Chapter Twelve
The Game (Or is it Games?) Are Afoot!
(Meg is strapped to a school desk.)
Dr. Sno: What is your password to that fanfiction website?
Meg: You're taking this job a bit too seriously. Really, what are you getting out of all of this?
Dr. Sno: The satisfaction of torturing a student! Tell me the password!
Meg: Let me think... no.
Dr. Sno: Fine. (Pulls over a television) Maybe this will break you.
(Barney and Friends starts to play.)
TV: I love you, you love me...
Meg: ARGH! I HATE BARNEY!
Dr. Sno: Mwhahahahahaha!
The kidnappers stopped about a foot away from Basil. One figure wrapped in a dark cloak took two steps from the others.
"Do you have the Eye?" this cloaked form asked.
"Do you have the children?" Basil countered.
The form turned to the group behind him. "Get them," he ordered.
The group scuffled and moved around. Finally two of the mice brought a young girl and boy to the front of the group.
"Mummy!" the little boy cried when he saw Mrs. Butler.
"Michael! Rose!" Mrs. Butler shrieked. She ran forward.
"No!" Basil grabbed her arms and held her back.
"My babies! My poor darlings! Please, let me go to them!"
"Wait just a little bit longer," Basil whispered kindly to her. In reality he was furious with her. An unemotional approach would have been so much better considering that they were now going to have to bargain for these children's lives.
"Where's the Eye?" the leader of the group asked.
Basil cleared his throat. "You knew that we were on the trail of the Eye of Diom. You knew that we had to solve riddles to find out the location of the Eye."
"Yes, yes, I knew all that!"
"We were on the last clue, but we only solved it about half an hour ago."
The leader hesitated. "So you don't have the Eye?" he said in a low voice.
"No. But we-"
"Kill them," the leader barked to his men.
"No! No, you can't do that!" Mrs. Butler screamed, lunging for her children.
Basil ran forward to stop her once again. "WAIT! STOP!"
"We gave you enough time!" the leader snarled.
Mrs. Butler grasped Michael's arm, but was shoved aside by one of the mice. Basil ran to the side of the bridge. "We don't have the Eye, but we have the location of the Eye!" He pulled out a piece of paper. All of the mice froze. "It's all in here, the location of the Eye of Diom. Release the children, and I will give the location to you. But if you kill the children, then I will destroy this information, Mr. Hunter."
The leader threw off his hood, revealing a black mouse in his mid-thirties wearing thick glasses.
"Garret Hunter?" Mrs. Butler breathed. "You attacked my husband and kidnapped my children?"
Hunter grinned. "Nice to see you too Danielle. Detective," he continued, "you and Danielle here can take us to this location. Only when I have that emerald in my own hands will I let the little brats go."
A word of advice for using Toby: make sure Basil is with you. Even though Dawson and I would have picked another form of transportation any day of the week, he was the quickest way in London to get from place to place. Unfortunately, Dawson and I still did not have a good handle on controlling the basset hound despite having used him several times before on our own.
The first problem was that Arlen was terrified of dogs. It took us five minutes to convince him that Toby would be the best choice of travel. When we had that cleared up, we had to worry about the Master being still awake; but it appeared that he, too, was on a case.
Then there was Toby himself. Toby does not trust strangers unless Basil tells him to trust them.
Toby started to growl at Arlen as soon as we climbed through the mousehole.
"Big dog..." Arlen squeaked. "Bloody big dog!" He turned to go back through the hole.
"Oh no you don't," I said, grabbing his arm.
Dawson went warily up to the hound. "Toby... ah, yes... good dog... see, we have a friend... a friend..." Dawson articulated when Toby began to growl again. "Basil's friend, yes Toby... be a good boy... sit... sit... sit..."
Toby walked up to Arlen and began to sniff him. The wind nearly knocked us over.
"Toby, sit!" I commanded.
He ignored me too.
"Oh, we're wasting time!" I exclaimed.
Arlen was practically hyperventilating, gripping my arm in fear.
"Dog... big dog..."
I got an idea. "Toby, Basil's in trouble!"
Toby began to growl again, but directed his attention to some imagined villain rather than Arlen.
Dawson gave a sigh of relief. "Yes Toby, yes... eh, let's go!"
After a couple of wrong turns because it was hard to steer Toby in the right direction, we finally reached the Indiya Inn at Number Twenty-Eight Gloucester Court. Dawson, after much frustration, finally managed to get Toby to in an alleyway across the street.
"I thought it was Number Fourteen," Arlen said unhappily, looking at the faded number 28 over the door.
"It's probably room Number Fourteen," Dawson tried to explain.
Dawson and I headed for the door when Arlen stopped us. "Wait! We have to do this right!"
"Pardon?"
"We can't just barge into the place. That'd draw suspicion."
"But someone else could already be in there, stealing our emerald!" Dawson said. "We have no time to lose!"
"Or maybe, if we go barging in there, we'll prompt this person t'act more quickly or even with violence!"
I wrung my hands nervously. "So what should we do?"
"Pretend we're looking for a room. We'll try to request Number Fourteen."
"Oh, we don't have time for this!" Dawson said, shoving Gillespie aside. "This person will probably recognize us anyway!" He flung the green doors open and went inside; Arlen and I following close behind.
The Indiya Inn was dimly lit by a few smoke-covered lanterns, which cast dark shadows off the mahogany walls. The carpet was dark green, as was the ceiling. The place looked respectable, but dark and depressing.
There was no one at the front desk. I looked at the cubbyholes behind the counter for room Number Fourteen's location. "There's the key!" I said excitedly.
I climbed over the desk to get it.
"Someone's coming!" Arlen hissed.
I grabbed the key from its cubby hole and tossed it to Dawson. Then I threw myself under the desk.
The innkeeper, a nervous-looking man with a very curly mustache, came down the stairs. He peered at the two mice at the desk.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"We want a room," Arlen said.
"One room?" the innkeeper said as he went around the desk.
"Yes."
The innkeeper pushed a book towards them. "Sign in."
Dawson quickly wrote down the name Frederick Jones. Arlen put down Leo Tolstoy.
Dawson shot Gillespie a look of bewilderment.
"What?" he asked.
Dawson looked at the bookshelf above the innkeeper's head. While that personage checked the names Dawson pointed out a copy of War and Peace to Arlen.
"Whoops," he muttered, reading the name of the author. "I knew I had heard that name somewhere before."
"I beg your pardon?" the innkeeper said.
"Nothing," Gillespie said quickly.
"All right, here's the key to room Number Sixteen," the innkeeper said, taking a key from the cubby hole. He paused, studying the cubby hole next to it.
Dawson noticed he was looking at the hole for room Number Fourteen.
"Where's the spare?" the innkeeper muttered to himself. He looked down at the ground to see if it had fallen off the shelf.
"Ah... can you show us where Number Sixteen is?" Dawson asked, hoping to distract the innkeeper from searching for the key and accidentally finding Meg.
The innkeeper came out from behind the desk. "Where are your bags?"
"We haven't got any," Arlen sighed. "Some bloke stole them."
"Oh, I'm so sorry. Well, the room is just up the stairs and to the right," the innkeeper said, apparently seeing that there was no reason to bother going up there if he did not have to carry any bags.
Dawson looked helplessly at Arlen. The Yardie shook his head. "Too suspicious. We'll have to leave her where she is."
Dawson was not ready to give up. He deliberately knocked over a table before heading up the stairs.
The innkeeper watched in bewilderment as the chubby fellow knocked over a table and did not even bother to straighten it up again. "Some people," he muttered as he walked around the counter to set it back in place.
I scrambled out from my hiding place, but just as I stood up a young couple entered the inn. I ducked back behind the desk as the innkeeper came back to the counter saying, "May I help you?"
"I guess we are going to have to leave her there," Dawson said after witnessing the scene.
"Dawson, there were two keys for each unoccupied room. There was only one key for Number Fourteen. Our man is probably already in there," Arlen warned.
"Are you armed?"
"Always."
"Good. Besides, he has to understand the lines of the poem that went, 'Beneath an emperor, / And within another of the same' before he can find the Eye of Diom."
Toby saw Basil go into the building the fat mouse, the lady mouse, and the scared mouse went into with a group of mice. He wanted to whine to let Basil know that he was here, but he remembered being commanded to 'Stay here and be quiet.' Toby pawed at the ground, upset that he could not go to the detective.
I inwardly groaned when I heard another group of people entering the inn. I was getting cramped under this desk, and the fear of being discovered did not make the time pass pleasantly.
I wondered how Dawson and Arlen were doing.
"We're going to have to barge in on the fellow," Dawson whispered.
"Bad idea," Arlen muttered.
"Got any better ones?"
"No. All right, you cover me."
"No, you cover me. I have the key."
Dawson produced the key. He unlocked the door to Number Fourteen and swung it open.
The culprit held a bust of Julius Caesar in his hands taken from a mantle, his back to the mice. Above the mantle was a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte.
"Stop!" Dawson commanded.
The culprit turned around.
"You?" Arlen gasped.
Emma: Meg wants to get this up before her long week begins. Lots of cross-country practices and races and tests. Sorry for the short chapter and the cliffhanger. If she continues with the story without a chapter break, then you might end up getting one really long chapter.
Leigh: In reality, my sister is just being a lazy waste of life and doesn't want to write the next chapter.
Lizz: That's not true!
RAEB: Yeah, she was kidnapped by Sno.
Emma: Whatever! Ok, Meg's really busy in September, so next chapter update is uncertain right now! The good news is that she just got her school laptop and can write her stories from there if she ever finds the time to do so.