The Orphan of Awkward Falls (14 page)

If it hadn’t been for an old shipping crate that happened to be perfectly positioned below the grate, Thaddeus and Josephine would surely have been seriously hurt in their fall from the ceiling of the lab. The crate was filled with sawdust, which had kept its contents of glass beakers and test tubes from breaking during shipment years ago. Thaddeus landed first, followed by Josephine, who fell right on top of him. The ample padding on Thaddeus’s plump body cushioned Josephine’s landing and kept her bony knees and elbows from doing anything more than knocking the wind out of the boy.

Josephine crawled to the edge of the crate and hopped to the floor. “Are you all right, Thaddeus?”

Only the top of Thaddeus’s head protruded from the sawdust. Josephine reached into the crate and helped pull him to the surface.

“Goorrgghhh,” he moaned, spitting sawdust. “I can’t see! I’m blind!”

“You’re not blind, silly. You’ve just lost your glasses.” Josephine dug around for a moment and fished them out of the sawdust. “Here they are.”

With a good deal of grunting and gasping, Thaddeus rolled out of the crate and plopped onto the floor. Josephine helped him to his feet and brushed the sawdust out of his hair.

“Egad! I’ve severed an artery!” he gasped frantically, spotting a small red stain on the elbow of his jacket.

Josephine pushed up his sleeve and found a tiny cut. “You’re fine. It’s only a scratch.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “It looks like an awful lot of blood!”

“I’m positive. We’ll put a Band-Aid on it later, I promise.”

When Thaddeus had calmed down a bit, the two began to take note of their surroundings. The room was carved out of bedrock and was bathed in a deep blue light. Ammonia fumes made their eyes sting and their noses burn.

Thaddeus carefully sniffed the air. “The ammonia content of the air appears to be within acceptable tolerances. A good thing, otherwise we’d be dying a horrible death at this moment.”

“That’s a lovely thought, Thaddeus,” Josephine said. “I feel so much better now.”

Once Josephine’s eyes began to adjust to the eerie light, she was astounded by what she saw. Although everything was very dusty, the place looked like the labs her father worked in. Colored
lights blinked on a large control console that sat in the center of the room in a kind of raised cockpit. Rows of numbers and letters scrolled across its three computer monitors. Banks of sleek, efficient- looking machinery built into the walls all around the lab hummed and hissed quietly. A spiral staircase led up to a series of catwalks that gave access to controls too high to reach from the floor. It seemed impossible that something like this could exist inside the creaky old mansion. Thaddeus’s grungy little lab was like something out of the Stone Age in comparison.

But the most impressive thing was a group of floor-to-ceiling glass cylinders that took up half the room. Specimens of some kind were floating inside the tubes.

“Wow! What is this place?”

Thaddeus’s mouth hung open as he took it all in. “I can’t believe it,” he gasped. “This must have been Grandfather’s real lab. I always wondered how he could have made all of his famous discoveries in such a small, ill-equipped space as the one upstairs. And to think this has been right here under my feet all along!”

The two were so dazzled by the lab they didn’t notice the fresh handprints here and there on the dusty monitor screens and work surfaces, or the bare footprints in the dust that covered the floor.

Thaddeus, with the excitement of a kid in a toy store, approached the nearest column to get a closer look at what was inside. “How fascinating!”

The creature inside was massive, with four legs and clawed paws like those of a bear or a lion. Its horned head was that of a buffalo, and wore a kind of metal skullcap. Large teeth protruded from its mouth, and an extra pair of legs grew from its midsection. Black rubber hoses ran from its underbelly and neck and disappeared into the murky slush at the bottom of the cylinder.

“It looks like it’s alive,” Josephine said.

Thaddeus pressed his nose against the glass. “I think it is. Look here.” He pointed to a small monitor set into a control pad at the foot of the cylinder. On it, a horizontal line pulsed into a jagged peak every couple of seconds. “The machinery is tracking the creature’s heartbeat. Quite ingenious.”

Sure enough, Josephine could see the thing’s breast slowly rising and falling in rhythm with the graph on the monitor. And its silver eyes, which appeared to be mechanical, seemed to be following them.

“It’s watching us!” Josephine whispered to Thaddeus. She instinctively clutched his arm for comfort where his biceps muscle should have been, but felt only flab instead.

He pulled his arm away. “Ow! You’re bruising me!”

The next cylinder in line held a creature whose furry body was riddled with tumors and half-formed limbs. Its front and rear legs were made of shiny steel, but there was also an extra set of appendages on the shoulders above the front legs. Spread out wide as if to
give someone a hug were a pair of mechanical arms, complete with jointed fingers. The head was scaly and earless and reminded Josephine of a monitor lizard.

“Are they robots?” asked Josephine.

“Perhaps partly. The use of mechanical components is quite interesting.”

Josephine felt her stomach turn. “This stuff is really scary, Thaddeus. What the heck is it all about?”

“I’m baffled. My own piddlings seem infantile in their simplicity by comparison. This is much more than mere repair work. What could Grandfather have been trying to achieve here?”

Thaddeus and Josephine slowly made their way down the row of columns, each one occupied by something more grotesque and frightening than the last. One contained an eight-armed spiderlike thing topped with the head of what Josephine thought was a baboon. Amazingly, this horrible thing, like the others, appeared to be alive.

They rounded the corner and found a new group of glass containers glowing in a dark alcove. The vessels were smaller and rounder than the previous ones. The first, which bore a plate stamped with the number one, was shattered and the floor was slick with the vat’s spilled fluid. Glass shards, rubber hoses, and other debris were scattered everywhere.

Josephine held her nose. “Phew! This looks like it was broken recently.” A small sound somewhere in the room caught her
attention. She glanced quickly between the rows of columns, but saw nothing. She had the strange sensation that they were being watched.

Thaddeus studied the broken cylinder’s gauges closely. The indicator needles were still twitching back and forth. “I’d say it was destroyed extremely recently. The readings are still in flux.”

After the awful things they had just seen in the other cylinders, Josephine didn’t think the horror show could get any worse.

She was wrong.

Josephine was the first to notice the crumpled body lying next to the wall. Something about it looked vaguely familiar. She went over to see what it was and screamed so loudly, Thaddeus nearly slipped and fell on the wet floor.

“What is it, Josephine? Did you injure yourself?” he asked, shuffling over as quickly as he could. But then he saw what was wrong and went whiter than he already was.

“Look!” she whispered. “It’s…it’s you!”

The pale lump on the floor was the body of another Thaddeus.

Thaddeus’s mind reeled at the nightmare of what he saw before him. Impossibly, his own corpse was lying at his feet.

Josephine knelt and pressed her hands on the glistening body’s neck, then held her ear to its chest. She shook her head. “There’s no heartbeat,” she said, wiping her fingers on her pajama bottoms. “It’s…he’s…whatever it is, is dead.”

“Are you sure?” Thaddeus asked.

She nodded. “ I have to sit through mom’s CPR class three times a year. I know how to tell.”

“I…I don’t understand this at all.” The boy stared at the dead thing that looked so uncannily like himself. “ How can this be?”

There were his own features—the messy white hair, the pudgy face with its bulbous, warty nose in the center, the blue eyes—all staring up at him from another being, albeit one that may never have been alive. To be sure, there were differences, too. Its age was hard to
guess, but it was smaller than Thaddeus, and thinner, and its body was dotted with tumors. A baseball-sized one stuck out from its forehead; smaller ones pebbled its neck. And there were deformities. The fingers on its left hand were webbed, and both hands showed two nubs where a sixth and seventh digit had started to grow.

The nightmare did not end there. Thaddeus looked up to find Josephine’s attention focused on the other vats behind this one. The darkness made it difficult to see what was inside them, but as he moved closer, it became clear enough.

Vat number two contained its own horrible version of the pink-skinned, white-haired creature. This one was more amphibian than human, with bulging black eyes, tiny arms, and long-toed feet. The next, floating in vat number three, was a nearly perfect replica of the boy. The only noticeable difference was its ears. They were nothing more than little curls of cartilage.

The last vat, number four, was empty and dark.

Thaddeus tried to sort out what he was seeing. He felt as if a tsunami were crashing through his head, laying waste to his entire image of who, and what, he was. He felt as if he had become untethered from the real world. Josephine caught the boy and held him up as he staggered backward.

“I’m feeling dizzy,” said Thaddeus.

“I gotcha,” she said. “Try to breathe, Thaddeus. If you pass out on me, we’re in big trouble.”

The boy inhaled several times, and the color began to return to his face.

“What are those things? And why do they look like…like that?” Josephine asked.

“They appear to be clones,” he wheezed, trying to get back on his feet. “Of me.”

“Did your grandfather really do all this?” Josephine’s voice trembled.

Thaddeus did not want to answer. Certainly the grandfather he had created in his imagination, the benevolent and wise genius the boy had idolized his whole life, would never have done such things. But the real Professor Celsius Hibble, a man Thaddeus now realized he did not know at all, apparently did do such things.

The words of Sally Twittington didn’t seem so crazy after all.

“It looks that way,” he said, shrugging. “Who else could have?”

“But what kind of scientist makes clones from his own grandson?” Josephine asked. “That’s a crazy thing to do.”

Thaddeus, having just noticed a feature shared by all the clones, was one awful step ahead of her. “I’m afraid you have it backward, Josephine,” the boy said. “I think the other creatures predate me. They were probably experimental prototypes too flawed to be used.”

“Prototypes? What do you mean, ‘used’?”

The boy’s chin began to quiver and the first tears he had ever known welled in his eyes. “I know why the last vat is empty,” he said.

Thaddeus unbuttoned the first few buttons on his shirt and pulled it open, exposing his chest. On his pale skin was a mark, no bigger than a nickel.

Josephine began shaking her head. “No,” she gasped. “That can’t be true, Thaddeus!”

Neatly centered on his chest was the number four.