The House On the Corner
by
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It was getting kind of late by then actually, and the wind had picked up a lot. Back in the house some tree branches were knocking against a window, and Chester longed suddenly to be back in his own room. Auntie had a small telescope again and looked between some of the curtains.
"Do you have a bead on the Gutenwald's clock?" Jeffrey said impatiently.
"No, no," Auntie said irritably, trying to look.
"Then we'll just have to go back to William's place," he replied. "And Chester, you should get back home!"
"No one can go anywhere yet," Agent B said flatly. "They're coming already."
"It can't be!" Jeffrey said. "How did they find out? Did you get a telemetry on the spectroscopics? Did you equalize the infer-ometry? Mitigate the supposition readings?"
"Look!" Agent B said, handing Jeffrey a printout with millions of tiny numbers on it. Jeffrey looked up, his face blank, and then glanced at Chester. A whiff of rain was falling on the window.
"I'm sorry Chester, but they're almost here already. The invisible brain suckers."
"I can't go home then!" Chester said. "It's too dangerous!"
Jeffrey seemed upset. "We're researchers, Chester, not kidnappers. You need to get home now. I'll call your parents."
Jeffrey went into the other room, and talked on the phone for what seemed to be a long time, sometimes saying, "uh huh" or "alright". He came back in, and sat on the couch.
"They agree you can come to a vacation in Arizona. For a month."
"What? My parents would never do that!" Chester said.
"I know," Jeffrey said. "This means we have to leave now!"
Agent B spoke up. "Fortunately brain suckers move slowly, so they won't reach here for a while. But I don't know where all of them are."
Chester almost felt like crying. "But my parents..."
Jeffrey spoke, very comfortingly. "Don't worry, many people live very long and successful lives without their brains. But we know people who can reverse the process, Chester, and we will be working to get your parents back. We will be working!" Jeffrey said, his voice rising with strong determination against the wind.
"What are we doing?" William said, coming in quickly with Agent B's suitcase in hand. "Start the car."
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About the Book
For a long time, Chester, we... that is, Auntie and I and William, and well, a whole lot of people, well, we only sort of felt that something might be happening around us, something we weren't really sure what it was...
When Chester visits his Uncle William's stuffy house, he's only trying to avoid cleaning the hall bathroom. But a single clue written on a gum wrapper will send them all on a frantic journey - across many cities and through places unknown to society. At every step along the way, they may even meet new and interesting people. They may need a few cases of bubblegum toothpaste. And they may be tossed into a terrible war between unimaginable forces, a battle that no one even knows about...
About the Author
Michael Rains was often commended by teachers for creative writing, even to having an award category created for him at a school graduation. "When drawing, I can never make a straight line," he says. "I guess I write the same way." After living on a hill at the end of Sylmar for nine years, he has learned to write books in the same way that a cactus finds water. If he found three wishes, one would be to see his favorite white cat that ran off.