The Remarkable Inventions of Walter Mortinson Page 4

  “When you finish, sure.”

  Walter nodded again. Then, clearly less cautious than his mother, he bent over the body. The boy barely looked as he went to work.

  “See? They have to be very close. It’s not easy, so don’t . . .” Hadorah trailed off, watching her son do a much better job than she ever had. Like a sewing machine, he completed a perfect zigzag stitch without pause, cut the needle off, tied the loose ends, and turned to look at his slack-jawed mother.

  “Good enough?”

  Hadorah had to remember to close her mouth before croaking out an answer. “I suppose.”

  That was all he needed. Walter took off, straight up the stairs and toward the workroom door (which was, conveniently, also the basement door of their house).

  “But, Walter!”

  He hesitated, hand on the doorknob, eyes squeezed shut in frustration. He was so close to freedom.

  “No more of your shenanigans. I mean it.”

  Walter let the gravity of her tone sink in before ripping the door open and hurrying back into the house. Hadorah waited for the knob to click before inspecting his work. She trailed a finger down the eerily identical stitches, releasing a low whistle.

  She smiled, cracking anew the dimples that had long lain dormant. It seemed he wasn’t naturally skilled at only his father’s work; he had the spark for hers as well.

  CHAPTER 8

  •  •  •

  THE BEAN

  The many clocks in Walter’s room ticked, for some reason, out of unison.

  Walter sat on his bed, legs crossed, the way he always did. There was nowhere else to work, as the entire room was an ocean of inventions.

  Just now he was adding to the ocean as he tinkered on a small white mechanism that fit perfectly in his hand. It was a tiny frog made of petrified wood, held together with springs and screws.

  Gently he placed it in one palm and pressed down on the back legs. When he released, the frog sprung off and jittered straight across the sea of junk. It leapt against the window and then ricocheted off another invention (what appeared to be a lamp containing either fireflies or highly agitated stars). The frog clicked back and forth against the pane. Walter waded over carefully to retrieve it.

  Timing it perfectly, he shot a hand out to catch the frog midjump. He grasped it, holding the fiend still as it tried to break free of his hand. Once it was subdued, Walter turned to look out the window . . . and saw something rather curious.

  A pale finger of moonlight managed to burst through the Moormouth smog and point straight at the ground. The spotlight shone directly on the vegetable garden, where Ralph the rabbit’s grave was still fresh and visible.

  Walter believed in coincidences only when it suited him. Therefore, this light, he decided, was no coincidence.

  It was a sign.

  • • •

  Mischievous children develop a condition early on. This condition is the result of a squishy little bean that grows in your brain somewhere between the lobe that tells you, Eating paste will result in a tummy ache and the lobe that says, Jumping off a building will result in something slightly worse than a tummy ache. This bean is that tiny thought in between that says, Yes, but doesn’t it look fun?

  Mannerly children, on the other hand, have perfectly plain brains, and so this thought never crosses their minds. Polite children don’t have to worry about what paste tastes like, because they don’t care. Their heads are so full of the things that adults have told them that they simply can’t make room for a squishy little bean.

  Walter had fallen ill to the bean; in fact, it had thoroughly taken over at least a sixth of his entire brain. This meant that he not only knew what paste tasted like (in several varieties), but he also knew that despite being told he was not allowed to go outside at night, he had decided to do it anyway.

  A well-behaved, beanless child would never do this. Walter had never been all that well behaved.

  Anyone with “the condition” can tell you what it feels like to sneak out, how your heart catches fire and desperately tries to beat the flames away, how your hands shiver because all the heat is now in your chest, how your ears can suddenly detect sounds you never before realized existed.

  Walter peeked out from behind his door, listening. When he was satisfied that the house was sleeping, he tiptoed out into the hallway. In his hand quivered the trowel, so polished that it reflected the moonlight from the window.

  He slunk down the hallway, knowing to avoid the squeaky fifth floorboard, until he got to the tall spiral staircase between him and freedom. He eased his way down, cringing, aware of what was about to come. On the fifth stair, he heard the dreaded creak slip out, before he quickly hopped onto the sixth, which only creaked more loudly, and onto the seventh, which creaked the loudest.

  Terrified, heart threatening to burst out his ears, he jumped up onto the banister and slid down. It was perfect, silent, but he was going too fast. At the last moment Walter swung himself off course and leapt onto the ground, scarcely avoiding disaster.

  He paused, waiting to see if he’d been heard. . . . The coast was still clear. He hurried, excitement renewed, out of the house.

  In his haste, he failed to notice that his mother’s hearse wasn’t parked in front as usual.

  Once at the grave, Walter dug, his hands quaking and his eyes darting back and forth between the garden and Hadorah’s bedroom window, willing the light to stay off. After a few uneasy jabs with the trowel, his curiosity and confidence built, and soon he went at it with gusto. His sweat dripped down as he glimpsed a glimmer of bone white. He dug more furiously. Ralph was waiting.

  He was distracted from his feverish digging by the crackling of car tires pulling into the gravel driveway, mere feet away.

  Like a thunderstruck cat, Walter sprang upward, flattening his body against the house’s side. Wide-eyed, he watched as the headlights flicked off.

  Hadorah clomped up the driveway to the porch, weariness clear in her heavy gait. If she had glanced at the corner of the house, on the shadowed side, she would have seen him—sweat dripping in rivulets down his hair, chest heaving. Walter watched her and hoped desperately that she’d be too tired to look over.

  She was.

  Hadorah passed him, no more than five feet away, going for the first step. Walter let out a quiet sigh of relief. He could sneak back in when she went to bed. But instead of the click of her clog meeting stone, there was a most terrible squish.

  “What the . . .”

  The lobes on either side of the bean screamed at Walter to stay put—begging him not to crane his neck and look, but he couldn’t help himself. Walter peeked around the wall and saw the second most terrible thing: the deflated tomato he’d dropped the night before, dripping from his mother’s heel. Then he looked up to see the first most terrible thing: his mother.

  “WALTER!”

  Without thinking, Walter shot from his place, ashen and trembling. He knew not where he was going, only that any place was better than this. Unfortunately, the direction his bean-diseased mind chose was straight toward her. She closed the gap, flying at him in a rage.

  “How dare you disobey me!”

  Walter winced as she stepped close to him, but then swiftly moved past . . . toward the hole. Horrified, he watched as she sank down, shoved a hand into the dirt, and emerged, standing, with Ralph gripped between her fingers. With gritted teeth, she threw the rabbit onto the ground.

  “No!” Walter took a step toward her, but it was too late. Hadorah stomped hard, cracking the thing into pieces.

  Breathing quick, heavy breaths, she stared down at the sad mess of bones, screws, and springs that littered the ground. After a few moments of silence, she looked up at Walter, to see tears forming at the corners of his eyes, and she suddenly deflated.

  “Oh, Walter. I didn’t mean . . .”

  She walked toward him, reaching out a hand, but Walter flinched away. He strode toward the house. Hadorah followed, hesitant.
>
  “I didn’t want you to—”

  He punctuated her shout by slamming the door.

  • • •

  Hadorah stopped at Walter’s room just in time to hear the clanging of fifteen locks.

  “Walter? Please. Let’s talk about this.”

  She waited, attempting to listen through the thick door, in vain. After a minute she sighed. Her shoulders slumped, making her look much, much older.

  “I’m just trying to keep you safe.”

  Walter listened from the other side, stick straight and stony faced. He waited to hear her footfalls leading her away. When she was finally gone, he released his own sigh, letting his shoulders drop too.

  Walter wiped at his face, smearing the two tears that had escaped, and then waded toward his dresser. He knocked behind it until he found the hollow place, then pulled the back panel off. Inside, it was surprisingly well organized, nothing like the rest of his room. He looked at the contents—first Maxwell’s gold-plated pocketknife. It was the closest to the opening and clean of the dust that lingered on the rest of the shelf. Walter often snuck the knife to school but was careful never to let Ms. Wartlebug or Hadorah see it. He didn’t want either to take it away. Then, when he got back home, he would quickly put it back, right on the edge of this secret compartment. Behind it were several other strange things: a video projector attached to an old cream-colored rotary phone, a stack of books he thought his mother might not like, and a small photo album. Carefully he pulled the album out. It was worn but well cared for.

  He plopped down onto his bed and began flipping through the book. The first few pages were pictures, mostly of young Walter. Then came the articles; they were stained with age. Each one featured the same grinning man.

  Walter was clearly a blend of him and Hadorah. The boy had Hadorah’s untamable red hair and spattering of freckles but also the rich, dark umber of this man’s complexion and the same scheming glint in his eyes. Walter stared at the pictures, his gloom only growing.

  The first headline read: INVENTOR BRINGS PROSPERITY TO FACTORY TOWN, over a photo of the man smiling in a much brighter Moormouth, cutting a big red ribbon.

  In the photo under the headline MORTINSON WOWS WORLD WITH INVENTIONS, the man stood, laughing, as children on winged tricycles (emblazoned with the name “Flycycle”) lifted off the ground around him.

  The last headline said, MAXWELL MORTINSON: HEIR TO THE FLASTERBORN EMPIRE. The man, Maxwell, stood with Horace Flasterborn, who had his arm around Max’s shoulders. Both looked positively gleeful, the older man’s goatee in full curl. Behind them, where the ink of the photo had smeared from thumbprints, was the shadow of a young, hawkish Tippy in the crowd, whom Walter might have recognized if he could ever have looked away from the man.

  Alas, he could not, for this was his father.

  Walter had read every newspaper story ever printed about Maxwell Mortinson but was rarely ever told anything else. There hadn’t even been a funeral for Max, a decision Walter simply could not understand. Everyone deserved a final good-bye, didn’t they?

  He stared, absorbing the pictures, something building inside of him. After a few moments he snapped the book shut, then tucked it safely back into its place behind the false back.

  The boy shakily stood. He was embarking on a new mission.

  CHAPTER 9

  •  •  •

  THE NEW MISSION

  Walter was tired of sneaking. He’d filled his furtive quota. By now his heart had given up caring, and he tromped down the stairs, daring them to squeak.

  When he passed his mother, asleep on the couch, he didn’t bother to check to see if her eyes were open or closed. Perhaps, had he been slightly more cautious, he would have seen the newspaper cutout fall from her sleeping fingers and drift under the sofa.

  But, no. He failed to see any of it as he strode straight toward the basement door and down out of sight.

  Once in his mother’s workroom, he hurried over to Arlo, now dressed and preserved. Walter pulled from his pocket the photo showing the old man with his marionette. Walter sat down and leaned the picture on the shelf above the worktable. He then extracted something else—the monocle he’d made. The rim was a thin bronze circle, with what appeared to be an ordinary glass lens in the middle. A delicate chain hung down from the rim, and when you shook it enough, a light blasted through the center of the glass, so bright that it lit the entire basement.

  Walter pried the lens out of the rim—revealing that it was actually two circles of glass with a little bulb in the center. He then pulled from his coat a small foil figure he’d made, one of an old man. He gently slipped it between the layers of glass in just the right position. Step one was completed.

  Walter then stood to grab the next tool, the tiniest screwdriver he’d ever seen, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t hanging on the wall where it was supposed to be. This was particularly troublesome, because, as small as it was, it was rather hard to see anyway.

  Walter had to scour the room to find it, opening every cupboard and drawer, peering into even the nookiest of nooks and the cranniest of crannies.

  As he sifted through the very back of a drawer, he found something strange underneath a stack of receipts: a map.

  Walter had to pull it out gently, for it looked old and worn. He then blew a layer of dust off the face and discovered that it was a map of the surrounding area, from Flaster Isle way in the west to Moormouth in the east. Between the two was a red line drawn in fat marker. There were cities circled along the way, places called “Honeyoaks” and “Shrew’s Borough” and other silly things like that. Walter had never heard of these places, let alone been to them. He hadn’t been anywhere outside Moormouth, actually.

  Fascinated, he pored over the parchment, memorizing every circle and divot along the journey. There were far more places out there than he’d ever realized.

  When his eyelids grew heavy and he realized how little time he had left, Walter rolled up the map, tucked it into his pocket, and went back to work.

  As he sat on the bench again, he was stabbed by something and instantly leapt up. He looked down to see that the smallest screwdriver was sitting right where he had been.

  Shaking his head, Walter picked it up with the tips of his fingers and began working on the monocle, having forgotten all about the strange map and the stranger places on it.

  • • •

  The map, of course, had once belonged to Hadorah, who had been the one to mark it up with the fat red marker.

  She and Maxwell had stood beside each other in their tiny apartment on Flaster Isle. It had been the size of only half a room. Hadorah had rented it because she’d liked how smart the building looked. Maxwell had moved in with her because he’d liked how smart Hadorah was.

  The two had looked down at the map as they’d planned their adventure. They hadn’t known where they would end up, only that it had to be far from the island they’d been stranded on.

  Hadorah had appraised the map, overwhelmed by how many places there were.

  “But where will we go?” Hadorah had asked.

  “Where we’re supposed to be,” Max had answered.

  She’d rolled her eyes. “But how will we know where that is?”

  “I guess we’ll just have to explore to find out, won’t we?”

  He’d taken the marker from her hand and capped it. They wouldn’t open it again for quite some time, not until they had traveled far away. Instead of planning where they’d go, they would record where they had found themselves, marking their journey with a red line.

  They had hoped for the trip, from Flaster Isle to wherever they were supposed to be, to take years, as they explored and marveled and learned. Then, after less than one year, Hadorah’s father had died, and Moormouth had needed a mortician. The two had returned just in time for Walter to join them.

  • • •

  The morning after Walter’s mission, Hadorah was careful not to wake her son up, lest he see the gleeful
smile she couldn’t quell. Her eyes took in every last inch of the scene, which filled her with so much pride, she feared she might burst.

  She had really gotten through to him, and now he was actually doing it, following in his mother’s footsteps. She had always hoped Walter would take on the family business, and he finally had. There he was, fast asleep with a pair of forceps in one hand and a tiny tin of pale mortuary makeup in the other. That could mean only one thing: Walter was well on his way to becoming a mortician.

  Her smile faltered when his head shifted. His eyes looked puffy, from lack of sleep? Tears? Without thinking, Hadorah leaned her face close to his, frowning.

  Walter snorted awake. Hadorah reeled back, steadying the plates of eggs in her hands. Walter fought back the heavy tentacles of sleep as they tried to claim him again.

  “I didn’t—Mom?”

  “I brought you breakfast.”

  Walter cautiously took the plate. The last time his mother had made breakfast was the day after his fifth birthday, and that was because all she’d had to do was slice off a piece of cake. He didn’t trust her intentions, nor the eggs, which were strangely black and crispy.

  The two ate without speaking, Arlo laid quietly in the middle, until Hadorah couldn’t take it anymore.

  “I’m really proud of you for listening to me. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

  He nearly choked on a particularly crunchy yolk, nodding politely. He had no idea what she was talking about, but he didn’t dare let her know that.

  “You’ll see, Walter. Morticianing is a very respectable profession. Not like inventing.”

  Walter’s chest felt hot; he couldn’t stop himself. “So Dad wasn’t respectable?”

  “No, of course I didn’t mean it like that. . . .”

  “But that’s what you said.”

  “Your father was a wonderful man, Walter, but he’s gone. And if it hadn’t been for his inventing, he’d still be here.” Her voice became stuck in her throat. She cleared it, turning her eyes away from Walter. “This isn’t something we should talk about.”