Stargazer

by Patrick Carman

  “It’s going to be close,” said Jonezy. “If he swings back on that vine, it could be a disaster. He might crash into the pillar beneath us.”

  And just about the time it seemed that Jonezy was right—that Yipes was a tiny bit shy of far enough and was about to come swinging back down—he did something even I didn’t think he was crazy enough to do. Yipes swung his legs as far in front of himself as he could and he leaned out from the vine, holding on with just one hand. He swung his legs up and out toward the fourth pillar and managed to catch his foot on one of the old wooden boards of the broken rope bridge. He was carried back toward us by his own settling weight, but the rung of wood held. Yipes was dangling between two worlds, the known world of the third pillar and the unknown of the fourth. He stayed perfectly still a moment, then reached back one hand and took hold of the lowest hanging rope from the old bridge. He tied the swinging rope securely, looked up at us from what was now a lower position on the side of the fourth pillar, and waved.

  “Wooooo-hooooo!” I yelled. Matilda and Jonezy celebrated along with me, and we all wished we weren’t quite so close to the edge of the third pillar so we could stand up and jump around.

  Yipes turned away from us and began to climb up the old bridge. It was very much like a wide wooden ladder strung through with overgrown vines. Climbing to the top was easy work for Yipes, even if it was quite a trek. When he looked down at us from his perch on the fourth pillar, he waved again.

  The rest would be much easier—just like any other skim across a vine—but I was still nervous about sailing over the Lonely Sea with nothing to catch me. While I thought about what it would feel like to be out over the water, Jonezy began to speak.

  “I went straight to your cottage this morning, but you were gone. There’s something surprising I need to tell you that might help us. It’s why I came running after you.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Something Phylo discovered after the night skim.”

  “Who’s Phylo?” I asked.

  And then Jonezy shared what he had to tell with Matilda and me.

  It was indeed surprising.

  CHAPTER 12

  A WEAPON OF OUR OWN

  “Let’s move away from the edge first, where we can stand up,” said Jonezy.

  The wind was growing stronger as we crept away from the rim of the third pillar. We would need to walk a good distance to find the beginning of the rope that ran across to where Yipes waited for us. When we were far enough back that I felt safe standing up, I turned toward the inside of the third pillar and looked down inside.

  “Someone else is coming,” I said, seeing a small figure making their way up the hill. “How is it that everyone seems to know what we’re up to?”

  Matilda shrugged. We had tried to be secretive about our plans, but it didn’t appear to have worked.

  “That would be Phylo,” said Jonezy. “I told him to wait for my return, but it doesn’t surprise me to see him.”

  It became clear that Phylo was a boy—not very old—and that he was racing up the hill at a steady clip.

  “He’s strong,” I said. “I don’t think I could run up the side of the third pillar quite that fast.”

  “The children are like that,” said Matilda. “It must be the fresh sea air and the steady diet of fish and vegetables. It’s hard to get them to sleep at night.”

  “Which is why he was up so late last night, right, Phylo?” asked Jonezy. Phylo had come up beside us, hardly out of breath, and was grinning from ear to ear. He carried a heavy pack over his shoulders.

  “Yes, sir!” he said. I looked at Phylo and wondered how old he was. Was he my age or younger? He was slightly taller than me, but there was still the look of a young child in his eyes.

  “Can I tell them?” he asked. “I want to tell them!” And this made me think he was no more than ten. The way he’d asked it—as if it were a treasure he could barely contain—had that exuberant quality of the very young.

  “You’re lucky I don’t send you packing back to the village,” Jonezy scolded the boy. “I told you to wait for me.”

  “But it was my idea—I should get to tell,” said Phylo. He had enormous eyes and teeth that the rest of his face hadn’t grown into yet.

  “Oh, just tell us already,” said Matilda. “We’re right in the middle of something important.”

  “We’ll be getting to that in a moment,” said Jonezy, glaring at her. “But first to this discovery of Phylo’s.” He looked squarely at the boy and folded his arms over his chest. “You may share it.”

  Phylo hopped up and down excitedly and dropped the pack on the ground with the thudding sound of rocks clanging together.

  “After the night skim, I was so awake I couldn’t even imagine trying to sleep. Jonezy always stays with all us boys in a cottage after the night skims. So I waited until he was snoring good and loud and all the other boys were asleep as well. Then I snuck out through the window.”

  “The mossy surface of the third pillar is so quiet,” Jonezy interrupted. “It’s not like the House on the Hill or the Warwick Beacon where every move is accompanied by a squeaky floorboard. These little urchins are always sneaking around at night. It can’t be helped.”

  Phylo was still smiling and didn’t seem to mind being called an urchin.

  “I had this idea, see, a great idea!”

  “Tell it to me,” I said, and Phylo became even more animated.

  “I found a nice round rock, the kind I can throw a really long way out into the sea. I carried the rock all the way up here.”

  Phylo looked around a little bit, then he picked up his pack and ran about twenty feet to the left and a little closer to the rim. He was fearless.

  “Right here!” he called back. “This is where I was last night. You see here?”

  He kneeled down and began pulling on a piece of moss as we approached.

  “Get away from the edge,” said Jonezy. “You’re too close.”

  Phylo yanked hard on the moss and fell backward, tumbling down the hill.

  “There! I got it!” said Phylo. He stood up and pulled a fat rock from his pack, almost too big to hold.

  “The rocks I had last night were just like this one. I smeared them heavy with green.”

  Phylo turned the moss over and revealed the substance that I had seen the night before. It didn’t glow brightly in the daylight. Instead it shimmered and sparkled like a million tiny mirrors in the morning sun. It wasn’t powder and it wasn’t liquid—it seemed to be both. I remembered touching it and having a hard time getting it off my hands. Phylo spread the green material all over the stone in his hand.

  “Where is he?” asked Phylo.

  “Where is who?” I asked.

  “The monster!”

  Matilda and I stared at Phylo and didn’t quite know what to make of this boy and his strange ideas.

  “Everyone lie down at the edge, where you can see below,” said Jonezy. “All but you, Phylo—you stay back.”

  Phylo nodded and pulled two more hand-sized rocks from his pack. He smeared green on those as well.

  When we were all lying down at the edge, we could see that Abaddon was back at the base of the fourth pillar, smashing it with angry arms, pulling chunks of stone free.

  “I’m ready when you are,” said Phylo.

  “Ready for wha —” I said, and looking at Phylo I saw that he’d been busy while my back had been turned. He’d taken two hooked objects from his pack and stabbed them deep into the ground. Across the two hooks ran a length of what appeared to be vine or rope.

  “It’s a long way—pull it back as hard as you can,” said Jonezy. He was pointing directly over our heads toward the sea monster. He turned to me. “Stay low. You don’t want to be hit with one of those. He can really fling them.”

  I glanced back once more and saw that Phylo was a very determined and able boy. He had a pile of five good-sized rocks all covered in green. There was a sixth in his hands,
which he had placed inside a sheath of leather at the center of the rope. Then he stretched and stretched until I was sure the rope would snap in half and Phylo would tumble down the hillside. It was a sling like I’d never imagined or seen. I would later discover that very young vines were stretchy in the extreme and could be harvested, but there was no time to ask as I heard the wailing voice of Phylo.

  “FIRE!”

  The rock sailed over my head with a frightening swish and nearly clobbered me.

  “A tiny bit to the right!” said Jonezy.

  “And a little higher!” I added, afraid the next one might tag me in the back of the head.

  Foooosh! Another rock sailed past.

  “To the left now! And farther! Farther!” yelled Jonezy, never taking his eyes off the writhing monster below.

  Foooosh! Fooosh! Fooosh!

  In rapid succession, three more stones zoomed past my head and out over the water. When the first two finally landed, they hit wide to the left and too short. The two that followed were much closer. One bounced too high, above Abaddon’s head, hitting the pillar. The other flew slightly too far right. But the last of them—the fifth stone—hit the pillar and shot into the air. It came down and caught one of Abaddon’s twisting arms. And that was when the strangest thing happened.

  It stuck. It was as if the glowing green stone had grabbed a hold of Abaddon with claws of its own and would not let go.

  “Now wait and see,” said Phylo. He had darted up next to me where he sat on his knees. “This is the best part.”

  We were far enough away that the green stone was nothing more than a speck in the distance on the huge body of the sea monster. And yet, we could see it more plainly the longer we looked.

  “It’s … growing,” I stammered.

  “Yes, it is!” cried Phylo. He was very proud of himself.

  At first Abaddon seemed like a creature annoyed by a fly that had landed on its arm. He swatted at it with another of his long, metallic tentacles. But pretty soon the glowing green had spread across a section that I would have guessed was bigger than me. Abaddon began to scream in a terrible, unearthly voice. His arms burst into flames and he swatted ferociously at the growing green mass.

  “That’s about it,” said Phylo. “Once he bursts into flames, the rock falls off and the green goes away.”

  And so it did … but not right away. It took a little while, and the screaming continued. And it seemed as if Abaddon had to use a lot of energy in order to set himself aflame on the surface of the Lonely Sea.

  “It was much better last night,” said Phylo. “I brought a big pile of rocks up here, about twenty. I could hear that monster gurgling and chewing away at the stone base of the fourth pillar. I knew where he was, but I couldn’t see him, so I launched the first ten stones toward the sound at different speeds. You should see them fly at night! They’re like shining green comets. When they hit the water, they sizzle and steam.”

  “I don’t know where he gets these ideas,” said Jonezy.

  But Phylo was undeterred. I would soon learn that once Phylo started talking, it was difficult to make him stop.

  “All those first tries were short, so I shot the rest of what I had harder. And that’s when it happened! I hit that thing down there. And BOY did it make him angry. Pretty soon he was bursting into flames and that’s when I gathered my things and ran back.”

  “And then he crept up next to me and shook me awake,” said Jonezy. “So he could show me the whole thing all over again.”

  “An excitable boy,” said Matilda.

  “If we could keep flinging those green stones at Abaddon,” I said, “it might keep him busy. It might even make him want to leave this place.”

  “That’s just what I was thinking!” howled Phylo. “We could rain rocks on him by the thousands!”

  I turned to Jonezy and asked, “I wonder what that moss is made of that makes it do all the strange things it does. And why would it attack Abaddon and not us? It’s used all the time here on the pillars, but it obviously doesn’t agree with Abaddon.”

  “Actually, there is something you don’t know about the moss,” said Jonezy. “It has a strong reaction to saltwater.”

  “So when it hits Abaddon, it also hits all the salty water he’s been swimming in,” I concluded.

  Jonezy nodded. “There’s something about the connection between the moss and the saltwater together that makes it unstable. We’ve always been careful to keep the two away from each other. It helps that the moss only grows on the third pillar, where none of the food is grown and none of the fish are caught.”

  “It grows on the fourth pillar as well,” said Matilda.

  The comment bothered Jonezy.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “It sure looks like it’s covered in moss,” said Matilda. “It’s green and fuzzy. What else could it be?”

  We were still well away from the edge, but the rounded top of the fourth pillar was in plain view. It was bright green, just as the inward curving top of the third pillar we stood on. It was as if the two would fit perfectly together if one were set on top of the other; the green moss would fuse them together like glue. It made me wonder if they had indeed been one taller pillar in a distant past, that one or the other had broken free.

  “I can’t imagine why or how the moss does what it does,” said Matilda. “Only Sir Alistair Wakefield might have known the answer to that.”

  This logic seemed to quiet Jonezy’s concern, if only a little. But I had another, more pressing concern that entered my mind as we stared at the fourth pillar.

  “Where’s Yipes gone to?” I asked no one in particular. I looked down the long ladder and hoped I wouldn’t see him climbing down to take the vine that ran across the Lonely Sea. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” said Matilda. “It’s time to leave.”

  We looked at each other and smiled, both of us thrilled at the idea of skimming across to an uncharted land.

  “You’ve got that Warvold look in your eye,” said Jonezy. “That look always makes me nervous.”

  “Not to worry,” I said. “If there’s something over there that can help us, we’ll find it and bring it back.”

  Jonezy looked hard at Matilda.

  “You know the sign,” he cautioned. “You know what he always said.”

  “What’s he talking about?” I asked Matilda, alarm rising in my voice. “Is Yipes in trouble?”

  I gazed across the divide that separated me from my truest friend and wished I could see him.

  “It’s nothing,” said Matilda. But there was a quiver in her voice that made me think otherwise.

  “Sir Alistair Wakefield stayed with us a great deal in the beginning,” said Jonezy. “He would venture to the fourth pillar only for a day or two, and then he would return. But as time went on and we became more self-sufficient, he stayed away longer. Finally, we came to a point where he visited us only a day here or a night there. The rest of the time he stayed on the fourth pillar, where we were not allowed to go.”

  “So you’re telling me no one ever ventured across that bridge except Sir Alistair Wakefield?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “There used to be a sign posted on both sides, but it was torn down when the bridge was cut,” said Matilda.

  “What did the sign say?” I asked, not sure I was ready for the answer.

  “I know!” said Phylo. “I remember that sign from before.” He’d been obediently quiet all through our conversation, but he really wanted to tell, so Jonezy nodded.

  “The way of yesterday is mine alone. Turn back!—and it was signed Sir A. Wakefield.”

  “We have no idea what it meant,” Jonezy added, “but we also knew better than to disobey a direct order from Sir Alistair Wakefield. He asked very little of us, but he really didn’t want anyone over there, which is why we’ve left it alone these long years since his passing.”
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  “I know that place,” I said. “The way of yesterday. I know what that means.”

  “What does it mean?” asked Matilda, suddenly very curious.

  I didn’t know how to explain, but I knew one thing for sure: “If this is anything like the way of yesterday I’m aware of, then we may well find the answers we seek on the other side.”

  Jonezy hesitated, glancing back and forth between the three of us, trying to be strong in his resolve. But my look crumbled his determination and he nodded quietly. Jonezy didn’t bother us with any more questions or concerns, for he knew our minds were made up. As he helped Phylo put his things back in his pack, the two talked about how they would build an army of stone launchers to defeat Abaddon. A moment later, they were walking down the side of the third pillar, busy with their plans, and Matilda asked the question I so longed to hear.

  “Are you ready for the ride of your life?”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE TUBE SLIDE

  “You first,” said Matilda. “I’ll be right behind.”

  I examined my slider carefully. After the incident at the night skim, I didn’t trust the small bit of rope and knots in my hand. It was one thing to fall at the skimming grounds, but quite another if I broke free over the open water with Abaddon awaiting me below.

  “You’ll never be a great skimmer if you don’t learn to trust your slider,” Matilda told me. “It won’t fail you this time.”

  Her words rang true. I flipped the slider over the long rope running all the way across to the fourth pillar. A second later, I jumped into the air. Right away, I knew that feeling again—as if I were a bird flying over blue water—and it was fast, faster than any of the skims I’d taken the night before, because it was a steep decline to the other side. The rope arced down at a wide angle and it took my breath away to travel so swiftly. The rope did not provide as smooth a ride as the vines did, and my body shook with tremors all the way down. As I approached the fourth pillar, I crossed the slider in my hands, tightening it around the rope. I was coming in too fast and I cinched the slider tighter still. Heat from the friction began to rise along the rope, and the knots grew hot in my hands.