Chapter the 15th
I should have felt like leaping for joy. At last I was free of the evil elves! Palerden and Dalerona were going to get a warm welcome in the human world where they were going to live more happily than they ever did in the elves’ world. But I didn’t feel any joy. I felt only the total lostness of Palerden and Dalerona that overwhelmed them. They wandered aimlessly through the forest, numb. I suggested that they shouldn’t be upset about getting thrown out of such an awful tribe but they angrily pushed me aside. To my surprise, Palerden and Dalerona were more than angry with me; they were furious. They weren’t blaming the elves for kicking them out of the tribe, they were blaming me for getting them kicked out. It was all my fault and they weren’t going to listen to me again. As Palerden and Dalerona wandered about and called me every bad name in their language, the sound of elvish piping and harping reached their ears. They didn’t want to listen to music from home and they tried to move away from it. But getting out of earshot of those pipers only brought them within range of some others. There was no escape.
“Hey! Palerden! Dalerona!” a young man called out.
The two elves looked up and saw Panselden perched in a tree. That raised my hopes for a minute but, to my dismay, Palerden and Dalerona turned away from the elf who were reaching out to them and started off in a different direction.
“Palerden! Dalerona!” Panselden called after them. “Are you not needing a place to go to?”
“No,” Palerden answered.
“You can not be wandering these woods by yourselves forever and ever,” said Panselden.
“Yes, we can,” said Dalerona.
“There is only one place you can go if you are going to be having a home now,” said Panselden, “and you really should go there.”
“Do you mean a home with the Menarinen?” asked Dalerona.
“Yes,” said Panselden. “We have made good friends in their world.”
“Traitor,” said Palerden in a cold, even voice.
“Traitor,” said Dalerona in the same cold, even tone of voice.
Palerden and Dalerona turned their backs on Panselden and walked off in a different direction. For me, that was the last straw. How could two elves who had just gotten kicked out of their tribe treat an offer of a new home so rudely? I couldn’t believe it. I lost my temper and really tore into them. I threw at them every insult in the book and added a bunch more. I told them point blank how mean and unjust their whole society was and how lucky they were to get out of it. Couldn’t they see even now what’s wrong with a society that’s constantly throwing people out of it?
I got nowhere, of course. I might as well have yelled at a couple of ice cubes. But there was something odd about these ice cubes. Something was going on inside of them. Something was melting them. Were these two elves finally having a change of heart after all? I hoped so, but then a flood of melted water hit me broadside with the pain inside of these two exiled elves. The pain was a million times worse than I thought any pain could be. Imagine having your gut ripped out while you’re still alive and you can’t faint. That’s just the beginning of how painful it was for Palerden and Dalerona. Add to that having your whole family, all your friends, all your teachers and everybody else you ever knew get together to throw you into a space capsule with no provisions, and then put you in orbit in outer space where you can’t ever come back! The one saving grace I would have had in that space capsule was that I could have cried my heart out. But Palerden and Dalerona couldn’t do that either. Elves do not care about pain. Pain is not worth noticing. That teaching was drilled into them from their earliest years. Elves never care about pain. Therefore, Palerden and Dalerona didn’t care about the pain tearing them apart, even though the pain sat on top of them as heavy and immovable as a mountain.
I remembered, then, the lesson I thought I’d learned just a short while before. Yelling and screaming at people isn’t a good way to get them to listen. It was like telling Gwen to go to her room and stay there and watch television when she came crying to me because she was afraid Mom and Dad weren’t coming back. Her fears were absurd, but she was still a little girl then and she couldn’t think rationally the way I could. I went through the same fears when I was little and I got through it. Gwen could get through it, too. Actually, I still feared my parents might never come home some night but I was too grown up to let that sort of thing bother me, no matter how angry or scared I got. The head of the family doesn’t cry. Dad never cries. When Mom and Dad were away, I was supposed to be the head of the family. I wanted out. Let Gwen take over. She did, until the elves got her. Then I realized that all this anger was sitting on top of me like an unmoveable mountain. I wanted very badly for somebody to pick me up and hold me and let me cry my fears out, just as Gwen wanted somebody to pick her up and hold her, just as Cynthia needs somebody to hold her and Sherman feels lost until somebody holds him.
But now I wanted desperately to be held and I knew Palerden and Dalerona needed it desperately but they still couldn’t see it. Being trapped inside of them, I could hardly pick them up and hold them in my arms, but I did what could. I pictured my mother holding me the way I needed to be held, but all I could picture was mother holding Sherman on her lap and playing with him when I came home from school. Maybe she held me that way once when I was little but I couldn’t remember it. Then Mrs. Rainer came to mind. “You must know that Gwion has to have a soul just like everybody else,” she said when Perlinda said I didn’t have one. “Why, even the worst of people have souls,” said Mrs. Rainer. “Just as you get a body for free when you’re born, you get a soul for free, too.” Maybe I was a crummy kid with a crummier soul, but I was given a soul for free, if Mrs. Rainer was right and the same goes for crummy elves like Palerden and Dalerona. But that doesn’t apply to us, does it? Palerden and Dalerona asked me. Yes, it applies to you, too. How do you know? I don’t know, but Mrs. Rainer got me to believe I’ve got a soul when and nobody else had gotten me to think I did. Maybe if they let Mrs. Rainer talk to them, she’d convince them they had souls like everybody else.
But Palerden and Dalerona kept on walking numbly and aimlessly through the forest until I thought they were going to keep on going like that until they dropped dead. They finally got so numb that they didn’t have the energy to shut me out and that is when I gently started to tell them a story I knew. It was a story about two children, a boy and a girl. One day, their parents took them out into a deep forest and left them there, all alone. The children had nowhere to go. They were lost in the forest with no home but the forest itself. They ate what berries and nuts they could find and they slept under the trees at night. As they walked aimlessly with nowhere to go, they came to a gingerbread house. They were so very hungry that they nibbled at the house. The owner of the house was a witch who used her house to trap children and eat them for dinner. So, while the children were enjoying their little snack, the witch jumped out of the house and nabbed the children. She put the boy in a cage to fatten him up and she made the girl help her prepare the meal she was about to have. The girl thought and thought about how she could save her brother, but he was locked up and the witch slept with the key under her pillow and there was nothing she could do about it. When the boy was fat enough to make a good meal for the witch, the girl knew she had to think of something real fast or her brother was a goner. The witch made the girl heat up the oven while she unlocked the cage and took out the boy. Then she told the boy to climb into the oven where he would be cooked for dinner. That is when the girl thought of something she could do. She told the witch that her brother was very stupid and he didn’t know how to climb into an oven. If the witch would only show her brother how to do it, then he would know how to crawl in for himself. So, the witch climbed in the oven to show the boy how easy it was. Then the girl and the boy slammed the oven shut and that was the end of the witch.
Palerden and Dalerona were sitting among the trees by the time I finished telling them this story. There was no question that they felt like Hansel and Gretel, just like I’ve felt like those kids a lot myself. It’s a sad story in spite of the funny ending. Hansel and Gretel get what’s left of the gingerbread house for a home but they’re still all alone in the forest. Palerden and Dalerona were just as alone and they still had no idea of where to go or what to do, but they seemed to feel better after hearing the story. That’s the way it is with me, too. I don’t know how to explain it, but I always felt better about waiting for Mom or Dad to come home after I’d told the story to Gwen, and Gwen seemed to feel better about being afraid Mom and Dad weren’t coming home. And then I remembered one night when I went to the girls’ room to tell them to shut up and go to sleep and found Cynthia in the middle of telling the same story to Sherman. I could see the story was making them feel a bit better about Mom and Dad not being home so I just sat and listened to Cynthia telling the story.
By this time, I was feeling a pretty steady flow of my own thoughts and memories pouring into Palerden and Dalerona. I’d never felt this much openness from them before. They weren’t just paying attention to what I said, they were paying attention to my feelings about the story and about Gwen. Palerden and Dalerona seemed to want to know more about Gwen and about the other the people who were crossing my mind, people I missed terribly. They seemed to want to know more about Kerry Blake most of all. And so I went on to tell the elves about the time Kerry sang at the school assembly and then my buddies and I ganged up on him after school. When Kerry’s face came back to haunt me once again, Palerden got upset. How could we humans be so cruel to other humans? Why treat Kerry as a designated elf when there wasn’t even a reason to designate anybody? That’s when I had to admit that humans are about the same as elves. Thinking that broke what ice was left between the elves and me. I asked Palerden and Dalerona if they would like to meet my sister and my friends. They said they would. Who should we start with? I asked. The elves said they wanted to start with my sister. That’s where I wanted to start, too.
I told Palerden and Dalerona that Gwen’s soul had been stolen by the Panlorimen. Might they want to help get her back from that awful tribe? They would. I told them that I’d found out that a stolen soul can’t live unless it’s got a body somewhere. That meant Gwen’s body had to be somewhere in this place. If we found the body, we could take it home and see if we could get the elves who took her soul to give it back. The trouble was, I still didn’t have the slightest idea of where to look for my sister’s body. The only hint I had was the story in that book Mr. Kirkpatrick got for Marakel. It said that the body of a boy, whose soul was stolen by the elves, was found in a bog, the kind of bog that preserves bodies for a long time. But there weren’t any bogs in this computer-generated forest, so that hint didn’t help much. So, where do you start looking for somebody missing body? Why, we will do a computer search for Gwen, was Dalerona’s answer.
I would have hit myself on the head if I’d had my head. Here we were inside a gigantic computer program and it didn’t occur to me that all we had to do was initiate a search for Gwen. This was too good to be true. All this time, I had thought that the search for the bodies would mean a huge battle with hundreds of monsters and everything. And here, all we had to do was make a computer search, enter the tunnel the search brings up, and there she’d be. Or at least, so I hoped. Dalerona typed on a tree and waited for the result. The name “Gwen Williams” flashed on the tree. Dalerona tapped on the link and she and Palerden started down a small tunnel that opened up until we got to a door that was labeled: “Gwen Williams.” The had to be too good to be true! Palerden opened the door. He and Dalerona peered into the small closet-size space and saw nothing but the woven branches that made up the walls. So, it was too good to be true. Gwen was gone! She wasn’t ever going to get back home! That knocked all the air out of my tires in a split second.
While the elves hung around, trying to think of what to do next, a dark shape emerged out of the wall. The shadowy figure looked at Palerden and Dalerona for a few seconds and then sank back into the wall.
“What was that all about?” Dalerona asked me.
I had no idea. Only when the shadow left did I think it might have been the shadow of my own soul. Even if that’s what it was, it wasn’t going to be much good for getting Gwen back home.
“Should we look somewhere else?” Palerden asked me.
“I don’t know where else to look for Gwen,” I answered.
Palerden and Dalerona stood in the empty closet, looking like they might just stay there forever, waiting for something to happen. But something happened before long. We heard a scraping, scrabbly sound that could have been mice crawling about behind the wall. Then another door opened up and a boy wearing a bright shirt walked in. I couldn’t see him very clearly, but with his fair hair, I thought he might be an elf, maybe Marakel.
“Are you looking for someone?” the boy asked in a voice so familiar I almost couldn’t stand to hear it and risk being disappointed.
“Yes,” said Dalerona. “We are looking for Gwen Williams. Our computer search led us to this file but she is not here. Do you know where she is?”
“Yes, I know where she is unless she took advantage of my running down here to skip out of her flute lesson,” said the boy, making a funny face that only one kid I know can do. “Want to come and meet her?”
“Yes,” said Palerden.
“Then come with me.”
I still couldn’t believe my eyes but every time I looked at the boy, he looked like Kerry Blake, and he sounded like him and acted like him. If this was some computer graphic using an image of Kerry, it was pretty good. And if Gwen’s body wasn’t where the computer search said it was, where was it and how did this boy know where it was? The boy who looked like Kerry led Palerden and Dalerona through a tunnel that had a blurry light at the end of it. As the elves walked, we heard the sound of a flute—no, two flutes. They were trying to play a simple tune together but they couldn’t quite manage it. When the boy got to the end of the tunnel, he took Dalerona by the hand.
“You need to take two steps down,” he explained to her.
The first step turned out to be a chair some distance down from the tunnel and the second step was a carpeted floor. As Dalerona and Palerden negotiated these steps with the boy’s help, the flute playing fell apart and then stopped. The two elves ended up in a living room where a girl stood at a music stand with a flute in her hand next to a blond boy with a flute in his hands. The boy who took us through the tunnel picked up a flute he’d left lying on a coffee table. I heard the familiar sound of a television coming from some other room close by.
“Gwen,” said the boy, “two more admirers have come to see you.”
The girl gave the two elves a curious look that only Gwen could make. She was back! She hadn’t needed me to rescue her after all! I knew then that the boy who came and got us really was Kerry Blake. So, he hadn’t needed my help, either! I finally recognized the strange living room as my own condo. I was feeling a bit disappointed that neither Gwen nor Kerry had rolled out the carpet to celebrate my return but then I remembered that they had no idea that I was trapped inside of the two strange elves who had just climbed through a computer into the living room.
“I’ll bet you’re more of the Lorakhienoi!” said Gwen to her new visitors.
“You know the term,” said Dalerona.
“Of course,” Gwen replied. “I speak fluent Elvish. Are you Rakhlakhadimen?”
Palerden and Dalerona looked down at the rug, their throats tightening. They had no interest in answering the question.
“I know that being designated hurts like a knife slicing through your heart,” said the boy I didn’t know, but his voice, too, was familiar, as was his accent.
“How would you know?” Palerden asked him coldly.
“I happened to me,” the boy replied.
Then I knew the boy was Marakel! It was his clothes that threw me. He was wearing blue jeans and a yellow shirt that was almost enough to make him look like a normal human being.
“You are a traitor,” Palerden accused Marakel.
“You are a traitor,” Dalerona repeated.
“No more a traitor than you,” said Kerry, cutting in, “and if you ask me, you aren’t the ones who’ve betrayed anybody.”
“But if we turn against our own—“ Dalerona began.
“Look,” said Kerry. “The only guys who are going to be loyal to you right now are guys like Marakel, Perlinda, Ralindera, Flenderal, Merlandera, Gwen, Margot and me. So, why not try being loyal to us?”
Kerry is irresistible when he talks like that, and I knew there was no way Palerden or Dalerona were going to be able to resist him.
“Would you like to sit down and have a drink?” Gwen asked the elves with her most irresistible smile. “We have Coke, Sprite and root beer.”
“I like root beer the best,” said Marakel.
“Then I will be trying the root beer,” said Dalerona.
“I will be trying the root beer, too,” said Palerden.
Gwen ran off to get the drinks and Marakel followed to help her. Kerry called Cynthia and Sherman and then made a quick phone call. The computer we’d just come through blinked off and a screen saver came on. I did a bit of a double-take then because the screen saver was a moving picture of Slurpy Gurvey playing ping-pong with my soul’s shadow. Cynthia and Sherman came out to meet the elves and a couple of minutes later, Margot and Ron and John and Karen and Perlinda and Ralindera and Flenderal and Merlandera and Panselden all poured into the living room. Gwen, of course, wasn’t going to stop at serving drinks. She also brought a plate full of brownies she’d baked herself. They were enough to make me wish I had my body back and could enjoy them for myself. As soon as Karen Lang got introduced to Palerden and Dalerona, she sat down next to them and talked up quite a storm.
“It has the appearance to me that you that Meradimen and Panlorimen are both uniting with Menarinen,” said Palerden. “Is this appearance true?”
“The appearance is true,” said Marakel firmly. “We are finding that all Lorakhienoi who were designated must unite with anybody who will unite with us.”
“Don’t worry,” said Kerry cheerfully, “there are lots of things that will take getting used to, but we’ll help you all you can.”
“My family is next in line to adopt one or two Lorakhienoi,” said Karen Lang, “and we can adopt you if you need a home.”
Palerden and Dalerona didn’t seem to know what to think about this but they seemed to think that if the other elves were all getting adopted by Menarinen families then maybe they should too.
“Daddy will make out adoption papers for you,” said Gwen.
This talk of adopting elves had me wondering if maybe Mom and Dad had adopted Marakel as I asked them to in my will. He sure looked like he was at home in our condo. Of course, they could adopt fifty elves without really taking care of any more kids than they’d done before by the looks of things with Gwen still running the family.
“I wish my mom would adopt some of you guys,” said Kerry, “but then maybe I shouldn’t wish her on anybody else. With the way she hassles me about being friends with you after the way you kidnaped me, I’ll probably have to get adopted by some other family myself.”
That was typical Kerry Blake: joking about stuff that you know is breaking his heart. After what I’d been through, I could see how badly he needed a few friends, better friends than I’d ever been.
The conversation went on for some time and I could tell that the heads of Palerden and Dalerona were really spinning. I’d never thought about how tough it can be to suddenly find out how rotten your own social system is and have to try and live by somebody else’s that you hope is better. I tried to explain things to the elves who still had my soul as best I could but it was impossible to keep up. The hardest thing for me was that I was feeling really left out of things. Here I was in the middle of my best friends and my family and they didn’t even know I was there, and maybe they didn’t care. And why should they? I only messed things up. It wasn’t because of me that anybody got rescued.
“Do either of you have any idea of where the soul of Gwion Williams is?” Kerry asked Palerden and Dalerona.
The question kind of came out of the blue because I’d started to tune out of things but I could see that Kerry had been planning to ask it for some time and I was pretty sure he strongly suspected Palerden and Dalerona of having my soul captive. Palerden and Dalerona stiffened a bit. They knew right away where that question was going to lead and they didn’t like it.
“Why would you want to know where the soul of Gwion Williams is?” asked Palerden.
“He’s the only one we haven’t gotten back,” said Gwen. “Mommy and Daddy are worried sick and I’m worried sick and so are Cynthia and Sherman.”
“Why should the mother and father be worried that the soul of Gwion Williams is not returned?” asked Dalerona.
This was my most frustrating moment yet. I was so close to being freed and yet so far. Palerden and Dalerona were blocking any input from me like mad. What if they got offended and walked out on everybody and kept me trapped inside them for the rest of my life? My only consolation was that Kerry and Gwen had stuck up for me which was more than I deserved from them.
“I think I have learned many things about having a soul since coming here,” said Marakel. “I am very sure now that I have a soul and I never had to take anybody else’s soul to get it.”
“And I’ll bet you a thousand nickels you both have souls of your own, too,” said Gwen.
“Flenderal and I had Kerry Blake’s soul,” said Merlandera, “but we learned that having the soul of another only prevents our having our own souls.”
“We have found that it is so much better to have Kerry Blake being himself and being our friend,” added Flenderal.
The conversation went on for a long time. It was as stressful as lying under a sword that might slice your head off at any time. For practical purposes, my life was at stake and there was nothing I could do but hope my friends would say the right things. More bunches of elves came to our condo to talk to Palerden and Dalerona, including the ones who once had the souls of Gwen and Margot. Mrs. Rainer and Mr. Kirkpatrick came and talked about what having a soul was really all about and then even Officer McDougall came to plead my case. When Sherman realized I was inside these two elves, he came and sat on Dalerona’s lap and started asking me to come out so he could see me. As time went on, Gwen and Cynthia started to cry and they didn’t stop.
In the end, it wasn’t sympathy for Sherman or Gwen or Cynthia that saved me; it was the elves’ tendency to conform. The bottom line was: Palerden and Dalerona didn’t want to be the only elves with a captive human soul if they had to live with a bunch of guys who didn’t approve of it. Finally, when I’d just about given up hope, Palerden and Dalerona let Kerry and Gwen lead them into my room. It was really weird to look at my body stretched out on my bed with intravenous feeding tubes and stuff cluttering the room. I found out later that the elves had insisted none of that stuff was needed by Dr. Rainer didn’t want to take any chances. Luckily I didn’t have to look at myself for long before I blacked out.
The first thing I was conscious of after that was the sound of a couple of flutes playing. Then I felt somebody gently pressing my wrist with a thumb. I opened my eyes. The room was dark. I was lying on my back on my bed. I focused my eyes. Dr. Rainer looked down at me. Kerry and Marakel and Gwen all stood around my bed playing their flutes.
“Are you awake?” Dr. Rainer asked me.
“Yea,” I said with a smile.
“Good, just relax while I listen to your heart.”
The flute playing stopped.
“Gwion! You’re back!” Kerry exclaimed.
“Yes, he’s back” said Dr. Rainer, “but not too much excitement all at once, please.”
I was already starting to pick up a lot of noise coming from the living room. It sounded like a dozen New Year’s parties were going on out there. Dr. Rainer had me sit up and he put a stethoscope to my chest in several places and then on my back.
“How do you feel?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“You’re weak, you’ll have to take it easy. Don’t get carried away by all the goodies out there and eat too much right away.
“I am making sure we save the best food until you are ready to eat it all,” Marakel assured me.
“I will guide you through every step of the way,” Gwen promised me. “I know exactly what it’s like.”
Thanks, Gwen,” I said in that tone of voice I reserve for those moments when she’s being too bossy..
“Sit up,” said Dr. Rainer. “Good. Do you feel dizzy?”
“Not really.”
“Try standing up.”
I did and then I really felt dizzy but Dr. Rainer held me to make sure I didn’t fall. Kerry put an arm around me and Gwen coached me on taking my first baby steps. Marakel played a tune on his flute that seemed to make me stronger. Dr. Rainer opened the door and I braced myself for the crowd that was out there waiting for me. I looked through the sea of faces for my parents but I didn’t see them.
“GWION!” cried Sherman.
Kerry and Dr. Rainer steadied me when the human cannonball struck and Gwen and Cynthia brought him under control.
“You’re back!” cried my mother from the midst of a group of women she’d obviously been talking to.
“You’re back!” cried my father, letting a bunch of papers drop off his lap.
Then Mom and Dad grabbed me and held me like I’d been gone for twenty years. Things got to be quite a blur after that. Margot made so much of me you’d think I’d saved her life or something. The rest of Ron Thompson’s family and John Wernicke’s too were there and Karen Lang’s parents looked like they were in the early hesitant stages of getting acquainted with Palerden and Dalerona. This was the first look I’d gotten at Palerden and Dalerona, which was kind of strange after being inside them for so long. Those two elves looked at me uneasily. I could understand the problem and so I kept some distance from them that night. Mr. Kirkpatrick told me how he got Ron, Karen, and John to help Marakel and him with the rescue operation. I told Ron how great it was of him to risk his soul playing the computer game and how awfully glad I was that nobody had to go rescue him after that. Ron said it was no problem. I also got to meet a lot of elves I hadn’t met before. They seemed to think I was pretty hot stuff, which seemed funny considering I hadn’t accomplished much.
Mrs. Rainer and Perlinda ran the kitchen, dishing out all the food that people had brought over. That freed Mom and Dad and Gwen and Cynthia and Sherman to talk to me. Dad talked about the work he was doing on all the legal matters that had to be done on behalf of the elves and laughed about the nightmare he was creating for the INS. Mom went on and on about the new group she’d started to work on relationships between elves and humans. I got a strong feeling that they really cared about me and about my new friends, but I also got the feeling I wasn’t going to see much more of them than I did before all this happened. For all the celebration going on, I picked up a lot of worry about humans in the neighborhood who didn’t like elves. Officer McDougall was spearheading a team that was monitoring their actions and trying to educate people on what elves are really like if you let them act like human beings. I was pumped with lots of questions about what happened to me and what it was like. I had a hard time explaining very much because I was still light-headed and I wasn’t that sure yet what had really happened. All the time that I talked about my adventure, this nagging thought kept haunting me. I hesitated to say anything because I was afraid it might spoil things, but the thought kept bugging me, and so when a lot of the guys had gone home and I was left with family and my best friends, I finally said it.
“I’m so glad you guys all got rescued while I was away,” I said to Gwen, Kerry and Margot. “It really made my day when I found out you were back here and safe. But—I guess I kind of messed up and wasn’t much help in getting you guys saved after all.”
That brought everybody to a standstill. I’d done it. Nobody wants to tell a guy who’s been to hell and back that he did it all for nothing, but what else could they say?
“Gwion,” said Kerry, his voice choking, “You don’t understand. It’s true I started to get a pretty good relationship with Flenderal and Merlandera, considering they’d taken my soul and all, but I was feeling awfully trapped and I didn’t see how I was going to be able to stand it for the rest of my life. Then you came along. I can’t tell you what that meant to me. Right on the spot, I took back all the things I’d thought about your being a lousy friend—I took them all back with six-hundred-and-forty-three percent interest.”
“Gwion,” said Flenderal, “Because we had Kerry’s soul captured within us, Merlandera and I knew who you were, why you had come, and how Kerry felt about it. We were amazed. To come and rescue another at such risk was something we had never heard of happening before. When we saw the scared and determined look in your eyes, and knew that you knew what you were doing, we knew for the first time what it really means to have a soul.”
“And from that moment on,” Merlandera continued, “we were determined that everybody you came to save would be rescued.”
“And we were,” added Margot, “thanks to you.”