Several spa staff stepped closer to the table, closing in on Cass and Max-Ernest. In the eerie light of the tent, their beautiful tanned skins looked like hard shells. And their once-sympathetic smiles turned to stony stares.
Cass’s first impression of the spa had been correct; it was a prison after all.
Have you ever been locked in a room hours away from home by people you have every reason to believe are capable of murder or worse?
Neither have I.
Maybe that’s why I can write about it without shedding a tear.
Tragically, Cass and Max-Ernest did not have the same luxury. They had to experience imprisonment firsthand.
Ten minutes after we last saw them, Max-Ernest was pacing back and forth in a state of agitation extreme even for him. “Stupid...stupid...stupid...” he was saying to himself. “How could I be so—”
“Will you stop muttering, please?” said Cass. “It’s really annoying.”
“You hate me, don’t you? I mean, I don’t blame you. I hate me, too—”
“I don’t hate you,” said Cass in a not very friendly tone. (Max-Ernest might be admitting his mistakes, but the image of Ms. Mauvais kissing his forehead was still fresh in Cass’s mind.) “I’m just trying to think how to get past those guys—you know, so we can get out of here alive.”
She gestured toward the window where Daisy and Owen could be seen standing guard outside the door. From our more comfortable perspective, they were a funny-looking couple: the tall, dour limousine driver and the shorter, freckled butler. But no doubt they were more than capable of keeping a pair of eleven-year-old kids from escaping.
“I knew I shouldn’t have brought the notebook!” said Max-Ernest, still speaking to himself as much as to Cass. “But they said it was the only way I could get a reservation. How else was I going to get in?”
“Forget about it. You didn’t have a choice,” said Cass. “But since we’re on the subject—what I don’t understand is why you had to come here in the first place. I thought you were done investigating.”
“Because I figured out they knew who you were—that’s why.”
“So?”
Max-Ernest looked at her like she was nuts. “So—so, you were here.”
“So?”
“So, I didn’t want them to kill you.”
“Oh...you didn’t?” said Cass, trying to get used to the idea.
“Duh. I swear, sometimes you don’t make any sense,” said Max-Ernest.
“Huh,” said Cass, “I guess sometimes I don’t.”
And she started to smile.
As for the rest of their conversation—well, if some conversations are too upsetting to record, others are too sappy and sentimental. Have you ever heard two people make up after they’ve been fighting? It’s not very interesting unless you happen to be one of those people yourself. I prefer listening in on insults and curses; let everyone else listen to the apologies and declarations of friendship.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how glad Max-Ernest was that he and Cass were collaborators again. However, at the risk of getting mushy, I’ll point out that as glad as he was, Cass was more so. You see, as many times as she had tried to save the world, nobody had ever tried to save her before. She was so touched that Max-Ernest had come to rescue her that it almost made up for the fact he had no plan of escape.
Almost.
Just as the rosy glow of their reunion was beginning to fade, and the direness of their situation was again coming into focus, the door opened and Dr. L strode in.
No longer the silky-smooth doctor who welcomed Cass to the spa, he wore an expression of fierce concentration, as if he was struggling to contain a deep, volcanic rage. Cass and Max-Ernest instinctively backed away from him.
“Ms. Mauvais is not happy. And neither am I,” he said with ominous understatement. “We were hoping to find certain...information.”
“You mean the Secret,” said Max-Ernest, a little hoarsely.
“Yes, I–mean–the–Secret,” Dr. L said through gritted teeth. “If you know anything about it, if you saw anything, if you even think anything—I advise you to tell me now.”
“Or what—you’re going to torture us?” asked Cass, much more boldly than she felt.
“Perhaps,” said Dr. L dismissively. He pointed an accusing finger at the kids: “But it’s what the Secret will do to you that you should be scared of.”
“What do you mean? Secrets don’t do anything,” said Max-Ernest, stepping next to Cass.
“Besides, you don’t even know what the Secret is,” said Cass, taking Max-Ernest’s hand protectively.
“We know certain things,” said Dr. L, coming so close to them that they were backed into a corner.
He started listing facts like a man obsessed: “We know when the Secret was discovered: 1212 BC. We know where: Luxor, Egypt. We know by whom: a court physician. We also know that three days after his discovery, he was executed. What we don’t know is why!”
He looked penetratingly at the kids, as though he suspected they knew the answer—as though they might even be responsible for killing the physician themselves.
“Was it because the physician refused to tell the pharaoh the secret?” Dr. L asked in a menacing tone. “Or did the physician tell the pharaoh his secret?— and the secret so enraged the pharaoh that he demanded the physician’s head!”
“W-why would the secret make him so mad?” asked Max-Ernest.
“Precisely! And there’s more—” said Dr. L, almost feverish now. “Before he died, the physician wrote his secret on a scrap of papyrus, intending the secret to be buried with him. And so it was. Until years later, when the papyrus was taken by tomb robbers. They had no idea of its value—they may not even have read it—but they died violent deaths soon after, and incited a forty-year war.”
He searched the kids’ faces to make sure they were properly scared. They tried not to show any reaction. But of course they were scared—at least of Dr. L.
He nodded with grim satisfaction and started pacing around the room. The subject of the Secret lit his face with an expression so vampiric one could almost have imagined a cape billowing behind him.
“In the early 19th century,” he continued, “the papyrus surfaced in Prague, where it was purchased as a curiosity by an antiquities dealer. He gave it to an Egyptologist for translation. The Egyptologist went mad, and the papyrus was never seen again. As for the antiquities dealer, he spent the remainder of his life in a fruitless search for the Secret, until he died alone and destitute, prey to a terrible, flesh-eating virus.”
Dr. L spun around and faced his young audience, his eyes gleaming.
“Now, I ask you—does this sound like a secret you want to keep?”
“So the Secret is a curse?” asked Max-Ernest, his head full of nightmarish visions.
“It’s a formula. It’s many things.”
“A formula for what?” asked Cass.
“Never mind that,” said Dr. L quickly. “Ms. Mauvais and I have prepared all our lives to learn the Secret. You are children. It will destroy you.”
“We keep telling you, we don’t know anything about it,” said Max-Ernest, pleadingly.
“It’s true,” said Cass. “There weren’t any more pages in the notebook—I swear!”
Dr. L stared at them, weighing their words—and their fates.
“If nobody ever saw the papyrus again, how do you know so much about it?” asked Cass, curiosity overcoming caution. “Did Pietro find it?”
“Pietro had very different ideas about the Secret,” said Dr. L evasively. “We did not see eye to eye on the subject.”
“He did—he found it, huh?” said Cass, feeling suddenly very reckless. “And you guys tried to get it from him. And when he wouldn’t give it to you, you burned down his house. And you killed him!”
She hadn’t necessarily intended to say so much—but now that she had she felt oddly victorious, as if she’d been waiting to make the accusa
tion all along, and had finally succeeded.
“Killed him, did we?” Dr. L asked, half smiling. “Then who has the missing pages from his notebook? If he didn’t take them—”
His eyes turned to steel. “Empty your pockets—both of you!”
Max-Ernest immediately complied, pulling out of his pants odd bits of paper, gum wrappers, a crumpled trading card, a chewed-up straw, and placing them on the table beside him.
As Cass put her hands in her pockets, her mind whirled:
Earlier, when Dr. L was looking at Pietro’s notebook, something had half occurred to her, just the smallest seed of an unformed thought. Later, listening to the way he pronounced Pietro’s name, the seed had come back to her as a half-formed suspicion. Now her suspicion was growing into a full-blown prediction.
But how to test it?
Dr. L looked at her angrily. “Didn’t you hear me?! I said empty your pockets—now!”
“OK, OK.”
Cass dug deeper and felt something sticky... Could it be? Yes, it was...
Cass pulled the Smoochie out of her pocket.
Making sure Dr. L was watching, she brazenly smeared it across her lips. Then she held up the Smoochie like a prize.
Max-Ernest looked at her like she was out of her mind. “What are you doing?” he mouthed.
“Do I smell...cotton candy?” asked Dr. L, frowning.
“Yeah, it’s my lip gloss,” said Cass with studied casualness.
“Lip gloss? Let me see it,” he commanded.
Cass handed it to him. “It’s made by the Skelton Sisters,” she said. “It’s just regular lip gloss, but people buy it ’cause of them. Kind of dumb, if you ask me.”
Dr. L examined the Smoochie quizzically, as if it were some unusual artifact, if not an Egyptian antiquity. Then he held it to his nose.
He closed his eyes and inhaled, holding his breath as if he couldn’t bear to let the scent go.
Max-Ernest looked at Cass—what’s going on? But she just shook her head—wait.
Completely lost in the moment, Dr. L let the Smoochie drop right out of his hand.
When he opened his eyes, there were tears in them.
“Did it hurt your eyes? Sometimes the really smelly ones do that,” said Cass, knowing perfectly well that wasn’t what happened.
“No—it was nothing! Just something from the past...ridiculous!”
He leaned down to pick up the Smoochie. “This is mine now,” he said, pocketing it.
He’d only bent his head for a second, but it had been long enough for Cass to get a glimpse of the back of his neck—and to get the proof she was looking for.
There was a knock on the door. Daisy entered the room, ducking slightly to avoid hitting her head in the doorway.
“Excuse me, Doctor. It’s the boy. He has a high fever. They think he might not make it. Ms. Mauvais says it has to be tonight.”
“Benjamin Blake!” exclaimed Max-Ernest, before Cass could dart him a look. “What are you doing to him?”
Dr. L stared at them, grim. “Ms. Mauvais is right. You kids know too much—and maybe not enough. You have twelve hours to decide whether you remember anything helpful. After that—” He left the threat hanging. “Of course, if all goes well tonight, we may not need you anymore. And that will be your bad luck.”
After he left, Cass turned to Max-Ernest. “Well, did you see it?”
“What?”
“The birthmark on his neck. It was shaped like a crescent moon.”
Max-Ernest opened his mouth—speechless, for once, at the thought that that horrible, horrible man was Luciano Bergamo.
For most of his life, Benjamin Blake thought he was bad at art—mostly because he didn’t understand it.
When other kids drew a triangle on top of a square, he didn’t see a house, he heard the shrill whistle of a train over the dull thud of a rock landing in dirt.
When they drew a circle around two dots and a curling line, he didn’t see a smiley face, he smelled baking cookies punctuated by two beeps and a low whine.
To Benjamin, everyone and everything was a unique combination of sound and color, smell and taste. When he drew, he tried to capture all these different dimensions of his subjects. But when other kids looked at his drawings all they saw was a jumbled mess. So Benjamin assumed he wasn’t any better at art than he was at math or science or Foosball.
Then he took an after-school enrichment class called “Art Out of Bounds.” In the class, he saw a picture of rocks that someone had stuck in a lake to form a spiral; the rocks were an example of a kind of art called Earthworks. He also heard about people who got up on stage and did silly things; they were called Performance Artists. And he heard about people who just wrote lists of ideas for art they never made; they were called Conceptual Artists.
It seemed like it would be pretty easy to be an artist if you could do any of those things.
In Art Out of Bounds, students had to do things like create imaginary languages and invent alternatives to gravity. When students wanted to draw or paint or sculpt or do any normal art things, their teacher—who had long dreadlocks that bounced up and down when he spoke and made everything he said seem really important—encouraged the students to make abstract art rather than try to copy the world around them. “Copies are what Xerox machines are for,” he said, which was funny because he had just showed them some Xerox art that didn’t look like a copy of anything.
Benjamin tried explaining that his paintings weren’t abstract, they were copies of the world as he saw it. But the teacher said that was close to the same thing and not to worry. After that, Benjamin started painting everything he saw, especially music, which was Benjamin’s favorite thing to look at.
Without telling Benjamin, the teacher submitted his work to the Young Leonardos Contest. Nobody could believe it when Benjamin won first prize, least of all himself. Not only had he never won a prize before, he’d never even entered a contest before.
Benjamin liked winning. But it wasn’t easy being a winner.
All of a sudden, everybody wanted to talk to him, and talking was very difficult for Benjamin. Usually, when he talked, people thought he was crazy. Or else that he was reciting poetry.
Like those two impressive-looking strangers in the school yard—the Golden Lady and the Silver Man.
“You have such a wonderful eye. Or should I say, such a wonderful ear?” said the Golden Lady. “I haven’t seen such a talented young man since, well, since this man here was a young boy.”
“Oh, but I never painted like that,” said the Silver Man with a self-deprecating laugh. “This boy is one of a kind. Aren’t you, son?”
But Benjamin couldn’t even muster a proper thank-you. He knew whatever he’d said must have come out wrong because instead of their smiles feeling warm, their smiles didn’t feel like anything at all.
Benjamin didn’t like these strangers.
They both had gray voices. Gray was the color of computer voices and recorded messages. In Benjamin’s experience, when people had gray voices they were usually lying. But his mother had told him that it wasn’t fair to judge people by the color of their voices; especially since nobody could see the color except him.
It was hard to believe that other people didn’t see the strangers’ words curling like smoke out of their mouths—or was it more like breath on a really frosty day?—but he tried not to look. Besides, if he just listened to what the strangers were saying, and not how they were saying it, he had to admit they were being very friendly.
They told him they had come to take him to an art camp.
“It’s going to be really fun,” said the Golden Lady. “We have all kinds of unusual art supplies and there’ll be plenty of other young artists for you to play with.”
Benjamin was relieved they weren’t taking his prize away; for some reason he thought they might. Nonetheless, this art camp sounded peculiar. Even Benjamin, who had never been to camp, and who had very little sense of time or dates
or seasons, knew people went to camp during summertime, not during the school year, and definitely not during school hours. But the strangers were grown-ups, and therefore he had to listen to them, and they said they had special permission from Mrs. Johnson, and they promised to bring him back to school at the end of the day.
As he mulled over what they were saying, he barely noticed that the strangers were escorting him out of the school’s back gate.
It was only after the limousine pulled away from the school that he remembered his mother’s other instructions: never get into a car with strangers.
Realizing he’d made a drastic mistake, he looked back at the lost safety of his school. The gate was still open, and a girl was looking out. It was Cassandra, the girl with the big pointy ears who for some reason always reminded him of mint-chip ice cream, kind of chocolaty but mostly minty. Their eyes locked for a moment and in his thoughts he yelled for help. Unfortunately, as weird as his brain was, he didn’t seem to be capable of mental telepathy.
One of the strangers put a handkerchief to his face, and then everything went black.
Benjamin woke still tasting mint-chip ice cream.
He was wearing some kind of white tunic and he was in bed in a small, unfamiliar room. The room was almost completely bare, with white walls, a stone floor, and a tiny window high up near the ceiling.
There was something indescribably strange about the room—what was it? It was the silence, he realized after a moment. He had never before experienced the total absence of sound.
He scratched his head and discovered it was completely smooth. Like an egg. He was bald.
Where was he?
Only then did he notice the Golden Lady standing nearby, studying him.
“Am I dreaming?” he asked, struggling to speak clearly.
She shook her head.
“Is this a hospital? What happened?”
“You’re in a purification chamber,” she said in a hushed tone. “Now, be quiet and close your eyes. You’re not supposed to have any stimulation.”
“What about art camp?”
“Later, Benjamin. Later.”
When he opened his eyes again, he was alone and he was afraid. Either he wasn’t dreaming or he was dreaming and unable to wake, which was worse.