“Ew?” Lisa asked.
“Yeah, imagine licking a stamp that’s over a hundred years old….”
“Okay, whatever, but do you think it looks like it’s a hundred years old?”
Nilly studied the stamp closely and had to admit that Lisa was definitely onto something. Aside from the fact that it was a little warped from having gotten wet, it looked brand-new. The colors weren’t faded and the edges looked crisp and fresh.
“Maybe it’s a fake, or a reproduction,” he said, but he didn’t sound quite so confident anymore.
“You think?” Lisa asked.
Nilly shook his head as if to say maybe not. “Yeah, there is something more here,” he said.
“Everything about this is upside down,” Lisa said.
“I thought you just said everything was backward,” Nilly pointed out.
“What did you just say?” Lisa asked.
“What you said.”
“Which was?”
“That everything was backward,” Nilly said. “You know, the writing.”
“That’s it,” Lisa said, snatching the card back from him. “That’s it!”
She studied it. And then gasped.
“What is it?” Nilly asked, concerned.
“I think … I think Doctor Proctor’s in danger,” she stammered, suddenly very pale. “Read the whole card backward.”
Nilly did. And you can too, of course. Right now, for instance …
DONE? DID YOU understand it?
All right, neither did Nilly, really. “READ ThIS,” he read. “W ANNA COmE HOME AND WEN EEdHELP, NiLLY & LISA.”
“So that’s what it says,” Lisa moaned. “Something is very wrong.”
“Yeah,” Nilly said. “ANNA W isn’t actually a name, it means WANNA. And it should be WE NEED instead of WEN EED.”
“Not that!” Lisa cried out. “Don’t you get anything?”
“Uh, no,” Nilly admitted, scratching his sideburns. “For example, I don’t get what he means by READ ThIS. The card? We did that.”
Lisa stared at the postcard, concentrating hard. “Look at the arrow,” she said. “It’s pointing at the stamp.”
Nilly stuck his right index finger into his right ear and twisted it around and around while squeezing his right eye shut. This always helped Nilly think—it was like turning the ignition key in a car; it sort of got his brain started. There was an audible plop sound when he pulled his finger back out.
“I’ve got it,” Nilly said, examining his finger with fascination. “The card is a secret message to us, something no one else is supposed to find out about. Proctor knew that a smart guy like me would realize that there was something strange about the way it was written.”
Lisa rolled her eyes, but Nilly pretended not to notice.
“READ ThIS and an arrow pointing to the stamp,” he continued. “That means that the rest of the message is under the stamp! We just have to take it off.”
“That is exactly what I have been thinking for a while now,” Lisa said.
Nilly passed the card back to Lisa with a satisfied sniff: “Good thing you have me here to crack these secret codes, don’t you think?”
Doctor Proctor’s Cellar
LISA’S FATHER, THE Commandant, woke up on his sofa with the taste of newspaper ink in his mouth. This was because, as usual, he had fallen asleep with the newspaper over his face and was snoring so vigorously that the curtains over by the window were swaying and the bottom page of the paper—the one with the weather on it—was being sucked into his mouth each time he inhaled. He glanced over at the clock and gave a contented sigh when he saw that it was almost time for bed. But first a chicken sandwich. Or two. He tossed the newspaper onto the coffee table, and hefted his large stomach out over the edge of the sofa, thus automatically tipping himself up onto his feet.
“Hi there,” he said when he walked into the kitchen. Lisa was standing by the counter and Nilly was standing on a chair next to her. The Commandant knew him as the tiny neighbor boy from the strange family that had moved onto Cannon Avenue that spring. The teakettle in front of Lisa and Nilly was quivering and sputtering as steam spewed out its spout.
“Tell me, aren’t you kids a little young to be drinking coffee?” the Commandant asked them with a yawn. “And at this late hour?”
“Aye aye, el commandante,” Nilly said. “We’re not making coffee.”
Only then did the Commandant notice that Lisa was holding something that looked like a postcard in the cloud of steam billowing up from the kettle.
“What are you guys up to?”
“Go back to the living room, Dad,” Lisa said.
“Hey, I’m the Commandant here!” the Commandant said. “I want to know what you two are up to!”
“Sorry, el commandante,” Nilly said. “This is so top secret that if we told you, you would know too much. And you know what happens to people who know too much, right?”
“What?” the Commandant asked, putting his hands on his hips.
“They get their tongues cut out so they can’t speak. And all the fingers on their right hands cut off so they can’t write.”
“And what if you guys discover that I’m left-handed?” the Commandant said.
“Then you’ll be really unlucky, because then we’ll have to remove the fingers from that hand, too.”
“And what if I can write with the pen between my toes?”
“Both legs right off, el commandante. Sorry, but spy work is serious business.”
“Yes, apparently it is,” the Commandant sighed.
“But everything has a bright side,” Nilly said. “Without legs you could lie on the sofa until Easter without having to wax any skis, wash any socks, or tie any shoelaces.”
“You may be onto something there,” the Commandant said. “But what if I figure out that I can put the pen in my mouth? Or send signals in Morse code by blinking my eyes?”
“I’m sorry you figured that out, el commandante. Now we’ll be forced to cut off your head right from the start.”
The Commandant laughed so hard his enormous belly shook.
“Quit fooling around, you two,” Lisa said. “Dad, get out of here! That’s an order.”
Once the Commandant had left, shaking his head, Lisa pulled the card out of the steam. They sat down at the kitchen table and Lisa peeled the stamp off very gingerly with a pair of tweezers.
“It worked!” Lisa exclaimed. “How did you know that steam would loosen the stamp?”
“Ah, just a little basic forensics,” Nilly said, but actually he looked a little surprised himself.
“There’s something written under where the stamp was, but the handwriting is too small for me to read it,” Lisa said, holding the postcard closer to the light. “Maybe it would be easier for you since you’re … uh, smaller?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Nilly asked, looking at her with his eyebrow raised.
Lisa shrugged. “Smaller people wear smaller clothes sizes and are happy with smaller cars. Why not smaller print, too?”
“Let me see it,” Nilly mumbled, grabbing the card and squinting at it intently.
“Nada,” he said, and held out his hand without looking at Lisa. “Magnifying glass, please.”
Lisa darted over to a drawer, found her mother’s magnifying glass, and placed it in Nilly’s outstretched hand.
When he saw what it said, Nilly said, “Aha.” Because what he saw was this:
SOS. I’ve disappeared in time. Bring the jar labeled “time soap” from the lab and come to Paris immediately. Also bring the French nose clips that are in the drawer marked “Unpatented Inventions.” You can get money for the plane ticket by selling this stamp to the Trench Coat Clock Shop on Rosenkrantz Street. But don’t say anything to the storeowner about where you got the stamp from or where you’re going. You understand, Nilly?
“Yup, understood,” Nilly mumbled, moving the magnifying glass down.
In Paris go str
aight to the Hotel Frainche-Fraille. Once you’re there . . .
. . . Sincerely, Doctor Proctor
“Hey!” Nilly yelped. “What is this? The rest is missing.”
“It must have gotten washed away by the water,” Lisa whispered breathlessly over his shoulder. “Does it say anything else?”
Nilly moved the magnifying glass down farther.
P.S. I hid the key to the lab in a very clever spot: under the doormat.
“What are we waiting for?” Nilly shouted.
“On your mark, get set …,” Lisa yelled.
“Go!” they both shouted in unison.
Then they jumped out of their chairs. Lisa rummaged around in the bottom drawer in the kitchen until she found her father’s flashlight and then they ran out onto Cannon Avenue, where darkness and silence had fallen over all the yards and wooden houses. The moon was curious and peeked out at them as they climbed over the fence surrounding the smallest house and the yard with the tallest grass. (Doctor Proctor had been away for a while.) They sprinted past the pear tree over to the cellar door and lifted up the doormat.
And, sure enough, a key gleamed in the moonlight.
They stuck it into the keyhole in the old, unpainted door, and the metal made a slightly spooky squeaking sound as they turned it.
They both stood there looking at the door.
“You first,” Lisa whispered.
“No problem,” Nilly said with a gulp. He took a deep breath. Then he kicked the door as hard as he could.
The hinges made a chilling creaking sound as the door swung open. A gust of cold, raw cellar air wafted out of the doorway, and something fluttered over their heads and disappeared into the night, something that might have been an unusually large moth or just an average-sized bat.
“Yikes,” said Lisa.
“And ew,” said Nilly. Then he turned on the flashlight and strolled in.
Lisa looked around outside. Even the usually welcoming pear tree looked like it was clawing at the moon with witch’s fingers. She pulled her jacket tighter around herself and hurried in after Nilly.
But he was already gone and all she saw was total darkness.
“Nilly?” Lisa whispered, because she knew that if you talk loudly in the dark, the noise would make you feel even more alone.
“Over here,” Nilly whispered. She followed the sound and saw that the cone of light from the flashlight was pointing at something on the wall.
“Did you find the time soap?” she asked.
“No,” Nilly said. “But I found the biggest spider in the northern hemisphere. It has seven legs and it hasn’t shaved them lately. And a mouth that’s so big you can see its lips. Check out this beast, huh?”
Lisa saw a very ordinary and not particularly large spider on the cellar wall.
“A seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider. They’re extremely rare!” Nilly whispered, excited. “They live by catching and sucking out the brains of other insects.”
“The brains?” Lisa said, looking at Nilly. “I didn’t think insects had brains.”
“Well that’s exactly why the seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider is so rare,” Nilly whispered. “It hardly ever finds any insects with brains to suck.”
“And just how do you know all this?” Lisa asked.
“It’s in—”
“Don’t say it,” Lisa interrupted. “In Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist?”
“Exactly,” Nilly said. “So if you’ll go find the time soap and the nose clips, I’ll work on trying to capture this rare spider specimen. Okay?”
“But we have only one flashlight.”
“Well why don’t we turn on the overhead light, then?”
“The overhead li—” Lisa started to say, putting her palm to her forehead as if to say duh. “Why didn’t we think of that before?”
“Because then it wouldn’t have been so delightfully spooky,” Nilly said, pointing the flashlight at the light switch next to the door. Lisa flipped it on and in an instant Doctor Proctor’s laboratory was bathed in white light.
There were kettles, pressure cookers, buckets, and shelves full of mason jars with different types of powder mixtures and chemicals. There were iron pipes, glass pipes, test tubes, and other kinds of pipes—even an old rifle with an ice hockey puck attached to its muzzle. And next to the rifle, on the wall, hung the picture that Lisa was so fond of. It was of a young Doctor Proctor on his motorcycle in France. She was sitting in the sidecar—the beautiful Juliette Margarine with the long auburn hair. His girlfriend and the love of his life. They were smiling and looked so happy that it filled Lisa’s heart with warmth. In the last postcard he’d sent, he had written that he was on her trail. In the only other card he’d sent from Paris, in June, he’d also written that he was on her trail. Maybe by now he’d found her?
Lisa continued scanning the room again and stopped when she spotted an almost empty mason jar with something strawberry-red in the bottom. It wasn’t the strawberry-red that caught her attention, but the label.
Because it looked like this:
Lisa took the jar down from the shelf and walked over to a big, rusty filing cabinet. She pulled out the drawer labeled “Unpatented Inventions,” flipped through the files until she got to F, and—sure enough—there was a manila folder marked “French Nose Clips.”
She opened the folder, turned it upside down, and two blue and seemingly completely normal clips fell out. But no instructions. They looked like you would use them for swimming. She tucked them into her jacket pocket and announced, “I found them! Let’s get out of here.”
She turned around and discovered that Nilly was standing on the workbench with his whole arm down inside another mason jar.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Taking a little fartonaut powder, what does it look like?”
“Nilly! That stuff is dangerous and totally illegal!”
“So sue me,” Nilly said. “Besides, a normal amount of farting is healthy.”
“A normal amount? The last time you took a spoonful of that stuff, you farted so hard you blasted off into outer space!”
“Leave the exaggerating to me, please,” Nilly said, pouring a fistful of the light blue fartonaut powder into a little plastic bag that he tied shut and stuffed in his jacket pocket. “I flew maybe fifty yards up into the air, and that’s not that high if you compare it to … well, like the Eiffel Tower, for example. You’re a girl, which is why you don’t have any talent for farting. You girls can hardly even manage to make little mouse farts.” Nilly farted an average fart to make his point.
“Did you hear that?” he asked. “Your turn.”
“Pff,” Lisa said. “I fart too, but only when absolutely necessary.”
“My dear Miss Fancy Fart,” Nilly said, screwing the lid back on tight and jumping down. “I officially bet you a ton of sticky caramels that you will never fart loud enough that it can be detected by human ears. Better leave the power-farting to us boys.”
“Just you wait and see,” Lisa said.
“Wait and hear, you mean,” Nilly said, putting one hand behind his ear. “And what do I hear? … Nothing!”
They turned off the light, locked the door, stuck the key back under the mat, strolled through the yard, and stopped under the pear tree to look up at the moon.
“So I guess we’re going to Paris,” Lisa said. “Alone.”
“Alone together,” Nilly corrected. “And Paris isn’t that far.”
“It’s farther than Sarpsborg,” Lisa said. That’s where her best friend had moved to.
“Just barely,” Nilly said.
“I have to ask my parents for permission first,” Lisa said.
“Forget that,” Nilly said. “They’ll never let you. They’ll just tell you to file a missing person report for Doctor Proctor with the Paris police. And then we both know exactly what’ll happen.”
“We do?” Lisa asked, a little unsure. “What will happen?”
&nb
sp; “Nothing,” Nilly said. “No grown-up will believe the stuff Doctor Proctor comes up with. ‘He’s disappeared in time using soap?’ they’ll say. ‘Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?’ That’s why the professor sent that postcard to us. He knew that no one else would believe him, right?”
“Maybe,” Lisa said cautiously. “But … but then, are you really sure that we believe him? I mean, he’s nice and everything, but he’s a little … uh, crazy.”
“Of course I’m sure we believe him,” Nilly said. “And Proctor isn’t a little crazy. He’s totally off-the-deep-end insane.”
“Exactly,” Lisa said. “So how can you be so sure?”
“Elementary, my dear Lisa. Doctor Proctor is our friend, and friends believe in each other.”
Lisa gazed at the moon for a long time and then nodded.
“That,” she said, “is the truest thing you’ve said in ages. So what do we do?”
“Well, tomorrow is Friday, right? So now you go home and tell your parents that Anna who moved to Sarpsborg invited you to come spend the weekend with her, that you’re going to take the train down there after school, and that her family is going to come pick you up at the train station.”
“Hm, that might work,” Lisa said, biting her lip. “What about you?”
“I’ll tell my mom that I’m going on a band trip to Arvika this weekend.”
“A band trip? Just out of the blue like that?”
Nilly shrugged. “My mom won’t bat an eyelid. She doesn’t keep track of stuff like that. In fact, she’ll probably just be happy to be rid of me for a few days. So anyway, tomorrow you should pack a few extra things in your backpack for school, not a lot, just a few little things that start with P. Your passport, a pair of pajamas, packs of peanuts and stuff like that. Then we’ll go to school and pretend like everything is normal, right? But then after school we’ll go downtown, to that clock shop….”
“The Trench Coat Clock Shop,” Lisa said.
“Exactly. We’ll sell the stamp, take the bus to the airport, buy tickets on the next flight to Paris, check in, and, presto, we’re there.”
Lisa chewed on her lower lip as she considered what Nilly had said. Presto this and presto that, she thought. When Nilly talked he had this way of making things that were actually very complex seem so simple.