Dandelion Fire

  His face pressed into something wet, and his body folded up behind him. He was still yelling, but now he could hear. He rolled onto his back in the darkness and felt himself falling.

  Henry threw up his arms, grabbing for anything to catch himself. Something hard bit into his shin, and he heard a slam. His right hand gripped a door, and something cracked. His left gripped another, closed on knobs, and slipped off. He heard a door slap shut, and he was falling again. But only a matter of inches.

  With a bang, he was sitting on the damp floor of his little attic room, and his back was against the foot of his bed. He didn't know why his mattress was wet. A single beam of light shone out of the post-office box above him.

  “Henrietta,” he said. “Are you in here? Richard?”

  The room was busy with small sounds and smells. Through it all, he could tell that Badon Hill was open. Blinking, his eyelids were sticking. He rolled onto his hands and knees and crawled to where he knew his lamp should be. It was lying on the floor, broken.

  In the very low light, Henry could see his backpack lumped against his doors. He picked it up, unzipped it, and felt around inside. Grandfather's journals were intact, still rubber-banded together. And beside them, he felt the flashlight.

  Henry pulled the flashlight out, flicked it on, and ran the spot across his cupboard wall. They were all open. Well, most of them. Endor was closed down by the floor, and so was one cupboard on the left side. He'd kicked and banged a few shut right around the post-office box, and the door to Badon Hill dangled on a single hinge. He'd almost pulled it entirely off.

  The compass lock door was closed.

  Henry stood up and pulled his bedroom doors open. Stepping out into the attic, he flicked light down onto Richard's spot. The sleeping bag was gone.

  The attic smelled a little funny, and the window at the end was broken. Outside, the sky was preparing for dawn. Or the sun had just set and it was dusk. He couldn't tell which just by looking out the attic window.

  “Hello?” Henry yelled down the stairs. “Uncle Frank? Aunt Dotty?”

  Henry stood at the top and shifted his feet nervously. Something was very wrong. Richard's bed was gone, the window was smashed, and most of the cupboards were open. Darius had pulled him through the cupboards, but he had assumed that nothing else had happened. Now he wished he hadn't yelled.

  He could feel his blood roaring through his veins, and his pulse twitched in his forehead. Listening, he could hear nothing human. A floorboard popped on the first story. Wind rustled in an open window somewhere. And why was the floor wet?

  There was no good excuse for staying in the attic. He had to go down. Henry turned off the flashlight. Then he sat down, pulled off his awkward boots, bit his lip, and began feeling his way down the stairs barefoot.

  Henry had heard each stair creak many times, and he'd snuck down them often enough. But now, the sigh of nails moving in their cramped homes jumped out at him, pulsing surprise and adrenaline along with his blood. He didn't know this house. Not anymore.

  He reached the second-story landing. There was only one window, and it was open. Its curtain was drifting in place. There was a little light, enough for him to see that the carpet was causing the dank smell. Enough to see that Grandfather's room was open. Henry stepped off the stairs and winced as moisture squirted between his toes. He hurried across the landing and knuckle-tapped on his aunt and uncle's door. It wasn't latched. He pushed it open and looked inside. They weren't there, and the bed had been stripped of blankets.

  Henry moved back to his cousins' door and pushed it open. The room was empty, and the blankets were gone.

  He didn't want to, but Henry took a deep breath and tiptoed across the wet floor and into Grandfather's room.

  The cupboard was open, and the bed was stripped. But Henry was trying to process something else. Something much stranger. Both of Grandfather's windows were smashed, and the wood around them had been splintered. The curtains had fallen or been pulled down. They lay on the floor. A breeze was crawling in, and it smelled much better than the house. Behind the breeze, there was a naked blue sky, dark, but brightening. Beneath the sky, there was no Henry, Kansas.

  Henry walked to the window slowly, forgetting everything else. A sea of grass rippled to the horizon. A police car was parked in the front yard, and someone had built a fire near it. A charred chair leg was still sticking out of the black spot in the short grass.

  Henry closed his eyes and opened them again. Nothing had changed. Staring, wondering, entirely confused, he forgot to breathe. When his body made him, he choked and coughed. His knees wobbled, and he sat down on Grandfather's bed.

  This was not how things were supposed to work. He should be home now, telling Anastasia to be quiet so he could finish his story, making Penelope laugh and impressing Henrietta with his escape and fall. Aunt Dotty should be hugging him, and Uncle Frank should be squeezing his shoulder and saying something that almost made sense. He should be calling Zeke about playing baseball today, maybe even trying to teach Richard.

  But they were all someplace else. He looked at the cupboard. Sliding off the bed, he squatted on the floor and turned on his flashlight. The cupboard back was solid. The compass combination didn't lead anywhere. He stood up. They might not be gone. They might all be stuck here.

  They might all be dead here.

  Henry pushed away his fear. He refused to think about it. He would go downstairs first, and then outside. If they were here, alive or dead, he would find them. If they weren't, well, if they weren't, he didn't know what he would do.

  He stood up and hurried out of the room. He wasn't going to sneak downstairs. He was going to yell. He was going to barge, quieting his nerves as much as he could with false confidence.

  It wasn't easy. He thumped down the stairs and yelled at the bottom.

  “Anyone here? Uncle Frank, are you okay?”

  The front door was open, but the screen was shut. It had a hole instead of a handle. Henry kicked it wide and leaned onto the front porch.

  “Hello?”

  He let the screen slam in front of him, turned, and walked through the living room. Something soft and smooth flattened beneath his toes, crushed into the swamped carpet. Henry stopped and looked down, lifting his foot. It was a mushroom. The living room floor had sprouted a ring of small mushrooms. In the center of the ring, a dense knot of them bulged up out of the carpet. Henry stared, and staring did nothing to help explain it. But there were weirder things going on than mushrooms in the living room.

  Picking his way around the floor fungi, he walked into the dining room. Four cans of tuna were stacked on the table beside a can opener.

  He threw open the door to the television room, glanced inside, then stepped back out and moved on to the kitchen.

  “Aunt Dotty?”

  He hurried on to the mudroom and jerked open the back door.

  Sunlight blazed, and Henry stepped backward, kicked his toe with his heel, and sat down with a crash.

  He was looking at early-morning Kansas. The thick grass that needed mowing ran down to where the barn hulked in all of its red, flaking glory. Beyond it were the fields of ripening grain. Henry picked himself up off the floor and stepped out onto the concrete block step and then into the yard.

  “Uncle Frank?” he yelled. “Aunt Dotty?”

  He heard nothing but the yammering of birds, and he turned around.

  He almost fell over again. There was no house. He was standing at the edge of a large hole with a pool at the bottom. Yellow police tape had been circled around it, but right in front of him, hanging in the air, there was an open doorway back into the mudroom.

  He did not want that door to shut.

  hope you intend to issue kidnapping warrants,” the woman said.

  “Couldn't say,” the cop said, shifting in the driver's seat. “Don't know why we would, though.”

  The woman turned and glared at him. He just watched the road. He could see the Willises' barn now
, and the yellow tape around the hole.

  “They have taken illegal possession of someone's child.” The woman shook her head. “Law enforcement.” She said it like an insult.

  The cop didn't want to get into an argument with her. The woman was a lawyer, and arguing is what she did. But he was not at all sure how someone could be charged with kidnapping when their entire house disappeared, along with a sergeant and his prowl car. As far as he was concerned, aliens were the likeliest explanation. And he didn't even believe in aliens.

  “That's it right there,” he said, and he slowed the car to a stop on the shoulder. “That's where the house has always been. At least since I was born.”

  “Who is that boy?” the woman asked.

  The cop leaned forward and squinted. She was right. There was a boy walking around, looking in the hole.

  The woman pulled out a photo, looked at it, and looked back up. “That's Henry York.”

  She opened her door and got out.

  “Henry!” she yelled. “Are you all right? I'm here to take you back to Boston to live with your mother.”

  The boy straightened up.

  “Your father granted custody, so things went much faster than we expected. Come get in the car.”

  She began picking her way carefully through the yard. The boy turned and ran around to the back of the hole. He looked at her and then at the cop car, and he jumped. When he jumped, he vanished.

  “Wha—” the cop said.

  The woman ran on her toes to the edge of the hole.

  “I can't see him,” she yelled. “Hurry! He'll drown.”

  Henry looked at the woman lawyer trying to walk through the grass in high heels, and then he jumped into the mudroom and shut the door.

  He wondered if the door would be visible from the outside, so he locked it. But then, changing his mind, he opened it a crack and listened.

  “He's not in there,” he heard a man say. “And if he is, it's not deep enough to drown in.”

  “A child can drown in two inches of water,” the woman said. “How would you explain it? I clearly saw him jump.”

  “I clearly stopped seeing him,” the cop muttered. “And that's more than two inches.”

  “My point exactly, genius. Are you going down there or not?”

  “Not.”

  Henry shut the door quietly and flipped the dead bolt. He stood on his toes and peered out the window high in the door. He wasn't looking at Kansas anymore. The barn was gone, and the fields had been replaced with the endless prairie of this new world.

  If he couldn't see them, he didn't think they would be able to see him. But he left the door locked. And he stood there with his left hand on the knob, thinking.

  It was strange, knowing that he had a way back to what had been his home. He could open the door, step outside, and be carted back to Boston by a lawyer, attend parentally mandated therapy, and enter the next grade in the fall. He could be safe. Very protected. Too protected. He could leave and never come back. Coming back probably wouldn't even be an option once he stepped outside and the door shut behind him.

  Henry swallowed and looked at the burn on his palm. Before he could see it move, he rubbed his hand on his forehead. He wanted to go back to Boston. He wanted to be done with this place, and he didn't care who he was or where his real parents were. He wanted the world to calm down and behave itself. To stop being so dangerous. He even wanted a nanny.

  He told himself all of this. He told himself that he could walk away with the scars he already had and the questions never to be answered, and he could be just fine. Everyone else? Well, wherever they were, they were together. He was on his own. He could go through life never knowing what happened to them. Never needing to know.

  But none of that was true. He was lying to himself, and he knew it. He'd never been good at lying. He could feel a warm tingling on his head, sprouting off his palm. Henry lowered his arm and looked at it. This time he watched it grow and swirl.

  The world was dangerous. He could be strong, or he could be weak. In Kansas or Byzanthamum. A dandelion had burned him behind a barn, had made him something else. Or he had already been something else, and the dandelion made him notice. There was no place he could go to escape the questions he had. He wouldn't be able to live with himself if he walked away now, without at least trying to find out what had happened to his cousins, to his aunt and uncle and Richard. To this already strange house.

  Henry wanted to know who he was. In a way, standing at that door, he was deciding who he was. He wasn't someone who could run away afraid. Not anymore.

  He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. It was dry and mealy. He let his hand drop off the doorknob, and he turned away, leaving a lawyer and cop staring at a muddy puddle. Leaving the barn and Kansas and Boston. Leaving more than that.

  He was hungry. In the kitchen, he tugged open the fridge and then shut it again quickly. There wasn't much in it, and what was inside was starting to smell worse than the rest of the house. He opened a few cupboards and ate a couple handfuls of dry cereal from the bottom of a box. Then he pulled out a glass and walked to the sink to get a drink. The faucet was dead.

  He'd made a decision about what he didn't want to do, but that didn't get him any closer to an idea of what he should do. Unsure, he moved back into the dining room and stared out at the empty world beyond the shattered windows. He couldn't get too close in his bare feet. He picked up a can of tuna off the table and looked at it. Tuna didn't sound too bad, and the can opener had already been set out. The covers from a toaster manual and the instructions for an apple peeler had been ripped off and were pinned to the table beneath it. Handwriting covered them, wrapping around the print and illustrations.

  Henry sat down, pulled the papers free, and began to grind open the tuna while he read.

  Henry pried back the tuna lid and pinched out the largest lump. He knew who the man-witch had to be. He didn't know who Ken Simmons was, or how Zeke would have gotten involved.

  Henry hadn't taken a bite since his first one. He pulled in a deep breath and blew it out slowly. Then he blinked twice and wiped his eyes. He read the note through again, then he set two cans of tuna beside it and put the can opener back on top.

  Holding the open can, he leaned back in his chair and stared out the windows. He could get up and find a fork, but he didn't want to. He wanted to sit and think about his uncle Frank. His fingers weren't exactly clean, but he didn't care about that, either. He finished the can and set it back on the table. He decided against drinking the fish juice.

  The note would have helped him, except for one thing. Grandfather's cupboard didn't lead anywhere.But what would have changed since everyone had gone through?

  He had changed. Henry closed his eyes and tried to envision what he must have done in his attic room. He had fallen face-first out of the wall and onto the end of his wet mattress. Then he had rolled and dropped and grabbed and kicked at everything he could reach. He'd nearly torn the Badon Hill door off. He must have messed up the compass locks.

  Henry pushed back from the table and hurried up both flights of stairs. He kicked the fancy boots out of the way and picked his backpack up off the attic floor. Carrying it and the flashlight, he burst into his little room. The light was gone from the post-office box. He set the pack on his bed and fished out Grandfather's journals, slipped the rubber band off, and opened the first one to the diagram of the wall and the list of cupboard names. He flicked on his flashlight and spotted it on the page. He ran his eyes over the wall diagram. The center cupboard had no number. The highest number was 98. The list of names stopped at 98. He dropped the journal onto the bed and picked up the other one, flipping to the combination page. The list of combinations was only numbered to 98 as well.

  Henry looked up at the wall. How could Uncle Frank have known they were going through the center cupboard? He must have. He didn't say he was guessing. Henry leaned over the bed and tugged at the door. It didn't budge.

&
nbsp; For a long time, he stood, chewing on his lip, staring at the wall, staring at the diagram of doors and at the list of combinations. He even counted them, just to be sure. Twice. Finally, he picked up everything, turned, and made his way back downstairs and into the dining room.

  He sat down and read Frank's note again, looking for any clues that he had been mistaken, or anywhere that Frank may have jotted down the combination the doors had been set to. He found nothing.

  Henry really wanted to break something. He raised his hand to bang the table, but he put it back down, puffing out his cheeks instead. He didn't know what to do. Frank obviously hadn't known that Kansas was just out the back door, and now they had gone off someplace where they would find Henrietta—he hadn't been in the center cupboard—and all live happily ever after. Panicking in the dark, he had messed up everything. At least for him. Well, not just for him. Zeke would probably like to be back in Kansas, and he knew Aunt Dotty would. And whoever Ken Simmons was, he probably hadn't been hoping to spend the rest of his life wherever the center cupboard happened to lead.

  That made Henry feel worse. If he hadn't goofed, he should have been able to catch up to everyone and tell them he'd found a way back to Kansas. Now, he was alone, and they were stuck.

  Frank had said he should make for Kansas, or for a place called Hylfing. Henry opened the journals again and looked over the cupboard names. Hylfing wasn't anywhere on there. He looked for the Deiran Coast, and for anything that could have been an abbreviation for the Deiran Coast. Nothing.

  Henry knew that he had two choices and only two choices. Total. He could go to Boston—and he had already made that decision—or he could go through the cupboards, searching for his family, but more likely just for a place called Hylfing on the Deiran Coast. First, he'd be searching for a world that had a Deiran Coast.

  He looked at the tuna juice. He really was getting thirsty.