Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms (2 page)
“By the time it was what by a what?”
“Burned down by a firebomb. In nineteen forty, during the Second World War, one fell on the factory when my father was away one night. My uncle Tony had been left in charge, but the fire took hold and the building was destroyed.”
“Fifty years ago,” said Stuart. “Almost exactly …”
Beside the steel gates were an intercom and a labeled buzzer that he had to stand on tiptoe to read:
Tricks of the Trade. Goods entrance
.
“So, what happened after the fire?” he asked.
His father, whose normal expression was one of mild happiness, looked suddenly serious, and he started walking again. It was a while before he spoke.
“It was all rather sad,” he said. “I suppose it marked the end of the family. My father tried to start the business again, without success, and after a few years he moved away from Beeton. He blamed my uncle Tony for the fire, you see, because Tony had never really been interested in the factory at all, he was an ent—” Stuart’s father stopped suddenly. “Good
lord
!” he said, staring ahead.
Stuart followed the direction of his gaze and saw a tall, shabby house, its yard overgrown, its windows boarded up, and its roof a patchwork of cracked and missing slates.
“That’s Uncle Tony’s house!” said his father. “The probate dispute must never have been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties concerned.”
Stuart ignored this last sentence. “What’s an ‘Ent’?” he asked. “You said he was an ‘Ent.’”
“An entertainer,” answered his father. “A prestidigitator.”
“A what?”
“A magician. He used to do conjuring tricks on stage.”
“A
magician
?” Stuart repeated. “You had an uncle who was a
magician
? But you never told me that.”
“Oh, didn’t I?” said his dad vaguely. “Well, I know very little about him. And I suppose it didn’t occur to me that you’d be interested.”
Stuart rolled his eyes in exasperation and walked up to the gate. It was encased in ivy, held tightly shut by the curling stems.
“Number six,” he said, running his finger over the brass number that was half hidden by the leaves. “So, what sort of tricks did he do?”
“I’m not sure.”
“And what was he like?”
“I don’t remember him at all, I’m afraid. I was very young when he disappeared.”
“He
disappeared
? What do you mean he disappeared?”
“I mean that he went away and never came back to Beeton.”
“Oh.” Stuart felt disappointed. For a second or two he’d imagined a puff of smoke and an empty stage and an audience gasping. “So, why’s the house all wrecked, then?” he asked.
“Because there was a probate dispute.”
“You said that, but what’s
probate
?”
“The legal enforcement of the will. Uncle Tony left the house to his fiancée, but apparently they had an argument. She ran off after the fire and nobody could ever trace her. My goodness, it does look a mess.”
Stuart stared at the front door. Several pieces of wood had been nailed right across it, but between them he could just glimpse an oval of stained glass, the multicolored pieces forming some sort of picture. A hat, was it? And a stick? And a word that he couldn’t quite read?
“But I was in bed …” came his father’s voice from the distance.
Stuart looked around. His father was walking away up the road, having failed to notice that Stuart hadn’t moved.
“So, he left a present for me,” explained Stuart’s father to the empty patch of sidewalk next to him.
“Who did?” shouted Stuart, running to catch up.
“Your great-uncle Tony. He came to visit my house one Christmas Eve when I was a small child, but I was already asleep.”
“And what was the present?”
“A box.”
“What sort of box? A magic box?”
“No, a money box. I still have it, as a matter of fact—it’s the one that I keep paper clips in.”
Stuart had seen the box almost every day of his life, though he’d never taken much notice of it. In the old house it had lived on his father’s desk, and in the new one it sat on the windowsill of the study.
As soon as he got back from the walk, Stuart ran upstairs to get it. It was cylindrical and made of tin, painted with a pattern of red and blue interlocking rings, although half the paint had worn away so that crescents of bright metal showed between the colors. He flipped open the hinged lid, tipped out the paper clips, and looked into the empty tin. He didn’t know what he’d expected to see, but there was nothing, just a blank, shiny interior. He slapped the lid back on again and stared at it for a moment. “Dad!” he shouted.
There was no answer. Stuart took the tin downstairs and found his father gazing out of the kitchen window with the kind of slack-jawed expression that he always wore when thinking up crossword clues.
“Dad, why did you say this was a money box?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“There’s no slit in the lid. Money boxes have a slit in the lid to put the coins in. So why did you call it a money box?”
“Oh …” His father peered down at the tin as if he’d never seen it before. “I think it was written somewhere. On the side, perhaps?”
Stuart looked hard at the worn pattern and saw something that looked a tiny bit like a curly
W
. He turned the tin the other way up and the
W
became an
M
. But there were no letters after the
M
. He started to rotate the tin in his hands.
“Now that I remember …” began his father.
“It’s not just upside down,” said Stuart. “It’s written back to front.”
The
O
and the
N
of the word
MONEY
had completely worn away, but he could just about see the
E
and the
Y
.
“Now that I remember,” Mr. Horten repeated, “there’d been some kind of error in the manufacture of the box. The word
MONEY
was printed upside down and back to front.”
“I just
said
that,” said Stuart. “But I bet it wasn’t a mistake.” He put the lid back on again and weighed the tin in his hand. The bottom felt heavier than the top. “It’s a trick box,” he declared, with sudden certainty. “Great-Uncle Tony was a magician, and he gave you a puzzle to solve.”
His father was gazing out of the window again.
“But unfortunately not a crossword puzzle,” added Stuart under his breath. He upended the tin, and tried to unscrew the bottom. It wouldn’t budge.
“Sorry?” said his father. “Did you just say something? I lost the thread …”
Stuart stopped what he was doing. The
thread
. It was a word with two meanings: not just a piece of cotton, but a spiral path, cut into metal.
Cautiously, he started to turn the bottom of the tin the
other
way—and it opened in one smooth movement. He was so startled that he dropped both pieces, and suddenly there were coins all over the floor, gold coins (a sort of dull gold, anyway), bouncing all over the place. Stuart scrambled to pick them up.
“Good lord!” said his father, switching his attention from the window. “Where did those come from?”
“There was a little compartment in the bottom,” Stuart told him. “They were packed so tightly that they didn’t even rattle.”
The coins were small with an irregular edge, a picture of a man with a beard on one side, and something that looked like a grid on the other.
“Are they worth thousands?”
“Let me see …” His father counted the coins into a little pile on the table. “Eight threepenny bits,” he said. “A threepenny bit is worth just over a penny in new money, so they’re worth—”
“Less than ten pence,” said Stuart disgustedly.
“Well, actually,” his father said, “they’re no longer legal tender, which means that you can’t spend them in the shops.”
“So, they’re worth
nothing
, then?”
Stuart flicked his finger at the little pile and it fell over. The top coin rolled off the table, onto the floor, and right out through the kitchen door, and he followed it, just to see how far it would go. Not far, as it turned out—only to the edge of the lawn. He knelt to pick it up.
“What’s your name?” asked a voice behind him.
Stuart turned and saw a girl looking at him from the yard next door. She wore glittery hair clips and had a clever expression. She was resting her chin on the fence.
“What’s your name?” she repeated.
“Stuart,” he said.
“And how old are you?”
“Ten.”
“So am I,” she said, “but I’m a lot taller than you. A
lot
. What’s your last name?”
He hated telling people his last name because of the whole “Shorten” thing. He shrugged. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because I do. I’m going to write an article about you and I need a full set of details. This is all I’ve got so far.” She held up an open notebook over the fence so that he could read what she’d written:
New neighbors arrived wednesday. Man looks like a giraffe, wears glasses, and hums all the time. Woman has awful hair, rides bicycle, and goes to work very early. One goldfish in small tank, looks dead. One son, probably about 8 years old.
“My goldfish isn’t dead,” said Stuart indignantly.
“I only wrote that it
looks
dead,” the girl replied, underlining the word
looks
with one finger. “It’s an impressions piece. But I need the true facts for tomorrow’s edition.”
“Tomorrow’s edition of what?”
“Our newspaper. Me and my sisters are writing one as a summer project. April’s the crime correspondent, May’s the photographer, and I’m the general reporter. I just need your last name, the name of your goldfish, the name of your new school, the name of your old school, your date of birth, your favorite hobby, your favorite food, your favorite animal, your favorite sport, your shoe size, your exact weight and height …”
Stuart started to edge away from the fence half a step at a time.
“… your best-ever Christmas present, your worst-ever Christmas present, your least favorite TV program, your most favorite TV program, your unhappiest memory, your … Come back!”
Stuart, who had edged almost as far as his own back door by this point, shook his head and dodged inside.
“Ah, there you are!” said his father as he entered. He was holding a Scrabble board. “I was just thinking of engaging in a little contest of—”
“Can I go for a bike ride?” asked Stuart quickly. “I’ll be really careful. I won’t go far. I won’t talk to strangers. I’ll wear my helmet. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
“Yes, all right,” said his father, looking a little disappointed. “Where are you going to go?”
“Oh, nowhere in particular.”
Which was a lie. Because Stuart went straight back to Great-Uncle Tony’s house.
Stuart locked his bike to a lamppost opposite the house and looked along the road. There was no one around. All the other houses on the street were small and modern and well-cared for, with tidy front yards and shining windows.
He crossed the road, glanced around one more time to check that no one was watching, and then he climbed over the gate.
The grass in the front yard was as high as his waist. He waded through it, stumbling over half-bricks and old bottles. When he reached the front door, he inspected the four planks of wood that were nailed across the frame. He pulled at one of them, but it held firm. He tried to peer through the mail slot, but it had been wired shut and he was too short to look through the stained-glass oval at the top of the door—though he could see the picture formed by the colored pieces clearly now: a top hat, a wand, and the initials
T-T TH
.
T-T TH
.
Tony Horten.
Something-something
Tony Horten.
Terrifically talented?
Stuart started to walk around the house, pausing to tug unsuccessfully at one of the boards that covered a side window. The backyard was even more overgrown than the front. There were swathes of giant stinging nettles and vast loops of brambles studded with unripe blackberries. Amid the jungle lay odd bits of junk.