If You're Reading This, It's Too Late

  “Girls — control yourselves! Have you forgotten why we’re here?”

  Ms. Mauvais had emerged onto the deck from the cabin below. No longer in her nautical outfit, she was resplendent in gold and she lit up her surroundings as if she were a kind of human beacon.

  “You must be Amber,” she said, training her icy blue eyes on the dazzled girl. “I’m Ms. Mauvais. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  As if possessed, Amber dropped to her knees and bowed.

  “Really, darling — that’s not necessary.” Ms. Mauvais gestured dismissively with her golden-gloved hand.

  “Are you . . . a queen?” Amber asked, trembling.

  “Ha! No, not . . . at the moment.” Ms. Mauvais made a chilly, tinkling sound that might have been a laugh. “But you are very shrewd — something tells me you’ll go far.”

  She stepped forward and stroked Amber’s bowed head as if she were rewarding a little lapdog. “I have a very special job for you, Amber. . . . How would you like to go to a concert?”

  From the beginning, there’d been a flaw in Cass’s plan: how to get to the Magic Museum once they were home? Their parents would never allow them to go so soon after returning.

  Luckily, Cass’s mother had decided to visit her sister while Cass was away (mainly, Cass thought, so her mother would have an excuse to leave Sebastian in a kennel for the weekend) and the house was empty when Cass’s grandfathers dropped off the young campers.

  Cass’s mother wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours. Time enough to get to the museum and back — hopefully. Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji could call their parents when they got back to Cass’s house, pretending they’d only just arrived from the mountains.

  “Bye!” / “Thanks!” / “Later!”

  They waved good-bye and waited to hear Grandpa Wayne’s truck disappear down the road. Then they let themselves out of the house, leaving all the backpacks except one — the one that wobbled back and forth all on its own.

  “City buses don’t have seat belts, either,” Max-Ernest noted when they mounted the bus. “Why do you think that is?”

  “Funny, I feel totally strapped in, even without a seat belt,” said a muffled voice. “You know, just because somebody spends most of his life underground doesn’t mean he likes being stuffed inside a backpack for hours and hours!”

  “Shh,” said Cass. “It’s just a little while longer.”

  “Hey, look at her,” whispered Yo-Yoji, pointing to a rather heavyset (which is a polite way of saying fat) and hirsute (which is a polite way of saying bearded) woman sitting on the bus.

  “Don’t point — it’s rude,” said Cass.

  But all three kids had trouble resisting looking at the Bearded Lady. And in fact, whenever one of them accidentally caught her eye, she winked as if she were used to being looked at — and didn’t mind at all.

  When they got onto the second bus, our friends had to try even harder not to stare:

  Up front behind the driver sat two little people (which is a polite way of saying midgets), one male, one female, wearing a tuxedo and a ball gown, respectively.

  Behind them sat a man who looked perfectly normal, except that his shirtsleeves hung rather loosely (which is a polite of way of saying he had no arms). When the Bearded Lady walked onto the bus, the Armless Man smiled and waved at her with his bare foot — which she then shook exactly as you would shake a hand.

  Eerily (or was it just coincidentally?), when Cass and Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji all transferred to the next bus, so, too, did this motley group of bus riders.

  “Are they following us?” whispered Max-Ernest nervously.

  “I dunno, just act . . . normal,” whispered Cass.

  Yo-Yoji laughed. “That’ll be the day.”

  On this, the third and last bus, they joined several other unique (which is a polite way of saying peculiar) passengers, including three colorfully costumed comedians (which is a polite way of saying clowns) and one strong (which is a polite way of saying bald, mustachioed, and wearing a leopard-skin leotard) man.

  “It’s like the circus is coming to town — aren’t they supposed to be on a train or something?” whispered Max-Ernest, thinking of the pictures they’d seen on the wall of the Magic Museum.

  “Where do you think they’re going?” asked Yo-Yoji.

  They didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

  As soon as they got off the bus, they found themselves in the middle of a noisy crowd of carnies (which is an impolite of way of referring to carnival workers and circus performers) moving en masse in the direction of the Magic Museum.

  Over the entrance to the museum hung a bright striped banner:

  THE OLE TIME TRAVELING CIRCUS REUNION

  WELCOME, FREAKY FRIENDS AND KOOKY COMRADES!

  “Hey! Can you can guys go a little easier on me?” asked the homunculus from inside the backpack as it bounced down the stairs that led to the museum’s front door. “And why don’t I smell the crown roast? Are you sure this is the right place?”

  “We’re not inside yet,” said Cass. “Just be quiet until we let you out —”

  The crowd had gathered in the big room that housed the collection of automata — which, it must be said, looked comparatively harmless next to some of the museum’s new inhabitants.

  At the far end of the room stood a very old (which, in this case, is a polite way of saying doddering) man in a top hat and a red coat holding a large ring and a bullwhip — a Lion Tamer? Beside him was a silver-studded (which is a polite way of saying pierced all over) and fully illustrated (which is a polite way of saying tattooed up to his eyeballs) man juggling bowling pins.

  Behind them, Pietro — now wearing a necktie rather than his woodworker’s apron — sat on a riser, smiling at the sight of so many old friends. Mr. Wallace sat next to him, a pained expression on his face.

  The Lion Tamer spoke, quavering, into a cone-shaped megaphone.

  “Hello, dear friends! Our esteemed colleague, Pietro, has brought us here . . . because . . . because . . .” His voice cracked as he struggled to remember. “Because he wants us all to . . . to do a reunion show, that’s it!” He scratched the side of his head. “Odd to call it that, though, considering we just performed last night. . . .”

  “You mean, fifty years ago last night!” the Illustrated Man corrected, tossing the bowling pins into the crowd. The Strong Man caught them and started juggling without missing a beat.

  The Illustrated Man grabbed the megaphone: “C’mon — let’s show the world what the Circus was like before it was just another way to sell hotel rooms in Las Vegas!”

  The carnies all cheered. “Right on!” “Hooray for the Ballyhoo!” “Vegas sucks!” “Long live the Circus!”

  “We are freaks and geeks, and we’re not going away quietly!” shouted the illustrated man. “We are nuts and we are proud of it!”

  More cheers. “Yay, Freaks!” “Go, Nuts!” “Down with normal people!”

  Our young heroes watched from the middle of the crowd, sandwiched between a chess-playing automaton and a heavily whiskered clown in a hobo outfit. They were trying to move toward the Gateway to the Invisible, but it was too tight.

  “No grub in this joint, huh?” asked the clown loudly. “What are they thinking? A guy’s gotta eat!”

  “Um, uh . . .” Cass panicked.

  The three kids looked as one at Max-Ernest’s backpack. But the homunculus didn’t appear to be listening.

  “Excuse me, do you folks mind coming with me?” Lily beckoned from the side of the room.

  Cass braced herself as they squirmed through the crowd: this was the moment she’d been dreading.

  “Hi, Lily,” said Cass when they reached her. “This is our friend — he’s been, um, helping us.” She nervously indicated Yo-Yoji.

  Lily nodded. “Hello, Yoji. It’s been a long time.”

  While Cass and Max-Ernest gaped in astonishment, Yo-Yoji bowed as deeply as he could in the packed room. “Master Wei.”


  “You’ve been practicing, I trust?”

  Yo-Yoji shook his head sheepishly. “Just, uh, the guitar.”

  Lily looked at him with clear disapproval. “You know what my father always said —”

  “Practice makes permanent, I know. I’m sorry.”

  Surprised, relieved, and deeply confused, Cass and Max-Ernest glanced back and forth from each other to the boy they thought they knew.

  “Yoji was one of my most talented students. It only seemed natural to ask him to help in our cause,” Lily explained a few minutes later. “I hope he has been more responsible in keeping up his Terces duties than his violin.”

  They were all standing in the sawdust of the basement workshop, safe for the moment from the crowd upstairs. It was the same group as last time — with the addition of Yo-Yoji and the subtraction of Owen, who was away on secret Terces business.

  “Well, we found the homunculus, didn’t we?” said Yo-Yoji, unable to resist defending himself.

  Pietro smiled at the kids. “You have all done better than I dared to hope. If only all my projects went so well.” He gestured to the old tree-growing vase, totally disassembled on the table in front of him.

  Cass’s ears flushed with pride. The news about Yo-Yoji was disconcerting — very — but Pietro’s words were exactly what she’d been longing for.

  “I didn’t believe it was possible, but we met him — he’s real! How ’bout that?” said Max-Ernest excitedly.

  “So where are you keeping the homunculus now?” Lily asked them.

  “He’s here. We brought him with us,” said Cass.

  The adults looked at the kids in alarm.

  “I don’t understand — where is he?” asked Mr. Wallace, looking around anxiously as if the homunculus might be locked up in one of the trick cabinets. “A creature like that — he’s dangerous. A thing of evil. Do you have him tied up?”

  “He’s not like that,” said Cass. “He’s really kind of nice once you get to know him.”

  “Except for the fact that he’s a cannibal,” said Max-Ernest.

  “But not in a bad way,” said Cass. “Here — meet him yourself —”

  Cass nudged Max-Ernest and he bent down to unzip his backpack, only to find —

  “Um, Mr. Cabbage Face?”

  The backpack was already open.

  The homunculus was gone.

  They tried the museum’s kitchen first. And saw at once that the homunculus had been there — but left in disgust.

  The kitchen looked like it hadn’t seen a meal in years; it was being used to store office supplies. The closest thing to food was a package of microwave popcorn that the homunculus had opened — then scattered without popping, as if to say “thanks, but no thanks!”

  Next, they tried the reunion party upstairs.

  Cass crawled under people’s legs, hoping to find a trail of corn kernels if not bones, but no such luck.

  Max-Ernest thought he saw the homunculus slip into the Gateway to the Invisible, only to see one of the midgets step out a second later.

  “Not too hard for him to disappear in this crowd,” commented Yo-Yoji, looking out at the sea of carnies — half of whom looked as weird as the homunculus.

  “Well, you’d know better than we would,” Cass snorted.

  “Not really. I only met those guys once before. I know about as much as you do.”

  Cass looked skeptical.

  “Seriously, I didn’t even know anything about the homunculus before you told me.”

  “Yeah, because you already had a job,” Cass said stonily. “Us.”

  “The only reason I didn’t tell you guys was that they said not to —!”

  “Whatever. It’s not important.”

  “What’s important is that we just lost a two-foot-tall, five-hundred-year-old man-eater, and we have no idea where he is!” said Max-Ernest, who had been having trouble following the logic — let alone the underlying feeling — behind the conversation.

  Giving up, they headed back downstairs.

  “Could the Midnight Sun have gotten to him?” asked Lily as they reconvened in the workshop. “If Dr. L or Ms. Mauvais had been here, wouldn’t we have seen them? Perhaps an operative of theirs . . . ?”

  “I think he was just hungry,” muttered Cass.

  The kids felt miserable. They were all thinking the same thing: that the homunculus had left because they’d lied about the food at the museum.

  Cass kept kicking herself for telling him that he would get crown roast. Why hadn’t she thought about what would happen when they got there? Had she expected Pietro to conjure a roast out of thin air?

  Pietro never said an unkind word. But that made it worse.

  Had he expressed any anger, our young heroes might have defended themselves. After all, they’d brought the homunculus all the way into the museum. Into the workshop, even. How were they supposed to know he’d escape from right under their noses?

  But instead of berating them, Pietro tried to hide how worried he was. He even showed Max-Ernest a quick card trick before they went home.*

  They were being treated like children and they knew it. There was no discussion of the Oath of Terces. No talk of future missions.

  Mr. Wallace never said, “I told you so,” but you didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what he was thinking.

  “What about the Sound Prism — shouldn’t they leave it with us? I think it would be safer,” he said.

  “But it’s hers — she’s the heir,” Lily reminded him.

  They debated as if Cass herself were not present until finally Pietro decided it was best that she keep the Sound Prism. “We don’t know much about this object. Perhaps the Sound Prism, it would not like to be in someone else’s hands.”

  But before they left he made the kids promise not to look for the homunculus.

  “It’s too risky,” he said. “That much we now know.”

  For nights afterward, Cass slept with the Sound Prism under her pillow — right next to her resurrected sock-monster. She was afraid even to keep the Sound Prism buried outside.

  Needless to say, she didn’t sleep very well.

  The Sound Prism whispered to her in her dreams, seeming to give voices to people and animals and inanimate objects indiscriminately. All taunting her for failing the Terces Society. For failing Pietro. Every barking dog was laughing at her. Every honking car was jeering at her.

  And you call yourself a survivalist! they said. You can’t even keep a homunculus in a backpack.

  Cass was convinced that the Sound Prism wanted her to call the homunculus again. Or at least that the Sound Prism would make her go crazy if she didn’t call him. But she resisted. If she couldn’t save the world, at least she could prove to Pietro that she could keep her word.

  One night, she woke up from an especially restless sleep. A rustling sound was coming from under her pillow.

  At first, she didn’t think much of it; she was getting used to odd, unidentified noises. But when she put the Sound Prism to her ear she became certain that the noise it was picking up was coming from the backyard.

  An animal perhaps? A cat? No, something larger . . . the homunculus? Was it Mr. Cabbage Face himself looking for her?

  She tiptoed downstairs and out into the back-yard in her pajama bottoms and favorite Tree People sleeping T.

  Although she held the Sound Prism in front of her, she didn’t hear any more rustling, or much of anything at all. For a second, she thought she heard some kind of drumming, then she realized it was her own heartbeat being broadcast back to her by the Sound Prism.

  Slowly, Cass made a circuit around the yard, peering into the darkness.

  “Mr. Cabbage Face?”

  She waited for a few minutes, hugging her arms against the cold. But there was no response.

  And yet, she was certain someone or something had been out there.

  Naturally, she thought of Ms. Mauvais and Dr. L — but wouldn’t they already have crept insid
e to look for the Sound Prism or to kidnap her or to do whatever horrible thing they were going to do?

  Perhaps the homunculus had come, but then changed his mind, or thought he had the wrong house?

  There was one way to know for sure: if she called him on the Sound Prism, he would have to come.

  True, Cass had promised not to look for him, but this was clearly a different situation. And she would try only a small, short toss — a small, short call. Audible only if he were close by.

  Cass looked back at her house to make sure no lights had gone on, and that her mother was still sleeping. Then she stood in the middle of the yard and tossed the Sound Prism into the air —

  The ball rose a little higher than she’d intended but not so high that the tune would carry all the way around the world. It had been a long time since she’d heard it, and the eerie song was strangely comforting.

  Almost immediately, she heard the rustling sound. All of her senses on alert, she scanned her surroundings for a sign of the homunculus. Surely, he would show himself now? Or was he still too angry with her?

  She saw a glimmer of light in the bushes behind the Barbie Graveyard —

  “Mr. Cabbage Face?” she whispered again.

  By the time she reached the spot, whatever or whoever it was was gone.

  As a cold, unhappy Cass walked back upstairs to her room, a smug, smiling Amber walked quickly down the street away from Cass’s house.

  She held her sparkling pink cell phone aloft like a trophy. And with good reason. On her phone was the freshly recorded song of the Sound Prism.

  Ms. Mauvais would be very happy.

  Max-Ernest released the two straws from his mouth and put down his two juice boxes. It had been less than two weeks since the disaster at the museum, but he appeared to be in high spirits.

  “How about this one . . . ?” He looked at his lunch companions to make sure he had their attention. “Knock, knock . . .”

  “Who’s there?” asked Yo-Yoji gamely.

  “I am.”

  “Um, ‘I am’ who?”

  “No, that was the answer.”

  “Just ‘I am’?”

  Max-Ernest nodded. “I read that a joke is when you expect one thing, then something else happens. Well, in a knock-knock joke you always think there’s going to be a joke after you say ‘who’s there?’ And I thought, what if there wasn’t a joke — would that be like a joke on a joke?”