Saint Philomene's Infirmary for Magical Creatures Read online

  The socks he’d used to plug up the hole in the pipe were now a black snowball, utterly unwearable, but they had done their job. He tossed them aside, then got down on his hands and knees to investigate the hole. The brisk wind still whistled through the pipe, but it seemed otherwise empty. He found a stick and jammed it deep inside.

  The stick jumped around in his hand; the wind inside blew with vigor.

  Then, something hit the stick. What in the world? He peered into the pipe. Nothing but blackness.

  Wait! A dim flash of light, gone as quickly as it had appeared, just like before. He put his ear to the hole. Over the wind, he could hear a very distant groan. It sounded a little like Chewbacca howling underwater.

  Chance sat back, leaning against one wall of his muddy hole, as two voices in his head argued back and forth. Should I? No way, José! You should because Dad would do it. There’s no way I’m putting anything else in there. Why don’t you do it to honor your dad? Nuh-uh! Do it. No. What’s the worst that can happen? Some knife-toothed monster will flay the skin off my arm, that’s what. That won’t happen; your sister could tell you that. Well, maybe. Then do it.

  So Chance slowly worked his left hand into the pipe. Farther, farther, until he was up to his elbow. He couldn’t feel the other side of the pipe; his hand just hung there in midair. It felt like he was sticking his arm out of a car going sixty miles per hour.

  Suddenly, something hit his hand—paper?—not too hard, and then was gone. It took every nanogram of fortitude he had not to squeal, yank his arm out, climb out of the hole, and shovel all the dirt back in again as fast as he could.

  But Chance knew himself pretty well. If he did that, he’d always wonder what was in this stupid pipe. Eventually, he would just dig it up again.

  So Chance left his arm in the hole. For nearly ten minutes nothing happened, except that his arm grew chilled from the wind.

  Then something wrapped itself around his wrist. Chance shrieked like a startled raccoon. It felt like a piece of ever-so-slightly damp paper. It stayed there, held in place by the wind.

  He eased his hand out of the hole, the paper sliding farther and farther down his wrist, eventually winding up in his hand. He grasped it tight. Careful not to tear the paper on the jagged edges of the broken pipe, he drew it out.

  It was a letter.

  CHAPTER 3

  There was a noise at the front door: tikki-tik-tik-tik. It was Mersey Marsh, who liked to “knock” by tapping her long midnight fingernails against the stained-glass pane in the door. Pauline let her in.

  “You have to see this,” Pauline said, leading her friend upstairs.

  The ceiling of Pauline’s room was dotted with hundreds and hundreds of little glow-in-the-dark stars. Just a foot below them, hanging by numerous lengths of fishing line, was a working antique orrery, the bronze ball representing the sun rotating ever so slowly as its glass-and-copper planets and their moons revolved around it. And scattered about on Pauline’s floor was pretty much her entire wardrobe, all among cardboard boxes filled with … stuff: broken microscopes, unfinished model F-15s, Legos and Lite-Brite pegs, collapsible fishing poles, broken slides for the broken microscopes, tons of agates and pieces of mica and flint and meteorites. The mess didn’t faze Mersey Marsh; her room was worse.

  Pauline opened one of the many boxes, pulled out her marvelous fulgurite, and handed it to her friend.

  “What … what is this? It’s beautiful.”

  Pauline explained fulgurites and detailed her trip into the storm to find one.

  “So light,” said Mersey. She studied it closely, sniffed it, then closed her eyes and put it up to her ear.

  “Not even a pound,” said Pauline, “according to the bathroom scale.”

  “This,” said Mersey, “is a powerful object.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I swear it’s vibrating. I think it can do … things.”

  “That’s bananas,” said Pauline, taking her fulgurite back. “It’s just a rock—”

  “I wonder if it’s a conduit to another place,” Mersey said, almost dreamily, clasping her hands together and looking up at the magnificent orrery. “Or another time. Or maybe it’s a channel to the restless dead.”

  “That’s all baloney, Mersey Marsh, and you know it.”

  “Not.”

  Fourteen-year-olds were too old to say not, but oh how Pauline wanted to. Sometimes Mersey drove her up the wall.

  “Let’s go downstairs and make macaroni and cheese and say hi to Mom.”

  “Hey, where’s your little brother?”

  “Probably out back digging to China.”

  “Oh, still?”

  “Yep.”

  “You Jeopard kids. Both diggers. I wonder what that’s about.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Chance leaned against the muddy wall of his hole and studied his letter in the growing dark. It was an ordinary-looking envelope, now very dirty, with an address, a return address, and a vermilion postage stamp with an intricately line-engraved bust of a strange creature, darkly canceled. The letter was thin, probably just a single folded sheet inside. The postage stamp was from some unrecognizable foreign country and denominated in clahd, a currency Chance, an enthusiastic numismatist, had never heard of. But the address was in English, in handwriting worse than his own:

  Patient 251987

  Saint Philomene’s Infirmary for Magical Creatures

  Basement, #299

  4211 Pipe C330649

  Level Two, Slice 1401.812

  Donbaloh

  And the return address:

  Fallor Medoby Dox

  20002 Pipe R001213

  Level One, Slice 60.996

  Oppabof

  What the…? How Chance wished he could google those names and places, but he was not yet allowed to have internet access in his room—that was a privilege he was hoping for on his thirteenth birthday, still four months away. The passwords to his mother’s desktop and his sister’s laptop had thus far completely defeated him. The only internet access was at Jiro’s.

  “Whatcha doin’ down there,” said a pair of voices in unison.

  “Augh!” shrieked Chance, turning quickly and hiding the letter behind his back. In the gloom above him, he noted the face of his annoying sister and the divine visage of Mersey Marsh. “Nothing!”

  “You look like you’ve been, um, digging,” said Pauline.

  “Nope!”

  “What have you got behind your back?” said Mersey, her sweet voice fluttering down into the hole like lace butterflies and landing on his head and face. What the heck is wrong with me?

  “Not a thing!” said Chance.

  “Suuuure,” said Pauline. “C’mon, Merse. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  At bedtime, after his second bath of the day, Chance put on his pajamas, then sat on the edge of the bed and held the begrimed envelope up to the bulb of his bedside lamp. He could make out writing inside, but no words. He tucked the envelope under his pillow and turned out his light. He lay there for what seemed like hours. He was conscious of Mersey and Pauline in the next room, also not sleeping but, rather, watching what Chance recognized from its timbre and tone as an episode of Battlestar Galactica. The girls giggled sometimes, and once or twice they laughed out loud. Chance kind of wished he was in there with them, a party to their secrets, but that would never happen: He was officially a bratty little brother.

  The letter under his head seemed to be screaming right through the pillow: Open me! What Chance thought he should do is go to sleep, get up early in the morning, drop the letter back in the pipe, and let the wind carry it to Saint Philomene’s Infirmary for Magical Creatures, whatever that was, and then plug up the jagged little hole with a tennis ball, climb out, and spend the day shoveling dirt back into the hole.

  But what Chance did do was this: tiptoe downstairs to the kitchen, quietly fill the kettle with water, turn on the burner, and wait for what seemed like eons until steam
finally began to flare from the spout. Water boiling in a steel kettle, even a non-whistling kettle, was awfully loud. And his mother, just down the hall in the downstairs bedroom, was a light sleeper. This needed to be done quick.

  He stuck the envelope in the cone of steam. So noisy! His mother was going to wake up. Or, worse, Pauline would come downstairs for a bowl of Count Chocula. Or Mersey Marsh, in the mood for a baloney sandwich, might wander in wearing one of Pauline’s nightgowns. That would undo Chance.

  Steam, hurry!

  An edge of the flap on the envelope suddenly popped up. The stickum was slowly melting. Eventually, the flap separated altogether. Chance slid the letter out of the envelope.

  My dearest friend,

  Your last letter worried me.

  What is that? Footsteps? Chance turned off the burner, raced upstairs as silently as he could, slipped into his room, and jumped into bed, where he held his breath and tried to will his heart to stop elbowing its way out of his chest. When all was quiet, and he could hear nothing but Mersey and Pauline murmuring, he unfolded the mysterious missive.

  CHAPTER 5

  Battlestar Galactica ended, and Pauline picked up her fulgurite again. It had a root, or maybe a trunk, that branched out into five limbs, each of which bore numerous twigs, and from these “grew” even smaller twigs, each tapering to a dull point. The fulgurite was hollow, and its inside walls were glassy and smooth, like the mouth of a conch shell. It took up about as much space as a regulation basketball.

  Mersey opened up Pauline’s planet-sticker-covered laptop.

  “Let’s research it,” she said. “What’s your password again?”

  “Gninthgil.”

  Mersey typed fulgurite magic into Google and was immediately rewarded with 78,140 hits.

  “Hah!” she said. “Look, fulgurites are used in spells, prayer, spiritual communication, and, when ground up and mixed with other stuff, they were used in medicine in the olden days. Like in the fifteenth century, doctors used them to treat the vapors.”

  “What are the vapors?” said Pauline.

  “Freak-outs, hysteria,” said Mersey, who was a walking dictionary of bygone words. “And here’s a website that says it was used, back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to treat werewolf bites. And to heal limbs broken by demons or malevolent spirits.”

  “Ridiculous,” said Pauline, but Mersey didn’t seem to hear. Mersey Marsh usually did not hear what Mersey Marsh did not want to hear.

  “And,” continued Mersey, “it says they were used to communicate over long distances. Two pieces broken off the same fulgurite act kind of like walkie-talkies, no matter how far apart.”

  Pauline said, “We’re sure not busting up my fulgurite to test it.”

  Mersey looked hurt.

  It was Pauline’s turn with the computer. A quick search revealed that big branched fulgurites, which were very fragile, were extremely rare and valuable. Pauline looked through all the images she could find. None were as beautiful as hers.

  “It’s a one of a kind,” said Pauline.

  “Let’s bring it in to Dr. Kinfiggish.”

  Dr. Kinfiggish was the earth sciences teacher, whose class both the girls had taken. Mersey had sat directly behind Pauline. It was there that they had met and become friends.

  The year before, during the fourth week of school, before they’d known each other, Mersey had passed a note written on yellow legal-pad paper folded into a Dorito-sized triangle to her future friend.

  The note was in green ink and read:

  Is Josh Ringle cute or what? I mean really.

  Pauline had never in her life received a note in class. She didn’t make friends easily, and when she did, the friendship was usually short-lived. She just didn’t have much to say to the other kids. She was especially shy around her earth sciences classmate Josh Ringle, on whom she had pinned a great crush the first day of classes that grew with each passing day. Pauline didn’t feel comfortable talking to her mother about boys, and, obviously, she couldn’t talk to Chance—he was a child. But now, there was someone. And she was right behind her. Pauline was not alone with her crush.

  Pauline wrote on the same piece of paper:

  Omigosh, I know!

  She carefully folded the paper back up, using the same creases, until it formed exactly the same triangle she had received, and passed it back.

  Pauline could hear her classmate unfolding it; she could just barely hear the smooth rumble of the green ballpoint on the wooden desk; she could hear the soft crackling as Mersey refolded the paper. Then, Pauline felt a light tap on her shoulder. Beneath their first exchange, Pauline’s new acquaintance had written:

  I love his green eyes and black hair.

  Pauline felt the same way and said so in the note, then folded it up and passed it back. This correspondence went on for the rest of the class. When the bell rang, Pauline was too shy to turn around and say hi, and the two went their separate ways.

  Day after day, the two of them passed the note—the same piece of paper, which grew more and more crowded with confessions, opinions, declarations, and plots, many of these centering on oblivious Josh, until the paper was covered, horror vacui, in ink and pencil scratchings.

  One Friday afternoon, in a space on the paper about two by twenty millimeters, Pauline wrote before passing the note:

  Meet @ DQ aft sch?

  Pauline felt something against her back, a small area of pressure like the dull end of a ballpoint pen.

  OK!

  And that started it. Dairy Queen became their favorite after-school hangout. They did homework, ate badly, played hangman, texted each other across the table, and discussed Josh. They discussed dozens of lesser boys, too, all cute in one way or another and each worthy of review, but none scored as high in so many categories as Josh Ringle.

  Mersey and Pauline plotted ways to get his attention, enumerated his good looks, remarked on his intelligence (he was a natural as far as the earth sciences went), and took secret photos of him. Mersey had one photo—a clear, zoomed-in profile—enlarged and printed as a poster, which she hung over her bed. From another photograph, Pauline painted in acrylic a miniature portrait on a tiny square of unstretched canvas. It was a fine likeness, and Mersey offered to trade her poster for it, but Pauline, as much as she loved Mersey, couldn’t part with her tiny masterpiece. For months she kept it rolled up in an Altoids box in her top drawer, then finally put it in a small but tasteful wooden frame and displayed it on her dresser.

  Now, months later, it still lay there as Pauline said to Mersey, “I was thinking I’d like to show Dr. Kinfiggish my fulgurite, but school’s out and all, and he’s probably happy to be away from all us kids.”

  “So what are you going to do with it?”

  “Nothing, I guess,” said Pauline, yawning like a canyon. “Maybe just put it on my dresser.”

  Pauline stood up and did exactly that. It became the centerpiece among a collection of knickknacks—a miniature operational printing press, a black leather folding case with a photo of her great-great-great-grandfather in his Civil War uniform, a small box of real arrowheads, a contrivance of magnets organized in such a way that a ball bearing suspended over them hovered in midair, and, of course, the tiny portrait of Josh.

  There was a knock on the door. Pauline scrambled up onto her bed and jumped under the covers while Mersey sheathed herself in a sleeping bag on the floor.

  “Is it your mom?” whispered Mersey. “Are we up too late?”

  “Who (yawn) is it (yawn)?” said Pauline, trying to sound sleepy.

  “It’s me, Chance!”

  Pauline sat up and rolled her eyes. Sometimes her brother made her roll her eyes so hard they felt like they might get stuck in her head.

  “What is it? Want to say hi to Mersey?”

  Mersey threw a pillow at her friend.

  “I have to show you guys something!”

  “We’re asleep,” said Pauline, tossing the pillow back at Mer
sey, who caught it with one hand and fired it back, scoring a direct face hit on Pauline.

  “No, I heard you giggling,” said Chance.

  “You can hear us?”

  “Sure,” Chance whispered through the door. “You watched Battlestar Galactica, opened two sodas, listened to a Daniel Johnston record—”

  “Don’t spy on us, sibling,” said Pauline, throwing a smaller, decorative pillow at her friend, which caught her on the temple. Mersey frisbeed it back just as Pauline hurled the big pillow.

  “I’m not spying; you’re just so loud I can’t sleep. Look, guys, I have to show you this thing I have!”

  “You can’t come in, Chance. Show me tomorrow. I have something to show you, too. We’ll do show-and-tell and eat Count Chocula in the morning.”

  “Can I borrow your computer then? And will you give me your password?”

  “Not a chance, Chance!”

  Mersey stood up, holding the big pillow by a corner, then came toward Pauline, swinging the pillow over her head like a mace. She was about to peg her friend on the side of the head when the pillow flew out of its case, whipped across the room, and knocked everything off Pauline’s dresser—the Civil War photo, the printing press, the arrowheads, the magnetic toy, Josh’s portrait, and, of course, the fulgurite, which fell to the hardwood floor with a glassy crunch, fracturing into dozens of pieces.

  CHAPTER 6

  Downstairs, Daisy was dreaming of a warm gray room filled ankle deep with water when a noise, at once loud but distant, startled her awake. She sat up, listening. A door slammed upstairs. Daisy grabbed a lamp, yanked out the plug, and proceeded up the stairs, her weapon poised above her head.

  “Chance?” she said. “Pauline?”

  No sound. She opened the door to her daughter’s room.

  “Girls?”

  “Yes, Mom?” said a fake-sleepy-sounding Pauline.

  “Yes, Mrs. Jeopard?” said a fake-sleepy-sounding Mersey.

  “What was that noise?”

  “What noise?”