Chapter the 34th
“I am not authorized to give you a report on Kip Sterling’s condition,” said the nurse on duty in the ER.
“But I’m concerned about him,” said Eleanore Gleason. “Can’t tell me something? He is one of my former students.”
“There is one thing I can tell you,” said the nurse, “I doubt that Kip will be well enough to conjugate verbs and diagram sentences for at least a few days.”
The nurse, another former student of Eleanore’s, was obviously relishing the chance to talk back to a teacher who had given her much grief. Eleanore started to give a barbed reply but then decided that she was receiving just retribution for the way she had treated her students. She swallowed her words and walked away, her mission unaccomplished.
She was startled to see some light when she walked through the lobby and out the door. That should have cheered her up, but the light was so much like the pale glow of her lost roses that she only felt worse. The load of bitter years came crashing down on her and it amazed her that she hadn’t known all along how wrong her life was. It had taken an embarrassing scene of hysterical behavior and a potentially serious injury to a young man for which she was to blame to bring her to her senses.
“As you can see,” said an older man in a dark suit, “it doesn’t do you any good to think of changing your ways.”
“Everybody has you pegged, just the way you had all your students pegged,” said a woman dressed in black.
“Nobody will ever find you likeable,” said a younger man, also wearing a black suit.
“Mark Clement gave me credit for trying not to be so crabby,” said Eleanore, “but I wasn’t as nice to him as I could have been.”
“Mark Clement was just trying to con you into giving him a better grade,” said the older man.
“He knows that if he decides to be a priest, he’ll obligated to be kind to you, even if he hates you as much as everybody else does,” said the woman.
“Only your hate gives you the power to drum English grammar into the ungrateful heads of your students,” said the younger man.
“Mark was a top student and he knew that I would have given him top marks even if he cold-shouldered me just like everybody else,” said Eleanore, hoping she wasn’t indulging in wishful thinking.
“That light you see is coming from one of your roses that somebody stole from you,” said the older man.
“And nobody cares about you at all,” added the woman.
“I don’t blame them,” said Eleanore.
Undecipherable crowd noises from down the hill started to reach Eleanore’s ear, piquing her curiosity.
“I wonder what is going on now,” she muttered to herself
“Forget about it,” said the older man. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Your best bet is to go home and read your favorite novels and forget everybody else,” said the woman.
“You are the last person in the world who can help anybody in a time of crisis,” said the younger man.
Those words from the three dark people repeated themselves in Eleanore’s head many times before she realized she had been standing still and leaning toward the street where she lived for quite some time.
“Sometimes you just have to try and do the right thing, even if everybody hates me,” said Eleanore.
She took a cautious step in the direction of the fighting. A strange humming sound reached her ears. She stopped and looked around but all she could see was a curious network of glowing purplish threads surrounded by a silvery ball.
“There it is!” cried an adolescent boy.
Eleanore looked up at the boy who was running up the street. Of all her students, he was the last person Eleanore would have expected to see show so much excitement about anything.
“What are you chasing, Gary?” asked Eleanore.
Gary Haggler stopped and shrank back from his English teacher, the way he always did when she called on him in class and he hadn’t done his homework.
“Nothing,” he said, dropping into his usual slouch.
Eleanore’s heart sank. She felt like giving up and stalking off, but she had just told herself she had to try and do the right thing even if everybody still hated her.
“You looked so excited,” said Eleanore. “Did you see something good?”
Gary seemed to relax a little in his slouch. Then he pointed.
“There.”
Gary’s finger took Eleanore’s eyes to the silvery ball and the purplish threads she had seen fleetingly a moment before. It was a silvery hummingbird with a reddish breast with the purple threads in its beak.
“What a beautiful creature!” Eleanore exclaimed.
“You can see it?” asked Gary, cautiously showing some life again.
“Yes, it’s the loveliest hummingbird I’ve seen in my life!”
“I think I’ve just discovered a new species,” said Gary.
“I don’t know about that,” said Eleanore. “There are an awful lot of species and it’s hard to know all of them.”
“I do!” said Gary. “Or I did know all of them until this one came along.”
The hummingbird zipped right up to Eleanore and hovered just over her hands and held itself in place, as if waiting for her to do something.
“It likes you!” Gary whispered.
Hardly believing that this could be happening, Eleanore turned her hand over so that the hummingbird could land in her palm if it wanted to. For a few seconds, it appeared that it was going to do just that. But instead, the hummingbird flew over her palm, dropped the thread from its beak and floated in front of her, as if waiting for her to do something.
“I don’t understand this,” said Eleanore.
“Neither do I,” said Gary.
“Any suggestions?” asked a bemused Eleanore.
Gary moved closer.
“What do you think, nectar drinker?” he asked the hummingbird.
The hummingbird flew up to Gary’s ear and his eyes grew wide with amazement.
“Did it say anything to you?” Eleanore asked him.
“Yea, he says: Pull gently on the web.”
Eleanore looked down and saw that the thread ran all the down to Main Street. The noise from there broke into the little bubble the hummingbird had created around it. Eleanore shuddered and gingerly pulled on the thread. She felt the resistance of something heavy, something that probably hadn’t budged.
“I’m not getting anywhere with this,” said Eleanore. “Are you sure this hummingbird knows what he’s doing?”
The hummingbird darted around Gary’s ear.
“William says he knows everything he’s doing,” said Gary. “He says: Keep trying.”
Obediently, Eleanore pulled a second time, a little harder, but only got herself pulled back so that she almost fell on her face.
“This is not working,” said Eleanore.
The crowd noise on Main Street exploded and people jumped at each other’s throats. She was just far enough away that she could see nothing of the melee clearly in the pale light, except that it was the worst she had ever seen in her life.
“I told you that people are incorrigible,” said the older man.
“If you hold on to that string a minute longer, you will be caught in the melee and you will get hurt,” cautioned the woman.
“Drop the string now and run from all these people who hate you,” advised the younger man.
“Don’t let go of the web!” Gary cried with more passion than he had ever shown for anything. “Pull again—quick!—but don’t pull so hard—hurry!”
Eleanore tightened her hold on the thread just before it slid out of her fingers. She tried pulling gently. She felt something move at the other end. Encouraged, she pulled some more. To her surprise, the more gently she pulled, the more the object the was pulling seemed to move.
“Keep pulling,” Gary urged her. “William says you’re doing fine.”
But as she pulled on the thread, the fighting mob spread halfway up the street, looking like a dark cloud on the move.
If she were by herself, Eleanore was sure she would have dropped the thread and run. But when Gary, who had never been famous for having even an ounce of courage, stood firmly where he was and took a hold of the thread when Eleanore almost lost it, there was no way the English teacher was going to abandon her pupil.
“Keep pulling!” somebody cried out in a high squeaky voice.
Eleanore pulled again and Gary let go. A large bearded man wearing a pirate hat seemed to ride the dark cloud. Then the cloud broke up into the shape of two boys dressed in shredded black cassocks. They came straight toward her riding on a sled, or something like it. The cuts and bruises on the boys’ faces made it clear that the melee on Main Street was all too real. The pirate, complete with a parrot on his shoulder, hurried after the boys. This close up, the pirate’s fearsome appearance was softened by a small boy cradled in his arms and tears in the man’s eyes.
“Hang on! Don’t let go!” cried the little boy the pirate was carrying.
The boys reached Eleanore and Gary and slid off what turned out to be a large treasure chest Like the mysterious paper carrier who created the roses she squandered, Eleanore did not recognize any of the three boys.
“Who are you and why have you been fighting?” she asked them as if she had caught them acting out in the hall at school.
The boys and the pirates blinked at the tone of her voice. The pirate put the boy down and gave the English teacher a guilty look. Eleanore’s gritted her teeth, wishing she could kick herself for her incurable temper.
“Lay off these guys, Teach,” said Gary. “They need our help.”
“I mean—What’s the matter? Who are you, and what can I do?” Eleanore asked the boys and the pirate, trying to soften her voice.
“I’m Captain Polly of the Twenty-Four seas,” said the pirate.
“I’m Hilary, deputy head chorister of the Carelin Boys’ Choir,” said one of the boys, “and this is Geoffrey and this is Dennis. They sing in the choir, too.”
“Then why have you been getting your cassocks ripped to shreds instead of singing?” asked the English teacher.
“Well, it’s like this,” said Captain Polly. “We had a bit of a disagreement with the captain of your town’s militia about whether or not he should check this treasure chest for a bomb—whatever that is.”
“And you pulled the chest away from them before they could get it,” said Hilary.
“Thanks for saving the treasure chest,” said Dennis.
“Should we open the chest now?” asked Geoffrey.
“Yes!” Dennis cried.
“I don’t know,” said Hilary.
“William says: Open the chest. Now,” said Gary.
“Look!” cried Dennis.
The hummingbird darted in among the choirboys and they exploded with excitement.
“Well I’ll be a whale all wrapped up around a giant seahorse!” cried Captain Polly.
“My Great Aunt will envy me for the rest of her life!” Dennis exclaimed. “Nobody’s seen William the Hummingbird for ages and ages!”
“I can hardly wait to tell Captain Nigel and Mr. Schnitzelbergen,” said Geoffrey.
“Yes!” cried Dennis. “William the Hummingbird wants us to open up the chest. Now.”
The boys and Captain Polly tried to open the latch on the chest, but it wouldn’t open.
“Uh—Miss?” said Hilary.
“She’s Miss Gleason,” said Gary. “Worst English teacher in the world, but pretty cool with hummingbirds.”
Eleanore was tempted to be furious with Gary, but she realized that getting any complement from him at all was a miracle.
“Miss Gleason,” Hilary asked. “Can you try pulling on the thread from Melanie’s Web again?”
“Uh—who’s Melanie?” asked Eleanore.
“She’s the Web Spinner,” said Dennis. “Don’t you teach your kids anything in this town?”
“Be polite to Miss Gleason,” Hilary reproved the smaller boy.
“Yes,” said Dennis, as William the Hummingbird flew around his ear. “We need you to pull the chest open. Now. Ple-e-e-ease.”
“Should it be a gentle tug, like the one that worked on the chest before?” asked Eleanore.
“Probably,” said Geoffrey.
Eleanore pulled on the thread gently, but with no result.
“I have an idea,” said Dennis. “My Great Aunt told me once that Melanie’s Web hardly ever goes in a straight line. So we should try pulling it in different directions.”
“When Captain Dennis tells you what his Great Aunt said, we’d better do it if we value the universe because his Great Aunt knows more than I ever learned on the twenty-four seas,” said Captain Polly.
“I must say,” said Eleanore, “that it has been a long time since I last met a boy who respected his great aunt.”
“So, this time we’ll all pull in a different direction,” said Hilary.
“That means you, Sloucher,” Captain Polly added.
Gary shrugged and took a hold of a strand of the web along with everybody else in the odd group and then they all pulled gently. To Eleanore’s surprise, she felt distinct promptings as to which direction to shift as the hummingbird zoomed in and around, as if he were inspecting the whole process, and then the top of the treasure chest suddenly popped open.
“Stand back!” the pirate warned.
“Stand back,” chirped the parrot.
Everybody stepped away and waited to see what would happen. The strands of Melanie’s Web disappeared into the chest. William the Hummingbird circled the chest and then plummeted into it. After a brief moment of quiet suspense, a pair of train tracks, light purple like the web, emerged from the treasure chest and snaked their way down the street. Then a melodious train whistle blasted off from inside the chest.
“Now we really better stand back,” Captain Polly advised.
Captain Polly gently maneuvered Eleanore and the boys further away from the tracks. The whistle repeated itself and they began to hear the rumble of a train. Suddenly the chest exploded into a full-blown train riding down the tracks toward Main Street.
“You did it! You did it!” the boys cried.
A chaos of noise from Main Street greeted the train as it cut through the fighters, forcibly separating them. Then a building popped up out of nowhere and the train came to a stop.
“Gosh, Miss Gleason!” Captain Dennis exclaimed. “You’re the best lady I’ve ever met!”
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An explosive sound rattled the passengers in the luxury car, and a pale light flowed in through the windows.
“I feel like we broke the sound barrier or something,” said Kevin.
“Maybe it was the light barrier,” Roger suggested.
“You can’t break the light barrier,” said Karen, “nothing can move fast enough to do that.”
“Who says?” asked Edmund.
“Einstein said so,” said Karen, “but it isn’t his rule; it’s just the way the universe works.”
“Why don’t you look out the window?”said Mona.
The other children ran to the window to look out.
“We’re home!” Kevin cried as he recognized the houses on a neighboring street.
“We’re home!” cried Nigel.
“Wait a minute,” said Karen. “What’s that lighthouse doing in the middle of the street?”
“And now it is giving out a bit of light as a lighthouse should,” said King Perezvon XXVI.
“And where did that fountain come from?” asked Sheila.
“There’s Morley’s Toy Store!” Edmund cried excitedly.
“There’s Donna’s Donuts!” cried Kevin.
“We can’t be in Milton and in Carelin at the same time, can we?” asked Karen.
Everybody looked at each other for a second.
“I think we could,” said Amarilla.
“And I think we are,” said Edmund.
“It looks like half the buildings here belong to Milton,” said Ted Sloane. “I don’t know if I’m in my own town or somebody else’s.”
“Like Amarilla said,” said Roger. “It’s both.”
“Oh No! What have I done?” Kevin cried out when he saw the wildly designed train station he had drawn that the train was pulling into.
“Isn’t that’s your train station?” Samantha asked with mischievous smile.
“If I’d known it would come to life,” said Kevin, “I would have ripped that drawing up into a million pieces.”
“It has its charm,” said Mona with undisguised sarcasm.
Suddenly the windows filled up with a chaotic scene of men and boys fighting each other.
“What in the name of Martahol is going on here?” asked Amarilla with dismay.
“The police are fighting a riot,” said Karen.
“Hey! That’s the rest of the choir getting beat up out there!” cried Edmund.
“We’ve got to get out there and help them!” Nigel cried. “Open the door!”
“Wait!” said Roger. “The Carelin militia’s helping them.”
“And so are the pirates,” added Samantha.
“I can’t tell if the police are making it better or making it worse,” Ted muttered. “I think they’re making things worse.
The train came to a halt with the luxury car aligned with Main Street. The fighting suddenly dissipated, leaving a lot of cut and bruised men and boys eyeing each other angrily.
“And I thought the children I had to take care of in Morley’s were bad,” Amarilla sighed.
“Forget them,” said Roger. “What we’ve got to do is figure out what we’re supposed to do with Sheila’s candle.”
Fenrir hit the window with this paws and growled excitedly.
“I think that means that he wants you to let him off the train right now,” said Bertha the Elephant.
“And you had better get off the train yourself with that candle,” said Humphrey the Bullfrog who was sitting on top of Bertha’s head.
“What do I do then?” asked Sheila.
“I think you’ll find out as soon as you get off the train,” said Amarilla.
The door at the end of the car slid open with a bang, and a small group of people from the Lost City stomped angrily into the luxury car.
“Sir Kevin!” yelled a man brandishing his spear.
“What’s the trouble?” asked Nigel as he stepped in front of Kevin to protect him.
“What’s the trouble?” the man echoed. “I thought Sir Kevin the Mapmaker and City Designer drew that train station for the Lost City!”
“I did,” said Kevin.
“Then what’s it doing in this town?”
“This doesn’t look like a lost city to me,” said a woman.
“You can have that station anytime you want to cart it away,” said Karen.
“This town stole our train station!” charged a boy.
The group from the Lost City began to move in on Kevin. Edmund jumped alongside of Nigel in front of Kevin.
“If you touch Kevin with as much as one finger,” Edmund threatened, “I’ll grind the bones of each and every one of you and throw the powder into the ocean!”
“I think I had better draw you another city, tear it up, and feed the pieces to the barracudas,” said Kevin with disgust.
“I don’t want to be eaten up by a barracuda!” wailed a girl.
“I have an idea,” said Roger.
“WHAT?” asked a young man.
“Let Kevin draw another train station that you can take back with you. I’ll bet you six doubloons you’ll like that one better than this one.
“Seven doubloons!” a boy countered..
“Forget it,” said Kevin as he tossed the feather pen away.
“We’re tired of being forgotten!” cried an old woman.
Samantha picked up the pen and a large piece of parchment and handed them back to Kevin. Fenrir tapped the window hard with his nails and whined loudly.
“The phoenix!” cried Edmund.
Everybody except Kevin dashed to the windows to watch the phoenix fly in circles above the crowd on Main Street.
“I think Fenrir wants to join the phoenix,” said Scott.
“I think there is no question about that,” said Amarilla.
“What about our train station?” asked the man with the spear.
“I’ll draw it,” said Kevin, who found himself unable to resist an idea that had just popped into his mind.
“Come on, Sheila,” Roger urged her, “let’s get you out of here so you can finish your quest.”
“May your quest end happily, dear,” said Bertha the Elephant.
“That is to say,” said Humphrey the Bullfrog, “we hope it turns out all right.”
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“I assure you that this is live coverage from Milton, Pennsylvania,” said Phil Carroway. “This odd-looking train that came out of nowhere is crossing Main Street and grinding to a halt at this art nouveau train station that sprang out of the sidewalk just to meet this train. Marcia, do you think the architect of this station was drunk when he designed it?”
“Either that or he’d read too many books on modern art,” Marcia replied.
“Speaking for myself,” said Phil, “just looking at the wild waves in the roof line makes me more sea sick than riding that pirate ship through the air would have done.”
“That’s not my favorite kind of art, either,” said Agnes Shepherd.
“That’s not art at all,” Bill Harrison grumbled.
With a bit of light filtering into the living room. Bill felt that he was waking up in the morning after sleeping in front of the television all night.
“The train cut through the riot that was in full progress just minutes ago,” Marcia commented, “and I’d say it pretty well broke up that disturbance, right when I thought there was going to be no end to it.”
“The train has distracted most of the people from what they were fighting about,” said Phil. “The local police chief, Everett McAlister, though, is organizing his men to attack the train if he thinks it’s necessary.”
“He looks pretty frustrated that his men don’t have any weapons except for billy clubs,” said Marcia.
“We could say that this is a little experiment in gun control,” Phil remarked.
“Phil, did you notice that this little army that marched into town don’t have their rifles, either?” asked Marcia.
“No, I didn’t,” Phil replied, “but now I see that they are armed only with their fists, which they used freely enough during the street fight.”
“I heard the young man with the harp tell the boy who claims to be a prince that it was unchivalrous for their army to keep their guns after they had disarmed the enemy,” said Marcia, “and the boy immediately ordered his own men to throw away their rifles.”
“Well,” said Phil, “that is about as amazing as seeing a pirate ship fly into town!”
“You can see what a rambunctious bunch these choirboys are from the after-affects of the fight,” said Marcia. “I wouldn’t want to be the choir mother who has to deal with those cassocks.”
“I’m not so sure I want to be any of the boys who have to explain what happened to their choir mother,” Phil quipped.
“All of this strains my credulity,” said Agnes Shepherd.
Bill Harrison grunted his assent.
“Do you have your hand gun inside your suit coat?” asked the older man dressed in black.
Bill stroked the handgun under his suit coat and nodded.
“This train looks like it’s been through at least five world wars and a dozen train wrecks,” said Phil Carroway.
“The circus car towards the end is all bent out of shape,” commented Marcia.
“I’d hate to see the wild animal that broke through those bars,” said Phil.
The camera zoomed in on a closeup of the passengers, many of them children, sticking their necks through the broken windows.
“Some of the children in this seem to car recognize some of the people in the crowd here, judging by the way they’re waving,” Marcia observed. “And yes! Several of the choirboys from the pirate ship are waving back at them.”
“Well, Marcia,” said Phil, “some passengers on this train aren’t human. I don’t know if the circus animals were converted into passengers or if this train was meant to be a sort of Noah’s Ark, but I really think that I see the head and trunk of an elephant sticking out of the window of a passenger car.”
“And I think I see a large toad or frog seated on top of the elephant’s head,” said Marcia.
“And either this is a wolf poking its nose of a broken window, or it’s an awfully large dog,” said Phil. “It’s enough to make me glad I didn’t take this train for a ride.”
“Phil! Get a load of the crest on the front of the train!” cried Marcia “Let’s get another shot of that if we can!”
“Boy! that is something!” Phil exclaimed. “It looks like some sort of bird, maybe an eagle or flamingo or something. It looks like its feathers are burning up but the fire department isn’t exactly hosing it down.”
“The eyes of this bird are pretty lifelike for a crest on a train engine,” said Marcia. “I get the feeling that it’s looking straight at me.”
“That bird,” said the older man in black to Bill Harrison, “the bird with the flaming feathers is to blame for your son’s disappearance.”
“It’s a phoenix,” said the woman, “the deadliest bird in the world.”
“You can tell by the evil look in its eyes,” said the younger man.
“That’s exactly the way my son looks at me when I don’t give him everything he wants, the way he wants it, when he wants it,” Bill grumbled.
“Bill,” said Agnes, “it won’t do you any good to see Shawn looking out at you through the eyes of every bird that appears on TV.”
“Who cares?” Bill grunted with a shrug.
“Hey! the crest has come alive and is flying away!” cried Phil. “I guess this bird was just hitching a free ride!”
“Now it’s making a circle above the train and the crowd below,” added Marcia.
“It’s flying like a hawk,” said Phil, “but its feathers are still on fire. Do you know what kind of bird is supposed to be made of fire, Marcia?”
“I’ve heard legends about the phoenix,” Marcia replied, “but the legends are just that: legends.”
“Well, what’s one more legend come to life on a day like this?” said Phil with a shrug.
“That beak,” said the woman in black. “It may be small, but it’s very sharp.”
“You mean it’s like a piranha?” Bill asked.
“A most apt comparison,” said the older man, “but the phoenix has a brain, and it is cunning.”
“You can see for yourself that this bird is to blame for Shawn’s disappearance,” said the younger man.
“It always helps to know who’s at fault,” said Bill. “I feel better that way.”
“Knowing who’s to blame makes the world go round,” said the woman.
“That’s for sure,” said Bill.
“So, you know what you must do,” urged the older man.
“Yep,” Bill answered as he touched the gun inside his coat pocket and then walked briskly out of the house.