The Kidnapped Smile Read online

  Artania II

  The Kidnapped Smile

  Laurie Woodward

  Copyright (C) 2017 Laurie Woodward

  Layout design and Copyright (C) 2017 by Creativia

  Published 2017 by Creativia

  Cover art by Bukovero

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  About the Author

  To my mother, whose smile continues to warm my heart.

  Chapter 1

  Bartholomew Borax III sat in the third row trying to pay attention. Integers. Negative Numbers. Absolute value. The seventh-grader didn't understand them at all. How can something be less than one? Why would subtracting a negative from a negative make it get bigger? Or did it get smaller? Oh, dust bunnies! He didn't remember.

  “Bartholomew, do problem number three,” the hulking Ms. Buttsfert said, tapping the yardstick in her hand like a drill sergeant.

  “Me?” He sat up, heart pounding. This wasn't going to be good. Ms. Buttsfert absolutely hated him.

  “I don't see any other Bartholomews here.” The math teacher adjusted the frizzy hair piled high atop her head again, buut it did about as much good as trying to straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It only drew more attention to one of the spandex dresses she always wore. They were too tight for a woman her size, and the tight bright belt only made her weight more noticeable.

  A few kids in the back of the room snickered. Bartholomew tried not to look at them as he made his way to the front, but he couldn't help it. No way! Not Gwen and Zach! He thought they were starting to like him. Red crept up in his cheeks.

  “What is negative seventeen minus negative twenty-four?” Ms. Buttsfert shook her head as her frizzled hairdo wobbled.

  Bartholomew picked up the blue marker and made the stick figure his teacher had taught them to use. “Okay, he's negative, so he faces right?”

  “Left,” she corrected.

  “Yes. He starts at twenty-four.”

  “No, Bartholomew,” Ms. Buttfert growled. “This is a subtraction problem. Begin with the first integer.”

  “Seventeen? But it's smaller than twenty-four. You can't start there.”

  “Class, is there anyone who can help Bartholomew?”

  Jose Hamlin was the first to raise his hand. He always got math problems right. Probably meditated about them.

  “Okay, Jose.”

  When the boy with the long brown ponytail walked up to the front of the room, his tie-dyed t-shirt seemed to blink the word idiot at Bartholomew to the class's nods. Jose picked up a whiteboard marker and rewrote the problem. “Negative seventeen. Like seventeen minutes late to meet your buds at the skate park. Then you realize, dude, your watch is totally messed up. It's even twenty-four minutes fast, so you get to erase all those seventeen minutes.”

  He drew a clock under the number line like this:

  * * *

  -17-16-15-14-13-12-11-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

  * * *

  “You keep moving twenty-four steps until you get to positive seven, and you have the answer. Positive seven. You've actually got seven extra minutes to chill before meeting your buds.”

  Bartholomew dropped his jaw. How could this boy relate something so abstract … so hard … to regular life?

  “Correct, Jose.”

  “Skateboarding rules!” Jose said with a fist pump.

  Several kids in the class giggled and cheered until Ms. Buttfert slammed a book on the desk and ordered silence.

  Bartholomew glanced at Alex Devinci and thought about their adventure in Artania the year before when the two of them molded weapons for an army of Egyptian gods. Later they'd skated double in and out of tunnels and around stalagmites to save captured pharaohs. Bartholomew hadn't fallen once. But it was in a magical dimension. Back here on Earth, I can't even visit, much less skateboard with Alex, Jose, and the gang.

  Shuffling to his seat, Bartholomew tried to pay attention, but he simply couldn't focus. He hated math. He hated numbers. You couldn't be friends with a number. You couldn't talk to them or learn about life from them. They stood in neat little rows like his mother, waiting for you to mess up, so you'd have to wipe them away, make the paper all white and pretty, and start all over again.

  Without realizing it, he doodled on the paper. Curly cues became the outlines of the gods Osiris, Isis, and his friend Horus. Next, he drew swords in their hands, so they could fight the hunchbacked Shadow Swine. A smile crept to the corners of his mouth as he imagined the Egyptian gods defeating those monsters.

  The patrolling Mrs. Buttsfert stopped at Bartholomew's desk and stomped one foot. Even though she wore sensible brown pumps, it was as loud as an entire platoon on the march. “Young man!”

  Bartholomew slammed his back against the chair, leading to more sniggers. He tried to hide his paper with his hand, but Mrs. Buttsfert snatched it from under his arm. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  When she pursed her fat lips, Bartholomew tried not to stare at the blonde moustache on her upper lip where whiskers stuck out as bristly as an old broom.

  Luckily, she was too angry to notice.

  The plump flesh on her arms rippled as she shook the yardstick. “If you think that wealth gives you privileges, you are sorely mi
staken. Detention after school.”

  “W-wha?” Bartholomew stuttered at the brink to argue until her mustached lip twitched angrily, and he lowered his head. “Yes, ma'am,” he said.

  “Start again.”

  Bartholomew nodded miserably. What was Mother going to say? A Borax in detention?

  His life was one horrible division problem with repeating decimals of misery.

  “I can't take it anymore,” he complained to Alex at break. “First school, then hours of tutoring with Mr. White. Next dinner, where Mother frets about every crumb and germ.”

  “I know, dude. Met her.”

  “At the table, she reminds me of how Father drowned in a mud puddle before I was born, making me feel even worse. So to make her happy, I take yet another bath, and when I'm completely exhausted, I get to do my homework.”

  “Man, that's messed up.” Alex shook his head, sun-bleached hair reminding Bartholomew of all the hours at the beach he never got to be part of.

  He'd barely set foot on the pier since moving to Santa Barbara the year before. Too many germs for Mother.

  “You know if I fail, it's homeschooling again,” Bartholomew reached into his pocket for the small bottle of hand sanitizer he always kept there and squirted a dollop into his palm.

  Alex patted Bartholomew's shoulder. “No way that's happening. I'll help you.”

  They stood and waited. Alex patted Bartholomew's shoulder again.

  Would his friend's touch bring the visions back? They hadn't seen that world beyond for nearly a year.

  For a second, Bartholomew thought there was a glimmer. His head shot up. He blinked. No, only the sun breaking through the fog. Two seconds passed. Four.

  Ten.

  “Come on, Alex. Cool the love fest and eat! Pizza's almost gone,” Gwen called from across the quad.

  Alex glanced at the group of chattering kids seated around steel picnic tables. “You mind?”

  “No. You go ahead. I'm not hungry.”

  Alex jogged off to join the rest of the kids flicking olives and shoving slices of pizza in their already full mouths.

  After school, Bartholomew was horrified to see the meanest kids in school, Conrad Fugate and Tybold Kilgore, in detention. Not that he was surprised. Con and Ty were always in trouble for cussing, bullying, or torturing any kid who was little or weak. Bartholomew had his own run-ins with them, so he tried not to look their way as he signed in.

  Ms. Buttsfert jowls wobbled as she barked, “You're one minute late.”

  “I-uh…”

  “You think because you're rich, the rules don't apply to you?” She didn't wait for an answer to add, “Double detention.”

  “What? But–”

  Ms. Buttsfert's glare cut his words short. Bartholomew mumbled an apology and took a seat.

  While the grumbling Ms. Buttsfert wrote problems for the detention students to solve, Bartholomew noticed Ty raise his eyebrows knowingly. He looked like a strange breed of chicken as he bobbed his purple-fringed mop of hair at Con. Ty pointed at her book as this thick-necked cohort gave him a thumbs-up, making Bartholomew wonder what wicked plan they were hatching now.

  Until he saw the book's cover: Math Assessments Answer Key, and he suddenly realized why the bullies were smiling.

  Because here was the solution to all Bartholomew's problems.

  Yep, with that book he could handle it all: Boring math and the hours with Mr. White filing his fingernails every other minute … even Mother crying filth each time she saw the slightest speck. It would be okay because he'd get to stay in school.

  In that moment, he was an uncaged sparrow.

  Only one question remained: How the bleach bottle was he going to get that answer key away from Ms. Buttfert?

  Chapter 2

  Alex stood at his mother's bedside watching her sleep. Her dark curls framed her face like a halo. He thought about touching them but didn't. She needed her rest. Even after a year, her heart was still weak, but color was returning to her cheeks.

  Searching her face for every nuance, Alex took one more mind photo before tiptoeing out of the bedroom. With his fluffy-eared Australian shepherd Rembrandt trailing behind, he headed straight for his art center in the garage.

  It wasn't as nice as the one back in Boulder, but Dad had managed to set up one corner with an easel, some crates full of palettes, and his paints. When the side door was open, light streaming in was pretty cool.

  He walked to the wooden shelves on the wall and grabbed a piece of canvas before settling onto a paint splattered stool with Rembrandt at his feet. “True art,” he said, remembering what the Artanians told him the year before.

  Alex had always loved to create but didn't know that each painting possessed powers until sixth grade when he and Bartholomew ventured into a magical world. There, he discovered an amazing secret: All art was alive. Every time someone painted, sketched, or sculpted, a living creature was born in Artania.

  But his and Bartholomew's art did more than only give birth to a new Artanian. Theirs was special—very special.

  Their creations guarded sleeping people everywhere from an evil race of beings. These dream invaders, the Shadow Swine, tried to turn humans away from creating. So Alex was always careful to make every painting both strong and beautiful.

  Alex closed his eyes and saw Mom's face; that small nose, dark lashes, and brilliant smile as white as moonlight. Her olive skin was flawless. Even after the heart attack, not a single blemish in sight.

  There were lines around her eyes. Calling them laugh lines, Dad said, “Those are from all the giggling Mom did when she finally got the baby she wanted.”

  “What baby, Dad?” Alex would ask on cue.

  “Why … you, curly top,” Dad always replied, tousling his hair.

  As he dipped the paintbrush in the palette, Alex smiled at the memory. Slowly his hand moved over the page. The eyebrows. The nose. Oval face. The brush moved faster. He outlined curls, soft lips, and joyful lines radiating from both eyes.

  His hand flew over the page like a skater racing down El Viento Hill. He painted 180s, kickflips, an ollie or two. In no time, it was done.

  He paused. Almost there. After trimming a bit from the chin, he carefully filled in the background. Alex's dog blinked up at him with silver blue eyes. “Hey, Rembrandt.” He grinned at the face striped black and gray. “Whadya think? Will Mom love it?”

  “Love what, kiddo?”

  Alex started. Nearly falling out of his chair, he glanced up. Dad stood there, both hands in the pockets of his slacks. “I'm painting Mom.”

  Charlie Devinci crossed the room and rested a hand on Alex's shoulder. He was silent for long moments then cleared his throat. “It's amazing, Alex. It looks exactly like her. More, even.”

  “Thanks. When I'm done I'm gonna frame it and give it to her.”

  “You're right. She'll love it.” Dad's voice cracked.

  Alex looked up again. His father changed this last year. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his crooked mouth was pinched and drawn. He didn't appear as strong as he used to before that terrible day. Going on runs wasn't such a priority anymore. Was Alex wrong or had his hairline receded in the last couple of months?

  “Mom's sleeping.”

  “I know. I checked on her as soon as I got in.” Mr. Devinci rubbed Rembrandt's ears but didn't look at Alex.

  “She looks better lately, Dad.”

  “She does.”

  “Maybe soon she'll be her old self again, huh?”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  Alex wondered if there was something Dad wasn't telling him. Had there been some new test the doctors did? He didn't ask, though. He'd rather think she was healing. Like magic. Like one of his creations in Artania. He imagined how creating true art would somehow fix her heart for good.

  “Well, I'm going to attempt to fix dinner. How does spaghetti sound?'

  “Umm… fine,” Alex replied doubtfully.

  “I know.
I'm not the gourmet cook like Mom, but we can't eat take-out every night. Dr. Bock says the perfect parent provides nutritious—”

  “Need any help?” Alex cut Dad off before he could launch into a full-blown Dr. Bock lecture. Alex's dad bore two passions: numbers and quoting from the latest edition of Dr. Bock's How to Be a Perfect Parent. As a math professor at UCSB, he could work equations to his heart's content, but Alex heard enough Bockisms in his twelve years to write his own parent guide. Did his dad ever get enough of them? Luckily, though, he was easy to distract.

  “Umm…” Dad tapped his chin. “I do have midterms to grade… and the equations… but no, you working on the sketch is all the help I need.” He tousled Alex's hair and left the room.

  Alex shook his curls back out. One of these days he was going to have to tell Dad that he was too old to get his hair ruffled.

  Rembrandt nuzzled Alex's knee, but Alex was staring at his painting. It still needed something. The dog nosed Alex's leg again.

  “Okay, boy,” Alex bent to bury his face in soft fur. He felt cool metal against his chest and reached for the pendant inside his t-shirt.

  When the Artanians gave him the ankh the year before, the goddess Isis explained how it was a symbol of everlasting life. Trying to remember her words, Alex hung it in on a corner of the canvas and traced the necklace's outline with one finger.

  “We are part of the eternal life force when art is true,” she had said.

  Alex studied the ornament. To create the loop at the top of the “T” just right, he added the tiny links of the chain first. Then, careful not to change the lines on her neck, he painted the ankh. The gold draped towards the left and her heart.

  Alex slipped the pendant back over his head, placed the brushes in a can of water, and retreated a step. The ankh hung gently on her long neck.

  It was Mom and a little more. She was surrounded by a glow. Odd. He hadn't remembered putting that in.

  Of course, some things happen when we create that we have no knowledge of. They simply come. From the stars. Or the sky. Or sometimes from a dimension far away—another world.

  Chapter 3

  Deep below Artania, the screams pierced the air. The howls echoed down the mountainous stalagmite, over the sulfuric River of Lies, and throughout the cavernous Subterranea. Every Shadow Swine throughout Lord Sickhert's domain cringed at the sound.