by E. Archer
“I know, but … I’m curious, aren’t you?” she said.
Ralph watched the two of them and thought about how well-equipped to discuss these matters they both seemed. For his part, he was only barely able to restrain himself from running around the room and making googly sounds.
“Uh-uh. We’ve got to tell Mum,” Cecil said.
“Gertrude?! She’d freak out that Chessie even approached Ralph, and then we wouldn’t be allowed to leave the castle all summer. If we’re safe because of the wards, why bother Mum about it? Let’s at least get that possibility off the table.”
“We tell Mum about it because Chessie killed her own son. You don’t mess around with those kinds of people.”
“You’re as much of a snob as Gert. And we don’t know that he’s dead.”
“It’s not about snobbery, Ugs. It’s about safety.”
“I bet it was an accident. All she did was grant his wish. And somehow that led to his death. At the very worst, Chessie ‘got her son killed.’ ”
Ralph found himself nodding emphatically.
“Even if it was an accident, do you want us to become another accident?” Beatrice said. “She’s reckless!”
“I think we have to ask ourselves,” Ralph said after clearing his throat, “why she’s so set on granting us wishes in the first place.”
“She’s an old school traditionalist,” Cecil spat. “That’s it, plain and simple.”
“If something went wrong with her son,” Beatrice said, “then maybe she’s looking for a vindication of the whole wish-granting system. That failure has got to be weighing on her.”
“I thought of both of those,” Ralph said. “But I also thought that maybe it could be that she hopes to get her son back through this, somehow.”
“Oh,” Beatrice said. “That’s … almost sweet.”
“So you’re trying to say we could be doing a good deed at the same time as getting our greatest desires fulfilled?” Cecil asked, raising an eyebrow. “Sounds convenient.”
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“Huh,” he said, weighing the possibility with his eyebrows. “Huh.”
“There’s been a prohibition on wish-granting for years,” Beatrice said. “We’d be doing something monumental.”
“Why are you so into this?” Cecil asked.
Beatrice shrugged, and Cecil probably would have pressed further had Daphne not then burst into the basement.
“There you guys are! How could you hide from me, right now, when I got, like, moved by magic? I swear, Ralph was there — weren’t you, Ralph?”
Beatrice drew her into her lap. “I know. We’re discussing it.”
“Sorry I didn’t go get you down right away,” Ralph said.
“It’s okay,” Daphne said. “I know how to use stairs. So what have we decided is going on?”
“How would you feel about —” Beatrice began.
“Don’t even,” Cecil said. “We can’t. Don’t even mention it to her, because we can’t, and we aren’t.”
“How would I feel about what? You are not going to keep this from me!”
“Fine, you explain it,” Beatrice said to Cecil.
Cecil toyed with the candle wax, dabbing a fingertip in and watching it cool.
“If you don’t tell me, right now, I’m going straight to Mummy.”
“An evil witch wants to put a curse on us, so we’re going to ignore her,” Ralph blurted. “Oh.”
Cecil held his hand out. “Everyone promise. We’re going straight to bed, and not talking about this until we get up tomorrow. Our discussion is over.”
Daphne visibly bit down on her excitement and placed her hand on Cecil’s. Ralph and finally Beatrice followed, her fingers lightly resting on his wrist.
CHAPTER XII
After leaving his cousins, Ralph had to pass by the castle study, at the entrance of which he stumbled into Lord Gideon Battersby. Gideon stood watching Ralph, the frames of his spectacles lost in the silver rays of his hair.
“Hello, Gideon,” Ralph said.
“Ralph.” He nodded. “Wouldn’t you come in? I’d love to speak to you for a moment.”
Ralph stepped onto the thick carpet. The library contained a few sloping desks, and short shelves filled with books with soft brown and green spines.
Gideon gave Ralph the sort of vigorous handshake generally reserved for bank presidents. “I was sitting in front of the window, examining one of my favorite books,” he said, holding up a sun-faded tome with The Fallacy of Magic embossed on the cover, “and I couldn’t help glimpsing, at the same time, that you were out on the grounds with Daphne.”
Ralph nodded.
“Did you happen to notice whether the geraniums are due for cutting back?”
“No, I’m afraid I didn’t,” said Ralph.
“I also noticed,” Gideon continued, “that while you were wandering with Daphne, my wife’s sister appeared to you, dressed in some fairy godmother get-up, and caused Daphne to be teleported to the roof.”
Though he tried to speak, Ralph stood mute.
“Let’s discuss this like cool-headed men. I know I can’t hold you accountable for my sister-in-law’s behavior, but I can only imagine what she may have said to you. I have to request, in the interest of gentlemanly conduct, that you avoid dealings with her from here on. Lady Battersby and I have taken great pains that she shouldn’t penetrate the boundaries of our family. Is that clear?”
Ralph nodded.
“Very good. Now, I have an international call to make before bed, but I wanted to make sure we had a suitable understanding first. There is little I can do to further curb Chessie’s actions, but since you are a guest in my house, I’m afraid I have to insist on your proper behavior. These are my express wishes. I trust you haven’t found me too emphatic on the issue.”
“No, not at all.”
Lord Gideon Battersby clapped Ralph on the shoulder. “So glad, so glad.” He breathed a sigh of relief. “So glad we had this talk.”
Once Gideon released him, Ralph went and found Cecil in his room, stuffing shirts into an army surplus bag.
“What are you doing?” Ralph asked from the doorway.
Cecil sprang up and slammed the door shut. “Shh! Daphne’s bound to be spying.”
“What are we hiding from her?” Ralph whispered.
“She can’t know the truth!” Cecil whispered back.
“And that is?” Ralph asked, yearning for once to be fewer than two steps behind everyone else.
“Should I pack shorts?” Cecil asked, suddenly distracted. “Or face wash? Will there be showers?”
“Where?”
“Shh! When you made a wish back in the day, you entered a fairy tale where it got acted out. Everyone knows that. What I’m asking you is whether I’ll need shorts and face wash!”
“Hold on — I thought no one was asking for a wish,” Ralph said, feeling his neck grow hot.
“I don’t want my sisters to risk themselves. But do you think I would actually pass up a chance to save the world?”
“Save it? From what?”
“Save it! Just save it! I’ll figure out the details when I get there.”
“Get where, exactly?”
Cecil paused as he was slinging the camouflage duffel over his shoulder. “I guess I don’t know. Where’s Chessie?”
“She’s on the grounds somewhere. But you can’t get close to her, because of the protection wards.”
“Well, that can’t stop me from trying,” Cecil said as he dashed from the room.
It was darkly funny, really, watching Cecil stow his duffel on the patio, wander off into the woods, locate Chessie, teleport to the roof via the Parental Protection Ward, scramble down the stairs, run out into the woods, teleport back to the roof, scramble down the stairs, and so on, all with a steadily reddening face. Ralph hovered at the edge of the patio and watched it happening, wondering when Gideon would look up from his phone call in the study and start
yelling.
“Come on, man, hold on a sec,” Ralph said, but Cecil sprinted to the tree, raggedly panting, only to be teleported away again. Ralph could see the outline of Chessie’s dress at the far side of the tree trunk as she waited for Cecil, could hear the distant moans of her frustration. He would block the door next time Cecil tried to pass, Ralph decided, would bar it with the couch … or he would go fetch Gert or Gideon, before Cecil fainted.
But when Cecil next ran by, Ralph did nothing.
He realized, then, that he had already made his decision: He wanted the wish to be granted.
He ducked into the hall, opened the glass door of the curio, and placed his face before the porcelain milkmaid. She was sulking in the corner, where she had propped her crook in front of her to keep the ducks at bay. “What do you want?” she asked.
“A Parental Protection Ward,” Ralph said urgently. “How do I remove one?”
“Oh, you’ve come around, I see,” she said, huffing as she stood. “Aren’t you the morally ambiguous one?”
“Enough. Give me details. What do I have to do?”
“It’s simple, really. A family member has to take something the child handled before the ward was ever placed, say he wants the ward removed, and mean it.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, it has to be in French. That was the official language of the English court when the Passive Magic Act was enacted.”
“Do you know any French?”
“I’m a milkmaid, love. I don’t even read English.”
“Okay, I’ll figure something out. I have to handle something they touched a long time ago, you say?”
“I’d suggest these iron ducks. They were all fascinated by them as kids. It would tickle me that I’ve been shepherding the keys to dispelling their protection. Come on, give me some irony to ponder in my lonely hours.”
Ralph scooped all three ducks off the shelf, clenched them in his sweaty fist, and ran back to the patio.
CHAPTER XIII
Ralph stood on the patio, gripped one of the metal ducks in his fist, and did his best to cobble a sentence from his memories of Mrs. Nelms’s seventh-grade French class. He could remember how to ask whether the elevator went to the fourth floor, but little more.
As Cecil clambered past him toward the tree, Ralph tried “warde pas, s’il vous plaît”
The patio chandelier dimmed, as if someone had flipped on an air conditioner elsewhere in the castle. Ralph raced outside.
Chessie and Cecil were beside the massive tree. She had her arm about him, and he was whispering to her. As Ralph barreled out onto the patio, she smiled toward him — a quick, kindly parting of her lips — and ducked, with Cecil under her arm, into the gatehouse.
Ralph raced forward to join them, but then halted in shock.
The very idea was preposterous, but nonetheless he was sure of it: The giant tree had moved. It had taken him a minute’s walk to reach it earlier that day, but now it dominated the clearing just beyond the perimeter of the castle, its trunk mere steps from his gatehouse. In the evening light the tree’s form was a ragged black shape cut out of the sky, its huge branches galaxies gone dark within the swaths of stars. It swayed in a breeze Ralph couldn’t otherwise detect, and those flicks of its branches seemed preparations for a grander movement, the pawing of a bull.
Ralph broke into a sprint toward the gatehouse, watching as the tree’s rapidly doubling girth grew to meet him. He threw open the front door and dashed inside just before the tree’s fluid trunk surrounded the gatehouse entirely.
The gatehouse interior was absolutely black. When he flicked on the switch by the door, no light came on.
“Hello?” Ralph risked calling. But there was no answer. He listened for footfalls — nothing. He wished, suddenly, that he had gone to the Battersby parents for help before dashing into the gatehouse.
He groped the dusty floorboards until his fingers curled around the flashlight he had packed (like any enterprising techie) into his luggage. He flicked it on.
Though nothing was missing, and nothing added, the gatehouse had nevertheless changed. The walls, for one thing. Where they had been perfectly vertical before, they now bowed in at the top, as if the rectangular house had recently made a slapdash attempt at becoming a cone.
Ralph did a visual circuit of the diminished borders of his room. The ceiling had been pinched closed like a pastry crust. The curtained windows had twisted and narrowed but not shattered; the bookcases — and, yes, Ralph gasped to discover, even the books on them — had shrunk at the tops. He gripped the flashlight between his teeth and opened a worn Forster. The book fell open with trapezoid pages. Even the dust he blew away from the top seam was a degree finer than that at the bottom.
It was unquestionably bizarre, but he wasn’t totally unnerved. His life over the past week had twisted so rapidly that this latest happening seemed merely the next progression into oddity. But he did feel that if an adventure was so clearly beginning, he ought to change out of his smelly T-shirt before going any further. He donned his whitest pair of underwear, slacks, and a dress shirt, tried to brush his teeth until he realized there was no water (the bathroom spigot had pertly turned up its nose during the transformation), and applied fresh deodorant before trying the front door.
It wouldn’t open. Not only wouldn’t it open, but it didn’t offer any of the slight budge even locked doors give. Ralph stared groggily at the offending door. How else did one leave a gatehouse, if not by the exit? There was the chimney, but peering up with the flashlight, he saw it had narrowed to a handsbreadth at the top, and that wherever the opening led, there was no daylight. That left the windows. Ralph approached one and threw back the curtain.
Wood.
It was dynamic, all waves and crests, like the tree had bubbled into the frame and frozen there. Ralph tried to open the window, but the warped panes of glass shattered and fell away. He reached a hand out to the exposed wood. It was moist with sap and as sharp as the end of a freshly broken branch. Ralph retreated from the window, huddled on the floor against a windowless wall, and hugged his knees to his chest, all the time nervously circling the room’s dim corners with his flashlight.
Eventually he regained the presence of mind to use his cell phone. Of course there wasn’t any reception from within a tree. Regardless, he wrote a text, using a macro he had programmed to have it sent automatically should the phone ever get reception:
BEAT/DAPH: SOS SOS IN TREE CHASING CECIL AND CHESS COME HELP. RALPH
Much as he tried to control them, his breaths came quicker and quicker. He had seen Chessie and Cecil enter this very gatehouse, and if they were no longer here, there had to be some way out.
The only room Ralph hadn’t investigated was the bathroom. When he carried the flashlight inside, raised the blind, and forced open the window, he found a narrow opening in the wood. It was like a branch turned inside-out, lengths of bark facing into an envelope-sized void. And at the end was a patch of stars, seen as if at the end of a telescope.
Ralph stood on the toilet seat and tried his shoulders against the narrow window frame. He would just fit. After rushing back to the bed and extracting his pet rock Jeremiah from under the mattress, he stuck his head in the tunnel, experienced a wave of claustrophobia, and decided to go feet first.
The shimmy out the window wasn’t too unpleasant, actually — the tree helped him along in small contractions. By the time he was halfway out, though, he could no longer see anything of the gatehouse. Ralph was comforted by a breeze on his ankles. Once he could kick his feet in the air, he slid forward and let himself come free.
CHAPTER XIV
He experienced a second’s terrifying freefall. Instead of hitting earth at the end of it, as he had expected, he hit a branch. He fell heavily on his ribs and barely wrapped his arms around the broadly curved surface in time to prevent himself from falling again. He looped his arms more firmly around the branch and peered down.
The tree
had gone from merely enormous to gigantic. The base of its circumference would now take minutes to walk around. The top of the trunk formed a horizon with the starry sky, disappearing at the limits of Ralph’s vision.
The Battersby castle was gone, just gone. There weren’t even ruined foundations where it had once been; it was as if the whole building had been sucked into the tower of wood.
A dozen feet above his head, he could see the ragged exit from his bathroom and then, even higher, a brick corner of the gatehouse emerging from between mottled bark lips.
He looked back down. The Battersbys’ cars had been hurled to their sides next to the tree, submerged up to their hoods in the trunk. The gravel road twisted where it neared the chaotic scene, broken into shreds like the tines of a mashed fork.
Gazing back up, all Ralph could see was a highway of bark.
Steeling himself, he grasped the next higher branch. Once he had secured his footing, he grasped the next branch and nervously heaved himself over. The limbs came frequently enough that he would be able to climb the entire tree this way, proceeding from branch to branch, rungs on an overgrown playground toy.
His muscles soon began to ache (for few boys who set up wireless networks are also made for climbing trees), and by the time he was a half minute’s fall from the earth, his arms and legs were burning.
As he continued climbing in the summer air, Ralph noticed the trunk narrowing — he was a mile into the sky, but nearing the top.
He looked up and saw clouds eclipsed by the silhouette of a large boxy building perched among the branches near the top. Cement and stones hung beneath its foundation like veins of a dismembered limb. The trunk swayed more and more violently as Ralph neared the Battersby castle.
By the time Ralph had struggled through a thin cloud layer to the bottom edge of the castle, he was swinging as much as a star slapped on a Christmas tree. He choked back vertigo as he crawled along a branch into a hole in the building’s basement. After cautiously shimmying up the end of the bending limb, Ralph hurled himself onto the broken floor.
