The Emerald Atlas

by John Stephens

  Abraham waved his hand as if brushing the question aside. “Nothing. It’s late and me old brain’s muddled. That photo’s just to know your new home wasn’t always the benighted and bedeviled place it is today. Now good night, and no wandering about.”

  Then he was gone, shuffling out the door before she could press him further. Left alone, Michael and Emma were asleep immediately, but Kate lay awake long into the night, watching the firelight on the ceiling and wondering what secret Abraham was keeping. The dread she’d felt when she first saw the house had wrapped itself like cold metal around her heart.

  Eventually, the journey, the large meal, the warmth of the fire all overcame her, and she fell into an uneasy sleep.

  The children got lost trying to find the kitchen. They ended up in a room on the second floor that had at one time been either a picture gallery or an indoor tennis court. They were hungry and frustrated.

  “Dwarves have an excellent sense of direction,” Michael said. “They never get lost.”

  “I wish you were a dwarf,” Emma said.

  Michael agreed that would be nice.

  “Do either of you smell bacon?” Kate asked.

  Following the smell, ten minutes later the children stumbled into the kitchen, where Miss Sallow pronounced herself honored that the Emperor and Empresses (the children had somehow been promoted) saw fit to grace her with their presence and said that next time they were late, she would give their food to the dogs.

  “We need to learn our way around,” Michael said as he tucked into a thick stack of pancakes. Kate and Emma agreed, and, after breakfast, they went back to their room and Michael dug in his bag till he found two flashlights, his camera, paper and pencils for making maps, a small knife, a compass, and gum.

  “All right, I guess it’s obvious I should be the expedition leader.”

  “Hardly. Kate should be leader. She’s oldest.”

  “But I have the most experience in exploring.”

  Emma snorted. “You mean poking around in the dirt, saying, ‘Oh, lookit this rock! Let’s pretend it belonged to a dwarf! I want to marry it!’ ”

  Kate said it was fine if Michael was leader, and Michael said Emma could carry the compass, which was all she wanted anyway.

  Over the next several hours, they discovered a music room with an ancient, out-of-tune piano. A ballroom with cobwebbed chandeliers slumped on the floor. An empty indoor pool. A two-story library with a sliding ladder that came crashing down when Emma tried to ride it. A game room with a billiards table that had families of mice living in the pockets, and bedroom after bedroom after bedroom.

  Michael dutifully recorded each new discovery in his notebook.

  They made it to the kitchen in time for lunch, and Miss Sallow served them turkey sandwiches with mango chutney and—apparently in honor of their visit—French-fried potatoes. After lunch, the children decided to go see the waterfall, it being, after all, what the town was named for. And so, their bellies full, they left the house and walked across the narrow bridge and through the snow along the edge of the gorge. Soon, they heard rumbling, and as they came over a small rise, the ground ended suddenly in a sharp cliff. The children found themselves looking out across a wide basin. In the distance, they could see the blue-gray expanse of Lake Champlain with the dark knot of Westport hugging its shores. And there, directly below them, the river shot out of the gorge and plunged hundreds of feet down the face of the cliff. It was dizzying, standing there amid the thundering of the water, the spray blowing back cold and wet on their faces.

  Emma held on to the back of Michael’s coat as he leaned forward and took a picture looking down the flume of water.

  For a long time, the children lay on their stomachs in the snow, watching the river tumble down the cliff. Kate could feel the snow melting into her coat, but she was content not to move. The sense of lurking danger she’d felt that first moment of arrival had not gone away. She had so many questions. What had happened to this place? What had killed the trees? Made the people so unfriendly? Why hadn’t they seen the mountains from Westport? Where was the mysterious Dr. Pym? And why—this troubled her most of all—were there no children anywhere?

  “Well, team”—Michael stood and brushed the snow off his coat—“we’d better be getting back.” Since becoming leader, he had taken to referring to Kate and Emma as his team. “There’re still a few rooms I want to get to before dinner. And I heard Miss Sallow mention something about beef potpie.”

  Returning to the house, they discovered a room filled only with clocks, another that had no ceiling, and another that had no floor. And then they discovered the room with the beds.

  It was on the ground floor at the southwestern end. There were at least sixty old metal bed frames, all ordered in rows. “It’s a dormitory,” Michael said. “Like in a real orphanage.” But when they opened the curtains, the children found iron bars on the windows. They didn’t stay in the room long.

  It was close to dinnertime when they descended a flight of stairs and pushed through a half-rotted door into the wine cellar. The air was cold and musty. The beams of their flashlights played across row after row of empty racks.

  Michael found a narrow corridor at the back of the cellar and followed it to where it ended in a brick wall. He’d just turned away when Emma and Kate came around the corner.

  “What’d you find?” Emma asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Where’s that go?”

  “Where’s what go?”

  “Are you blind? That.”

  Michael turned. Where moments before had been a solid brick wall, there was now a door. He felt the breath go out of him and his heart begin to pound against his chest.

  “What’s wrong?” Kate asked.

  “Nothing, just”—he struggled to keep his voice steady—“that door wasn’t there a second ago.”

  “What?”

  “He’s kidding,” Emma said. “It’s part of his exploring, pretending-dwarves-are-real, boring-everyone-to-death game, remember?”

  “Is that true?” Kate said. “You’re just playing?”

  Michael opened his mouth to tell her no, he was telling the truth; then he saw the look in her eyes and knew if he said that, she would make them leave. And what was he saying? That the door had appeared out of nowhere? That was impossible. Obviously, he had missed it somehow.

  Only he hadn’t. He knew that.…

  “Michael?”

  “Yes. I was kidding around.” And he smiled to show that everything was okay.

  “Told you he was being weird,” Emma said. “Look how he’s smiling.”

  The door opened easily and revealed a narrow flight of stairs going down. Michael went first, counting each step aloud. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two … forty-three, forty-four, forty-five … fifty … sixty … seventy. At the eighty-second step, they came to another door.

  Michael stopped and faced his sisters.

  “I have a confession. I lied. The door wasn’t there.”

  “What—”

  “I’m sorry. Leaders should never lie to their team. I just really wanted to find out what was down here.”

  Kate shook her head angrily. “We have to go—now.”

  Emma groaned. “He’s just playing that game again. Tell her.”

  “Come on, both of you!”

  “Kate—” Michael went up a step so he was close to her. “Please.”

  Afterward, Kate would sometimes think about this moment—out of all the moments—and wonder what might have happened if she hadn’t given in, if she hadn’t looked at Michael and seen his eagerness, his excitement, the desperate plea in his eyes.…

  “Fine,” she sighed, telling herself that in the dimly lit cellar he simply hadn’t seen the door, that there was no need to over-react. “Five minutes.”

  Instantly, Michael had his hand on the knob. The door opened to darkness.

  They moved forward in two groups, Kate and Emma to one side, Michael to the other
, their flashlights revealing a lab or study of some kind. The ceiling was curved, giving the space a cave-like feel, and it was either very large, very small, or sort of normal-sized. Each time they turned around, the walls seemed to have shifted. There were books and papers everywhere, piled on the floor, on tables, stacked on shelves. There were cabinets crammed with various-sized bottles and long brass instruments with dials and screws. Kate found a globe, but as she turned it, the countries seemed to change, assuming shapes she didn’t recognize.

  Had the lamps been lit or the fire burning, Kate might have recognized the room sooner. As it was, she simply stumbled about in the darkness, counting the seconds till they could leave.

  “Look at this,” Emma said. She was standing in front of a row of jars, pointing to one in particular. Kate leaned in close. A tiny lizard with long claws hung suspended in amber liquid. Folded onto the lizard’s back was a pair of papery wings.

  Across the room, Michael raised his camera. Just as he snapped the picture, he heard Kate behind him, saying something that sounded like “Oh no.”

  His camera spat out the photo, and Michael waved it dry, blinking to erase the spots from his vision. He’d taken a picture of an old book he’d found on the desk. It was bound in green leather, and all the pages were blank.

  Kate hurried up, dragging a protesting Emma.

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “Look.” He used one hand to flip through the book. “All the pages are empty. Like it’s been wiped clean.”

  “Michael, we shouldn’t be here. I’m not kidding.”

  His photo was dry, so Michael slipped it into his notebook. As he did so, he found the photo Abraham had given them the night before showing the lake with the village in the distance.

  “Are you listening to me?” Kate asked. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  “Let go!” Emma was struggling in Kate’s grasp.

  “You said five minutes. Anyway, it’s just someone’s study. This is probably an old photo album. See?”

  As Michael reached down with Abraham’s photo, Kate took hold of his arm. She was saying something. Something about a dream she’d had. But the instant Abraham’s photo touched the blank page, the floor disappeared beneath their feet.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Countess of Cambridge Falls

  “This is—oh boy—I mean, we must’ve—”

  “Michael, are you okay?”

  “—there’s no other—I mean, it happened, right, we—”

  “Michael—”

  “—oh boy—”

  “Michael!”

  “What?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Am I—I mean, yes, I’m fine.”

  “Emma?”

  “I’m okay. I think.”

  They were on the shores of a large, smooth lake. In the distance, chimneys and the peaked roofs of houses rose above the pine trees. It was a cloudless summer day. Kate could smell the flowers blooming.

  “What … happened?” Emma asked. “Where are we?”

  “I can answer that.” Michael’s face was flushed with excitement, his words tumbling all over themselves. “We’re in Abraham’s picture! Well, not in the actual picture itself; that would be ridiculous”—he allowed himself a quick chuckle—“we’ve been transported to the time and place the photo was taken.”

  Emma stared at him. “Huh?”

  “Don’t you see? It’s magic! It has to be!”

  “There’s no such thing!”

  “Really? Then how’d we get here?”

  Emma looked about and, seeing no clear way to argue, wisely changed the subject. “So where are we, then?”

  “Cambridge Falls, of course!”

  “Ha! There’s a big giant lake out there! And trees and stuff! Cambridge Falls looks like the moon!” She was pleased to prove him wrong about something.

  “I mean before! The way it used to look! You didn’t see the picture! This is it exactly! I put it in the book, and now we’re here! Wait—the book! Where—”

  The book, its cover now deep emerald in the sun, lay on the ground a foot or so away. Michael snatched it up and quickly flipped through the pages.

  “The picture’s gone! But it really did bring us here!” Grinning hugely, Michael slid the book into his bag and gave it a pat. “It’s real. It’s all real.”

  Kate had stepped away and was half staring at an enormous boat floating far out in the middle of the lake. Being responsible for her brother and sister had made her very literal-minded. She’d never indulged in the games of fantasy Michael played. But he was right: he had put the photo in the book and now they were here. Only what did that really mean? That the book was magic? That they had traveled through time? How was that possible?

  “Bless me.…”

  Kate spun around. A small man stood a few paces off, holding a camera. He wore a brown suit, was completely bald, and had a neat white beard. His mouth hung open in astonishment.

  “It’s Abraham,” Michael said. “That makes sense. He’d have to be here to take the picture. It’s him, but younger.”

  “Still bald,” Emma said.

  Kate took a deep breath. She had to pull herself together. But just then a scream echoed out from the woods, a scream unlike any the children had ever heard before. It passed through them like an icy wind, rippling the water on the lake.

  Abraham groaned, “Oh no …”

  A figure emerged from the trees, running toward them through the high grass. It was dressed in dark rags, and some kind of mask covered its face. As it came closer, Kate saw that the creature ran with an odd, herky-jerky lope, as if with each stride it had to throw its legs forward.

  “Run,” Abraham hissed. “You must run!”

  “What is it?” Kate asked.

  “Just run! Run!”

  But Michael was fumbling with his camera and Emma had already snatched up a rock, and Kate knew it was too late. The creature pulled out a long, curved sword and screamed again. This time was much worse; Kate felt her legs tremble and her heart crumple in her chest as if all the blood, all the life, were being squeezed out of her.

  The creature knocked Abraham to the ground.

  Shaking, Kate stepped forward to put herself between this thing and her brother and sister.

  “Stop!”

  Amazingly, it did. Coming to a halt right in front of her. It was not breathing hard, despite having run all the way from the trees. In fact, Kate wasn’t sure it was breathing at all. Up close, the creature’s clothes were discernible as the tattered remains of an ancient uniform. There was a faded insignia on its chest. The metal of its sword was tarnished and chipped. But what truly drew her attention was the creature’s skin. It was a muddy, greenish color and covered here and there with bits of dirt, small sticks, and even patches of moss. As Kate watched, a thick pink worm slithered out from beneath the creature’s ribs.

  She forced herself to look at its face. It wasn’t wearing a mask. Rather, strips of black cloth were wrapped around its head so that only its eyes were visible. The eyes were yellow, with thin vertical pupils like a cat’s. The creature smelled like something that had been buried in a swamp for centuries and then dug up.

  It raised its sword and pointed back the way it had come.

  “You’d better go,” Abraham said. “It’ll make you anyway.”

  Stepping around Kate, the creature seized Michael and practically threw him toward the trees. It turned on Emma, but Kate moved again into its path.

  “Stop, okay, stop! We’re going!”

  “Get my camera!” Michael called.

  Kate stooped, retrieved the camera, and draped it around her neck. Emma was still clutching the rock she hadn’t thrown, so Kate took her free hand and together they joined Michael, the three of them walking toward the line of evergreens, with the thing, whatever it was, trudging behind.

  The forest the children were driven through held little relation to the Cambridge Falls they knew. The trees w
ere tall and thick, ferns blanketed the ground, the air was filled with birdcalls. Everything around them was rich and alive.

  “… And I bet you Dr. Pym’s a wizard,” Michael whispered excitedly. “That had to be his room, don’t you think? I wonder what else he’s got in there.”

  Kate had now accepted that what had happened to them was magic. The truth was, it explained a great deal, not just the book Michael had found, but how, for instance, an entire mountain range could have been hidden from view. So fine, magic was real. Right now, she was more concerned with how they were going to get out of here.

  “Where do you think he’s taking us?” Emma asked.

  “He’s probably going to execute us,” Michael said, pushing up his glasses. The day was warm and humid, and they had all three begun to sweat.

  “As long as he executes you first, Mr. It’s-Just-a-Photo-Album. ’Cause I’m definitely gonna watch that.” She turned to their captor. “Where’re you taking us, stinker?”

  “Don’t talk to it,” Kate said.

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “I know you’re not,” Kate said, though in fact she knew the opposite to be true. “But don’t anyway.”

  After ten minutes of being forced along with grunts and shoves, the children came overtop a short rise, the woods opened, and Michael stopped in his tracks.

  “Look!”

  He was pointing toward the river. At first, Kate didn’t understand what she was seeing. It was as if the water had gotten halfway down the gorge, gone under the narrow stone bridge, and suddenly stopped, a quarter mile shy of the falls. Only there were no falls! No river shooting down to tumble over the cliff! Kate looked back along the dry groove of the chasm to where the blue strip of water halted. She noticed what looked like a wide wooden wall built across the gorge, and it hit her: Abraham’s dam!

  She glanced toward the town, to the shimmering lake in the distance, and saw the same large boat from before, floating on the glassy surface. In the other Cambridge Falls, the one they’d left, there was no dam, no lake, and hardly any trees. What had happened to change everything? Was their ragged captor to blame?