Lost in Cyberspace by Richard Peck

Author:Richard Peck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

12

Thousands of Afternoons Ago

We whirled through time without moving. I smelled something frying and hoped it wasn’t us. The whole experience hurt worse than my mugging. Then we fell over backward. Me being there probably threw us off balance. We landed on a polished wood floor.

We were behind a carved table. The first thing I saw was the ceiling. It had fancy plasterwork now—then. And a tinkling chandelier.

I was still clinging like a monkey to Aaron’s back. He jerked around. “What are you doing here?”

I blinked.

“You must have been in my force field,” he muttered.

Then we heard screaming.

We scrambled up in a crouch and peered over the table past a silver fruit bowl. There were two kids there: boys.

One was about nine or an overweight eight. He was wearing a full Indian costume: buckskin breeches, war paint over his freckles, feather headdress, and beaded moccasins. He had a tomahawk in his hand, and it looked like the real thing.

He was doing a war dance around a chair in the middle of the room. A smaller kid was tied to the chair by a lot of rope. Half the screams were his. The other half were the big one’s war whoops.

“That is one hyperactive Native American,” Aaron said.

It must have been Cuthbert in costume. Lysander was trussed up like a turkey in the chair and screaming his head off. Then I noticed the crumpled-up newspaper around the chair legs.

My head was aching anyway, and the screaming and whooping didn’t help. I still had Aaron in a near-death grip.

Then Cuthbert dropped his tomahawk, reached down into his buckskin breeches, and came up with a box of matches. Before you could think, he struck a light. You could smell sulfur. A breeze from the window that was there then sent the lace curtains billowing. The flame jumped onto them. But Cuthbert was too focused to notice. He leaned down and set the crumpled paper on fire under Lysander’s kicking feet.

Flames licked up the curtains. More flames started licking Lysander’s feet. Luckily he was wearing buttoned-up high-tops.

Aaron and I leaped up and skidded around the table. Little oriental rugs skittered under our feet. Cuthbert went on with his authentic war dance, waving his tomahawk around. Smoke drifted around the room, and Lysander was really yowling.

I didn’t know what to do. “Quick,” Aaron said. “Get a vase.” There were flowers in glass vases around the long room. He grabbed one off a reading table, dumping out the flowers. Then he doused the burning paper under Lysander.

“Hey, no fair,” Cuthbert said. We were visible, and he was annoyed. But he didn’t seem that surprised to see us. He was probably used to having a lot of servants around. And by the way, where were they?

The lace curtains were going up like dry weeds. There was a fireplace on that wall. Two vases of flowers were up on the mantel. I went for one and could just reach it. I dumped the flowers and ran over to the window.

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