This Isn't What It Looks Like-secret 4 Read online

  “Cass would want him here—you know that,” said Grandpa Larry. “And the poor boy feels bad enough as it is—look at him.”

  “Besides,” said Grandpa Wayne, “maybe the sound of his voice will wake her up.”

  If only it were that simple! thought Max-Ernest. Then he would force himself to start talking again, no matter how hard it was. If he thought it would help, he would never stop talking. Not even to eat or sleep. Not even to breathe. He would take his old condition back a thousand times over if it meant curing Cass’s. He wanted his friend back more desperately than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.

  Tonight, Cass’s mother was leaving early. Everyone at the hospital agreed it was time for her to get some sleep.

  When she passed Max-Ernest in the hallway, she grabbed his wrist. Her eyes were red with tiredness.

  “Max-Ernest, please, when are you going to…?”

  Then she let go, as if she didn’t have the strength to ask the question. She walked away, shaking her head.

  Max-Ernest opened his mouth for a second, then closed it without saying anything.

  Cass’s mother was right; he was hiding something. But even if he’d been at liberty to speak, even if he hadn’t taken a sacred vow of secrecy, even if he’d risked all and told his story, nobody would have believed him. The truth was so incredible, so outlandish, so utterly bizarre, he would be branded as a liar, or delusional at best. So what was the point?

  It was better not to say anything at all.

  There was a vending machine next to Cass’s room.

  Max-Ernest fumblingly fed a dollar into it and selected the largest and plainest chocolate bar available. He proceeded to eat the bar so fast, a passerby might have thought it was his first meal in weeks.

  “Hmmgh…”

  As he ate, he made a peculiar sound—part hum, part groan—that he made only when he was eating chocolate. A sound he couldn’t control any more than his urge to eat chocolate in the first place.

  “Hmmgh… hmmmgh… hmmmmgh…”

  Hardly hesitating, Max-Ernest bought three more chocolate bars and wolfed them down in as many bites. Then he bought a fifth bar and put it in his pocket for later. He looked into the machine, considering a sixth bar, but the machine was alarmingly empty-looking. At this rate it would run out of chocolate bars in less than a day.

  The thought filled him with a sense of panic. Ever since he’d discovered he wasn’t allergic, Max-Ernest had been feasting on chocolate in quantities that would have astonished all but the most voracious chocolate eaters. Ten bars a day on average, if you had to count (and if you know Max-Ernest, you know he always had to count). What would he do, he worried now, if the hospital’s chocolate supply was not replenished?

  How could he continue to visit Cass without the rich, ripe, dark, deep, zippy, zesty, wicked, wonderful, delicious, delightful, delectable, and even electable (if he could vote), vibrant, vivacious, seductive, addictive, oh-so-very-attractive, nourishing, flourishing, rather ravishing, beautiful, buttery, sometimes bittersweet but never bitter, gorgeous and worth gorging on, berry-ish, cherry-ish, meaty yet fruity, elemental yet complex, mellow yet electric, soothing yet energizing, earthy yet heavenly, melt-in-your-mouth pleasure of chocolate?*

  He would have to plan ahead and carry chocolate with him—that was the answer to this particular dilemma—but the thought did nothing to reassure him. Normally, Cass was the plan-ahead person. Whenever they went on a mission for their secret organization, the Terces Society, Max-Ernest could count on Cass to pack her famous “super chip” trail mix, which contained a portion of chocolate chips so generous that the trail mix invariably melted into a big chocolaty clump. Alas, he had never tasted the trail mix because of his supposed allergies. It was something he’d been looking forward to. But now…? His panic was replaced by a wave of sadness.

  Would his survivalist friend survive? Cass had spent her entire life preparing for disasters of one kind or another. Earthquakes. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Not to mention the extinction-level events. Giant meteors. Global warming. Nuclear war. And here she was, done in by such a piddling thing? A mere trifle—indeed, a mere truffle. Had she trained all those years for toxic sludge only to succumb to toxic fudge?*

  Yes, chocolate was the culprit.

  Cass’s doctors had not been particularly surprised to find traces of chocolate in Cass’s stomach—she was a kid, after all—and had quickly dismissed it as a possible cause of her condition. Chocolate allergies were very rare, they said. And they hardly ever induced such severe reactions.

  Max-Ernest could attest to that last point. His allergy, at any rate, had turned out to be a phantom. Nonetheless, he, and he alone, knew that it was a bite of chocolate that had brought on Cass’s coma.

  Not just any chocolate, of course. Not chocolate like he ate every night from the hospital vending machine. Not chocolate chocolate.

  No, this was extra-chocolaty chocolate.

  Extreme chocolate.

  Extremely dark, that is. The darkest chocolate of all time.

  Chocolate made with the legendary Tuning Fork—the magical (there was no other word to use, although it made Max-Ernest wince to think it) cooking instrument of the Aztecs.

  Time Travel Chocolate, as Cass and Max-Ernest had come to think of it.

  Chocolate that sent the eater back into her ancestral past. (Although whether or not Cass had in fact gone back into the past was debatable. After all, her body was still in the present. It was her mind that was gone.)

  As the Secret Keeper, Cass held knowledge of the Secret—the very secret that the Terces Society was sworn to protect—buried in her ancestral memory.

  The wicked master chef, Señor Hugo, had made the chocolate specifically for Cass so she would reveal the Secret to Hugo’s colleagues, those cunning alchemists known as the Masters of the Midnight Sun. (The Masters believed the Secret was the key to immortality and they would stop at nothing to uncover it.)*

  The first time Cass ate the chocolate, she’d been tricked into it and had only escaped giving away the Secret by the narrowest of margins. This last time, Cass had eaten the chocolate voluntarily—and against Max-Ernest’s explicit advice, as he often reminded himself—in order to learn the Secret herself.

  As far as they knew, only a specially prepared antidote—a mysterious milky-white substance whipped up with the Tuning Fork—could bring her back to present-day reality. Cass had left the Tuning Fork with Max-Ernest so he could administer the same antidote the second time around.

  But it didn’t work. She had eaten too much of the chocolate. Or he had made the antidote incorrectly. Or he had waited too long to give it to her (only five minutes, though it seemed like five hours). Or… Max-Ernest could think of dozens of things that might have gone wrong.

  Before he could try again, Cass’s mother had unexpectedly arrived at Max-Ernest’s house to pick up Cass. As soon as she saw Cass lying unconscious on the floor, she called an ambulance—and she’d barely left her daughter’s side since. Max-Ernest never had another chance to be alone with Cass.

  Tonight was different. Tonight, Max-Ernest was determined to give her the antidote once more.

  Not for the first time since Cass’s collapse, he wished their friend and fellow Terces member Yo-Yoji were there to help. But Yo-Yoji was back in Japan for two months with his family. Yo-Yoji had tried to persuade his parents to let him stay with Max-Ernest, but of course he wasn’t able to tell them the real reason he didn’t want to leave the country. Any mention of the Terces Society was strictly forbidden.

  They’d e-mailed each other from time to time, encrypting their messages, naturally, with their usual keyword code. (Hint: keyword = first part of Yo-Yoji’s band name.) But the e-mails had only made Max-Ernest feel more isolated. The last one from Yo-Yoji had been particularly discouraging:*

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: fuji-bound

  To: [email protected]

  Euen, gust jnttfmc u
hmow f wfjj ln obbjfmn bor a wh. Lakpfmc w tdn ’rnmts om Kt Bugf so eae iam bfmfsd tdat pojjutfom stuey bruk jast yr. You hmow tdn rujn—mo njnitromfi motdfmc fm maturn. (Mot nvnm kusfi!!! Aaarcd—Suihacn!) Wfjj idnih u out soom as F’k laih. Dopn Lass oh ly tdnm.

  Stay cool, yo. Y-Y

  m/ (>.<) m/

  (Rock On!)

  It was up to Max-Ernest to do the job alone.

  For a moment, after he entered Cass’s room, Max-Ernest just stared. At the tubes going in and out of her. At the jagged green line on the monitor measuring her heart rate.

  Eyes closed, lips still, her face was so expressionless she could have been anyone. Only the big, pointy ears were indisputably Cass’s. They twitched every once in a while as if to reassure Max-Ernest that, yes, in fact, this was his friend lying in front of him.

  “Hi… Cass,” he said. Speaking was such an effort that his voice came out in monosyllabic squeaks. “It’s… me… I’m… here.”

  He exhaled, relieved that the talking part was over. Then he pulled an ancient two-pronged instrument—the Tuning Fork—out of his jacket pocket, located a pitcher of water, and went to work.

  Absorbed in his task, Max-Ernest didn’t notice his friend’s lips forming the word ghost again…

  and again…

  and again…

  and again…

  and again…

  If I am a ghost, I must be dead.

  The girl glanced down. To the rest of the world she might have been transparent, but to her own eyes her limbs looked solid. There was nothing she could see that indicated a death, whether recent or long ago. No sign of accident or bodily trauma. No evidence of decay or flesh-eating maggots. She looked nothing like the walking dead in a horror movie.

  She tried holding her breath. Logically, a dead person should not need to breathe, but she soon found herself coughing for air.

  She jumped up to see whether she would float or even fly—

  “Ow.”

  Alas, the laws of gravity were in full effect.

  (Actually, it didn’t hurt very much. Her exclamation was an instinctive reaction to a slight twist of her left ankle as she landed.)

  As for her surroundings, they looked lifelike enough, even if she didn’t recognize where she was. If this was some kind of otherworldly limbo, it wasn’t what you’d imagine. There were no spooky wisps of fog. No lost souls wandering the streets.

  She certainly didn’t feel dead. (Although how would you know what you would feel?) And yet she didn’t feel fully alive, either. She felt very little at all, really—very little physically, very little emotionally. It was as if her invisibility insulated her from the world, separating her from all experience.

  She kept walking. What else was there to do?

  Finally, a town—well, a few houses and a horse—appeared on the horizon. She quickened her pace.

  Her first thought was that she had entered one of those Renaissance faires where people dress up in velvet tunics and green tights, or sometimes just burlap sacks and Birkenstocks, and say “Hear ye, hear ye!” over and over. She couldn’t remember the details, but she had a vague recollection of just such an event. (A school field trip, maybe? Did she go to school?) But here there were far fewer lords and ladies and far more peasants. Also, there were no funnel cakes or deep-fried Twinkies for sale, just muddy carrots and wilting cabbages. Mangy turkeys and scrawny chickens wandered loose, running in and out of the stalls and under carts. It could have been market day in a town square hundreds of years ago. The small thatched huts that surrounded the square looked surprisingly authentic. Perhaps it was not a faire but a movie set?

  Whatever it was, it was very crowded, and the girl kept bumping into people as she walked.

  There was the meat-pie vendor whose pies she caused to land on several unlucky shoppers: “Beslubbering boar-pig!” “Swag-bellied lout!” they complained.

  And she nearly started a fight between two young fops in plumed hats and flouncy collars: “Clay-brained coxcomb!” “Mewling milk-livered maggot!”*

  Momentarily she forgot about her transparent condition and asked a kind-looking woman for the name of the town they were in. Rather than responding, the woman walked straight into her, crashing their heads together. Then she spun around in confusion, cursing loudly.

  The girl hardly felt the impact—her senses were still quite dull—but it was disconcerting nonetheless. She felt a bit guilty about wreaking such havoc, and yet she couldn’t help admiring how skilled everyone here was at staying in character. (A theater camp for adult actors—could that be it?)

  Avoiding further collisions as best she could, she made her way across the market, ducking here, weaving there, hoping for some sign that would tell her where she was.

  She noticed that a small crowd had gathered in the center of the market. They cheered and jeered and generally seemed to be having a good time. Afraid she might start a riot if she pushed her way in, the girl stood on tiptoe and tried to see who or what was causing the commotion.

  First, she caught sight of three potatoes sailing in and out of view as they were repeatedly tossed in the air. Then she saw the silvery shimmer of bells dangling from the three pointed ends of a hat. Finally, she made out a wiry young man in a diamond-patterned outfit—a jester—standing on a box of some sort.* He was juggling and telling jokes that were, judging by the groans of the crowd, more confusing than they were funny.

  She strained to listen.

  “What dost thou say—that I have not sense?” he shouted at a heckler. “No, I have better, I have a sense of humor!”

  The girl felt an unexpected jolt of recognition. What was it about him that seemed so familiar? Had she been a jester in her former life? She looked down at her jeans and sneakers—it hardly seemed likely. Perhaps she was raised in a circus, bouncing on the knee of a clown? That seemed like a better possibility. If she’d spent her childhood performing on a trapeze, that might explain why she was such a skilled climber. Then again, she really couldn’t imagine herself in a sparkly leotard.

  * * *

  When she reached a quieter corner of the market, she stopped to consider her options.

  What to do next? She felt a sense of urgency, as though she had only a limited amount of time to accomplish a specific task. And yet, for all she knew, her time was infinite.

  “Hail, young traveler.”

  The girl turned to see an old, straggly-haired woman sitting on a tree stump under an old, straggly-limbed tree. In front of the woman were a larger tree stump that served as a table and another, smaller stump for a companion to sit on.

  With a start, the girl realized the old woman was staring directly at her.

  “You can see me?”

  The woman nodded. “I am a Seer. I have what they call second sight…. Sit. I will tell your fortune.”

  The woman was so fair-skinned, her hair so white, she was almost colorless. She was barefoot and wore a plain cotton shift.

  Her only ornament: a gold-rimmed monocle that magnified her pale, watery blue eye.

  “I don’t really believe in that,” said the girl, backing away.

  “In what? Sitting?”

  The girl hesitated. Who knew what she believed in? And what did it matter anyway? She might not believe in ghosts, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t one.

  She felt in her pocket. “I don’t have any money.”

  The woman smiled as if this were a grim joke. “Your money is no use here, I think. Please—” She motioned to the smaller tree stump. “What is your name, child?”

  “I-I am…,” the girl stammered, sitting. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who I am.”

  “Don’t worry, the cards will tell us.”

  “Am I… dead?”

  The girl waited, tense. She was not at all certain she wanted to hear the answer.

  The Seer peered at the girl through the golden monocle. While the Seer’s left eye was closed, her right eye seemed never to blink.

  “I don’t
think so,” the Seer said finally. “In my experience, the dead are much more sure of themselves. They can be very tiresome that way.”

  “So then I’m not a ghost?” asked the girl, relieved, but only just.

  “There are many kinds of ghosts. Only some are ghosts of the dead. Others are simply the appearance of someone far away. A few even come from the future.”

  “The future?” repeated the girl, growing more confused by the minute.

  Looking down, she noticed the multitude of concentric rings that made up the large tree stump in front of her. From somewhere in her past, she heard a kindly man’s voice (whose? she couldn’t remember) telling her that each ring represented a year’s passing and that you could read the age of a tree by counting the rings.*

  “What year is it, anyway?” she asked.

  But the Seer was no longer listening. Her eyes were closed and she was passing her hand over a deck of cards. The cards were well-worn and decorated with a pattern of moons and stars on their back sides.

  As the girl watched, the Seer arranged ten cards facedown on the table. The girl rubbed her eyes. Unless she’d missed it, the Seer had never once touched the cards. Her hand had simply hovered over them.

  Only after the middle card had flipped over—as if stirred by a breeze—did the Seer open her eyes and pick up her monocle.

  The card was delicately painted with a picture of a slender youth standing against a backdrop of billowing clouds. He was thrusting his sword forward while looking back over his shoulder.

  “Ah, yes, the Page of Swords,” said the Seer. “A stealthy card, the spy in the tarot deck. A natural for an invisible girl, yes? It means, I think, that you have been sent to this world on a mission.”

  “A mission? What kind?”

  Ignoring the question, the Seer held her hand over a second card. By the time her hand moved away, the card had flipped over and was lying faceup across the first card. The second card bore a compass-like design framed in four directions by animals and crowned on top by a sphinx.