The Book of Nonsense (6 page)

“How disappointing. I'm so glad to see you've chosen a wiser path.”

Dex seized up with rage. He wanted to throw heavy objects over the edge of the loft. He wanted to scream out that Daphna was a nerd and a loser and the biggest snob in the history of the world. The only reason he managed to restrain himself was that he was stunned to hear his sister speaking so freely with a stranger. She was a private person, and not given to rambling like that, even on subjects she was well practiced in—like insulting him.

Dex was incensed enough, though. He slid around and prepared to make his way back toward the ladder. But he paused when Rash said, “Now, this won't hurt a bit.”

“What?” Daphna asked, tension infusing her voice. “What won't hurt a bit?”

Rash laughed. “I'm going to say something. Your eyes may itch, but it won't hurt.”

“My eyes?”

Rash didn't respond. He appeared to be concentrating.

“Did you say my eyes are going to itch?” Daphna asked again.

“Quiet!” Rash ordered. “I'm trying to remember.”

“But—!”

“Silence!”

Daphna, apparently cowed, did not speak again.

“Blast it!” Rash cried. “After so much planning, how could I forget to check that word?! Blast my fading memory! But no matter,” he said, now in a tone that suggested he was talking to himself. “I'll need to consult my ledger—of course that could take all night with that ineffectual fool. Should I keep you here? What's the point?! What's one more day?!”

Then he laughed and shouted something that sounded like “Kalice!” There was silence for a moment, then Rash leaned forward and said, “Daphna, dear, listen closely—”

“Yes?” Daphna asked, and quite meekly.

“Thank you for reading to me from my book about birds. You will return tomorrow morning. We will finish what we've started here and then leave shortly after. You will be, as you wish so desperately to be,
my new as-
sistant
. If all goes well, we'll begin watching for the First Tongue immediately.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Rash!” was Daphna's enthusiastic reply.

Dex was stupefied. Did she not understand that he just told her they'd be
leaving
? What did she think she was doing? He'd seen enough. Dex got to his knees and crawled with relative speed back across the loft, too aggravated to worry about his safety anymore. The boards groaned beneath him, but did not give way, and he was quickly back on the ladder, which only moved a hair when he climbed it.

Dexter scrambled onto the roof, hurried down to the ground and around the building, and in no time at all was back in the alley across the street.

He didn't head off though, but rather just stood there, trying to sort out what he'd seen.

He was still standing there ten minutes later when Daphna finally came out of the ABC. She rubbed her eyes at the dismal, gray day.

Daphna looked around. She'd somehow forgotten where she was and what she was doing, and the feeling was frightening.

Dex watched her standing there, looking as if she'd just woken up somewhere she hadn't gone to sleep. Her bewildered expression was comical. He was glad he hadn't taken off because he suddenly decided to find out what Daphna was up to. He'd always suspected that her good-girl routine was a fraud—or at least he'd found himself often hoping so. And now it might actually turn out to be true. Besides, all the spying he'd managed had galvanized him in a way he'd never been before.

“Hey!” he called, brushing and whacking at the dust clinging all over him. Daphna saw him and crossed the street hesitantly. The pair walked half a block to the village coffee shop and sat down at a table in front with a green umbrella attached.

Daphna was still mired in confusion, but she finally looked at her brother. “You're all dusty,” she said.

Brushing himself again, Dex said, “So you met this Rash guy then, huh?”

Daphna screwed up her eyes for a moment. It looked to Dex like she thought he was the one talking gibberish. “Oh, Mr. Rash!” she finally realized. “He's okay. I was just being silly—I guess.”

“Hmm, interesting,” Dex said, tingling with anticipation. Daphna was going to lie to him. “So, you two just hung out, chatted and whatnot. A nice, friendly old man.”

“Well, yeah. I guess so.”

“What did you talk about?” Toying with his sister was fun, a rare opportunity.

“We didn't talk all that much—I guess. We went to his little cubby, and I read him something—a book about—birds.”

“Birds, huh?”

“Yeah, birds. I guess he's some kind of bird-lover or something. I'm going back tomorrow to finish it.”

As much as Dex enjoyed the idea of stringing his sister along, he suddenly lost patience. “Just how stupid do you think I am, Daphna? I've always known you were a phony.”

“What do you mean, phony? Who called you stupid? But never mind, you're being stupid now.”

Dex tried to calm himself. Of course Daphna couldn't know he was on to her.

“Okay, tell me this,” he said. “Did you talk about me?”

“
Oh
,
sure
, we talked about you the whole time. I mean, as you know, the world revolves around you.” But Daphna looked deeply uncertain, however pointed her words.

“So,” Dex continued, relishing the upper hand, “there was no time to squeeze in anything about Mom and Dad then?”

“What, like I'm going to tell a complete stranger the story of my life?
I'm
not stupid, you know.” Daphna was getting angry now. Her brother was obviously looking for some way to put her down. He constantly made fun of her for visiting the old folks at The R & R.

Dex and Daphna turned away from each other, exasperated, and both happened to look over at the ABC. Emmet was out front, donning his shades and heading off to do who knew what awful things.

“I just don't see why you need some old fart to get you out of here,” Dexter said. “If you want to run away, just run away.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about, Dexter,” Daphna retorted. “Is this your idea of a joke?” She got to her feet. “I don't know why I even bother,” she said, “but here's a little piece of advice: people might actually talk to you if you learned some basic social skills.”

“You mean like they talk to you?”

“Yes!”

“Daphna,” Dex said, amazed. He'd often considered saying this, but now was the time, after what she said about him to Rash. “Are you telling me,” he sneered, “that you don't know the only time anyone talks to you at school is so you'll do their work?”

“YOU'RE A BIG FAT LIAR, DEXTER WAX!” Daphna wailed. “Wren and Teal—”

“I saw them both in the park last week,” Dex said. He laughed. This was a bald-faced lie, but if he had to hear his sister say those two names one more time, he was going to lose his mind.

“I don't believe you,” Daphna muttered, her voice broken.

Deciding he'd won, Dex looked at his sister and said, coolly, “Daphna, you know very well you weren't reading a book about birds. You were sitting across from that old dude, and he was making you read some gobbledygook over and over in a long, skinny book—he was leaning over, holding on to it while you read, like you were gonna eat the pages or something.”

Daphna screwed up her whole face. Her mind was twisting. Why was Dex saying these things, and why did they make her feel so dizzy?

“And he said some wacko words,” Dex added, smirking. In a magician's extravagant voice and with an exaggerated flourish of his hands, he pronounced, “Graaaal!”

“
That's right!
” Daphna's face had drained itself of color, and she tottered on her feet. It all started coming back in a rush.

“That's right!” she repeated, falling back into her chair and breaking into tears. “I—I was so scared!” she sputtered. “Dex! How—how do you know this?!”

Dex scrutinized his sister. She was nearly hyperventilating. She looked frantic, really scared, and—he had to admit—she was no actress.

So he told her he'd happened to see Emmet go into the store, and since he'd seen him around the neighborhood menacing people, he'd decided to spy on him, which led to his discovery of the rusted trap door on the roof leading to the loft overhanging half the warehouse. It was a weak story, he knew, but Daphna was in no condition to dissect it.

Daphna shivered as Dexter spoke, her very bones recalling the terror she suppressed the whole time she sat in Rash's creepy little cubby. It was a much more powerful version of what she'd felt upon seeing his silhouette through the curtain with her father. She couldn't conceive of how she hadn't remembered any of it.

“I'll never go near him again!” Daphna swore. “Why did he make me keep reading that—that—what was it, Dex?”

“I have no idea,” said Dex. “It made no sense. He said you were going to be his new assistant.”

“He wants me to leave with him!” Daphna wailed. She was appalled. “Who is he? Why does he want me?”

Dex disliked the look that passed momentarily across his sister's face. It was as if she'd pondered which of her outstanding qualities made her so abductable.

“He said something about watching for the First Tongue right away,” Dex said, letting it go. “But that makes no sense.” 

This was something to latch on to at least. Unnerved at the thought of being kidnapped, Daphna considered the phrase a moment.

“Well,” she said, “‘Tongue' can also mean language, of course. I'm tutoring in both French and Spanish this year. But what could ‘first language' mean?”

“Who knows?” Dex replied, irritated by his sister's know-it-all tone. But then, mostly kidding, he said, “Once on TV, I saw some guy hypnotize his dog by chanting some goofy word. Made him think he was a duck, and he actually started quacking.”

“Yes!” Daphna cried. “It has to be something like that! Wait, if Rash thinks it's some kind of magic language, then of course he'd be interested in it! That whole place has nothing but books on magic!” She put her heels on the edge of the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees.

“Is it possible?” Daphna asked. “He scares me, Dex. When he talks, all you know is his voice. I was in a daze. Something freaky is going on. I don't think I would ever have remembered if you hadn't—”

“—told you what happened.”

Daphna leapt to her feet. “Wait a minute! He made Dad give him that book yesterday. He was doing some weird thing moving his lips, but he must have hypnotized Dad, too! At dinner, Dad started to remember when I told him he gave the book away! I didn't tell him enough!”

“Dad's mixed up in all this.” Dex realized it the moment he said it.

“Why do you say that?!” Daphna demanded.

Dex told her how he'd found their father in the middle of the night muttering about “botching” things and how he wasn't a “bad man.”

“Well,” Daphna replied, taking her seat once again, “maybe that's because he didn't mean to give a potentially valuable book away to such a psycho. He did botch the negotiation for it, but that's because Rash made him! Maybe he said he's not a bad man because he feels guilty for staying away on this last scouting trip for so long!
Who knows? 
We've got to find him and tell him what happened!”

“That wasn't the only word he said,” Dex realized. He was warming up to the idea that Rash really was some sort of hypnotist. “He also said, ‘Kalice.'”

“This is crazy,” Daphna said, “but something tells me I'm lucky to have gotten out of there.” She looked down at the tabletop and said, “About all that stuff I said about you—well, I'm sorry. It's just that if you actually took it as advice, you'd—”

Dex looked blankly at his sister. One of her classic “apologies.” It didn't even deserve a response.

“Anyway,” Daphna said, “I'm going home to wait for Dad to come back. Hey! Maybe that's what that book is! It was full of bizarre looking words! Maybe they're for hypnotism!”

“What was he going to do to your eyes?” Dex asked, wondering if such a thing might actually be possible.

“I don't know,” Daphna said. “But he said he needed something in that ledger Emmet always has up front. Anyway,” she said again, shuddering, “I don't care. I'm never going anywhere near either one of those horrid people again for as long as I live.”

“You know,” Dex said, “that guy who made his dog start quacking. He had to say his word again to make it stop.”

“Right! Maybe we can snap Dad out of it with those words! What were they again?”

“'Graal' and ‘Kalice.'”

“Graal and Kalice, Graal and Kalice,” Daphna repeated. Then she leveled her eyes at Dex and said, “You're a duck.”

“What? Oh, quack,” Dex said with the hint of a smile.

“Worth a try,” Daphna said, smiling too. But then she got serious again. “Maybe we don't have the words just right, but they really are worth a try.” She rose again and said,

“We both should go home and wait for Dad. Latty's probably already having a conniption.”

“You go,” said Dex. “I'm gonna hang out for a while, do some thinking.”

“Ah, okay,” Daphna replied, though she wanted to slug Dexter for his total lack of concern for their father. But the truth was she'd probably be better off without his help. She headed off, muttering, “Graal and Kalice. Graal and Kalice,” as she walked.

Dex had no intentions of thinking.
Doing
was his new thing. He got up, made sure Emmet wasn't around, then rushed across the street and back down behind the warehouse.

Daphna, for once, had given him a good idea. If this were true, if it wasn't just TV gimmicks combined with his sister going crazy, and there really were words that could hypnotize people—even though it went against every fiber of his being, against his bottomless loathing of books and everything to do with them—he wanted those words. Ruby would help him. She was good at languages, his French grade notwithstanding.
Even just
one, if it's the right one
, Dex thought,
my life
would never be the same
.