We parted with another handshake all round. Ari escorted Spare14 to the front door. I wondered if the various subjects of our conversation had left Ari wishing he’d been an insurance adjustor. When he came back upstairs, he admitted to feeling stressed.
“I was thinking of going to the gym for my weights routine,” he said. “But I shouldn’t leave you here alone. Come with me.”
I groaned. “No, I’ll be perfectly safe as long as I stay inside the security system. Spare told you that our prowler isn’t likely to come back, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but—”
“Ari, please! I don’t want to argue about the damned gym.”
He set his hands on his hips and scowled at me. I glared in return. Finally, he said, “Very well, if you’re sure you’ll be safe.”
“I am. Really. I can protect myself, y’know. Besides, I know where the alarm nodes are, and if I have to, I’ll punch the panic button and set everything off. The noise alone will send the criminals away screaming.”
Ari smiled, but grudgingly. “I’ll do a shorter workout than usual. I should be back in about an hour and a half.”
On this compromise, he grabbed his sports bag and left.
I sat down at my computer and filed the usual reports and took care of the usual e-mail, then logged off and shut down. Although I waited for a few minutes, Cryptic Creep never appeared on the monitor. I flopped onto the couch to
think. Spare14’s mysterious briefcase had reminded me of something that had happened years before.
I needed to recover the memory, and at last, it rose. I remembered sitting on my father’s lap, which meant I was eight at the very oldest, and laughing when he showed me a secret drawer in his desk, the same one that I now had downstairs. What, I wondered, did he keep in it, and was that something still there? I ran an SM:D and felt no threats in the vicinity. I checked the clock: almost time for Ari to return. I decided, therefore, that I could go downstairs safely, even though I’d have to spend a brief minute outside on the front steps.
I got out of one flat and into the other with no trouble, nor did I see or sense any threat nearby. The downstairs flat, shut up for so long, smelled of dust and damp. I decided against opening a window, just in case a trans-world prowler came around while I was there. Dad’s desk, a heavy oak number with drawers on each side of the kneehole, sat in the oddly shaped antechamber, a tiny room with a big walk-in closet on the back wall.
I pulled up the desk chair and sat down to examine the desk. A solid oak slab about an inch thick topped it. Under that, a shallow drawer hung directly over the kneehole. It slid in and out in the ordinary way. It also ran across the entire depth of the desk with no room for a second compartment in back. None of the other drawers allowed for extra space. I got up and examined the back panel just to make sure.
Yet I vividly remembered Dad doing something one-handed underneath that central drawer and pulling out a secret compartment. Maybe someone had dismantled it at some point in the desk’s history. I crouched down to look at the bottom of the existing drawer. Not one mark or scuff indicated damage, not a nail hole or chip. I sat back in the chair and let my mind range back to the memory.
“Where is it, Dad?” my child’s voice said.
“Not in this world, sweetheart,” Dad said.
In the present moment I said aloud a word that my father would have slapped me for saying. At the time I’d thought
he was teasing me. Now I realized that he’d told me the simple truth. The drawer doubtless existed in some other world or dimension, a place only he could access. Probably this meant that something very important lay hidden in it, not that it was going to do me one damn bit of good.
Michael, however, might have enough world-walking talent to find the mystery drawer and retrieve the important whatever. I pulled my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and called him. He answered promptly.
“You’re not in class, are you?” I said. “I’ll sign off if you are.”
“Uh, no. Actually uh—”
“You’re cutting school.”
“Well, yeah. I’m working on the map. I’m failing Civics anyway, so I figured I might as well just cut. It’s the last class of the day.”
I would have enjoyed yelling and lecturing, but they would have been wastes of time and breath.
“I’ve got something else in that department for you to work on,” I said. “But I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”
“Cool! I’ll be right over.”
“Where are you? What about Sean?”
“I’m up by the Cliff House. I think there’s a gate in Sutro Gardens. Sean couldn’t meet me today, but maybe he can find it tomorrow.”
“You can look after you get out of school.”
“Sure. Uh, I’ll be right over.”
Michael appeared on the covered porch so quickly that I assumed he’d hitched a ride. I let him into the lower flat. The first thing he did was pull out his cell phone and text Sophie to tell her where he was. For an encore, he took off his down-filled jacket and dropped it on the floor. With his jeans he was wearing a short-sleeved orange Giants T-shirt over a long-sleeved red 49ers T-shirt, not what I’d call a successful combination. I picked up the jacket and hung it over the back of the desk chair.
“Sophie’ll tell Aunt Eileen,” Michael said. “I don’t want them to worry.”
“Good. Sophie has her own phone now, huh?”
“It’s the one Aunt E used to have. She never used it much, because it was too complicated or something, so she gave it to Sophie.”
“Well, hey, that was generous of her.”
“I thanked her a whole lot, don’t worry. And I took out the garbage without her telling me to. A bunch of times.”
“Good. Now look, bro, we’ve got some problems on our hands. One: we can’t trust Ari to look the other way if we end up having to do something that’s—let’s just say dubious—to get Dad home. So say nothing.”
Michael nodded and held up one hand like a Boy Scout.
“Two,” I continued. “Do not mention gates and stuff like that over your cell phone. All those calls end up stored on some server farm somewhere.”
“Ah, come on, no one’s going to go over all that shit.”
“You never know.” I fixed him with a stare one notch above the gimlet eye. “In the Agency we do not take stupid risks.”
“Okay, okay. I won’t.”
“Good. Now, finally, I’ve got some bureaucratic business to deal with here. I can’t leave to go traveling across the worlds, not even to rescue Dad, until this job is finished. If things do work out here, we may be able to get top-notch help for the rescue, but it could take months.”
“Months? Jeezus H!” Michael pulled a long face. “I guess you can’t tell me what the problem is, huh?”
“You guessed right. There are drawbacks to having a sister who’s a secret agent. Sorry.”
His SPP radiated a profound sense of self-pity mingled with youthful impatience.
“Now, as to why I called you,” I said. “It’s about Dad’s desk here.”
After I explained the problem, Michael sat down in the chair. He laid both hands palm down on the desktop.
“I feel something, for sure,” he said. “But I dunno. I mean, hey, wait!”
With his right hand he reached under the central drawer, then grinned. He pulled out a second drawer with the same twist of the wrist and flourish that I remembered Dad using. I squatted down and peered past his knees to see how
the drawer hung—on narrow brass runners that had not existed earlier, at least not on this world level.
“There it is,” he said. “Epic cool!”
Inside the drawer lay a manila folder. Michael picked it up and handed it to me. “That’s the only thing in here.”
When he closed the drawer, it disappeared. So did the rails. I shivered, I admit it—me! who should have been the expert on such phenomena.
“Y’know,” Michael said. “We could put those boxes in this drawer.”
“Very sly, bro. So one fine night you could pick the lock on the front door and come in and take them?”
Michael gave me a grin of the “I’m just a goof don’t hit me” variety.
“I know they call to you,” I went on, “but you’ll have to wait to answer. Now, don’t forget your jacket.”
We returned to the upstairs flat. While Michael raided my refrigerator, I sat down in one of the armchairs to leaf through the folder. It contained a medium-sized stack of printer paper, slightly yellowed along the edges with age. The printout text, in the old Bunchló na Nod font, was mostly in Irish Gaelic, not that I was surprised. Dad had written notes by hand, also in Irish, all over the margins.
Michael came back with half a pastrami sandwich clamped in one hand and a bottle of turquoise-blue sports drink in the other. He stood next to me and craned his neck to see the paper I was holding.
“Jeez,” Michael said. “What is that weird shit?”
“Your ancestral tongue.”
“Oh. I guess I shouldn’t have called it weird shit, then.”
“You got that right.” I scowled at the papers. “It’s mostly Irish, anyway. I keep finding passages in a peculiar Latin.” I waved the bundle of papers in his direction. “It’s going to take me a while to translate these.”
“Is there anything in there about the boxes? Can you tell that much?”
“Not yet. Let me get my dictionary.”
He flopped down in the second armchair while I searched the bookshelves.
With the aid of the dictionary I could pick out meaning
here and there. I could read the notes Dad had written, but the printout presented real problems. The parts in Irish Gaelic were written in a very archaic language, positively medieval in its constant invocation of various saints and dire warnings of damnation to fall upon anyone who misused the information for evil. Worse yet, not all the words were in my dictionary.
I got the general impression that the information in question had originally been part of a book. Nothing gave me so much as a clue of what it was or where Dad had found it.
“Well?” Michael said.
“It’s going to take me a long time to work this stuff over.” I laid the papers down on the coffee table. “But I think they might have something to do with the gates and worlds. Dad made notes about a passage concerning keys to the doors guarded by angels.”
“How long?” Michael popped the last bit of the sandwich into his mouth and mumbled. “Will it take you to translate it, I mean?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said. “A couple of days, maybe. This stuff is dense.”
Michael groaned with dire drama and wiped his greasy hand on his jeans.
I was about to suggest he use a napkin when I heard the front door open. I went to the top of the stairs to check: Ari, still damp from his shower. He smiled at me as he ran up the entire flight.
“I can’t believe you’ve got the energy to do that,” I said.
“Working out builds energy,” he said. “You’d find that out if—”
“No! I’m not going to some smelly icky gym.”
He rolled his eyes skyward and strode into the living room.
“Mike!” Ari said. “You came by?”
“Nola had some stuff to show me from Dad’s desk. So she called me, yeah.”
Ari nodded and trotted off down the hall to put his sweaty workout clothes into the washing machine. I felt a pang of conscience at just how quickly we’d shifted his status to “outside the family.” I followed Ari down the hall.
“Well, actually,” I told him, “I discovered something weird about Dad’s desk. It’s got a drawer that’s in another world. Sort of like Spare14’s briefcase.”
Ari stopped pouring liquid detergent into the dispenser and turned to give me one of his reproachful stares. He set the bottle of detergent down.
“You must have noticed the way Belial’s box fit into the briefcase,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” Ari said. “I’ve been trying to forget it ever since. I take it Mike can open the drawer.”
“Yeah. I couldn’t. There were some papers in it that might be important.”
“Might be?”
“I don’t know yet. They’re really peculiar.”
“Nothing new about that, then.”
I returned to the living room to find Michael eating my recently purchased vegan peanut cookies right out of the bag. He was looking through the stack of Dad’s papers and scattering the occasional crumb or nut fragment onto the floor.
“What is this?” I said. “Aunt Eileen’s stopped feeding you?”
“I jogged over here on the beach,” Michael said. “The sea air, y’know?”
“Okay. Can you understand anything in those papers?”
“No. I’m just kind of studying Dad’s handwriting. In case I have to, like, forge it on something.”
“You’re going to be a real credit to the Agency one day.”
“Yeah?” He gave me a brilliant smile. “Thanks!”
Before I could explain the meaning of the term “sarcasm,” his cell phone let fly with a heavy metal guitar riff. Michael took it from his pocket with the cookie-free hand and stared at the text.
“It’s from Sophie,” he told me. “I guess I better go.”
“How are you getting home?”
“Muni.” Michael handed me the bag with the last two cookies in it. “It’s kind of a walk between buses, but that’s okay.”
“Ari and I could drive you.”
“No, he just got home and stuff. It’s no problem. Honest.”
I considered offering to drive him by myself, but the memory of the false image attack stopped me. Michael grabbed his jacket and headed off downstairs. I put the bag on the coffee table, then followed Michael down to let him out. By the time I came back upstairs, Ari was sitting on the couch with my Irish dictionary, and the last cookies had disappeared. So much for my adding extra calories to my diet. Ari looked up from the dictionary and frowned.
“I have never seen a language before,” he said, “that requires twenty pages of small print for the pronunciation guide.”
“And what’s more,” I said, “the guide’s unreliable. When it comes to pronouncing proper names, you’ve really got to ask someone who already knows.”
Ari shut the book and laid it on the coffee table. He was about to make a remark when my cell phone rang. Aunt Eileen, I thought. It was.
“Has Michael left yet?” she said.
“Yeah, he has. Why?”
“He needs to start his homework. His English teacher’s given him one last chance to pass if he can revise one essay and finish another. Oh, wait… Here he is now. I’ll let you go.”