Chapter 3
As quietly as they could, Nick and Bill crawled across the dusty shed floor towards the metal box. There was an overwhelming musty smell that, mixed with odours of oil and grease, seemed to make the air as thick as sour custard. They could almost taste the rancid diesel fumes. The floor was made of set concrete and was icy beneath their knees and on the palms of their hands.
Suddenly, a very large spider scurried over Bill’s outstretched fingers, and made him shout in fright. He shot up and sent a tin of paint from the shelf next to him clattering to the ground. They both froze. After waiting for nearly a full minute in total silence, Bill let out a sigh of relief. Luckily, the sudden noise had not aroused anyone. They crossed the rest of floor and reached the box on the far wall. The light from outside did not reach that far into the shed so it was safe for them to stand to their full height.
“Pass me the torch,” whispered Nick.
Bill handed the torch to Nick who flicked it on but quickly shut it off again. The caretaker only lived about a hundred yards from the shed and Nick did not want to tempt fate again. Having found the box, Nick gently flipped it open and was quite surprised by what he found. Dimly lit buttons were set into a plastic panel that looked like a futuristic telephone keypad. It had the same numbers and letters as a normal telephone but it was very cleverly disguised in the old metal box on the wall. Nick just stared at it, uncertain what to do next.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It may be some sort of coded entry,” suggested Bill, leaning so close that his nose was almost touching the keys.
“Great! So what is the code then, genius?” asked Nick, not happy about the dead end they had run into.
“Don’t be so sardonic,” said Bill. “There is no such thing as an unsolvable mystery. You taught me that.”
Nick made a mental note to look up ‘sardonic’ in the dictionary when he got home. This was no time for explanations. Suddenly Nick had an idea.
“Can you see which buttons have been pressed?” he asked.
“Well, the 1 and the 3 look a bit dustier than the others,” said Bill. “They obviously haven’t been pressed recently so we can rule them out.”
“Yes,” agreed Nick, looking even closer. “Well spotted. It looks like the only ones that have been pressed are the 2, the 8 and the 9.”
Nick tried a few combinations of those numbers but all he got was a series of three soft beeps after every six buttons he pressed.
“So then, the code has to be six digits long,” noticed Nick, biting his lip and thinking hard.
“Hmnn… and it has to include the numbers 2, 8 and 9,” added Bill.
“The star button also looks much cleaner than the 7 above it,” said Nick and without thinking, started humming the rhyme that Mr. Hipobaum had been singing, When you wish upon a star.
Bill’s eyes brightened in the weak glow of the keypad. “That’s it! Mnemonic!” he said excitedly.
“Bill, this is no time for your stupid nic game!” grumbled Nick, feeling more than a little frustrated.
“No, Nick mnemonic. It is an easy way to remember things. Maybe Hippobottomus was singing that rhyme for a reason! A mnemonic is a rhyme where each word starts with the same letter as the word you want to remember. You know, like how to remember the names of the planets in the solar system …”
“My very energetic monkey jumps swiftly under nine planets,” recited Nick. “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.”
“OK, now think of the words to When you wish upon a star and look at the keypad.”
Nick did as Bill asked when suddenly it dawned on him. “I’ve got it!” he almost shouted. “There are letters underneath the numbers! OK, so the first letters of When you wish upon a star are W, Y, W, U, A, S which on the keypad is 999 827—six numbers!”
“Yes but 7 hasn’t been pressed,” Bill reminded him.
“All right then, 99982 and then the star key,” said Nick.
“Go on then, try them,” urged Bill.
Very carefully, Nick pressed the numbers in sequence.
9 – 9 – 9 – 8 – 2 – *
Beep, beep, beep.
“Are you sure you pressed them right?” asked Bill.
“Of course I’m sure! Watch I’ll do it again. Nine, nine, nine, eight, two, star,” said Nick, punching in each number as he said them.
Once again, the machine responded with an annoying ‘Beep, beep, beep!’
“Hang on a sec,” said Nick “The word ‘you’ can also be written as the letter ‘U’ and ‘U’ is on the number 8 button. That would make the sequence 9 8 982 then *.” He carefully pressed each button, whispering the numbers as he went along. The box let out a single long beeeeeeep and then there was a loud ‘click’. Suddenly the whole wall tilted forward like a garage door and then stopped. The boys stepped back, their sense of dread at what lay behind the door momentarily over-shadowing their triumph at cracking the code.
There was a soft light beyond the opening, which seeped onto the garage floor like a spill of watery yellow paint. Nick bent to lift the door from the ground. His heart was beating so loudly in his chest that he was surprised the sound didn’t rattle the nearby windows. He pulled the door open a little further. Taking a deep breath and looking once more to Bill for encouragement, he ducked under the opening. When he stood up on the other side, he could not believe his eyes.