The Collectors

by Jacqueline West

  Pebble grasped the rungs and began to climb. She glanced back, jerking her head for him to come along.

  “Okay,” Van whispered to himself. “Here we go.”

  “Hooray!” cheered the squirrel. “Here we go! We’re going! Let’s go!”

  The rungs were cold and firm. But Van’s sweaty palms turned them warm and slippery in no time. The thin soles of his slippers bent around the bars, hurting his feet and making him wobble. And the top of the ladder was still nowhere in sight. Van pinned his eyes to the wall between the bars, trying not to think about how much of that wall was waiting above him. Or dwindling away below him.

  “Good climbing!” cheered Barnavelt. “We’re almost there!”

  “Really?” gasped Van.

  “No. Not really.” The squirrel leaned closer to his ear, dropping his voice to a whisper. “And your climbing isn’t very good either.”

  Higher. Higher. Higher.

  Van’s arms ached. His hands burned. His feet felt like they’d been hammered into horseshoes from carrying his weight up all those metal bars.

  Something fluttered the ends of his hair.

  He looked up.

  A few rungs above him, Pebble had pushed open a hatch in the metal wall. Through it, Van could see a slash of purple sky spotted with stars.

  “Almost there!” squeaked Barnavelt, hopping up and down on Van’s shoulder. “Really, this time!”

  The hem of Pebble’s coat disappeared over the rim of the hatch. A second later, her face poked back through the opening. She said something Van couldn’t hear.

  Blood thundered in his ears. He hoisted himself up the final rungs and lifted his head out into the night air.

  They were somewhere high. Somewhere very, very high. The air felt thin, woven with threads of powerful wind. A breeze battered him. He clutched the ladder tight.

  Pebble held out a hand. Reluctantly, Van let go of the rung to take it, and she half helped, half hauled him through the hatch onto a tiny platform. Van moved his grip from Pebble’s hands to the railing at the platform’s edge. Then, at last, he took a look around.

  The entire city spread out below them.

  Van gazed down at the rooftops of tall buildings, at the streets’ interlacing slices of light, at the tiny glints of moving cars. A few skyscrapers reached even higher than their platform, spearing their tips into the violet sky. He turned in a slow circle, and saw that he and Pebble were perched on the roof of a water tower—one of those huge, round, pointy-topped tanks that stood atop the city’s older buildings. The observatory’s round, metal-walled room suddenly made sense. What a perfect place to hide and stare up at the stars. The sky seemed so close, Van could have reached up and smeared it with his fingers—if he hadn’t been too afraid to let go of the railing, anyway.

  “And now we go down!” Barnavelt sang, leaping from Van’s shoulder to Pebble’s.

  “Down?” Van glanced over the railing.

  There, along the outside of the water tower, was another set of metal rungs.

  His stomach started to churn.

  Pebble threw one leg over the railing. She paused for a moment, steadying herself in a gust of wind. Then she crouched down and set her feet on the rungs. Before Van could speak again, she’d climbed out of sight.

  Van wavered.

  He looked up at the sky once more, as if a handy plastic sleigh might come sailing past and scoop him up. But there was no sleigh. There was only the huge, purple, nighttime sky, and the giant twinkling city, and the hidden lair full of furious Collectors waiting below him, like a nest of wasps.

  There was no other choice.

  Van slid one leg over the railing, like Pebble had done. His foot couldn’t quite reach the rungs. Balancing his torso on the rail, he inched sideways, until his foot hit a solid surface. He dragged the other leg over. Now he was holding tight to the outside of a tiny ledge, with nothing between him and the city far, far below except for the whipping night air.

  Slowly, never letting go of the railing, Van bent into a crouch. He locked his right hand, and then his left, around the top rung. The wind puffed, shoving him sideways. Van let out a little shriek. His arms went rigid. After what seemed like ages, the wind softened again, and he shuffled his feet downward, through the darkness, onto the waiting rungs.

  Don’t think about how many rungs are left, Van told himself. Don’t think about how far you are from the ground. Just move one step at a time. Be calm. Be brave. Be like SuperVan.

  Of course, SuperVan could have just flown away.

  Don’t think about that, either.

  The metal rungs were icy and slick with condensation. Even Van’s sweaty hands couldn’t warm them. He clenched each rung so hard, his knuckles gleamed through the skin. The soreness in his feet deepened into rubbery numbness. Only the pressure lancing up his shins told him when he’d settled on another rung.

  He crept down another step. Another. Another.

  He was moving so slowly, it would take him forever to reach the bottom. But he was too terrified to go any faster.

  He threw a brief glance downward.

  Pebble was many rungs below him—so many that he could barely make out her face in the dimness. Her bulky coat whipped around her. Spreading out beneath her was the world of miniature trees and miniature buildings and tiny toy cars. Everything was so small that it looked pretend, like the set on a gigantic model stage.

  Van lowered himself down another rung.

  He was never going to reach the bottom.

  He could hardly remember how he’d gotten here in the first place. He had been stuck, clinging to a narrow metal ladder high above a city, forever. And this was where he would stay. Because there was absolutely no way he would get down from here in one Van-shaped piece.

  He was doomed.

  His knees locked.

  Panic flooded him. It poured through his stomach. It filled his mouth. It shorted out the wiring in his brain. For a long, empty moment, Van hung there, eyes closed, the wind dragging through his hair.

  Something else brushed his cheek.

  Van looked up.

  A glossy black bird hovered beside him. Then it landed on the rung just above, its eyes boring into Van like the tips of two pins.

  Lemuel.

  Van sucked in a gasp.

  The bird took off. “Hee’s heeeerrrre!” Van heard the bird shriek, as it wheeled upward and out of sight. “Heeeeeeeerrre!”

  Van forced himself to move again. His sweaty hands scrabbled at the rungs. He glanced up, but there was no sign of Jack or the other guards making their way down the ladder.

  Not yet.

  He looked down. Still so far to go.

  And as he was looking, his slipper skidded. His heel dropped backward. In less than a breath, Van was dangling from the ladder by one cold, exhausted hand.

  For an instant he hung there, the wind grabbing at his pajamas like hungry teeth. He clenched his fingers as hard as he could. But every muscle in his body was ready to give in. Van felt his elbow go slack, and then his wrist, and then, one by one, each of his freezing fingers.

  And then there was nothing left.

  Van fell.

  He caught a flash of Pebble’s horrified face as he plummeted past her, Barnavelt’s smaller, wide-eyed face on her shoulder, and then they were both shrinking upward, and he was still falling down, down, down.

  He missed the rooftop of the building below the tank by inches. Van wasn’t sure if this was a worse or a better thing; if the smash might or might not have killed him—but it didn’t really matter. He was still falling, and now the building’s sheer stone wall was streaking past him, and he knew that the smash had only been delayed.

  Everything slowed. His body flipped over, shifting and kicking. He watched one of his slippers sail away into the dark. The air was as thick as water. Van could feel it pushing back as he plunged through it, growing warmer, damper, dewier. . . .

  A shimmering filled the air.

 
Something vast, with wings that nearly spanned the street, dove after him.

  Van cringed.

  But there was no shelter in midair, and the vast thing seared toward him with the speed of a comet. For a second Van wondered if it actually was a comet, and then two huge, smoking paws closed around him.

  Wind rushed in all directions at once. Van couldn’t tell if he was falling or flying, or if it was just the beating of the creature’s massive wings that pulled the air straight out of his lungs. He squinted up, his eyes blearing, and saw a body like a lion’s, with a bat’s face and leathery wings, and a tail that seemed to stretch to the other end of the city block.

  A Wish Eater.

  A gigantic Wish Eater.

  It plunged toward the pavement.

  Van closed his eyes, bracing for the smash.

  But the smash didn’t come.

  His body hit something firm but stretchy—something that tossed him upward again, like a gymnast on a trampoline. He opened his eyes just in time to see the Wish Eater soaring off above him, its tail vanishing into the distance. Van’s body hit the peak of its bounce and dropped gently down again. A poof of striped fabric ballooned around him, and then he was rolling off a wide canvas awning into a planter full of petunias.

  Van lay there for a long time.

  Nothing—not the Greys’ guest-room bed, not the king-size bed with a zillion pillows that he’d slept on at the Covent Garden Hotel in London, not his own cozy twin bed with the spaceship sheets—had ever felt quite as comfortable as that planter full of petunias.

  His heart thunked steadily in his chest.

  His breaths whooshed in and out.

  He stared up at the slice of purple sky peeping through the towering buildings, now looking very, very far away—

  —until a squirrel’s face popped up in front of it, looking very, very close.

  “It’s Vanderbilt!” cheered Barnavelt. “He’s alive!”

  Pebble’s face appeared over Barnavelt’s little shoulders. Even in the dimness, Van could tell that her face was red, and she was out of breath, as though she’d just run down several dozen flights of fire-escape stairs.

  “It was a Wish Eater!” Van exclaimed, before she could speak. “It saved me!”

  Pebble pulled a hand out of her pocket. She held up the halves of a snapped wishbone. “I know.”

  26

  Unwelcome Wishes

  VAN sucked in a gasp. “Where did you get that?”

  It was hard to see Pebble’s lips in the predawn dark. “Ocarina . . . case . . .”

  “What?”

  “She said, ‘I carry it with me, just in case,’” Barnavelt piped in.

  Pebble grabbed Van by both hands and pulled him out of the planter.

  Van swayed on the sidewalk. His knees felt watery. The rest of his body was full of such relief and joy, it could have dissolved into a thousand floating bubbles.

  Pebble glanced to both sides, scanning the nearly deserted street. Then, still holding him by the arm, she broke into a run.

  “Where are we going now?” Van asked, as Barnavelt scampered up Van’s pajamas and perched beside his ear.

  If Pebble answered him, Van couldn’t hear or see it.

  “I smell doughnuts,” said Barnavelt dreamily. “Do you smell doughnuts?”

  As a matter of fact, Van did smell doughnuts. A moment later, he realized why.

  Scattered over the stoop of a building to their right were dozens and dozens of doughnuts. As Van watched, more doughnuts plopped onto the steps. They seemed to be falling straight out of the sky, like glazed and sprinkled hailstones.

  “What . . . ,” Van started to say, before he found his own answer.

  Of course. The Wish Eaters. How many of the Collection’s wishes had they eaten and granted? How much other magic had they made? How many of them were now on the loose?

  Van was still watching one sprinkled doughnut bounce off a handrail when a herd of creamy white horses galloped past. Van turned to stare as the horses ran down the street, manes and tails flying, and disappeared between the rows of sleeping buildings.

  Over her shoulder, Pebble shot him a look.

  “She says, ‘See?’” squeaked the squirrel in his ear. “‘People wish for stupid things.’”

  Pebble dragged him faster, around corners, down blocks that grew leafier and quieter, until they were racing down a familiar street.

  Several sudden thoughts collided in Van’s head.

  Pebble had made a wish. She had always seemed so firmly opposed to wishing—but maybe she was only opposed when the wishes were for ‘stupid things,’ not for life-and-death emergencies. Maybe she thought the risks of wishing didn’t apply to her. Or maybe, Van thought, as she rushed ahead of him toward Mr. Falborg’s tall white house, there was something else going on here.

  Pebble flew straight past the walkway that led to the blue front door. She dragged Van along the manicured hedges and whipped into a narrow side path that ran between high walls of shrubbery. Above the hedges, Van could see the windows of Mr. Falborg’s house staring down at them like dark, empty eyes. They came to a planter spilling with vines. There Pebble turned again, pulling Van through a gap in another hedge, opening a wrought-iron gate, and stepping through it into a large, sunken, completely enclosed backyard.

  Mr. Falborg’s backyard was as grand and beautiful as the house itself. Blossoming plants scaled the brick walls. Moonlit statues posed on pedestals. Sturdy trees, some heavy with fruit, some with flowers, waved their limbs in the nighttime breeze. In the center of the yard stood a huge stone fountain. Pearls of water fell from bowl to bowl before splashing into a pond flocked with lily pads. Van spotted soft, peach-hued fins sculling in the water’s shadows.

  And seated on a little bench beside the pond, his white suit glowing in the darkness, was Mr. Falborg.

  He didn’t look surprised to see a girl in a too-large coat, a boy in pajamas, and a wild-eyed silver squirrel come tearing into his backyard.

  In fact, he looked pleased.

  Or even—maybe—relieved.

  Mr. Falborg got to his feet. “Ah,” Van saw him say. “There you are.” But it was too dim and too muddy, with the breeze and the fountain and his own rasping breath, to catch more.

  Pebble finally let go of Van’s arm. She strode toward Mr. Falborg, speaking fast. Van heard only a stream of sounds falling one on another like the drops in the fountain. He glanced over at the splashing water.

  That was when he noticed it.

  Past the fountain, beyond a cluster of trees, something smoky and silvery and very, very large was coiled in the shadows. Van made out two wide eyes. Ruffled ears. Jagged, foot-long teeth.

  The branches of a maple tree stirred. Van looked up.

  Something with leathery wings and a long, whipping tail perched in the branches, its body nearly as large as the tree itself.

  He checked the corners. More faces. More smoky claws. More teeth. More huge, cloudy eyes—all of them staring hungrily down at the splashing fountain.

  Van’s mouth went dry.

  He jerked his gaze back toward Pebble and Mr. Falborg. He couldn’t tell if they were arguing or just talking—but at the moment, he got the sense that they were talking about him. Mr. Falborg gestured in Van’s direction. Then he glanced up, perhaps waiting for Van to reply.

  “What did he say?” Van whispered to the squirrel on his shoulder.

  “He says, ‘Haven’t you?’” Barnavelt whispered back.

  “Haven’t you what?”

  Barnavelt blinked. “Haven’t I what?”

  “. . . can’t hear us,” Van thought he heard Pebble say.

  Mr. Falborg’s eyebrows rose. He reached into his vest pocket. His palm emerged, covered with glinting coins.

  The hidden Wish Eaters craned closer. Van could feel their appetite in the air, sharp and stinging.

  Mr. Falborg said something to Pebble and gestured at Van again. Pebble threw a panicked look in Van’s di
rection.

  “What did he say now?” Van asked the squirrel.

  “He said, ‘A worthy wish,’” the squirrel repeated. “‘Why don’t we fix that problem once and for all?’”

  Mr. Falborg was already lifting a silver coin out of the pile.

  Can’t hear. That problem. Once and for all.

  Realization seared through Van’s brain.

  He thought of the horrible, pounding blur of sounds that had plugged his ears all night. Of all the times he had wanted to reach up and yank those sounds right out again, but couldn’t.

  He didn’t want that. Not once and for all.

  “No!” Van shouted.

  He rushed forward, trying to swipe the coin out of Mr. Falborg’s fingers. Mr. Falborg raised his hand out of Van’s reach.

  “Don’t wish that!” Van yelled. “I don’t want that!”

  Mr. Falborg blinked down at him, looking politely surprised. “Well . . . some . . . better . . . squirrel translator . . .” Then, too quickly for Van to block it, Mr. Falborg tossed a coin toward the fountain.

  Van felt his heart echo the coin’s path, pounding upward, then falling, falling, falling.

  The coin splashed into the fountain.

  Pebble dove after it.

  But a huge, many-legged creature had already surged out of the shadows and thrown itself into the water. Van saw a spark of light wink once before vanishing into the creature’s mouth.

  The air filled with fog.

  A breeze that came from every direction at once battered against Van, pressing the air out of his lungs and forcing his eyes shut.

  When he opened them again, the breeze had stilled. The fountain glittered. The smoky creature hovered beside the fountain, looming even larger than before. And there was something in Van’s hand.

  He squinted down at his palm.

  His hearing aids.

  Van took a deep breath. He could feel the air rushing in and out, but he couldn’t hear it. He could see the leaves rustling, and the fountain trickling, but he couldn’t hear them either. He was still himself.

  He looked up at Mr. Falborg.

  The man in the white suit gazed back at him with an expectant expression, as if he was waiting for Van to thank him.