The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  She had passed the tree many times in her lunch-hour wanderings—she was an enthusiastic bird watcher—but the instant she’d overheard the Four Children whispering together she’d known that the “secret place” and the tree were identical, for no other tree could have called forth such praise.

  Now, seeing the tree again in her mind’s eyes, towering and immense, she reproached herself bitterly for not having thought of it sooner. But the news of the childrens’ disappearance had disoriented her, and it was only the sheriff’s report that they had been seen heading for the cove that recalled the oak tree to her mind. There had been at least a dozen more dangerous places to consider first and her oversight, while unfortunate, did not really call for self-condemnation. She was sure that if she hurried and found that the children had avoided the bogs and were playing house beneath the giant oak’s swaying branches, her relief would be so overwhelming that the oversight would not seem worth recalling.

  She discarded the thought of returning to her tiny office for the scarf which she usually wore in the woods and descended the emergency fire exit so swiftly that she had to pause an instant at the base of the stairs to regain her breath.

  A moment later she was crossing the lawn to the edge of the woods causing her red-bronze hair blowing in the wind that was causing the dandelions between the trees and the brick-walled orphanage to sway and waltz about like inch-high ballerinas.

  The trees at the edge of the wood were in motion too, and a squirrel the same color as the red-walled building went scampering away into the forest gloom as her hurrying footsteps set up a crackling sound. Never before had she seen so many dry and withered leaves on the forest floor so early in the autumn, but she refused to regard that as an ill-omen.

  The trees might be losing their leaves prematurely in an unusually chill October. But the Four Children were full of spring sap and vigor, no matter how much of a problem they might pose for Miss Grayson and the sheriff. She, alone, understood them and always would. At seven and nine and twelve children had every right to be adventuresome, particularly when they were orphans. And if they became more than merely adventuresome now and then, sympathy and understanding could make it easier for them to stay out of trouble and abide by some of the rules.

  There were three winding footpaths between the trees, all leading toward the cove. But Joyce chose the one which zigzagged the most, because the gardener had cleared it of the dense masses of vegetation which made the other two almost impassable in the summer and early fall.

  For five minutes she moved swiftly through the forest gloom, pausing only once to remove a pebble from her shoe. Finally she saw in the distance the gleaming, bright waters of the cove and off to the right a clearing between the trees which was close to the giant oak tree.

  She continued along the path until she was standing at the edge of the clearing. On the far side the trees stood in an almost unbroken row with their branches swaying in the breeze, forming a solid wall of greenery that extended for thirty feet in both directions. But the wall was broken at one place by a lightning-blasted tree that had crashed to the forest floor, leaving a narrow gap filled with a pale green glimmering.

  Joyce drew a deep breath, knowing that the giant oak stood alone just beyond the glimmering, where the sunlight was flooding down with unusual brilliance and that a few more steps would bring its hollow, moss-covered trunk into view.

  Should she call out first, to find out if the children were there? Might it not be better to know immediately, to get the suspense over with before crossing the clearing to make sure? Wasn’t it always wiser to seek the truth as quickly as possible and then, if the truth was shattering, to face up to it with grim fortitude?

  Abruptly she cupped her hands and called out: “Children, it’s me—Miss Drake! We’ve been searching everywhere for you!”

  The words went echoing through the forest and died away into silence.

  Joyce’s heart did a flip-flop, then seemed to sink down through her body like a leaden weight, leaving her drained and despairing and with no heartbeat at all for a moment. Surely if the children had been sitting inside the tree or anywhere near it they would have heard her.

  The sobbing began so quietly at first that Joyce mistook it for a flurry of wind stirring the branches on the opposite side of the clearing. But all at once it became louder, turning into what was unmistakably the anguished wailing of a small child.

  Joyce raced swiftly across the clearing and between the narrow gap in the foliage on the far side and her hair caught on a low-hanging bough, and she had to stop to untangle it.

  For an instant her hands seemed clumsy. But just knowing that she had guessed right about the Four Children’s whereabouts had lifted a great burden from her mind and it took her only a few seconds to conquer her agitation, free her hair and continue breathlessly on.

  Six-year-old Betty Anne Thacker was standing alone at the base of the giant oak, digging her knuckles into her eyes. The instant she saw Joyce she came running toward her with a despairing cry.

  Her face was wet with tears, her small mouth was quivering, and there was a look of fright in her eyes so intense it seemed almost unnatural in a child. A crumpled calico doll lay at the base of the tree, completely dwarfed by its immensity. But Betty Anne herself seemed almost as dwarfed, for she was unusually small for her age and the downstreaming sunlight cascaded about her as she ran making her look wraithlike.

  Without saying a word, she buried her face in the heavily starched folds of Joyce’s white supervisor’s uniform, and continued to sob wildly, her small shoulders rising and falling.

  For a moment Joyce remained silent, gently stroking the child’s hair and looking apprehensively toward the tree, too shaken to ask what had become of the other children. There was no sign of them anywhere and it was unlikely that they were playing house inside the tree when such a commotion was taking place outside.

  A small commotion perhaps, just the clinging of a badly frightened child to an almost equally frightened woman. But the very young could usually be depended upon to know what was going on in their immediate vicinity, whether it was a tree-uprooting tornado, or just some strange, small animal peering out of the forest gloom with an incessant chattering.

  “There, there,” Joyce suddenly heard herself saying. “Everything is going to be all right now, because I’m here with you. Tell me, darling. Where are the twins and your brother? You all came here to play house, didn’t you?”

  Betty Anne stopped crying so abruptly that Joyce was taken a little aback, until she remembered how natural it was for a small, emotionally distraught child to pay instant attention to an urgent adult question.

  “We didn’t do anything bad,” Betty Anne said, raising her tear-stained face from Joyce’s stiffly starched uniform. “Richard said it wasn’t stealing.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t,” Joyce said soothingly.” You took something with you. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “Two camp stools,” Betty Anne said, from the gym. We were going to bring them back. Really and truly we were.”

  “Of course you were. You just wanted to fix the tree up like a playhouse. What else did you take?”

  It was a totally unimportant question. But Joyce knew that to get the truth out of so young a child she would have to be psychologically adroit and manipulative.

  Betty Anne was clearly weighed down by guilt, and that seemed to be preventing her from answering the only question that was important. There was no doubt in Joyce’s mind that the whereabouts of the other three children was tied in with that guilt in some way. She knew that a few sympathetic leading questions were effective in dissolving guilt in a child and open the floodgates wide on more vital information.

  “Richard took some forks and spoons,” Betty Anne was saying, with a sobbing catch in her voice. “And I took some cups and saucers. I wanted a picture to hang on the wall,
but Richard said he was scared you’d be very angry if we took a picture.”

  “Miss Grayson would have punished you severely if she found a picture missing,” Joyce said. “But I wouldn’t have been angry, darling—not if you really intended to return everything as soon as you got tired of playing house. You’d have gotten tired of it before long, Betty Anne. It’s very lonely out here in the woods. If you’d come to me and told me what you were planning to do—You call this the ‘secret place,’ don’t you?”

  “We didn’t want anybody to know about it,” Betty Anne said. “How did you find out, Miss Drake?”

  “Darling, listen to me,” Joyce said, drawing Betty Anne closer. “We just haven’t time to talk about that right now. There’s something I’ve got to know and only you can tell me. Where are the twins and your brother?”

  “Two big bad men came and there was nobody around to shoot them,” Betty Anne said. “Richard told Sally and Jane to run as fast as they could. But the bad men ran after them and caught them. They hit Richard to make him stop crying. He was only crying because he didn’t want them to take Sally and Jane away. Sally and Jane were scared, but Richard wasn’t, Miss Drake. He was just mad. But he had to go with them, too.”

  Hard as it was for a child of six to describe a brutal kidnapping, Betty Anne had done very well. But it was the look in her eyes that gave her childish prattle so ominous an implication that Joyce was struck speechless.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A coldness was creeping over her now. Although there were more questions clamoring to be answered, she wondered how she could draw out Betty Anne without causing the child to burst into tears again. Her brother’s abduction and being left alone in the woods seemed to be causing her far more anguish than the terrible danger all three of the children were in.

  It was natural enough for so young a child to draw no distinction between an immediate disaster that concerned only herself and a threat to another’s safety that was too far in the future to seem real to her. But that did no make Joyce’s task less difficult.

  “The big men, Betty Anne,” she asked, “what were they like? Did they look like hoboes? You know what a hobo is, don’t you? A hobo…a tramp?”

  Betty Anne nodded, and Joyce could see that, despite her tearfulness, she was trying to be as helpful as possible.

  “They wore something over their heads, and I couldn’t see their faces. Their clothes were all shiny.”

  Into Joyce’s mind there flashed a picture of two unshaven derelicts in shabby clothes, shiny from long wear, with burlap sacks drawn over their heads—sacks with cut-out holes, through which they could see just how terrified the children were and how much force they would have to use to make off with them.

  But somehow it didn’t seem exactly the right picture. There was something wrong with it, for a frightened child would hardly have noticed or stressed the fact that their clothes were shiny.

  Shiny?… Shining? Could Betty Anne mean that the kidnapers had been brightly, even dazzlingly attired? Deer hunters, perhaps, wearing day-glo hats and day-glo jackets, to make themselves as conspicuous as possible while moving through the woods? But why would deer hunters want to kidnap three small children? And even if their hats had been lowered, would lowered hat look like something drawn completely over their heads?

  “What made you say their clothes were all shiny?” Joyce asked.

  Betty Anne’s reply demolished what, at best, had been an unlikely conjecture.

  “Because they were.” Her tears had started to flow again, but she managed to continue. “They looked like the knight in the Christmas play who woke up Snow White.”

  Joyce shut her eyes for an instant, trying to visualize the Disney knight figure who had played a prominent role in the Christmas play which the orphanage had put on to brighten the lives of children whose days were, for the most part, tragically cheerless.

  The knight had worn a breastplate and his papier-mâché clothes had borne so close a resemblance to chain-mail that the children hadn’t doubted for a moment that he had come riding straight out of a fairyland castle to awaken Snow White. The autumn trees in the background had been starkly bare—amazingly realistic stage props—and there had been artificial snow flurries.

  To Joyce, the forest clearing in which she was standing, facing a badly frightened child, seemed suddenly just as bleak and threatening.

  The two men who had kidnapped the children were no shining knights, regardless of what kind of clothes they had been wearing. And there was no reassurance in the thought that they had probably been wearing fantastic masquerade costumes to conceal their identities and make it more difficult for the sheriff to pick up their trail.

  She could picture the two men carrying the children to some remote cabin in the woods, discarding the costumes and writing a carefully penned ransom note to—Joyce shook her head, realizing she was letting her imagination get out of hand. What could kidnapers hope to gain by writing a ransom note to a county orphanage?

  The county would not pay a cent to get the children back, even if the rules could sometimes be stretched a little in an emergency. Public funds could not be used to ransom kidnapped children, no matter how desperate their plight might be. Funds to uphold the law, yes—funds to see that no stone was left unturned to bring the kidnapers to justice. But only wealthy parents were in a position to rescue their children from the basest of criminals.

  What could it mean? Why would two men dressed like a character in a children’s Christmas play carry off Betty Anne’s brother, and the Trilling twins and leave her alone, crying her heart out in the woods?

  “Where were you, Betty Anne, when all this happened?”

  “I was hiding,” Betty Anne said, between sobs.

  “Where, darling?”

  “In the tree.”

  “And your brother and the twins were outside, is that it?”

  “They went to look for some acorns,” Betty Anne said. “We were playing acorns for keeps, and I won all the big green ones. The big green ones are hard to find. You only find a lot of them in the spring.”

  It made sense, of course. There was nothing very unusual about a big, hollow oak, and the two men had apparently been in too much of a hurry to make off with the other children to realize that it was being used as a playhouse.

  “Why didn’t the two bad men look inside the tree?” Joyce asked, to make sure that her surmise had not gone wide of the mark.

  “I kept my head down,” Betty Anne said. “But I looked out just once and saw them.”

  It confirmed what Joyce had always known—that the Four Children were both courageous and highly intelligent, despite their bent for mischief-making. Betty Anne’s brother could so easily have lost his head, and cried out in a futile effort to warn her. Then Betty Anne would have vanished also, and only the stolen dishes and camp stools would have been a pathetic memento of the lost children and secret place that had become the children’s second home.

  There would have been nothing to indicate from where the children were abducted. Were it not for the quick thinking of the children, Betty Anne, too, would have vanished, and her description of the men “in shining clothes” would have been lost.

  Despite the child’s small size and the fright that was still making her tremble, Joyce was sure that more information could be pried out of her.

  For a moment Joyce was tom by indecision. Should she take Betty Anne directly to the sheriff, and let him do the questioning? It was wise, surely, to take advantage of the facilities of the agencies of the law.

  But there was a disadvantage in calling in the police, particularly when a small child was the key witness to a crime. Most small children instinctively mistrust policemen and Betty Anne might not talk freely to the representative of the law.

  Betty Anne had been very cooperative so far. Might it not be better to try to find out where the
kidnapers had gone and follow a trail that might still lead somewhere? A warm trail was better than a cold one, and if she let another hour go by…

  She took firm hold of Betty Anne’s shoulders and shook her gently. “Stop crying, Betty Anne,” she said in firm tones. “The men won’t come back. You’re much too old to carry on this way.”

  Joyce knew nothing could have been further from the truth. Betty Anne had witnessed something that would have terrified most adults and left them shaken for hours. But she knew an appeal to Betty Anne’s pride would be the best way to calm her and get her cooperation.

  Joyce turned and pointed toward the cove, giving Betty Anne a slight nudge as she did so. “When the big men left, Betty Anne, where did they go? Was it in that direction?”

  Betty Anne shook her head.

  “Over there, then?” Joyce asked, pointing in the opposite direction.

  Without replying Betty Anne turned and pointed to the northeast, where the vegetation thinned a little, and Joyce could see from where she was standing, the beginning of another trail.

  It was a wide trail and Joyce knew it well, for she had followed it several times in her bird-watching explorations.

  It led to a wide stretch of marshland more firm than the soggy ground immediately surrounding the cove, with its many dangerous quicksand bogs. The two marshlands converged where the forest thinned and became a dismal tidal wasteland for many miles, but there was a mile-long stretch of comparatively firm ground and a few cabins scattered about between the trees.

  Had the kidnapers taken the children to one of those cabins? It seemed unlikely, but it might not be too late to find out. Joyce gripped Betty Anne firmly by the hand and started off in the direction of the marsh.

  They had not advanced more than sixty feet along the winding footpath when they felt the first strong tug of a rising wind. Trees on both sides of the path were in violent motion as the wind came in gusts of steadily increasing violence. The trunks seemed also to be swaying, as if they were in danger of being uprooted by a wind of hurricane force.