Potlendh

by David J. Wallis

  Whoa! What is going on here? “Easy to get into; almost impossible to get out of.” That’s another old phrase that might come in handy, and thinking about the implications of this phrase is when it dawned on the children that something felt very wrong here.

  Normally, when you and I go to a fair or to a mall, we are kind of excited. When we are standing in line, we cannot wait until it is our turn. We talk a lot, and we move around a lot. And when we finally get to sit on the ride bench or seat and put on our seat belts, we can hardly contain ourselves. We want to shout: “Let’s go! Let’s go!” But all the people on the Ferris wheel and waiting in the line were uncannily silent. The happiness displayed by the riders the twins initially perceived were now gone. Despite the gay music that blared loudly and should have inspired happiness and excitement, the faces of all these people were strangely somber or even blank. It was like they were just going through the motions of enjoying themselves.

  “Uh, Sis, I think I’ll skip this ride,” Carl decided, feeling a little uneasy.

  “Let’s see what else there is.”

  They found the same kind of situation at each of the different amusement rides. No one screamed while riding the roller coaster. No one yelled with fright inside the haunted house. No one smiled while eating cotton candy or ice cream. No one was having any fun! It was as if they were robots performing the same action over and over without stopping—without wanting to stop or even being prevented from stopping.

  Carl’s ears heard a familiar sound, and he guided his sister over to one of the arcades that was crammed full of all kinds of video games. Some of them were his favorites, and he was eager to try them.

  “Hey,” he exclaimed. “They are all free, too!”

  He was about to position himself in front of one the video games when his sister tapped him on the shoulder and then pointed at the other players who were busy playing games.

  “Whoa!” Carl breathed.

  The arcade was filled with a lot of people, young and old. Each person seemed actively engaged in whatever game he or she were playing, but from the expressions on all of their faces it was acutely apparent that they were actually bored. Yet, they played on and on, not caring if they won or lost.

  “Excuse me,” Carl approached a boy who looked like he was an older teenager.

  “Get out of here!” the boy snarled back, barely taking his eyes off his game. “Go find your own. This is my game.”

  “Sorry,” Carl apologized.

  The boy’s face quickly transformed into something really ugly—like a Halloween mask—as he turned on Carl in a fit of rage. “Get away from me,” he growled menacingly. “Can’t you see I’m trying to have fun?”

  “It’s like they’re all hypnotized!” Carl remarked to his sister.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Karen suggested feeling fearful. “Let’s find something I’d want to do.”

  As the twins walked through this maze-like mall, they saw the same signs everywhere: the people were listless and mechanical, almost as if the joy of life had been sucked right out of them. Then they came to a clothes emporium, where women could shop for anything they wanted.

  “All right!” Karen uttered excitedly. “Come on. Let’s go in.”

  Now Carl, like most boys, did not understand why girls love clothes so much. And, of course, a clothes store would be the last place that he would want to enter. But he worried about his sister and thought it best to stick close to her, if not to protect her from the strange madness that had captured those other people’s minds. He thought his distaste of clothes shopping could protect both of them.

  In the store, Karen found all kinds of lovely things. Everything was so beautifully made and colorful and, of course, stylish. She already began to imagine how beautiful she would look dressed in some of these clothes and how envious other girls might be if they saw her wearing them. (Given that she lived with her brother in the middle of the ocean never entered her mind.) She was about to pick up a blouse when Carl’s touch at the elbow caused her to look up.

  She saw several women carrying dresses—and the gowns were just drop-dead gorgeous. In turn, each woman entered a dressing room and later came out wearing an exquisite gown. Again, like robotic mannequins, each woman walked up to a large three-sided mirror, twirled around to look at the gown on her body, then walk away to pick up another gown and go back to waiting in line. It was kind of like watching a parade, but there was no joy in trying on so many gowns. After a while, Karen thought that each woman kept trying on the same gown or several gowns in a row without making a decision.

  Then there was the shoe department. One woman was literally surrounded by hundreds of boxes of shoes, yet she kept putting on and taking off the same new pair of shoes, muttering all the while if she should not try some other pair.

  “Carl,” she whispered urgently, “we gotta get out of here. I don’t like this place at all.”

  “I’m with you, Sis,” Carl whispered back, and together they started to walk towards the exit. “I get the feeling like this is all one big trap.”

  I don’t know about you, but if I were either Carl or Karen, I know that I would want to start running for the exit, maybe scream a little, too. I might think that a big spider has caught me up in its web, and now that I am inside this spider’s lair, I might be eaten. Then, too, I might also be thinking that once I started trying to get away, someone or something might try to stop me before I can get out.

  I’m sure this is how the twins felt, but you have to admire them for they kept their heads and walked not too quickly and not too slowly towards an exit, trying not to draw too much attention. I mentioned quickly that the mall had become a bit of a maze, and another form of panic set in as the twins could not identify an exit. They tried to retrace their steps, but they found that the direction they thought they came from was not familiar. Not only had the mall become a maze, it was a changing maze, as if the layout changed at a whim. No matter where the twins set off to, they quickly found themselves in the same places that they had already visited.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking for an exit,” Carl suggested. I believe he, too, felt that something was watching them, anticipating their desire to leave, and preventing them from leaving by changing things around.

  “What should we be looking for?” Karen shot back, but she was just as frightened as her brother.

  “The Ferris wheel,” Carl suggested. “It was the first thing we saw when we came in. Remember?”

  This seemed like a good plan, and the mall did not put up any obstacles as they made for the Ferris wheel, which because of its dominant size was hard to miss. When they finally arrived at the end of the line waiting to ride, they began looking around surreptitiously for the entrance doors. They hoped that if they pretended to be interested in riding the Ferris wheel that the “something” watching them would relax its grip on them. For the longest time, they couldn’t see anything. The line moved forward very slowly, but their surroundings still did not change.

  “Perhaps we should act bored,” Karen suggested. “Maybe the “whatever” that is watching us will think that it has won, and we are trapped here for good.”

  Carl shrugged, but he tried to erase any emotion from his face. His eyes glassed over, as if he could no longer see anything clearly. With a side-glance, he noticed his sister had assumed a similar appearance and was almost scared that she had really succumbed to this villainous mall. But then she gave him a small wink and whispered out of the side of her mouth.

  “When I say ‘run,’ I want you to run as fast as you can directly behind you.”

  Carl nodded his head as slowly as he could so that whoever was watching them would not notice.

  “Run!” Karen yelled, and the two of them raced madly in a single direction. Carl had not seen the exit, and he was blindly following his sister, trusting that she had seen their escape and it was not another obstacle or ruse.

  “Hold on there, children!” a stranger sudd
enly stepped in front of them, blocking their direct access to the outside and safety. He held up his hands as if to grab them as they passed by, but the twins instinctively ducked and weaved, even sliding on their shins just under his outstretched claws, and then they were past him. “No running in the mall,” the stranger screamed at them. A second later, he acted as if he had not even seen the children and continued robotically to enjoy himself.

  The entrance doors appeared even smaller than when Karen had first observed their change in size. They pulled on the handles, but the doors would not budge. They tried pushing the doors the other way, and still no success.

  “How do we get out of here?” Carl whined.

  “Try pulling from side to side!” Karen cried out in panic, fearful that at any moment some kind of mall police would catch them and pull them back into the midst of the never-ending carnival of delight.

  I suppose that comparing the eternity those people trapped in merriment to the interminable effort the children spent in wrestling with the doors would seem kind of silly. Normally, I would use a worn-out phrase like “It took forever” to describe how long it took the children to finally get the doors open. But then again, in the end, they were out, bruised from squeezing through tiny openings, panting and sweating from exertion and fear. And, as they took only a moment to look at the entrance, they were once again shocked to see how large the doors had become and how clearly marked it was as an entrance to untold pleasures.

  “‘Easy to get into; hard to get out of.’ You ever remember hearing that one?” Karen panted, so happy to be out of the nightmarish mall. “Let’s get out of here before someone forces us back in!”

  They started running down the village street. But no one came after them. No one in this lonely village seemed to even know that they existed.

  “Wow!” Carl exhaled, feeling out of breath as they paused halfway between the solitary runway building and the village. “That was close!”

  “We’re not out of the woods yet,” Karen warned. (Here the “woods” meant the “village.”) “We still got to get back to the runway.”

  And run again they did, not even bothering to look back. Only when they reached the lonely building again and opened the door to the refuge inside did they pause to catch their breaths and/or breathe a sigh of relief. To their amazement, they found the old man had set the table with three plates, and on each plate sat a couple of sandwiches. There were also refilled glasses of lemonade.

  “Oh, hello,” Mr. Who greeted them. “Welcome back.” He turned to return to a small kitchen as if nothing had happened to the children.

  “Just a minute,” Carl challenged. “You knew we were coming back!”

  Mr. Who turned and eyed them with a mischievous smile. “Not entirely,” he remarked. “But I had a feeling, yes.”

  “How did you know we might come back?” Karen asked.

  Mr. Who turned completely around and looked at them as if they were something different than when he first met them. “You are different.”

  “How?” demanded Carl.

  “What did you think of the village?” Mr. Who asked them, seemingly trying to change the subject.

  “A nightmare,” Carl instantly replied.

  “Was it not fun?” Mr. Who’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “I thought you might enjoy yourselves. You were awfully bored out there on that—what did you call it? Ah. That oceanographic platform.”

  “Wait a minute!” Karen interrupted. “How do you know where we came from? We never even told you our names, and you seem to know a lot about us.”

  Mr. Who chuckled. “I do, don’t I? I guess my parents misnamed me. I guess they should have named me Know-It-All.” He stood a little straighter and spoke to the air. “Who Know-It-All.” Then he shook his head and added. “No. Doesn’t fit. Besides, it’s too long.” To the children he spoke: “Eat your sandwiches, children, and then we can talk.” He retreated to the kitchen.

  The twins were all for talking now, but at that moment they felt like they were simply starving. The time they spent in the mall could be anyone’s guess. If being stuck in the mall could be likened to an eternity, they might have been marooned there for days. At least their stomachs felt like it had been days since they had been filled last. The children eagerly picked up the sandwiches and began wolfing them down. When they had finished their bout of gluttony and washed down the meal with the cold lemonade, Mr. Who again made his appearance and sat down with the children at the table, which I must point out seemed a lot firmer than when the children first inspected the set.

  “Now, what should we talk about? What would you like to do?” he asked them.

  “I want to know more about this Island,” Carl blurted without thinking.

  “I want to know when Tony is coming back and when we can leave,” Karen said.

  “How interesting,” the old man thought aloud. “Not ten minutes ago you wanted to know all about the village, and already you have forgotten it.”

  “Yes. No.” Carl again spoke without thinking. Ten minutes ago? Seemed like days ago. “I mean, yes, we would like to know more about the village. And, no, we haven’t forgotten.”

  “And, yes, we would like to know when we can leave this Island. And, no, we really don’t care about the village or this Island,” Karen added, giving her brother a little dig with her elbow.

  Mr. Who chuckled. “My, my. You two are really the best ones to come here. I had hopes for you, and I see that I have not been disappointed.” The twins looked at him, but they could not understand what he had just said. “The village is just like the real world,” he started to explain. “Everyone looks for fun in their lives, but when they find fun they just make it into work. No one really understands what it is like to have fun, or that looking for fun is fun. Life is just full of fun things to do: challenges, puzzles, even work. Instead, people just want to make fun into misery until misery is fun to do.”

  It took a while for Mr. Who’s words to sink in. After all, it did kind of sound like a pun or a rhyme.

  “That sounds too easy,” Karen commented finally, thinking she had the meaning all worked out.

  “It is a good thing that you think the way that you do,” Mr. Who told her. “You seem to know what fun is all about. And, I would bet that you would understand what work is, too.”

  “So, what’s to become of us,” Carl persisted. “I mean, if the village is really a place where there is no fun—and this place is no fun either—what do you want us to do? Work?”

  For the first time the children heard the old man laugh. It was one of those laughs that seems to start at the toes, then works its way up through the stomach, goes right through the heart, gets power from the lungs, and then just explodes in merriment like one of those huge fireworks displays.

  “Oh, I enjoy having you here,” he said, wiping away a cascade of tears from his face and eyes. “I haven’t had this much fun in—oh—I don’t know, but it’s been many years. I think it’s best that you two just sit here and wait for Tony. You don’t want to get into any more trouble now, do you?”

  The twinkling of his eyes should have told the twins something.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CASSANDRA AND UNIQUA

  It only took a few hours of being cooped up in the lone building before Karen and her brother were simply bored out of tears. I mean, they were so bored that if they could or wanted to cry they didn’t have any tears to cry with.

  But before I go on and tell you how Carl decided to end their boredom, I should tell you a little about the area around Lonely Field. So, pretend you are a bird or in a hot-air balloon, and we will look down at the landscape from a high position, but not too high that you cannot see details of the land well.

  As you might have guessed, the runway had been built on the flattest part of Lonely Field, right up to the edge of the beach, pointing to the north. Mr. Who’s lone building sat directly east of the runway, and the Village even further to the east. And, all around the gro
und was kind of sandy, and only sparse vegetation managed to grow in this kind of soil. Now, if you looked directly north, you would see this towering mountain in the far distance. Carl would remember from the map that this mountain sat in the heart—or middle—of the Island. It was so tall that its peak rose above the ever-present clouds. It looked like what a classic volcano might have looked like—towering, cone-shaped—but to the best of the twins’ knowledge it had never been an active one.

  Now, if we hover over the runway and look panoramically around, we would see mountains encircling this small patch of land on the west, north, and east sides, making Lonely Field and the Village a kind of enclave, a separate and protective part of the Island. These mountains were not very tall but still imposing. While they were mostly bare of vegetation for the top third of their height, trees and jungle-like growth grew thickly together at their base, making it virtually impossible to traverse. Thus, it was known as the Barrier, and no one would even think of trying to climb them much less cross them. It was far too dangerous, and, besides, there were menacing creatures said to live in them. The sea, of course, lay to the south. So, I could understand how the twins or anyone else might think that they were trapped in this one tiny and boring place: there seemed to be no way to get to any other part of the Island (unless you were a bird or in our make-believe hot-air balloon).

  “Did you see that?” Carl nudged his sister and pointed towards the far north end where the Barrier mountains here met those of the west.

  “See what?” his sister said a little crossly, being not only bored but dead tired.

  “Something flashed!” Carl exclaimed.

  “What do you mean flashed? Like a piece of metal or a flashlight?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think it was something like a mirror or a piece of metal. Let’s go check it out.”

  “Oh, do we have to?” she whined. “I’m tired. Maybe we can go check it out tomorrow. That is unless Tony comes back first.”

  “But it might be gone tomorrow,” Carl insisted. “I mean, it’s not that far away; and I might not remember where I saw it coming from tomorrow.”