Here by Mistake (3 page)

“I’m sorry,” Brandon said, looking quickly at Sarah and Stephen and then at his feet. “I dumped on both of you. I’m twisted up over the keys.” He took a basket of silk flowers off the table and started fidgeting with it.

“It’s done, B,” Stephen said.

“Yes,” Sarah said. “You’re really hung up on that basement, aren’t you?” She looked off in the direction of Cherry Boulevard. “The harm’s done with the keys. I know we shouldn’t, but since you have them . . . do you want to see the basement?”

Brandon dropped the basket. “For real?”

Sarah turned to Stephen. “What do you think?”

As before, Stephen appeared nervous but fascinated. He ran the straps of his backpack through his fingers as he thought about it. Then he said, “Okay.”

Faye Birmingham’s house was the biggest in Rollings. To Brandon it had always looked like a castle, except there was no moat. The gray stone façade rose for three stories and was topped with battlements. In his mind’s eye, six-year-old Brandon had seen knights shooting arrows at an invading army from those battlements. At six and a half, he had prowled the yard with his lance on a mission for the king. At seven he had even started to dig the moat, a project his mother quickly put a stop to.

Faye Birmingham and her husband had been collectors—of everything, it seemed to Brandon. The house’s twenty-three rooms were filled with things he had never seen anywhere else. Pink glass chandeliers hung in the entrance hall. A huge grandfather clock with sailing ships carved into its cabinet faced the main staircase. Tables inlaid with colored stones filled the living and dining rooms. Paintings instead of pictures hung on the walls.

Everything looked fancy—and old, but nothing looked worn out. And some of the things were really strange. On visits to his aunt when he was little, Brandon had explored the house and tried to make sense of it all. Once he found a spinning wheel in a second-floor closet and asked his mother what it did. She did her best to explain, but he still couldn’t quite get his mind around it.

Walking along Cherry Boulevard with Sarah and Stephen that afternoon, Brandon recalled the spinning wheel and smiled to himself. The house was cool. But the basement would have the coolest, strangest stuff—the treasure. He was finally going to see it, and now he was old enough to make sense of it all.

They arrived at the house and walked around to the back door. Brandon brought out the keys and pushed one into the lock. It wouldn’t turn, and he pulled it out. “Here’s the same kind of key with more rust on it,” he said. He slid it into the cylinder and turned until he heard a click. He pushed the door open.

They stepped inside and closed the door behind them. The room was the kitchen, and it was big. Oak cabinets, granite countertops, and stainless steel appliances covered three walls. One doorway opened to the entrance hall and another to the dining room. The shades were drawn, but the dining room’s formal table and twelve chairs were visible in the shadows.

Stephen whispered, “What a place.”

“No need to whisper; we’re the only ones here,” Brandon said crisply. “No need to stay in the dark, either.” He flipped the switch above the telephone stand, and the kitchen blazed with light.

Sarah stepped into the entrance hall and looked up at the chandeliers. “Where did they come from?”

“Venice, my mom said,” Brandon replied. “I know. Lots of rooms and all kinds of stuff. We could go through the whole house, but it’s getting late. The basement’s over here.”

He showed his friends a nook with a steel door in the wall. The door had two locks—one in the knob and one above it. After three guesses Brandon found the key for the knob, but it turned very hard. “C’mon,” he said. “When’s the last time someone opened this, anyway?” Then he heard a click. He chose the shiniest key on the ring for the lock in the door, which turned out to be the one. He released the deadbolt and pulled the door open.

The three looked down into complete darkness.

“The windows’ve always been blocked up,” Brandon said. He felt for a switch on the wall and flipped it, and lights below came dimly to life. Brandon went down first. Stephen hitched his backpack to his shoulder and went next. Sarah followed, pulling cobwebs she couldn’t see out of her face.

The basement was as Quint had described it. Most things were in crates stacked high, with narrow paths running between the stacks. Some things were loose and could be looked at. Everything was filthy.

“I should’ve worn old clothes,” Sarah moaned.

Brandon found a pair of binoculars and tried looking at Sarah through them. When he put them down there were deep black circles around his eyes, and she burst out laughing. Brandon looked in a dusty mirror and laughed, too. Sarah gave him a pack of moistened towelettes; he pulled out two and wiped his face.

Brandon and Sarah walked into the stacks and came upon a barrister bookcase with a brass plaque that said FIRST EDITIONS. Brandon used his towelettes to wipe the dust off the glass door fronting one of the shelves. “
Gone with the Wind
,” he murmured, peering through the glass. He raised the door up, slid it back, and pulled out the book. It was a brown leather volume embossed in gold. Brandon opened it to the first page, which had a signature and date: “Margaret Mitchell – June 10, 1936.” Sarah looked closely and caught her breath. “Signed by the author,” she said. She took the book and slid it carefully into its spot and closed the door. She and Brandon retraced their steps.

As he emerged from the stacks, Brandon noticed a player piano he had missed when descending the stairs. It was constructed of dark oak or was very dirty (or both) and had a paper music roll loaded in its chamber. Brandon found a crank and gave it a full turn. The piano plinked out a few ragtime notes before the paper snapped and the mechanism seized.

“B, you said we’d just look,” Sarah said.

“Okay, okay.”

Stephen backed into something that made a clanging sound. He spun around and found himself looking up at a suit of armor on a pedestal. “Wow, look, B,” he exclaimed. “Where’d your aunt ever get this?”

“She went to Europe a lot. I guess she got it there. What’s the knight holding?”

“A battle axe,” Stephen said. “I never even saw things this cool in a museum.”

Brandon and Stephen crossed to the opposite wall and discovered shelving units extending to the end of the basement. The first unit groaned under the weight of reference books. One was
Ballard's Illustrated Dictionary of the Modern American Language
, which was almost a foot thick and had its copyright date of 1911 featured on its binding. Another was
Ballard's English-Latin/Latin-English Dictionary
from the same year. Black leather collector’s albums filled the remaining shelving units. The albums were thick with dust and mildew, but the words on their bindings were legible. Each one said COINS or STAMPS and had a sequence number. Brandon slid out COINS 57 and opened it to the middle. The Liberty heads on six rows of gold pieces stared back at him. “Wow, look, Stephen,” he said. Stephen looked and blinked. He took off his glasses and put them back on and looked again. Brandon closed the album and put it back in its spot.

Brandon and Stephen followed the shelving units down the wall until Brandon’s foot hit something heavy. He bent down to find a metal strongbox with the word UNCATEGORIZED stenciled on top of it. The box had no lock, and Brandon raised the lid. His jaw dropped. Gold and silver coins, almost level with the top of the box, glinted in the basement’s dim light. Brandon tried to say, “Wow” but couldn’t find his voice. He thrust his hands into the coins and brought up two fistfuls. He let them rain down into the box. Suddenly he was seized by the temptation to fill his pockets. He shook it off and silently chided himself. He closed the strongbox hard. “Let’s get back to Sarah,” he said hoarsely to Stephen.

Sarah had wandered far into the stacks on the other side of the basement. She turned a corner and screamed.

“Sarah, what?” Brandon yelled.

He and Stephen came running. They found Sarah backed into a corner by an eight-foot grizzly bear. Like the knight, the grizzly was standing on a pedestal. Its teeth and claws looked sharp, and its eyes were on Sarah.

“Cool!” Brandon and Stephen said at once.

Sarah was gasping. Brandon was breathless too. “Let’s see if there’re any more.” He and Stephen ran deeper into the stacks. Soon Stephen called out, “B, a moose!” and a few seconds after that they both cried “Cool!” again. Sarah didn’t go see the moose. She backed away from the grizzly and got out of the stacks.

Keeping to the wide path that ran down the middle of the basement, Sarah passed a roll-top desk of black wood and a brass telescope on a tripod with so much dust it looked fuzzy. She came to a pallet with four crumbling cardboard boxes and raised the lid off the first box. It held at least twenty bunches of pictures tied with strings. She took a bunch and walked on, thumbing through the pictures. The path ended and she raised her eyes.

Leaning against the wall was a metal object as tall and almost as wide as the double doors in front of the house. The object had a border with strange lettering, a rounded top, and a recess that curved in and down. Its bright amber color stood out against the wood frame surrounding it.

Brandon and Stephen ran out of the stacks and stood with Sarah.

“What’s that?” Brandon asked.

“You’re asking me?” Sarah said. “I don’t know. Is it a door?”

Stephen smoothed his hand over the recess. “It’s a niche.”

What’s it for?” Brandon snapped. At fourteen he still couldn’t make sense of the stuff in his aunt’s house.

“Probably just for looking nice,” Stephen said. “Sometimes people put a statue or something in that inside part for decoration. Some people use a niche to pray, but this doesn’t look like it’s for praying. It looks . . .” His voice trailed off as he examined it closely.

“What?” Brandon asked.

“Weird. Look, the frame’s dirty like everything else down here, but the niche is clean. And doesn’t it look like it’s sort of . . . glowing?”

Sarah ran her finger across some of the lettering. “That’s Latin, isn’t it?” Stephen nodded, and she smiled. “Well, you’re the Latin scholar. What’s it say?”

“The slats cover some of it,” Stephen said. “It’s something about—” He stopped when Brandon grabbed a slat and yanked it off the frame.

“B,” Sarah protested. “You said no tearing things apart. You said let’s just look.”

Brandon held up his hands. “I’ll put them back after he reads it to us.” He pulled the other slats off the frame and set them against the wall. “Okay, Stephen, what’s the message?”

Stephen opened his backpack and took out a notebook and pen. He copied down the words:

“I need that Latin-English dictionary we saw. Just a second.” He ran up the wide path and was gone about five minutes.

“Hey, Stephen, hurry up,” Brandon called out.

Stephen ran down the path and handed Brandon a sheet of paper. “Here’s what it says in English,” he said proudly.

Brandon read the words:

He looked at Stephen. “What’s that mean? That’s as bad as the Latin.” He showed the paper to Sarah.

Sarah giggled. “You’re a hopeless romantic, B. Let me try: If you really believe in something and search for it, you can find it.”

“I think it’s saying more than that,” Stephen said quickly. “I think it’s saying the niche can help you find it.”

“So, if I rub this thing a genie’ll grant me three wishes?” Brandon asked, smirking.

Sarah reached up and smoothed his hair into place. “Well, you search a lot. You’re on a search right now.”

“That’s right, B,” Stephen said. “Tell the niche your dream.”

Something in his words brought Brandon back to thoughts of his aunt and her world. Sarah touched his cheek to reclaim his attention. “My dream,” he murmured. “I . . . want to see how things used to be.”

“Used to be?”

Brandon turned around with a sweeping gesture. “Look at this stuff. It doesn’t belong to now. It belongs to my aunt’s time, and even before. That’s why I can’t figure it. I want to see the time it does belong to.”

“Which time, B?” Stephen asked. “Some of this stuff’s old. Some of it’s ancient.”

Sarah took a picture from the bunch she was holding and showed it to Brandon. “Would you settle for forty years ago?” she asked. “That’s when it was all brought here.”

Brandon studied the picture. It showed a moving van parked in front of the Cherry Boulevard house. Four men were carrying a crate out of the van. The picture’s white border contained a tiny
Nov. ‘65
.

“Sure, 1965,” Brandon said. “People then must’ve been able to figure out this stuff better than we can now.”

“Well, B, ‘Speak the dream.’” Stephen smiled.

Brandon struck a dramatic pose and laughed into the recess, “Show me 1965.”

Nothing happened.

“Don’t like my dream?” He grinned. “Too bad. This is what I want.” He held up the picture. “Show me this.” He touched the picture’s corner to the recess. At once, circular waves spread out over the surface.

Brandon stumbled backward into Stephen. He gaped at the swirling recess of the niche, which had been solid metal a moment before. “St-Stephen, what’s it doing?”

“B, I don’t know,” Stephen said with awe in his voice. “It looks like it’s made of water now.”

Brandon gathered his nerve and approached the niche, staring into the recess. A haze settled over his mind and he felt strangely pulled toward the waves.
Dive in.
The thought thrust itself upon him. He gave his head a shake and the idea vanished. But the pull was still there.

Sarah cried, “Get away from it.”

“Don’t worry. I just want to see it.”

“Come away from it. It looks—”

“Sarah, I’ve got to see this.”

Brandon touched the picture to the recess again. It passed through the surface as if through water. He pulled it out and checked it. It wasn’t wet, and the image was still sharp. He held his palms up to the recess. “It doesn’t feel hot.” He touched it lightly with his finger. “It’s not hot, and it doesn’t hurt.” He pushed his hand through the surface.

“B!” Sarah cried.

“It’s okay,” Brandon said, reaching in up to his elbow. “Stephen, this is wild. I can feel my fingers moving, but I can’t feel them rubbing against each other.” He pulled his arm out and checked it. His fingers were fine, and his arm was not wet. “Look behind it,” he said. “This—whaddayacallit, niche—goes back maybe six inches. And I had my arm in it to my elbow. It must be some kind of door, like you were saying, Sarah.”

“Well, if it is, keep it closed,” Sarah said. “Stay away from it. You don’t know what it will do.”