Chapter the 8th
I didn’t recognize this cop at first with his face being so panicky and all but after a bit, I realized he was one of the cops who questioned me after my escape from the supposed kidnapers. Worse, he was the one who most made me feel like a criminal for getting kidnaped. I put two and two together pretty fast and thought I knew how this cop got to where he was. I’d also noticed by then that a few golden arrows were stuck in a tree here and a tree there so I guessed an elf or two were having sport with him. No wonder he was running scared..
“Who—who are you?” the cop asked, and he wasn’t exactly sounding polite about it.
“Perlinda.”
“Ralindera.”
I didn’t want to identify myself to this cop and so I didn’t say anything.
“You, kid, who are you?”
“I’m Rumpelstiltskin.”
I suppose that was dumb, but I didn’t feel like cooperating with a cop who was sure to make it harder for me and the elf girls to do what we had come to do. When the cop looked at me real closely with a ton of suspicion, I decided it really was dumb to say what I did, but it was too late.
“I—I think I know who you are,” gasped the cop. “You-you’re one of the kids we saved—then you went missing again. You-you’re—you’re the kid with the funny name.”
“Don’t trash my name,” I snapped back at the cop.
Maybe that was dumb, too. Who wants to make a cop mad when he’s got a gun pointed at you? But maybe that was smart, too, because he suddenly seemed to decide he’d better be a bit nicer to me. All this time, the two elf girls stared at the cop with eyes as warm as ice cubes.
“All right, I’m sorry. It’s not a funny name; it’s just a name I can’t remember. But you’re one of the missing kids, right?”
“Yea, I’m Gwion Williams,” I admitted, deciding that game was up.
“Then I—then I found you!” he cried.
“You could say I found you,” I said in return.
“Who are you?” Perlinda asked the cop.
“Uh—I’m Officer McDougall, of the Chicago Police Department. Are you the two missing girls? I don’t recognize you?”
“We were both designated by our tribe,” Ralindera answered.
“What the hel—the heck does that mean?”
“It means that we were designated to take the places of the two Menarinen who were adopted into our tribe,” Perlinda explained.
“Ah! So you’re the kidnapers!” Officer McDougall exclaimed, brandishing his gun at the girls.
“No,” said Ralindera. “We have stolen nobody.”
“You can’t arrest these girls,” I said to the cop, “they got kicked out of their tribe and so now they’re helping me get back Kerry and Gwen and Margot, who are still in the clutches of the elves.”
“El—elves?” Officer McDougall spluttered.
That was dumb of me. I decided on the spur of the moment to take a bullish attitude and hope that wasn’t even dumber.
“Yea elves,” I said. “Want to make something of it?”
“That is your term,” said Perlinda, her voice chillier than ever.
“We were of the Lorakhienoi until we were designated,” said Ralindera. “We now are joining your tribe.”
“B-b-but there are n-no such things as elves or fairies!” Officer McDougall insisted.
“YOU WANNA MAKE A BET?” I yelled.
“W-well, n-no,” the cop admitted.
Just then, something zinged past and hit a tree trunk just over the cop’s shoulder. It was a yellow arrow. I was flat on the ground in nothing flat. The cop fired his pistol but nothing happened. I guessed he’d used up all his bullets shooting back at elves already. The cop yelled out some words a cop shouldn’t use in front of kids and flung the gun down to the ground. Perlinda wasted no time in snatching it up.
“Y-you give that back to me!” Officer McDougall demanded.
“No,” said Perlinda.
“That is a government-issued pistol!”
“What is that?” asked Ralindera.
“Don’t you know what a government is?”
The elf girls looked at each other questioningly.
“Is the government the king and war leaders?” asked Perlinda.
“No, we’re a demo—“
I was just starting to raise my head when another arrow struck the tree right behind Officer McDougall. So far, the elves didn’t seem to be aiming at me, but I wasn’t about to press my luck. The cop lunged at Perlinda but she jumped several feet away from him in a micro-second. The frustrated cop whipped out his billy club and waved it wildly. All the more reason for me to keep my head on the ground, I decided.
“Come on! Come on and fight me like a man!” the cop yelled.
The only reply was some high-pitched laughter and a snatch of a music played on a flute.
“You have invaded their forest,” said Perlinda cooly to the cop.
“Th-their forest? I didn’t ask to come here!”
“How did you get here?” Ralindera asked him.
“Well-uh—it’s hard to—hard to explain,” the officer stammered. “I guess I fell in. I didn’t mean to—I didn’t mean to invade your place.”
I decided to press our advantage.
“I’ll tell you how it happened,” I said, carefully sitting up on the ground. “I’ll bet you were searching door to door through the Wesley condos, searching for the criminals who kidnaped me and Kerry and Gwen and Margot. And I’ll bet further that you came to a condo that was supposed to have been sold, but when you opened the door, you found it empty. By the way, did you get a search warrant or something before barging in? Well, I’ll bet you found the condo empty. And on top of that, I’ll bet you saw a small wooden thing looking like the freakiest computer you saw in your life in a corner and you saw a holographic image of a tunnel floating above it. And I’ll bet you got too curious about the floating holograph image and you got too close to it and then you fell in and you’ve been stuck in here ever since.”
As I spoke, the officer’s face registered surprise, then amazement, and finally panic.
“How—how did you know?” he gasped.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell the cop how I knew but then I decided I’d rather not.
“I’m not telling,” I said.
“You’re not cooperating with an officer of the law!” the cop charged me.
“You aren’t cooperating with the rescue team sent out to get Kerry and Gwen and Margot,” I counter-charged the cop.
“But getting those kids back is my job!” Officer McDougall insisted.
“Yea, but you don’t know how to do it.”
“Since when do you know how to do our job?”
“Since two days ago, when I found out what’s happened and got the help of a couple of guys who know what to do about it, which is more than you’ve done.”
“We are being delayed long enough,” said Ralindera. “We must go the rest of the way to the house of books and read the books there.”
“Uh—I’ve got different ideas in mind,” said Officer McDougall. “I—I think I’d better take you in to the station for questioning.”
I was about to sass the cop again when I suddenly realized how funny this was and I ended up laughing at him. That was dumb, but I couldn’t help it.
“What’s so funny?” the cop asked me.
“Do you know how you’re going to get out of here so you can take us to your precious police station?” I asked him.
“W-w-well you’re—you know the way out, right?”
“Maybe.”
“And you don’t want to get arrested for not cooperating with an officer of the law, do you?”
“Arrest?” asked Perlinda.
“That means putting us in a room with bars on it and locking us up so we can’t get away,” I explained.
“I think we must not be delaying our trip to the house of books,” said Ralindera. “This Menarinen is an obstacle to our mission. We must tie him up and leave him here for now. We will set him free when we come back with our mission accomplished.”
Officer McDougall’s face turned as mean as a thundercloud. He raised his billy club at Ralindera she aimed the gun at him. Perlinda made a move so fast I couldn’t see it. I only know that, a micro-second later, she was standing several feet away from the cop with the billy club in her hand.
“I think we will tie you up here,” said Perlinda with no expression in her voice.
“That is what I think,” Ralindera agreed.
Officer McDougall clenched his fists. Perlinda reached into a pocket I didn’t know was even there and pulled out a rope that could have been a vine.
“You’d better not,” the cop threatened.
The next few seconds were a blur. Officer McDougall made a move to get the billy club back and he ended up pinned against a tree with the rope wrapped around his arms and trunk. The elf girls stood there, showing no signs of exertion. Panic suddenly returned to the officer’s face in full force.
Let me go!” he cried, sounding like a scared kid. “I can’t stand being in this place any longer! You’ve got to get me out of here! I’ll starve to death!”
“We will ask my designated mother to bring you food if we our mission takes too long,” said Perlinda.
“But—what if those guys shoot at me again?”
“They will probably not kill you, now that you are tied up and can no longer hurt them,” Ralindera assured him.
“But—but—it’s so weird here! I can’t stand it! You can’t imagine what it’s like! Kid, make them let me out of here! I was only trying to save you when all this happened!”
“You haven’t done a thing to help me,” I told him. “All you’ve done is make it harder for us to rescue Kerry and Margot and my sister.”
“But it’s my job to find kids who are kidnaped and to bring the criminals to justice!”
“Like I said: this time, you do not know how to do it and you are hindering us from doing it.”
The truth is, I didn’t have any idea of how we were going to rescue my friends and my sister, either, but I knew I had a better chance of doing it than this cop.
“I’ll do anything I can to help you,” pleaded the officer, “JUST DON’T LEAVE ME HERE IN THIS PLACE!”
“You said you would put us in a room with bars,” said Ralindera.
“I won’t arrest you! I promise!”
I almost felt sorry for the cop but I was pretty impatient to get on with doing what I could to save Kerry and Gwen and Margot and I couldn’t trust this guy to let us do that.
“Just stop yelling and drawing the attention of all the elves with their arrows and you should be okay,” I told him, but I was having a harder time saying that than I thought I would.
“I-I-I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” Moaned the cop.
I couldn’t believe it, either, but I looked away and waited impatiently while Perlinda typed on a tree. She waited for the desired result but nothing happened. She typed on the tree a second time. Still nothing.
“Why is the computer not opening?” asked Ralindera.
“I am not knowing,” Perlinda answered.
“Could the connection be broken?”
“I am thinking that is possible.”
That is when a draft of air colder than an ice cube hit me. What I saw was a thread of white mist floating among a few nearby trees. It would have been a charming sight if the white cloud wasn’t vaporizing the trees it settled on. Then the cloud began to move slowly in our direction. It made me feel like I’d been teleported to the North Pole. What scared me most about the cloud was the shadows inside it. For a couple of seconds I saw the faintest traces of a pair of large, droopy eyes and a long tongue moving back and forth across a fat mouth and then I saw a darker human-shaped shadow blot out those traces of Slurpy Gurvey’s face. I might have screamed if my throat wasn’t too frozen to do anything.
“Now we know what broke the connection to the computer in the house of books,” said Perlinda.
Even then, the elf girls showed no reaction to the devouring cloud.
“Wh-what’s that?” the officer gasped.
“It is the empty file of Gwion’s soul,” Perlinda replied.
“WHAT?” I croaked.
“But I remembered what Perlinda said about the elves’ trying to steal my soul from a photo Kerry took of me the way they stole the souls of Gwen and Margot. As if to confirm what Perlinda said, I started to see a few features of the face of the shadow that was inside the cloud with Slurpy Gurvey. I couldn’t believe it. That face looked a lot like me. That chilled me a million times more than the cold did.
“An empty file is a nothing,” said Perlinda
“Because Gwion’s soul is a nothing,” added Ralindera.
“Nothing can survive in an empty file,” said Perlinda.
“No soul can survive in an empty file,” added Ralindera.
“Wh-what is that thing going t-to do?” cried the cop.
There he was, once again, reduced to a blob of jelly. I didn’t blame him. I’d have been a blob of jelly myself if I wasn’t too frozen shake like jelly.
“It might destroy everything here if Gwion is not doing something about it,” said Perlinda.
“If it decides to eat us, we cannot outrun it,” said Ralindera.
“It will eat anything as close to it as we are,” said Perlinda, “unless Gwion does something about it.”
I tried to ask her what she expected me to do about the cloud, but I choked on my words. It was then, of all times that I heard another zinging sound close to my ear. This time I couldn’t have hit the ground if my life depended on it, and I thought my life did depend on it. I was about as frozen to the spot as anybody could be. The weird thing, though was that I saw the shape of the arrow inside the cloud, looking like maybe the arrow was floating in it somehow.
“That didn’t work,” said somebody, a teen-age boy maybe, somewhere above me.
“We’ll have to try something else,” said another person, probably a girl, her voice also coming from above me.
“You can’t kill the empty computer file of the soul of a Menarinen with an arrow,” said Perlinda.
“So that is what it is,” said the boy.
“Then we can’t kill it with anything, can we?” said the girl.
“There is nothing that can be done unless Gwion is doing something about it,” said Ralindera.
I heard a thump and saw two elves land on the ground in front of me, both armed with bows and arrows. As I thought, one was a boy on the verge of his teens and the other a girl who might be about my age. They looked familiar but then I’d seen an awful lot of elves in a short time and I still couldn’t tell them apart.
“Is this Gwion the one who is tied to the tree?” asked the boy.
“No, that is a Menarinen interfering with our mission,” said Perlinda.
“I think the empty soul file is interfering with your mission,” said the elf girl.
“Yes, the empty file is interfering with our mission and Gwion is doing nothing about it,” said Ralindera.
“Is this boy standing in front of the cloud the Gwion you are speaking about?” asked the elf boy.
“It must be,” said the girl. “I see the face of the Gwion in the shadows inside the empty file of the empty soul.”
“Then it is Gwion who is going to have to do something about it,” said the elf boy.
BUT WHAT? I desperately wanted to ask, but I still could not make my mouth and throat get any words out.
I was beginning to feel like I was willing to do anything in the world if it would make the chilling destroying cloud go away and stay away.
“I see another face inside the cloud,” said the elf girl.
“Yes, I see the face, too,” said the elf boy. “The face is familiar.”
“Are you saying there is more inside the empty soul file than Gwion’s empty soul?” asked the elf girl.
“Yes,” said the elf boy, “that is what I am saying. I am hoping that the file of the empty soul does not turn the other shadow into nothing.”
“Are you saying that Gwion is going to have to do something about the empty soul?” asked the elf girl.
“That is what I am saying,” said the elf boy.
WHAT DO YOU GOOGLE GUYS WANT ME TO DO? I wanted to yell at the top of his lungs, but I couldn’t. Did they want me to step inside the freezing cloud or something? A lot of good getting evaporated out of existence would do me or anybody else. I couldn’t even do that because my legs were so frozen I couldn’t take as much as one step forward. I could see, off to the side of me, Perlinda and Ralindera standing still. They could have been waiting for a bus on Clark Street for all the anxiety or concern they were showing. I saw the blue lips of the cop gibbering but no sound came out of his mouth. That was a plus.
“Are you thinking it will help if we play a tune?” the elf boy asked the elf girl.
“It might.”
A slow, sad tune started to sound on a flute. A second flute-like instrument joined in. I didn’t see what good the music was going to do but at least it was more entertaining than nothing at all. As the music continued, I saw the shadows stirring inside the frozen cloud. I thought I saw the eyes of Slurpy Gurvey look at me and then he waved a paw to urge me to come to him. I tried to take a step forward to see if I could do it and I could. I took another step forward and the cloud covered me and froze out my brain.