by Jack Castle
Nonetheless, George balled his fists and was about to step forward and strike him when the last manservant held up his palms in surrender and said, “Wait, don’t hit me, I’m just an accountant.”
This caused George to hesitate. “What?”
The man nodded, jostling his jowls comically. He glanced quickly over his shoulder as he spoke, and whispered, “Yeah, I’m an account out of Butler, Pennsylvania. I got captured by this crazy witch and pressed into service.”
Infuriated by this interruption the Lady Wellington roared, “What are you waiting for, slave? Kill him!”
George noted for such a tiny woman she certainly had a powerful pair of lungs.
The fat-faced man jumped at the sound of her voice. Obviously not really wanting to, he drew a jeweled dagger from his belt and held it high over his head. “Sorry about this, pal,” he whispered. “I don’t have a choice.” And then loud enough for the Lady Wellington to hear him he shouted a death cry and ran forward as fast as his fat stubby legs would carry him.
The attack was crude and clumsy. George easily blocked the downward strike, wrist-locked the knife out of the man’s hand and flipped him to the ground. As he pinned the man’s head with his knee and was about to plunge the knife into him he heard the man sobbing rapidly, “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me.”
When George lifted his eyes to scan for any immediate threats he saw Maddie in the shadows, staring at him from underneath the table. She was watching him with eyes wide. She shook her head, telling him not to hurt the man beneath his knee.
George sighed and whispered to the fat-faced man, “Congratulations, buddy, you owe your life to a nine-year-old girl. You better just stay down.” And with that said he pantomimed striking the fat-faced man in the head with the handle of the blade. The accountant wouldn’t have won an academy award for his performance or anything, but he feigned being knocked out well enough.
When George looked back at Maddie her jaw was hanging open. “What?” When she didn’t answer him right away he asked quickly, “Are you okay? Are you hurt?” He checked her over for any signs of wounds.
“No, Dad, it’s just…”
George didn’t find anything physically wrong with her. “It’s just what?”
“It’s just,” she exclaimed, “I didn’t know you could fight like that.”
George frowned in a way that said, ‘Is that all?’ but settled for actually saying, “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”
As Maddie crawled out from underneath the table George snatched an abandoned scarf on the table and tied it over his leg wound. He then used the table to pull himself to his feet and then pulled up Maddie up after him.
He was about to stomp over to Lady Wellington and throttle some answers out of her when she pulled on a long brown lever on a nearby tree and dropped through a hatch in the ground. George wasn’t surprised by this, especially after seeing the massive complex below.
As George and Maddie dusted themselves off he gazed down at her and said, “Baby-girl, you’ve got more lives than a cat.”
“I know,” Maddie heartily agreed. She tilted her head to the side, counted on her fingers, and mumbled to herself, “Let’s see--the drone, the guillotine, the train, the crossbow bolt,” then confident she had the right numbers she said, “I think that was my fifth life. I really should be more careful.”
“Uh-huh.”
Seeing that he was hurt Maddie lifted his arm and draped it around her small shoulders.
“C’mon, let’s get out of this stupid maze.”
As they hobbled out of the field toward what appeared to be the exit she added, “Still, I think it was pretty cool the way you beat up all those guys back there.”
“Yep,” he answered, wincing with each step, but doing his best not to show it.
“But, I mean, you like totally punched all those guys in the face.”
“Maddie!” he said, using his Daddy voice.
“Okay, okay.” Then, after thinking about it for a second longer she asked slyly, “Can you teach me how to punch people in the face?”
Chapter 14
“Barnaby Hornbuckle”
“Dad, you’re bleeding again!”
Although painful, the slash across his belly was mostly superficial. The hole in his thigh was another matter, however, as the puncture wound was pretty deep. After they had left the grassy meadow he used one of the manservant’s daggers to cut bandages from a tunic and make a more suitable field dressing. And now that the bizarre glen was far behind them and he became more aware of it, it was beginning to hurt like hell.
Despite this he managed with some semblance of believability, “I’m okay, baby-girl.”
Soon he began to wince with each step. Seeing this, Maddie grabbed his hand and draped his arm over her shoulders once more. “Here, lean on me, Dad.”
He smiled weakly and didn’t argue. This time, he actually did lean on her a bit.
“Hey, can I come with you?”
George spun around, but then realizing it was only the stupid accountant he said, “No. Get lost.”
“My name…” he began meekly “…my name is Barnaby Hornbuckle,”
A huge smile had spread across Maddie’s face and she waved enthusiastically back at him. “Hi, Barnaby. Nice to meet you.”
“Beat it,” George said. This man wasn’t his responsibility, and he most likely would get them all killed at the first opportunity.
“Look, I’m really sorry about back there. I’m just an accountant out of…”
“I know,” George cut him off and finished for him, “an accountant out of Butler, Pennsylvania, I heard you the first time when you came at me with the knife.”
Barnaby stammered, “I didn’t have a choice. That crazy witch would’ve had me killed if I hadn’t.”
“Oh c’mon, Dad. Let him come with us.”
This was the smelly cat all over again. What was that stupid cat’s name again? He was always forgetting. Oh yeah, Lucy. Maddie had found this half-dead cat in the road one afternoon. The poor thing must’ve been hit by a car. Anyway, Maddie nursed the thing back to health, but the accident screwed up the feline’s bowels so bad that the thing always smelled like a skunk that barfed up a dumpster. But it didn’t matter to Maddie, because like her mother, Maddie was the patron saint of lost causes. And that’s when he realized for the first time in his life, when his wife Tessa had first met him, he was the smelly cat.
Barnaby, refusing to give up, removed the makeshift bag from his shoulder and said, “Look, I brought food. I remembered you hadn’t finished your meal.”
“Food?” Maddie repeated hungrily. She carefully undraped his arm and ran back to Barnaby Hornbuckle, the accountant from Pennsylvania, and peeked into his bag.
George watched the man’s body language warily but Barnaby seemed non-threatening enough. The portly fellow opened the bag for Maddie to see its contents inside and said, “It’s not much, just what I could grab off the table before they came back.”
As Maddie dove into the goodie bag and brought out an apple he continued with a hundred-yard stare, “You don’t know what it was like. I was a slave, emptying her honey bucket, painting her nails, standing for hours upon hours on end holding that stupid fan, even on the coolest of days. I thought because I was the only survivor out of my group that I was one of the lucky ones. Now I know better.”
What did he just say?
George interrupted, “Wait a minute, did you say, a group?”
Barnaby nodded his head. “Yeah, you guys didn’t wake up with a group?”
George and Maddie exchanged a look and then he answered, “No, it was just the two of us.”
“Wow, you guys are more screwed up than I thought.” When George gave him a hard stare Barnaby quickly continued, “Anyway, like I was saying, my group and I got separated, most of us got captured by that witch’s soldiers back there. Eight long years; that’s one more than being an indentured servant in the Bible, ya
know? I’m pretty sure I’m the only one left.”
“What were those manservant things back there anyway, some kind of robot?”
“No, that’s what I keep telling you. This,” he said gesturing with his arms wildly, “this is all real. Those fairies, the manservants? It’s all real.”
George shook his head. “Gotta be some sort of trick. An illusion or something.”
“That’s what I thought at first, too. I tried to figure it all out, find a logical reason for everything. Don’t you get it? There is none. About eight years ago I woke up in the suit I was buried in. I know, because I remember picking it out. Anyway, I wake up in this field of grass, I mean, we’re talking a prairie the size of Wisconsin, it just went on for miles. It isn’t long before I realize, I’m not the only one. There are like, dozens of us.”
“What were their names? Were they like you?” Maddie asked.
Barnaby shook his head, his jowls bouncing again. “No. I mean, I don’t know. It was so long ago. We didn’t even get to exchange names or anything when we all got captured. It was like they knew where we were going to be because they came out of nowhere. Everyone else scattered. I think I was in shock or something, because I just stood there and let them take me. I think I remember a market or something. Yeah, I remember an auction of some kind. Lady Wellington bought me, and I’ve been wearing this stupid costume for the last eight years.”
Barnaby tried to hold back the tears, looked away in shame, and manage to stifle most of his sobbing. To George’s surprise Maddie grabbed Barnaby’s hand and said, “It’s okay, Barnaby, you don’t have to be scared anymore. You’re with us now.”
Barnaby tried to answer, but could only manage to nod down to her.
George sighed. “Great,” he muttered, then turned around and started walking down the path again. Behind him he heard Maddie say, “Don’t worry about my dad. Mom says he’s more like an acquired taste.”
About an hour later they came to a fork in the path. Both paths were identical.
“Not that way,” Barnaby called after him. “That leads to the Zombie-Pirate swamp. And trust me, you do not want to go in there. Even Lady Wellington steers clear of the Zombie-Pirate King.”
George stopped, sighed, and decided Barnaby was probably telling the truth. He backed up and hiking his thumb down the path to the left, said, “I don’t suppose you know what’s down this way?”
Barnaby closed his eyes in concentration. After a time, he opened them. “Sorry, I’m not sure. Lady Wellington doesn’t normally travel on foot. We usually just sail on her barge.”
Barnaby scanned the two paths ahead, and then the one behind. “Hang on a second. If there’s a fork in the road, there’s usually a door around somewhere.”
George didn’t see even the remotest sign of a door, only more of the impassable hedges lining the path.
Barnaby walked up to the fork in the path, stopped then walked backward, , counting his steps under his breath as he went. He then took an abrupt left and marched right into the hedges and vanished as if by magic.
“Wow, Dad! Did you see that? He walked right through the wall!” Maddie exclaimed.
George refused to be impressed, even though he really was.
“This way!” Barnaby’s disembodied voice called after them. “Just walk straight ahead and you’ll walk right through.”
“I think we should go with him, Dad.”
Before Maddie could dart after Barnaby, George put a restraining hand on her shoulder. Lowering his voice he whispered, “Look, I’ll let him stick with us until morning, but after that, we go our separate ways.”
“Sounds great by me,” Barnaby said, sticking his head back through the hedges so he looked like a floating head.
“I think he heard you,” Maddie whispered back.
Barnaby nodded vigorously in a way that made his jowls bounce.
Maddie stifled a laugh but George gave her a hard stare, trying to keep down his own smirk.
Without even thinking about it she grabbed him by the hand and called after Barnaby, who had already vanished into the bushes again.
“Don’t worry, Barnaby. We’re coming!”
Chapter 15
“Canyon”
“Can we stop now?” Barnaby asked. “I can’t walk another step.”
It was dusk now and would be getting dark soon. As much as he didn’t want to, George had to lean more and more of his weight onto Maddie. They were both exhausted, and understandably so. Spending most of last night below ground, this morning at the bizarre tea party, and hiking for most of the day had really begun to take its toll. If they didn’t find someplace to rest soon they were going to drop from sheer exhaustion.
George was just about ready to call it, and start building some sort of campsite in the wilderness, when they arrived to the mouth of a small canyon. The moment they approached its threshold a wooden torch mounted on a cliff wall suddenly sprang to life.
“Must be some sort of sensor or something,” Barnaby said aloud.
In succession, more torches lit themselves on the walls on down the canyon, as if beckoning them within. George could see the canyon meander back and forth but he couldn’t quite see all the way to the other side. What he could see, however, was a bright white light at the far opposite end.
“What do you think?” George asked.
It took a moment before Barnaby realized George was actually talking to him. His face was aghast (as it normally was when he wasn’t pouting), and Barnaby finally turned and asked, “What do you mean?”
George sighed, swept a hand toward the canyon, “The canyon, Barnaby. Have you been this way or not?”
“Dad,” Maddie spoke under his arm. “Be nice to Barnaby, he’s just as scared as we are.”
Barnaby lifted his eyes from Maddie and back to him. He shook his jowls and stammered, “I don’t know. Er… what I mean to say is… I’ve never gone this way before.”
George grunted as he released his hold on Maddie and hobbled over to the torch mounted on the cliff wall. With some effort, he removed the wooden torch from the metal clasp bolted into granite.
The moment George raised the torch and lit the canyon’s interior, a stiff wind arose from within and fanned the flames. George didn’t care. Now they not only had a light, but a weapon.
“C’mon, Maddie,” George said, but before she resumed her post beneath his arm, Maddie called over to Barnaby in the most reassuring voice she could muster, “Don’t worry, Barnaby. My dad will protect you.”
One glance over his shoulder and George could see Barnaby wasn’t so sure.
They were approximately halfway through the rock canyon when Maddie first noticed the odd protrusions in the wall for what they really were.
“Dad, look! A fossil,” Maddie exclaimed. “I think he used to be a dinosaur.”
George guided his torchlight onto the wall and saw she was right; the skeleton of a dinosaur he couldn’t quite place was half-buried into the wall.
“I’m pretty sure he’s a Euoplocephalus,” Maddie said.
Impressed, George asked, “A Euco…plo…ce…phallus? What are you, a Paleontologist now?”
Ignoring her dad’s barb Maddie replied, “We studied them in school. You can tell by the hard shell on their backs and the way their tail looks like a mallet. See?”
Leaving the dinosaur bones behind George noticed a dark niche coming up.
He held up a hand and ordered in his no nonsense voice, “Wait here.”
“What’s a matter?” Barnaby asked, obviously frightened.
“There’s a blind spot coming up and I want to make sure nothing’s hiding inside it.”
“Alright,” Barnaby quickly agreed. “I’ll, uh, stay back here and uh, guard Maddie.”
You do that, George thought.
“Be careful, Dad,” Maddie said after him.
Holding the torch out in front of him as both light and defense, George found the niche was little more than just that, a n
iche.
“There’s nothing here.” He waved Maddie and Barnaby quickly past it.
As Barnaby passed him George asked out of Maddie’s earshot, “You sure you’ve never been this way before?”
Barnaby squinted as he thought about this. “I might have, but it would’ve been over eight years ago. I can’t remember. I’m sorry.”
George nodded that he understood, but the reality was he didn’t trust the man. Barnaby wasn’t telling them everything, of that he was certain. George suspected there was more to the story of how he and the rest of his “group” had been captured.
The canyon twisted and they came around the blind bend. When they did they saw the head of a giant dinosaur waiting for them, the monster’s jaws open and ready to devour them. Maddie’s eyes widened. “Whoah, what’s that?”
Suddenly, they both heard the sound of rapid footfalls retreating behind them, and when they turned, they glimpsed Barnaby vanishing back into the gorge.
George lifted his torch and the light revealed that the giant mouth belonged to the head of a fossilized Tyrannosaurs Rex. To exit the canyon they would have to walk right through the T-Rex’s open maw and out the back of its skull.
“At least he’s not alive,” Maddie said quietly, and then giggled nervously. Realizing Barnaby had just run away, Maddie turned around, cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted, “Barnaby, it’s okay, it’s just another fossil!”
They both listened to see if Barnaby had heard her but Barnaby was as good as gone.
Maddie raised her cupped hand to her mouth once more but George, worried someone else, or something else, might hear them, stopped her. “Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll figure it out… eventually.”
Maddie appeared worried but didn’t say as much. Instead she nodded feebly and turned back toward the exit.
As soon as they reached the giant skull Maddie touched one of the massive teeth and George asked harshly, “Hey, what are you doing? Don’t touch that.”
“But Dad, it’s dead,” she responded dryly. “It has been dead for quite some time.”
