This Isn't What It Looks Like

  “Come on, help me break this off,” said Yo-Yoji, grabbing a tree branch roughly the size of a knight’s lance.

  Together, the three boys pulled the branch until it snapped, throwing Glob to the ground. “Ow!”

  “Are you going to fight him again?” asked Max-Ernest. “You’re crazy.”

  Yo-Yoji was about to argue, then said, “You’re right, I just got a better idea. Both of you, get out of sight.”

  As the other two boys moved away from the trail, Yo-Yoji crouched behind a bush. As soon as Cass had run by, the sound of Lord Pharaoh’s heavy steel boots could be heard. Yo-Yoji thrust the branch out across the trail, wedging it against a rock on the other side. He held it with both hands about a foot above the ground. He was counting on Lord Pharaoh’s eyes being on Cass—and they were. Lord Pharaoh’s steel-clad shin rammed into the branch, and he fell forward just as Yo-Yoji had hoped. Yo-Yoji simultaneously pulled up on the branch, forcing Lord Pharaoh’s legs into the air and his invisible head to the ground.

  “Now, run!” Yo-Yoji shouted to the others as he started booking it.

  Glob and Max-Ernest scrambled back onto the trail, then started running as fast they could. Cass was waiting just ahead. With Cass and Yo-Yoji taking turns pulling Glob along, they all ran back toward the Renaissance Faire, stopping only when they’d reached the other side of the dry riverbed. Looking back, none of them could see Lord Pharaoh. But of course that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

  Cass felt the familiar chill. She was sure that he was watching them. And that sooner or later she’d be meeting Lord Pharaoh again.

  “Come on, let’s go,” said Cass.

  They didn’t stop running again until they reached the school bus.

  Good sirs, m’lady, how many in your party tonight?”

  The three young Terces Society members had hoped to get to work immediately cracking the mystery of the lodestone, but Glob had absolutely insisted that they join him at Medieval Days Restaurant that evening. As it turned out, he had a more than sufficient number of coupons stashed in his pockets to cover dinner for a dozen people. And a good thing, too, because there were six Nuts Table regulars sitting at the Round Table at Medieval Days (one of the Round Tables, I should say): Cass, Max-Ernest, Yo-Yoji, Benjamin, Glob, and Daniel-not-Danielle (who had been so happy at the news of Glob’s safe return that he’d begged his father to take him to dinner). Seven if you count Max-Ernest’s baby brother, PC (but since he was too young to sit in a high chair, the “serving wench” said not to count him). And eleven if you counted the four parent chaperones who, it was agreed by all, would sit at their own table farther away from the jousting stage and all the mayhem and who, of course, were not Nuts Table regulars in the first place.

  Needless to say, Medieval Days was not an easy place to concentrate. The combination of clattering dishes, screaming children, and jousting knights made it difficult to hold a conversation, let alone to study a five-hundred-year-old object for clues about an ancient Egyptian secret. Not that they could have spoken very freely with Glob and Daniel-not-Danielle present anyway.

  None of that stopped Max-Ernest from surreptitiously examining the lodestone under their table. Alas, he was no more able to find a secret message written on it than Lord Pharaoh had been. When PC started grabbing the lodestone, Max-Ernest gave up and passed it under the table to Cass, silently communicating with her that they would examine it again later.

  OK, she tried silently to communicate back—but remember we have to return the lodestone to Mrs. Johnson tomorrow. We don’t have very much time.

  In the end, the tired kids had little choice but to focus on the food and the entertainment. The hamburgers, everybody agreed, were terrible—although Glob wolfed his down anyway, just in case the management was looking. As for the joust, it was vastly inferior to what they’d seen earlier in the day. Yo-Yoji, Glob asserted, would have annihilated all the so-called knights at the restaurant.

  “Thanks, bro,” said Yo-Yoji, figuring anybody who helped them catch Lord Pharaoh, even unwittingly, deserved bro status.

  “By the way, Cass, Glob has some really good ideas about marketing your trail mix,” said Max-Ernest, perhaps thinking the same thing.

  “Oh, that’s great,” said Cass with a notable lack of enthusiasm.

  Daniel-not-Danielle smiled at her from behind his dreadlocks. Don’t worry, he seemed to be saying, Glob will be on to his next scheme tomorrow and will forget all about your trail mix.

  Late that night, Max-Ernest called Cass to tell her he’d had an inspiration and that he was on his way over to her house with PC in tow. (One advantage of his parents’ newfound total lack of interest in him was that he could come and go as he pleased.)

  She waited by the front door so she could let in Max-Ernest and his baby brother without waking her mom. When they got up to her room, Max-Ernest laid PC on Cass’s bed, then pulled a toy out of his pocket. It consisted of a yellow cardboard rectangle laminated in plastic. It was about the size of a small book and said HAIRY BARRY on top. In the middle was a bald, barefaced smiling man. At the bottom was a layer of what looked like black dust.

  Cass looked at it askance. “This is what you had to show me? HAIRY BARRY?”

  “It’s a game. You’re supposed to put his hair back on him. Watch—”

  Max-Ernest removed the small metal bar from the slot on the side and proceeded to drag it across the plastic. Black dust rose from the bottom of the picture and settled in a ragged line under the man’s nose.

  “After hearing all about magnets from Pietro and Mrs. Johnson, I sent away for all these magnet magic tricks,” Max-Ernest explained. “This one came today.”

  “Great. But I think PC is about to destroy your mustache.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Max-Ernest, pulling HAIRY BARRY out of the baby’s hand. “Get me a plate and scissors.”

  When Cass returned with the requested items, Max-Ernest cut a corner off the toy and poured all the magnetic filings onto the plate.

  “Now give me the lodestone.”

  “OK, but all the dust is going to go flying onto it.”

  “I know, that’s what I want.”

  In order to retrieve the lodestone from her backpack, Cass had to separate it from a compass, a flashlight, and a Swiss Army knife; but after a moderate amount of exertion, she handed it to Max-Ernest.

  As soon as he brought the lodestone within three feet of the magnetic dust, the dust started streaming through the air toward it. Within seconds, the lodestone was entirely covered.

  “Nice,” said Cass. “Now it looks like a big furry bug.”

  “Patience, Watson,” said Max-Ernest, brushing some of the magnetic dust off the back side of the lodestone. “I noticed the silver on the back of the lodestone was a little thicker than you might expect, but not that heavy. So I thought, what if there’s another layer inside…? And guess what—I don’t know if it’s wood or wax or stone or what, but whatever it is, it blocks the magnet.”

  Grinning, Max-Ernest turned the lodestone so that the silver back now faced Cass. “How ’bout that?”

  “Very cool. But don’t call me Watson.”*

  Most of the silver was covered with the magnetic dust. But where the lodestone’s magnetic power had been blocked, small letters had emerged. Cass’s ears tingled as she read:

  It was as if the Jester were right there in the room with them.

  As thrilling as it was to see the lodestone’s secret message revealed, by the next morning when they delivered the lodestone to the principal’s office, Cass’s excitement had waned. After all, the message was one she’d already heard several times from the fortune-teller. Coming from the Jester, the meaning seemed even more obscure.

  Max-Ernest, however, would not be deterred. “It’s not necessarily supposed to be the Secret itself—just like a clue or message, you said, right?”

  For the next twenty-four hours or so, he devoted himself to trying to decipher potential mea
nings and permutations of the words AS ABOVE, SO BELOW. He reported back that they were the first words of the Emerald Tablet, supposedly one of the founding documents of alchemy.

  Cass couldn’t help feeling Max-Ernest was looking in the wrong direction. She knew the Jester. Unless his interests had changed radically as he got older, he wasn’t particularly interested in alchemy or anything else very serious.

  “Well, he obviously knew about it or he wouldn’t have written that,” said Max-Ernest, slightly peeved. “So what direction do you think I should be looking in?”

  “Just think about it like, well, like the Jester liked the kind of stuff you like.”

  “Oh yeah? What stuff is that?” asked Max-Ernest.

  “You know, magic, jokes, puns, codes, whatever.”

  “Alchemy has all of that stuff. For example, I was just reading that—”

  “Oh, never mind. Forget I said anything.”

  And they left it at that. For the moment.

  For Cass and Max-Ernest, a rainy Sunday afternoon almost always meant tea at the fire station. And so it was that they found themselves at Cass’s grandfathers’ kitchen table one rainy Sunday afternoon a few weeks later.

  By now their tea was cold, and all the best chocolate-chip cookies eaten. (For Cass, best meant chewiest; for Max-Ernest, it meant chocolatiest.) After regaling them with a war story that everyone present knew to be entirely made up, Grandpa Larry excused himself to “go catch up on some work”—an activity that everyone knew was code for a nap. Grandpa Wayne said he was going to tinker with the old record player he’d purchased at a garage sale that morning—an activity that, everyone knew, could go on for hours or days or, as in the case of one old eight-track tape player, years and years.

  Cass and Max-Ernest, meanwhile, were both reluctant to go home, as it would have meant stepping out into the rain. Cass sipped her cold tea and regarded her uncharacteristically quiet friend. With Yo-Yoji back at home, his parents returned, and with Pietro and the other Terces members keeping their distance, still hoping Cass would crack the mystery of the Secret, it felt to Cass very much like the beginning of their friendship, when it was just her and Max-Ernest.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Nothing…”

  “Nothing? There’s never been a second of your life when you were thinking about nothing. You have more thoughts than anybody I know.”

  “That’s what Benjamin said.”

  “So…?”

  “So what?”

  “So what were you thinking?”

  “I guess I was just thinking about that time I looked through the Double Monocle…. But I wasn’t really thinking anything about it,” Max-Ernest added quickly.

  “You mean at the hospital? You said you just saw yourself in the mirror….”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of right.”

  “What else did you see?” Cass could tell there was something he wasn’t telling her.

  “Just myself…”

  “But…”

  “But it was the future. I was old.”

  “Really? That must have been weird.” A year ago, Cass might have assumed he was making this up, but having seen so many unexpected things in the monocle herself, she didn’t question the truth of what he said.

  “Yeah. Really weird.”

  “So what did you look like?”

  “Crazy.”

  “Seriously, what were you? I mean, what are you going to be? A stand-up comedian?”

  “I don’t think so—I was sitting down, and I wasn’t exactly telling jokes.”

  “A magician?”

  “No, at least it didn’t look like it.”

  “What were you doing, then?”

  “Not much.”

  “You must have been doing something.”

  “Well, I was… writing,” said Max-Ernest reluctantly.

  “Writing?” Cass repeated in surprise.

  “Yeah, I think I’m going to be a writer. Can you believe that?”

  “What’s wrong with being a writer? You like books.”

  “Nothing, I guess—I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Why, what were you writing?”

  Max-Ernest shook his head in disgust. “I’m not sure. It looked like a novel. But it sounded more like the ravings of a lunatic.”

  “So you could read it—through the mirror?”

  “Just a little bit.”

  “Well…?”

  Max-Ernest shook his head.

  “Come on. You have to tell me. You tell me everything.”

  “The only words I remember are, ‘I can’t keep a secret. Never could…’ ”

  Cass laughed. “Well, that’s true!”

  “And then—wait, promise me you won’t get upset.”

  “How can I promise that?”

  “I swore I wasn’t going to tell you this—but I saw our names,” said Max-Ernest, speaking in a rush now. “Well, they weren’t really our names, but I could tell they were stand-ins for our names. Like mine was Max-Ernest instead of Xxx-Xxxxxx and yours was Cass instead of Xxxx.”

  Cass was appalled. “You were writing about us?!”

  “Don’t get mad at me—I haven’t done it yet!” said Max-Ernest, already regretting his words.

  “Yeah, but you’re going to. That’s worse.”

  “Why? What’s so terrible about writing about us?”

  “It means I can’t trust you ever again. How can I even talk to you knowing that what I say might wind up in a book one day?”

  Max-Ernest put his head in his hands. Why couldn’t he ever keep anything to himself?

  Rrrring. Rrrring.

  It was the fire station’s doorbell—i.e., the old fire alarm. It didn’t ring very often but when it did, it was so loud the whole place seemed to shake.

  Sebastian, Cass’s grandfathers’ old ailing and blind basset hound, gave a halfhearted bark, his voice no longer competition for the doorbell.

  “Can you get it, Cass?” Grandpa Wayne called from down below. Unlike Grandpa Larry, who was asleep or at least pretending to be, Wayne was not what is known as a people person. If Cass was around to get the door, he always asked her to do it.

  She and Max-Ernest slid down the fire pole and made their way through the maze of boxes that filled the bottom floor of the fire station. Cass patted Sebastian, who was already back to sleep on his pillow. Then she opened the door.

  A postman stood on the front stoop.

  “Is there a Cassandra here?” he asked.

  “Yeah, that’s me….”

  The postman smiled wide. “Well, then I believe this is for you—”

  He gestured toward the big old trunk at his feet. “It was in the back of our storage room. Been there for forty or fifty years at least.”

  Cass and Max-Ernest stared at the trunk. It was unusual-looking to say the least. For one thing, you could barely see it: there were stamps and stickers and receipts covering nearly every inch of its surface. They bore the names of cities and countries, trains and steamships, all sorts of ports of call. They were written in dozens of languages and gave dozens of conflicting instructions. It looked as though the trunk had traveled the world many times over—and had been doing so for centuries.

  “They’re shutting down our post office, what with all the cutbacks these days, and somebody was about to have it hauled away,” the postman continued. “Then I noticed this old tag—”

  He fingered a cracked and worn leather tag affixed to the top of the trunk. It looked so old it was a wonder it hadn’t disintegrated altogether.

  At the bottom was the name of her town.

  “I figured you’d be much older, seeing as the tag was written so many years ago. But by the looks of it, you weren’t even alive yet! You have any idea how somebody could have known you’d be here so long ago? A mother or grandmother with the same name maybe…?”

  Cass shook her head. Over the years, many unusual things had been left on her grandfat
hers’ doorstep. Their antique store was like the neighborhood attic (or maybe the town dump). A taxidermic moose. A broken unicycle. A life-size portrait of Elvis. Most memorably, of course, Cass herself had been left on their doorstep, a newborn baby in a cardboard box. But never before had an item arrived that seemed so accurately to predict the future. It was certainly mysterious.

  “Well, all I can say is, this beauty’s been around. Here’s the manifest, if you want to look at it,” said the postman. He started unrolling what looked like a long scroll with many attached pages. The most recent sections were typewritten, the older handwritten. Some of the oldest bore royal crests and wax seals.

  “It took me an hour just to read through it. Can you believe this trunk has traveled to all seven continents, including Antarctica? It’s been on Spanish galleons… warships. It was even on the Mayflower…. It’s been in museum collections… royal treasuries… And guess what, as far as I can tell, nobody’s ever opened it—not even once!”

  He looked at Cass and Max-Ernest, waiting for a reaction.

  Cass didn’t say anything. She was thinking too hard.

  “Wow” was all Max-Ernest could manage.

  The postman laughed. “I guess that means you won’t be opening it in front of me, huh? Shucks. Can’t blame a guy for hoping…. Well, just sign right here and I’ll be on my way.”

  He pointed to the top of the manifest and handed Cass a pen.

  “And you be careful now. Never know, there might be some old bones in there. Old trunk like that, it could be cursed!”

  New loot, especially new old loot, usually proved irresistible to Cass’s grandfathers. But Wayne was so absorbed in his record player, and Larry so fast asleep, that neither came running when Cass and Max-Ernest hauled the trunk inside. The two young people were free to put their considerable detective skills to work on the trunk, uninhibited by the older men.

  “I wonder how old it is,” said Max-Ernest. “It seems like that tag with your name on it was there from the beginning. How ’bout that?”

  “I think it’s about five hundred years old, actually,” said Cass, her ears tingling with excitement.