Compass of Dreams

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  Patches, though, was happy as ever, excited to explore the forest. Meb was a little worried about nightfall, but Aiby seemed completely focused on the task at hand.

  “Are we sure that it works?” I asked for probably the twentieth time. We seemed to be zigzagging more than heading in a specific direction. While I realized that magic often seemed to work outside the realm of logic, I still felt like we were heading nowhere.

  “Yep,” Aiby said. “Have a little patience, Fin. Not all magic works quickly.”

  “Can I ask you something?” I asked. “What does that spell I keep repeating even mean?”

  “Nature loves to hide,” she answered.

  “But those words, ‘physis vattelapesca.’ What language is that?”

  “It’s ancient Greek,” she said.

  “And why is it in ancient Greek?” I asked.

  Aiby shrugged. “Maybe the magical object originally belonged to someone who loved ancient Greece?”

  It was a fair answer, but not at all satisfying. I mean, what’s the point of an incantation if you don’t even know what the words mean? I decided I would study the Enchanted Language once this adventure was over.

  “It was a language that was spoken many years ago,” Aiby said. “These days, it would be considered a dead language. Like Latin.”

  We kept walking. The wind made her hair dance around her shoulders while her toes stepped through tufts of moss. As I watched her walk through the woods like a woman of the wild, it seemed like I’d known her for much longer than I had. Strange words wandered through my head, one after another, so fast that I had to stop and sit down.

  Aiby and Meb stopped alongside me. “I don’t really think languages can be considered dead, Aiby,” Meb said. “They still exist, they just aren’t used in casual conversation or by any specific cultures.”

  Aiby nodded. “Oh, I agree. I don’t think there are dead people, either,” Aiby said. Meb raised an eyebrow. “My mom used to say that life is eternal, and that dead people are simply the living who lost their curiosity of life.”

  That’s beautiful, I thought. Aiby sure has a way with words.

  Aiby turned and smiled at me, and for a moment I wondered if she could read my thoughts. Ridiculous, I know, but it sure would’ve explained a lot.

  “Even when people die,” she said, “they continue to talk to us, or ask us questions, kind of like a voice deep inside our minds.”

  “That happens to me all the time,” I said. “Hearing a voice in my head, I mean. But I usually ignore it.”

  Meb laughed. “And whose voice is it?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Whose voice do you hear in your head?” Meb repeated.

  I was caught off-guard by the question, but I didn’t hesitate. “My grandmother’s, I think,” I said.

  I looked up at Aiby and something strange happened: her skin . . . quivered. Or maybe it was her aura, if you believe in that kind of thing. I’d never seen anything like that before, but on that afternoon, in the woods, my sense of perception seemed amplified.

  “My grandmother died when I was seven,” I said quietly.

  Aiby nodded. “My mom —” Aiby began, but Patches began to bark furiously. Then he dashed away into the depths of the forest.

  “Patches heard something,” I said.

  “I heard it, too,” Aiby said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  The skin on Aiby’s arm seemed to shimmer with light. “Let’s go see,” she said.

  I realized we were on the right path when I saw the grass beneath my feet was singed. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or disappointed. The smell of the wild was also more intense, like it was part of the very air itself.

  A few moments after his display of adventurousness, Patches returned. He started to yelp while leaping around my ankles. I pet him and continued onward.

  I pushed aside some branches and found myself in front of a small cave, its entrance partially covered by woven branches. Immediately I recalled the story of the two green children we’d read about in The Black Book of the Woods . . .

  We entered cautiously. Just inside the cave, there were three sheep tied to stakes.

  “Mystery solved,” Meb said.

  “Not really,” I said, looking around. The cave was small and shallow. “It’s a dead end, and this cave is far too small to hold all the town’s missing sheep.”

  Unless, I thought, the cave has another entrance. I tried to recall the whole story of those two green children. They’d lived somewhere else, then entered the cave and found themselves in a forest. The forest of Suffolk.

  On the ground, I saw dozens of fish bones and a mountain of shrimp shells. The smell was unbearable, and clouds of flies were buzzing around both piles. Deeper inside the cave, some of the grass had been pressed down in the shape of a crude bed.

  “Either way,” Aiby said, “this seems to be the place our sheep thief lives.”

  “Lucky for us, he isn’t home,” I added.

  Patches sniffed the air, his tail snapping back and forth like a whip.

  “Yuck,” Meb said, staring at the refuse. “We need to untie the sheep and tell the others about this place.”

  Not yet, I thought. I knelt in the grass, swatting away the flies with my palm. In the shells, I saw something strange that looked like small, elongated slivers of gold.

  I took one between my fingers and rolled it between them. “Hey,” I said. “This is a grain of barley.”

  Along with barley, shrimp shells, and fish bones, we found a container with some hot peppers inside as well as a chipped whiskey bottle. It was the same brand of whiskey that Dad had found in front of our house.

  Suddenly, a roar shook the forest. Patches jumped back and yelped.

  “What was that?!” Aiby asked.

  “It was a rifle shot!” I said.

  We’d had enough for one day. The four of us ran through the woods in the general direction we’d come. The evening light stretched through the branches, casting shadows like long, dark fingers. By some miracle, we reached Meb’s car just as the sun dipped below the horizon. I could already see the stars piercing the black veil of the night sky.

  Aiby jumped into the front. I hopped in the back.

  “Who fired that shot?” Aiby asked.

  “And at whom?” Meb added, starting the car.

  Aiby turned on the small dome light in the passenger side of the car and began to leaf through one of the two books she had in the car. I still felt weird, otherwise I would’ve teased Aiby for her habit of looking for answers in ancient books. I just felt too out of it to joke around.

  “Now that I’ve seen where it lives,” Aiby said, “I think I can find this creature of ours in The Grand Book of Magical Creatures . . .”

  “Great,” I muttered. “What are you searching for?”

  “I checked the index for the words: sheep, fish, barley, and whiskey.”

  I laughed. It wasn’t all that surprising, considering most magical encyclopedias were sorted by words or phrases. That way, magicians leafing through the volumes could find things relevant to their magical interests far more easily.

  “Well? Did you find anything?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Aiby said. “I’m not certain, but I think we’re dealing with a wild being called a psychopomp.”

  Patches barked.

  “Patches stole my question,” I said. “What the heck is a psychopomp?”

  “The psychopomps are like guides who accompany living beings from one world to another,” she said. “Like Charon, the ferryman of souls, who shows the way for those who must leave this world.”

  “You mean the dead,” I said.

  “Like I said, I don’t think people die,” Aiby said. “Not in that way. In any case, the particular
psychopomp we’re dealing with is a type of Green Man called Green Jack, or Jack in the Green. Apparently, he guides individuals back and forth between the real world and the magical world. In order to summon him, you need sheep, shrimp, roasted barley, and a special whiskey distilled with twenty-one hot peppers.”

  “Those are all the things we found in his lair,” whispered Meb.

  I saw the town’s lights in the distance. “So someone has summoned him already?” I asked. “To do what?”

  “The book says that Green Jack is considered to be extremely dangerous and uncooperative,” Aiby said.

  “Sounds about right, considering his love of whiskey,” I said.

  Aiby ignored my joke. “He lives barefoot, his feet are constantly burning . . .”

  “That explains the burnt grass!” I said.

  Aiby nodded. “And he loves to dress with long colorful cloaks and often wears a pair of black glasses with one broken lens. The broken lens lets him see the magical world while the other lens lets him see ours.”

  “A broken lens . . .” I said, trailing off. A detail popped into my head that had previously seemed unimportant. When I’d seen that strange man at the edge of my yard, I noticed a reflection of light in his face . . . as if he were wearing a pair of glasses with a broken lens!

  “Stop the car!” I cried.

  Meb shrugged, then slowed to a stop. I grabbed her and Aiby by their shoulders. “It was definitely him,” I whispered. “When I saw him, he was making this strange gesture with his hands, like . . . well I can’t really explain it. But he kept doing it, over and over.”

  Aiby scratched her chin and continued to read. “Apparently, whenever Green Jack is seen in an area, one person dies each week for three weeks.”

  “Three weeks?” I said. “So, twenty-one days.”

  “Like twenty-one hot peppers,” Meb added.

  I shivered. “Twenty-one grams,” I added. “The weight of the soul.” Aiby raised an eyebrow at me. “Um, I heard it in a movie Doug was watching.”

  Aiby shrugged. “The book says that Green Jack finds his victims by examining them with his glasses. If a person looks interesting enough through both lenses —”

  “What do you mean by ‘interesting?’” I asked.

  Aiby turned the page. “Magic Soul,” she said. “If a person has a Magic Soul, then he challenges them.”

  “Challenges them to what?” I asked quietly.

  Aiby frowned. “It says ‘a simple card game.’ If Green Jack wins, he takes the person’s Magic Soul for himself.”

  “And if Green Jack loses?” I asked.

  “The book says that he has never lost.”

  I sank deeper into my seat. “But what kind of simple card game?” I asked.

  Aiby slammed the book shut. I wasn’t sure if that meant there were no more answers, or if she didn’t like the thought of playing games with Green Jack.

  Soon, we arrived in Applecross. The street lamps were lit, and countless moths were flitting around the halos of light. “We have to warn the others,” I said. “And find a way to stop this guy.”

  “How?” Aiby asked. “We just give him a call and ask him to leave?”

  I shrugged. “How long have sheep been disappearing from Applecross?”

  “For at least two weeks,” Meb said.

  “So, it started about the same time that old lady Cumai died.” I said. “But then what? Mr. Dogberry died too, but long before any of this stuff started happening.”

  “What if Green Jack comes after one of us next?” Aiby said quietly.

  “If he does, then we play his game,” I said, smiling. “I volunteer — I have lots of good luck, after all.”

  Aiby shook her head but said nothing.

  We parked in front of the Greenlock Pub and knew that something was wrong. As soon as the crowd saw us approaching, they ran toward us. They seemed agitated, but had every right to be.

  “Someone shot Aiby’s father.”

  Aiby’s shoulders slumped. I tried to support her in case she fainted. The three of us pushed through the crowd, but I lost sight of them. The last thing I saw was Meb making her way into the Greenlock Pub before I was overwhelmed by my neighbors.

  “He was shot in Reginald Bay!” one man said.

  “No! It was on the road leading to the bay!” another argued.

  “It was the McBlacks, I tell you!” another man cried. “Mr. Lily was shot by Barragh!”

  In a haze, I soon learned that Barragh McBlack had shot Mr. Lily somewhere on the road that led to Scary Villa during the night patrol. Upon realizing who he had shot, Barragh immediately drove Locan to the pub.

  “But why did he bring Mr. Lily to the pub?” I asked. The villagers were crowded under the pub’s banner depicting a green padlock.

  “It was the only place where there was sure to be alcohol — you know, for disinfectant,” Mr. Humpty Wallace explained, simultaneously wiping the beer foam from his mustache.

  Another man nodded. “It was just the best thing to do.”

  “I was with Barragh on patrol,” a man said. “There were two people on the road when he fired his rifle!”

  “And Barragh shot one of them.”

  “The wrong one!”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  I had finally reached the pub’s entrance when I heard a familiar voice. “Hey, McPhee,” someone said. I turned to see Sammy Monkfish perched on a stool just outside the door. “What are you doing here?”

  My former classmate always wore a red and green plaid shirt, corduroy pants, and anti-mosquito rubber boots. It didn’t seem to matter to him that it was mid-summer and he had to be boiling in that ridiculous outfit.

  Sammy spat on the ground. The gesture meant something more than simple rudeness. I think he wanted me to understand that he’d become a man that day.

  “I was on patrol tonight,” he told me. “With Barragh McBlack.”

  I looked around at all the men in the pub. “Why you?” I said.

  “Someone had to go,” he said defensively. “And I know how to use a rifle.”

  “Were you the one who fired at Mr. Lily, then?” I asked, hoping to catch him off-guard.

  Sammy Monkfish laughed. “Are you kidding?” he said. “If it had been me, Mr. Lily would be dead already.”

  It took everything I had to restrain myself from punching him square in the nose. Instead, I kicked the leg of the stool he sat on.

  “Hey!” Sammy cried out as he hit the ground. He sprang to his feet and got right up in my face. “What’s your problem, McPhee?! Don’t tell me you’re on the thief’s side.”

  “The thief?” I said. “Sammy, are you seriously saying that Mr. Lily stole the town’s missing sheep?”

  Sammy narrowed his eyes. “Of course I am!”

  “Then you’re an idiot,” I said, and entered the pub. There was no point in arguing with Sammy. I had to find someone reasonable to tell what Aiby, Meb, Patches, and I had discovered. I wasn’t even planning to tell anyone about Green Jack. No one would believe me. Not yet.

  I walked into the pub and kept elbowing through the crowd of people. Judging by the mix of stable smells and fish fumes that hung in the air, the news must have brought everyone to the pub.

  The Greenlock had three rooms, a large fireplace, a blackboard with the daily menu (which hadn’t changed in over a year), and the bar. As usual, Michael, the son of the owner, towered over the available taps while handing out mug after mug of ale.

  “Typical McBlack, huh?” I heard a man say.

  “He says he saw Mr. Lily setting a trap with raw meat!” another said.

  “Was he alone?”

  “No. Another man was with him.”

  “Wrong. He was alone, I tell you!”

  “And when did all this happen?”

/>   “No more than an hour ago.”

  “Did you hear the shot?”

  It was pure chaos. The scene definitely proved that men are every bit as gossipy as old women.

  I kept my head down while dodging elbows. Patches snuck through the crowd at my heels. I noticed Reverend Prospero sitting in a corner and having a serious talk with Professor Everett. I headed in their direction, figuring they’d have the best information of the day’s events. Suddenly, a strong hand pulled me out of the crowd.

  I turned to see my brother staring at me. “Doug!” I cried.

  “Did you hear?” he asked, a concerned look on his face.

  I wanted to mock him for his dumb question, but I restrained myself. “Do you know where Locan is?” I asked.

  “This way,” my brother said. He led me around the bar, toward the bathrooms. He opened a small door at the top of some steps and we entered.

  “How is Aiby’s father doing?” I asked Doug as we climbed the creaky staircase. My legs felt like bricks due to the long trek earlier that day.

  “Barragh shot him in the arm,” Doug said. “Nothing too serious, but he lost a lot of blood. However, it’s almost a miracle that they were able to carry him as far as they did.”

  I nodded grimly. Doug pushed open a door and we found ourselves in a long and narrow corridor. On the far end, I heard Aiby’s voice. I wanted to run to her.

  “We found the lair, Doug,” I told my brother. Quickly, I explained to him what we’d discovered that afternoon.

  “I did what I had to do, you rude little brat!” Barragh McBlack yelled. “I’m sorry for the accident, but your father shouldn’t have been sneaking around at night like a common thief!”

  “So it’s shoot first and ask questions later?!” Aiby shouted.

  “Watch your mouth, girl!” Barragh yelled back. “It just so happens that thieves were in my house today, so I was on edge! And if you continue to talk to me like this, we’ll keep you here until Bobby Thorne arrives!”

  Bobby Thorne was the district’s police officer. He didn’t live in Applecross, so summoning him meant we had to rely on a person who made a living of avoiding anything difficult. The only reason Bobby could be convinced to come in a timely fashion was for “evidence gathering” on the farms, which really meant begging for slices of blueberry pie from the farmers’ wives.