by Kaleb Nation
"No!"
"WAHHHH!" Balder fell to the ground again, picking up dirt and throwing it at everyone. Duncelanders around them dodged the flying clods, huffing and puffing in Sewey’s direction about how he should more extensively restrain his offspring.
"Make it two triples, on the double," Sewey hissed, going red under their disdainful glances.
"And make it Tattered Da-Chocolate!" Balder demanded. He dusted his clothes off.
"I’m sorry," the man replied. "There was an unfortunate accident on the road last week, and all the Tattered Da-Chocolate was lost."
"I’ll settle for Vanilla Vonsway," Balder pouted.
"That’s gone too," the man said, shrugging.
"Blagh!" Balder spat. "Then just give me Honkerbutton Supreme!"
"Now that we do have," the man said, and he stacked three scoops into each cone. "Twenty sib, thank you," he told Sewey, handing one to Balder and the other to Baldretta.
"Twenty?" Sewey gasped. "Outrageous! Completely absurd!"
"Twenty sib, please," the man insisted, not giving in. Sewey growled, but finally pulled the money out of his wallet with reluctance. The man counted it, grinned, and nodded.
"Come again!" he said. Baldretta giggled as she licked the ice cream.
"This is why I hate Duncelander Fairs!" Sewey grumbled. "Twenty sib. Banditry!"
He stormed off, but Rosie caught Bran by the shoulder and held him back.
"Wait." She dug about in her purse. "What kind of ice cream do you want? My treat."
Bran was so surprised that he didn’t know what to say.
"Not on your life!" Mabel squealed. "It’ll ruin him, all that sugar!"
"But a single scoop won’t…" Rosie protested, digging around in her purse for some money.
"No! I say no!" And Mabel followed Sewey. Bran shrugged.
"I’ll make it up to you later," Rosie said. Balder licked his ice cream and grinned at them, little honkerbuttons sticking to the edges of his mouth.
All of a sudden, there was the sound of horns blasting behind them. They all spun around, and Bran saw a large group of men in white suits carrying trumpets and blasting loud tunes in unison, their faces red and puffed up. Sewey pushed everyone to the side of the path as the trumpeters came by, not even glancing at the people who had begun to cheer in the sidelines.
"Look!" Rosie said. "That must be the mayor coming!"
Indeed it was, but no one could see him. Around the bend came a baby elephant, and on its back was a canopied box. The elephant looked as if it was having a rather hard time carrying the box, and it wobbled to and fro among the acrobats that were doing flips under its feet. The box on its back was covered with thick cloths, all different colors, so no one could see the inside, but so there wasn’t any confusion, there was a sign above the box that read:
IN THIS BOX IS THE MAYOR OF DUNCE
AND HIS WIFE.
STAY OUT OF THE WAY AND DO NOT FEED
THE ELEPHANT.
The towering, four-footed beast walked slowly with the parade, and more men in blue suits came behind it, clanging cymbals and banging bells. Bran stood on the tips of his toes to see better as the elephant neared the bend, heading toward a clearing in the distance where the mayor was going to give his speech. The sounds of the parade disappeared into the distance, and soon the conversations started up again among the people.
"Well, now that they’re here, I’ve got to go talk to Mrs. Demark," Mabel said, starting off.
"No!" Sewey said. "I most certainly will not stand there and listen to you gab about influenza and Midhampton’s disease with the mayor’s wife for two hours again!"
"Then you can just go off by yourself," Mabel retorted. "And when something terrible happens, you can find us over there at the picnic tables!"
"Fine!" Sewey said, and he started off in the opposite direction.
"I hope you come running back for your life to those picnic tables!" Mabel called after him.
"Nyah!" Sewey stuck his tongue out. Some people looked at them again, whispering more things about those strange Bolton Roaders.
Bran watched Sewey disappear into the crowds. "I’ve got a feeling he’ll be running back in about five minutes," he said, grinning at Rosie.
Sewey grumbled his way through the crowds, jostling everyone aside like a big ape.
What I need is a bunch of trumpeters, he thought. And an elephant. Then people would move out of my way!
But he had neither, so he kept pushing. He looked up and down the rows for anything to do. He came to a tent with about eighteen different cakes sitting all in a row on a long table. He tried a bite of each one, and then saw a blue ribbon on the last, awarding it for Best Cake Design.
"Whoops…" he said, still covered with blue icing.
The next tent he came to had a sign strictly prohibiting children to enter.
"Hmmm…" he said curiously, and he looked both ways before going in. It was dimly lit with a small wall set up in the middle. There was a basket of apples to throw at short people running back and forth behind it. The people were dressed up as gnomes, complete with red felt hats and long white beards. Sewey dashed out of the tent, covering his eyes.
"The indecency one finds at these fairs," he gasped. "And they got those gnomes all wrong!"
He moved on to the next tent, and then the next, but there simply wasn’t anything to do. He was getting so bored he almost considered going to listen to the mayor’s speech. "No, never," he told himself, rushing on. He passed nearly a dozen booths and paused to wipe his forehead, when he was stopped by a hoarse whisper.
"Psst!" It came from his left and between two large tents.
Sewey darted his gaze around. "What do you want?" he growled into the darkness. "You had better not be another charity."
"Come here," the low voice said. Sewey peered into the shadows and saw a man with an unshaven face and a closed umbrella in his hand. The man looked warily about, his uncut, sandy hair so thin it went off in every direction like tiny sprouts. The man was nearly as thin as his hair, his eyes searching the road furtively in case anyone noticed him. Sewey stepped closer.
"Yes?" Sewey asked, his voice filled with irritation.
"You look respectable," the man mumbled. "The name’s Rat, Mr. Rat…"
He stepped backward and ushered Sewey deeper into the shadows. Sewey looked around and saw that most of the people were ignoring them, despite their strange position.
"Yes, what is it?" Sewey asked impatiently, crossing his arms.
"It’s what’s in the umbrella, that’s what," Mr. Rat said conspiratorially, patting the umbrella.
"And what’s in the umbrella?" Sewey asked, getting tired of the little game being played. The man placed it handle-up on the ground, standing back as he opened it up to reveal…
"Papers," Sewey said, not impressed. "Just plain old papers."
"Not just any normal papers, no siree." Mr. Rat looked around. "Magic papers!"
Sewey gasped with shock and his hand came up to cover his mouth. He gulped and looked inside the open umbrella: the sheets were completely blank.
"M-m-magic…?" Sewey’s voice was even lower than Mr. Rat’s. His heart nearly stopped.
"Yes, magic," Mr. Rat said with a twinkle in his cautious eyes. "Any businessman’s got to be interested, but given the, er, circumstances, we’ve got to keep it quiet around the police. To make it work, you write with a pen here on the page." Mr. Rat proceeded to pull a pen from his shirt pocket, taking up one of the papers and closing the umbrella.
"See, look: I write a five here, and here I write a multiplication sign, then an eight." He wrote on the paper, much to the astonishment of Sewey, who was in too much shock to stop him.
"And now watch—it changes! "
And indeed it did. Right before Sewey’s eyes, the two numbers and the multiplication sign both wavered and disappeared and were replaced, in clean black ink, by the number forty. It was as shocking as if the man had turned into a roo
ster.
"See, a calculator, anytime, anywhere. Yours for three sib."
"What?" Sewey squawked. He felt faint.
"Well, it is low, isn’t it? But got to take what I can get in Dunce," Mr. Rat said. "I ain’t no mage, either, just a simple salesma…"
"NO!" Sewey exploded, screaming even louder than the babbling crowds. "Magic! MAGIC!"
"Shhh! Sir!" the man pleaded. He waved his hands frantically to try and quiet Sewey.
"Magic! Magic!" Sewey screeched like an old woman, running away. "Officer!" he shouted, waving his arms and dashing from the tents. His shouts had already gotten the attention a rotund officer, pushing through the crowds.
After a few gasping words from Sewey, the officer seized the whimpering Mr. Rat, but because he was so thin, Mr. Rat just slipped right out like a weasel.
The officer barely caught hold of him by the hairs of his bushy head. "C’mere!" the officer wheezed, dragging Mr. Rat away and seizing the umbrella. He radioed for two more officers to come quick, and they appeared from either side, attempting to subdue the screaming Mr. Rat. "I need the magecuffs!"
One of the officers yanked the special handcuffs off his belt. They were battery powered and mechanically designed to keep mages from doing magic.
"No!" Mr. Rat protested. "I’m not a mage! Not the magecuffs! "
They slapped them on anyway. Sewey clutched at his heart as if it had stopped.
"Will someone stop this madness?" Sewey asked the world around him.
The police shoved Mr. Rat into a car, which rushed off screaming down the road. Sewey did the same, rushing off screaming through the park for Mabel and the picnic tables.
Mabel laughed and laughed and laughed. Sewey barely managed to get his story out with all the noise she was making. Not a single one of them believed it.
"But he did try to sell me magic papers!" Sewey insisted, gasping for air.
"Yeah, right," Balder said. Sewey knew better than to try to convince them.
"Why do these things happen to me?" he moaned later to Rosie, Balder, and Bran, all of them sitting at a picnic table. Mabel was with Baldretta and chatting away with Mrs. Demark by another table. The elephant and the trumpeters were gone, but on the stage, Bran saw the mayor signing autographs for a line of people. His wife wore a beekeeper’s hat with a net over her head to keep spores from nipping at her eyes.
"Maybe you looked to him like the type of person who would buy magic things," Rosie said, trying to get Sewey to be quiet.
"What?" Sewey demanded. "Magic objects? ME? Preposterous!" He shook his fist at the sky. "I tell you, Rosie Tuttle, there are six things that I will never do. I will never, ever buy anything magical, and I will never, ever shake hands with a gnome. I will never join the army, or live anywhere near my brother, or help a mage out of jail. And I will never, ever, ever become a politician! Is that clear to you, Rosie Tuttle?"
Rosie nodded nervously. They were in a small clearing just below the famous Givvyng Hill, which went very far up above them with a slow slant. On top of the hill was the Givvyng Tree, the same on which were carved the famous words, "no gnomes, no mages." A short distance away, there was a sidewalk that ran alongside the major road; gathering along the sidewalk was a row of booths.
"Blast this crazy Duncelander weather," Sewey moaned. "It’s so hot."
"Oh, I give up," Rosie said, exasperated. She stood up and fixed her hat. "I’m going over there to look at the jewelry stand," she said, checking her purse. "I might be able to buy a new pin or something."
"Bah!" Sewey waved his hand, and she started off for the stands close to the road. The table went very quiet when she left.
Bran looked about, bored. A short way off to the west, there was a long brick wall that went for miles north and south, so far that he couldn’t see the end. It divided the city of Dunce from the wild and ferocious West Wood. There were tall trees that peeked over the top of the wall, and as Bran peered off into the west, he thought it was darker to that direction in a strange and foreboding way. Balder saw him looking at it.
"Sewey," Balder pointed to the wall. "What’s that?"
"What’s what?" Sewey said, looking around.
"That wall over there," Balder pointed. Sewey’s gaze followed his finger.
"That, Balder," Sewey explained, "is the West Wall. It divides our city from the ferocious West Wood, which is filled with terrible things. Terrible beasts: maybe bugbears, or
worse!"
"Bugbears?" Balder sneered. "You’re pulling my leg!"
"It’s true," Sewey insisted, waving his arms. "No one ever goes in there; not even mages will step foot in them for fear of the beasts. Wish they would though, and never come back! Those woods go all the way up the side of the globe, and no one’s ever plotted a map of them, and every airplane that accidentally ventures over never returns." He mopped his brow before going on. "It’s best not to even think of the Wall. There are plenty of other, safer things to think of, like banking. And finances. And the stock market…"
"But what’s in there?" Bran asked, staring at it.
Sewey wrinkled his brow. "I already said, no one ever goes in," he replied. "So no one knows."
"I bet there are monsters in there, and they’ll be getting out soon!" Balder burst with glee.
"Not through that wall, they won’t." Another voice came from behind them, and Bran turned.
"Hello, Adi," he said.
Sewey spun as she walked up to them, dressed in light green and holding a cup of lemonade. She smiled warmly and nodded toward the wall.
"It’s solid brick," she went on. "One door in and one door out, and that’s the Greene Gate."
She pointed over Balder’s shoulder. Far off, there was a dark green wooden door—thick, bolted, and set into the wall tightly. The hinges were black metal and held it strongly in place. "No one’s opened it for years," she added, putting on an air of mystery. "Thirty years ago, when explorers broke down part of the wall to go in, only one of the entire group made it home: Martilla Greene. She was so terrified when she got back, she was mute the rest of her life, spent all her money to build that gate, and never told anyone what was beyond the wall."
Sewey’s eyes went wide. He gulped.
"Are there…monsters?" he whispered.
Adi shrugged. "Like I said, no one knows," she said, and she took a sip of her lemonade.
Sewey stared at the wall for a long while, and then finally crossed his arms again. "Well, whatever it is," he said, "it’s probably some gnome’s fault for causing it!" He turned on Adi. "In fact, after what happened to me Friday, things have only gotten worse!" He began to rant at her about what had happened that morning on the way up.
Bran, having heard it all before, started to watch the people walking by the booths. He spotted one of their neighbors, and across the grass, Rosie at the jewelry stand, looking at something.
For a moment, his gaze was grabbed from her by a man who was wandering down the path. The man didn’t look strange at all but for some reason, he didn’t seem to be acting right. He kept looking from one person to the next, and finally he saw Rosie, and started to move closer to her.
What’s he doing? Bran wondered, watching him closely. Rosie didn’t see him, and the man started to move in her direction through the crowd, though he only glanced at her every few steps. A big truck drove by on the road behind them, honking to the people at the fair in greeting, and Rosie laughed at something the booth owner had said.
"And then," Sewey went on beside Bran, "this man named Mr. Rat comes and…"
Sewey’s voice seemed to fade into the back of Bran’s head, like a distant echo. A strange feeling began to creep over him, something he had not felt before, almost electrifying. He didn’t know what it was, but it felt as if his senses were abruptly coming around and he could see and hear a hundred times better than before.
He couldn’t tear his eyes from the strange man moving next to Rosie, and he saw her laugh again and start to turn fr
om the booth. And in that split second, something happened.
Suddenly, the man leapt at her, shoving her to the side and into the booth. Bran jumped to his feet, and Rosie screamed, people in the crowds falling over as the man pushed her.
"Rosie!" Bran shouted. The man grabbed for her purse, trying to get it from her. Her arm was caught in the strap, though, and she screamed when he pulled her with it.
Bran leapt off the table and started to run for her, his heart pounding. Sewey and Adi spun, but Bran was already gone, and the man dodged a booth owner and started running toward the road, Rosie struggling to get her arm out as he dragged her behind him.
"Someone help her!" a woman screamed. A police officer ran in her direction, only to trip over a cable holding the tents up. Bran’s feet pounded against the grass, and he saw the man give a final jerk on the purse, sending Rosie falling into the middle of the road. The man dashed off, leaving her behind.
"Help!" Rosie screamed, struggling to stand, just as Bran got to the end of the sidewalk.
"Rosie!" he shouted. She was trying to sit up, sobbing. He reached the road and was almost to her when all of a sudden, he saw something rushing in their direction out of the corner of his eye.
He turned his head, and in a moment, it seemed as if time stopped. He could hear the beating of his own heart in his ears. And he saw a freight truck, coming right at them down the road.
No! his mind gasped. He heard the crowd behind him, shouting. He heard Rosie scream, trying to move. And he heard the horn of the truck, the driver unable to stop. It was rushing closer, faster, its horn ringing in his ear, and Bran’s eyes widened as it came.
And then, it happened.
It was as if something broke free within him. There was a rush, then a quick cold jolt that washed over him as if he had been hit by a tidal wave on a freezing night. He saw the truck coming at them, he saw the grille on the front, closer and closer. He saw the driver, trying to stop, he saw the license plate—all of it at once. And in a sudden motion, he swung his hands out in front of him and Rosie, as if something else was controlling his reflexes, as if he could stop the truck right there. He saw something blue, like a wall in front of him, translucent at his hands, and though he didn’t know what was happening, a second later the truck was upon them.
