Mission Unstoppable (17 page)

Chapter 23
The House on the Rock

T
here’s a birthday tradition in the McDonald household: cupcakes before breakfast! With a candle in each one. It’s called Backward Day. Dessert first and then the meal. Mrs. McDonald woke up before the twins so she could bake four cupcakes in the RV’s little microwave oven. They may not have been as delicious as last year’s, but cupcakes were cupcakes. Presents, it was agreed, would be given out at the end of the day.

The McDonalds checked out of the campground and followed Route 23 heading south through the gentle hills and dairy farms of southern Wisconsin. After about an hour, they passed this sign:

The twins looked at each other. They had lived together for thirteen years, and by now each knew what the other was thinking. They didn’t have to say it out loud.

This was it. No more ciphers. No more mysteries. No more secret meetings with odd strangers. Neither of them knew what was going to happen at The House on the Rock; but whatever happened, it would be over. For all they knew, this could very well be their last birthday. Pep hugged her brother, and he hugged her back.

Coke played a mental video of everything that had happened to them since the last day of school. The guys in golf carts with blow guns. The jump off the cliff. The fire at school. Meeting Bones and learning about The Genius Files. The ciphers. The balls of twine. Doing the dump on Mrs. Higgins. The singing sand dune. The sadistic bowler dudes. The SPAM fiasco. Dad going crazy at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Mom flipping out at the nonexistent Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. The miles and miles of highway they had traveled. The strange places they had visited.

It had been quite a trip, and they were only a little more than halfway across the country.

From the parking lot, you can barely see the house
or
the rock. Trees on all sides block the view. The twins grabbed their backpacks and followed their parents down a twisted walkway to the entrance. A group of people were waiting in line to buy tickets. Dr. McDonald paid the admission with his credit card and asked the man behind the desk where the bathrooms were located.

“How about we meet back here later?” Coke suggested to his parents.

“Okay,” his mother replied. “You two stay together—and stay out of trouble, you hear? Don’t touch anything.”

“We won’t.”

When the twins were little, they’d held hands with their parents and went everywhere as a foursome. By the time they were ten, whenever they went out as a family, the kids had wanted to run up ahead. Parents walk too slowly. They have to look at
every little thing
. And it seemed like they
always
had to stop and use the bathroom. Grown-ups just can’t hold it in the way kids can.

Near the entrance, there was a plaque on the wall that said a visionary architect named Alex Jordan started building The House on the Rock back in the 1940s, all by himself. It became his life’s work and obsession until he died in 1989.

Coke and Pep silenced their cell phones and checked the time. It was 12:29 p.m.

“Perfect,” Coke said. “We have a half an hour to find The Infinity Room. Plenty of time. Let’s roll.”

“Maybe we should ask for directions,” his sister suggested.

“I don’t want to make anyone suspicious,” Coke replied. “We’ll find it on our own.”

Pep shook her head and mumbled one word.

“Boys.”

They followed a group of tourists who were lining up outside The Gate House, which was the entryway to the main part of The House on the Rock. Once inside the door, it was hard to see. The room was illuminated mainly by colorful antique stained glass lamps. The floor and walls were lined with carpet except for some floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The ceiling was low, and Coke bumped his head against it. Fortunately, the ceiling was carpeted, too. It gave the room a claustrophobic feel.

“This place is creepy,” Pep whispered into her brother’s ear.

“Just be careful,” he replied. “Don’t let down your guard.”

In one corner of The Gate House was a group of odd-looking violins, drums, and other musical instruments. The twins—and everyone else in the room—were startled when this little orchestra spontaneously started playing chamber music for no reason . . . and with no human help. It appeared to be controlled not electronically, but pneumatically.

The music was slightly out of tune. It was an eerie sound, the tune unrecognizable.

The place was sort of like a museum, but sort of
not
like a museum, too. It looked more like a
Haunted
House on the Rock.

“I’m scared, Mommy,” a little boy said, clinging to his mother while the strange music played.

The door at the end of The Gate House opened to the outside, where a red-carpeted ramp extended mazelike to The House on the Rock itself. Inside were more dimly lit rooms filled with lamps topped by fancy multicolored stained glass shades. There was also a stained glass door that had been turned on its side and made into a coffee table.

“Alex Jordan sure loved stained glass,” Coke told his sister.

Judging by the rest of the house, Jordan also loved odd sculptures, big bells lined up in a row, mysterious electrical equipment, machinery of all kinds, wind chimes, water wheels, and lots of other random things that had been mixed and matched into a gigantic whirlwind of
stuff
. There was another automatic music machine, this one playing the theme from
The Godfather
.

It looked like the storage room of a museum that had too many artifacts to display at once. The twins dashed from one room to the next looking for The Infinity Room and wondering what could possibly be next.

“This place looks like Disneyland on drugs,” Coke commented.

“There’s something in every nook and cranny,” his sister said.

“What’s a cranny?” Coke asked. “I always wondered what the difference between a nook and a cranny was.”

“You mean there’s something that you admit you don’t know?”

They had walked through every room in the house, except The Infinity Room.

But Alex Jordan’s house itself, they discovered, was only the
beginning
of this thing called The House on the Rock. After exiting the main house, they saw signs pointing to a path that led back down a ramp, past a garden plaza area, to another building marked
The Mill House
.

“I hate to say this,” Pep said as they walked down the ramp to The Mill House, “but I have a feeling that somebody’s following us.”

“
Lots
of people are following us,” Coke replied. “This place is crawling with tourists.”

But in fact, Pep was right, as usual. Somebody
was
following them. Right outside the door to The Mill House, a tall woman with a large purse was wiping her hands with a tissue.

“Mrs. Higgins!” Pep exclaimed, stopping in her tracks not five feet from the health teacher.

The twins had not seen Mrs. Higgins since they’d dumped the contents of their family’s RV’s bathroom on her head a few days earlier in Darwin, Minnesota. Coke gripped his sister’s hand tightly. His instinct was to bolt, but he was thrown off because his health teacher had a big smile on her face.

“Well, if it isn’t the McDonald twins!” Mrs. Higgins said sweetly. “What a lovely coincidence!”

Pep was taken aback too. It wasn’t like Mrs. Higgins to be charming. Pep didn’t quite know what to make of it.

“Fancy meeting
you
here,” she said.

“Small world,” Mrs. Higgins replied. “Wasn’t it
horrible
what happened to the school? Who could have done such a terrible thing?”

“Yes, horrible.”

Pep could hardly believe that she was making small talk with a woman who had tried to kill them.
Maybe I had it all wrong,
Pep thought.
Maybe it really was a coincidence that Mrs. Higgins happened to be at The House on the Rock today. Maybe she didn’t set that fire at school and trap us in the detention room. Maybe she wasn’t trying to do a suicide attack at the ball of twine. And maybe she didn’t even know we were the ones who dropped five days’ worth of human waste on her head while she was seat-belted in her car. Maybe it was all a big mistake. A case of mistaken identity.

Mrs. Higgins was carrying a purse, but she didn’t appear to have any kind of weapon on her. It was probably full of hand sanitizer and disinfectant. She seemed harmless.

But suddenly the expression on her face darkened.

“C’mere, you two!” she barked, reaching out to grab their arms.

“Run!” Coke yelled to his sister. He karate-chopped Mrs. Higgins’s hand away and took off.

Pep pushed open the door to The Mill House and shoved her way past a group of fifteen Japanese tourists. Right behind her, Coke knocked down an elderly man as they dashed through a gigantic room stuffed to the rafters with antique dolls, African masks, toy trains, and miniature hot-air balloons. They rushed past an entire wall filled with old mechanical piggy banks and another one with colored glass bottles, vases, and paperweights. The twins followed the path and ran up a spiral staircase to a room with more stained glass, bronze statues, and a huge fireplace.

They didn’t take the time to look at any of that stuff. They were running for their lives.

As he ran, Coke turned around to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Higgins rudely pushing her way through the crowd of Japanese tourists. She had pulled something out of her purse and was holding it in front of her, but he couldn’t tell what it was.

“I think she has a knife!” Pep said.

“Follow me!” he told his sister, pulling her into the next room, marked
Streets of Yesterday
.

With Mrs. Higgins gaining on them, the twins hurried through a replica of a small-town American street from the 1880s. There was a toy store, a barber’s shop, sheriff’s office, and fire station, the windows of all the buildings filled with antique treasures of the period. The trees were made of cement. The “street” was made of bricks and was illuminated by dim gas lamps. It was like a trip back in time to the days before strip malls and fast food.

At the end of the “street” they rushed past The Gladiator Calliope, a mechanical music machine that looked like a marching band on a steamboat. Foot-high statues were playing cymbals and snare drums. Dixieland music filled the air.

“You brats won’t get away
this
time!” Mrs. Higgins shouted at them.

The twins were out of breath already but didn’t dare slow down. There was a clump of people in front of them taking pictures of the displays with disposable cameras.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!” Coke said as he elbowed past them. “Coming through! Sorry! Bathroom emergency!”

“We can’t just keep running!” Pep said breathlessly. “We’ve got to do something to stop her!”

“I know,” Coke replied as they left Streets of Yesterday and entered another room called The Heritage of the Sea. “Grab one of those balls of twine out of my backpack, will you?”

“You’re gonna throw a ball of
twine
at her?” Pep said, trying to keep moving and unzip Coke’s backpack at the same time.

“No, you dope,” Coke told her. “You’ll see.”