Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (26 page)

“So you can ask your golden compass if I am lying. Did you ever get a report on what happened to your first three small twilight gate machines you sent into my world? I don’t know what you call them. The little ones.”

“Spears.”

“Good name. The first three spears. Two were shot the same moment they emerged, and the third opened a gate for a minute or less, and then was negated suddenly. Does that match up with your info? If someone from our world sent spears through a small gate to try to open a bigger gate, just like what you did to us, what would happen? You would predict the exact moment, and have people standing by to smash them the moment they came through.”

“Are you saying your Astrologers foretold that we were making our breach?”

“You don’t get two questions. My turn.”

He sat back on his throne, gripping the armrests with his gloves, frustrated. “Ask.”

“These things you keep calling stars. They enslaved you. You don’t know what they are. They are just something or someone who gives you orders, using your star patterns and your calculus to tell you what to do, and cursing you like Oedipus was cursed if you disobey.”

“You blaspheme most delightfully, Undying One,” he said with a slight laugh, “But you do not ask a question.”

“The question is not mine, but yours. Riddle me this, Lord of Magicians: If the stars have enslaved you, and if serving them destroys your soul, and your reward for your loyal service is to be murdered by them, thrown out the window like a chamber pot, why serve them?”

Since he and I both saw that it did not matter what he said aloud to me in reply, he turned on the Moebius gate hidden in the rim of the hole in the ceiling of the cell, summoned an orb of darkness surrounded by the swath of many-colored fire, and vanished.

After he left, I was desolate. It was as if my thoughts were affecting my body.

I felt a strange rumble in my stomach, like I had swallowed a worm. Then, a moment later, the blue light began to shine from the floorboards, and my stomach quieted down.

I was alone, and I had water, and I had three days. After that, they were going to torture Penny.

If I could kill myself, they would have no reason to torture her. But I could not even do that. They were going to torture her. And I could do nothing.

I had heard of Penelope Dreadful two years before I met her. Me and the entire English-speaking world. I was thirteen at the time.

My dad had the habit, when he would sit in his favorite big chair with his back to the window and the sunlight on his lap, of shouting advice at the newspaper, or arguing with the editorials, even though all he was holding in his hand was, well, it was paper, a crinkly yet inanimate object.

Sometimes he would bring us in on the arguments with the newspaper. I always took Dad’s side. The newspaper could not give me an advance on my allowance because it was a crinkly yet inanimate object (as stated above, see last paragraph) and therefore it was not in my enlightened self-interest to side with the paper. My brothers reasoned likewise.

This particular morning, however, I sided with the newspaper and against my brothers and father. It seemed that this girl only two years older than I was had decided to circumnavigate the globe all by herself.

Well, herself and her pet bird: a tiny, fierce-looking thing with gray wings and white and black breast. The newspaper said it was a merlin. It was very photogenic. The papers were always showing the sailor girl in a big smile and small bathing suit with a big glove swallowing her slender wrist on which her small bird perched. She was very photogenic too.

Girl and boat and bird had set out from Cabo San Lucas at the tip of the Baja Peninsula in February; in March she rounded Cape Horn, and in May, the Cape of Good Hope. June found her in a remote area of the Indian Ocean, about 2,000 miles west of Australia, when a thirty-foot high wave capsized her forty-foot yacht and snapped off the mast. Radio contact was lost for two days while seaplanes and fishing boats in the area looked for her.

The newspaper said that her father, a widower of no fixed income who lived off of honorariums and patents, should be arrested and charged with child-endangerment, then tarred and feathered, hanged and sentenced to transportation for life. (I don’t know if that is what the newspaper actually said, or if that was my Dad’s special interpretation.) Because of the controversy, the World Speed Sailing Record Council officially discontinued marking the world record for solo world circumnavigation in the “youngest” category.

“What are they going to do?” Dad bellyached, “Pad the entire world in a pillow? Make everyone wear a helmet who wants to stick his head in a lion’s mouth? The whole world is turning into little girls! And now the only one with guts to do anything is — well, this little girl!”

Like I said, normally I’d agree. But there was something about being lost at sea which always sent a particularly cold little icepick of fear into my heart. It was one of the recurring thoughts that used to scare me at night. My brother once told me this creepy little story about how the second to last woolly mammoth in the world drowned in the sea, fighting waves against which even its great strength was of no avail. So I was not a fan of letting women drown.

The other reason was that when you disappear at sea, no one finds your body to put into the grave. When there is no body, they just put up a stone. I knew this because Mom’s funeral earlier that year had just been over a stone.

So the argument got pretty heated. Mom had not been gone long, and we had not gotten used to having no one around to break up fights. I remember at one point, I said, “If Grandpa Mikhail had let Mom get lost at sea, we’d never have been born!”

Alexei hissed. “Not us, but you’d have been born! We picked you up from the Monkey House at the zoo!”

Dad’s voice came out from behind the newspaper like the voice of Jehovah from the fires of Mount Sinai. “Son! You are never to speak that way.”

Alexei was now angry with me for getting him in trouble. He turned sideways on the couch we were sitting on, and kicked me with both legs, trying to trash-compact me into the corner where the couch arm met couch back.

I called out. “Da-aa-ad! He’s
picking
on me!”

Dad did not look up from the newspaper. “Grab his heel and his toes like I showed you, twist, and fracture his ankle. Try to make it a clean break.”

Mom was not there to stop word fights, so she was also not there to stop fight fights. I ended up crying, but I was getting too old to end up crying, so I started making regular stops at the gym, and paid more attention to my physical training and weapon practice. I figured the best way to prevent my brothers from murdering me, was to be fit and hale enough to murder them. There is an old saying:
If you want peace, prepare for war
. I think it is in the Bible or something.

It was not until later that I realized that Dad may not have been snapping at me or Alexei. He simply could not bear to hear about Mom. And his voice had sounded a little weird when he told me to mug Alexei. Maybe Dad was hiding behind that paper until he had a chance to wipe his face, and he needed the three-way wrestling match as a distraction. Dobrin joined in, of course. (I did not have the strength to twist off Alexei’s foot, but I was able to send him across the coffee table onto the carpet.)

Four months later, she was in the newspapers again. Amid cries of outrage and calls for new laws to stop such recklessness, her father had bought her another yacht from a shipwright in India, and now she was setting sail from the Coromandel Coast to resume her voyage. The newspaper speculated at her motive, since circumnavigating the world with a four-month interruption in the middle did not count for any record, and even if it had, the official record would no longer be kept for the youngest mariner to circle the globe. Everyone was puzzled, but I understood. You finish what you start.

It gave me an odd feeling, because I felt I knew her, knew her inner thoughts, even if the rest of the world could not.

I had a world map in my bedroom tacked to a board of cork. With little flags I marked the places the newspapers said she’d stopped or stayed. There seemed to be no record of where she had been born. The rumor was that her mother had given birth to her on an island in the South Seas, aided by a native witch-doctor. Her father was a world traveler, and lived out of a houseboat that was also a floating laboratory for his experiments, some of which were conducted outside the twelve-mile limit where the laws of nations ended. Each time I added a tiny flag to the map, I promised myself I would visit that place, breathe the air, see the sights, touch the soil, meet people whose every next word I could not guess.

The names of those far places were poetry to me: Katmandu and Istanbul, Mogadishu and Khartoum, Islamabad and Allepo, Amritsar and Khandahar and Zanzibar, Kyoto, Paris, and Saint Petersburg, Tallinn and Tahiti and Canton and Penzance, and Imhambane and Polokwane, Marrakech and Reykjavik, Äänekoski and Ushuaia.

She was photographed wherever she went, and she always smiled for the camera, as if she were delighted in any place she found herself, great or small, warm or cold, anywhere from Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, provided it was a place where she could wander as if lost, far and foreign lands of wonder where she could lose herself. Again, I understood; and those smiling photographs I cut out or copied or printed out in color, and thumb-tacked in careful order around the border of the corkboard.

There was never any mother seen with her, and her father spoke to no newspaper about whatever sorrow he hid. Once only, when directly asked, did he mention a gravestone on an island found only at low tide, never claimed by any nation. That loss I understood most of all.

That summer, the local newspapers told she was coming to Tillamook. I was puzzled, and I didn’t understand. What was in Tillamook that was not in California or Coromandel or all the other exotic places in the world she’d seen?

Everyone in town was excited at having a celebrity move in. The excitement took on a quieter undertone of curious uneasiness when it was found out that her eccentric father was renovating the Haunted Museum and reopening it. The Museum had once been a fine house owned by a branch of the Stillwell family, but who had fallen on hard times when, after World War II, the Navy discontinued the use of blimps and closed the local air base.

Foster Hidden and I became buddies back when I still went to school, and he and I were the only members of the archery team who took it seriously.

Also, I liked hanging around him because girls, usually in pairs and trios and quartets, and I mean the cutest girls in school, cheerleaders in their little red and white uniforms, would come up to talk to him on the least excuse, while he was just standing leaning against a locker or something, and ask him some stupid question, for example if he wanted to be the Cheesemaker or something (Cheesemaker was our school mascot. Really.)

He had dark and fine features, but his eyes were a startling blue, with big irises, and looked like sapphire laser beams, and he had dark eyebrows which were naturally high on his forehead, giving him a look halfway between a curious imp and a drowsy fox. I think the girls were magnetized to him because he knew how to pick locks and read fortune-telling cards, and so had an aura of dangerous wickedness to him.

It was false advertising: not only was he inwardly dying of shyness (he later told me in secret) whenever groups of girls flocked to him, he and I were the only kids our age at school who didn’t drink or smoke or swear that much, worked hard, went to bed early. But there was something about his face that made it look like he was keeping secrets and smiling at the rest of us.

He and I had gone bow-hunting together for a week the summer I turned fifteen. That was when I learned how hard it was to judge distance and shot angles in the woods. At Foster’s suggestion, we marked trees with surveyor's tape at different yardages from the blind. The tape doesn’t spook the deer if you don’t touch it with bare hands and leave your scent behind. First time out, I only took broadside or quartering away shots, and missed everything. He shot a 3 year old, about 160 pounds, 9 pointer with a clean broadside shot at 50 feet. The arrow went clean through the animal’s heart. I know how much the buck weighed because I helped him carry it back to camp, and, all the next week, helped him eat the venison steaks.

We were in the same scout troop and patrol, Troop 2, Bobcat patrol. Foster always wished he had been born an American Indian. He knew more about the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, their history and lore, than anyone I ever met. That was why he was interested in bows and arrows, I guess. He was the inventor of Bobcat Hash, a barely edible food substance that defies description, and this made him world-famous among the eight other members of our patrol. He kept half a log in back of his house near a creek that formed the border with the Snyder farm, and every now and again he would build a small fire in it and chop at the burnt insides with an ax, trying to hollow it out and make an honest-Injun dugout canoe.

Foster had seen photos of the world-famous sailor girl behind the wheel of her yacht, smiling for the cameras, falcon on her wrist, in her bathing suit, and therefore had a crush on Penelope Dreadful.

I told him it was absurd to get a crush on a girl you’d only ever seen in the papers, so he and I looked up video footage of her on my phone.

We started taking hikes with our bows in hand, like we were hunting or something, and would by non-coincidence stray near the coast around the lighthouse, but we never really ever got up the nerve to approach the Haunted Museum itself. We just wanted to see if moving vans had arrived, or if someone had mowed the grass or turned on the power or committed another murder-suicide by hanging. You know. Idle curiosity.

One hot, hot, summer day when all the insects were chirruping, there was no breath of wind at all but plenty of little midges and mites everywhere, Foster and I came out from the brush near the foot of the hill, and he stopped short.