"Well," Laurie said, "you'll have to take some of the blame, Brian. I mean, you were the one who brought Mother into it. You should have had me swear on Lew's name. He could go to hell."
Lissa, who was young enough and kind-hearted enough not to wish anyone in hell, was so distressed by this line of discourse that she began to cry.
"Hush, all of you," Trent said, and hugged Lissa until she had regained most of her composure. "What's done is done, and I happen to think it all worked out for the best."
"You do?" Brian asked. If Trent said a thing was good, Brian would have died defending it, that went without saying, but Laurie had sworn on Mom's name.
"Something this weird needs to be investigated, and if we waste a lot of time arguing over who was right or wrong to break their promise, we'll never get it done."
Trent glanced pointedly up at the clock on the wall of his room, where they had gathered. It was twenty after three. He really didn't have to say any more. Their mother had been up this morning to get Lew his breakfast--two three-minute eggs with whole-wheat toast and marmalade was one of his many daily requirements--but afterward she had gone back to bed, and there she had remained. She suffered from dreadful headaches, migraines that sometimes spent two or even three days snarling and clawing at her defenseless (and often bewildered) brain before decamping for a month or so.
She would not be apt to see them on the third floor and wonder what they were up to, but "Daddy Lew" was a different kettle of fish altogether. With his study just down the hall from the strange crack, they could count on avoiding his notice--and his curiosity--only if they conducted their investigations while he was away, and that was what Trent's pointed glance at the clock had meant.
The family had returned to the States a full ten days before Lew was scheduled to begin teaching classes again, but he could no more stay away from the University once he was back within ten miles of it than a fish could live out of water. He had left shortly after noon, with a briefcase crammed full of papers he had collected at various spots of historical interest in England. He said he was going up to file these papers away. Trent thought that meant he'd cram them into one of his desk drawers, then lock his office and go down to the History Department's Faculty Lounge. There he would drink coffee and gossip with his buddies . . . except, Trent had discovered, when you were a college teacher, people thought you were dumb if you had buddies. You were supposed to say they were your colleagues. So he was away, and that was good, but he might be back at any time between now and five, and that was bad. Still, they had some time, and Trent was determined they weren't going to spend it squabbling about who swore what to who.
"Listen to me, you guys," he said, and was gratified to see that they actually were listening, their differences and recriminations forgotten in the excitement of an investigation. They had also been caught by Trent's inability to explain what Lissa had found. All three of them shared, at least to some extent, Brian's simple faith in Trent--if Trent was puzzled by something, if Trent thought that something was strange and just possibly amazing, they all thought so.
Laurie spoke for all of them when she said: "Just tell us what to do, Trent--we'll do it."
"Okay," Trent said. "We'll need some things." He took a deep breath and began explaining what they were.
*
Once they were convened around the crack at the end of the third-floor hallway, Trent held Lissa up so she could shine the beam of a small flashlight--it was the one their mother used to inspect their ears, eyes, and noses when they weren't feeling well--into the crack. They could all see the metal; it wasn't shiny enough to throw back a clear reflection of the beam, but it shone silkily just the same. Steel, was Trent's opinion--steel, or some sort of alloy.
"What's an alloy, Trent?" Brian asked.
Trent shook his head. He didn't know exactly. He turned to Laurie and asked her to give him the drill.
Brian and Lissa exchanged an uneasy glance as Laurie passed it over. It had come from the basement workshop, and the basement was the one remaining place in the house which was their real father's. Daddy Lew hadn't been down there a dozen times since he had married Catherine Bradbury. The smaller children knew that as well as Trent and Laurie. They weren't afraid Daddy Lew would notice someone had been using the drill; it was the holes in the wall outside his study they were worried about. Neither one of them said this out loud, but Trent read it on their troubled faces.
"Look," Trent said, holding the drill out so they could get a good look. "This is what they call a needle-point drillbit. See how tiny it is? And since we're only going to drill behind the pictures, I don't think we have to worry."
There were about a dozen framed prints along the third-floor hallway, half of them beyond the study door, on the way to the closet at the end where the suitcases were stored. Most of these were very old (and mostly uninteresting) views of Titusville, where the Bradburys lived.
"He doesn't even look at them, let alone behind them," Laurie agreed.
Brian touched the tip of the drill with one finger, then nodded. Lissa watched, then copied both the touch and the nod. If Laurie said something was okay, it probably was; if Trent said so, it almost certainly was; if they both said so, there could be no question.
Laurie took down the picture which hung closest to the small crack in the plaster and gave it to Brian. Trent drilled. They stood watching him in a tight little circle of three, like infielders encouraging their pitcher at a particularly tense moment of the game.
The drillbit went easily into the wall, and the hole it made was every bit as tiny as promised. The darker square of wallpaper which had been revealed when Laurie took the print off its hook was also encouraging. It suggested that no one had bothered taking the dark line engraving of the Titusville Public Library off its hook for a very long time.
After a dozen turns of the drill's handle, Trent stopped and reversed, pulling the bit free.
"Why'd you quit?" Brian asked.
"Hit something hard."
"More metal?" Lissa asked.
"I think so. Sure wasn't wood. Let's see." He shone the light in and cocked his head this way and that before shaking it decisively. "My head's too big. Let's boost Lissa."
Laurie and Trent lifted her up and Brian handed her the Pen Lite. Lissa squinted for a time, then said, "Just like in the crack I found."
"Okay," Trent said. "Next picture."
The drill hit metal behind the second, and the third, as well. Behind the fourth--by this time they were quite close to the door of Lew's study--it went all the way in before Trent pulled it out. This time when she was boosted up, Lissa told them she saw "the pink stuff."
"Yeah, the insulation I told you about," Trent said to Laurie. "Let's try the other side of the hall."
They had to drill behind four pictures on the east side of the corridor before they struck first wood-lath and then insulation behind the plaster . . . and as they were re-hanging the last picture, they heard the out-of-tune snarl of Lew's elderly Porsche turning into the driveway.
Brian, who had been in charge of hanging this picture--he could just reach the hook on tip-toe--dropped it. Laurie reached out and grabbed it by the frame on the way down. A moment later she found herself shaking so badly she had to hand the picture to Trent, or she would have dropped it herself.
"You hang it," she said, turning a stricken face to her older brother. "I would have dropped it if I'd been thinking about what I was doing. I really would."
Trent hung the picture, which showed horse-drawn carriages clopping through City Park, and saw it was hanging slightly askew. He reached out to adjust it, then pulled back just before his fingers touched the frame. His sisters and his brother thought he was something like a god; Trent himself was smart enough to know he was only a kid. But even a kid--assuming he was a kid with half a brain--knew that when things like this started to go bad, you ought to leave them alone. If he messed with it anymore, this picture would fall for sure, spraying the f
loor with broken glass, and somehow Trent knew it.
"Go!" he whispered. "Downstairs! TV room!"
The back door slammed downstairs as Lew came in.
"But it's not straight!" Lissa protested. "Trent, it's not--"
"Never mind!" Laurie said. "Do what Trent says!"
Trent and Laurie looked at each other, wide-eyed. If Lew went into the kitchen to fix himself a bite to tide himself over until supper, all still might be well. If he didn't, he would meet Lissa and Brian on the stairs. One look at them and he'd know something was going on. The two younger Bradbury children were old enough to close their mouths, but not their faces.
Brian and Lissa went fast.
Trent and Laurie came behind, more slowly, listening. There was a moment of almost unbearable suspense when the only sounds were the little kids' footsteps on the stairs, and then Lew bawled up at them from the kitchen: "KEEP IT DOWN, CAN'T YOU? YOUR MOTHER'S TAKING A NAP!"
And if that doesn't wake her up, Laurie thought, nothing will.
*
Late that night, as Trent was drowsing off to sleep, Laurie opened the door of his room, came in, and sat down beside him on the bed.
"You don't like him, but that's not all," she said.
"Who-wha?" Trent asked, peeling a cautious eyelid.
"Lew," she said quietly. "You know who I mean, Trent."
"Yeah," he said, giving up. "And you're right. I don't like him."
"You're scared of him, too, aren't you?"
After a long, long moment, Trent said: "Yeah. A little."
"Just a little?"
"Maybe a little more than a little," Trent said. He winked at her, hoping for a smile, but Laurie only looked at him, and Trent gave up. She wasn't going to be diverted, at least not tonight.
"Why? Do you think he might hurt us?"
Lew shouted at them a lot, but he had never put his hands on them. No, Laurie suddenly remembered, that wasn't quite true. One time when Brian had walked into his study without knocking, Lew had given him a spanking. A hard one. Brian had tried not to cry, but in the end he had. And Mom had cried, too, although she hadn't tried to stop the spanking. But she must have said something to him later on, because Laurie had heard Lew shouting at her.
Still, it had been a spanking, not child abuse, and Brian could be an insufferable cheese-dog when he put his mind to it.
Had he been putting his mind to it that night? Laurie wondered now. Or had Lew spanked her brother and made him cry over something which had only been an honest little kid's mistake? She didn't know, and had a sudden and unwelcome insight, the sort of thought that made her think Peter Pan had had the right idea about never wanting to grow up: she wasn't sure she wanted to know. One thing she did know: who the real cheese-dog around here was.
She realized Trent hadn't answered her question, and gave him a poke. "Cat got your tongue?"
"Just thinking," he said. "It's a toughie, you know?"
"Yes," she said soberly. "I know."
This time she let him think.
"Nah," he said at last, and laced his hands together behind his head. "I don't think so, Sprat." She hated to be called that, but tonight she decided to let it go. She couldn't remember Trent ever speaking to her this carefully and seriously. "I don't think he would . . . but I think he could." He got up on one elbow and looked at her even more seriously. "But I think he's hurting Mom, and I think it gets a little worse for her every day."
"She's sorry, isn't she?" Laurie asked. Suddenly she felt like crying. Why were adults so stupid sometimes about stuff kids could see right away? It made you want to kick them. "She never wanted to go to England in the first place . . . and there's the way he shouts at her sometimes . . ."
"Don't forget the headaches," Trent said flatly. "The ones he says she talks herself into. Yeah, she's sorry, all right."
"Would she ever . . . you know . . ."
"Divorce him?"
"Yes," Laurie said, relieved. She wasn't sure she could have brought the word out herself, and had she realized how much she was her mother's daughter in that regard, she could have answered her own question.
"No," Trent said. "Not Mom."
"Then there's nothing we can do," Laurie sighed.
Trent said in a voice so soft she almost couldn't hear it: "Oh yeah?"
*
During the next week and a half, they drilled other small holes around the house when there was no one around to see them: holes behind posters in their various rooms, behind the refrigerator in the pantry (Brian was able to squeeze in and just had room to use the drill), in the downstairs closets. Trent even drilled one in a dining-room wall, high up in one corner where the shadows never quite left. He stood on top of the step-ladder while Laurie held it steady.
There was no metal anywhere. Just lath.
The children forgot for a little while.
*
One day about a month later, after Lew had gone back to teaching full-time, Brian came to Trent and told him there was another crack in the plaster on the third floor, and that he could see more metal behind it. Trent and Lissa came at once. Laurie was still in school, at band practice.
As on the occasion of the first crack, their mother was lying down with a headache. Lew's temper had improved once he was back at school (as Trent and Laurie had been sure it would), but he'd had a crackerjack argument with their mother the night before, about a party he wanted to have for fellow faculty members in the History Department. If there was anything the former Mrs. Bradbury hated and feared, it was playing hostess at faculty parties. Lew had insisted on this one, however, and she had finally given in. Now she was lying in the shadowy bedroom with a damp towel over her eyes and a bottle of Fiorinal on the night-table while Lew was presumably passing around invitations in the Faculty Lounge and clapping his colleagues on the back.
The new crack was on the west side of the hallway, between the study door and the stairwell.
"You sure you saw metal in there?" Trent asked. "We checked this side, Bri."
"Look for yourself," Brian said, and Trent did. There was no need of a flashlight; this crack was wider, and there was no question about the metal at the bottom of it.
After a long look, Trent told them he had to go to the hardware store, right away.
"Why?" Lissa asked.
"I want to get some plaster. I don't want him to see that crack." He hesitated, then added: "And I especially don't want him to see the metal inside it."
Lissa frowned at him. "Why not, Trent?"
But Trent didn't exactly know. At least, not yet.
*
They started drilling again, and this time they found metal behind all the walls on the third floor, including Lew's study. Trent snuck in there one afternoon with the drill while Lew was at the college and their mother was out shopping for the upcoming faculty party.
The former Mrs. Bradbury looked very pale and drawn these days--even Lissa had noticed--but when any of the children asked her if she was okay, she always flashed a troubling, over-bright smile and told them never better, in the pink, rolling in clover. Laurie, who could be blunt, told her she looked too thin. Oh no, her mother responded, Lew says I was turning into a blob over in England--all those rich teas. She was just trying to get back into fighting trim, that was all.
Laurie knew better, but not even Laurie was blunt enough to call her mother a liar to her face. If all four of them had come to her at once--ganged up on her, so to speak--they might have gotten a different story. But not even Trent thought of doing that.
One of Lew's advanced degrees was hanging on the wall over his desk in a frame. While the other children clustered outside the door, nearly vomiting with terror, Trent removed the framed degree from its hook, laid it on the desk, and drilled a pinhole in the center of the square where it had been. Two inches in, the drill hit metal.
Trent carefully rehung the degree--making very sure it wasn't crooked--and came back out.
Lissa burst into tears
of relief, and Brian quickly joined her; he looked disgusted but seemed unable to help himself. Laurie had to struggle very hard against her own tears.
They drilled holes at intervals along the stairs to the second floor and found metal behind these walls, too. It continued roughly halfway down the second-floor hallway as it proceeded toward the front of the house. There was metal behind the walls of Brian's room, but behind only one wall of Laurie's.
"It hasn't finished growing in here," Laurie said darkly.
Trent looked at her, surprised. "Huh?"
Before she could reply, Brian had a brainstorm.
"Try the floor, Trent!" he said. "See if it's there, too."
Trent thought it over, shrugged, and drilled into the floor of Laurie's room. The drill went in all the way with no resistance, but when he peeled back the rug at the foot of his own bed and tried there, he soon encountered solid steel . . . or solid whatever-it-was.
Then, at Lissa's insistence, he stood on a stool and drilled up into the ceiling, eyes slitted against the plaster-dust that sifted down into his face.
"Boink," he said after a few moments. "More metal. Let's quit for the day."
Laurie was the only one who saw how deeply troubled Trent looked.
*
That night after lights-out, it was Trent who came to Laurie's room, and Laurie didn't even pretend to be sleepy. The truth was, neither of them had been sleeping very well for the last couple of weeks.
"What did you mean?" Trent whispered, sitting down beside her.
"About what?" Laurie asked, getting up on one elbow.
"You said it hadn't finished growing in your room. What did you mean?"
"Come on, Trent--you're not dumb."
"No, I'm not," he agreed without conceit. "Maybe I just want to hear you say it, Sprat."
"If you call me that, you never will."
"Okay. Laurie, Laurie, Laurie. You satisfied?"
"Yes. That stuffs growing all over the house." She paused. "No, that's not right. It's growing under the house."
"That's not right, either."
Laurie thought about it, then sighed. "Okay," she said. "It's growing in the house. It's stealing the house. Is that good enough, Mr. Smarty?"
"Stealing the house . . ." Trent sat quietly beside her on the bed, looking at her poster of Chrissie Hynde and seeming to taste the phrase she had used. At last he nodded and flashed the smile she loved. "Yes--that's good enough."