Chapter the 4th
I felt trapped with the trees looming over me like they were. Having Margot and Gwen near me kept me from going berserk—by a small margin. I looked over my shoulder, hoping to see the park, but it was gone! Not only did I feel trapped, I was trapped by the same knotted trees that almost trapped Kerry in the computer game. With the trees bare except for budding leaves growing so thick around me, it was almost like walking in a cave. I heard the music I heard when the trees first appeared, but it was still faint and distant. The springy ground was covered with a carper of colored leaves. I was on the verge of admiring them when I remembered that dead leaves wouldn’t all be this moist and colorful.
Marakel threaded his way through the trees and Gwen kept up with him, clambering about like a monkey. Margot was ahead of me and not far behind them. I tried to avoid touching the branches, even though I’d seen the girls do it without any obvious bad effect, but I couldn’t move without doing it. I don’t know if I expected an electric shock or something, but that didn’t happen. What I got was worse: the tree branches and then a tree trunk I stumbled into felt exactly the way real trees feel. Only these trees weren’t real, were they? Wasn’t I in some computer game? Something like virtual reality? Suddenly realizing that Marakel and Gwen were out of sight and I was about to lose Margot, I tore after them. Margot’s blue shirt and her white sneakers became my only guides until I suddenly stumbled and fell. The ground was soft and so it didn’t hurt but I didn’t like having two girls and a weirdo boy looking down at me.
“Want a hand?” Margot asked me.
“No. I’m okay.”
I pushed myself up to my feet and avoided looking at anybody. Even so, I realized that nobody was laughing at me. Even the girls seemed to be too spooked out for that. I realized then that we were standing in a small clearing that had just enough room for the four of us to stand together. There was enough of an opening in the trees for me to see the sky, if it really was a sky. It looked so dark, I thought at first it was filled with storm clouds, but then I saw that it was freakier than that. There was a pinkish cris-cross pattern across the sky, sort of like in a sunset.
“We are all here?” Marakel asked.
“It looks like we are,” said Margot uneasily.
“Where are we?” I asked Marakel.
“Here.”
“Where is here?” I asked.
“Here is where we are,” Marakel answered.
“You’re impossible!” I exclaimed.
I thought Marakel would make a face or say something snappy back at me the way Kerry would have, but he didn’t. He stood still, hands at his sides, and did some thinking.
“I must be possible,” said Marakel. “If I am impossible, I am not here. If I am here, I am possible.”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“Marakel,” said Gwen. “Do you know the name of the place where we are right now?”
“We are in Windellynn.” Marakel replied.
“Never heard of it,” I said.
“We were not telling you about it before,” said Marakel.
“Is this a secret place?” Gwen asked eagerly.
“We are the only ones in our tribe who know this place,” Marakel answered.
“Do you think Kerry might be here?” asked Margot.
“That is what I am thinking,” said Markel.
“But where do we look for him in this place?” asked Gwen.
“We decide on what our search will be and then we make the search,” said Marakel.
“I thought we had already decided to make a search for Kerry,” I said, more frizzled with Marakel than ever.
“The search engine will not list Kerry,” said Marakel. “We must do another search that will lead us to Kerry. You said that Kerry was playing the game baseball when he disappeared. Is that right?”
“Yes,” said Margot.
“Okay. I think we will do a search for ‘baseball.’”
I was about to ask Marakel how he was going to do a computer search in a forest where computers weren’t exactly growing on trees, but the words died on my tongue when Marakel walked up to the nearest tree and tapped on the trunk the way you would punch keys for a burglar alarm to keep it from going off. The eyes of both girls got as wide as mine when three lines of words in an alphabet I’d never seen before shone on the tree trunk. If I had said what I was going to say about computers not growing on trees, I would have had to eat a mouthful of tree-flavored words. Marakel studied the words shining in gold for a moment and then tapped one of them with his finger.
Immediately, the trees in front of us opened up, showing us a perfectly manicured lawn with a bunch of kids playing on it. At the same time, a blast of sound almost knocked me over. Part of it was music filled with beating drums and high-pitched squealing and part of it was from the kids screaming at each other. These kids were in something like a baseball formation but with some big differences. A pitcher was standing on a delicate light purple cloth, and four bases were marked pieces of cloth similar to the one that served for the pitcher’s mound. The bases, however, were very far apart from each other with second base way out in centerfield. There were two outfielders and two infielders. Another odd thing: each outfielder was holding a long, tall pole. The fielders didn’t seem to be wearing baseball mitts but after a while, I did notice that they were wearing light brown gloves that fit their hands closely. The batter took some practice swings with a big, thick stick that could have been torn off a tree. I soon realized that there was a lot more yelling going on than the players on the field could be responsible for. When I looked closely, I saw many faces peering from between the branches of the trees all around the playing field. The children were wearing clothes that looked a little like Marakel’s. A second glance told me the players weren’t all children. Some of them were tall and one had a wispy beard. Some of the players were female if their long hair extending down past their waists meant anything.
“I don’t see Kerry out there,” said Gwen sadly.
“We are still finding Kerry,” said Marakel. “We are looking for clues.”
“I don’t see any,” I said.
“Do you know how Kerry plays baseball?” Marakel asked.
“Yes,” I said. “He plays centerfield and he’s fast and he hits line drives.”
“Look for a baseball player who does those things,” said Marakel.
That didn’t make much sense but with the pitcher going into a delicate windup and throwing a fastball towards the batter, my attention was drawn to the game. When the ball reached what I can only call home cloth, the batter swung and sent the ball soaring high in the air deep into the outfield and ran towards first base. Here is where the game really got strange. The boy in the outfield chased the ball faster than a bolt of lightning, but then just as he caught up with it, he jabbed his long stick into the ground and jumped up in the air, like a pole vault jumper. The boy timed his jump just right and batted down the ball with his gloved hand to the young woman playing the outfield with him. Then the boy dropped his pole and landed on the ground.
“That’s not how to play baseball,” I muttered.
“That outfielder acted like a pole vaulter at a track meet,” said Margot.
“Does Kerry do pole vaulter?” asked Marakel.
“Yes.”
Meanwhile, the action on the field got more curious yet. Instead of catching the ball to make a relay to the plate, the other outfielder let it hit the ground, fielded it with her feet and kicked it over to the pitcher, who handled it like a soccer player. The pitcher tried to pass the ball back to the boy who was streaming in from the outfield, but one of the infielders intercepted it and kicked it back into the outfield. All this time, the crowd’s yelling and the music got more deafening by the second.
“Now it’s more like a soccer game!” Gwen yelled over the noise.
The outfielder caught up with the ball and gave it a good kick towards home cloth, while the base runner streaked home. The pitcher fielded the ball with his feet and kicked the ball at a tree trunk right behind the cloth just as the base runner slid into the home cloth. All of the players on both sides broke out into cheers that almost sounded like music and began to dance. I had no idea of whether the runner was safe or out and I was all the more confused with everybody acted like winners. The batter and the infielders danced in one circle while the pitcher and outfielders danced in another. The spectators jumped out of their trees and joined one team or the other in dancing about the field. Some of them played lively tunes on little pipes as they moved into one dance circle or the other while other people carried harps or guitars or violins or drums. In the middle of one group was a bearded man wearing a glittering crown and in the middle of the other group was a tall woman who wore a crown just like the man’s. The playing, the singing and the dancing got wilder and wilder by the second and more and more out of tune. After a while, I came to the conclusion that each group was playing a different tune. It was pretty easy to see that each group was dancing to a pretty different beat. I kept looking at all the people out there, hoping to see Kerry, but he wasn’t there.
I was beginning to think that the celebration was going to go on forever when one of the young men stopped singing and dancing and seemed to notice that the other group was celebrating as much as his own. He shouted something at the top of his lungs that didn’t sound musical at all. Immediately, everybody on his side broke off singing and dancing and began to yell at the other group. The yelling stopped the singing and dancing of that group and next thing I knew, they were staging a grand shouting match in some foreign language. The man with a beard and the tall woman, the ones wearing crowns took center stage and got to shouting at each other head to head. I guessed they were the chief honchoes. They acted like it anyway. The yelling and screaming rose to a fevered pitch that couldn’t have gotten louder if they had the best loudspeakers in the world and then several of the guys pulled out their bows and arrows. Trees sprang up throughout the baseball field to shield the fighters as they notched their arrows and let fly at each other.
“Down!” Marakel ordered.
I didn’t need to be told even once to drop to the ground.
“Omygod!” cried Margot, “they’re going to kill each other. Can’t we stop them?”
“No,” said Marakel. “We cannot.”
The air became thick with arrows and I expected to see corpses littered all over the place but, so far, I hadn’t seen anybody get killed. As the archers shot at each other, people cheered them and others beat their drums and—unbelievable as it seems—others played their instruments as if this whole battle was just another game like baseball.
Then a deafening outcry by some of the fighters put a sudden stop to the flow of arrows, the cheering, the singing and the dancing. A young woman lay stretched out on the field with an arrow sticking out of her chest, looking pretty dead to me. The dead fighter’s group, led by the queen, started to sing a slow and mournful song as they danced slowly around the victim with much weeping and wailing. The other group, with the bearded man at their head, broke out into a victory song and dance even more boisterous than the one they did after the crazy baseball game. Margot and Gwen were sobbing and holding on to each other. If Marakel had any feelings over what had happened, he didn’t show it. I buried my head between my knees for some time until another cry, different in tone, caught my attention. Looking up, I saw a boy playing what looked like a wooden flute and a girl playing a pipe walk up to the wounded woman. All other singing and dancing stopped. The expressions on the faces of everybody out there were as blank as Marakel’s face. The boy knelt down and slowly pulled out the arrow while his companion played a tune on her pipe. As soon as the arrow was out, their was a dull roar of murmuring from all directions. The woman fluttered open her eyes. The boy gently picked her up, carried her to one of the groups, and handed her over to her people. As if all this was not confusing enough, those people glared at the boy as if he had committed the worst sin in world history and the murmuring got louder and more menacing.
“What’s going on?” Margot asked Marakel.
“I do not know,” Marakel replied. “This never happens.”
“It’s happening now,” I said.
“I know this is happening now,” said Marakel, “but this has never happened before.”
“Why don’t those guys seem to like it,” said Gwen, tears still staining her face.
“The warrior did not die. The war is not settled,” said Marakel. “Nobody has won the war.”
“Why can’t they just call it quits?” Gwen asked him.
“Call quits? Marakel asked. “You mean, stop a war that is not won, I think. That never happens.”
I was furious enough to say something to Marakel about that but the angry murmuring was getting too loud for us to hear each other talk. I saw the two groups move off in opposite directions as each group chanted something that sounded really horrible. The woman who had just been saved was being forced to walk on her two feet with little support and I thought she might stumble and fall but somehow, she didn’t. Suddenly the chanting stopped and everybody melted into the trees. Everybody, that is, except one person from each group who was left behind. One was a boy who could have been my age and the other was a girl who might have been a bit older than me. The two of them stood some distance apart, looking as expressionless as Marakel. They eyed each other coldly for some time until the girl started to walk off by herself into the forest. Then the boy followed after the girl without hurrying or giving any indication that he wanted to catch up with her. Then they were gone.
“What was that about?” Gwen asked.
“The war was not won or lost with one side losing a member of the tribe,” Marakel explained, his voice as cold as ever. “When no tribe wins and no tribe loses, both tribes designate one member.”
“Are you saying that those two children were thrown out?” Margot asked.
“That is not what I am saying,” Marakel replied. “They were designated to leave the tribe.”
“That’s not fair!” Gwen protested.
“Fair?” asked Marakel.
“Yea!” I said. “Fair! Fair means having a bit of justice. Do you know what that is?”
“Justice is a hammer,” said Marakel. “Is that right?”
“You’ll never understand,” I said in disgust.
“Aren’t those kids going to starve all by themselves?” asked Gwen.
Marakel thought for a moment.
“They will not starve. They will eat something. We must find Kerry now.”
“BUT WHAT ABOUT THOSE TWO KIDS ?” Gwen yelled.
“I will find them later,” said Marakel. “I do not need your help to find them. I need your help to find Kerry and you need my help to find Kerry.”
“I didn’t see him out there all this time,” I said.
“I think Kerry was in the baseball game.”
“But we didn’t see him!” I yelled.
“I know you did not see him,” said Marakel. “We can not be finding Kerry now by seeing him. We have to follow clues that tell us where Kerry is. The baseball game might have clues.”
“That was some game,” said Margot in her favorite sarcastic tone as she leaned against a tree.
“Like I said, that wasn’t how you play baseball,” I said. “It looks like those guys made up a whole bunch of new rules.”
“That might be a clue,” said Marakel. “You said the pole vault jump was wrong with this game?”
“Yes,” said Margot.
“What does that have to do with Kerry?” I asked. “He doesn’t go pole vaulting on the baseball field.”
“That’s his specialty in track,” Margot reminded me.
“Kerry tracks animals with a pole vault?” asked Marakel.
“No,” said Margot, “Track is a contest for running and jumping, things like that. Pole vaulting over a bar is another thing you do in track.”
“Okay,” said Marakel. “Are there other things wrong with the game?
“They kind of turned it into a soccer game,” said Margot.
“Did they do that because Kerry plays on the soccer team at school?” I asked sarcastically.
“Very possible,” Marakel replied in his humorless voice.
“And Kerry plays the flute, but he doesn’t play the other instruments,” I added. “I suppose that’s supposed to be a clue, too.”
“It is a clue,” said Marakel.
As we talked, I eyed the baseball that was left in the middle of the field under one of the trees that sprang up during the arrow fight. I walked over, picked it up and looked it over. I couldn’t be sure, of course, but since Margot and I didn’t find the ball when we looked for it, and since you get to know the scuffs and grass stains of a baseball you keep on using, I was pretty sure this was the one Kerry was chasing when he disappeared.
“Speaking of clues,” I said, “this baseball looks a lot like the baseball we were using, the baseball Kerry was chasing when he disappeared.”
“It could be,” said Margot as she looked at it, “but you can’t be sure.”
“I think you are likely,” said Marakel.
“Thanks for the complement,” I said as I tossed the ball back onto the field.
“Does Kerry shoot arrows?” asked Marakel.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “Last summer, Kerry sent me an e-mail to brag about winning an archery meet at summer camp. Attached to the letter was a photo of himself aiming an arrow at the target.”
“Is that a clue?” asked Margot.
“Yes,” said Marakel.
“But he wouldn’t shoot arrows at people!” Margot insisted.
“Is that a clue?” I asked sarcastically.
“Yes, that is a clue. Does Kerry do things like pull out an arrow of a designated member?”
“Do you mean, would Kerry play a flute and help somebody in trouble?” asked Gwen.
“That is what I am meaning,” said Marakel.
“If Kerry sees anybody get hurt like that,” said Margot, “he does anything he can to help.”
“There was a game when Kerry hit a line drive that hit the pitcher,” I said. “Kerry ran right out to the mound to make sure he was okay instead of running to first base. He got called out for running out of the baselines, but he didn’t care.”
“That is another clue,” said Marakel.
“It seems that these guys are doing bits and pieces of the things that Kerry does and they get most of them wrong,” said Margot. “But where is Kerry?”
“That is what we are finding out,” said Marakel.
“We are not finding out anything!” cried Gwen.
“I think I know where Kerry might be,” said Marakel, acting more like a cold fish all the time.
“WHERE?” we all cried.
“You said Kerry downloaded the computer game where you saw the trees?” Marakel asked.
“Yes,” said Gwen, her patience getting pretty thin.
“Then we must go to Kerry’s computer,” said Marakel.
“Kerry’s computer is back in his condo,” said Margot.
“We will go there,” said Marakel.
“His mom won’t let us in,” I said, “and the policeman told me she kicked out a boy, and the description of the boy she kicked out fits you perfectly.”
“That is true,” said Marakel, still showing no sign that he felt hurt by Kerry’s mother. “I cannot go back there. There is another way to his computer. We will go that way.”
“But Kerry isn’t inside his own computer is he?” I asked.
Marakel thought for a moment.
“I am thinking Kerry’s computer is the best way to get to Kerry,” he answered.
I didn’t have the foggiest notion of what Marakel thought he was doing but I didn’t exactly have any suggestions of my own. Marakel took the piece of bark out of his pocket that he used before to bring us to this place and wedged it into the ground. First, the more distant trees blinked out and then the trees closest to us faded out, until we were left standing on soggy ground in a dark place with a chilly breeze numbing me with cold. I saw some street lights some distance away and cars driving by. Across the street was the high rise where I live. Some lights were on, but most of them were out.
“If it’s the middle of the night like I think it is,” said Margot, “my parents are going to kill me.”
“Maybe a hundred years have passed and our parents have retired and moved to Florida and we’re all on our own,” Gwen suggested.
“What else is new?” I asked.
A harsh light suddenly struck us.
“Freeze. Identify yourselves!”
I could barely make out the outlines of several humanoid shapes making a semi-circle about us.
“I’m Gwion Williams.”
“Oh thank God!” cried another man. “Is Gwen with you? And Margot Rainer?”
“Yes, we’re both here,” said Margot.
The light turned away from our faces and I could see that the humanoid figures surrounding us were cops.
“Your parents are worried about you,” said a cop. “Were you kidnaped?”
“Yes,” I lied.
The other officer shone the light over my head, catching the slightest glimpse of Marakel.
“Freeze!” the officer ordered.
Instead, Marakel disappeared and no amount of frantic searching by the police could locate him.