfeltonasaurus! Our names will go down in history!”

  Sydney snorted at the absurdity of the name before she could stop herself. The so
und reverberated outward in an ever-expanding circle, filling the entire room with an audio eye roll. Both men immediately looked up.

  “Did you hear that?” asked the small, young one, who was either Wickles or Felton—Sydney had no way of knowing.

  “Yeeeeeees,” replied the older, disheveled one, who was either Felton or Wickles. “You’re certain we’re alone?”

  Sydney held her breath as the two men peered into the gloom in their general direction. She prayed her habitual disdain had not proved their undoing.

  “Perhaps it was nothing,” said either Felton or Wickles very slowly.

  “If it was nothing,” responded either Wickles or Felton, reaching into the crate. “Then it won’t mind if we bash its head in.”

  A shiver ran down Sydney’s spine as the man pulled a large, wicked-looking bone out of the crate and hefted it like a club.

  “Yeeeeeees. An excellent idea,” agreed either Felton or Wickles, reaching into the crate to procure his own Bone of Serious Bludgeoning.

  “We should get out of here,” whispered Zack. “Do you have the doorknob?”

  Sydney nodded and backed away, keeping her eyes glued on the two men, who were slowly edging down their own aisle. She was thankful there were multiple shelves of junk between them.

  Suddenly, she stepped backward onto a shard of pottery with an audible crack. Everybody froze.

  “Got you!” cried either Wickles or Felton. He swung his bone into the row of shelving in front of him, smashing it aside with a blow far more tremendous than a man his size ought to have been able to make.

  “Run!” yelled Zack.

  Sydney took off, Zack at her heels. Behind them, the sound of utter destruction filled the room as the two men used their prized discovery to create their own aisle through the rows of ancient shelving.

  As she approached the door—the same boring wooden door that now stood hooked up to an impossible memory machine back home—Sydney fumbled in her pocket for the knob and tried to remember how Aunt Gladys had said the trick worked. Did she just hold the knob up to the door? Did she have to attach it somehow? Did it attach itself magically? Panic swelled within her, punctuated by the crescendo of chaos chasing them. Her fingers found the knob and she pulled it out of her pocket.