Ignatius MacFarland (21 page)

“Hey, like I said, I’m a teacher,” he said with a smile. “I taught them. I rolled up my sleeves and got to know them and just went one step at a time. I started to teach them English by telling them the words for different objects, then once they caught on to that I taught them how to form sentences. More and more of them got interested in learning and pretty soon, lots of them were speaking and we could communicate. And then those creatures went out and persuaded more creatures to come and learn English and soon it seemed like the whole place could speak and understand. And then once we could do that, the world was an open book. I could teach them music, I could write them plays and teach them to act and everybody else could watch and enjoy. I could show them how to build buildings and make clothes and help them to do all the things that I knew were going to make their lives a thousand times better. And I did. And there it is.”

He held his hand out to the city and smiled again.

“You did all that in
five years
?” I asked, amazed at the thought of Mr. Arthur working that hard just so everybody could understand him.

“Hey, what
else
did I have to do?”He laughed.

“And you got them to build the whole city that fast?”

“Once they got a taste of our world, they couldn’t get enough of it. I showed them some drawings of buildings I had sketched and they wanted to make some of their own. They all pitched in and got to work and suddenly buildings were popping up all over the place. Granted, their work wasn’t perfect but the fact that they were doing it made it all seem so . . . wonderful.

“I mean, I even think it all looks better than it did back home. More creative, you know? Anyway, I drew up the plans for Art’s Square and the next thing I knew that was being built, too. And then I showed them my design for the White House here and pretty soon that was done. It was amazing.”

“Why’s the town called Lesterville?”

“Lester is my middle name.”

“But why didn’t you call it Arthurville or Artville?”

He looked at me and chuckled. “Iggy, I don’t want people to think I have a big ego.”

Uh . . . no comment.

“So how’d you get an army?” I asked this because I really was curious. I didn’t think it would be something he might get weird about.

Mr. Arthur gave me a disapproving look. “They’re not an army, Iggy. They’re just sort of my police force. Sadly, every large group of people needs a few of their peers to make sure they don’t do things they shouldn’t do. It’s like having hall monitors in school, you know? If no one was watching what went on in the hallways, anything could happen. People could do things they shouldn’t do and disrupt other classes or not participate in the things they should be involved in. So I’m just having the creatures who like me and like the city I’ve created here help out by keeping an eye on their friends, that’s all.”

He gave me a fatherly smile and a pat on the back that sort of indicated he didn’t want to talk about this anymore. I desperately wanted to ask him why he had his “police force” destroy the flying people’s city but got the feeling that if I brought it up he might get mad. And I wasn’t really in the mood to get thrown in that dungeon that Karen had told me about.

“C’mon, let’s go and pick you out a room to stay in,” he said as he headed back to the door. As I turned and hoped that he was talking about a real room with a bed and carpeting and a bathroom and not some hideous concrete cell in which I’d have to pee and poo into a bucket, I looked up and noticed that high above in the sky, Foo was hovering and watching me.

Mr. Arthur turned and looked at me from the doorway. I snapped my eyes down from the sky to meet his eyes, not wanting him to look up and see Foo.

“You coming, Ignatius MacFarland?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, trying not to sound caught.

“Iggy, my dad was ‘sir.’ You can call me Chester,” he said with a laugh.

“Yes, sir . . . uh, Chester,” I said as I walked through the door. I glanced up quickly and saw Foo fly away. As I headed down the stairs to select my new room, I couldn’t help but wonder and worry about where Karen and Foo and all the flying people were going to sleep that night.

29

BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR

As I lay in the really soft and comfortable bed in the big bedroom that Mr. Arthur told me I could have as my own private place for as long as I stayed there, I started to get really depressed. It had been kind of nice and exciting being away from home in this weird new world, and when I was running around and fighting with Karen and seeing all sorts of new things for the first time my mind was too busy to realize that I might never see my parents or my friends or my hometown again. I had always wanted to leave the Earth and imagined that the relief of not having Frank Gutenkunitz trying to beat me up and humiliate me every day would make me immune to any kind of homesickness.

However, now that I was sitting in bed in a room that only had grandma furniture in it and a huge painting of Mr. Arthur staring at me from the opposite wall, and with only my schoolbooks to keep me company (and not even my dad’s Shakespeare book, which Mr. Arthur had taken with him), I suddenly got really really sad. What if I had to stay here for the rest of my life? What would I do? Help Mr. Arthur keep passing off things from our world as inventions he thought up? What was he going to do to Karen when he finally found her? And was I ever going to see her or Foo or the cat who thought it was a dog again?

Just as my brain was starting to get that spinning feeling it does when things become overwhelming and I think I’m going to have a panic attack, like when I have a big paper due in class the next day that I haven’t even started to write yet, I heard a weird noise outside my room.

. . . clank . . . clank . . .

It was far away but just loud enough to snap me out of my self-pity. Normally if I was at home watching TV or playing video games or working on my computer, it was the kind of noise I wouldn’t even have paid attention to. But since I was sitting in a room by myself with absolutely nothing to do except be depressed, I decided to see what it was. I got out of bed and went to the door. I was wearing a pair of pajamas Mr. Arthur had given me that read Sleepin’ on Arthur Time! with a picture of him giving a big thumbs-up across the front. I had no idea what it meant but had to figure it was something he thought was cool, like when my dad would hear a rapper use some slang term and then blurt it out at dinner to show us that he wasn’t as old and uncool as we all knew he really was.

I put my ear against the door and listened.

. . . clank . . . clank . . .

I slipped on my shoes, opened the door, and stepped out into the hallway. It was dark except for some light from Lesterville coming in through a window at the end of the hallway. I walked quietly down the hall, not wanting to wake anybody up, even though I had no idea if there was anybody around
to
wake up.

. . . clank . . . clank . . .

The sound was getting louder as I headed for the end of the hallway. I kept looking nervously behind me, just in case the butler or some army guys were sneaking up on me while I was busy sneaking up on the clanking sound. The floor kept creaking loudly and I realized that the White House was basically as poorly built as everything else in Lesterville, even though it looked nicer. Creak. I’d stop and hold my breath, then take a few more steps. Creak. Man, this place was annoying.

. . . clank . . . clank . . .

I finally got to the end of the hallway and saw a green door. There was light coming out from the small space between the bottom of it and the carpet. I put my ear against the door and listened.

Clank. Clank.

Whatever was clanking was clanking behind that door. I carefully put my hand on the knob and gave it a small, slow turn to see if it was unlocked. It was. Should I crack open the door and take a look? I asked myself. Why the heck not? I’ve got nothing else to do.

I very slowly and cautiously started to push the door open, trying to crack it just enough for me to peek through. I put my eye to the gap and squinted against the bright lights inside the room. As my eye began to adjust and come into focus, I saw something very strange indeed.

The room was sort of a big, dirty warehouse with lots of Mr. Arthur’s junk piled around. It looked like it was one of his workshops but that it had been taken over for another purpose. All his inventions and materials were pushed up against the walls and a big open area was in the middle of the floor.

A weird futuristic machine that looked a little bit like a really big version of those metal detector security things you walk through at the airport was in the center of the floor. It was sort of like a giant archway with a really high-tech computer screen on one side. Mr. Arthur was standing next to the screen talking to someone I couldn’t see because they were blocked by the machine. And then I saw the source of all the clanking — two giant purple babies were stacking up a big pile of gold bars underneath the machine’s archway. They were just like the gold bars I’d seen in movies about bank robberies and the U.S. mint, all shiny and rectangular and heavy-looking. The babies were taking bars one at a time off a large cart with big wheels that had a lot more of the bars piled up on it. Standing behind them was a very mean-looking gorilla guard who kept growling at them and holding out his sword to let them know that if they stopped unloading the gold he would do something terrible to them.

And then I saw that there were more gold bars piled up on the right side of the room. I don’t know how much gold bars are actually worth but I’m confident enough to say that the amount of bars in that place was worth a buttload of money back in our frequency.

“Why would they destroy the entire city?” I heard Mr. Arthur saying in a kind of panicky voice to whomever he was talking to. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“You really are an idiot, aren’t you, Arthur?”

It was a man’s voice, the voice of someone who was used to speaking English. It didn’t have any of the uncertainty and weird pronunciations that all the creatures in this frequency had. It almost sounded like someone from
our
frequency.

“I just told them to go and find the girl and the newcomer,” said Mr. Arthur in the same tone I used to use to get out of trouble with my teachers when I was late with my homework. “I didn’t tell them to destroy the entire place.”

And it was then that I saw whom he was talking to. A man, slightly older and about two feet shorter than Mr. Arthur, who was wearing a suit and tie on his rather pudgy body, stepped out from behind the machine and got in Mr. Arthur’s face. The man was angry but not yelling. He was what my father would call intense.

“You’ve really complicated things, Arthur,” said the man in the tie. “This operation was almost complete. All I had to do was cart the rest of the gold from the mines to here. We were working in an area where the flyers never went. Our transportation path was completely unobserved. And so what do you do? You destroy their city and fill the sky with them!”

“But I didn’t tell my guys to destroy the city!”

“The groundies hate the flyers! Everybody knows that! Don’t you ever get out of this ridiculous White House and talk to anybody? Or are you just too busy ripping off everybody with actual talent from our frequency?”

Mr. Arthur stood there, not quite knowing what to say. The man in the tie sighed, then looked over at the gold.

“It doesn’t matter,” said the man. “I’ll finish this operation and get out of here and then you can do whatever you want with this place. You can be Shakespeare and Frank Sinatra and Leonardo da Vinci and anyone else you want to be. But for now you have to make sure that nothing impedes the transport of the gold out of this frequency, do you understand me? If anything goes wrong I’m holding you personally responsible and will effectively
end
your presidency. You got it?”

As Mr. Arthur just stood there and nodded, clearly afraid of the guy in the tie, I stared at the weird machine that the gold was being put inside. Transport the gold out of this frequency? I couldn’t believe it. That machine was able to go back and forth between this world and ours. And the guy in the tie was using it to steal gold. How long had he been here? Karen had lived in the White House when she first arrived and yet she had never mentioned anybody from our frequency other than Mr. Arthur. Who was this guy?