Chapter the 13th
Drawing with the knitting needle had a calming effect on Kevin. He drew broad golden swirls, and then inside them, he etched gem-like shapes that opened and closed like clam shells and inside those he drew serpentine coils. The design only increased his appetite for drawing smaller coils inside the little coils that were embedded in the clam-shapes. The more he focused on the smaller aspects of the design, the larger everything became, making room for everything he wanted to draw inside of what he had already drawn. The fish who had accompanied him swam up into a part of the design where they seemed to fit right in. Kevin noted that he could hardly have placed them better. The prickly white carnation shone ever higher like a star in the sky. On the whim of the moment, Kevin drew a fine golden line in the direction of the star, even though he could not reach it. The string did, however, latch itself on to a thick golden stream that anchored it in place. The only problem was that Kevin could only get the string to come down only so far before the knitting needle stopped producing a line, as if it were a pen that had just run out of ink. That prompted Kevin to try an experiment. He tried drawing a similar string coming from the opposite direction. Again, the needle worked right up to the point where the two strings were about to meet, then the thread gave out, leaving a nebulous line of darkness between the two strings. The same problem he had while working on the train was repeating itself. Kevin decided he had to resign himself to the dark gap and allow it to have its place in the overall pattern of his art. Kevin’s feet were still cold from the snow that had poured into the empty castle through the open windows, but the shawl kept the rest of his body warm.
Kevin tried to avoid making any animal shapes for fear that one of them might turn into the wild boar, but he started to notice that some of the small circles inside the serpentine threads inside the clam-shaped circles were coming together closely enough to look like pairs of black eyes, just like the serpents that had made up the tree roots. Kevin shuddered, and pulled himself together in an effort to regain control over what he was doing. He drew the next pair of circles further apart, only to find himself drawing the shape of a mouth under the circles. Kevin tried to avoid the mouth-like half circle the next time, only to find himself drawing a picture of Michael Bullinger.
Kevin dropped the knitting needle, but it was too late to prevent the Michael Bullinger he had drawn from coming alive. Michael threw a rolled-up newspaper that hit Kevin in the face.
"You brat!" Kevin cried out helplessly.
"Show me your scars," said Michael.
"I'll show you my scars!" Kevin yelled. Then, taking up the knitting needle as if it were a jousting lance, he began to draw furiously with it. As he worked, another face emerged out of the drawing, his mother. As usual, she was at sixes and sevens in an attempt to get out of the house while Kevin and Karen waited impatiently at the door. His grandmother stood beside him, looking like the prickly white carnation in the drawing, a pillar of serenity amid the frantic movements. His mother's delay was fatal. The phone rang. Kevin tried to block his mother's way to the phone with his knitting needle, but she ran right through it and picked up the phone.
"I hope the lion eats you up if you won’t go and see him!" cried Kevin.
But his mother had already disappeared inside the telephone that summoned her. Kevin inspected the surrounding swirling lines for a sign of Goldfire. When he heard a rustling sound behind him, Kevin whirled about, sure that he had caught a glimpse of Goldfire disappearing between a pair of threads. With redoubled fury, Kevin began to draw yet another face, this one of a handsome man whose face beamed like that of a small child. Kevin sketched in a sandbox like the one in his back yard when he was little. Kevin lay down his knitting needle as the two of them knelt down together and they started to build sand castles together.
"I could build castles with you all day!" exclaimed the man.
"So could I!" cried Kevin.
"Let's make a deal. Okay?"
"Okay."
“We’ll build sand castles together every day forever and forever and we’ll build them up to the sky until we’re way above the clouds. Is it a deal?”
"It's a deal!" Kevin cried.
But no sooner were the words out of his mouth then the man kicked a cloud of sand in Kevin's face and ran off. Blinded by the sand, Kevin picked up the knitting needle and ran after the man with all the fury of a charging wild boar. The shawl pulled Kevin back, making it hard for him to follow the sound of the man’s laughter as it guided Kevin after him through the labyrinth. Spots formed in Kevin's eyes and he stumbled. He grabbed hold of a tendril for dear life and it wriggled out of his hands. The laughter of his father echoed from the abyss until it died away, leaving Kevin behind.
“I hope the wild boar tears your guts out!” Kevin yelled after him.
But he knew his father couldn’t hear him. Feeling more lost than ever, Kevin walked aimlessly through the threads that now grew about him like wild grass in a field. The shawl caught snag after snag in the grass, but when Kevin tried to shrug it off, it only caught more snags than ever, so Kevin had to resign himself to being stuck with the shawl. He used the knitting needle to draw a path through the grass and tried to get a picture of something that would give him a sense of direction. One more familiar face emerged. Kevin sketched a door as quickly as possible to give himself an escape route.
"And where do you think you're going?" asked Karen.
"Where do you think? And since when do I need your permission to go to the library?"
"I just want to know where you’ll be so I’ll know where to find you in case I have to call you home to dinner."
"Cold macaroni and all?"
"Maybe I'll make a low-calorie salad to make sure you don't get too much cholesterol."
"Then I'll never come home. Why don't you fix your life instead of these stupid salads that are supposed to save me from having a heart attack?”
With that, Kevin slammed the door and stumbled into the golden grass that had grown taller than his head. The grass swayed in a chilly breeze, causing Kevin to imagine little points of black eyes peering at him from the heads of the blades of grass. The closed door towered before him The knob was so high up that Kevin could never hope to reach it. Kevin banged on the door.
“Let me in!”
But nobody answered the door. With the door’s surface his only refuge, Kevin turned again to drawing with his knitting needle spear. He produced golden swirls and decorative bits of color with seemingly little effort. The wind picked up and whipped the blades of grass against Kevin’s face so that he felt as if snakes were licking him with their tongues. Several blades of grass wrapped themselves around the knitting needle which in turn wove them into the design Kevin was drawing.
Kevin thought he heard a rustling sound in the grass. With the wild boar on his mind again, Kevin put himself on full alert, his knitting needle spear ready. When he heard the rustling again, Kevin saw a movement in the grass just up ahead. Tired of running away from everything that moved, Kevin squared himself and walked quietly up to the spot where the animal was hiding. When he was almost on top of the animal, he thrust the knitting needle at it with a trembling hand. The high-pitched scream that answered the thrust almost made Kevin drop the needle, but he held on until he realized that it was pointed at a small boy whose winter coat had probably saved him from being skewered by the needle.
"Who are you?" Kevin demanded.
The boy rolled over and then sat up on his knees in a begging position.
"I’m Edmund! Please don't kill me!" the boy pleaded.
“Why should I spare you?” Kevin asked, feeling stronger by the second now that he had a boy cowering before him for the first time in his life.
“Because—I won’t hurt you—why I haven't even hurt an armadillo in my life—and—and if you kill me up before my voice changes, Mr. Spitzenbergen will punch you in the nose.”
“Why should he care about you?” Kevin snarled.
“Because I sing in the Carelin Cathedral choir—first treble and—and he still wants me to sing Palestrina motets for him, that’s why.”
"What do Pastrami motes have to do with anything?" asked Kevin, sticking the needle at him.
"Why—Palestrina motets might have some of the missing notes we’re looking for.”
"Missing notes?!" Kevin exploded. "What missing notes?"
"Uh—we don't know which notes are missing and which ones aren't, but we know some of them are missing because suddenly we’ve been having an octopus-awful time singing and it seems like this blizzard blew the notes away—so Mr. Spitzenbergen and some of the other boys in the choir and me went out looking for the missing notes—and then Amarilla and this guy named Michael suggested we try to find the royal palace and look there—and so we did—and—and we found the palace, but these yellow and gold streams were flowing in and out through the windows and—floating in the streams were these real neat boats made of clam shells so we—we started jumping into the boats to ride into the palace and my friend Nigel jumped into one and I was going to jump in with him but then—like all of a sudden I heard this door slam and—and it was like Nigel and the boat were locked out and I was lost in this field and I started looking and calling for the other boys but—well—now I’m really lost and I can't find anybody."
When a tear started to form in Edmund's eye, Kevin jabbed the needle at him harder.
"DO YOU MEAN TO SAY FINDING ME STILL ISN'T FINDING ANYBODY?"
Now Edmund began to cry in real earnest.
“Don’t eat me up!” Edmund cried.
"And what makes you think I'm going to eat you up?" Kevin asked.
"Why—if you don't mind my saying so—or even if you do mind my saying so—you’re eyes are getting red and—your—your teeth are getting pretty big and long.”
Kevin opened his mouth to tell Edmund that his eyes and teeth were nothing to brag about either, but all that came out of his mouth was a loud, inarticulate roar. Dropping down to his hands and knees, Kevin closed in on a cowering Edmund.
“Your—your golden fur looks—uh—looks real nice,” stammered Edmund.
Hardly flattered by that, Kevin tried to say some choice things about Edmund’s fair hair, but again, his words were blurred by the only sound his vocal chords could make.
___________
In order to move at all through the books Karen was swimming in, she had to shrug off everything her school librarian had drilled into her concerning the proper care of books and then shove books aside regardless of what happened to them as a result of her actions. For one horrible moment, she thought she had lost Roger and Samantha, but then she heard the sound of muffled voices. She pushed herself in that direction until a small hand came out of nowhere and grabbed her.
"This way!"
Karen let the hand that held her guide her through the suffocating books into a small cave where Roger was pitching books left and right to give Karen room to maneuver. Samantha helpfully pulled the shawl gently to give Karen some slack. The cave, walled with books jutting out like rocks, was dark except for a small flickering light. It was a candle resting precariously on a book that lit up the pimpled face of a thin man with a head of hair like straw. He was wearing a pea-green waist coat and he sat on the floor of books with a large book across his knee. He was scribbling away on one piece of paper while he studied another piece of paper that was torn in two. Apparently oblivious to the visitors who had just broken in on him, he continued with his writing without looking up at them. When he came to the end of a page, the man threw the page away, adding to a large pile of paper and continued scribbling on the next piece of paper without stopping the movement of his pen in the slightest.
“Want to ask him if he’s Professor Dinwoodie?” Samantha prompted Karen.
“Can’t you ask him?” Karen replied.
“It’s your quest,” said Roger.
Karen shrugged her shoulders and decided she did have to be afraid of a man who looked eccentric but dangerous.
"Are you Professor Dinwoodie?" Karen asked him timidly.
The professor continued to scribble furiously, giving no indication that he heard Karen.
"He must be Professor Dinwoodie," said Roger.
"How do you know?" Karen asked.
"Because Professor Dinwoodie never answers any questions addressed to him," Roger replied.
"If he had answered you," Samantha added, "then we would have known it wasn't Professor Dinwoodie."
“Let’s see what he’s doing,” Samantha suggested.
Emboldened by the example of the children, Karen followed them behind the man until they were close enough to look over his shoulder. It made Karen feel they were all being rather rude to the professor, even if the professor was also being rude to them. However, the professor continued on with his scribbling and gave no sign that he was affected in the least by anything the children did or said. The professor's handwriting was so illegible, that it could have been in any language and Karen would not have known the difference.
"Wow!" Roger and Samantha cried out. “There’s Sir Kevin’s illumination!”
The two torn pieces of paper were covered with breathtaking fragments of an illumination where golden swirls filled with diamond-like bits of color snaked in and out of similar golden swirls. As she looked, Karen thought she saw little black eyes look out at her in the middle of the swirls. She blinked and then tried looking again. This time, she could see that the basic shape of the design was a harp that was broken in the middle by the tear in the paper. Suspecting that she was looking at a color version of the drawing Kevin had left behind in the library at Milton, Karen took the crumpled paper out of her pocket and compared Kevin's pencil drawing with the colored version before her. It was indeed the same drawing. Even the tear in the paper was the same. That was enough to make Karen dizzy.
“How did that get here?” asked Karen.
“Probably by always being here,” Samantha replied in a normal voice.
“But—the drawing couldn’t just be here without a cause,” Karen protested.
“Causes don’t always make things happen,” said Roger.
“Every effect has a cause,” Karen insisted.
“How do you know?” asked Samantha.
“Well, one drawing is a copy of the other. That means the copy is caused by the original and the copy is also caused by the person who makes the copy.”
“But which is the copy and which is the original?” asked Roger.
“This pencil drawing would be the original,” said Karen.
“Not if Sir Kevin was copying his painting in the codex,” said Roger.
“And not if this manuscript is a copy of Kevin's copy," said Samantha.
“Which might be a copy of the copy of Kevin’s copy,” added Roger.
"Shut up," Karen interjected, "I can't think when you talk like that."
Both children closed their mouths respectfully. Karen looked at the drawing again. The more she looked at the thick golden streams in the design, the more the gem-like flecks of color looked like blood corpuscles with little chromosomes in them. Other bits of color took on the look of a network of neurons.
"I wonder if the pieces fit together," Roger remarked quietly.
"There's one way to find out," Samantha replied.
Roger reached over and brought the two pieces of paper together as best he could. Even then, the professor did not notice the intrusion although he was clearly scrutinizing the drawing as Roger moved the pieces. As it turned out, the two pieces did not fit but they left a gap in the middle of the broken harp strings.
"What's it look like to you?" Roger asked.
“It looks like he's drawn blood corpuscles inside the gold snakes,” Karen replied. “See?"
Karen pointed them out to the children.
"What are corpuscles?” Samantha asked.
“Corpuscles are cells inside your blood that carry chemicals to every organ in your body.”
“Oh good!” cried Samantha. “I’ve always wanted to play an organ inside somebody’s liver.”
“Are you talking about the little clam shells that the blood’s pushing along?” asked Roger.
"What clam shells?" Karen scoffed.
"Why, the blood clam shells," Roger explained. "You know, every time you have a good thought or a bad thought, one of the clam shells opens up right where the thought gets under your skin. Then the shell snaps shut and carries the thought to where it’s supposed to go in your body and leaves it there. That's why we have to try to have good thoughts."
Karen was speechless.
"A lot of the clam shells in this drawing are closed," Samantha observed. “That means there are a lot of thoughts being carried about. I don’t see the organ, though. Maybe it’s trapped in one of the clam shells."
"Are you putting me on?" Karen asked.
Samantha looked at Karen.
"Looks like we're putting you off."
“Clam shells can’t get inside your blood stream," said Karen, “they’re much too big.”
“No they’re not,” said Samantha, “the clam shells and the blood adjust their sizes.”
"The clams live in the cosmic ocean," Roger explained, “and the water from the ocean flows into you when you're about to be born. That’s when the clam shells get inside you.”
“This is no time for nursery tales,” said Karen. “If your teacher hasn’t given you any biology lessons yet, I’ll have to do it. These are corpuscles. Corpuscles are blood cells.”
“They sell blood to people?” Roger asked.
“Don’t you kids understand anything?” Karen asked, her patience growing thing. “You must know that your body is made up of little tiny cells of all kinds.”
“No, we don’t know that” Samantha answered.
“The body is made up of alphabet blocks,” said Roger. “Each block reads the letter on the other blocks, and that’s how they know what to do.”
“Well, that’s one way of looking at it,” Karen admitted. “There are little letters with instructions deep inside the cells. Now, those threads over there look like a network of neurons. Neurons are nerve cells. See the extensions? Those are dendrites. They pick up nerve signals -"
"Those are seeds from the tree of life," Samantha interrupted Karen.
"What?"
"Samantha said: those are seeds from the tree of life," said Roger. "When you are about to be born, the tree of life plants seeds in you. These seeds grow into a field of trees. These trees send their roots and branches throughout your body. The good and bad thoughts that the clam shells pick up get planted in one of the seeds that grows into another tree. That's why you want to have more good thoughts than bad thoughts."
"But—can't you see that inside these cells, he's even drawn little chromosomes?" Karen asked helplessly.
The longer the children looked at the illustration, the more details came into focus. To Karen’s eyes, the chromosomes were wriggling inside the nucleus like a nest of snakes. They could hardly be clearer if she were looking at them through a microscope.
"Oh those," said Samantha. "Those are the little serpents that eat up all the thoughts the clam shells bring them."
“They do?” Karen asked incredulously. “And what happens to the thoughts after the serpents eat them?”
“The thoughts live inside the serpent that eats them,” Roger explained. “That’s why you want to have your serpents feed on good thoughts instead of bad ones, because bad thoughts make the serpents sick and that makes the bad thoughts even sicker.”
“And then the serpents get sicker yet,” added Samantha, “and that makes the thoughts even sicker.”
"STOP!” cried Karen in despair, her head swimming so that lines in the drawing were flowing together like a river system. “Don't you kids learn any science in school?"
"Of course we do,” Roger replied.
“Then why do you keep talking about clam shells floating in your blood with serpents living inside the clam shells?”
“Because that’s what we learn in science class," Roger answered.
“YOU KIDS!” Karen cried as she threw up her arms in despair.
She lost her balance and fell, but not into a stack of books but into a river. The water was warm and Karen, being a competent swimmer, would have had no difficulty bringing herself back up to the surface if the shawl were not dragging her down at the shoulders.
"Over here!" cried Samantha.
Karen kept her head above the liquid just enough to see Roger and Samantha waving from a coracle floating in the river. A candle Samantha must have snatched from Professor Dinwoodie furnished the only light. Of the professor, there was no sign. Karen thrashed about in the warm liquid, still thwarted by the shawl.
“Grab me!” Roger cried.
Karen made her way over to the coracle and Roger pulled her in.
“I’ve got to get rid of this thing!” Karen muttered as she tried to get the sopping shawl off her shoulders.
“You’ve got to keep it,” said Samantha.
“No I don’t!”
But to her dismay, Karen found that there was no way she could get the shawl off of her by herself. Since it was clear that neither Roger nor Samantha were going to help her get it off, she was stuck with the shawl dragging in the river behind her. As far as Karen could tell by the candle’s light, they were floating on a river in an underground cave with a low ceiling.
“Well, I must admit that this coracle looks about as much like a clam shell as it could,” said Karen. “Yip!”
Looking down to see what slimy thing was moving over her feet, Karen saw a tangle of golden snakes.
“Don’t worry about the snakes,” Samantha advised her. “Just worry about the thoughts they’ve swallowed.”
"What did I tell you?" said Roger.
“Shut up!” Karen scowled.