Knock (Then Duck)

The first day of summer in Windle Bay was very, very boring.

Windle Bay was a small town by the sea. It had a harbor full of fishing boats, a white lighthouse, and a big green mountain right behind the houses. Most weeks, the biggest news in town was about seagulls.

Miles and Beno sat at the window table of the Harbor Cafe with two mugs of hot chocolate.

"Six weeks," said Beno. "Six whole weeks of summer. And we've already done everything."

"We've done one thing," said Miles. "We came here."

"Exactly. Everything."

Miles looked out of the window. A seagull was standing on the wall outside, staring at a man with a sandwich.

"Look at him," said Miles. "He's got a plan. I'm calling him Gordon."

"Why Gordon?"

"He looks like a Gordon."

Beno looked at the seagull for a long time. "He DOES look like a Gordon."

Outside, Gordon hopped onto the man's table, grabbed the whole sandwich, and flew off with it.

"Go, Gordon!" said Miles.

Mrs. Pike came over with a plate of toast they hadn't ordered. She ran the Harbor Cafe, and she knew everything that happened in Windle Bay, usually before it happened.

"Eat that," she said. "And Beno, whatever you're thinking, the answer is no."

"I'm not thinking anything," said Beno.

"You've got your thinking face on."

"This is just my face."

"Then your face is thinking," said Mrs. Pike, and she went back to the counter.

Beno waited until she was gone. Then he leaned across the table.

"Miles," he whispered. "I've got an idea."

Miles put down his toast. "What is it?"

"A catapult."

Miles's eyes went wide. "A CATAPULT? A real one? How big?"

"Huge. We build it on the hill. We launch a ball so high it comes back down with snow on it."

"Yes! YES! What do we build it out of?"

Beno counted on his fingers. "My dad's old ski poles. Two stretchy cords from the garage. And my old yellow pencil case."

"I'll bring tape," said Miles. "You can never have too much tape."

From behind the counter, without looking up, Mrs. Pike said, "Please don't launch anything at my cafe."

"We won't!" said Beno.

"We'll launch it the other way," said Miles.

Keep an eye on that catapult. It's going to matter later.

The hill above the harbor was steep and grassy, with a few prickly bushes and a small group of sheep. The sheep watched the boys carry the ski poles up the path. They did not look impressed.

"Do you think they want to watch?" said Beno.

"They're already watching," said Miles.

"Should we wave?"

Miles waved. The sheep did not wave back.

It took them all morning to build the catapult. They pushed the ski poles into the grass, an arm's span apart. The poles fell over. They pushed them in deeper. One fell over again. Beno tied the stretchy cords to the tops of the poles, one red and one blue. Miles unzipped the yellow pencil case and tied it in the middle of the cords, for a pouch. Then he taped the knots, then taped them again, then taped the tape.

Beno pulled one of the cords to test it. It slipped out of his hand and snapped back against his arm.

"OW. It bit me."

"Cords don't bite."

"This one does. This one's angry."

He tied it on anyway, very carefully, keeping one eye on it the whole time.

At last it was finished. They stood back to look at it. One pole leaned to one side. The other was propped up with a rock. The pencil case swung in the breeze.

"It's perfect," said Beno.

"It needs a name," said Miles. He thought hard. "The Flinger."

"Why the Flinger?"

"Because it flings."

Beno nodded slowly. "That's actually the best name I've ever heard."

Beno put his old red ball in the pencil case. Miles held the poles steady, one in each hand. Then Beno grabbed the pencil case and walked backward, one step, two steps, ten steps, until the cords were stretched so tight they creaked like an old door.

"On three," said Beno. "One..."

Miles noticed something. Miles always noticed things. Beno wasn't aiming at the empty field behind the hill, where they'd agreed to aim. He was aiming a little to the left. Down the hill. Toward the harbor road, and the row of shops, and the back of Nell's Hardware Shop.

"Beno, wait. I think it's pointing at..."

"THREE!"

Beno let go.

The cords snapped forward with a loud TWANG. The ball shot out of the pencil case and into the sky. It went up and up, a tiny red dot in the blue, and for one amazing second it looked like it might never come down.

Then it came down.

It flew over the bushes, over the path, over the harbor road, and straight through the back window of Nell's Hardware Shop.

CRASH.

Nobody moved. Not Miles. Not Beno. Not the sheep.

Then a small puff of green smoke floated out of the broken window.

"Was that us?" said Beno.

"We don't have smoke," said Miles. "Do we have smoke?"

"We have ski poles."

One of the sheep went back to eating grass.

"Should we run?" said Beno.

"No," said Miles. "We should go down there and say sorry. And get your ball back."

Beno thought about it. "Can we run away just a little bit first?"

"No. But we can walk there fast."

So they walked down the hill very, very fast.

Beno practiced what he was going to say all the way down the hill.

"Hello. We're very sorry. Our ball went through your window by accident. It was the catapult's fault."

"You can't blame the catapult," said Miles. "We built the catapult."

"Fine. It was the pencil case's fault."

"You can't blame the pencil case either."

Beno walked faster. "We could say a seagull did it."

Miles stopped. "Not Gordon!"

"No! Not Gordon," said Beno quickly. "A different seagull. A bad one."

"Gordon only steals sandwiches," said Miles.

They both burst out laughing, and laughed all the way down the harbor road.

Nell's Hardware Shop sat in the middle of the harbor road, between the bakery and the place that fixed boat engines. The front window was full of buckets, ladders, watering cans and a sign that said EVERYTHING YOU NEED, PROBABLY. A bell jingled over the door when they went in.

Inside, it smelled of wood and oil and something burnt. There were shelves from the floor to the ceiling, packed with paint cans, ropes, light bulbs, hinges, and jars and jars and jars of screws.

Behind the counter sat an older woman in a work apron, with her reading glasses on a cord around her neck. She was sorting screws into jars, one at a time. She did not look up.

"Back window?" she said.

He opened his mouth. All of his practice went straight out of his head.

"Yes," said Miles. "That was us. We're really sorry."

"It was an accident," said Beno. "We built a catapult, and it pointed the wrong way, and the ball went... that way. Into your window. Sorry."

The woman dropped one more screw into a jar. Clink. Then she looked at them over the top of her glasses.

"Catapult," she said.

"Yes."

"Homemade?"

"Yes."

"What did you use for the frame?"

Beno blinked. Nobody had ever asked him that before. "My dad's old ski poles."

"Hm," said the woman, and for a second Beno thought she might be smiling. "Not bad. Glass is easy. I'm Nell. I have plenty of glass." She pointed a screw toward the back of the shop. "Your ball is through there. Knock first."

"Then what?" said Beno.

"It's on the sign," said Nell, and she went back to her screws.

At the back of the shop was a narrow hallway, and at the end of the hallway was a door. The door had been painted blue a long time ago. There were scorch marks around the handle. And in the middle, in big hand-painted letters, was a sign:

KNOCK (THEN DUCK)

Then Miles read it out loud. "Knock, then duck. Why would you need to..."

Miles knocked.

From the other side of the door, a voice shouted, "DUCK!"

Miles and Beno looked at each other.

"Duck where?" said Beno.

"Duck how?" said Miles.

The thing is that nobody who comes to that door ever ducks.

The door flew open. Something small, silver and very fast whizzed out, straight between their heads, so close that Beno's hair moved. It bounced off a jar of screws, spun around twice in the air, and dropped into a bucket of water with a FIZZ.

The hallway went quiet.

A boy stood in the doorway. He was smaller than them, and quick-looking, and he had a headlamp switched on over his hair even though it was the middle of the day. A pair of goggles was pushed up on his forehead. Around his waist was a tool belt with more pockets than Beno could count. There was a smudge of something green on the end of his nose.

"Sorry!" said the boy. "Sorry, sorry. Are you okay? That was supposed to be a doorbell."

Beno looked at the bucket. The silver thing was still fizzing at the bottom.

"A doorbell," said Beno. "That flies."

"A doorbell that FINDS you," said the boy. "So you never miss a visitor. It's still a work in progress."

"That," said Miles, "is AMAZING."

The boy looked at Miles as if Miles had said something in another language.

Before anyone could speak, there was a clatter from inside the workshop, and a loud noise that went: Ding-DONG! Ding-DONG!

Something came racing down the hallway on wheels.

It was about the size of a dog. Its body was a dented silver toaster, with two bread slots on top and a patch of tape on one side. Its four legs were bendy vacuum cleaner hoses, with little roller-skate wheels on the ends. Its head was an old desk lamp, with two round flashlight eyes that didn't quite match and glowed a warm yellow. It had a shiny brass doorbell for a nose, two bent spatulas for floppy ears, a bicycle chain for a collar, and a long coiled spring for a tail, with a bicycle bell on the end.

The spring tail was wagging so hard the bell kept ringing.

"Ding-DONG!" said the robot. "Ding-DONG! Ding-DONG!"

It skidded to a stop in front of Beno, and dropped something at his feet.

It was his red ball.

"Is that..." said Beno slowly, "a dog?"

"That's Bolt," said the boy. "Please don't tell him he isn't."

Bolt looked up at Beno with his flashlight eyes. Then he spun around, zoomed back into the workshop, and came racing out again with a sock in his mouth. He dropped it next to the ball.

Then a spoon.

Then a whole broom, sideways, which got stuck in the doorway, so he had to back up and try again.

"We didn't throw any of those," said Miles.

"He knows," said the boy. "He just likes to be ready."

Theo had been inventing things for as long as he could remember. In all that time, nobody had ever said his inventions were amazing.

People had said other things. They had said, "What is that supposed to be?" and "Why is it smoking?" and, once, "Please put that down and step away from the fish tank." Kids at school mostly just said, "Weird." Then they walked off.

But these two boys didn't walk off. They walked in.

They stood in the middle of his workshop with their mouths open, looking at everything.

Theo looked at it too, trying to see it the way they did. Shelves full of jars of screws, nuts, springs and buttons, sorted by size and then by color. A long wooden workbench covered in burn marks. A whiteboard so full of drawings that some of them were drawn on top of other drawings. A small, neat hole in the ceiling.

"What happened up there?" said Beno, pointing.

Theo nodded at the old cooking pot on the workbench. "Same experiment," he said. "First try."

On the workbench, an old cooking pot sat in the middle of a puddle of green goo. It was still giving off little puffs of green smoke. Some of the goo had splashed onto the wall. Some had splashed onto Theo's nose.

"That's where your ball landed," said Theo. "Right in my experiment."

Beno winced. "Sorry. Really sorry. Did we ruin it?"

"No," said Theo. "It was going to explode anyway. You just helped it explode a little faster."

Miles laughed. It wasn't a mean laugh. It was a delighted, couldn't-help-it laugh, and Beno joined in, and then, to his own surprise, so did Theo.

"I'm Miles," said Miles. "That's Beno."

"Theo." He wiped his nose with his sleeve, which only spread the green around. "Nell's my grandma. I live upstairs."

Bolt rolled over and sat down on Beno's foot, which seemed to be his way of saying that Beno belonged to him now.

"How did you MAKE him?" said Beno.

Theo felt a grin coming, the big kind he usually tried to keep in. He started counting on his fingers.

"One toaster. One vacuum cleaner, for the legs. One desk lamp. Two spatulas. Four roller-skate wheels. A bicycle bell. A bicycle chain, for the collar. And a doorbell, for the nose."

Beno nodded seriously. "So a toaster, a vacuum, a lamp, two... spaghettis..."

"Spatulas."

"That's what I said."

Bolt wagged his tail. Ding-ding.

Miles had wandered over to the bucket in the hallway. He fished out the silver flying thing and held it up, dripping. It had tiny wings made from bottle caps and a doorbell button on the front.

"What's this one called?" he asked.

"Doorbell Prototype Seven," said Theo.

Miles turned it over in his hands. "What about the Doorbird?"

Theo thought about it. He thought about it for a while.

"That's better than my name," he admitted.

"Miles is good at names," said Beno. "He named a seagull this morning."

"The seagull didn't ask," said Miles. "But it suits him."

Then Beno pointed at something on the shelf, and asked, "What does THAT one do?"

And then Miles pointed at something else, and asked the same thing.

Theo told them. He showed them the self-stirring spoon (it stirred, but mostly it stirred the person holding it). He showed them the umbrella that opened by itself when it rained (and also, for some reason, when anyone sneezed). He showed them his glow-in-the-dark marbles, which weren't finished yet, and his talking can opener, which was finished, but which only ever said "hello" in a very low, worried voice.

Every time, Miles said, "That's AMAZING," and Beno said, "Can I try it?"

Theo had been asked "What is that supposed to be?" a hundred times. Nobody had ever asked, "Can I try it?"

Footsteps came down the hallway. Nell stood in the doorway with a measuring tape in one hand, looking at the broken window, then at the green goo, then at the three of them.

"Well," she said. "That window's going to cost you."

Beno's face fell. "How much?"

"One week," said Nell. "You two will help in the shop every morning. Sorting, sweeping, carrying." She looked at Theo over her glasses. "And in the afternoons, you can help him."

"Gran," said Theo, going pink. "I don't need..."

"Every good build needs more than two hands," said Nell. "Even yours." And she went back to the counter, measuring tape and all.

Miles and Beno looked at each other.

"We have to spend a whole week," said Beno slowly, "in a workshop full of inventions."

"As a PUNISHMENT," said Miles.

They both looked like they'd won a prize.

Beno was the one who noticed the whiteboard first. Not the small drawings. The big one in the middle, the one all the other drawings were crowded around.

It was a machine. A big one, with a round body and two huge claws at the front. It had headlights for eyes and a pointed nose. Arrows pointed at every part of it, with notes in Theo's tiny handwriting.

"What's that?" said Beno.

Theo went quiet. He picked up a marker, then put it down again.

"That's the biggest thing I've ever drawn," he said. "It's a digging machine. It digs. Through dirt, through rock... through almost anything."

"WHOA," said Beno.

"Where are you going to dig?" said Miles.

Theo looked at the drawing for a long moment.

"That's the problem," he said. "I don't have anywhere to dig to."

Bolt went still. The room went quiet, except for the soft puff, puff of the green smoke.

Miles didn't say anything. He had turned toward the broken window, where the morning breeze was coming in, and beyond the rooftops of Windle Bay, he was looking up at the big green mountain.