Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  Magda now stood weeping on a narrow stretch of deck that had not succumbed to the collapse. She thought about diving either into the water or into the flames. Death was certain one way or another. Perhaps at least she should choose the manner of her destruction. But she could not do it. Others still huddled near her, hoping for a miracle.

  The boat slowed and then jolted to a stop as it ran aground. A man to her left shouted, “Look!” He was pointing to the tallest of the ship’s flagpoles, still standing above the flames. A small boy, just about Henry’s age, Magda guessed, was climbing the pole, slowly moving higher to escape the deck burning beneath him. Magda held her breath as she watched. The fate of all those who had thus far survived seemed to her bound up with that of this child. He could, she told herself, be Henry. The smoke made it impossible to distinguish his features. He could be her brother.

  Magda saw a small rescue craft approaching. All eyes stayed on the boy. He climbed a little higher and a little higher with each jump of the tongues of flame from below until he was almost at the top. Each time he found he had not gone far enough he would shake his yellow curls determinedly and work his way a few inches more. It was a brave fight. He lost it. The flagstaff began to tremble just as the rescue boat was getting around in position to get at the child. The staff fell back into the floating furnace, and the boy with it. As he disappeared below the water, Magda lost all hope. Tears streaming down her face, she turned and leapt into the water.

  As the current yanked her below the surface, Magda felt a ray of comfort. Soon she would be joining her mother and the twins, and until then the cold water brought blessed relief from the heat of the fire.

  Magda had closed her eyes when she jumped, but now she opened them as she felt something solid brushing against her arm. She could not make it out in the murky river, but out of instinct, she grabbed it and felt herself being pulled through the water. In a few seconds she was back above the surface and the quiet of the underwater world gave way to a cacophony of shouts, screams, splashes, and the roar of the fire behind her. She found herself, with several others, being hauled to shore clinging to a long ladder. The people who pulled them in were not burly firemen or police officers, but delicate young ladies dressed in white nurses’ uniforms. Magda fell to her knees as she felt solid ground beneath her, and two pairs of arms lifted her and helped her walk a short distance away from the river.

  “You rest here,” said a calm voice. Magda’s eyes burned and her ears rang. The world around her seemed unreal, as if she were watching the figures running back and forth to the water and listening to the shouts of the rescuers from a great distance. She could not make her mind comprehend what had happened in the past twenty minutes since that perfect moment on the deck with her mother and the twins. And as soon as she thought of the twins, the sounds around her faded to nothing and the world went black.

  “Can you hear me? Miss, can you hear me?”

  Magda opened her eyes and thought for a moment she was looking into the face of an angel—a figure dressed in white, a perfect woman’s face framed with red hair. Then the shouts and cries of despair intruded on her consciousness and she thought perhaps she had not arrived in heaven, but somewhere else entirely.

  “Where am I?” said Magda.

  “North Brother Island,” said the woman.

  Had the fire been a dream, Magda wondered. Her mother and the twins had not died on North Brother Island; her father had died there. “But I’m not sick,” she said.

  “No, miss. The captain beached the boat here. I’m a nurse at the hospital. Do you think you can stand up?”

  With help from the nurse, Magda rose shakily to her feet. She stood on a wide green lawn just in front of a large brick building—a building she had never seen, never wanted to see. North Brother had several such buildings. This tiny island in the East River was home to a hospital for infectious and contagious diseases.

  “You work at the hospital?” said Magda weakly.

  “Yes, miss. My name is Mary McCann. But you can call me Mary. I work with the tuberculosis patients.”

  “Did you know Herr Frederick Hertzenberger?” said Magda, gazing up at the imposing facade of the hospital. Her father had been transferred to the tuberculosis unit on North Brother Island shortly before his death two years ago. Magda still had the last letter he had written to her. In German he wrote, “When I walk on the lawn I can see where the smallpox patients are housed. How lucky we are to be among those who only cough.” Three days later he was dead.

  “I’m afraid not,” said Mary. “There are so many, you know.”

  Magda shivered at the thought that the last time her father had walked outside and breathed fresh air may have been on this very lawn. Had he unknowingly gazed out at the water in which his wife and children would die?

  “You’re cold, miss,” said Mary. “Perhaps we should walk a bit. Get your blood pumping.”

  Magda turned toward the water and felt her breath catch as she saw row after row of corpses laying on the lawn, their picnic clothes clinging to them. At the water’s edge, men and women pulled still more bodies from the river, dragging them onto the lawn to add to the horror. A few relatively uninjured survivors staggered along these rows, stopping to wail with grief when they saw a familiar face.

  “Are you German then, miss?” said Mary, clearly trying to distract Magda from the dreadful reality of what lay before them.

  Magda thought of how she had wished, earlier that day, to leave behind all that was German, to be a true American. Now that wish had come true in the most dreadful way possible. Who was she now? She could not bear the thought of returning to the empty apartment on St. Mark’s Place. Who knew what would even happen to the neighborhood or the church with so many of the families now devastated by tragedy? Those few who did remain would want to take Magda in, to comfort her; and that comfort would be a painful daily reminder of all she had lost. No, she thought—she did not want to walk up and down the rows of corpses until she found her family; she did not want to return to the arms of a grieving community; she did not want to attend funeral after funeral and hear words of grief pouring forth in German on every street corner. With her family gone, she saw no reason to stay in Kleindeutschland; no reason to continue as Magdalena Hertzenberger.

  She turned away from the awful view of the makeshift morgue and said, in her best American accent, “No, I am not German. Mr. Hertzenberger was a family friend.” She heard in her head the voice of Pastor Haas reading the lesson about Peter denying Christ three times before the crow of the cock, but she pushed that memory away. She was an American now.

  “My name is Mary Stone,” she said.

  In the end, disappearing from her own life proved easy—although Magda had not yet had her last view of those bodies (according to the papers, the final count had been over a thousand). With a small gift from Mary McCann, Magda rented a room for the night at a residential hotel on Thirty-Fourth Street. The next day, she closed her mother’s account at the German Savings Bank on Fourteenth Street and opened a new account in the name of Mary Stone at the Excelsior Bank on West Twenty-Third. Her mother’s savings together with the carefully guarded life insurance money paid out on her father’s death amounted to nearly a thousand dollars. The transformation of Magdalena Hertzenberger into Mary Stone required only one further, difficult step.

  Late on the afternoon of June 17, just forty-eight hours after she had once again felt the firm ground of Manhattan under her feet, having been returned from North Brother Island by one of the dozens of small private boats pressed into such service, Magda entered the cavernous space of the Twenty-Sixth Street Pier, where a temporary morgue had been set up. The morgue at Bellevue had been unable to store the huge number of bodies, and so the friends and families of those who had sailed on the General Slocum came to Twenty-Sixth Street to identify their dead.

  The sounds of grief were softer now. W
eeping and sighing had replaced shrieks and cries. Magda dared not look at those bodies that were unburned, lest she recognize her mother. She stayed far clear of the rows of smaller bodies—all that was left of the children of Kleindeutschland. It took her no more than five minutes to find a corpse about her own height, with the face and hair badly burned. Glancing around to be sure no one was watching, she removed the necklace her mother had given her on her eighteenth birthday and placed it around the blackened neck of the corpse.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said to a member of the coroner’s staff. “I knew this woman. This was Magdalena Hertzenberger. I recognize her necklace.”

  The next day, from the comfort of a furnished room in a clean and respectable boardinghouse on West Twenty-Third Street, well clear of Kleindeutschland, Magdalena opened a copy of the New York Sun and saw her name listed among those who had died in the General Slocum disaster. She folded the paper and slipped it under the mattress of what was now her bed, vowing never again to think of that day.

  Then Mary Stone went downstairs, stepped into the warm air of a New York summer, and began her life.

  VII

  New York City, Upper West Side, 2010

  Robbie and his father had rationed out the final box of Pop Pop’s books to make them last, which meant that Robbie had just turned twelve when they reached the final book in the Tremendous Trio series. When they had opened the cover of The Tremendous Trio around the World Robbie discovered a packet of several fragile pages held together by a rusty staple.

  “I remember those,” said his father with a smile.

  “What are they?” said Robbie.

  “We have to read the book first,” said his father.

  Robbie had loved The Tremendous Trio around the World, but his father read at an excruciatingly slow pace, almost as if he wanted to delay the moment the two of them finally looked at those mysterious pages. Now, Robert picked up the packet with an echo of the excitement he had felt over twenty years ago.

  “Do you want to read it?” Robbie had said to his father, when they had finally finished the round-the-world adventure.

  “You read it,” said his father, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. “Slowly.”

  Now, sitting alone in his study, Robert picked up the stapled packet of printed pages off his desk and began to read.

  The Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio

  You are old enough now. Old enough to know what the world is really like; to know that not every young man is either clean-cut and well-behaved or scruffy and evil; to know that the good guys don’t always win, that the dark side of human nature is darker than you thought, and that boys and girls do more than kiss on the cheek and hold hands. We think you’re old enough that when you see a girl, or perhaps a boy, you feel a certain stirring, feel a haze cover your eyes and clarity disappear and urges well up inside. You are old enough to know that even made-up characters in books can’t always be heroes, and that you will not always be a hero. Sometimes even the best characters do dreadful things and sometimes, in all likelihood, you will too. You are old enough to know about secrets and hidden places. And so we are going to tell you.

  Are you parents watching? Make sure they are not before you read any further. This is not going to be an ordinary adventure story. This is going to be something altogether different, something we think you are ready for. But be sure no one can see you, because not everyone will agree with us—not your parents and certainly not our publisher.

  This is how our publisher would like us to begin this story:

  Frank looked back up the tunnel to see the Lady of the Sky hanging amidst a forest of stalactites. The airship was never intended to fly through underground caverns, but she was doing well so far. He turned to look at the two branches of the tunnel before him, knowing he needed to decide which one Dan had disappeared down. He was just leaning over to inspect the damp floor for footprints when there was a loud snap and the cave was plunged into darkness. Frank opened his mouth to scream, but a wet, hairy hand grabbed him by the throat, and he could not make a sound. Frank’s last thought before fainting was that Dan didn’t know how to fly the airship. Unless he could find Alice, he would never make it out alive.

  It sounds exciting, but you’ve read that story before, or something just like it. You know that Frank and Dan and Alice will escape the cavern and bring home a fortune in gold or diamonds. In the final chapter, Dan will kiss Alice on the back of the hand and Alice will blush and none of the three will say how they really feel about all this.

  But have you noticed that in all those adventures you read—whether it’s the Motor Boys or the Rover Boys or even the Tremendous Trio—the boys never actually kiss the girls on the lips? Or that if they do, it is quick and chaste? (If you want to know what that word means, go look it up. As we said, you’re old enough.) In this book the boys won’t just kiss the girls, they will linger. Sometimes the girl will kiss back and sometimes she will slap the boy so hard it will leave a red handprint. But those kisses will always lead to something interesting—something scarier and more dangerous than being trapped deep beneath the surface of the earth in the clutches of a hairy ape.

  The boys and girls in those books you have been reading are always well-washed, and well-mannered, and kind. But not in this book. The children in this book are dirtier and meaner and sometimes angrier and always more real than the ones you have been reading about. After all—are you always sweet, and clean, and kind? Of course not. And do you sometimes act cruel, or get angry, or want to kiss someone? Of course you do.

  This is the place, in the first chapter, where the publisher would like us to tell you that you need to read the other books in the series to understand the characters in this one. There is a simple reason for this: The publisher wants you to buy the other books so he can make more money. But honestly, he has plenty of money, and besides, you may have already read all the other books about the Tremendous Trio—Dan Dawson, Alice Gold, and Frank Fairfax. If not, and even if you have, all you really need to know is this: Dan Dawson may have made some amazing rescues, saving people from floods and fires and earthquakes, but there are a lot of people he didn’t rescue; a lot of people died. Dan has nightmares about that. Alice Gold doesn’t just invent washing machines, and kitchen devices, and better ways to clean a house. Alice is smarter than the smartest person you have ever met—as smart as Edison or Tesla—and she has thought of all sorts of inventions. Some are what you might call “good” inventions. They feed hungry people and make boats safer or trains faster. Others are not so good—and these are the ones Alice spends most of her time thinking about. And Frank Fairfax wants to do more than write newspaper articles about other people’s expeditions. Sure, he likes blazing a trail through the Amazon or stumbling upon ancient ruins, but the expedition he really wants to take is into the dark alleys of New York City. He wants to meet the people who live in the shadows—the street urchins and the orphans and especially the criminals—and he wants to write about their dirty, complicated, mysterious world.

  So, find a comfortable spot where no one will discover you, and prepare yourself. This may be the last adventure of the Tremendous Trio, but it will be the first one that tells you the truth. And for goodness sake, when you are not reading this, keep it hidden away. If your parents find it . . . well, we wouldn’t want to be around to see what happens.

  Dexter Cornwall

  Neptune B. Smythe

  Buck Larson

  “What happens next?” Robbie had asked his father when he reached the end.

  “No idea,” said his father.

  “Where is this from?”

  “Pop Pop never told me,” said his father. “I pestered him for the rest of the story or even just the next chapter, but he just shook his head and said that this was all he had.”

  So many questions, so many memories, so many emotions lurked in those browning pages t
hat now lay on Robert’s desk. He and his father had read them over and over, speculating together about what happened next. Robbie had turned his nascent writing skills to crafting a story that began with this chapter, but he never got far. Perhaps at twelve he had still not been old enough to understand “secrets and hidden places” and all the other things this “final adventure” purported to offer.

  “Do you think Pop Pop tore these pages out of the book?” said Robbie one day.

  “I wish I knew,” said his father. “Maybe he had the whole book someplace and thought I wasn’t old enough to read it. By the time I was old enough, I’d probably lost interest.”

  “I won’t lose interest,” said Robbie earnestly.