The Shadow Mask Read online

  “I will,” I said. “One last thing, Dr. Reed. Do you know someone named Bertrand Veirhelst?”

  “Bertie? I never met him in the flesh, but he was a legend among all us globe-trotters like your father and me. He was a diplomat from Belgium, but his true love was the study of other cultures. He helped countless anthropologists acquire visas to study cultures abroad, your father as well, I believe.”

  “You said ‘was.’”

  “Yes, Bertie passed on not more than three months ago. A tragic fall from his apartment balcony.”

  “Lady, you can’t sleep here!” Stump said, holding the door open. “We gotta beat it before we’re snowed in completely.”

  Dr. Reed kissed me on the cheek and slid her business card in my pocket, telling me to call her soon if I needed some motherly attention, then disappeared into the storm. The door shut.

  My head was spinning as I walked to the elevator. I had a lot of disconnected information swimming in my head. Old Marie Rathbone and her otherworldly artifacts. That twin mask with its hypnotic eyes. A mysterious Belgian diplomat who died falling off his balcony. My parents’ voices and the fragments of their conversation I had heard in Jeremy’s shop. Could it be that they were all connected? Was Bertie a secret spymaster, and my parents his spies? They were always traveling all over the world. And of course, with these thoughts came the familiar hope, the desperate, crazy hope that somehow my parents were still alive.

  As I made for the elevator, I found that the metal doors were halfway open. I looked through the opening and the brass bars and saw Crane on one knee. He was whispering into the dark little doorway of one of the basement bedrooms. I got the distinct feeling that I was seeing something not meant for my eyes, because when Klevko spotted me, he immediately closed the apartment door. Hastily, he pulled Crane up as he slid open the gate.

  “I can get up myself, you clod. I’m not an invalid,” Crane snapped. “And hello there, Leo. Dmitri was just telling me an intriguing story about your adventures today.”

  “R-really?” I stammered, my heart beating fast. Had Dmitri heard my conversation with Hollis? Had he already told Crane everything? Think fast, feel nothing, I repeated to myself. “Dmitri makes up tons of great stories,” I said with a nervous laugh.

  “He was telling me, Leo, how well you’re doing at your new school,” Crane said, looking at me hard. I tried to determine if he was just toying with me, trying to get me to spill the truth, or if he and Dmitri really were talking about school. As always, Crane’s face was a mystery.

  “Dmitri thinks so highly of you he wants to take you on as a partner in his business,” Crane said. “Klevko, why are we standing still? Seventh floor, you donkey.”

  “Yeah, I’m just trying to blend in,” I said as the elevator lurched upward.

  “Well, I hope your partnership with Dmitri won’t interfere with our partnership. I’m depending on you, Leo. You’re making excellent strides, excellent strides, and perhaps soon your paperwork will go through and you can go back to your old school….”

  “Really? That’s great.”

  “Soon, Leo, very soon. But first I want you to do something for me tomorrow. I’d consider it a personal favor.”

  He pulled out his keychain and handed me one of the keys. It had a tag on it with an address in Staten Island.

  “I want you to go to your parents’ storage locker in Staten Island tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” I said, remembering my plan to go Jeremy’s.

  “I hope it’s not a problem. I’m at a dead end and need more clues. Bring back anything you can find about that mask and your father’s trip to Borneo.”

  As we got off the elevator, it occurred to me that Crane and I had never gotten off the elevator at the same time, just the two of us. I’d never learned where he slept. I was curious to finally see where it was that Crane retired to, so I stood by the elevator and waited for him to make a move, but apparently he was doing the same thing.

  “Well … uh, good night, Leo.”

  “Hey, Crane,” I said. “This might seem random, but do you know anything about diplomats?”

  “A man in my position must know an exceedingly large amount about diplomats,” he said. “Most are worthless slugs with massive debt — they can be easily bribed. The other half are spies. They, too, can be bribed or blackmailed once you have penetrated their cover. Why do you ask, Leo?”

  “There’s just this kid at school who was giving me a hard time today named Pieter, and he said there was nothing I could do about it because his dad was a big deal diplomat. His name is Pieter Veirhelst, and I think his dad’s name is Bertrand.”

  “Pieter is surely lying,” Crane said. “Diplomats send their kids to diplomatic schools — but the boy’s father might be connected to his embassy. Tell you what, Leo. Bring back something useful tomorrow, and I’ll give you information on this supposed diplomat. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Very well, one of my men will pick you up from school. Now is there anything else?”

  “Um, not really,” I said.

  “Then go to bed, Leo. Go on.”

  As I left, I snuck a peek over my shoulder and saw Crane, still standing by the elevator, watching me. By the time I crossed the glass bridge for the Mask Room, the lights were no longer on, and the room glowed dimly with an eerie white light from the storm outside. The entire floor-to-ceiling window was like a giant flat-screen TV, broadcasting a white and orange picture, making the masks on the walls seem like fun-house shadows, with their four hundred blind eyes staring at me. I broke into a run and ran the rest of the way to my dark room.

  I pushed open my door and sprinted for the control panel, turning on the lights as bright as they’d go. When the room was lit up, I turned to my desk only to discover that my computer had been removed.

  Crane. He was everywhere.

  But Crane hadn’t gotten my phone. It was in my closet. And it had eleven new messages.

  I listened to nine messages from Hollis, Trevor, and Jeremy, each one a different shade of nervousness depending on the time. They had been so worried about me, especially Hollis. He’d left five messages before Dmitri’s text — he must have had a rotten morning. After a message from Jeremy, there was a message filled with eerie static that rolled like waves. The sounds sent shivers up and down my spine, and when the tingles moved to the back of my neck, I could have sworn I heard a voice in the static, just a whisper, a tinny little voice trying to break through. It sounded flat, inhuman. And just when I thought I could hear something understandable, the message cut off abruptly.

  “Next message, 8:44 p.m.,” the robot voice-mail voice said.

  It was a message from Mike Hazel. Luckily, and my first stroke of good luck in a day, I’d never bothered to record a voice-mail greeting, so it was one of those automated replies that just said my phone number.

  “Hi, this is Mike Hazel from Fox Five news. I’m trying to contact a boy named Leon Loman, and one my sources gave me this number, saying you might know him. I’m looking for some background information regarding a story I’m working on. Give me a call back before midnight tonight, my deadline.”

  It was 10:30. I turned off my phone and made for Hollis’s room.

  He was asleep in his bed, still in his clothes with his arm around the neck of his acoustic guitar. I decided not to wake him, and sat down at his computer to do some research. I had a lot to look into.

  I tried Bertrand Veirhelst first. His obituary on the New York Times site said he was a Belgian diplomat, but there was much about him that they didn’t know. He was born in Rwanda and lived there until he was a teenager, and resurfaced next in Belgium where he was running a sort of immigration business with his wife until it was discovered that he also had another family in Turkish Cyprus. He then disappeared for seven years, until he resurfaced in Kiev, Ukraine, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, working for a giant natural gas company. His whole life was like that — he’d appear in
some strange place, disappear for a number of years, then reappear several years later in another strange place. If he wasn’t a spy, then he did everything he could to make his life read as if he were one.

  Next I tried Spiricom, that record my Dad was so eager to get hold of. There were no direct hits, but after a long and winding search, somehow I found myself on a web-page about a guy named Konstantin Raudive. He was a scientist from Latvia, and he had made all these recordings of white noise and static, which, he claimed, contained the voices of dead people. He claimed that if you listened very carefully, you could hear the flat, nonmelodic voices of the dead trying to communicate with the living. I couldn’t find any of the recordings online, but I looked through tons of different pages about those voices, called electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, and just followed all the links wherever they took me. Nothing was connecting … yet.

  I remembered that strange voice-mail message. Even though just thinking of it gave me a nervous sinking feeling, I knew there was a voice in it. I wanted to listen to it, but I didn’t want to chance turning on my phone only to have Mike Hazel call me.

  It was almost midnight by the time I started my search of Marie Rathbone. My head was swimming with hundreds of fragmentary thoughts about spies and kooky scientists, twin masks and hollow Earths, voices from the dead and snatches of my parents’ voices that I’d channeled from my dad’s note. That card! Maybe if I listened again, I would be able to hear more this time.

  Hollis was still wearing his jacket, so I kneeled on his bed and very carefully reached my hand into his pocket. He mumbled something and turned, half waking up.

  “Hey,” he said softly.

  “Hey. You sleep. I’m just getting this card.”

  “Leo,” he yawned and rolled over. “Can you really do that sound thing?”

  His voice had lost its suspicious edge. Things always make a different kind of sense when you’ve been asleep and just wake up. Maybe that had happened to him.

  “Yeah, I can,” I told him. “I’m going to Mom and Dad’s storage locker tomorrow after school. You should come with me, and I’ll show you how my power works.”

  “Okay. Wait, we’re going to Jeremy’s tomorrow.”

  “I know, but I have to go to the storage locker. I’ll explain tomorrow morning. You should go back to sleep.”

  “Make sure you tell Trevor.” He yawned and rolled over. “Oh, and don’t forget to show me that blue disc, and that letter from Dad.”

  “I will tomorrow,” I promised. But as I sat by his side, watching him fall back asleep, I realized I hadn’t seen the disc since I got back from Palmira. I dimly remembered that when I got back, I had to put it somewhere really safe, a place where Crane or any of his minions would never find it. In my mind, I went through my room to remember where I might have stashed it, but never got that “aha” feeling. And that gave me a terrible heavy pressing feeling in my chest. After all, Crane had been in there to take my computer. There was no telling what else he’d found.

  I went back to my room and laid my head back on the pillow, just staring up at the ceiling. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the card with my dad’s handwriting and held it in my hand. This time, I heard nothing. I waited for what seemed like a long time, half closing my eyes and catching myself falling asleep now and then. I awoke suddenly when I heard a rattling boom from overhead — the sound of something big on the roof crashing. Then the power went out. Completely. In the total darkness, the sound of the howling wind outside was deafening.

  I turned my phone on. It was 1:45. There were two new messages on it, both probably from Mike Hazel, who had missed his deadline. I left it on as a night-light, laid my head back on the pillow. I didn’t even remember closing my eyes.

  I awoke feeling as if no time had passed. Someone was pounding on my door. Without waiting for me to answer, Dmitri barged right in.

  I sat up and shot him an icy stare. “If you’re just going to come in, Dmitri, why even knock?”

  “Why do you sleep in your clothes, Leo? If you don’t have pajamas, I can ask my matka to get you some.” He marched to my bedside, forced me aside, and, from the control panel, turned on the lights in the room.

  “What are you doing, Dmitri? Just get out of here and let me sleep. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Stupid Leo, you think it’s the middle of the night!” He exploded in a snorting laugh, splashing me with some spittle. “It’s seven thirty. The power in the building went out, so none of the clocks are working. The buses will be crowded. We have to leave right away.”

  It all came rushing back, the misery of my previous day at Satellite North. I didn’t know how much more I could take of those dingy halls filled with tough guys who were just dying to beat me up and a principal who seemed out to punish me. Mr. Dickerson, who was probably waiting for me at detention. For my detention at six thirty …

  “Oh no,” I gasped, and held my head, digging my fingers almost into my brain. “Dmitri, I had detention today. Can we get Stump to drive us to —”

  “Stump drives Hollis, not you and me.”

  “Okay, I’ll be ready in five minutes,” I told Dmitri, but he just stood there, not leaving. “Uh, Dmitri, a little privacy, please.”

  “I am supposed to stay with you, Leo. Your uncle wants me to protect you.”

  “And you do everything he tells you to?”

  “No,” he said sharply. “I make my own decisions. It is my decision to give you some breakfast.” He dug into his pocket and handed me an off-brand granola bar that was all soft and out of shape.

  “Thanks, Dmitri. Now give me some space. We’re partners, right? So believe me when I tell you that you don’t have to protect me in here. Come on,” I said, pushing him step-by-step to the door.

  “Okay, partner. I’ll come back in five minutes.”

  I waited until I saw him disappear down the hall, and actually followed him to make sure he wasn’t hanging around spying on me. He wasn’t, or at least, not that I could see. I went into Hollis’s room. There was a hot chocolate and blueberry muffin on a black lacquer tray next to his bed.

  “Hey, where’d that come from?” I asked him.

  “Klevko brought it up. He said it was from Crane. Didn’t you get the same thing?”

  “Nah, Dmitri made me breakfast,” I said, and held up the granola bar.

  Hollis tore the muffin in half, then held out the cup to offer me a sip.

  “Thanks, chief,” I said, washing the delicious muffin down with a huge swig of chocolate. “I have to run. I just want to remind you about the storage locker. Meet me there after school. Here.” I gave him a scrap of paper with the address.

  “How am I supposed to get there?” he asked. “It’s all the way in Staten Island.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” I said. “Not hard to do when you have a personal limo and driver.”

  Dmitri came back exactly five minutes later, and together we raced to the bus stop. The nor’easter had dumped several feet of ice crystals during the night, and though it was just misting now, Dmitri said it would be back later. The buses were slow due to the horrible weather, and packed. Dmitri elbowed his way into the last seat on the bus and immediately pretended to fall asleep just like he’d done the day before. The traffic was terrible due to the storm, and by the time we arrived at Satellite North, it was nearly nine thirty. I’d missed my detention by a whopping three hours.

  “Can you find your classes okay?” Dmitri asked as we stomped the snow off our boots just outside the entrance. I nodded. “Fine, I will come get you at the beginning of lunch. Today you will begin working for me.”

  I wanted to tell him no, but because I didn’t have any lunch money and I’d already eaten that disgusting granola bar, I was in no position to turn him down. We went in together — Dmitri headed for the stairs while I raced to my English class. And that’s when I crashed into a huge, hulking mountain of a man.

  “Well, well, well, Mr. Lomax.” It was Mr.
Dickerson, in a tiny parka with an elastic bottom that rode up around his stomach. “I looked for you in detention this morning, but all I saw was an empty seat. Your empty seat, however, was quite well behaved.”

  “Listen, about that, Mr. Dickerson, the power went out in our neighborhood, and it took me forever to get here.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Leo. That means it will take you forever to get out of detention after school.”

  “Oh, sorry, Mr. Dickerson, but I can’t do it today. I have … um … previous plans.”

  “You’re starting to annoy me, Leo,” he said, a blood vessel on his neck twitching. The walkie-talkie on his belt blasted something I couldn’t understand, and he mumbled a few incomprehensible words back into it. “We’ll have to postpone this chat for now,” he said, “but you can be sure I’ll be discussing your truancy with your uncle.”

  Then he lumbered off in the direction of his next victim.

  I made a dash for my English classroom, and as I entered, I pretended to be breathing hard and winded. With a little ceremonial bow, I made my way to the only remaining desk, the last seat in the last row. My teacher wasn’t amused, but a few kids laughed. Diana was one of them, and as I settled into my desk while giving her a cocky smile, I realized my desk was right next to the crown prince of the Ukrainian Mafia, my good friend Pieter.

  “How you doing, honors boy?” he whispered. “Missed you in detention this morning. But we’ll find you and Dmitri after school.”

  I wished he had lowered his voice when he said the word detention. I’m sure Diana heard it, and after eight years without seeing each other, it wasn’t exactly the first impression I wanted to make on her. As the teacher put the homework reading on the board, I stole a few glances over at her. I could see how she was her mother’s daughter. The long dark hair, the native jewelry, the way she was tuned in to everything around her. But her eyes seemed sad, somehow. I wondered how she had survived at this school.

  After class, I was surprised when she joined me as we walked out into the hall.