The Clackity by Lora Senf

Author:Lora Senf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The fourth house was taller than I remembered. Or maybe it was just perspective, now that it was all by itself in a flat landscape. The house was mostly windows of frosted blue glass. It looked like a people aquarium. Everything about it was straight and square, and it belonged somewhere warm where the air smelled like salt. Somewhere under a blue sky and yellow sun and close to a great, wide ocean.

There were no steps, just a white stone porch that rose an inch or two above the sand.

The front door was the same blue glass as the windows. There was no keyhole anywhere to be found, which was weird since I had a key that matched.

I tried the handle. When I turned it, there was a sound like pebbles made from glass tumbling around. I pushed open the door and it felt like it pushed back. At first I thought it was heavy, until I saw that something was stopping it from swinging open. There was no floor to the house, only more sand.

There were no rooms or walls or ceilings in the fourth house.

Only a beach.

I’d managed to open the door enough to squeeze through. Once inside—or outside?—I took a deep breath. On one side of the door, in the desert, the air didn’t move. Here, “inside” the fourth house, there was a breeze coming off the calm, shining water. It mostly smelled like every beach trip I’d ever taken, like sand and water and the plants growing just beneath the surface, the ones that wash up on shore and rot. But here, the rotten smell was strong. Like maybe some animals were rotting along with the plants. And the smell made me wonder what kind of creatures might be living in all that water. I was willing to bet most of them wouldn’t be very friendly.

There was so much water it might have been an enormous lake, or a small sea, but it was dark under the black sun. Out in that obsidian water was a small island, and I knew that was where I had to go.

I remembered the door then, and how Pope couldn’t seem to open what I closed. So I turned to shut it behind me. But when I reached out and touched the handle, the door collapsed in a gush of clear water. One second it was there; the next, it was a puddle being sucked up by the greedy sand.

My head spun. I was inside a house that wasn’t a house, and I couldn’t get out because the door was gone. It was like a riddle where the words kept changing, and I couldn’t keep up.

Looking past where the door had been, out toward the desert, I could make out a figure through the shimmering heat waves. It was too small and far away for me to see clearly, but I didn’t need to.

It was Pope. Which meant it was time for me to go.

I didn’t know what he could see.

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