The Cypher Read Online Free PDF Page A

shoulder and winked. Then he followed the butler out of the room.
    Thomas stood in the room, afraid to move. The room was spacious but it didn’t have any windows. Old furniture was arranged around a T.V. set encased in wood, old portraits hung from the walls, and a roman-style bust sat in each corner.
    The anxiety he had felt in the mansion was slowly being replaced by curiosity. In Fullton, he’d been to rooms that looked just like this one. His grandpa kept many things at home that he considered treasures. Grandma’s bell and little spoon collection, grandpa’s patches and uniforms from when he was in the Marine Corps. Even some of his dad’s toys and comic books from when he was a child, each one stirring a memory too precious to discard.
    This room was like that, a room full of memories.
    Who chose the plaid furniture? When were the portraits painted and who were the men depicted in the busts? What T.V shows were the owners’ favorites?
    He zeroed-in on the old T.V. Maybe that could tell him something more about the mansion’s owners.
    Thomas walked toward the T.V. and turned a knob. A little click sounded from the box, but the screen remained blank. He crouched and read the dials: one dial was the on/off switch and the other was a dial numbered from zero to two hundred.
    He tried the switch again but nothing happened. So he tried the dial, which only clicked with every number he turned. After giving it a couple of turns, he gave up.
    On top of the T.V. sat a small pedestal holding a black and gold cube that he hadn’t noticed before. It seemed to have just materialized when he was distracted with the dials.
    The surface of the cube was painted with gold filigree and shapes that seemed out of order, jumbled, as if someone had mixed it all up. Lines crisscrossed the surfaces of the cube, as if scrawled by a two-year old.
    But there was something there on the surface. The more he looked at it, the more he could discern shapes, lines that probably belonged to an eye, or a leg, or a tree.
    “It’s an Atheliol.” Bolswaithe startled him from the edge of the door. “An ancient puzzle. You might want to try it while you wait, young sir. It might be a long interview.”
    Thomas checked the cube and chuckled. It didn’t look that old. It seemed made out of metal. Apart from the golden filigree, it was completely smooth, not a blemish or scratch in its surface. A brand-new chromed car bumper would look old beside it.
    Thomas looked back at the butler – like the mansion itself, he wasn’t scary. Just oddly perfect for his job, as if he had been born and trained forever to fill the stereotype of the English butler.
    “Go ahead,” the butler encouraged him. “I’ll be back with water.”
    When Thomas heard his footsteps grow fainter, he hesitantly picked up the cube. He half expected to receive a little static shock from it, like the one he had learned to avoid after walking on his grandpa’s carpet and touching the doorknob. But nothing happened.
    The surface was warm to the touch and completely smooth. He couldn’t even feel the filigree painted on the surface. It was as if the gold lines were embedded on the Atheliol. He had played with a Rubik’s cube before and he’d even learned to finish them after his mom had showed him the little tricks used to solve it.
    His mother always finished the Rubik’s cube in less than a minute. Thomas watched in awe as his mother’s hands, lithe and delicate, fiddle with the cube, twisting and turning, until each side was the same color. And, as always, his mother would wink, then toss the cube into Thomas’s lap.
    “Betcha an ice cream,” she always teased him, and Thomas had decided to learn and beat her at her game.
    He had learned, first by himself, then by asking her for help.
    But he had always lost the ice cream.
    Thomas sighed. He missed his mother. It had been eight months since his parents disappeared. He held the Atheliol in his shaky hands. His mother would