by Dale Peck
It was this last that caught Charles’s eye. Perhaps jogged by the book in the music room, he said, “Is that… Atlantis?”
But even as he said it, the island was gone. Then, on the opposite wall, there was a burst of color so bright it painted everyone’s face orange and red. A volcano was erupting in a wall of lava, and at its base rested a city of red brick and white pillars.
“Pompeii!” Susan exclaimed. But even as she said its name, the city was gone.
There was another city, this one surrounded by a wall, inside of which Charles spied an enormous horse, and then it too seemed to dissolve in flames.
“Troy!”
“Lost cities,” Uncle Farley breathed quietly. “They’re all lost cities. But why?”
There were other cities, some of which were no more than little camps, others that seemed so magical and splendid it was hard to believe they were of our world. Uncle Farley spotted the hard ones: Timbuktu, the ancient capital of West Africa, and the Arizona cliff dwellings of the Anasazi, and Tenochtitlán, the Aztec metropolis that now lies beneath Mexico City. Charles recognized Machu Picchu, the last home of the Incas. Susan guessed that a tiny stand of cabins was the lost colony of Roanoke. Everyone recognized the Easter Island statues, and the atomic bomb exploding over Hiroshima. And then there was another image that was even more familiar, though far, far more distressing.
“Uncle Farley!” Susan said. “It’s the, it’s the—” She couldn’t say it.
“It’s the twin towers,” Charles said. His voice was cold and flat. It reminded Susan of Murray’s voice, since he’d gone to the future and come back.
The horrific image grew and grew, until the two silver spires filled up opposite walls of the room. Smoke billowed from broken windows, shrouding the walls of the drawing room a uniform gray, and Susan actually coughed. The quality of the color thickened, seemed almost to dampen, and without quite knowing when it had happened the onlookers realized the smoke had turned to fog. And, also without understanding, the three people in the room sensed that the strange, overwhelming show was over.
“Uncle Farley,” Susan said. “Do you think we’ll go—we have to go—to all those places? Even—” She shuddered at the memory of the last image.
Uncle Farley didn’t answer her. He walked over to a side table with a distracted expression on his face. There was a piece of pottery on a stand, into which the smooth contours of a woman’s face had been impressed. The face was haunting—empty, blank eyed, yet searching for something.
“It’s from Pompeii,” Uncle Farley said quietly.
“Really!” Susan reached a hand toward the face, but Uncle Farley was still speaking.
“It’s a death mask.”
Susan jerked her finger back. “That was put on a dead person’s face?”
“Not exactly. She was alive at first. It’s lava. It vitrified around the woman instantly, preserving her face for eternity.”
“Vitrified? That sounds like a word for”—she turned toward the door—“you, Charles. Charles?”
But she was speaking to empty air. Charles was gone.
SEVEN
Up a Tree (Without a Paddle)
Charles Oakenfeld was two months past his tenth birthday. Already in his short life he had been to Rome, London, and Austin, Texas, not to mention the Bay of Eternity, the Sea of Time, and the Island of the Past. He’d ridden the world’s tallest Ferris wheel at the Millennium Fair, built homemade telephones and radios out of spare parts, and even figured out how to operate a flying carpet all by himself. But he had never climbed a tree.
He didn’t know why climbing a tree was the first thing he thought of when he crept out of the house with the mysterious book in his backpack. The idea had come to him while he was watching the show on the drawing room walls, and as soon as Uncle Farley and Susan got caught up with that creepy clay mask he had slipped out. It seemed to him Mario’s book practically shivered with excitement as he stowed it in his backpack. He could feel it tingling against his shoulderblades as though wings were sprouting from his back. Maybe it was the image of wings, but Charles just had to get up high. If only he knew where Uncle Farley had stowed the flying carpet! But, in its absence, he settled for a tree.
Using the low garden wall for cover, he made his way toward the forested hills that ringed Drift House. Charles could see Mr. Zenubian’s handiwork all over the place: tender green shoots stuck up out of a layer of thinly spread manure, which smelled almost sweet in the open air. He wondered who would manage the grounds now that the caretaker was gone. And where had the caretaker come from anyway? A vague feeling tickled the back of his brain, as though he had unfinished business with the strange, creepy, but compelling old man. But what? Charles couldn’t remember.
Using a budding maple as cover, he turned back toward the house. It looked quiet, almost lonely. The cannons gleamed on the upper deck, and on either side of the building the calm waters of the Bay of Eternity glittered like diamond paste.
In the back of his head, Charles heard a voice. Don’t let her take it. Charles didn’t like this voice, yet he couldn’t ignore it. And Susan was always taking things from him—taking all the credit for things they’d done together. If he opened Mario’s book in front of her, she was sure to say she had figured it out, and since she was oldest and spoke in that hoity-toity accent, everyone would believe her version of things. They always did. Well, Charles was tired of coming in second place. It was his turn. And, squashing any further doubts, he turned and climbed higher uphill.
Fallen needles muffled his footsteps. The forest was eerily silent—no birds singing, none of the deer the children had seen so often last fall. Charles felt terribly alone, but excited too. He was equal to this challenge. He would do it on his own.
A thick branch barred his path. He was about to clamber over, when he glanced at the tree it was connected to. The branch sloped gently upward to a thick trunk about fifteen feet above his head: it couldn’t have looked any more like a staircase unless it had had a banister and a sign: climb here.
The branch swayed lightly beneath his weight. As if he’d been doing it all his life, Charles shuffled up on his hands and feet. The tree’s bark was deeply scored, offering plenty of hand- and toeholds. In a moment he was at the trunk. It reared up like a blank wall, blocking his way. It was so wide he couldn’t see around it on either side.
“Well, now what?”
Since he couldn’t go left or right, Charles looked up. There was a branch a few feet above his head. His fingers grazed the bottom of it if he stood on tiptoe. He could jump and grab it easily—if his fingers slipped, however, it was a long way down. But Charles didn’t feel he was high enough yet, and so, tucking his glasses in his pocket, he took a deep breath and jumped. His fingers curled around the branch, and his feet walked up the trunk and he hooked his right ankle over the branch, then his left. For a moment he hung upside down like a giant sloth. He looked at the ground far below him, but didn’t feel afraid. (The blurriness caused by his lack of glasses might have helped with that.) The truth was he felt like laughing—it was so good to be up so high, alone with his book. He wanted to go even higher.
It took a little shimmying to twist on top of the branch, but soon enough he’d done it. After that it was easy: branches poked from the trunk with ladderlike regularity. Charles climbed higher and higher. When he felt he’d reached the last branch that could safely support his weight, he turned and sat with his legs straddling the limb beneath him. His back was against the trunk, which, even at this great height, was still wider than his body. About twelve inches in front of him was a convenient fork that made a perfect strut to rest his bag on.
Charles felt a tickle of excitement when he thought what his parents would say if they knew how high he’d climbed. Still, no matter how many unspoken rules he’d broken, he was a prudent boy, and he tied the straps of his backpack to the two forks of the branch. Only when he was sure he’d made a secure resting place did he unzip t
he bag and pull out Mario’s book. For the first time he traced the edges of the golden letters, let his fingers trail over the ridges of the seven scored lines beneath the title. An electric buzz tingled beneath his fingertips. It was just strong enough that Charles instinctively pulled his hand back. He was sure Susan and Uncle Farley couldn’t have felt such a charge without showing it, and this made him even more certain he really did have a special relationship with Mario’s book. That his brother had sent it from the future with a special message for him alone.
Charles reached for the cover. He half expected something to stop him, as something had stopped him every other time he’d tried to open it. But the forest remained silent, as if it too was waiting to see what lay beneath those seven empty lines. Sucking in a breath and holding it, Charles lifted the thick piece of tooled leather…
… and immediately let his breath out in a gasp. Charles didn’t know what he’d expected to see, but he was completely mystified by what appeared: a double spread of swirly muted pastels, pinks, greens, pale browns. Charles stared at the pages for a long time, trying to decipher a pattern in the swirls, and then, with a sheepish start, realized he was just looking at the book’s marbled endpapers. Laughing at himself, he turned to the next page…
… and gasped again. But this time there was a real picture before his eyes. It seemed to be painted, yet it was more vivid than any photograph Charles had ever seen. The two pages depicted nothing more than a large field of grass, but each blade was so distinctly realized the image seemed almost miraculous. Charles could see the seams running down the center of each stalk, could make out bug bites and bits of brown and even the infinitesimally small hairs that lined their edges. Only after he’d marveled at the technical skill that had gone into the painting did Charles notice that the field wasn’t completely smooth. A series of low oblong mounds jutted from the ground in a regular pattern, and as Charles looked at them, the answer to what the mounds were seemed to pop into his head.
They were graves.
Charles was surprised at his reaction to this realization. He wasn’t scared, or sad, or grossed out. Instead he felt a stillness, a cool spot in his stomach that acknowledged what he was seeing but didn’t get overwhelmed by it. He looked at the picture one last time, then turned the page.
And gasped a third time.
For a walled garden filled the pages before him. No tree or flower was the same as any other, nor were any of them recognizable to Charles. Each and every one was lush and green and perfect—not a bit of rust marred a single leaf in the entire picture. The plants were blooming if they bore flowers and heavy laden with red or yellow or purple orbs if they bore fruit. At the center of the image was one tree, smaller than many of the others, but irresistibly luminous. As Charles stared into its dense foliage he could see each leaf, each twig, the flakings of bark and the little holes insects had drilled in search of food and birds had widened in search of insects. But what he couldn’t quite make out was the scattered fruit that hung from the tree. Every one was partially hidden by leaves and branches, as if the fruit itself—gold, not red, and egg shaped, with a pink blush on the sunny side—were shy, or coy. Tempting. Yes, that was the word. Tempting. Charles put his finger on the page and stroked the curved skin of one of them. Though the picture itself was smaller than his fingertip, he could feel the heft of the fruit, its weight, its shape, as if he’d already pulled it off the branch and was bringing it to his mouth.
With a start, Charles jerked his finger back. The sound of his own nervous laughter made him start again. The Oakenfelds weren’t a religious family, but still, this image, this tree, the act he was contemplating… they sounded a chord deep within him.
“Wow.”
Charles shook his head in wonder. The drawing room’s walls produced uncannily detailed images, but the pictures in this book seemed to be able to put thoughts in your head that weren’t actually on the page. Charles felt as though he could look at this single scene forever and still not take in everything it was trying to tell him. But the sun was high in the sky now, and he’d looked at only two pictures. Sooner or later Uncle Farley or Susan was going to come looking for him.
He began turning pages faster. He found it didn’t matter how quickly the pictures whizzed by—each was fully present to him, whether he glanced at it or stared for several minutes. Many of the places the book showed had also appeared in the drawing room’s mural, like Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, and the statues on Easter Island’s grassy hills. But these images came with so much more information. As Charles glanced at the solemn statues on Easter Island—they were called moai, he knew, and the people who had built them were the Rapu Nui—he saw the trees that had once covered the bare hills, and the villages full of warriors and farmers and sculptors, and he saw them slowly starving to death after they’d cut down every tree and eaten every animal on their isolated island home. He saw the first Aztecs ascending to a high plain on which sat a wide, flat lake, and in the center of the lake he saw an eagle perched on a cactus with a live snake in its beak, and he knew that this was the sign that told them to build there. As a tiny, ice-bound village passed before his eyes, Charles could see the paths leading to hilltop pastures and fjords that seamed between mountainous glaciers. Charles knew “fjord” was the right word, rather than “valley,” just as he knew the village’s name was Osterbygd, and he knew that Osterbygd meant “Western Settlement.” As the Tower of Babel flashed by Charles could see every route through the city that led to the great blue ziggurat. He knew the building was called a ziggurat, not a pyramid, knew that it was built out of mud bricks covered in kiln-fired tiles, knew that there were 999 steps in the stairway that scaled the building’s seven tiers, and that the small columned temple at the top housed animal sacrifices (unlike the Aztec temples, where human blood was spilled). He even saw a second, larger temple buried deep beneath the tower—could hear the thudding of footsteps as soldiers marched into the subterranean chamber, almost smelled the smoke of the burning city as he ran through its narrow streets in search of—
“Quite impressive, isn’t it?”
Charles had taken great pains to make sure Mario’s book was safe from falling, but had not been so diligent about his person. At the sound of the voice he jerked in surprise and racked back and forth on his branch. A dizzying blur of the ground far below wavered in front of his eyes, but Charles’s first thoughts were of the book, which he slammed closed. Even as he regained his balance, however, he continued to shake a little, because when he glimpsed the ground he realized he didn’t have his glasses on. He’d been examining Mario’s book unaided, yet all its images had been crystal clear.
As he fumbled in his pocket, he noticed a green and red blur perched on a branch about five feet above him, and when his glasses were on his face, this blur resolved itself (not unexpectedly) into the shape of President Wilson. The parrot seemed unconcerned that he’d nearly caused Charles to plummet to his death.
“I couldn’t see what Mr. Zenubian found so remarkable earlier. But now I’m beginning to understand. There is something extraordinarily… compelling about this book.”
Charles only glared at the parrot. “Did Susan send you to spy on me?”
President Wilson did something that on a human would be a shrug. “‘Spy’ is a strong word, Charles—as is ‘send’ for that matter. I came to see if you were all right. Mr. Zenubian is still unaccounted for, after all.”
Charles dismissed the idea that anyone, even Mr. Zenubian, could take Mario’s book from him. He was more convinced than ever that it had chosen him, and that only it could decide when to leave.
“Of course I’m okay. I’m not a baby.”
“You’ve certainly been acting like one. Throwing temper tantrums and sneaking off when people’s backs are turned.”
“It’s not my fault! Susan gets to do everything because she’s oldest. Everyone says wait till you’re as old as Susan, but she’ll always be older than me. I want to be in ch
arge for once.”
President Wilson let Charles finish, then hopped down to a lower branch.
“Do you know how old I am, Charles?”
Charles pulled up short. It’s not like parrots got gray hairs—or, he supposed, gray feathers. President Wilson’s plumage seemed as bright as a baby parrot’s.
“One hundred and three. Yes, Charles, I was born in the last year of the nineteenth century, lived through the entirety of the twentieth, and am now making my way into the twenty-first. And if I have learned one thing during all that time, it’s that there is always someone higher up the ladder who will tell you what to do. The key is not to worry about what other people are about, but what you need to do yourself. Charles, are you hearing a word I’m saying?”
A faraway look had taken over Charles’s face. President Wilson glanced at the backpack at first, as if the book inside might be distracting the boy, then turned and looked over his shoulder in the direction of the bay. What he saw nearly knocked him from his branch.
Far out on the Bay of Eternity, a wall of water was catapulting toward Drift House. It was shimmering and soundless and huge—less a wall than a gauzy, delicate curtain.
But when the wave reached the beach and tore up the lawn, it was no longer silent. It roared with a sound like a hundred jets taking off at once. It frothed and churned and swallowed everything in its path. Drift House disappeared beneath—inside—it, as did even the highest trees on the lawn. And still the wave continued to advance, smashing into the hillside and climbing with terrifying speed. Charles and President Wilson could only stare, transfixed, as the water rose higher and higher. It slowed a little as it stretched farther from the bay, but still the ease with which it surged forward looked less like water than like a shadow thrown across a wall by a moving car. When it was a few feet below them Charles pulled his legs onto the branch. He turned to President Wilson.
“You should save yourself. Fly.”
