Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  "Later," he mumbled, his cheeks burning. "I'll take care of it later."

  He followed Thor and Grim out of the workshop, across the echoing treasury, and through the door to the spiral corridor—this time, of course, they just opened it and walked on through. They glanced up and down the arcing hall, but there was neither sound nor sign of ferisher—the whole mob, the giant said, had trooped out into the fields for their games. Quickly they ran down and around, and around, and around, past all the doors they had passed on their way up, until at last the corridor ran out, and they were face-to-face with the great oak door of the cell. Thor laid his hands against the wood, and closed his eyes—and the door swung open. Grim grinned as Thor jumped back with a cry.

  "No need to wear yourself out with scamperings," he said. "I know the door grammers, took it right—oh."

  Ethan and Thor crowded in behind him, and stood there, gaping at the jumble of empty straw pallets that were all that it contained.

  "Come on," said Thor. "Let's get scampering."

  CHAPTER 16

  A Rat in the Walls

  "I'M SICK OF THIS!" said Jennifer T. "What happened to those guys? Where are they?"

  The lone candle had nearly burned down; there was no way to know how long they had been waiting in the semi-darkness, but it felt like hours.

  "They were probably captured," Spider-Rose said gloomily.

  "Then why didn't they bring them back here?"

  "Maybe they gave them to Grimalkin John. They sometimes do that with the ill-behaved ones."

  "Grimalkin John?" Jennifer T. said. "A giant?"

  "The tiniest giant in the Summerlands," Spider-Rose said. "He's no bigger than your friends are themselves. Mostly we has him around to keep down the mice and rats, better than a cat. Powerful hungry for rats, he is. Clever with his hands, too."

  There was a low moan from the ferisher in the corner. Taffy was kneeling alongside him, mopping his brow with a damp rush, but it was clear that Cinquefoil was past any relief that cool water could provide. He had shrunk visibly, inward rather than in length, his chest collapsing and chin sinking down. His skin had turned the yellowy gray of a very old bruise, and felt leathery and dry to the touch. His feet had curled like the corners of a burning page. Meanwhile his wounded hand had swollen to four or five times its normal size, the tiny fingers protruding from it like teats from an udder; the sight of it turned her stomach.

  "Well, then we just got to get ourselves out of this," Jennifer T. said. "We have a better chance of finding a piece of ashwood out there in the world than we do in here."

  "How do you propose we do that?" Taffy said. The long hours of captivity seemed to have stirred glum memories of her years as the house pet of Mooseknuckle John. She sat, idly dribbling water across the ferisher's brow and staring off into shadows as if seeing in the faces of her long-dead children.

  "You." Jennifer T. looked at Spider-Rose, who jumped. "Ferishers can scamper. I know they can, because Cinquefoil did it."

  "Maybe that one can," Spider-Rose said, shaking her head. "He's at least a thousand years old, and a chief, and a very great athlete besides. I'm just a kid. I can't even work a proper grammer yet, not really. I'm not good at anything."

  Jennifer T. sat down on her pallet and then lay back. But she could not get comfortable—the crazy book her uncle Mo had given her was poking her in the behind. That crazy hook. Half-idly, with a snort of disgust with herself for even entertaining the idea, she sat up again and took out The Wa-He-Ta Brave's Official Tribe Handbook. Maybe there was something in the lockpicking section again, or a recipe for explosives using only dried rushes and Sasquatch spit. She smiled grimly to herself, paging through the old handbook, wondering what in the hell had become of Ethan Feld. She found the chapter on lockbreaking, and held the book toward the guttering light of the last candle, but there was nothing of any use that she could see. She flipped through the next few chapters, devoted in turn to earning Feathers in Boat-Craft, Knife-Throwing, and Building Igloos and Snow Houses, which might come in handy, she thought, if they ever did find themselves in the Winterlands. She had to hand it to those lame old Wa-He-Ta guys—even with all the fake Indian stuff, those kids must have had some fun. There was even a whole chapter for those who hoped to earn a Feather in De-Ghosting a Haunted House. This chapter featured sections on poltergeists, knockers, specters and revenants, with a number of ghoulish illustrations, and, toward the end, detailed discussions of such common haunted-house features as Shifting Staircases, False Panels, and…

  "Secret Passages," she whispered.

  "Eh?" Taffy said. "What's that?"

  Jennifer T. got up and, carrying the handbook, began searching the walls of the cell for what the book described as Telltale Signs of a Secret Passage. "Look for a section of the wall," the anonymous author had written, "or, as it may be, of the ceiling, which is of a different shade or hue, however slightly, than the rest." The walls of their cell were whitewashed, but quite poorly, and not recently, and so they were fairly awash in patches of different hues—in fact you might almost have said that no two stretches of sloping wall were quite the same shade of white. The next recommended technique was, of course, tapping. Jennifer T. knelt down at the bottom of the wall by the door and began to tap, working her way up and down, using the spine of the handbook itself, listening for that Telltale Hollowness. Taffy, catching on to what Jennifer T. had in mind, started on the other side of the door and began to rap with her hairy knuckles, working herself around the room in the other direction.

  "I get what you're looking for okay," Spider-Rose said. "But it isn't going to work. I been poking around this old hump a dirt these last hundred and seven years and I would—hey."

  "Shh!" hissed Jennifer T., though Spider-Rose, having heard the same extraordinary sound, had already fallen silent. At the bottom of the wall, where it met the floor, just a little to the right of Cinquefoil's poor curled-up feet, Jennifer T. held the book tightly between her fingers and tapped, once, twice, three times. And there it was again: tap-tap-tap, as if somebody on the other side of the wall were tapping back.

  "Is there another cell on the other side of that wall?" Taffy wondered.

  Spider-Rose shook her head, her eyes wide, her mouth a tiny dot.

  "Could it be rats?" Jennifer T. was kicking now at the spot at the bottom of the wall whence the tapping had come. It seemed to her that the spot on the wall distinctly kicked back. "You said there are rats in this place?"

  "Precious few," said Spider-Rose. "That Grim the Giant is crazy about rat. Rat kebab. Rat goulash."

  "Rat goulash," said Jennifer T. Though she had never tasted goulash of any kind, its name, encountered in books or on television, had always struck her as highly suspicious. She was not at all surprised to learn that it could be made from rat meat. "Yuck."

  "In any case," Taffy remarked, "rats are certainly intelligent creatures, but they are not, so far as I am aware, capable of counting to three."

  With a crunch of plaster, and a pebbly scrabbling of dirt, Jennifer's T. foot disappeared into the wall. A small, scratchy voice said, "Oh, hell," and then a moment later a little black snout appeared, tipped with a moist black droplet of a nose, whiskers aquiver.

  "What you know about rats, Bigfoot," said the creature, stepping into the room, slapping the dust from his breeches, "wouldn't fill the jockstrap of a weevil, I'm sure."

  It was, Jennifer T. would have said, a very small man, perhaps one-half as tall as a ferisher—but a man with the tail, narrow snout, whiskers, and tufted, softly curling ears of a rat. He walked upright, though with a stoop, and had an impressive pot belly.

  "Dick Pettipaw!" Spider-Rose said. "You stinking thief! I should have known!"

  "And I should have strangled you in your cradle when I had the chance, but there you have it, life is nothing but a string of missed opportunities."

  "A wererat," said Jennifer T.

  "A thieving wererat. Been raiding our larders for years."
>
  "True enough," said Pettipaw. "And here today for the very same purpose. Though one look at you lot and I can see the day's fun is spoilt. What's wrong with this ferisher, then? Ironshot, is he? Alas, alas. What a pity." He didn't sound sorry in the least. He crept forward, and peered curiously, snout aquiver, at Cinquefoil. "Not one of you rustic lot, by the look of him, neither, though it's hard enough to tell with him all shriveled up that way." He turned his attention now to Taffy and Jennifer T., tugging thoughtfully on a whisker. One of his eyes, Jennifer T. noticed now, was covered in a dashing silk patch, purple trimmed with black. "A ferisher princess, a Sasquatch, and a reuben girl. Interesting assortment. Not the usual fare, to be sure. I don't doubt but what you all have some connection to that rattling bucket of reuben enginery I passed on my way into the hillside."

  "Our car," Jennifer T. said. "Listen, Mr. Pittypat or whatever your name is. How wide is that tunnel of yours?"

  "Wide enough to fit you, I'd wager, and these ferishers. But your hirsute companion would have herself a difficult time."

  "It doesn't matter," Taffy said, sinking into a corner. "Leave me."

  "No," Jennifer T. said. "No way." She grabbed hold of the sides of the hole she had kicked in the wall and began to pull at the edges. The plastering was thin here, and in a rush of small stones and root-choked earth she succeeded in widening the hole enough to get her head and shoulders through. It was surprisingly dark in the tunnel behind the wall—no light entered from the cell—but she felt around, and confirmed what the wererat had told them. There was just enough room for someone as large as herself. She crawled backward into the cell and discovered the reason for the darkness in the tunnel—the last candle in the cell had finally gone out.

  "Well, that's it then," Spider-Rose said. "Stuck in the dark till they come to change the tapers. Who knows when that will be."

  "You may be stuck," the wererat said. "But I can see perfectly well, thank you. Some of us are more fortunately gifted than others, perhaps. And now, if you ladies will excuse me, I'll just be—"

  Jennifer T. sat down, hard, in front of the hole in the wall. Her back just managed to block it, with perhaps an inch to spare on either side.

  "Wait a minute," she said. The wererat's mention of his gifts had triggered something in her memory. "You're a wererat. Part rat, part human."

  "That's a distasteful way of putting it," Dick Pettipaw said, sounding offended. "Now get out of my way."

  "Are wererats like werefoxes?"

  "Are reubens like baboons? No, don't answer that, you'll only hurt your own feelings. But, yes, we're part of the greater kinship of the werebeasts. Shaped by the playful hand of the Changer, a very, very long time ago."

  "Then you know how to scamper! Don't you?"

  "No."

  Jennifer T. had been feeling quite excited by the idea of getting Pettipaw to scamper them right out of the cell. Now her heart sank.

  "But I thought that all creatures who—who are…" She didn't want to offend the creature again, not if they were going to need his help.

  "Not me," came the brusque reply. "Never bothered to learn."

  "He's lying," Taffy growled out of the darkness. "He does it all the time. His heartbeat, the timbre of his voice—believe me, I know. I can hear lies." The Sasquatch's voice turned acid. " 'Some of us are more fortunately gifted than others, perhaps.'"

  There followed, in the darkness of the ferisher cell, a prolonged silence.

  "When I was passing that rangabang heap of yours," the wererat said at last, "it seemed to me that my mighty organ of olfaction detected a distinct odor of Braunschweiger sausage."

  "It's yours," Jennifer T. said at once. "Just help us find our friends, and then when we get to the car, you can have everything we've got."

  "Nope," the wererat said. "It's straight to the 'car' and the liverwurst, or nothing. Your friends will have to find their own way out."

  Jennifer T was about to say no—she couldn't imagine leaving her friends lost or recaptured, somewhere in the knoll—when Taffy spoke up again.

  "Don't forget, girl," Taffy said. "That boy, Thor, he can scamper right out of this hill anytime he wants. Maybe he already has."

  "True," Jennifer T. said. "All right, then."

  It took a few minutes to arrange themselves in the dark. Jennifer T. had to feel her way carefully, keeping her body between herself and Pettipaw in case he decided to make a break for the tunnel. The wererat pressed himself against the far wall of the cell, where his shadowtail sense detected a thin shoot of the Tree leading out.

  Jennifer T. reached toward him and her hand settled, with a start, on a patch of long, coarse fur, under which she could feel the delicate bones of his shoulder. A moment later Jennifer T. felt Taffy's great hand feel its way onto her own shoulder. The Sasquatch was cradling Cinquefoil in her other arm. The ferisher's breathing sounded low and rattling and frighteningly slow in Jennifer T.'s ears.

  "Ready, then?" the wererat said. He sighed. "All this bother for a Braunschweiger sandwich."

  Jennifer T. could feel him shaking his head at his own greed. Then all at once the dark around them turned very cold. She followed him forward, and there was a tinkling of ice. In the corner of her eye, something flickered. She stopped.

  "Keep moving!" Pettipaw snapped. "You must never stop when you're scampering! Keep moving!"

  The darkness through which they moved had begun to shiver. Great dazzling cracks of color, green and blue and gold, broke through the darkness like veins in a leaf or forks of lightning. The colors starred the darkness. They broke the darkness into bright little squares and patches. They were patches, she thought, of the outside world, but they were scattered, like pieces of a puzzle. And somehow the patches had a different look or feel, as if they were the pieces perhaps of two different puzzles jumbled together. And through the jumble of world and darkness three figures moved, shadowy silhouettes walking in single file.

  "Keep moving!" the wererat cried. "We're losing our way!"

  "There's—there's someone there!" said Jennifer T. "They're coming this way!"

  One of the figures, she saw, was carrying something in its hand, a kind of wand of light. As the figures drew nearer, the wand of light burned brighter and brighter, throwing out light in all directions. The patches of tree green and sky blue began to whirl around each other, mingling with purple and yellow and orange and red. The darkness dissolved in the swirl of color and light until it was spinning all around, a great rushing swirl of color in bands like the glowing stripes of Jupiter, and the light from the wand flowered and burst over everything. Jennifer T.'s ears hummed, and a burnt smell like tar filled her nostrils. The ground began to rumble and shift under feet, and she lost her balance and fell with a cry, throwing out her hands to break her fall. In the instant before the light of the wand filled every last corner of her vision she had the strange sensation of clutching two thick tufts of grass in her fingers.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Research of Mr. Feld

  CUTBELLY THE WEREFOX HAD SPENT a good portion of his very long life observing the habits and behavior of the interesting creatures known in the Far Territories of the Summerlands as reubens. As a shadowtail he had done a fair amount of traveling to the Middling. He had seen more of it than any reuben ever had, that much was certain. He had seen war and torment. He had seen illness and destruction. He had seen a lot of sad sights. But he had never seen anything quite like the case of Bruce Feld, Ph. D.

  "Here," the werefox said, backing into the laboratory, carrying a tray laid with caribou-butter tea and a plate of those rude Winterlands biscuits known as cracknuckles. The makeshift laboratory in the bowels of the steam-sledge Panic rattled and lurched. The beakers and glass pipes chimed steadily, a carillon that never ceased. Cutbelly had often wondered if it were not the endless ringing of all those damned tubes and pipes that had finally driven Bruce Feld mad. "I brought you something to eat."

  "No time," Mr. Feld said. He did not tak
e his eyes from the flask whose contents he was heating with an autoclave. The autoclave (a kind of super-pressure cooker used by chemists), and all of the other fancy equipment in the laboratory, had been manufactured by Coyote's grayling smiths, to Mr. Feld's exact specifications. Coyote's plan was founded on Middling science. So his toxin-delivery system had to be created by Middling means. Except, of course, for the fact that all the electricity was provided by Coyote's herd of thunder buffalo. And except for the fact that the flasks and beakers had been blown by fire gnomes, and the tools wrought from walrus bone and Winterlands weird-iron.

  "You have to eat something, reuben," Cutbelly said. "What good will it do your son to see you again if you've starved yourself to death first?"

  "Later," Mr. Feld said. His conversation, never plentiful, had long since dried up completely. An elaborate skyline of glassware separated him from his assistant. "I'm in the middle of a trial."

  "Which trial?"

  "Number five hundred and twenty-seven," Mr. Feld said. "Get ready."

  Dutifully Cutbelly set down the tray and scurried over to a wooden table in a corner of the lab. As Mr. Feld's assistant, his only real duties consisted of taking down Mr. Feld's laboratory notes and trying without success to get him to eat. Mr. Feld had been working nonstop for ages, without taking more than a nibble of a cracknuckle now and then, and a sip of caribou-butter tea here or there. He slept less than Cutbelly, and werefoxes need very little sleep.

  Exhaustion had made deep bruises under Mr. Feld's eyes. His beard grew at Winterlands speed, half an inch per day, and it was a wild tangle. Someone had found him a real lab coat, and he wore it all the time. Because all he ever did was work.

  "I observe picofiberization and it appears to be quite evenly distributed," he said in the dry, high, nasal voice he used when he was dictating his notes to Cutbelly. P-fib distrib Cutbelly wrote. Even. Mr. Feld held the beaker up to eyelevel and tipped it back and forth. The clear liquid it had once contained had turned a pale white color and thickened like a pudding on the cool. Mr. Feld poked at it with the tip of a long, thin probe. Inset into the bone handle of the probe was a spring-loaded gauge with a red wire needle. The probe slid in with ease but then when Mr. Feld tried to remove it, the thick white stuff refused to let go. Mr. Feld had to set the beaker down, clamp it to a brace, and jerk the probe out with both hands. "Auto-adhesion index off the chart," he said.