The Cracks in the Kingdom Read online

  TO CORRIE STEPAN AND RACHEL COHN

  FOR FRIENDSHIP ABOVE AND BEYOND

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Excerpt from Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life

  Excerpt from The Kingdom of Cello: An Illustrated Travel Guide

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  Part 8

  Part 9

  Part 10

  Part 11

  Part 12

  Part 13

  Part 14

  Part 15

  Part 16

  Part 17

  Part 18

  Part 19

  Part 20

  Part 21

  Part 22

  Part 23

  Part 24

  Part 25

  Part 26

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  From Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, by William Stukeley, 1752:

  On the day that Oliver Cromwell died, there was a very great wind, or tempest over the whole kingdom. That day, as the boys were playing, a set of them went to leaping. Sir Isaac, tho’ he was little practis’d in the exercise, & at other times outdone by many; yet this day was surprizingly superior to them all, which they much wondered at, but could not discover the reason; which was this: Sir Isaac observed the gusts of wind, & took so proper an advantage of them, as to carry him far beyond the rest …

  From The Kingdom of Cello: An Illustrated Travel Guide, by T. I. Candle, 7th edition, © 2012, reprinted with kind permission, Brellidge University Press, T. I. Candle.

  There are plenty of people in Cello, so that’s good news.

  Most of these people sleep at night, and love their royal family, and get about by walking on the ground. Nevertheless, in the course of your visit to Cello, you may well meet a Night-Dweller. Or come across a Wandering Hostile. Or bump into an Occasional — actually, you probably won’t meet an Occasional Pilot. That’s about as likely as finding a toad living underneath your fingernail, to be honest. (Although considerably more pleasant — Occasional Pilots are a total blast, whereas a toad under your nail would surely irk.)

  In any case, this section is designed to prepare you for such a meeting, and to help you avoid any awkwardness should one take place.

  1.

  Maximillian Reisman can stand on his head for thirty minutes if he wants to.

  Today he doesn’t want to.

  His head is too busy, for a start.

  It is trying to recall some advice he was once given, about how to revive wilting lettuce leaves. At the same time, it is constructing an advertising campaign for organic oatmeal. It is composing a humorous speech to deliver at a colleague’s farewell drinks; it is holding a cell phone underneath Maximillian’s chin; and on that very chin, it is quietly growing a beard.

  Maximillian kicks the fridge closed on the wilting lettuce leaves. He snaps his cell phone shut without leaving a message.

  “Tabernacle,” he says. This is a curse word. He says it because he has realised, abruptly, that he (and his head) are trying to do too much.

  Maximillian is fifty-two years old. He is lighting a cigarette. He is walking to the window. He is opening the shutters, leaning out into the warm evening air. He is blowing smoke across Place d’Youville, watching it fade into the shadows of the Musée d’archéologie.

  It is 6 P.M. on Saturday, August 22, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

  Maximillian is thinking.

  A smile forms around his cigarette.

  It’s the beard! The growing of the beard! That is the thing that has taken him over the edge into too busy.

  He heads to the bathroom to shave.

  * * *

  The heat wakes Sasha Wilczek, as it does every morning, with its weight and its feather lines of sweat.

  It is 6 A.M. on Sunday, August 23, in Taipei, Taiwan.

  Sasha’s bedroom is not much bigger than Maximillian’s bathtub.

  Pale murmurs drift through the open door. The tap of a fingernail against a fan of cards.

  Those are Sasha’s flatmates. A boy and a girl, both American students. They play gin rummy through the nights.

  “You have a dry sense of humour.” That’s the girl’s voice, suddenly clear.

  Sasha waits for the boy’s reply.

  “What does that mean?” he says eventually.

  “It means your tone doesn’t change when you’re making a joke,” replies the girl.

  Sasha Wilczek is forty-nine years old. She is lying in a narrow bed. She is considering the girl’s definition of dry humour, turning it over in her mind. She is looking at the dust-smudged bedroom window, at its criss-crossed patterns of masking tape ready for typhoons. She is looking through the dust into her mind, into her schedule for today.

  She teaches an 11 A.M. Zumba class at a local gym. Also 2 P.M. Hip Hop and 3:30 P.M. Freestyle dance.

  Outside her bedroom, the boy flatmate yawns and wonders aloud why he’s so tired.

  That boy does not have a dry sense of humour, Sasha thinks suddenly. He has no sense of humour at all. That’s why his tone never changes.

  Maybe she could recommend a 5 P.M. Sense of Humour class.

  * * *

  Monty Rickard is laughing so hard he has to fall down on the carpet.

  It is four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, August 22, in Boise, Idaho, USA.

  There are five people in the room. Two of them are laughing as they unplug a computer and lift its cords and keyboard into the air. The others, like Monty, are letting their laughter knock them sideways.

  Everything could be lost! Everything!

  It’s not really that funny.

  For the last six months, in their spare time, Monty and his friends have been designing a computer game. Gianni (one of the people falling about) is always going on about how they need to back it up.

  Just now, Gianni spilled a can of Red Bull all over the computer.

  There’s no backup copy.

  They’re laughing so hard their throats are hurting.

  Monty Rickard is eighteen. He has just started a dog-walking business. He chews his knuckles. He plays seven different musical instruments including saxophone, drums, and mandolin. He’s not especially good at computer programming, but his friends are, especially Gianni.

  A dog jumps onto Monty’s stomach, not sure how else to join the hilarity. A guitar, leaning up against the wall, slips to the floor with a twang that makes the laughter rise an octave.

  * * *

  In Berlin, Germany, it’s midnight. Chimes are splitting Saturday, August 22, from Sunday, 23.

  Ariel Peters is studying her new tattoo. It’s on her arm. It’s a dragon. Her room vibrates with the backbeat from the dance floor downstairs. There are sudden thudding footsteps outside her door, then they’re gone.

  Ariel is fourteen. She lied about her age to get the job behind the bar downstairs. Also, to get this room. Also, the tattoo.

  It needs more. The dragon needs to breathe fire. It needs to be carrying a basket of eggs in its claws. A saddle so she can ride it. Maybe a cover for rainy days. An espresso maker.

  She’ll save up her pay and return to the tattoo parlour soon.

  * * *

  Finn Mackenzie, eight years old, is watching a snail climb a window.

  Eight A.M., Sunday, August 23.

  Beyond the snail is Avoca Beach, which is an hour north of Sydney, Australia.

  Finn sees a couple walk along the beach. They’re carrying their shoes, skirting seaweed. The woman wears a long woollen scarf. She cro
uches down to fold up her jeans, and the scarf drapes along the sand beside her.

  Finn has solemn eyes and a head cold. He wipes his nose on the back of his sleeve. “You’re heading in the wrong direction,” he says. “Snails don’t belong in the sky.” He thinks he might watch Toy Story 3 again today. He thinks that the colour of the woman’s scarf is exactly like a raspberry slushy.

  * * *

  These small events across the world, you’ll be wondering why they’re here.

  You’ll be right to wonder: They are profoundly inconsequential.

  Except for two things.

  First:

  Time slides around the world so strangely that all of this is happening at once. Summer dusk in Montreal is midnight in Berlin is winter breakfast time on a beach to the north of Sydney. Maximillian shaves while Sasha dusts her mind while Monty scratches behind his dog’s ears. Ariel imagines a new tattoo just as little Finn raises the window and flicks the snail from the glass. He watches it fall into the garden.

  Second:

  Maximillian Reisman, Sasha Wilczek, Monty Rickard, Ariel Peters, and Finn Mackenzie are not, originally, from this world.

  Those are not even their real names.

  They all come from a kingdom called Cello.

  They were brought here to our world against their will, through cracks that were sealed tightly behind them. Now they laugh, fry eggs, take showers, send texts — and sometimes even stand on their heads — in a world that, to them, is as strange as time itself.

  2.

  “So there’s a kingdom called Cello and it’s lost its royal family.” “Right.”

  “Careless.”

  “I know, right? I said the same thing. But they were abducted and brought here to our world. That’s what they think anyway.”

  “That’s what who think?”

  “I don’t know. The police or security force or whatever in Cello.”

  “So who’s in the family, like, a king and a queen?”

  “Yeah, and four kids. Three of the kids are missing: an eighteen-year-old prince, a fourteen-year-old princess, and another prince, a little boy. He’s eight.”

  “And you know about the Kingdom of Cello cause …”

  “Because I found a, sort of like, conduit between our world and Cello. In a parking meter. I’ve been using it to write letters to a boy named Elliot Baranski.”

  There was a long pause.

  Belle, who had been asking the questions, turned and looked at Madeleine.

  Madeleine shrugged. “I get that it sounds sort of —”

  “Unexpected.” Jack’s voice drifted out from the bathroom where he was cleaning the toilet.

  “Like bollocks.” Belle plunged a scrubbing brush into the bucket beside her. “Unnecessarily complicated bollocks,” she amended thoughtfully. “And who needs complications in bollocks?”

  Madeleine, Jack, and Belle were in a flat in Cambridge, England. The flat’s owner, Denny Michalski, was one of their home-schooling teachers, but he’d gone to see a doctor about his asthma.

  He’d left them a Geography assignment to complete.

  Denny’s real work was in computer-hardware repair, and his place was overrun with toolboxes and motherboards: You couldn’t take a step without stubbing your toe on an open PC carcass.

  “It’s a health and safety disaster zone,” Jack had said.

  “Dust and dog hairs everywhere,” Belle had added. “No wonder he’s got asthma.”

  “I’m not really moved by tectonic plates,” Madeleine had reflected, looking at the Geography assignment.

  So they had decided to clean the flat instead.

  While they cleaned, Madeleine was telling her friends about the Kingdom of Cello. She’d never mentioned it to them before. Why now?

  The cleaning fluids must have muddled her brain. She turned on the kitchen tap to wash the suds away. Could you get water back into the tap once it was down the drain?

  No, she thought philosophically. You could not.

  But you could try.

  “Forget it,” she commanded. “I was just making the whole thing up.”

  “But to get it straight,” Belle said, “you’ve been sending letters to a boy named Elliot Baranski who lives in a kingdom called Cello?”

  “I get that it sounds crazy,” Madeleine repeated. She found the broom leaning up against the fridge, and started sweeping. “I thought it was a hoax at first, and that Elliot Baranski was just somebody’s invention. But one time I went into the Kingdom. For a fraction of a moment. A splinter of a second.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Sunny.”

  Belle nodded, approving of Cellian weather, and Madeleine continued.

  “Anyway, Elliot’s dad disappeared ages ago, and turns out he’s been captured by a terrorist organisation. So Elliot wants to be rescuing his dad, but his Kingdom want him to help find the royal family.”

  “Conflicting priorities,” Jack called sympathetically. “Why’d they want his help in particular?”

  “They found out he has a contact here in the World.”

  “Cool. Who’s his contact?”

  “Well. Me.”

  She swept over a small object on the floor three or four times but it didn’t shift, so she gave the broom a disappointed glance and crouched down to dig it out herself. It was just a little bolt, stuck between the floorboards. Or was this called a nut? Who knew.

  Madeleine looked up. Belle was watching her. Jack, in the bathroom, was silent, except for the swish of a cloth along the bath tiles.

  “I mean, I get that I must have been hallucinating when I went into the Kingdom. And I get that it doesn’t really exist —”

  “Can you stop getting things?” Belle interrupted. “It’s materialistic. And what do you mean it doesn’t exist?”

  “Well, obviously — and you just …”

  “I said it sounds like bollocks,” Belle said irritably. “Not that it is. Why should there not be a kingdom called Cello?”

  “I always thought there might be.” Jack sat himself cross-legged in the doorway to the bathroom. “I mean, I thought there’d be another world. Not that it would be called Cello. How could I have known its name?”

  He rested his head against the doorframe.

  “For all I knew,” he said, “it could’ve been Violin or Double Bass. Not even necessarily strings. Could have been the Kingdom of Trumpet.”

  “Who said it had to be an instrument?” said Belle. “You tosser.”

  Jack ignored her. “There’s probably more than just the one kingdom in your parking meter.” He looked at Madeleine respectfully. “There’s a whole brass band of them.”

  Madeleine twisted the broom between her hands, and turned to Belle.

  “You believe there’s a kingdom in the parking meter?”

  “Not in the parking meter. Wouldn’t fit, would it? Jack doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And anyway, I thought you said the meter was like a conduit or mailbox or something?” In her exasperation, Belle sent a spray of water flying across the room. It splattered onto the bedspread. “Oops,” she said in a formal sort of way.

  At that moment there was the sound of the door slamming downstairs. All three of them paused, gazing around at the mops, rags, buckets of sludge brown water, and half-hearted piles of swept-up crumbs and wire snippets.

  There were slow footsteps on the stairs, and pattering claws.

  “If the royal family’s here in our world,” Belle said suddenly, “who’s running the Kingdom of Cello?”

  The door opened. Denny walked in, his dog, Sulky-Anne, slipping past as if she’d remembered something urgent. She ran straight to the bed, leapt onto it, got herself comfortable, and fixed them with a penetrating gaze.

  Denny’s own eyes had the wild bright look they always got when he’d just had asthma treatment. Now his face changed shape with emotion.

  “You kids,” he said. “You’ve cleaned.”

  “We didn’t do
any of the assignment,” all three confessed rapidly, under cover of his enthusiasm.

  “You’ve even done the bathroom!” Denny was ducking his head into that room. He emerged again. “And you’ve got that donkey-shaped mould stain off the wall!”

  “Plus we got rid of the junk you had along the other wall,” Madeleine pointed out. “Those bikes with missing wheels and the half dartboard and that? We chucked them in a bin.”

  “I feel like they might have been useful at some point.” Denny’s voice turned suddenly mournful.

  “That seems unlikely,” Belle said caustically, then to Madeleine in an aside: “Seriously, who’s running Cello? Or is it the sort of rubbish monarchy where the royals are just for dressing up and getting pregnant?”

  Madeleine reflected. “Yeah, no, I think they’ve got proper royalty. And there’s one princess sister left behind. She’s only fifteen or something, and she’s ruling the Kingdom.”

  “Nice,” said Belle, impressed, and Madeleine felt a surge of pride, as if she herself were the ruling princess. Belle was almost never impressed.

  “I see you’ve reorganised my trays of screws and things.” Denny’s voice was swinging towards doubt.

  “I just re-classified,” Jack explained. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”

  Denny settled on recklessness. “How could it hurt! Hey, you know what, guys? Who cares about Geography! Let’s go out and celebrate the fact that I can breathe! And that I have a clean” — he paused, looked about — “a half … a quarter-clean flat!”

  Everyone agreed, including the dog.

  3.

  Princess Ko, reigning monarch of Cello (by default), was rolling a mint along the table.

  She was in the upper-level boardroom of the White Palace, and the Commissioner of Finance was addressing her.

  The mint spun quietly. It hit Princess Ko’s right palm and she batted it back to her left.

  “I’ve briefed the Queen on all of this,” the Commissioner was saying. “By which I mean, of course, that I sent the proposals to her in the Southern Climes a fortnight ago. How is your mother getting along there anyhow?”

  The Princess stopped the flow of the mint with a turn of her hand.

  “Like a starspin!” she exclaimed. “At least, when I spoke to her last night, that’s how she sounded. The southern chocolate just does my mother in! Of course, she might have run out by now and gone into a tailspin. Don’t look so bemused! That was humor! I’m sure she’s still got plenty of chocolate!”