An hour and a half later, all but Dan had returned to the tent but none of them had anything positive to report. Mart, Jim, Honey and Diana each had a short sleep. Brian remained awake to work on his plans, while Trixie paced around and interrupted him.
At last, Dan touched down in front of the tent and found himself the centre of attention among all who were awake.
“Any luck?” Trixie caught him by the arm.
“You didn’t find him?” Di asked, catching the look on his face. Her own face crumpled. “Something terrible’s happened to him; I just know it. And it’s all my fault.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Dan answered. “Just because I can’t find him doesn’t mean he’s not okay.”
Trixie snapped her fingers. “Did you try the Glen Road Inn?”
Dan stared at her. “Why would he even be there?”
“Just a hunch,” she answered. “And you can check in on the girls while you’re there.”
“Now, I’m not sure about that. I don’t want to get caught peeking in windows.”
“Take Honey or Di with you.”
“Honey’s sleeping,” Brian put in.
“Well, Di’s probably more useful anyway, because she can get you out of any trouble you get into.” She waved her hands at them. “Off you go.”
Dan shrugged, took hold of Di and lifted off.
“I’ve missed this while we’ve been here,” she admitted, as they sailed over the treetops. “I don’t like forcing people to do things they don’t want to do.” She sighed. “And I don’t know how I’ll live with myself if something’s happened to Dan.”
“Why are you so worried?” he asked softly.
“The last time I saw him, he was at the lake.” A tear leaked from her eye and was whipped away by the wind. “I thought that if I could only get the other Di away, they’d all be okay, but when we went back, Mart and Brian were in the clubhouse and Dan was just gone.”
“You can fly a long way in not much time.”
She nodded. “I know that, in my head. But I can’t help remembering how both Honey and I thought one of them might drown before we could get them to safety.”
Dan set them down a short distance from the Inn and they approached it on foot. And there, on the doorstep, slept the other Dan. Diana ran to him, crying freely.
“Oh! He’s right here!” She sobbed a little, then brought herself under control. “I’m so relieved. He’s really okay.”
“Hey, don’t touch him; he’ll wake up.”
Di shook her head. “No. Trixie’s hunch was right. I must have accidentally influenced him to come here and go to sleep when I did it to the other Bob-White girls. And our Honey. That was by accident, too, only I knew that I’d done it.”
Dan glanced up at the building. “I guess he’s safe here for now. But where are the rooms we need to check?”
“Around the other side of the building,” she answered. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
They walked around to the back and Di pointed out the windows she thought might be the right ones. Dan lifted them both up to that level and Di peeked inside.
“Yes, this is the right room,” she told him at the first one. “That’s Honey and she’s asleep. Try the next one over there.”
“This right?”
“Yes. That’s me.”
“And this one?”
“It’s Trixie. They’re all sleeping.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay. Let’s go back.”
He swooped up and over the roof.
When they touched down back at the tent, Di lost no time in sharing the news.
“Everything’s okay. Dan’s sleeping on the doorstep and Honey, Trixie and I are sleeping in our rooms.”
Trixie closed her eyes and exhaled. “That’s a relief. How about if we get an early breakfast and we can be up at Ten Acres at first light?”
“How about if we all get a couple of hours’ sleep?” Brian countered. “We’ll all do better if we have a rest.”
His sister rolled her eyes. “Fine. But Di has to influence everyone to wake up at the right time.”
“Someone had better go and rescue the other Dan before anyone wakes up at the Inn,” Dan noted.
“I’ll do that,” Brian offered. “We should choose someone to be in charge of breakfast. Maybe Jim could do that – he’s had more sleep than most of us. Di, can you influence him while he’s still asleep.”
She nodded, in resignation. “I guess I could.”
They talked through times for a few minutes, then Di did her stuff.
“Right. Let’s all get a little sleep,” Brian directed. “Find yourselves a space.”
They squeezed themselves in, either inside the tent or in its doorway on the mat someone had laid there, and under Di’s influence, drifted off to sleep.
“Wake up!”
Di blinked, trying to make sense of what was happening around her. This time, the person leaning over her was Trixie, but she couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out if it was the Trixie from her own reality or the alternate one.
“Just wake up, okay?” Trixie gave her a shake.
“Okay. I’m awake,” Di answered.
“Great. Now, get up. Everything’s gone wrong.”
She rubbed her eyes and sat up. “Which everything?”
“All the everything!” Trixie scrambled to her feet. “When Brian went to get Dan, he was gone. And so Dan and I went to check on the girls and they were gone. Then we checked on Brian and Mart and they were gone. And then, of course, we had to check on Jim and he was gone, too. We don’t know where any of the other set of Bob-Whites are.”
“And they’re all scheming things,” Di added, following her friend out of the tent and into the chaos just outside. “Brian and Mart were after Jim and so was Dan. Trixie, Honey and Diana were planning on doing something to the boys. And Jim was talking about revenge against Brian, Mart and Dan.”
Trixie’s eyes widened. “We should all be at Ten Acres!”
“You’re right,” Honey agreed, from right behind her. “That’s where they all expect their victims to be.”
“But that’s the place that we want everyone to avoid,” Brian pointed out.
“Which is why we need to get there and prevent a disaster,” Trixie replied. “Dan, you take Di ahead and see if she can calm everything down long enough for the rest of us to get there.”
“Right.” He grabbed Di and lifted off. “Sorry. This is not going to be as fun a flight as last night.”
She groaned. “I know. I hate flying at this time of day. You spend half your time dodging between trees, trying to avoid Mr. Lytell.”
He smiled and swung them around a clump of trees. “At least this isn’t far away. We’ll be there in a minute.”
They landed a short distance away from their destination and began circling closer on foot.
“Look,” Di breathed. “The girls are over there, but I don’t know what they’re doing.”
“Whatever it is, I don’t like the look of it,” he answered, then pointed in a different direction. “There’s Jim.”
“Oh! Dan is sneaking up on him!”
“And so are Brian and Mart.”
Di groaned. “They’re all too far away. But I can get the girls from here.”
Trixie dropped what she was doing and began singing ‘Tomorrow’ from the musical Annie at the top of her voice, what she lacked in knowledge of the words and tune made up in enthusiasm. Honey and Di barely hesitated before joining in.
As their antics drew the attention of the male part of their club, Dan and Di took the chance to get closer.
“I think I can get Dan from here.” She concentrated. “Yes, I’ve got him. But I don’t think the others are close enough, yet.”
Dan began to line-dance in time with the girls’ singing. Brian and Mart caught sight of him and hooted with laughter. They approached him openly to get a better look.
“Come on,” regular Dan urged Di. “Get closer and do something to them.”
Di crept forward, mind scrambling for another idea. She concentrated on Brian and Mart once they came into range and they began to impersonate John Travolta’s character from Saturday Night Fever. Brian’s impressive pout and disco stance surprised a laugh out of the Dan beside her.
“Now for Jim,” he urged. “Can you get him from here?”
“I’ll try.” She concentrated. “No. He’s still too far away.”
He took her arm and they ran, half-crouching, around to a closer vantage point. She tried again and this time Jim started yodelling.
“Maybe not the best choice,” Dan muttered beside her.
“It was what I thought of first.” She shrugged. “It just has to keep them occupied until the others get here and we can decide what to do.”
“It’ll take them a while to walk here,” Dan pointed out. “Influence them all to forget about pranks and revenge. Then, maybe, we can start walking them back to their own clubhouse or something.”
Over the next several minutes, Diana put her influence on each of the alternate Bob-Whites, while keeping the one that they were acting under. She manoeuvred them all into one group, but away from their campsite and the area that felt wrong. Before she had time to decide how to move them out, Trixie arrived beside her.
“What is that noise?”
“You mean Jim’s yodelling?” Dan asked. “Or your singing?”
“I meant the yodelling.” She screwed up her nose. “Can you make him stop?”
Sighing, Diana concentrated. Jim switched from yodelling to line-dancing without missing a beat.
“That’s better.” Trixie glanced over her shoulder. “Mart’s getting started on searching for the cause of all this and the others are helping him. I don’t think it’ll take very long; we can feel it really strongly, now.”
“Here!” a voice called in the middle distance.
Excited voices continued for a few minutes, then Honey ran over.
“We’ve found it! It’s a power amplifier, like Brian used that other time, only it’s gotten wet.” She waved at the dancing, singing alternates. “Can you bring them all down to the clubhouse? We need to make some decisions and Brian thinks we need all fourteen of us together to do it.”
Di looked at Dan and he nodded.
“Okay,” she agreed. “The two of us and the seven of them will meet the other five of us at the clubhouse. But you’d better go a different way to us in case we meet anyone along the way.”
Honey nodded and darted away to make the arrangements.
“Set them going and we’ll do short-hop flights to keep an eye on them,” Dan suggested.
Di nodded. The light of mischief came into her eyes and she concentrated. A short distance away, the seven alternate Bob-Whites formed an inverted V-shape and began singing the riff to the song ‘Thriller’ and doing a dance to match.
Dan snickered. “Funny. But I think they’d better walk.”
She smiled and released them from that influence, adding a new compulsion to hurry to the clubhouse. Several of them broke into a run.
“Come on. They’ll get there first at this rate,” Dan urged.
He picked her up and they flew along behind the group all the way to the clubhouse. Before long, the small room was filled to overflowing with fourteen Bob-Whites.
“Di! Influence them to be sensible!” Trixie urged in a whisper.
“I don’t think that’s going to work!”
“Well, at least influence them to listen to me.”
Diana did her best. The hubbub lessened until Trixie could talk over the top of it.
“Can I have some quiet?”
A hush fell.
“Has anyone who lives here noticed anything weird lately?” she asked. “Any changes in yourselves, maybe? Or each other?”
Several of the alternates shook their heads.
“Because we’ve noticed changes in all of you,” Trixie explained, “and we think we know what’s causing it.”
“Well, I don’t see any problems with how things are now,” Honey put in. “Everything’s fine.”
“That’s right,” alternate Di chimed in.
“I don’t think we want things to change,” alternate Dan added. “We like how things are now.”
With a barely-perceptible sigh, regular Brian began poking around in a drawer in the background. After a short time, while the alternate Bob-Whites still voiced their satisfaction with the status quo, he found what he was looking for. Regular Diana caught sight of a pair of wire cutters, as he slipped them into his pocket.
Alternate Trixie stood up and faced her double. “And if you don’t like how things are here, maybe you should go back where you came from, and not come back. Ever!”
“Yeah.” Trixie nodded slowly. “Maybe we should. Maybe we will.”
“Excuse me. I just need to do something.” Brian opened the clubhouse door and stepped out. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
Nobody from the alternate reality paid him much attention, but all of the regular Bob-Whites caught each others’ eyes. All of them knew what he had gone to do.
“We should make a formal agreement between ourselves,” Diana suggested, casting just a little hint of hypnotic influence with the words. “Because, really, if we’re not going to come here, then you shouldn’t come to us and none of us should go to any of the other realities, where we might accidentally meet each other, and we should have an agreement on how that works and what penalties there should be for breaking the agreement.”
“There should be clauses to do with each of the portal-forming areas,” regular Mart added. “We should make a list of them all and decide how each of them should be managed.”
“No. We just don’t use portals any more,” alternate Trixie argued. “All of you go back where you came from right now.”
“We’ll have to wait for Brian,” Honey answered.
Trixie shook her head. “We’ll send him after you.”
Honey kept her voice calm. “We’d rather wait and go together, thanks.”
“And we need to set out our agreement first, too,” Mart added. “Does anyone have a piece of paper?”
Alternate Trixie made an angry noise and went to get one, and a pen. She slapped them down in front of regular Mart.
“Write it down. Just a plain agreement that none of us will use any of the portals any more. And no big words, either.”
He sighed. “Fine. We’ll do it that way. But does ‘undersigned’ constitute a big word? And if I can’t say, ‘we, the undersigned,’ what phrase do you suggest?”
She shook her head impatiently. “It’s fine. Just don’t put lots of meaningless mumbo-jumbo in there.”
At the end of more than five minutes’ debate as to precise wording – facilitated mostly by the regular Bob-Whites, but sometimes inadvertently by their doubles – Mart settled down to write out the finished agreement. He made a big production of this, too, then of reading out the finished product.
“I want to make sure that this is exactly what we, collectively, mean to agree to, so I’d appreciate it if each of you listen very carefully,” he explained. “I’m going to read out the whole agreement that we’ve just decided upon, but if I haven’t written any of it out correctly, there’s still time to make corrections and try again.”
“Yes, yes. Get on with it,” Trixie urged.
“Okay. I’ll begin.” He cleared his throat dramatically. “We, the undersigned, do on this sixteenth day of August in the year of Two Thousand and Eight, agree to sever all ties between our respective realities. We agree not to form any portals between our own world and any others, including from Jim’s bedroom wall, the clubhouse storage room or bathroom, the Crabapple Farm laundry room, the Manor House stables, or in any other location as-yet unknown. We agree not to visit any realities other than our own, either by portal or by any other method as-yet unknown. We agree not to send any inanimate objects, persons, animals, birds, insects, miscellaneous invertebrates, microscopic organisms, trees, plants, fungi–”
He broke off as a wave passed over them all.
“What was that?” alternate Trixie demanded, jumping to her feet and swaying as another one washed past. “What did you send Brian to do?”
Her double shook her head. “I didn’t send him to do anything.”
“Fine, then. What did he go and do, of his own accord?”
“Wait!” Alternate Honey rubbed her head for a moment. “Trixie, what were we doing last night?”
A third wave sent all of them reeling, then Honey’s face contorted in horror.
“Trixie!” she cried. “What have we been doing?”
Alternate Trixie did not answer. Both her hands clutched at her curls and her breathing came heavily. Around the room, each of the alternates showed some sign of distress, discomfort, or just plain horror at their actions.
Alternate Honey looked around wildly. “Dan and Dan, go and get Brian and fly him back here. I don’t care if all of Sleepyside sees you, he needs to be here.”
The two looked at each other and shrugged.
“I’m not real sure that’s a good idea.” Alternate Dan glanced around the room. “And anyway, I don’t want to miss what’s happening here.”
“I can handle him by myself,” regular Dan answered, getting up. “Probably.”
He left the room, almost unnoticed.
“It looks like you’ve saved us from disaster yet again,” the other Brian noted. “I don’t know how to thank you, but please know that we do appreciate your help.”
Regular Trixie shrugged. “I think you all helped yourselves, in a way, before things got so bad that you couldn’t think straight.”
Alternate Diana groaned and put her hand across her eyes. “I don’t think we did, except by accident. I don’t think we had any idea that you weren’t thinking the same way we were.”
“It’s amazing we didn’t kill someone,” alternate Honey added, looking sick. “We were going to cover people in honey and birdseed and make them climb on the Manor House roof! And we thought it was funny!”
“We were going to make them bicycle naked to Croton-on-Hudson!” Trixie added.
Again, alternate Diana groaned. “We were going to take pictures of Dan flying and send them to the Sleepyside Sun.”
“You think that’s bad?” alternate Mart asked. “We decided that just shaving Jim’s head and plucking out all his eyebrows wasn’t bad enough. After that, were going to cover him head-to-toe in indelible blue ink.”
“Well, you’d have had to wait in line,” alternate Dan told him. “Because I’d planned out how I was going to catch Jim and fly him up to the top of that blue spruce with the broken top and hang him from it by his collar.”
Alternate Jim shrugged. “You’d have had trouble doing that if my plan had been enacted. I was going to become invisible – naked, of course, so I wouldn’t have had a collar to be hung by – and go around all of your houses to squeeze out your toothpaste tubes and fill them back up with white glue.”
From outside, they all heard Brian clearly say, “In future, I think I’d rather walk.”
“Oh, at last!” alternate Honey cried. “Get inside, both of you.”
“What did you do?” alternate Trixie demanded, almost before her brother’s double was in the door.
He took his time to find a seat. “This morning, we located a power amplification device up at Ten Acres. It had been enclosed in a plastic bag, but moisture had gotten inside.”
“It was malfunctioning?” alternate Honey asked. “Is this the same thing that Brian – I mean, our Brian – used a year ago?”
“It looks very much like it,” he agreed. “I’m not sure whether it was malfunctioning, or if it had been switched off and the moisture getting in simply completed a circuit.”
Alternate Trixie turned to her eldest brother. “Do you remember anything about this?”
He shook his head. “You know that the two Dianas made me forget about electronics. I even had to re-learn how to use my calculator.”
“Sorry,” regular Di squeaked.
He waved the apology away. “I almost destroyed both our realities. Having to re-learn a few things is a small price to pay.”
“So, you went up there and destroyed it?” alternate Trixie prompted.
The other Brian nodded. “The irrational thought, the disregard of safety and common sense was exactly what we observed last year, but this was all of you, and at a more extreme level. Obviously, you weren’t going to agree to fixing this, so someone had to take the responsibility.”
“Thank you.” Alternate Trixie caught his hand. “Thank you for helping us when we didn’t even want to be helped.”
“It’s no problem.” He smiled at her. “Bob-Whites look after each other. Even alternate Bob-Whites.”
“Tear up that agreement, Mart,” alternate Honey directed. “We have another agreement to make, but we don’t need to write it down. I propose that we agree that we’ll all keep an eye on each other – both here and in your reality – to make sure that none of us ever lose our common sense ever again. And that if we do, those who’ve kept theirs will save us.”
“All in favour?” regular Trixie asked. She counted the votes. “That’s unanimous.”
“I think there’s also something else we should agree to do,” Jim suggested. “We should make a plan to check for any other bits of electronics which might be left over from that time and to either destroy them, or put them in a safe place where they can be monitored.”
“Yes. I don’t know why we didn’t think of that in the first place.” Alternate Honey looked around the room. “Maybe we should plan some hunting parties.”
“That sounds like fun,” regular Diana commented, then she yawned. “But if you’ll excuse us, I think we’d all like to go and get some sleep before we do anything else. It’s been a long night.”
“Of course!” Alternate Honey began counting on her fingers. “If we use the sofabed here, the beds in our rooms at the Glen Road Inn – they’re paid for until tomorrow morning, though actually, we only paid for one person per room, so that’s only three more – we only need to find… how many?”
“We have a tent, too.” Regular Jim glanced around and found agreement from the others from his reality. “That will be plenty, thanks, Honey.”
“And while you’re sleeping, we’ll prepare a big lunch,” Honey promised. “But has anyone eaten breakfast, yet? Maybe we should start with a big breakfast, then naps, and then a big lunch together to celebrate.”
“Now, that sounds like a plan I can approve of,” regular Mart commented.
The End
Author’s Notes: A big thank you to Fannie (Jedi1ant), who stepped in and edited in record time when my regular editor, Mary, was too weighed down by real life. Your help is very much appreciated!
This story is posted in celebration of my seventeenth anniversary of becoming a Jix author. A big thank you to all those who help make Jix the wonderful place that it is. I am very thankful to have found it and been a part of it for so long. It also marks the point where I admit that this actually is a universe and therefore deserves its own page.
Return to the Reality Displaced Page
Please note: Trixie Belden is a registered trademark of Random House Publishing. This site is in no way associated with Random House and no profit is being made from these pages.