Heaven Cent Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Stone, turn soft!” he ordered it.
    The stone changed color. It now looked like boiled mush.
    Dolph stared. “It worked!” he exclaimed, amazed.
    Marrow poked a bone finger at it. “It remains very hard,” he said.
    Dolph touched it. The rock was absolutely solid. It looked so soft it should sag at any moment and crawl across the floor, but that was not the case.
    “The perversity of the inanimate,” Marrow said. “I say it as should not.”
    Dolph knew what perversity meant, because his big sister Ivy liked to use it on him. It meant doing the opposite of what he was supposed to. “Well, maybe the other way, then.” He faced the rock. “Stone, turn hard!”
    The rock assumed a complexion like polished steel. It looked so hard he was almost afraid to touch it. Marrow poked it instead.
    “It has not changed,” the skeleton reported regretfully. “It appears that we can affect only its appearance, not its reality.”
    Indeed that seemed to be the case. The wall changed color freely, but never its hardness. They still could not get in.
    “But this must be the way,” Dolph said. “The Good Magician wouldn't set up something like this just to look pretty!”
    “So it would seem.”
    But they remained stumped. The wall would assume any color they asked, either by name or by description, but would not change in any other way. They could not get through it.
    Then Dolph had a bright idea. “Maybe we don't have to get in to it!”
    "Do you mean there is nothing worthwhile inside?*'
    “No! Maybe we can see what's in it instead of touching it!”
    “What good would that do?”
    “Let's find out!” Dolph addressed the wall: “Stone, be no color!”
    The wall became transparent, it looked like colorless gel, completely transparent.
    Now they could see through to the center. There was a small chamber there, and in the chamber was a piece of paper.
    “Very interesting,” Marrow said. “You have penetrated the secret. But I can not read what is on the paper.”
    “Neither can I,” Dolph said. “But I do know how to read; that horsey centaur Chem made me learn. Maybe if I can see it from above—”
    They went upstairs. They lifted the tiles from the floor of the room above and swept away the dust. There was the transparent stone. They could see the paper flat-on!
    Dolph put his eye to the stone and peered down, but the paper was too far away; all he saw was black markings.
    “Perhaps—” Marrow began.
    “If I became an eagle, with sharp eyes,” Dolph finished. “But then I might not be able to understand the writing I see.”
    “But perhaps you could trace it with your claw, and then—”
    “Gotcha!” Dolph became the eagle, and peered down through the stone. Now he could make out die writing on the paper.
    He made a mental note of the first of the lines, then moved over and scratched similar lines in the dirt they had moved. He returned for another peek at the paper, then scratched a few more lines in the dirt. After several such exchanges, he had it all.
    He returned to boy form and looked at what he had scratched. It said:
    SKELETON KEY TO HEAVEN CENT
    It was certainly a message! But what did it mean? Neither one of them could make any sense of it.
    It was now getting late. They had spent all day on this. But Dolph was pleased because he knew he had made more progress than his mother had expected, and more than anyone had before. This was a message left by the Good Magician himself, and surely it told where to find him. All they had to do was figure it out.
    “Skeleton key,” Dolph said. “Does that have something to do with you?”
    Marrow's tone indicated that he was smiling. “No, a skeleton key is -a magic key that fits any lock. Obviously only such a key can fit the lock of the Heaven Cent, whatever mat may be.”
    “So first we need to find the skeleton key. But that could be anywhere!”
    “It occurs to me—”
    “Ha! You have an idea! I can tell!”
    “—that there could be a pun