“This family just got a whole lot weirder,” Henry said to himself. He reached tentatively for the wand and yanked it out of the ground.

A slight shiver ran down his back when he put the wand into his pocket. He shook it off with a shrug. Then he unpinned the flap, closed off the cave, and followed the path to the house.

In the darkness, the hole in the ground silently sealed shut.

Chapter Eight

The sign stared back at Henry through the library window. He had arrived on his bicycle just as Mrs. Verrity was taping it to the front door. “Just a minute, Henry,” she said, her voice muffled by the glass. “Is it straight?”

“Perfect, Mrs. Verrity.” In a small town like Henry’s, it wasn’t unusual for local merchants to know the names of their best customers. And since school let out for the summer, Henry had become a library regular.

Over the last several weeks, Henry had continued to work at translating the books. He’d filled notebook after notebook with his neatest handwriting. Some of it made sense, but much of it sounded like complete gibberish. Also included within the main body of the text were lists of things that looked like recipes for what could qualify as some of the nastiest-tasting food on Earth—unless, of course, the food wasn’t meant for human consumption.

He was particularly grossed out by one recipe that contained a scab from a cat’s ear. Occasionally his cat would return home after a rough night in the neighborhood sporting fresh, oozing wounds. The thought of picking a scab from the cat made him shudder. And besides, he was sure that if he tried, he would receive a cat-scratch scab or two of his own.

The dictionary had become his best friend. So many of the words he saw in the ulexite were new to him. He looked up every one of them. When there was more than one definition, he wrote the one or two that best fit the sentence he was translating. As a result, his study habits as well as his vocabulary had improved remarkably.

One night at dinner, he slipped and used the word “transmogrification” when Brianna was talking about tadpoles turning into frogs. “Why, Henry, where did you pick up a word like that?” his mother asked.

“Um … I must have read it in a book,” he answered, which wasn’t a lie. But he made a mental note to be more careful.

The more he translated the old books, the greater his thirst for knowledge became. Whenever he arrived at a peculiar word or the mention of an exotic location, he felt compelled to do some research.