Map of the Passages: 3 (Enchanted Emporium)

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  I had heard these names before, but never listed one after the other like some sort of spell. I counted them in my head. “One family’s missing,” I said. “The Askells.”

  “Oh, they’re not missing,” Aiby said, getting to her feet. “It’s just that we don’t think the meeting will happen at their place in Antarctica because it’s Semueld Askell’s behavior that we need to talk about with the other families.”

  “Even though Semueld Askell is certainly not our most serious problem,” Mr. Lily added.

  I couldn’t imagine what could be more serious than Semueld Askell. The man regularly roamed Applecross wrapped in a Cloak of Mirrors, accompanied by a flock of ravens. He awakened a stone giant in order to destroy the Enchanted Emporium. He conjured the Green Man who had wreaked havoc on Applecross. Then he tried to steal the Big Book of Magical Objects from the Enchanted Emporium.

  “We have information from highly knowledgeable collectors and magicians,” Aiby said after a long silence. “And then we received these letters.”

  Aiby produced two strange-looking envelopes covered with stamps. I recognized the golden lettering on one of them. “This first one is from the Imaginary Travelers Club,” Aiby said, “a group of people especially interested in places that exist out of time. There’s also one from the Mystery Society, a conjurers’ organization that recently reopened its headquarters in Paris, France. Both letters report disturbances as well as some hard-to-confirm, ugly rumors. Our clients, as you know, are quite eccentric, so their statements aren’t always reliable. But the situation is getting difficult now that the Others seem to be angry with us.”

  Aiby showed us some pages written in elegant script that was full of flourishes.

  “Angry? With the four of us?” I asked.

  “Not with the four of us in particular, but with the village of Applecross, apparently,” Aiby said.

  “But why?” I asked.

  Mr. Lily sighed. “Because of old lady Cumai’s death. She was one of them. One of the Others.”

  Meb’s eyes widened. “She was a magical being?”

  “Exactly, Mr. Lily said. “Her death made the others suspicious of us. And now they’ve sworn to avenge her death.”

  “Somerled talked to me about Cumai, too,” I said. “And she seemed really worried.”

  They looked at me like I was crazy, so I rushed to explain. “I saw Somerled late yesterday evening at the pub, after you all left. Actually, I didn’t really see her since she wasn’t actually there . . . but I heard her talking through a plant I found in the back of her father’s van.” Meb stared at me with a blank look on her face. “I swear it’s true! I didn’t even believe it at first, but Somerled explained that it was one of the two tricks she still could do. She called it something like verde . . . verdelenza . . .”

  “Virdilingua,” Aiby said.

  “That’s it! And she asked me to meet her this morning at ten,” I said. Since Meb, Aiby, and Locan Lily kept staring at me in apparent confusion, I added, “Don’t you know who I’m talking about? Somerled McBlack? She has green skin? Lives in Scary Villa? I think she’s a magical being, too. So if these people are really angry with us, then maybe she can help us!”

  More silence followed. I pulled the Second Hand Watch out from my pocket and checked the time. “I’m supposed to meet her like right now,” I said.

  “Where?” asked Aiby.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about that, but then Mr. Lily started telling the whole story of the Hollow World and I forgot all about it.”

  Aiby touched my shoulder. “Did she at least say the name of a place?” she asked.

  “She just said we’d meet at ten in the morning at the Black Birch in Reginald Bay and that’s why I thought you might know where that is,” I said in a single breath.

  Aiby glanced at her father. “I know where that is.”

  “Great!” I said. “Where?”

  “The Black Birch is the tree that first caught fire and burned down the rest of Applecross forest,” Mr. Lily said.

  “Oh,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like a great place to meet.”

  “It sure doesn’t,” Meb agreed.

  “However, it is what it is and is not something else,” Mr. Lily said. “So hurry up and go!”

  Aiby disappeared into the store. As soon as I’d reached my bike, Patches suspected we were about to do something exciting and started wagging his tail.

  Aiby came back as I was already pushing my bike up the path and suggested I leave it where it was. She shoved a handful of objects into my backpack and said, “The shortest path is to climb up that way.”

  I looked in the direction she was pointing and nearly fainted. There was a hundred-foot ascent via huge, white, egg-shaped boulders stacked atop one another.

  “That looks unsafe,” I said without slowing my pace.

  “True. Put these on,” she said, tossing me two metal plates with strange designs etched into them. She showed me how to attach them to the soles of my shoes.

  I did so without uttering a word. Then I followed her up the stones as she climbed. “So,” I said, following her. “What are these things?”

  “Ossendowski Step Guards,” she said.

  “Oh, that explains everything, then,” I said, hopping from one stone to the next.

  Patches was trying to follow us, but he was only able to climb onto the first white stone. He watched me worriedly from his precariously balanced spot. A pair of seagulls circled above him and squawked as if they were mocking him.

  “They’re Danger Dodgers for Small Explorers,” Aiby explained. “They are used to avoid hazards and accidents by making sure you put your feet down in the right places.”

  “Hmph,” I said. “How do they work?”

  “You just don’t think about anything and walk. Let your instincts guide you, and you should be safe.”

  Don’t think about anything and walk, I thought.

  I laughed. “Kind of like what your father said: you just have to believe!”

  “Hurry up already,” Aiby said. “It’s almost ten!”

  We clambered up from one stone to the next along the path without slipping or sliding even once. The foot thingies Aiby gave me were fantastic. If everything went perfectly, at 11:30 I would still be on a mission to who-knows-where in the forest and Doug wouldn’t be able to take Aiby on a romantic boat picnic.

  The Ossendowski Step Guards seemed to help me choose the right path, but they didn’t make hiking any easier. “By the way, Aiby!” I yelled, stopping to catch my breath.

  “What is it now?” she asked.

  I wanted to ask how old she was, but the question got stuck in my throat like a bullet in a gun that misfired.

  Aiby saw me hesitate. “Is everything okay, Finley?”

  I replaced the question I’d had in my mind with a new one. “About these Others . . . if they’re really angry with us, what are they capable of doing?”

  Aiby shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “They could destroy our world, for instance, or just use this event as an excuse for starting another Magical Revolution so they can destroy the fabric of Time once and for all.”

  “So, the usual,” I joked, starting to jump from stone to stone again. For some reason nothing seemed particularly worrisome as I leapt along. “I was afraid it would be something bad.”

  I slipped sideways unexpectedly. Aiby caught me just in time.

  “Yikes!” I shouted, getting back on my feet. I dusted off my hands and pretended everything was fine even though my knee was throbbing. “Did these Step Guard things break?”

  “You were distracted by something,” Aiby said, scolding me. “You were thinking, weren’t you?”

  “That’s not true!” I exclaimed. “Well, maybe a little
true.”

  We were facing each other, balanced on one white, egg-shaped rock. Aiby’s nose was sprinkled with freckles, her long hair was frizzy from the wind, and her eyes reflected the slivers of light from the sea.

  “I’m just a little worried,” I admitted, my voice growing weak.

  Aiby nodded, then jumped to a nearby rock. “It is a little worrisome,” she said. “Cumai was a Spokesperson, after all.”

  “A Spokesperson?” I said. I took two jumps behind her. “Like . . . an ambassador for the Others?”

  “See?” Aiby said, smiling. “You can figure things out on your own!”

  “I better stop thinking or I’ll slip again,” I said. Aiby chuckled.

  We reached the tree line of the forest, ending our climb. Aiby ran, continuing to speak. “Usually Spokespersons are very important Others who have chosen to live here.”

  “They can choose?” I asked.

  “Of course they can choose,” she said.

  We walked over the soft grass, steering clear of the deep hollows in the land that looked like a giant’s footprints (which, in fact, is exactly what they were).

  “So does that work in reverse, too?” I asked. “I mean, can one of us choose to live among the Others?”

  “Yes,” said Aiby. “We shopkeepers refer to them as Migratory Magicians, but they have many different names. Reverend Prospero, for example, would call them saints.”

  “Reverend Prospero seems to have disappeared,” I said. “Maybe he caught a whiff of the danger and left town.”

  I stopped in the middle of the forest. Beams of light were dancing between the leaves and trunks of the oak trees. Aiby breathed softly and stood still, right in front of me. She was so close that the six-inch height difference between us seemed more intimidating than ever.

  We’d reached a small clearing dotted with little blue flowers. The gnarled trunk of a birch tree stood out in the middle of the area. Its dark gray bark looked more like granite split by countless cracks than anything else. It was ancient and in pretty rough shape with only a few shriveled up branches and even fewer leaves. It had grown apart from the other trees in the grove.

  As I examined the tree, the shape of a young girl began to appear in the bark. She slipped through a fissure in the trunk as if she were stepping out from behind some drapes. Her legs became visible, then her ankles and feet.

  Then, finally, Somerled stood before us, her skin as green as a duck’s egg. She had two large green eyes and long hair the color of motor oil. Her skin was so pale that you could make out her veins and arteries, which seemed more like veins filled with gold than blood. Her fingers were webbed to each other with a thin membrane like those of a frog. Her nails were a lightly flecked pale blue color.

  Aiby and I stood there in wide-eyed, stunned silence.

  “Sorry I’m late,” McBlack’s daughter finally whispered. “I couldn’t pass through the first time I tried.”

  I blinked my eyes a couple of times. “You mean pass through . . . the tree?”

  Who knows why, but I’d imagined that Somerled would reach us by foot, across the sea, or maybe in a Victorian carriage. Certainly not through the trunk of a birch tree as if it were a bark-covered portal.

  “I told you I knew a second trick, Finley McPhee,” Somerled said with a smile.

  “A trick my dad calls the Core of Kalamos,” Aiby whispered. “We had a ring that granted a similar ability.”

  “My brother and I just called it Tree Passing,” Somerled said. She climbed over the roots in her bare feet and stood in front of us. She gave off a slightly sweet but intense scent, like violets. “But that was when we were still . . . in the Other Place.”

  “In the Hollow World?” I asked.

  “If that’s what you call it,” Somerled answered. “And now, if you please, I’d like to properly introduce myself, as it’s the polite thing to do.” She gracefully turned toward Aiby and curtsied. “Pleased to meet you. My name is Somerled.”

  “Oh,” Aiby said. “I’m Finley’s friend.”

  “You’re Aiby Lily, right?” Somerled said. “I’ve heard so much about you!”

  “Really? From who?” Aiby asked.

  “From the trees,” Somerled said. “They’re very happy you’ve come back to Applecross.”

  Aiby let out a nervous giggle.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Do the trees say anything about me?” I asked, sounding a little insecure.

  Somerled gave me a big smile. “They said that I can trust you. That’s why I decided to talk to you. Now that we’ve been face to face, you two certainly seem like a couple of magical spirits.”

  I blushed. Aiby did, too.

  “Well, we’re not a couple,” I said, watching for Aiby’s reaction. “Aiby’s a lot older than I am.”

  “What’re you saying?” she said, her eyes like daggers.

  “It’s true,” I said with a smirk.

  “No, it’s not!” Aiby said.

  I was getting angry for some reason. “That’s not what Doug said,” I replied.

  “Doug? What does Doug have to do with anything?” Aiby said.

  Somerled coughed lightly. “However old you are, Aiby, you’ll never be older than I am,” she said. “The last time I counted, I was over four hundred years old.”

  “Over four hundred?” Aiby said. I was thankful for the distraction.

  Somerled nodded. “Mr. Ralph Coggeshall wrote a story in a cloth booklet that claimed we were even older than that,” she said. “Mr. Keightley, on the other hand, wrote that we were ten years old, at most. He insisted he had been the one to discover us in a forest. The truth is that my brother and I came out of a cave in Suffolk well over four hundred years ago. We weren’t able to go back through it. There didn’t appear to be anything edible in our new environment, so my brother died. I was luckier than him, I suppose.”

  Aiby and I remained silent, listening.

  “After a long while, I revealed myself to some farmers,” Somerled continued. “They spoke to me, but I couldn’t understand a single world of what you call ‘English.’ But they were good people and brought me to the castle of a knight named Sir Richard of Calne. He had me try every type of food he had. After failing to find anything I could eat, I finally discovered beans. I ate a lot of them and, little by little, recovered my health. Sir Richard kept me hidden in his castle and taught me how to speak. He eventually died, and then his son died, too, while I stayed the same age. I went from house to house, offering gold to anyone who would shelter me. I’ve figured out how to ‘feel’ the veins of gold in the earth like how your water diviners sense water underground.”

  Somerled’s voice grew quieter. I could tell that her tale was coming to an end.

  “Then, about a dozen years ago,” she whispered, “I heard about a man named Barragh McBlack. He didn’t have children and had amassed a fortune from his whisky distillery. He was also intending to move here to Applecross, where someone else lived — someone like me, who had come from another world.”

  “Cumai,” I murmured.

  “Cumai,” Somerled agreed. “And so I decided to pretend to be McBlack’s daughter. I moved here with him in hopes of somehow meeting her and speaking to her. Our agreement was that he’d give me room and board in exchange for as much gold as I could find.”

  Somerled paused, then chuckled. “When he chose to live at Scary Villa, as they call it in the village, I thought that would be the best solution for me. I didn’t want to have too much contact with people during my attempts to return home. Of all the people I spoke to, only three left me with favorable memories of our long discussions. One was a nice Dane named Ludwig Holberg who wanted to write a play about my home world. The second was a distinguished Frenchman, Mr. Verne, who asked me many detailed questions. He used my answers to write a magnificent adventure book, in fact. The third
person was old lady Cumai herself, who I came to talk to you about.”

  I heard grass being trampled, followed by furious howling. I recognized the shaggy shape of my devoted friend as he bounded toward me, energetic as ever.

  “Patches!” I cried out. He must have covered the stretch of rocks at a gallop, following his nose. “Good dog, good dog.” I rubbed him behind the ears the way he liked.

  Patches wasn’t convinced that Somerled was safe, but after a bit of scratching, his barking turned to soft whines. Bit by bit he stretched out between the little green girl and me, silent and happy.

  Somerled took a deep breath. A gentle breeze shook the oak’s branches, making it seem like the whole world was creaking. As we sat in the cool, damp grass, the black birch tree swayed back and forth in the scant light.

  “Cumai was murdered,” Somerled said, her voice barely above a whisper. “And I know who did it.” Before we could ask a single question, she added, “It was a kinkishin. A Sidhe soldier.”

  “My father said Cumai died from a heart attack,” Aiby said.

  “A ‘heart attack’ is what it’s called in this world,” Somerled murmured. “But we call it a Sidhe Strike. The person who inflicts it is called a kinkishin.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” Aiby asked.

  Somerled reached out like a willow and grabbed her toes. “Probably because you’re the only people in Applecross who would believe me — other than perhaps Reverend Prospero. But unlike you, he hates fairies and magic except for what’s in the book he preaches from. So that left me without much of a choice, don’t you agree?”

  “Agreed,” I said. “So, who killed Cumai?”

  “A man with clothing that jingles,” Somerled said.

  I threw Aiby a concerned glance. Would we need to deal with some sort of armed crusader?