The Weird in the Wilds

by Deb Caletti

  “Don’t look down, Henry,” Pirate Girl says. “We’re so, so high!”

  He’s trying not to. It’s somewhat difficult, because the Shadow has ambled over to the thin peak the children are now hanging off of like ornaments on a tree, and is standing against it, attempting to climb. It thumps its tail on the ground, its square head thrashing this way and that.

  Henry grips the sharp edge of the pinnacle with one hand while holding Button under his other arm. His knees wobble.

  “I thought this was the very last thing we were supposed to do!” Jo’s voice quakes in fear. She’s clinging to the rock above Henry, and he can see the wavy bottom ridges of her shoes as she steps from one stone foothold to another. Pirate Girl is higher still, and Apollo is beneath him somewhere. Above them, the sky is as flat and gray as that stone, and below them, a great distance now, is that vast land of spikes and spires, and the jagged teeth of the Shadow.

  “We had no choice!” Apollo calls upward. “There was no other way around!”

  Or Something

  “Look! I got away faster than any of you! I’m not afraid up here at all,” Jason Scrum brags. “I bet I’m related to a famous mountain climber or something.”

  “Follow me!” Pirate Girl shouts. “I see a ledge.” At least, Henry thinks that’s what she says. At that height, the wind whooshes around, and fright can be very loud in one’s ears.

  Henry reaches, reaches—ouch! Everywhere he grabs, there’s a rock edge that jabs his thin, pale skin. He wraps his fingers around a jutting spike. Button is clutching Henry as tightly as he is clutching her. Now his foot stretches, stretches from the ledge it’s on to another, more distant one. Over this terrifyingly high canyon with a knife forest below, he’s doing some sort of impossible feat of contortion.

  Impossible Feat of Contortion

  “You can do it, Henry! Stay still, Button! Only a few more steps!” Pirate Girl shouts. Henry quickly glances up. Pirate Girl is sitting on a flat overhang of rock, large enough for all of them. “I see a way down, guys!” she continues. “To a safe place, if you can only get here!”

  Henry peeks down again, and, oh, it’s awful. Apollo balances on a tiny wedge of stone. His fingers grip two small protruding rocks. His ankles and arms shake. Below them, spires upon spires zig and zag upward, like rows and rows of arrows ready to shoot from their bows. The Shadow cranes its endless neck to try to see them better. Above Henry, one of Jo’s feet swings up to the spot where Pirate Girl stands, and then the other lifts, too.

  “That was so scary!” Jo’s voice trembles. She and Pirate Girl grab hands in relief and gladness.

  “It’s impossible!” Apollo cries, his voice full of tears. “I’ll never make it! It goes on and on and on and on!”

  “Don’t stop believing, Poll! Hold on!” Jo says. “You can do it!”

  As you can see, it’s one of those most alarming times, where everything you say has an exclamation point. Button has gone completely quiet, as if she knows that a single wiggle might send them tumbling down into the vast canyon of knives. The ledge is just above Henry now, but it looks so far away. Fear mixes with all the terrible memories of recess—missed baseballs, and lost relay races, and smacks of the dodgeball against his thin legs. His confidence shakes, same as his hands, and his grip loosens.

  “Henry, hang on!” Pirate Girl shouts. “You’re almost here!”

  Henry gathers every bit of might in his thin body and swings his legs until—all at once—he’s up, and the girls are hugging him and Button both, and this would have been enormously embarrassing if he weren’t so relieved.

  “Plenty of room up here for me,” Jason Scrum says, hopping neatly to the ledge and crowding them dangerously.

  “Move over! Be careful!” Jo says.

  “Stop taking up all the space, or we’ll fall!” Pirate Girl says.

  It’s quite terrifying to look down from their rock shelf, and yet, Henry can’t move his eyes from Apollo, who’s still making his way from one jutting handhold to the next. He gets that feeling of doom about Apollo again, one that he had on their last adventure, when they were trying to change Rocco from a naked lizard back into a boy. It’s like something awful is going to happen to Apollo sometime in the future. He has no idea what, but right now, he just tries to keep Apollo safe with his own concentration.

  “Something wet is on me,” the gerenuk says. “Blech! There it is again! How many times do I have to say it? NO WATER.”

  “He’s right,” Pirate Girl whispers to them nervously. “It’s starting to rain! And that rock is only going to get more slippery.”

  “My hands,” Apollo says. “I can’t do it!”

  The wind, well, it’s bellowing in Henry’s ears, and his eyes are locked on Apollo, but that’s when something strange happens. Henry feels the drumbeat of courage, the bass note of bravery, the thrum of his own anthem coming from who-knows-where and who-knows-when. The important thing is, it rises within him with some sort of ancient clarity. We can be heroes, he thinks. Even just for one day. Henry gets on his knees.

  “Henry, no!” Pirate Girl says. “That’s too dangerous!”

  But this is what a hero would do, or a friend, or a king, and so he reaches out his hand. “I’m right here, Apollo,” he says.

  Apollo takes Henry’s hand, and Henry pulls. He pulls with all his might. He pulls with more might than he even knew he had in his small body.

  One of Apollo’s knees reaches the ledge, and then . . . he’s up.

  “You made it, Apollo!” Henry wants to cry with relief and joy.

  “Thank you, Henry. Thank you!” Henry can see tears in Apollo’s eyes. Apollo hugs him hard. Henry wipes the sweat and dirt and old stardust from his hands.

  “Henry! Henry! That was amazing,” Jo says, and Henry’s cheeks flush.

  “It was, Henry! It was,” Pirate Girl says. “Thank goodness, we all made it. We’re here! And hey! Down there, the Shadow looks like a little toy.”

  Pirate Girl is right. From that distance, it seems almost harmless.

  “And the way it’s thumping its tail, it reminds me of you, Button, when you want to play.”

  Button gives Pirate Girl a doubtful look.

  “But, guys, look over there.” Pirate Girl shifts her focus from the vast canyon of spires from where they came, to the far side of the peak, out of sight until now. “Those bits of rock are practically steps! Pointed and jagged and horrible steps, but still. And do you see how this giant pinnacle and that outer edge form a barrier? If we can just get down, the Shadow won’t be able to reach us.”

  “It’s a long way, but we can do it.” The thrum in Henry’s head is fading, but he still feels that ba-bamp of courage.

  “Let’s hurry, before the rain really gets going and makes this limestone slippery as ice,” Jo says.

  “Wait!” Apollo says with excitement. “Do you see what else is down there?”

  “Is it the wall? Or at least, the wall they’re trying to build? It should be somewhere nearby.” Pirate Girl squints.

  “No one can see as good as you can in those glasses, Poll,” Jo says.

  “It’s a lodge!” Apollo says. “A beautiful lodge at the edge of the Wilds.”

  “How wonderful!” Jo says.

  Pirate Girl scrunches her face with suspicion. “Why in the world would there be a lodge at the edge of the Wilds? Who does it belong to?”

  “No one comes here.” The idea of a lodge makes Henry nervous.

  “Maybe it’s a warm winter home where we can rest for a minute before we go looking for the wall,” Apollo says. “I’m exhausted.”

  “I’m just glad you can see the edge of the Wilds!” Jo says.

  “I thought we might be lost in there forever,” Henry agrees.

  “Man, am I ever tired of being around you guys,” t
he gerenuk says. “All you do is whine and complain, whine and complain, like a bunch of little babies.” He moves his hooves around like a crying infant. “Wah, wah, wa—”

  That’s when it happens.

  Something awful.

  Something more awful than what has already happened, but less awful than what is coming. Jason Scrum loses his balance. He steps backward. He steps backward one inch too far, and before they know it, his hooves are scurrying madly midair, and he’s disappearing from sight, vanishing down the far side of the summit, and there is a terrible, terrible gerenuk scream.

  Here you must imagine the sound of—

  A Terrible Cyclone

  Wait. That tragic cry is impossible to imagine. Something that horrible and distressing is too unbearable to describe. Even if you put many atrocious and ear-shattering noises together—the screeching brakes of a careening truck, the shriek of a dentist’s drill, the wail that escapes your throat when your ice cream falls off the cone—it wouldn’t be this sound, the kind that you feel even more than you hear. That scream whirls up inside Henry’s whole body like a terrible cyclone.

  “Jason!” Jo cries. “Jason, no!”

  CHAPTER 20

  A Hazardous Trip Down

  Pirate Girl holds her hands to her mouth in horror. “He can’t . . .” She can barely speak. “He can’t be all right, can he?”

  Henry’s stomach feels sick. “I don’t think so,” he says.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” Jo says. Tears gather in her eyes, and one drops off her nose, same as—well. Same as you-know-who just dropped off the you-know-what.

  “This is so awful,” Apollo says. “I mean, I was beginning to hate his guts, but I never wanted that to happen.”

  “I know,” Pirate Girl says. “Same here. Thank heavens he fell on that side, though, and not . . .” That slurping and crunching sound now comes to each of their minds. Henry shivers.

  “His poor parents!” Jo says. “And how are we ever going to tell Ms. Fortune? Instead of breaking the spell, we made things much, much worse. I’m sure Jason’s parents would rather have had a stinky gerenuk for a son than no son at all!” She sniffles.

  Pirate Girl is nearly crying, too. She has to wipe her nose on her sleeve before she’s able to speak. “And . . . and what do we do now?”

  The children look at Henry. Our Henry. Our thin, pale-skinned Henry with his knobby knees, who’s still wearing his school clothes from the day before, clothes that are even shabbier now after a hungry Shadow and a magic cave and a forest of knives. Remember, too, that Henry is still up on that high ledge shelf, with the pinnacles below, and the pit-pat of raindrops beginning to fall. This is the problem when your grandfather is someone as wise and astonishing as Captain Every, the oldest spell breaker on earth. Sometimes your new friends look to you for answers when all you have are questions.

  The Team That Always Loses

  “We should make sure,” Henry says, “that he, um, doesn’t need help. I mean, that he isn’t, or is, well, um . . .” Henry can’t bear to say the word he’s thinking. “And then . . . there is only one way out, and that’s through.” Oh, Henry. This sounds like what a coach might say to the team that always loses.

  “Let’s get off this slippery ledge before we all get impaled,” Pirate Girl says.

  With heavy hearts, the children make their way down each stone step. Henry has never felt so sad in his life. A crawl of guilt and badness overtakes him, too. Poor Jason! I should have been nicer to him, Henry thinks, taking one dangerous step down and then another.

  “We should have been more patient with the bully,” Jo says, dropping one foot and then the next into increasingly perilous territory.

  “We should’ve?” Pirate Girl asks. She watches her feet, taking very sensible and slow steps.

  “I feel just awful,” Jo says.

  “Me too,” Henry says.

  “And I don’t see him anywhere,” Apollo says. Henry’s afraid to even look.

  Finally, they’ve nearly reached the bottom of that horrid summit, and at the very moment their hearts cannot get even an ounce heavier, Pirate Girl stops.

  “Wait,” she says. “Do you hear what I hear?”

  The whine is awful. Worse than a toddler after a long shopping trip.

  “Where are you weirdos? Come untangle me,” Jason Scrum cries.

  CHAPTER 21

  Quite a Tangle

  Hurry!” Apollo says, which is surprisingly easy now that they are at long last off that peak and on solid ground again.

  “I can’t believe he’s okay,” Jo says.

  “Bullies are sturdy,” Pirate Girl says, and sighs. This does seem to be quite true. So true that Button sighs out her nose, too.

  “And thank heavens we’re free of that Shadow,” Jo says.

  Henry couldn’t agree more. What a relief! And here, on this other side of the Forest of Knives, at the outer edge of the Wilds, the land evens out, and the children find themselves in a wide, rocky area of yellow grasses and dirt, which goes on and on until it meets the beginnings of another forest. A more familiar forest. At least, a forest filled with the cedars and pines and spruces that the children are used to. Henry can spot the poky needles and mossy rocks and damp ferns that he’s seen many times before.

  “It’s the forest on Rulers Mountain,” Pirate Girl realizes. “This must be the far side of it.”

  For a brief moment—snap your fingers, because that’s how brief—Henry feels almost happy to see a familiar landscape, even if it’s part of Rulers Mountain.

  But then he smells smoke.

  He sees smoke.

  He sees it roiling into the sky like an episode of Rocket Galaxy where Rex Xavier’s ship is in trouble. Henry’s heart ba-bamps. His tummy feels horridly wiggly, as if he’s just eaten a bowl of Octopus Mondavi.

  Octopus Mondavi

  The smoke must be coming from that lodge somewhere in the distance. And this is terrible news, in Henry’s opinion. Smoke means that it’s not a great big empty lodge after all. Someone lit that fire. And the only someones anywhere near here are the evil people on Rulers Mountain, or maybe even Vlad himself.

  “Smoke.” Henry points.

  “Oh no,” Pirate Girl says.

  “Maybe they have a fire going at that lodge. How cozy,” Jo says. “I love that smell.”

  “Cozy?” Pirate Girl cries. “Only if you think Needleman or Vlad or Vlad’s spies are cozy!”

  “You don’t know that for sure, Pirate Girl. We’ve never been on the far side of the mountain. You don’t know who might be out here.”

  “The wall is somewhere nearby! Mr. Reese told us so! Who do you think is out here?” Pirate Girl says with alarm.

  “I wish there was a wall nearby,” Jo says. “But there’s no sign of one anywhere.”

  “Wait. I see Jason,” Apollo says. “He’s waving his four hooves around in the air.”

  “Would you people hurry up?” the gerenuk cries. “You’re the slowest weirdos in the world.”

  “Remember when we felt so sorry for him back there?” Jo says.

  “Wow. I’m already despising him again,” Pirate Girl says. “That was fast.”

  “He just keeps on being who he is.” Henry sighs.

  Now they all see the gerenuk. He’s stuck on his back, like an upside-down potato bug. His hooves point skyward, and his big alien eyes bulge. He looks completely unharmed, except for a strange red string wrapped around his legs in jumbled knots.

  “Oh no. Look at him! What a mess,” Jo says.

  “What is that stuff?” Pirate Girl asks.

  “Yarn. Red yarn,” Apollo says. “My mother used some just like it to make a beautiful holiday craft.”

  A Beautiful Holiday Craft

  �
��That’s so strange. Why would there be yarn out here?” Pirate Girl asks.

  “Where have you guys been?” Jason Scrum complains, waving his hooves around and making the tangle worse. “One minute, I was standing way up high, and the next, I was floating through the air. And then these”—he tries to point to his oversized ears, knotting the string even further—“began to spin like a helicopter, and this”—he wiggles his rump, indicating his tail—“rotated in a circle, and I was like a human whirligig, floating downward and away from those spiky trees. I have no idea how that happened.”

  “It could take us hours to untangle him,” Jo says. “And there’s no wall in sight, and it’s already afternoon. The celebration of love is in one day.”

  How That Happened

  “Don’t worry, Jo.” Pirate Girl whips her pocketknife from her vest and holds it in the air. “I’ll have him out in no time.”

  “And then we’ll hurry and find the wall,” Henry says. “And we’d better really hurry. We’re completely out in the open.”

  Pirate Girl is slicing bits of string and holding other bits of string in her teeth. “I don’t understand, though. The wall should be right here,” she says, though it sounds like I ont unerhan, oh. The wall ould be ight ere with her teeth biting down on the yarn.

  “Ow, you nicked me!” the gerenuk screams. “Now I’m bleeding everywhere.”

  “I barely touched you,” Pirate Girl snarls. “And quit wiggling, or it will happen again.”

  “Stop making such a racket, too,” Jo scolds. “Do you want us to be found?”

  “The string . . . ,” Apollo says, peering through his wondrous glasses. “It goes on and on. Look.”