Copyright © 2007 by Pseudonymous Bosch
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Or Else!
Little, Brown and Company
(they’re neither little nor brown, but that’s another story.)
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.hachettebookgroup.com
First eBook Edition: September 2008
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
That is, if you believe in coincidences.
Cover illustration and interior illustrations copyright © 2007 by Gilbert Ford
ISBN: 978-0-316-03992-5
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter One and a Half
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
FOR W.P. MAY
Good.
Now I know I can trust you.
You’re curious. You’re brave. And you’re not afraid to lead a life of crime.
But let’s get something straight: if, despite my warning, you insist on reading this book, you can’t hold me responsible for the consequences.
And, make no bones about it, this is a very dangerous book.
No, it won’t blow up in your face. Or bite your head off. Or tear you limb from limb.
It probably won’t injure you at all. Unless somebody throws it at you, which is a possibility that should never be discounted.
Generally speaking, books don’t cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems.
Books can, for example, give you ideas. I don’t know if you’ve ever had an idea before, but, if you have, you know how much trouble an idea can get you into.
Books can also provoke emotions. And emotions sometimes are even more troublesome than ideas. Emotions have led people to do all sorts of things they later regret—like, oh, throwing a book at someone else.
But the main reason this book is so dangerous is that it concerns a secret.
A big secret.
It’s funny the way secrets work. If you don’t know about a secret, it doesn’t bother you. You go about your business without a care in the world.
La la la, you sing. Everything’s fine and dandy. (Maybe you don’t actually sing “la la la,” but you know what I mean.)
But as soon as you hear about the secret, it starts to nag at you. What is this secret? you wonder. Why am I not supposed to know about it? Why is it so important?
Suddenly, you’re dying to know what the secret is.
You beg. You plead. You threaten. You cajole. You promise never to tell anyone else. You try anything and everything. You dig into the secret-keeper’s belongings. You pull his or her hair. And when that doesn’t work, you pull your own.
Not knowing a secret is just about the worst thing in the world.
No, I can think of one thing worse.
Knowing a secret.
Read on, if you must.
But, remember, I warned you.
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I’m sorry I couldn’t let you read Chapter One.
That was where you would have learned the names of the characters in this story. You also would have learned where it takes place. And when. You would have learned all the things you usually learn at the beginning of a book.
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you any of those things.
Yes, this is a story about a secret. But it’s also a secret story.
I shouldn’t even be telling you that I shouldn’t be telling you the story. That’s how much of a secret it is.
Not only can’t I tell you the names of the people involved, I can’t even tell you what they’ve done or why.
I can’t tell you what kind of pets they have. Or how many annoying little brothers. Or how many bossy big sisters. Or whether they like their ice cream plain or with mix-ins.
I can’t tell you about their schools or their friends or their favorite television shows. Or if they ride skateboards. Or if they are champion chess players. Or if they compete in fencing competitions. Or even if they wear braces.
In short, I can’t tell you anything that would
help you identify the people involved in this story if you were to meet them at your orthodontist’s office. (Teeth, as you may know from watching television, are very useful when detectives are identifying cadavers.)
This is for your own protection as well as mine. And for the protection of your friends. And even of your enemies. (You know, those ones you say you want to kill but in the end you’d rather keep alive.)
Still, you must find my silence very frustrating.
How can you follow a story if you don’t know whom it’s about? Somebody has got to be getting lost in the woods, or slaying dragons, or traveling in time, or whatever it is that happens in the story.
I’ll tell you what—I’ll make you a deal.
To help you follow my story, I’m going to break my own rule—already!—and I’m going to give my characters names and faces. But remember these aren’t their real names and faces. They’re more like code names or cover identities, like a spy or a criminal would have.
If you don’t like a name I choose, change it. If I write “Tim loved to pick his nose,” and you prefer the name Tom to Tim, then read the line as “Tom loved to pick his nose.” I won’t take offense. You can do that with all the names in this book if you like.
Or keep my names. It’s up to you.
Now, just as it’s hard to read a story without knowing whom the story’s about, it’s also hard to read a story without knowing where the story takes place. Even if you were reading about extraterrestrials from another dimension, you’d want to imagine something about their surroundings. Like that they lived in a murky green miasma. Or in some place really hot.
Although the real location of this story will have to remain a mystery, to make it easier for all of us, why don’t we say the story takes place in a place you know very well?
We’ll call it Your Hometown.
When you read about the town the characters live in, just think of the town you live in. Is the town big or little? By the sea or by a lake? Or is your town all asphalt and shopping malls? You tell me.
When you read about the characters’ school, think of Your School. Is it in an old one-room schoolhouse or in a bunch of double wide mobile homes? You decide.
When they go home, imagine they live on Your Street, maybe even in a house right across from yours.
Who knows, maybe Your Street is where the story really takes place. I wouldn’t tell you if it was. But I couldn’t tell you for certain that it’s not.
In return for all the freedom I’m giving you, I ask only one favor: if I ever slip and reveal something that I shouldn’t—and I will!—please forget what I’ve said as soon as possible.
In fact, when you’re reading this book, it’s a good idea to forget everything you read as soon as you read it. If you’re one of those people who can read with their eyes closed, I urge you to do so. And, if you’re blind and reading this in braille, keep your hands off the page!
Why do I write under such awful circumstances? Wouldn’t it be better to scrap this book altogether and do something else?
Oh, I could give you all kinds of reasons.
I could tell you that I write this book so you will learn from the mistakes of others. I could tell you that, as dangerous as writing this book is, it would be even more dangerous not to write it.
But the real reason is nothing so glorious. It’s very simple.
I can’t keep a secret. Never could.
I hope you have better luck.
True, I cannot tell you the year this story begins, or even the month. But I see no harm in telling you the day.
It was a Wednesday.
A humble, unremarkable day. The middle child in the weekday family. A Wednesday has to work hard to be noticed. Most people let each one pass without comment.
But not the heroine of our story. She is the kind of girl who notices things that others don’t.
Meet Cassandra.
Wednesday is her favorite day. She believes it’s just when you least expect something earth-shattering to happen that it does.
According to Greek myth, the original Cassandra was a princess of ancient Troy. She was very beautiful, and Apollo, god of the sun, fell in love with her.
When she rejected him, Apollo became so angry he placed a curse on her: he gave her the power to predict the future, but he also ensured that nobody would believe her predictions. Imagine knowing that your whole world was about to be destroyed by a tornado or typhoon, and then having nobody believe you when you told them. What misery!
Unlike the Cassandra of myth, the girl who figures in our story is not a prophet. She cannot see into the future. Nor has she been cursed by a god, at least not to my knowledge. But she resembles a prophet in that she is always predicting disaster. Earthquakes, hurricanes, plagues—she is an expert in all things terrible and she sees evidence of them everywhere.
That is why I am calling her Cassandra—or Cass, for short.
As you know, I cannot describe Cass in detail. But this much I will tell you: from the outside, Cass looks like a typical eleven-year-old. Her major distinguishing feature is that she has rather large, pointy ears. And before you tell me that I shouldn’t have told you about the ears, let me explain that she almost always covers her ears with her hair or with a hat. So chances are you will never see them.
While she may look like other girls, Cass is in other respects a very un-average sort of person. She doesn’t play games involving fortune-telling or jump rope or strings of any kind. She doesn’t even watch television very often. She doesn’t own a single pair of soft suede boots lined with fleece. She wouldn’t even want a pair, unless they were waterproof and could protect her in a snowstorm.
As you can tell, Cass is very practical; she has no time for trivial matters.
Her motto: Be Prepared.
Her mission: to make sure that she and her friends and family survive all the disasters that befall them.
Cass is a survivalist.
These are things Cass carries in her backpack every day:
Flashlight
Compass
Silver Mylar space blanket—surprisingly warm if you haven’t tried one; also has useful reflective properties
Box of juice—usually grape, doubles as ink in a pinch
Bubble gum—for its sticking value, and because chewing helps her concentrate
Cass’s patented “super-chip” trail mix—chocolate chips, peanut-butter chips, banana chips, potato chips (and no raisins, ever!)
Topographic maps—of all the closest desert and mountain areas, as well as of Micronesia and the Galápagos Islands
Rope
Tool kit
First-aid kit
Dust mask
Extra pair of socks and shoes—in case of flash floods and other wet conditions
Matches—technically not allowed at school
Plastic knife—because a jackknife is really not allowed
Schoolbooks and homework—when she remembers, which is not very often (she keeps forgetting to put schoolwork on her supplies checklist)
On the evidence of the items in her backpack, you might guess that Cass had led a very adventurous life. But you would be wrong. The truth is, up until the time this story begins, none of the disasters she predicted had befallen her. There’d been no earthquakes at school—none strong enough to shatter a window, anyway. The mildew in her mother’s shower turned out to be just that—not the killer mold Cass predicted. And that child spinning around on the grass did not have mad cow disease—he was just having a good time.
Cass didn’t exactly mind that her predictions hadn’t come true. After all, she didn’t wish for disaster. But she couldn’t help wishing people took her concerns more seriously.
Instead, everyone was always reminding her about the boy who cried wolf. Naturally, they took that story to mean the boy shouldn’t have cried wolf when there weren’t any. But Cass knew the true moral of the story: that the boy was right, there really were wolves around, and they’d get
you in the end if you didn’t watch out.
Better to cry wolf over and over than never to cry wolf at all.
Of all the people in the world, only two paid attention to Cass’s predictions: Grandpa Larry and Grandpa Wayne.
Larry and Wayne weren’t Cass’s original, biological grandfathers. They were her substitute grandfathers. Larry had been Cass’s mother’s history teacher in high school, and they’d remained friends ever since. Since neither of Cass’s original grandfathers were around, Cass’s mother asked Larry and Wayne to fill in.
Larry and Wayne lived around the corner from Cass in an old abandoned fire station. The bottom floor, where the fire engines had been kept, they had converted to an antiques store and warehouse. Their living quarters were upstairs, where in the old days the firemen had slept between fires.
Every Wednesday after school, Cass was supposed to work in their shop until her mother called to say dinner was ready. But, in truth, very little work ever got done at the fire station.
“You’re just in time for tea,” Grandpa Larry would say whenever she visited.
Grandpa Larry wasn’t British, but he’d spent time in England when he was in the army and he’d developed a serious tea habit. Cass thought Larry’s elaborate tea rituals were a little silly, but she loved the cookies Larry made (he called them “biscuits”) and the stories he told while their tea was brewing. By now, Cass suspected that most of his stories were exaggerated, if not entirely made up, but they always included useful information—like how to put up a tent in a sandstorm or how to milk a camel.
On the particular Wednesday that this story begins, Larry was showing Cass how to make a compass by placing a cork in a bowl of water.* The compass was almost complete, and the cork just about to point north, when her grandfathers’ basset hound, Sebastian, started barking so noisily that the water shook out of the edge of the bowl.
Sebastian was blind, and now that he was growing old he was very nearly deaf as well. But he had the keenest sense of smell in town—everyone called him “Sebastian, the Seeing-Nose Dog”—and he always knew when visitors were about to enter the shop.
“Fire drill!” called Grandpa Wayne from down below, which was their code for when a customer had arrived.