Chapter the 9th
I thought I was a goner and I almost didn’t care. I don’t know how to describe what being inside that cloud was like but, basically, I felt like a real nothing and being nothing meant I had nothing to lose. The only thing I cared about during that frozen time was my poor sister and my friends Margot and Kerry. I deserved to get vaporized by this cloud but they didn’t deserve to get kidnaped by these elves and have nobody left to rescue them. All this frozen time, I was hearing the two elves play their instruments and I thought maybe two more instruments were joining in. I suppose that if my brain was really frozen through, I wouldn’t have been able to hear the music or still wish I could do something for my sister and my friends. All I can say is that my brain felt frozen but I wasn’t completely brain dead—yet.
Sometime or other in this frozen state, I got to feeling or thinking that I was a shadow and nothing but a shadow. I wasn’t much of a shadow because I couldn’t do anything. Then I got to seeing this goofy face looking at me. I remembered that the face belonged to Slurpy Gurvey. He rolled his eyes around his head and let his tongue hang out. I didn’t laugh because I was too frozen. Then Slurpy Gurvey’s face kind of puckered and I thought maybe he was crying.
“Do you know Kerry Blake?” I heard a soft rumbling voice ask me.
“Yea, I think so,” I answered, amazed that I could answer at all when my throat was more frozen than my brain.
“Kerry Blake is twisted and twusted and twasted in knots with his mouth tied behind his back and his hands tied behind his mouth, if you know what I mean,” said Slurpy Gurvey.
This was the kind of oddball talk Kerry used in his captions for Slurpy Gurvey, but it wasn’t very funny this time.
“I think I know what you mean,” I said to Slurpy. “I was trying to come and rescue him but first this cop got in our way and now this cloud’s stopped me and I’ll never get out.”
“If you want to pull and pry and ploy Kerry loose from the knot knitting his knees to his face, just skip out of the cloud skip and scrimp and scruff your way to the risking rescue,” said Slurpy Gurvey.
“I can’t!” I said. “I’m too frozen to move!”
“How do you do, do you doodoo dee doo you know you can’t skip and scrimp and scruff away from here?”
“I guess I don’t know,” I said.
Slurpy Gurvey put his paws up to his mouth as if he was playing a flute and the flute and other instruments I heard from outside the cloud and that got me thinking that I might as well see if I could skip and scrimp and scruff my way out of the cloud. And so I did.
“That’s a pea-pecking poop-pappy pal!” roared Slurpy Gurvey.
He tapped me on a shoulder with his paw and just about pushed me past a couple of trees and into another tree that was in my way. Now I could hear the music quite clearly. I balanced myself against the tree and turned around. The white cloud was still hanging itself in the air not far from me and I still felt its fierce chill. All four of the elves were playing instruments but they didn’t seem to agree on what tune to play. Either the cloud shrank to a small size or the shadows got bigger. Either way, Slurpy Gurvey and the human-shaped shadow outgrew the cloud. Slurpy Gurvey waved to me and then the other shadow turned towards me. I just about dropped my knees. I saw, in that shadow, a bit of my own face looking out at me. This was almost too much in one way but, in another way, it wasn’t so bad. It’s like I almost had a face to look at myself with, if you know what I mean. The shadow waved at me and then the two figures moved off, riding the puff of cloud that was left.
I was relieved, but I was still shaking from the cold and the fear. The cloud, small as it might have gotten, still left a white swath of vaporized trees in its wake. It’s like there was nothing but a ragged line of white mist where there were trees. The elves stopped their piping and pocketed their instruments. Perlinda and Ralindera stood by the edge of the blank, empty space, looking like they were thinking real hard. You’d never know their lives had just been threatened.
“Now we can fix the connections and continue our mission,” said Perlinda.
“Want some help?” asked the elf boy.
Perlinda and Ralindera gave the other two elves a stare as frigid as the misty cloud I had just gotten rid of.
“Proper Panlorimen never need help from Meladimen,” said Perlinda primly.
“Proper Meladimen would never help Panlorimen,” said Ralindera.
“Proper Lorakhienoi would never risk themselves to deliver a Menarinen from danger,” said Perlinda.
The two elves who helped us out looked at each other and shrugged.
“We can be proper Meladimen and proper Lorakhienoi when we choose,” said the elf girl.
With that, the two elves slipped in among the trees and were gone before I could open my mouth. It was only then that a little lightbulb lit up in my head and I recognized who those two elves were: they were the ones who healed the archer who’d been wounded during the brawl after the goofy baseball game.
“That’s no way to treat those guys after what they did!” I protested.
“We have treated them exactly the way they should be treated,” said Ralindera.
“Don’t you think it might be easier if they helped us fix this connection that got broken?” I asked.
“No,” said Perlinda. “We can fix the connection much better without their help.”
Perlinda ran her fingers down the tree trunk nearest to the edge of the blankness. It made me dizzy just to look at her and so I turned away before I got so dizzy that I fell down and maybe fell into the white mist. Turning my face didn’t help much because that got me looking at Ralindera taking a root from a tree at the edge on the other side of the misty swathe and snaking it into the mist. I was afraid the root would disappear but a shadow of the root slithered across the mist and met a root coming from the opposite direction. The roots merged to form one line from tree to tree and similar roots began to branch out from the other trees at the edge so that a matrix of interconnected roots filled up the blankness and slender baby trees started to form.
“Now, we will attempt, again, our mission to the house of books,” Perlinda announced.
“I’m ready to get out of here,” I said.
Perlinda, looking like a bandit with the cop’s billy club and pistol strapped under her belt, tapped a tree the way she did before the white cloud attacked us. This time the tree turned like a doorway, opening into a tunnel like the other elves’ computer tunnels I’d seen.
“Let us go,” said Ralindera.
“Y-you aren’t going to leave he here, are you?” the cop asked, getting his voice for the first time.
“Yes, we are leaving you here until we return,” said Perlinda.
“YOU CAN’T!” cried the cop.
“We can,” said Ralindera.
I was getting tired of delays and even more tired of this rerun. I just wanted to get this cop out of my life and keep him there, but somehow, I couldn’t. In one way, I felt the same way I did before that cloud threatened us but in another way, I didn’t. Part of it was that I knew I wouldn’t get that fear-filled face out of my mind if I turned my back on him. Another part of it was that I got to thinking about how scary it must be for a man who doesn’t have a clue about elves to be stuck alone in this place. Yet another part of it was that I got to thinking that leaving the cop alone in this forest would just make me feel like that empty shadow that turned out to me, sort of, and I didn’t want to feel like that again. So I turned back and faced Officer McDougall.
“All right,” I said him. “I guess it’s got to be pretty spooky being here all alone.”
“You’re dam-darn right. You’re going to take me with you, aren’t you?”
Seeing this cop shaking in his pants made me feel braver and stronger than I really was. I puffed out my chest and made myself look at stern as I could.
“I will take you with us under one condition,” I told him. “It is most important that you understand that we are the ones who know how to rescue Kerry and Gwen and Margot and you don’t. Therefore, we will let you go and let you come with us under the condition that you not hinder us in any way in this mission. Do you promise on your highest policeman’s honor that you will cooperate with us every step of the way until the rescue is completed?”
“I promise! I promise!” the officer whimpered.
Perlinda and Ralindera turned on me with stony looks that were enough to convince me that they were poor substitutes for Gwen and Margot.
“Are you sure we should take him with us?” Perlinda asked.
The officer gave me such a helpless, lost puppy look that I felt like grinding him in the dust under my heel, but I had committed myself and I wasn’t going to back down.
“No, I’m not sure,” I said, “but I still say he comes with us. He’s made his promise.”
“And what value is a promise?” asked Ralindera.
“I PROMISE! I PROMISE!” cried the cop.
“Come on, set him free so we can get on with it,” I said.
The elf girl shrugged and, together, they flicked the rope away in a microsecond.
“Thank you, thank you, kid,” said the cop.
“My name’s Gwion,” I told him.
“Yea, Gwion. Thanks.”
The relief on the cop’s face made me feel good for a few seconds, but as soon as he got away from that tree he didn’t look the least bit grateful. That gave me second thoughts, but it was too late. I was pretty sure I had done the right thing, but I wasn’t getting the good feeling that people say they get from doing good. Perlinda entered the tunnel and the rest of us followed.
“Are we going in there?” asked the cop as he peered down the tunnel.
“If you wish to get out of here, yes,” I told him. “It’s not that bad.”
Officer McDougall looked awfully doubtful but, seeing that he had no choice, he tip-toed into the tunnel and slipped and slid in the round shape of it. We made a couple of turns in the tunnel and then came to a branching passage with a bright yellowish sign in the elvish alphabet. The girls nodded to each other with satisfaction, and made the turn. The end was just a few steps away. Perlinda tapped on the wall and it opened up to another dark place.
“This is it?” Ralindera asked me.
I picked up a musty smell that might have been the smell of old books and sneezed.
“I smell old books all right,” I said.
I took a careful step forward, slid into the dark with my arms around a pillow and hit a wall. That kind of frazzled me for a second or two. I tried to get my balance and slid some more and almost fell off of whatever I was riding. Somehow I got my arm around the pillow and finally realized I was sprawled on a chair with wheels on it and I was looking at a holograph of the tunnel with two elves and a cop perched at the entrance.
“Are you okay?” Officer McDougall asked me.
I had to admit it was nice of him to ask. My eyes were getting used to the dark and I could make out the computer monitor standing on a desk. To my left, I saw a beam of light coming through a window that flooded piles of books stacked on a nearby table. There wasn’t any question that we’d gotten to Parchment Place as we planned. The only problem was that it looked like we’d gotten there in the middle of the night. I had forgotten about the time warps you get every time you get mixed up with these elves. I pushed myself off the chair and returned to the holographic image. The elf girls and the cop looked kind of funny, being so small.
“I’ll help you out and down,” I offered.
“That will not be needed,” said Perlinda.
She jumped down to the floor like a cat and Ralindera followed suit. It looked even funnier to see them both change sizes in the middle of their jumps. That left Officer McDougall.
“I-I need help,” he said, though I could see it killed him to say that.
I gave him a hand and he thumped on the floor and shook me up when he jerked my arm out of shape by taking on his usual size. Officer McDougall looked around to get himself some idea of where he was.
“This looks like a book store,” said the cop, with a tone of suspicion in his voice.
“It’s Parchment Place,” I said.
“And you came here to rob the place?” the cop asked.
All of a sudden, he was acting so bully brave you’d never known he was on his knees begging for mercy just a short time ago.
“The girls just wanted to check up on some books,” I replied.
“In the middle of the night?”
“It was sometime in the afternoon when we started out,” I explained. “We didn’t expect it to be this late when we got here.”
“You will have to tell that to the judge,” said the cop. “And while you’re at it, you can explain to the judge why you couldn’t just walk down the street like anybody else.”
“We couldn’t do that because people like you would have stopped us and asked us a million questions about Kerry and Gwen and Margot and stopped us from doing anything to rescue them,” I replied, getting my dander up pretty good.
“It’s my job to rescue those children!”
“I thought we had an understanding,” I reminded the cop.
“It was not my understanding that I was aiding and abetting your breaking and entering a bookstore.”
“We didn’t break anything,” I said.
“The law will consider whether or not what you have done is breaking and entering.”
I DON’T CARE WHAT THE LAW SAYS PISSFACE!” I yelled at the cop.
That was dumb, saying something like that to a cop, and I don’t usually use language like that, but I was furious beyond reasoning after doing a good deed for once in my life and the getting done in for it.
“What did you say?” asked the cop.
“I think you heard what I said,” I growled.
“That is not the proper way to speak to an officer of the law,” said the cop.
“It’s the right way to speak to you after what I did for you,” I said in return,
“May I help you?” asked a person with a high-pitched voice.
That turned all of us around to the back of the store. Of all people, Marakel was standing in an open doorway with a computer screen at his back casting a faint light on him.
“Do I see yet another burglar?” the policeman asked, his voice dripping with suspicion. “What is this, anyway? Some kind of burglarizing gang?”
“Burglar?” asked Marakel.
“A burglar is somebody who breaks into a home or a store or after it is closed, when nobody is supposed to come into it,” the policeman repeated, his patience growing thinner.
“I am not breaking into this house of books,” said Marakel. “Mr. Kirkpatrick said I could stay here and work on his computer tonight.”
“I will give him a chance to verify that in the morning,” said the policeman.
“Do you want to get sent back down to that tunnel we rescued you from?” I threatened the cop.
“Gwion!” Marakel cried. “It’s you! You got away!”
“No thanks to you that I did!” I snapped back at him.
Marakel stopped in midstep and looked at me.
“You are being angry with me, I think,” said Marakel.
“OF COURSE I’M ANGRY AT YOU FOR DUMPING ME INTO THE HANDS OF THE KIDNAPERS!” I yelled.
“I am sorry I could not rescue you,” Marakel apologized.
“Rescue me, my foot! You traitor!” I charged.
“Traitor?” Marakel asked.
“A traitor is a person who promises to help and then puts you straight in the arms of kidnapers who want to steal your soul!” I yelled at the elf. “That’s you!”
For a moment, Marakel froze, making him look as cold as the destroying cloud I’d just fought. His face became a total blank, something I had come to expect of a creature without a soul. Then Marakel’s lip quivered ever so slightly. I assumed that the first tear that I saw trickle down his face was a trick of the streetlights outside. But then another tear followed the first. Officer McDougall paced about the store, apparently deciding to wait for this spell to blow over before carting us off to jail. The trickle on Marakel’s face became a pair of streams down both cheeks. The girls stood where they were, unmoved. As for me, I felt like the bottom was falling out of my life.
“He is pretending to be sorry,” said Ralindera.
“All the easier to be a traitor again,” said Perlinda.
“My sentiments exactly,” I added.
Marakel sniffed back his tears loudly. I decided he was putting on a pretty good act for an elf who didn’t know how to be a human being.
“Do you—do you really think I put you into the hands of the double twisted Panlorimen?” he asked through his tears.
“What else do you expect me to think?” I asked in return.
Marakel sniffed again.
“I thought we would land at a safe distance,” said Marakel. “I think the virus-making Panlorimen changed the program just to catch you. I tried to rescue you, but I failed. So I came here to find books that would tell me how to rescue you.”
“Do you expect me to believe that?” I asked.
More tears streamed down Marakel’s face. The girls remained as stone faced as ever. This was getting to be enough to make me believe him.
“Is this what it means to have a soul?” Marakel sobbed.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“I feel something cracking inside,” said Marakel, fighting back his tears.
“It’s your rib cage,” said Ralindera.
“It’s your brain bone,” said Perlinda.
“A soul isn’t this kind of mushy mash, if that’s what you’re talking about” said Officer McDougall. “A soul is what makes you walk tall and take a stand for justice.”
Those words made something crack inside of me. The image of Kerry Blake’s face when I flung my first insult at him for singing at the assembly hit me like a ton of baseball bats and I saw the pain in Kerry’s face for the first time and saw what I’d really done to him. And to think I bragged about it to the elves when I was their guest! Now I realized that I was acting just like the policeman who had betrayed me. Whatever I wanted to be, I knew I didn’t want to be like Officer McDougall and I didn’t want to be like Perlinda and Ralindera, and I didn’t want to be like John and Tim and me when we trashed Kerry the way we did.
“What is this place getting to be?” the cop asked, “a nursery?”
Only then did I realize that tears were streaming down my face as much as they were on Marakel’s.
“Gwion has caught the crying virus from Marakel,” said Ralindera.
“The Meladimen are trying to spread the virus to all Menarinen and to all the Panlorimen,” said Perlinda.
In a way, that was true. It wasn’t a virus, of course, but I don’t think there’s a chance in the world I would have cried if Marakel hadn’t already broken down. I was burning with shame for having accused Marakel of being a traitor when I should have known that he hadn’t necessarily put Margot, Gwen and I into the hands of the elves. I was in no position to talk about being a traitor after the way I betrayed Kerry. I sniffed back my nose hard so that I could talk a little.
“I’m sorry I called you a traitor,” I apologized to Marakel.
“I am being sorry, too,” Marakel replied.
“I’m really sorry,” I said, thinking he was being sarcastic the way most people are when they say that.
“That is what made something break inside me,” said Marakel, looking as broken as ever.
“Marakel,” I said, “I think a soul might be about fixing what’s broken inside of somebody else.”
“It is your head that’s broken, you Meladimen,” said Ralindera.
“You have broken Gwion’s head, you Meladimen,” said Perlinda.
“You Meladimen tried to get ahead in the war by kidnaping Kerry,” Ralindera charged.
“You Panlorimen tired to get ahead in the war by kidnaping Gwen and Margot and Gwion,” Marakel charged in return.
“We didn’t keep Gwion because he has no soul,” said Perlinda.
“He is having a soul now,” said Marakel.
“You tricked him into having a soul so that you Meladimen could give you the advantage in the war,” Ralindera accused Marakel.
“Inverted rotten tooth!” Perlinda called him.
“Punched-up nose swilling in snot!” the more creative Ralindera called him.
“You are as false as a corrupted program,” said Perlinda.
“You are as empty as a file without characters,” said Ralindera.
“All right,” Officer McDougall intervened. “Let’s put a stop to this squabbling and get marching to the police station.”
Only then did the cop remember that Perlinda had his billy club and his gun. Perlinda tossed the gun to Ralindera. Marakel snatched a heavy book from a nearby table and he held it ready to strike one or both of the elf girls. With his face turned back into stone, you’d never think Marakel had broken down in tears just a minute before.
“We go nowhere before we finish the battle,” said Perlinda.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked. “We’ve got to work together to rescue these guys.”
“The Panlorimen and the Meladimen never work together,” said Marakel solemnly.
“The Meladimen and the Panlorimen never work together,” Ralindera echoed.
“But you guys were kicked out of your tribes,” I reminded them. “How can you possibly keep up that war when you aren’t even part of it?”
Three elves turned their faces in my direction, their eyes like knives of ice. After a tense moment, sharp blows struck me on both sides of my head and the surging pain blacked me out.