The Empress of Otherworld

Run

Chapter 1

The Colonel’s Study

High on a hill in a big, yellow house lived a boy named Happy who was anything but. It was the morning of his eleventh birthday, but he didn’t want to open his eyes. Not because he disliked birthdays; he usually loved them. After all, the past ten birthdays had started with his mom’s off-key singing followed by a batch of his dad’s famous kiwi waffles. But not this birthday. Eight months ago his parents had died in a car wreck, and Hap—as everyone called him—had been sent to live with his only known relative, his Great Aunt Benny.

And now Hap was starting to suspect that his birthday had completely slipped her mind. Of course, at 104 years old, lots of things slipped Great Aunt Benny’s mind—groceries, the location of her dentures, the number of times she’d been married—but he had hoped that his special day would be an exception.

After a few more minutes, Hap finally opened his eyes. He climbed out of bed, tugged off his pajamas, and put on some jeans, a t-shirt, his favorite gray hoodie, and his red Chucks. He trudged down the back stairway to the kitchen and kicked open the swinging door. It slammed against the wall with a loud bang.

The sudden noise startled Great Aunt Benny, who had been rummaging through the fridge. She hit her head on the refrigerator shelf and stumbled backward on her tiny feet.

Hap rushed to her side. Are you OK?

She steadied herself. Oh, I’m fine, dear, she said. If getting clobbered with a brick by my second husband didn’t do me in, I can surely survive a little love tap from the icebox. Besides, my wig took the brunt of it. She straightened the mop of curly lavender hair and smoothed the wrinkles from her matching blouse. Why are you still home? Isn’t it time for you to head to school?

No, Hap replied. This was true. It was 10:55. And Saturday.

Great Aunt Benny reached into the fridge and grabbed a sandwich bag. She held it up to the light to examine its contents. Does that look like mashed potatoes or homemade play dough to you?

Neither, Hap said. I think it’s some kind of cheese.

She opened the bag and took a whiff. You’re right, she said. Smells like feet. She tossed the bag back and grabbed a foil-covered dish. When she turned around again, she almost ran into Hap. She studied him over the top of her trifocals for a moment as if seeing him for the first time. Are you still here, dear?

Yes. I don’t have school today, Great Aunt Benny.

How nice! She headed through the kitchen doorway. Is it Casimir Pulaski Day already?

I don’t think so. Hap followed her into the foyer. What’s in the bowl?

Pickled herring for the buffet. She paused. I hope.

Buffet? Hap asked, grinning. Maybe she hadn’t forgotten his birthday, after all. Expecting guests, are we?

Yep.

Hap grinned a little wider. Why? Is today a special occasion?

Of course! she said.

Hap was positively beaming. And what would that occasion be?

It’s my turn to host the monthly acey-deucey tournament.

Hap stopped smiling. Oh. He followed Great Aunt Benny into the sitting room where she sat the bowl on a card table and removed the foil.

"It is pickled herring! Thank goodness."

The doorbell rang.

It can’t be 11:00 already, Great Aunt Benny exclaimed. I’m not done setting out the food. I still need to put out the cottage cheese with pineapple. And the pimento loaf. I can’t forget that! It’s Rosalind Ampersand’s favorite. Would you get the door for me, dear?

Hap headed across the foyer, his shoulders slumped. He opened the door and was overrun by a rush of wrinkled women in sundresses and flowery hats.

I’m telling you, a woman with a particularly prune-y face said much too loudly to the woman beside her, the clerk at Lynn’s Shoe Emporium glanced at my slip while he was measuring my foot.

Oh, Rosalind, the other woman said with a squeal. "Quelle scandale!"

The ladies pushed past Hap, who was half hidden behind the door. Only the last person on the porch, a small man dressed in tweed and smelling of VapoRub, acknowledged Hap. He poked one boney finger into Hap’s belly. Looks like Benny’s not letting you go hungry, he chuckled. Getting a little soft around the middle, ain’t ya?

My mom always said I’m just a little husky.

As Great Aunt Benny returned from the kitchen with a tray of pimento loaf, Hap slipped back upstairs, dove into his nest of blankets, and stared at the Avengers poster above his bed. I wish I lived at Avengers Mansion, he muttered. My teammates would remember to wish me happy birthday, at least. I wonder what the Hulk would get me.

He pulled his hood up over his head and tied it shut, trying to imagine that his mom had just presented him with another hand-knitted cap and that his dad was packing up the fishing supplies to take him out for an afternoon on the lake. But pretending hurt even worse. If the previous ten minutes had taught him anything, it was this—no one in the world cared that he was an entire year older.

But Hap cared. And if no one else was going to give him a birthday present, he’d give one to himself. He’d reward himself by doing the one thing that Great Aunt Benny had specifically asked him not to do when he came to live with her in her big house on Drury’s Run. He’d investigate the Colonel’s study.

The Colonel’s study was the only room that Great Aunt Benny kept locked. It sat perched on the house like a waiting vulture, tucked away at the top of a thin, twisting flight of stairs hidden in the back of a closet in one of the guest bedrooms. Hap’s dad had warned him about the Colonel’s study when he was small, so it took Hap more than a week after he moved in with Great Aunt Benny to work up the courage to mention the room. She pursed her lips and sucked her dentures, but agreed to let him see it, revealing a cramped but cozy room stuffed to overflowing with piles of musty books, a gigantic desk, a broken tickertape machine, a pair of oil lanterns, and an assortment of cuckoo clocks. Hap ignored all those things, though, his attention drawn to one particular item—a brass compass on a display stand on the corner of the desk. When they left the Colonel’s study, Great Aunt Benny warned him to not go poking around up there and locked the room with a tarnished skeleton key. Hap saw her stash the key in the top drawer of her nightstand.

That key was calling his name now.

Hap tiptoed down the hall and paused in the doorway of Great Aunt Benny’s room. He knew that snooping through her belongings would be wrong, but she had forgotten his birthday, which was even wronger. Determined, he pulled open her nightstand drawer and peered inside. Beneath a mass of twisted yarn, several wheat pennies, and a crusty jar of cold cream he found what he was looking for.

Key in hand, he raced to the guest bedroom, threw open the closet door, pushed aside a row of polyester leisure suits, and climbed the hidden staircase two steps at a time. At the top of the stairs he inserted the key in the metal lock and gave it a twist.

The door sprang open in a cloud of dust, revealing the bookshelf-lined walls and low, sloping ceiling of the Colonel’s study. The sun struggled to penetrate the one filthy window, bathing the room in an eerie half-light. Even in the gloom, Hap could see that the room was now empty. Gone were the books. Gone was the gigantic desk. Gone were the cuckoo clocks. Even the compass and its stand were missing.

Hap wiped the dirt from the window with one sleeve of his hoodie and peered out at the overgrown flower patch behind the house. Great Aunt Benny called it her heirloom garden and said that it dated to before the Civil War. The big, yellow house itself was even older than the garden, having been a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Hap turned back to the room. A beam of light streamed through the newly clean window and shone onto the top shelf of an empty bookcase, spotlighting a small box wrapped in newspaper comic pages.

Hap sucked in his breath. The package looked suspiciously like a present. He raced toward the bookshelf. In his excitement, his left foot caught in his right shoelace, and he pitched forward. He threw his arms out in front of him, catching hold of the edge of the top shelf of the bookcase for support. The shelf gave way with a click, tipping down on a set of hidden hinges and folding flat against the back of the bookcase. Hap hit the hardwood floor face first as the present dropped from the top shelf onto the second-to-top shelf.

Above him, the bookshelf began to whir and groan as if long-disused machinery was grinding to life behind the wooden façade, triggered by the movement of the top shelf. The second-to-top shelf clicked and tilted downward just as the top one had done, dropping the package onto the middle shelf. Hap watched, awestruck, as the package was dumped from the bookshelf’s middle shelf onto the second-to-bottom shelf and then from the second-to-bottom shelf onto the bottom shelf. There it sat for the briefest of instants, vibrating slightly as the hidden gears continued to hum. Finally, even the bottom shelf, which was even with the floor, tilted downward, dropping the box into a dark, gaping hole in the floorboards beneath the bookcase. As the package fell, a small, white tag tied to its top by a string stood upright in mid air for a fraction of a second. To my beloved Hap, the tag read.

Hap slid along the floor, grabbing for the present, but it was too late; the package and its enticing tag were both gone, having disappeared through the trapdoor. Unable to stop his momentum, Hap followed the present, slipping headfirst into the dark passageway like a penguin sliding off an iceberg.

And then he was falling, plunging into a black void of nothingness beneath the floorboards of the Colonel’s study.

He rolled onto his back as he fell, straining to make out the pale glow of the open trapdoor as it disappeared above him.

Soon, even that little bit of light was gone, and Hap found himself dropping through absolute darkness, alone and afraid.

Chapter 2

A Strange Kind of Jam

As Hap plunged through the blackness beneath the bookshelf, he closed his eyes and tried to gauge where he was inside Great Aunt Benny’s house on Drury’s Run. He mentally checked off the attic, the third floor, the second floor, the first floor, the basement, the cellar, and the sub-cellar. Soon, he guessed, he must have been hundreds of feet underground. He swallowed hard and wondered if he would only stop when he reached the center of the Earth where gravity would rip him apart.

Trying not to imagine what that would feel like, he noticed that he was slowing down; the air around him was thickening, turning into what felt like liquid then Jell-O then tar. Finally, he stopped moving altogether.

He opened his eyes, expecting to see dirt, worms, and maybe a few bleached roots as thin as corn silk. Instead, he found himself lying on a cold stone floor in the middle of a cavernous, circular room. A series of caged, red light bulbs produced strobes of crimson light that swept across the rocky walls in a hypnotic rhythm. The ceiling of the room was so high that Hap was unable to distinguish it from the shadows. A drip, drip, drip of falling liquid was the only sound.

Hap sat up, rubbed the back of his neck, and scanned the room for his present. A row of fifty or more gigantic, glass-and-copper jars filled with a translucent green liquid that looked like antifreeze ringed the curved outer edge of the room. The jars reminded Hap of Great Aunt Benny’s stockpile of jalapeño jam—although he couldn’t guess what strange kind of jam filled these giant jars. The present was nowhere to be seen.

Confused, Hap rolled onto his knees to stand up and saw that he had landed on a round, metal platform that was raised an inch or two off the floor. A red X marked its center. He hopped to his feet but stopped mid-crouch when he heard a sudden scuffling in the dark.

H-hello? Hap stammered.

The only response was the sound of bare feet on stone.

Hap squinted into the shadows as a short figure dashed between two jars.

Is someone there?

If the stranger answered, Hap was unable to hear the response; a sudden, blaring klaxon sent its awooga awooga echoing throughout the chamber. Hap covered his ears as a hydraulic hiss and a column of steam joined the siren.

Unsure what to do, he remained frozen, keeping his eyes on the last place he had seen the dodging shadow. From the darkness, a small form dove at him. A tiny set of hands gripped his hoodie and pulled him off the platform. Hap slid along the stone floor, skidding to a stop beside a closed door.

Behind him a huge jar—exactly like the ones ringing the room’s outer wall—dropped from the ceiling onto the X and sealed itself against the platform with a metallic groan. Large iron