They walked down a long hall to his writing factory, where there was a teapot on a hot plate and bags hanging out of the lid and over the side.
Jack Masterson sat her in a big brown leather chair and gave her a cup of steaming hot tea full of sugar like he’d promised. And it was good. (To this day, she drank black tea with sugar, no milk.) She looked around the office in wonder and amazement. All the bookshelves. All the books. Masks. Model rockets. A glowing glass jack-o’-lantern in place of a desk lamp. Moths with eyes on their wings in glass boxes. A globe of the moon. A black bird on a driftwood perch by the open window looking out on the ocean.
A living bird.
“That’s a crow,” she said in shock when the bird moved.
Mr. Masterson raised his hand to his lips and shushed her.
“Raven,” he said softly. “Thurl is very sensitive. But he’s only a baby, so he’ll grow out of that. Come here, Thurl.”
He whistled and the raven flapped his wings, flew across the room to land on Jack’s wrist.
“Wow,” Lucy said. “What’s his name? Thurl?”
“Yes, Thurl Ravenscroft. No relation.”
“Relation to who?”
“Thurl Ravenscroft.”
She stared at him. He was weirder than she’d expected. She never ever wanted to leave.
“You have a pet raven?”
“‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’ the lovely Miss Emily Dickinson once wrote. Well, if that’s the case, then a wish is a thing with black feathers.” He smiled as he stroked Thurl Ravenscroft’s glossy black chest. “Black feathers, a sharp beak, and talons. Dangerous things, wishes. Sometimes they come to you when you call. Sometimes they fly away after biting you.” He put his finger up to Thurl’s beak, but the raven didn’t bite him. Jack whistled again and Thurl returned to his perch, a piece of carved driftwood.
“Wish carefully is all I’m saying.”
“I just wish I could stay here,” she said. “I want that more than anything.”
Mr. Masterson turned to her, put his hand to his chin, and eyed her like he was taking the measure of her. She must have passed some sort of test because he said then, “Lucy, would you like to see something I’ve been working on?”
“Sure,” Lucy breathed. “What is it?”
“There was a very strange man named Charles Dodgson—you probably know him as Lewis Carroll, yes?”
“Yes, I know him,” Lucy said eagerly.
“Personally?” Mr. Masterson asked.
“We’ve never met,” Lucy said. That made him smile.
“He asked a riddle in a book once. ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ I could never figure it out,” he said. “Nothing worse than hearing a riddle and not knowing the answer to it. Maddening, which was certainly his point. Because I was on deadlines, I didn’t have time to go mad. I made up an answer of my own.”
“You made up an answer?”
Jack Masterson grinned at her. According to his entry in the online encyclopedia, he was fifty-four years old, but at that moment, he looked like a little boy.
“Watch this,” he said and went to his window where Thurl was perched. Mr. Masterson opened the window wide. Then he picked up a little wooden lap desk, not much bigger than a cafeteria tray. With a flourish, he tossed it out the window. Lucy gasped. Was Mr. Masterson crazy? She ran to the window, looked out, expecting to see the writing desk on the ground below.
But the most amazing thing happened, Lucy told Christopher. The desk didn’t fall to the ground. It hovered in the air. Mr. Masterson held some kind of remote control in his hand.
“I put toy helicopter rotors under the bottom of the desk,” he explained as he pushed buttons on the controller. “Flies just like those little hovering thingos you see in the shopping malls.”
The writing desk fluttered and hovered and rose and fell and eventually came back to the window, where he snatched it out of the air.
Lucy knew at that very moment that Jack Masterson was the most incredible man who had ever lived and would ever live, and she had to be his sidekick, or she’d never be truly happy as long as she lived.
Jack Masterson asked her, “Now you know…why is a raven like a writing desk?”
* * *
—
Now, thirteen years later, Christopher answered the riddle.
His voice was soft and full of wonder as he said, “They both can fly.”
“Exactly,” Lucy said with a smile. “Turns out…with a little help, they both can fly.”
Christopher stared at her in wide-eyed amazement.
“Anyway,” Lucy went on—she’d promised Christopher that the story had a happy ending, so she better give him one—“I had to leave, of course. You can’t just show up on your favorite writer’s doorstep and actually move in with him when you’re thirteen years old. But he was supernice, and he did sign a book for me. And he said when I was older, I could come back and visit him again. So maybe I’ll get to do that someday.”
“Can I come with you?” he asked.
She was about to say yes, of course she’d take him anywhere, when she remembered what Mrs. Costa had said, that she was never going to be Christopher’s mother, not unless a miracle happened.
She needed to say something, though. Christopher was looking at her, waiting for an answer. Maybe now was the right time to tell him, to at least start breaking it to him that things weren’t going to work out the way they’d wished.
“You know, sweetheart. I wanted to talk to you about—” she began, but suddenly Theresa appeared in the doorway of the computer room.
“There you are,” Theresa said. Lucy saw she was holding a blue envelope in her hand. “This was just delivered for you. By courier. Hope you’re not getting sued, baby girl.”
She looked at the blue envelope. She looked at Christopher. Christopher looked at the blue envelope. Christopher looked at her.
He screamed. She screamed.
When you gotta scream, you gotta scream.
Tick-Tock. Welcome to the Clock.
In the middle of the deep green wood stood a house half-hidden by towering maple trees. Astrid had never seen a house so strange or so dark. Although the house was tall and wide and made of red brick, so much green ivy grew over it that she could only tell where the windows were by the way the moonlight glinted on the glass.
“Is that it?” Max whispered behind her. “Is that his house?”
“I think so,” Astrid whispered back. “Let’s go in.”
“It’s dark. No one’s inside. We should go home.”
“Not when we just got here.” Astrid wanted to go home too. Nothing would be easier than to go home. But they wouldn’t get their wish if they gave up now.
A light appeared in the window. Someone was inside.
Astrid gasped softly. Max gasped loudly.
They looked at each other. Slowly they approached the house on a path made of slick mossy stones. Max followed close behind her.
When they reached the door, it was so dark Astrid had to turn on her flashlight to find the bell. She pushed the button and waited to hear a ring.
She didn’t hear a ring but a voice, a weird mechanical voice.
“What can’t be touched, tasted, or held but can be broken?”
Astrid jumped back, which made Max jump. They were both panting with fear.