68 Rooms 04 - The Secret of the Key by Marianne Malone

Author:Marianne Malone [Malone, Marianne]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: YA 09+, Retail
ISBN: 9780307977212
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2014-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

RUTHIE AND JACK LISTENED TO Rivy—the missing Becky Brown—while she told her story of what had happened. Almost forty years earlier, when she was fifteen, she brought her seven-year-old brother with her into the past. They found themselves in late seventeenth-century Lincolnshire, England.

“Oliver was acting like little boys sometimes do,” she explained. “He ran around and was impatient. First he wanted my rings. I let him have the mood ring, but when he was bored with that he wanted the antique one and the key too. He wanted to carry all of them, and I finally gave in and let him. Once he’d seen Belton House—this one, not the miniature—he wanted to explore more rooms, especially the castle rooms. I was growing short-tempered with him and he ran off. When I went to look for him, the door—the portal, as you call it—had disappeared, and … I never saw him again.” She blinked hard. “He never came back for me. Ever.”

Ruthie shuddered. She remembered the feeling she’d had just a few days ago when Jack had removed the animator from room E6 and she was cut off from her life for all of fifteen minutes. What if he hadn’t come back and she’d been trapped?

And then it occurred to Ruthie: “Jack—we never figured out what the animator is.”

“The what?” Rivy asked.

“It’s the object in the room that makes the outside world alive. So far the animators have been old, from the time the room represents,” Jack answered. “Whatever it is, Oliver must have taken it. Probably without even knowing it.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Ruthie pointed out, “because we’re here now. The room is animated. And the portal didn’t close behind us.”

“Maybe he put it back,” Jack said.

“But then the portal would have reappeared for her,” Ruthie said. “Something doesn’t add up.” Ruthie felt a shiver at the possibility of an unexpected animator or rules they didn’t understand.

“Could it be the ring?” Rivy asked.

“You had the ring with you when you first came to Belton House?” Jack asked.

“I think it was in Oliver’s pocket.”

“So far, all the animators we’ve discovered have had to stay put in the rooms. If you move them from their place, the portal closes,” Ruthie explained.

“Maybe the ring works differently; maybe you can come out into the past with it,” Jack suggested. “If the ring is the animator, when Oliver went out to the corridor the portal would have closed up.” Jack scratched his head. “Maybe he came back to get her, but he didn’t have the ring anymore—”

“Because he’d left it in the box where we found it!” Ruthie interjected.

“Right. Room E4 would’ve been dead.”

Ruthie jumped up and ran to the window. Suppose, as Jack said, the ring as animator behaved differently than the others; suppose the portal closed later, when they were farther away from it …

“What’s wrong?” Jack asked.

“We were able to see Belton House from the patio; can we see the patio from here?” Ruthie said, looking through the glass panes.

Jack joined her at the window.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.