Evan Burl and the Falling

by Justin Blaney

  With all they had been drinking, I was as good as dead. But I saw boots out of the corner of my eye. Huge boots. It was Ballard. He smashed two of them together like they were rabbits. The bearded man took one look at Ballard and took off running for the gate. The other two pulled themselves into the cart and whipped the horses into a gallop.

  "You can forget 'bout gitting the rest of this d'livery," the bearded man yelled, blood still dripping from his face where I knocked him into the cart. He threw open the gate and jumped into the speeding cart. "And we'll be t'lling e'eryone in town to stay aways from 'ere from now on."

  Ballard lumbered over and slammed the gate shut with a flick of his wrist. I rolled onto my stomach, moaning, and Pearl's bare feet appeared in the grass beside me. I looked sideways at her.

  "You shouldn't have tried to do that," Ballard said.

  "What was I supposed to do? They were going to hurt Pearl."

  "You almost killed yourself."

  "We're all going to die someday."

  "Thanks," Pearl said softly in a way that reminded me so much of Little Sae. "For saving me."

  I smiled at her, but when I looked at her face I saw Little Sae looking down at me.

  I shut my eyes tight, trying to make myself remember that it was Pearl who was standing next to me, not Little Sae. Little Sae was gone. And she wasn't ever coming back.

  "Try not to die," Pearl said. "What would we do without you?"

  I smiled at her, but inside I felt sick. I might be able to save her from three drunk runners, but could I save her from myself?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Monday

  10:11 pm

  I guess one beating per day was my uncle's moral limit. He said he spent everything he had for whatever those men were delivering and we only got a quarter of the order. The veins on his forehead looked like they were going to burst, but in the end he just told me to get to work.

  For eight and a half hours, I pretended to be strong for the others, working with them in the Caldroen. That's where we spend most of our time, ever since the clankers arrived.

  The Caldroen is a six floor hollow tower at the center of the castle, with a glass dome ceiling. At sixty feet tall, it's the fifth tallest tower in Daemanhur, but it's by far the widest: over fifty feet across at the base. There are a whole slew of black iron walkways and spiral staircases that hug the walls around the edges of the Caldroen like great spider webs.

  The room get's its name from the broiler that sits in the center and rises up four floors high. At the base is a furnace that's thirty feet across and 20 feet tall. It usually runs about 1500 degrees. That's hot enough to turn me to ash in a few seconds. The heat powers the broiler which sits on top, a tank of boiling water that makes steam for running the clankers.

  Ballard and Yesler were just unloading the first clankers, the day Pike died. In all, the castle now has 48 clankers, most of them in the Caldroen. Copper and iron beasts caught in the web of platforms and walkways that hang from the Caldroen's walls. They rumble and rattle and hiss and moan and creak and pop. Pipes go in and pipes go out. Mazol has never said a word about what moves through those pipes or what comes out the end of them. All we know is he sells whatever the clankers make, supposedly using the money to pay for food and supplies to run the orphanage.

  At first, the clankers were the perfect diversion from what happened to Pike. I would hang out in the Caldroen every chance I got watching the men install the machines. It took twenty men from the town 11 months to get them all assembled and working properly. I used to stare up at the clankers, my eyes filled with wonder at the shinny copper and hundreds of spinning gears and levers and gauges and pipes.

  But the fun wore off when it sunk in that we would be working those clankers from sun up till sun down, six days a week, until we were old enough to leave Daemanhur or we were dead.

  All day long I worked. I didn't know whether to be sad or angry, wavering back and forth between choking back tears and imagining throwing Mazol over the courtyard walls into the jungle. Henri standing on that stool, all alone. Little Sae dying. Pearl getting attacked. Pike. Everything. But when I was finally alone that night in my room, no tears came.

  I fell face first into a pile of blankets.

  Henri and I searched for years to find enough scraps of cloth around the castle to make that bed. Those rich runners who attacked Pearl were probably sleeping on feather beds at that very moment.

  The room felt cold without Henri beside me. Something was buzzing loudly around the room, probably a yellow jacket or a big fly. I shut my eyes, rolled onto my side, carefully making sure nothing touched my back. I hugged my shoulders, imagining Henri's hands were around me and not mine. But it didn't work. And I knew I wasn't going to get any sleep that night. I couldn't keep the image of Henri standing in that dark room all alone out of my mind.

  I thought about how I could save her from that stool for the hundredth time, but came to the same conclusion. If I went to help her, I'd risk her getting lashed. There was no way to outsmart Mazol this time.

  I sat up, grabbed the stick Yesler gave me that morning, and lifted myself up. There was still plenty of work to do that night, and no one but me to do it. I hobbled to the door. Every muscle in my body begged me to go lie back down, but since when did beggars get their way. Marcus said if someone was caught begging they were thrown out of the city's walls into the jungle. I was no beggar.

  I peeked outside. The castle was huge, almost endless, there was no end of secret passageways and hidden rooms, but I never knew when Yesler or Mazol would sneak up behind me or pop out a door as I passed. Ballard mostly left me alone, he didn't go out of his way to make my life miserable like the others.

  I looked several times in both directions. Satisfied I was alone, I began to slowly limp down the hall. I desperately needed to hold the book again, I hated and loved it at the same time. Though I felt like a slave to it's words, knowing my future, even if it was a bad future, had a certain calming effect. But there were a few things I had to do before I could indulge myself.

  I came to Pearl's room first and listened at the door. I heard a voice and what sounded like rustling bed sheets. I opened the door quietly and looked in. Pearl was laying on one of the only mattresses in the castle. It was dirty and brown, with a few springs popping out at the base, but it was beautiful and white when it was new.

  I found it stashed away on the fourth floor in the back of a windowless old storage room. I'm sure whoever was master of the castle long ago might have thrown a ratty thing like that out, but thankfully someone must have forgotten it was there. Hundreds of light pink flowers were embroidered on it; that's why I gave it to Pearl. She loved pink. Mazol would have sold it if he could have found someone to give him a penny for it.

  Pearl tossed on the mattress, like she was having a bad nightmare. She was talking too.

  I reached over and shook her.

  "Wake up."

  She sat up suddenly and screamed. I couldn't help but jump. Her eyes were wide with fear.

  "It was just a dream," I said as I patted her softly. My chest was still pounding. She hugged me tight and I winced from the pain of her touching my back. But she didn't notice and I didn't say anything.

  "She's been doing that for half an hour," a quiet voice in the shadows said.

  "Is that you, Anabelle?" I was wondering where she had gotten to. Pearl and Anabelle always slept together.

  The eleven-year-old girl glided out of the shadows like a ghost.

  "I tried to wake her, but she wouldn't stop," Anabelle said.

  I imagined Pearl was dreaming about those men, or maybe Little Sae, but didn't want to ask.

  "Come here," I said to Anabelle and helped her climb into the bed. "Do you want to see a magic trick?"

  "Oh, yes. Please."

  I pulled a bit of cloth from my pocket and laid it over my hand. Pausing for effect, I lifted the cloth dramatically. They both grabbed at my hand.

  "Nothi
ng's there," Pearl said.

  "Oh," I said, pretending to be as surprised as them, "I must have done it wrong. Let me see." I placed the cloth back on my hand, peeked under it, then put my finger to my lips.

  "Shhhh. You have to be very quiet for the magic to work." I waited another second then said, "You pull it off this time."

  Anabelle lifted the cloth up slowly, like she was expecting something to bite her, but squealed when she saw my hand. In my open palm were two tiny dolls made of wood; Marcus snuck them to me with a wink when Mazol wasn't looking the last time he made a delivery. The girls grabbed one each and kissed me.

  "Now time for bed."

  They fell backwards, pulling thin blankets up to their chins. Anabelle and Pearl liked to sleep with their head at the other's feet. I told Pearl one time that sleeping that way would make you feel like you were standing on your head, and standing on your head is one of the best ways to make sure you don't have scary dreams. She had been sleeping that way ever since.

  I turned to Anabelle and said, "Have you kept the star I gave you safe?"

  She nodded her head and showed me a black metal star hanging around her wrist by a thin piece of twine.

  "That's good. It will keep you safe tonight." She turned the star in her tiny hands a few times and it glowed with soft silvery light.

  I reached down to tuck Anabelle in and noticed something on her neck. I looked closer and discovered some kind of rash.

  "What's this?" I asked.

  She scratched and said, "I don't know. I don't think it's anything."

  Only me and the warts got sick. Henri and the other girls hadn't ever caught as much as a sniffle. They were special in lots of ways, but one of them was they never got sick.

  "Does it hurt?"

  "No, just a little itchy."

  My chest tightened as I gave her a long look, but in the end, kissed her on the forehead and went to the door.

  "Tell me if it gets any worse tomorrow, all right?"

  "I will," she said sleepily.

  "G'night," I said quietly as I shut the door. Neither one responded. I figured they were asleep before I got ten feet down the hall.

  I kept thinking about Anabelle's rash as I repeated this scene or something like it with the eight other girls. By the time I was done, I decided there was nothing I could do about Anabelle till morning anyway and resolved myself to stop worrying about it. Maybe Marcus would come soon and I could ask him what he thought.

  I passed a clock and wasn't surprised to see that it was 1:54 in the morning.

  Now, I could go and find my book.

  I headed towards my elusian. We all had them—secret rooms we could hide out in. Places we could be alone—or in my case, be alone with Henri—and keep things we didn't want anyone to find. Like whole collections of gadgets and toys Henri and I had found or stolen. There were the most strange and amazing things hidden in Daemanhur castle.

  After limping along for about 5 minutes, I arrived at the end of a dark hallway. I looked over my shoulder again, took a breath, and stepped inside a broom closet. After shutting the door, I felt around on the back wall. It was smooth bamboo paneling, the type of material that was only used in the closets of the servant's wing of the castle. Not that there was anything wrong with bamboo panelling. It's quite strong actually, but not nearly grand enough to match the materials used in Daemanhur's public areas.

  I quickly found the loose board two feet from the floor and pushed it. The back wall of the closet swung away and a whoosh of wind rushed passed me into the room.

  I breathed out as I stepped into the large space on the other side, silently wishing for the hundredth time I had picked an elusian that didn't require passing through a cramped closet to get inside.

  I don't know if the castle was designed this way on purpose or if it was just a flaw in building a structure so enormous, but there were at least 19 rooms that could not be accessed from hallways. And those were just the rooms I had found. Some required passing through sliding fireplace walls. Others had to be climbed up into through trap doors in the floor. Many were hidden behind closets like the one I had just used. Some were even entered through furniture, like grand clocks or pianos. The best rooms required secret codes or large iron keys to unlock them.

  I chose this room as my elusian for a number of reasons. Though it didn't have a lock, it was one of the best hidden rooms in the whole castle. It took me years to find it. It's also perfectly sealed off from the rest of Daemanhur. Henri and I tested it once; she stood inside the room screaming as loud as she could and I couldn't hear a whisper from the other side of the closet. But the thing I loved most about my elusian is there was a hidden firewood elevator so I could bring up as much wood as I liked without having to carry it through the castle and possibly be followed.

  It was rarely cold enough to need the warmth of a fire, but oil was very expensive and we almost never had any so fire was the only good light source we had inside the castle. There was an entire jungle inside Daemanhur's courtyard, filled with more wood than we could ever use.

  There was a little moon light coming through the windows, but other than that, the room was completely dark. I already had a fire ready to light in the massive, ceiling height fireplace that took up most of one wall. After a few strikes from the flint, the kindling lit up and soon the room was filled with flickering firelight.

  I limped past some of my collections on my way to the desk in the corner of the room. There was an enormous assortment of shoes. I especially liked the ones with spikes sticking out the heel. I laughed when I first found one like that, what could they ever be used for? Punching holes in the ground? Whoever lived in Daemanhur before us must have loved them because I had found hundreds of them in closets all over the castle.

  I had several boxes of black and white drawings so realistic they looked like real little-people were trapped inside. I imagined they jumped off the page whenever I wasn't looking.

  After the pictures was almost the entire collection of a series of books titled Natural History, 19 of 21 total volumes about everything from anthropology to zoology. Those books were one of my greatest treasures, probably worth more money than I would earn the rest of my life.

  I would have sold them if I could have done it without Mazol finding out and taking the money. I worked for weeks to figure out the combination to one of the locked secret rooms in the castle and was rewarded with those books and a room full of other treasures.

  I taught myself to read with those books and some of the learning papers I stole from my uncle after Pike died. Besides Marcus, those books were the only reason I knew anything about the outside world. But I could never be sure of what was real and what was just the author's imagination. Marcus gave me the funniest looks sometimes when I asked him about the things I read in those books. Things like Elk which were large brown skinned animals that supposedly grew great racks of horns on their heads. Or snow; white fluffy stuff that fell from the clouds. My favorite entry was about clankers that could fly up into the sky like birds with no wings.

  I ran my fingers down the spines of the books as I limped on. The next shelf was another one of my favorite collections. Three whole rows of toys. I had 98 in all, if you counted each of the marbles separately. I took a miniature horse down and stood it up on my palm. I almost spoke to it, but stopped myself. It had been many years since I had talked to my toys. The thought made me smile, embarrassed at myself. For a few moments I thought back to the room we passed on the way to the entrance hall that morning.

  At one time it was my absolute favorite room in the castle, filled with the most wonderful toys you can imagine. I had only managed to smuggle a few up to my elusian before Mazol sold them all off.

  There were life-size toy soldiers that shot oranges out of cannons, train engines you could ride that poured real smoke out of their stacks and balls that bounced so high they could hit the ceiling in the great hall.

  Henri's favorite was a knit doll that could t
alk. It would tilt it's head up mechanically as she cradled it in her arms and say, "mama." Henri used to want ten children when she grew up; it was all she talked about. She would line up all her dolls in a row and pretend I was the dad and she was the mom. That was back when my Uncle Mazol was happier. Sometimes he sat with us or just watched with a thin smile as we laughed and played all day.

  A short time before Pike died, Mazol started selling everything he could find a buyer for. He hired Ballard and Yesler; their job was to make sure we ran the clankers properly. But after Pike died, it got much worse. Mazol lost the happiness he once had. Slowly, it was replaced with anger. He forced those of us who were old enough to start working. As we worked more and more, we found ourselves with less and less.

  Yesler couldn't have come at a worse time. He pushed Mazol to be more ruthless with us until punishment became a way of life. It was getting worse with every passing day.

  Just last night Little Sae died.

  She was my favorite, the best little sister you could ever ask for. Up until this moment I'd managed to keep the images from my head, but now there was nothing to distract me. Mazol said she killed herself, but her little body was covered in bruises when Henri and I found her hanging from the rafters in the top of the great castle tower. How did she get all those bruises if she killed herself?

  Thankfully I was able to take the black metal star I had given her before Mazol found it. It was glowing beneath her shirt when we found her. Mazol would have sold it for sure. Now Anabelle will get to keep the star safe, carry it for Little Sae. It was supposed to be a luck charm. I hope it works better for Anabelle than it did for Little Sae.