by Colin Meloy
There will be people who will tell you that it is foolhardy to believe this feeling.
Those people are wrong.
And like every first-time novelist before him, Charlie had written a very large and beautiful CHAPTER ONE at the top of his plan to wrest the Rosenberg Cipher from its unlawful owners; he had enough faith in his storytelling ability that the rest would fall into place.
Wouldn’t it?
“This is it,” said Amir, stopping abruptly in the middle of the road and interrupting Charlie’s brief reverie. “This is as far as I go.”
Charlie looked up to see that the road had begun to widen; an intersecting road cut across the mud at a perpendicular angle. Marking one of the corners of the crossroads was a small tin shed. It seemed to almost grow out of the jungle itself, or as if the surrounding forest was intent on reclaiming it: great tree boughs and vines had wrapped themselves around the walls and roof like tentacles. Charlie looked back at Amir; Amir nodded, his face lined with worry. His feet were agitating in the dirt of the road; he was antsy to leave.
“Here?” asked Charlie.
“I gotta go, Charlie,” said Amir. “I’m risking a lot just being here right now.” He began to turn to leave.
“Wait,” said Charlie. “I want you to have this.” He undid the watchband at his wrist and dangled the silver Rolex from his fingers. “If I don’t make it back.”
“Oh, Charlie,” said Amir. “I told you, don’t do this thing.”
“This’ll be enough to get you started on your boat. I’m sure those nice folks at Abdel Wahab will have you back.” Charlie was holding out the watch, waiting for Amir to take it.
Amir accepted the watch wordlessly. “What about you?” he said, after a beat.
“I’ll work it out,” said Charlie. “Don’t worry about me. You shouldn’t stick around.”
Amir nodded. He fastened the watch at his wrist, admired it there for a moment. He then looked up at Charlie. “So long, Charlie.”
“So long, Amir,” said Charlie.
Amir smiled and gave a small wave. He then turned and began walking quickly the way they’d come. He soon disappeared into the mist.
Charlie took a deep, invigorating breath, coughed once, and approached the small shack. A bent tin portico hung over a porch where an old red chair stood guard. There didn’t appear to be anyone occupying the building; no light shone from the single glass window next to the door. A thick layer of dirt clouded the pane, so Charlie wiped a peephole with the hem of his shirt. Inside, the shack had all the appearances of a bare-bones shop: a counter ran across the back wall, surrounded by what appeared to be empty postcard and candy racks. A refrigerator case stood by the far wall, its interior lit by a single working bulb. Charlie tried the door; it was open. He stuck his head inside and called out, “Hello?”
No one answered.
He cautiously entered the bodega. A peculiar smell of gathered dust and engine oil pervaded the interior of the shop. A noise, some creature of the jungle, far off, making its screech, gave Charlie a start. “Hello?” he repeated. Still, no answer. What was with the Whiz Mob and their uninhabited shops? It seemed to Charlie they could really stand to improve on their front operations.
He walked back out onto the road and peered in each direction. Amir was long gone; there didn’t seem to be signs of any other human in the vicinity—no truck or car that would suggest that the bodega’s apparent state of abandonment was temporary. He walked back into the shop and announced, loudly, “I’d like a Coke in a paper cup, please? I mean, with a lime!” Still, no answer. He returned to the shop’s front porch, where he sat down on the red chair and waited.
And waited.
Out of habit, he glanced at his wrist to read the time before remembering that he’d just given his watch away. Amir would be halfway back to El Toro by now, he figured. He hoped Amir would make it back unmolested. He could only imagine what sort of punishment would be meted out to the boy for having led him this far. A kind of dark mood fell over Charlie as he considered his predicament. He tried to sing a song to lift his spirits.
“Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue
I’m in a jungle in Colombia
What, oh what did I do?”
It didn’t seem to help.
Suddenly, there was movement on the road. As if materializing out of the mist, a child appeared, walking toward the shack. He was, at Charlie’s best estimate, around six years old and was wearing a grubby T-shirt and jeans. He did not acknowledge Charlie’s presence on the porch of the bodega, even though Charlie gave him a slight wave as he approached. He threw open the front door; it slammed closed behind him. An electronic buzz sounded and a neon sign reading ABIERTO flared into life in the window. It flickered noisily, as if uncertain of its own accuracy. Charlie sat for a stunned moment before standing and following the boy inside.
In the shop, the boy had taken his place behind the counter, his attention diverted to a newspaper he’d unfolded across the countertop. He appeared to be studying the results of several football matches. He still did not seem to be aware that Charlie was there.
“Hola,” said Charlie. The boy didn’t answer. Charlie cleared his throat and said, “I’d like a Coke, please. With lime.”
The boy looked up from his newspaper and stared directly at Charlie.
“In a paper cup,” added Charlie.
The boy calmly folded up his newspaper. He then reached his hand beneath the counter and retrieved a black Bakelite telephone, placing it on the countertop. He lifted the receiver to his ear and proceeded to input three numbers on the rotary dial. When he’d done this, he casually stared at Charlie as he waited for the other end of the line to pick up.
“Sí,” said the boy, presumably when the call had been answered. He spoke quietly and turned his head in such a way that Charlie could not discern his speech. The conversation did not last long; in a few moments, the boy nodded twice and then hung up the receiver. He returned the phone to its place below the counter and said, in perfect English, “Wait here, please.”
It appeared that Charlie would not, in fact, get his Coke with lime, which left him a little disappointed. He’d been contemplating the sad deceptiveness of the code phrase for only a few minutes when the door slammed open behind him, loudly. He began to turn around to greet the newcomers when a hood was abruptly thrown over his head and he was trundled into the seat of some kind of fitfully idling vehicle.
Charlie could smell the exhaust collecting below his hood and it made him nauseated. Two bodies bookended him into the middle of what he presumed to be the backseat of the car as the engine roared and the automobile began to move. The person to his left smelled slightly of pine needles. Neither of his escorts said a word as they traveled.
The ride lasted, to Charlie’s best guess, two excruciating hours. The vehicle wound along a very snakelike road, and Charlie’s shoulders ricocheted between the twin pinball cushions of his seat neighbors with every twist and turn. Not a minute passed without some kind of jarring concussion of the car as it navigated what was undoubtedly a road much in need of some basic maintenance. By the time the vehicle had grumbled to a stop, Charlie felt like he had been run through some washing machine’s spin cycle, so great was his motion sickness. Plus, he desperately had to use the bathroom.
“Guys,” said Charlie, “I really have to pee.”
The door was thrown open and Charlie was led some feet away from the car, there to do his business. The hood was removed from his head and his vision was returned. What Charlie saw was enough to make him forget even the most insistent bladder.
It took a moment for his eyes to acclimate, but when they did, they took in one of the more spectacular vistas Charlie had witnessed in his life. He was standing, no doubt, on the top of a very large mountain—he could see several deep valley rifts opening up before him, their troughs all blanketed in fog. Only the nearby tree-strewn ridges could be seen rising above the cloud, and
he towered above them all. But the thing that was most extraordinary was the solid stone edifice that stood before Charlie, just beyond the wrought-iron gate he’d been instructed to pee against.
If only the cosmos would accommodate a single thunder crack and lightning flash to starkly illuminate the building Charlie saw—but, alas, it was a moderate spring day with only a hint of cloud cover. No such revelation occurred. The pleasant weather did the monstrosity that commanded the top of the mountain a disservice. It was unlike any building Charlie had ever seen—Amir had been right to call it a fortress. It stood some ways up from the gate, across a wide lawn that had been denuded of the army of trees that lay siege to the property just beyond the fence line.
He’d arrived at the School of Seven Bells.
To Charlie’s eyes, the school looked like some cobbled-together Gothic cathedral, but one that had been made by someone who had only heard descriptions of such structures and took a crack at it using whatever materials lay at hand. It had all the ornamental trappings of some dark European edifice—like a Chartres Cathedral or Westminster Abbey—but there seemed to be a strange, organic look to its construction. The stones were more rough-hewn than those in a European fortress of the same kind—their placement was less symmetrical and the size of the stones varied greatly. Some of the windows had been hung at odd angles, and none of them seemed to match their neighbors. Ornamental statues appeared occasionally in the stonework, but instead of the traditional gargoyles or angels, these monstrosities looked to be descended from some ancient native mythos, all feathered warriors in profile and towering winged giants. A central clock tower, dizzying in its height, wound up from the building like the single horn of a deranged creature. The time read four p.m.
Charlie no longer had to pee.
“You finished?” asked one of his hosts. Charlie turned around and saw that it was a boy, about Charlie’s age. His skin was dark and his hair was cropped close to his head. An older girl stood next to him and was eyeing Charlie suspiciously.
“What’s this about?” she asked. Apparently, she’d just joined them. She spoke with an accent Charlie couldn’t ascertain—Swedish?
“He came from the forward station. Had the pass code,” replied the boy. Another boy, younger than the first, walked up next to Charlie and studied him.
“Does the Headmaster expect him?” asked the girl.
“Don’t know,” replied the boy.
“He should,” said Charlie. “Expect me, that is.”
The girl, who up to this point had seemed to pretend Charlie wasn’t even there, fixed him with a blinding glare. She had red hair, cut short; a scar wound its way down her left cheek. She was wearing what appeared to be the school uniform: a maroon blazer over a white shirt and a pair of trousers. An embroidered patch sporting a beetle surrounded by seven small bells had been sewn onto her coat’s breast. “Who are you?” she asked. “And what do you want?”
At this moment, Charlie gathered all his courage, every last ounce. He gathered courage from places he never knew courage existed, where it had perhaps been put somewhere, long ago, and been forgotten like a set of keys or a bit of jewelry of which you had been very fond, but had given up for lost, only to be found, years later, in a place where you had thought you’d looked a thousand times but, no, there it was. And with these ounces, now amounting to pounds, Charlie spoke:
“I’m Charlie Fisher. The Headmaster has stolen something from me. I want it back.”
This statement was met by complete silence. The girl looked at him in disbelief, her jaw slackened so much that Charlie could see the gold fillings in her teeth. A wind whipped over the edge of the mountain, tousling everyone’s hair in a strangely jocular way.
“I’m sorry . . . ,” began the girl. Charlie’s response had clearly thrown her. “What did you say?”
“The Headmaster has stolen something—”
“I got that. Where did you come from? How did you get here?”
“From France. The Headmaster has stolen something from me.”
“The Headmaster has.”
“Yes,” said Charlie. “I mean, the Whiz Mob has. For the Headmaster.”
“A whiz mob stole from you.”
“The Whiz Mob of Marseille, to be specific.”
“How did you get here?” pressed the girl. “Who brought you here?”
“I came by my own wits. I came to see the Headmaster.”
The girl continued to stare at him. Finally, she said, “Stay here.” She walked away to a small booth that was set off to the side of the gate. She retrieved a radio receiver and, holding it up to her mouth and depressing the call button, began relaying this information to some unseen person on the other end.
The younger boy on Charlie’s left side, standing close by, said, “You came from France?”
Charlie nodded, still watching the girl in the booth.
“To get something that a whiz mob stole from you,” repeated the boy. He began laughing until the other boy shot him a glare, and he hastily put on a straight face.
The red-haired girl in the booth stuck her head out and called out to Charlie, “Sorry, what’s your name again? The Headmaster wants to know.”
“Tell him,” began Charlie. He paused, feeling suddenly emboldened. “Tell him it’s the Grenadine Kid.”
The girl raised an eyebrow and related this information into the receiver. The boy on Charlie’s left said, “The Grenadine Kid?”
“It’s my nickname, from the mob,” said Charlie proudly.
“That’s a dumb name,” said the boy, before he was again reproached by his partner.
The girl returned from the booth, a bemused look on her face.
“Take him to the office,” she said. She looked squarely at Charlie. “The Headmaster will decide what to do with you, Grenadine Kid.”
The gate was thrown open and Charlie was marched onto the campus of the School of Seven Bells.
The grounds of the school, through which Charlie was rudely escorted, bore an eerie resemblance to your typical American East Coast private or Ivy League school—the grass seemed recently shorn to a comfortable picnic-outing length, and there were enough manicured trees and shrubs scattered across the great lawn to satisfy the most demanding landscape designer’s eye. Here and there, groups of students were gathered, lying about on blankets or sitting in circles, no doubt discussing some new and high-minded approach to binging a souper off a fat pappy. They all wore identical maroon blazers over crisp white shirts. An older man wearing a corduroy jacket with leather elbows addressed a small crowd of younger students, evidently having taken advantage of the fine weather to host the lecture alfresco. He flipped a coin between his fingers while he spoke. As Charlie and his captors walked past, Charlie saw the professor slip the coin into a pocket of his blazer and then invite a student to attempt the prat. Charlie didn’t get a chance to see the test resolved before he was navigating the stone steps to the front doors of the school.
The massive oaken doors—ancient, mottled things—were so large as to require, Charlie imagined, some sort of mechanical device to open them. For more casual use, a smaller entry had been cut into the center of the doors, and it was through this opening that Charlie was ushered. They walked into an enormous foyer, its floor made of weathered granite flagstones, its ceiling a splendor of decorated arches and vaults; there they were greeted by a guard in a red blazer, a pin on his chest indicating his station. When he was told of Charlie’s provenance, the guard looked at him aghast.
“France,” he said.
“Yes, France,” said the girl.
He waved them through a set of double doors on the far side of the foyer, which let into a room that Charlie judged to be about half the length of an American football field. The walls on all sides were lined with tall shelves filled with books. Light poured in from the arched windows on either side of the room, windows that were so tall as to nearly touch the wooden beamed ceiling, some sixty feet above Charlie’s head
. Along the floor of the giant room had been placed dozens of practice dummies, much like the one Charlie had cobbled together in his room back home, dressed in a costume shop’s variety of clothing. They were all currently being set upon by cannons-to-be, each eagerly practicing new and better ways of removing coins from unseen places. Instructors hovered around the would-be thieves and their silent marks, shouting commands—“Left hip! Keister! Coat pit!”—as the students tried to manage each pinch. A few onlookers stopped to stare at Charlie as he was paraded by; some appeared to size him up as a chump, their faces contorting as if they’d caught a whiff of some terrible smell.
A staircase wound up beyond the glass doors at the end of the room; Charlie and his entourage climbed these stairs several floors to a long hallway, this one lined with dark wooden wainscoting. At the end of the hall was a glass-paned door. On the glass, in plain type, had been painted a single word:
HEADMASTER.
Arriving at the door, the girl rapped her knuckles against the glass. A moment passed before a voice from within called out, “Enter!”
The girl gave Charlie a look that he could not decipher—was it pity? Or annoyance? Perhaps he sensed a flicker of resentment that he, a mere chump, would be seeing the Headmaster, the mysterious figurehead propped at the helm of this strange ship. In any case, he didn’t have time to ponder it, as the door was swung open and there, in the center of a very well-appointed room, was a large desk, and behind the desk sat a large man. A crossword puzzle, cut from a newspaper page, was laid out in front of him, something the man’s attention remained fixed upon even as Charlie and his escorts entered the room.
“Charlie Fisher,” said the man, etching letters into the white boxes of his puzzle with a ballpoint pen. Studiously, he read what he’d written and tapped the tip of the pen against the paper. “Welcome to the School of Seven Bells.”
