When they reached the spiral staircase in the South Wing, Wile held a finger to his lips. He lay down on his stomach near the stairs then dipped his head down. Once he was satisfied the coast was clear, he led her down the stairs, through the headmonsters’ office, and out the door to the boys’ hall.
“How’d you get in?” Vita asked after he shut the office door behind them.
“These locks are old and easy to pick,” he replied. He pulled a bobby pin that had been bent out of shape from his pocket. It looked almost real—realer than any of Rosie or Grover’s creations looked outside their Dream Chambers. “Here, take it. I’ve got tons of ’em. Remind me to show you how sometime.”
She slipped the bobby pin into her pocket. “Thanks.”
After a short silence he reached toward her to squeeze her hand once more. Then without another word he crossed to the other end of the hall and ducked inside his Dream Chamber.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LUMARIA
The next few days went by in a blur of lessons. She ran into Wile in the Mess Hall a few times, but always along with Rosie and Grover. Wile barely acknowledged her and part of her began to wonder if she’d imagined their meeting in the North Hall and the way he’d squeezed her hand.
Today she’d found Wile sitting by himself in the Mess Hall. She’d noticed that the music playing was more cheerful than usual: an acoustic and electric guitar intertwined in an upbeat, whimsical sort of tune. Wile’s mood matched the music—he’d been far friendlier and at one point had proposed giving her that “lesson” they’d talked about after they were finished. So now they were crouched in the girls’ hall outside the door to headmonsters’ office.
Vita looked back and forth nervously. “How can you be sure the office will be empty?”
“They’re never around at this time,” Wile said as he maneuvered the straightened bobby pin into the door’s keyhole. “Now pay attention.”
She obeyed and exhaled a deep sigh of relief when the door clicked open and the office was empty.
Wile looked at her. “Now it’s your turn.”
With her heart pounding in fear of Fironella and her henchmen showing up at any second, Vita did her best to pick the lock that led out to the boys’ hall with the pin Wile had given her. She was surprised when she completed the task rather easily—panic turned out to be a good motivator, she supposed.
“Not so hard, right?” Wile said as they walked out into the boys’ hall.
“I guess not,” Vita said.
Wile walked down the hall to the doors to his Dream Chamber. He fit his compass into the compass hole and the doors swung open. Vita walked the few steps to one of the Mess Hall doors and raised her hand in a hesitant wave goodbye.
“I finally invite you in and now you’re gonna pass?” Wile asked, his compass still in the keyhole.
She practically skipped over to him. “You decided I’m not a thief?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “I’m still not sure.” Then he flashed her a brilliant smile. “But I want to show you anyway.” With that he replaced his compass around his neck and stepped into his Dream Chamber. Vita ran through the doors just before they shut behind her.
Her shoes sank into the ground and she almost fell onto the smooth white sand. Only a few feet from where she stood brilliant blue waves rushed forward then receded, leaving a strip of soaking brown sand in their midst. Wile stood across the beach, at the end of a long wooden dock. He still wore the same clothes as always, though now his jeans had been shortened to shorts that ended at the knee and he wore rubber flip flops in place of his usual sneakers.
She tiptoed across the beach, grains of sand filling her tennis shoes, and onto the dock. Wile smiled at her when she joined him at the end of the dock and they both leaned on the railing and looked out at the sea. The sunlight fell in bright rays that made the blue water’s surface sparkle. At first the girl thought the vast blue ocean went on forever, but when she squinted she could see the skyline of a city in the distance.
“Vita, the music,” Melina said in the girl’s ear, the caterpillar’s barely audible voice full of awe.
The girl wasn’t sure how she hadn’t noticed the music that floated over the air right away. Perhaps it was because the music seemed as much a part of this world as the wind or the sound of the waves rushing against the sand. Piano, violin, and guitar wove together into a bittersweet melody that reached into Vita’s chest and clutched at her heart. She searched around for the source of the music—up into the bright blue sky, across the matching sea below, but found nothing.
She turned back to the front wall of the Dream Chamber and gasped. There the sky continued around the gray stone archway right down to the sandy ground, just as it did in Vita’s own Chamber. However here the clouds seemed to dance to the music somehow—they stretched, expanded, twisted and twirled according to the rise and fall of a melody that wasn’t quite classical and wasn’t quite jazz, and was really something all its own.
The girl looked back at Wile, who now had turned to watch the clouds as well. He leaned back against the railing with his arms crossed.
“It’s, it’s you,” she said. “All this time I thought the music in the Mess Hall came from the gramophone…”
He chuckled. “That old thing? I’m not sure it’s ever worked, and if it did it certainly doesn’t now.”
“You … I …” she trailed off, lost for words. “The music’s like your Melina?” she finally asked lamely.
He smiled. “That’s right.” He leaned his elbows back over the railing and Vita did the same. “It’s pretty clear who you, Rosie, and Grover would take with you if you won the Crossing Cloak.” He glanced at Melina with an expression as bittersweet as the music that rang over the waves. “But it’s not like you can throw a cloak over music.”
She peered over at him. “Who would you take, then?” she asked. “If you won?”
He wouldn’t meet her eyes. Instead he looked to their right. A hundred yards away stood a small forest green house, the only building Vita could see in the distance. “I want to show you something,” was all he said before he took off in the direction of the house. With a sigh she followed.
The house looked like a garage of sorts. When Vita caught up to Wile he pulled a chord to open the white door that took up most of the building’s front and revealed a gleaming wooden sailboat. They entered the boathouse through a side door and hopped into the boat. Wile pushed them out of the boathouse and into the sea, then got to work rigging the ivory sails. Vita assisted in hoisting the jib and mainsail under his instruction.
“Where’d you learn about sailing?” she asked as she knotted a piece of rope at the head of the mainsail. She’d never been anywhere near a sailboat before, though she’d often pretended the laundry basket was one when she’d been very small.
“To tell you the truth, V, I’m not sure,” Wile answered. He took the mainsail from her and placed it in the track along the backside of the mast. “I might be a little sharper than Rosie and Grover but I still … there’s a lot I don’t remember.”
She thought back on how angry he’d seemed when she’d asked questions about his home life, like if he’d ever had a dog. Perhaps the anger had been not at her, but at the fact that the boy couldn’t remember whether he’d had a dog or not.
Once they had finished rigging the sails they crossed the deck to the boat’s front railing. Now that the sails were up, the wind rushed the boat across the sea and away from the boathouse at a brisk pace. “Do you remember your life all right?” Wile asked her.
She nodded, though her stomach squirmed when she tried to picture her siblings. Or remember their names. She knew their names, of course she did … she’d known them just the day before, hadn’t she? She felt some relief when she could still bring up the teetering homemade bookcase at the foot of her parents’ bed, the smells of her mother’s violet perfume and her father’s shampoo.
“I remember most of it, I think,” the
girl said after a few moments.
“Good,” he replied. “Try to hold onto those memories for as long as you can.” He moved to the mast so he could grab onto it for balance. “You should move back here,” he warned Vita when she didn’t follow.
When she reached the mast and held on, the music began to change. It shifted from a slow, relaxing melody to something more up-tempo and bluegrassy, with fast strumming banjos and guitars. As if taking a cue from the music, the sailboat rose up into the air. It surged upward until it reached the clouds then began to sail through them just as it had sailed the sea below.
Once the boat was level Vita rushed back to the railing. The music was even louder up here, as if it came straight from the dancing clouds. In the distance on the grassy western and eastern banks of the sea she could see large wooden windmills as well as even larger ones made of steel. As they spun the spokes of the windmills folded inward and outward to the frenetic pace of the banjos. And when then the tempo of the song suddenly slowed, the spinning of the windmills stilled at just the right moment.
The beach on the southern bank of the sea matched the first, dotted with wooden docks and boathouses of forest green and navy blue. Beyond that was a city of tall gray skyscrapers. As the boat approached the city, the music slinked down into something slower and bouncier, abandoning the banjo line and focusing on the swinging guitar. A banging piano and upright bass joined in, and the buildings folded downward on themselves and back up according to the bluesy bass line, stretching and contracting like accordions. It was the sort of tune that made Vita want to get up and shake her hips right alongside the dancing buildings.
Soon the bouncing skyscrapers gave way to trees and mountains, and the music shifted seamlessly to a folksier sound with multiple guitars and a xylophone. The music matched the surroundings—it made Vita think of wandering through unknown forests and mountaintops. There was a sense of longing in the melody, like how she felt each time she stacked the colorful, nature-filled life she desired against her smelly, gray reality. The boat sailed over waterfalls that fell in fits and squirts in pace with the beats of the xylophone. As the tune began to focus more on the flowing tones of the piano and violins, the patterns of the waterfalls changed with it.
Vita looked to Melina around her shoulders and was surprised to find her friend had fallen asleep. The girl couldn’t fathom how the caterpillar could sleep through such enchanting surroundings. She glanced back at Wile, who still stood holding the sailboat’s mast. “What’s it called, Wile?”
He walked across the ship’s deck to join her at the railing. “Lumaria,” he whispered. She could barely hear him over the music-infused wind.
“You’re going to win,” she replied, just as quietly.
“You haven’t seen everything,” was all he said.
The boat sailed on over forests and cities, each with some component that moved and pulsed to the ever-present music, and the sun rose higher in the sky. Melina continued to doze around Vita’s neck, even when they passed a city where buildings exploded at the right moments to add to the rock music’s percussion.
They flew over another patch of mountains and the banjo made a return appearance in a fast and bouncy sort of folksy tune. The boat veered eastward and headed straight toward a gray rock wall that went on for miles. “Should you maybe turn the boat or something?” Vita asked.
The boy looked ahead as well then checked the compass around his neck. “No, we should be fine.”
The girl returned her gaze to the stone wall they were rapidly approaching and swallowed hard. “Wile, are you sure we—?”
“It’ll be fine, V.”
Melina woke up when they were about ten yards away from the wall and yowled in her version of a scream. Vita couldn’t help joining the caterpillar in her cries as the boat veered closer and closer to the very solid wall with no sign of turning. Vita braced herself for impact, the boat barreling toward the wall at top speed.
But it never came. Instead the boat sailed through the wall as if it were as insubstantial as the caterpillar around Vita’s neck. With no wind to move it forward, the boat stopped in midair then dropped down into a pool of water with a splash. Or at least Vita hoped it was water—she had to go on sound and feel alone in the blacker than black cave.
She noted that the music had changed the moment the boat had gone through the wall. The other instruments fell away and left only the piano behind. It sounded like something from a movie that would play during the montage where you see how great somebody’s life has been, five minutes before it all goes wrong.
Lights above flicked on and she blinked away the startled dots before her eyes. At the same moment she heard a soft chopping like a gentle helicopter, a cowbell ringing, and the unmistakable toot of a train whistle. The bell and whistle wove in and out of the piano tune, complimenting and adding to it.
Vita found the pool in which they floated took up almost the entirety of the circular cave. A stretch of pavement barely a foot wide wrapped all the way around the pool. The racecars that sped around the banks of the blue pool were the size of toys but Vita had never seen a toy car this sophisticated. The racecars were long and sleek, painted red, blue, gold, and silver, with giant black numbers emblazoned against white circles on their hoods. Above them she found several model airplanes hanging from the ceiling between the stalactites from transparent bits of wire. They had the slim bodies and long noses of single-flyer fighter planes. Some of the planes looped through the air, no wires necessary.
There were windows in the walls but none of them faced outside—instead they revealed another wall just a few inches away from the first that was covered in a beautifully painted mural. The mural depicted cities and famous sites from all over the world—panoramic views of New York, London, and Paris, of the Taj Mahal, the Hollywood sign (which stretched out wide to spell “HOLLYWOODLAND”), and the Great Wall of China. The train noises came from the two little sets of black railroad tracks that crisscrossed over the gray walls from top to bottom, swooping under, over, and between all the windows. One elegant model train was blue; the other was gold.
The girl’s shoulders needed a rest so she sat her caterpillar friend down on the deck. After a few minutes of grumpy harrumphing, Melina curled her long body into a spiral and went back to sleep.
Meanwhile Vita joined Wile at the boat’s railing to watch the trains. Her eyes widened as she watched the gold train burp puffs of smoke. “What is this place?” she asked him. Without waiting for an answer, she blurted, “Was Jeff’s world like this?”
He nodded. “There was so much more to it … this was all I could remember by the time I thought to build this.”
“But who was he?”
“He was my friend,” he replied. “Jeff was a few years older than me, and wasn’t afraid of the monsters at all—he even made friends with some of them. He didn’t care if the rest of us came into his Dream Chamber, where he was building this beautiful world full of cars, trains, and airplanes. Jeff loved anything that could go fast. Anything that could take you someplace else. With him here, we weren’t scared all the time. We were happy.”
The piano melody slowed and softened as he spoke. It was essentially the same sweet, simple melody as before but its mood had changed entirely. Fast and loud the melody had been boisterous and fun—slow and soft the same tune turned wistful and melancholy.
“What happened to him?” she asked gently.
Now his eyes were even bleaker than they’d been in the North Wing. “He disappeared.”
“He just vanished?”
Wile probed his temples. “I don’t think so. I think there was more to it than that.” He groaned. “I just can’t seem to remember. All I know is that he disappeared. And afterward, Rosie and Grover didn’t remember him. Just me.”
Vita thought back on when Grover had mentioned Jeff, how Rosie and Grover had looked at her when she remarked upon it. How long had Wile been enduring that same pitying look from them both?
“And it made you trust me even less,” she finished for him. “I understand. I wouldn’t have trusted me either.” As original as she’d thought Railstown had been when she’d come up with it, she couldn’t deny the similarities between it and Jeff’s world. She and this boy had even picked the same color scheme. She peered over at Wile. “Do you, now? Trust me, I mean?”
“I showed you this,” he replied, which didn’t really answer the question, but made her feel better all the same.
“My Chamber used to be Jeff’s?” she asked. Wile nodded. “So where did his world go?”
“Wherever he did, I guess.”
She looked up at the model planes flying above. “Do you remember what Jeff’s world was called?”
“Astroland,” he answered with a grave chuckle. “Jeff was never great with names. He and Rosie had that in common.”
The two were both staring down into the water when a loud flurry of xylophone tones interrupted the piano melody. Unlike the train whistle and bell, this sound didn’t compliment the music at all.
“That’s the doorbell,” Wile said. “We’d better go.”
Vita helped him push at the train-track-free portions of the walls until they had successfully turned the boat around. With Melina back around her neck, Vita and Wile used the walls to push themselves forward through the insubstantial wall and emerged several stories above the grassy ground. Vita’s heart leapt into her throat when the boat dropped down toward the ground for a moment, but then a furious gust of wind caught the sails and pushed them through the clouds toward the Dream Chamber’s entrance.
Vita and the Monsters of Moorhouse Page 15
