by Colin Meloy
Silence followed. Brendan: “Who’s there? Name yourself!”
The lump of feathers quivered slightly where it lay. Finally, its long neck rose from its body, like the articulating antenna of a lunar rover, at the top of which was the stately beak of a heron. The bird shook its head and picked at the dirt that had sullied its wing.
“Are you okay?” This was Curtis, having recovered from the surprise.
The heron’s response was unexpected; it was defensive, embarrassed. “I’m fine, thanks,” it said acidly. “Just fine.”
“Who are you?” called Brendan. “And what business do you have in Wildwood, waterbird?”
As if ignoring the Bandit King’s demands, the heron took its time pulling its long body from the snow. Curtis was awed by the majesty of the creature; by the time it had bloomed to its full height, it was like a metamorphosis had taken place. What had been a dirty gray lump on the ground was suddenly the towering, graceful form of one of the most striking birds Curtis had ever seen: a long, slender-beaked head topped an S-curved neck that led to a great egg of a body, covered in long, lashlike, white and gray feathers, all supported by two spindly legs. Stretching its neck to its full height to take in its new surroundings, the bird stood easily as tall as Curtis.
“My name is Maude,” replied the heron finally. “And I’ve been sent by the Crown Prince of the Avians.” The bird swiveled her head to look directly into Curtis’s eyes. “I’ve come for you, boy. Your friend, the girl McKeel, seems to be in grave danger.”
By the time the car’s wheels had left the familiarity of the pavement and began crunching along the wet gravel of the artery road, the passengers had grown silent. Elsie Mehlberg, nine years old, fiddled with the shoulder strap of her seat belt and watched her parents as their faces grew progressively more sallow and concerned. She could tell they were struggling with the decision they’d made—but what choice did they have? Elsie didn’t blame them. And while her older sister, Rachel, had put up more of a fight when the plan was initially presented to them, in the end she’d begrudgingly agreed.
The snow had given way to a heavy, cold rain, and the drops made thick streaks down the car’s backseat window, distorting the already imposing metal buildings into bulging and fractured shapes. They’d crossed the boundary into the Industrial Wastes some time ago. It was a place Elsie’d never been; it was cold and ominous. The rusted white chemical tanks that lined the gravel roads, with their winding staircases and wiry tresses of plumbing, looked almost science fiction in their otherworldliness. Somewhere, deep inside this nest of clattering machinery, she imagined bearded dwarves at work, long removed from the sunshine of the above-world—only instead of broadswords and battle-axes, they were making refrigerator doors and motorcycle camshafts.
Elsie looked back again to her father in the driver’s seat as he navigated the family sedan through the Wastes’ narrow roads. There were filigrees of gray hair at his temples; Elsie was sure they hadn’t been there the summer before. And those deep creases that made a kind of canyon landscape on his brow—certainly those were new as well.
All since her brother’s disappearance.
The initial shock had been tremendous; a fog had descended over the house. Whatever joy had previously lived under that roof had all but disappeared. And Elsie hated her brother for it. First had come the police. They squatted down on the living room furniture like elephants in polyester and scribbled down little notes while her mother and father tearfully repeated everything they remembered since the last time Curtis had been seen. Then came the reporters, the news cameramen, the rubbernecking neighbors walking by the picture window and peering in at their broken, desperate family. Finally, Lydia, Elsie’s mom, had drawn the curtains to block out the inquisitive, and the windows remained that way for months. The living room, all through the fall, stayed as dark and shadowed as their hearts. Elsie’s dad, David, became withdrawn and spent hours on end in his home office, standing vigil on a variety of internet message boards, imploring anyone who would listen to help him find his son. Elsie would sit up at night in her bed, listening to her parents’ hushed conversations in the room next door, and would alternately curse her brother and plead for him to return. “C’mon, Curtis,” she’d whisper. “Just quit it already. Come home.”
So when Elsie’s dad came running into the kitchen from his office one day, announcing he’d gotten a lead, that someone in Istanbul, Turkey—of all places—had seen a young American boy who fit Curtis’s description on the streets of this ancient city, the entire family erupted into a fit of unbridled celebration. It wasn’t until they began investigating the cost of airfare and lodging that it was decided that the two girls, Elsie and Rachel, would have to stay in Portland while the elder Mehlbergs flew to Turkey to search for their son. And where would the girls stay? Without a suitable family member in town to take them in, the only option was the local orphanage, where, for a reasonable price, a desperate parent could board his or her children for however much time was needed.
“The Jamisons did it with their kids when they went on that scuba vacation,” was all the reassurance the two younger Mehlbergs were given.
And so here they were, slowly winding the labyrinthine byways of the Industrial Wastes, to arrive at the Joffrey Unthank Home for Wayward Youth. A neon sign shone in the dim light ahead of them, advertising as much—with the helpful addendum below it, a flickering string of words that seemed to be at the mercy of a lesser power source: AND INDUSTRIAL MACHINE PARTS.
Rachel, who’d remained silent the entire journey, looked up and gasped when the building came into view. Her pale face appeared briefly from between the twin curtains of her long, straight black hair, and her thin shoulders shuddered beneath her threadbare Corrosion of Conformity T-shirt. “I can’t believe this,” she said quietly. She fiddled with the little tangle of dark bands that encircled her left wrist.
“Now, honey,” said Lydia from the front passenger seat, “we’ve been through this. We just don’t have any other options.” She craned her head to look at the two girls in the backseat. “Think of it this way: You’re doing your part in helping to find Curtis.”
“Right,” responded Rachel glumly.
“Whoa,” said Elsie, staring ahead through the whisks of the windshield wipers. “That place looks creepy.”
Silence followed as everyone in the car gave tacit agreement. The gravel drive the car was following finally cleared the rows of windowless metal buildings and chemical tanks to arrive at an open space, fenced in by a wall of chain-link fence. In the middle of the clearing stood a drab building, seemingly transported to the spot from another era. Its slate-gray stucco walls were stained by lichen and soot, a surface broken regularly by tall mullioned windows. The roof, shale shingles sporting an impressive growth of positively iridescent moss, sloped up to a crest topped by a clock tower. A heavy oak door loomed just beyond a jumble of untidy blackberry bushes. The neon sign pulsated noisily just above this door, a strange modern juxtaposition to the building’s decidedly nineteenth-century appearance.
A wave of nervousness overcame Elsie, and she reached down between her feet to undo the top zipper of her backpack. From within, she peeked the head of her Intrepid Tina™ doll from the bag and attempted a warm smile.
“It’s okay, Tina,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be just fine.” Intrepid Tina was made of hard plastic, and her blond hair was cropped in a bob at her neck. Elsie snaked her fingers down the back of Tina’s beige “Safari Sass” outfit to find the little button nub nestled between the doll’s shoulder blades. She gave it a push and was calmed to hear the following affirmation, muffled as it was, coming from the little recorder in Tina’s chest: “INTREPID GIRLZ NEVER SHY AWAY FROM THE PROMISE OF A NEW ADVENTURE!” Tina’s voice had a kind of tough rasp to it.
Elsie heard her sister sigh and looked over to see that Rachel was watching her askance through the strands of her hair. Elsie waited for a snarky reproach, Rachel’s usual res
ponse to having been within earshot when Elsie activated Intrepid Tina’s voice box, but none came. The situation really was so bad, Elsie thought, that even Rachel was inspired by Tina’s words.
Easing to a stop in front of the building, the Mehlbergs’ sedan idled for a moment before David turned the key and the engine sputtered into silence. The whistling of the wind, blowing down through the corridors between the Wastes’ structures, sounded through the car’s windows. David craned his head and looked at his two daughters in the backseat. “Just two weeks,” he said, attempting reassurance. “That’s all. Two weeks. And then we’ll be back for you.”
Elsie ran her fingers along the plastic flaxen hair of Intrepid Tina. Two weeks had never seemed like a longer span of time in her life.
CHAPTER 3
The Secret Language of Plants; North Wood Ho!; The Janitor’s Warning
With her long knitted scarf wrapped high around her face, Prue pretended momentarily that she was a Bedouin nomad, braving the vast expanse of some Saharan range, when in fact she was only walking aimlessly down Lombard Street. Given the circumstances, it did really seem like a preferable way of life. She wondered if Bedouin kids were forced to go to Bedouin school and memorize stuff like who invented the cotton gin and where penicillin came from. She guessed not. She supposed that Bedouin kids mostly just had camel races and learned how to find oases in the wild desert. She decided that she would Google Bedouins when she got home and see if there wasn’t any way she could volunteer to be one.
In the meantime, she found herself wandering the cold streets of St. Johns, her home neighborhood in this northernmost part of Portland, Oregon. It was February; even at this hour—barely four o’clock—the light was really beginning to fade. The streets were wet from the previous morning’s fall of slush, and Prue kicked idly at the puddles as she walked. It was too cold to ride her bike, she decided, but she had desperately needed to get out of the house. All this talk of expectation and promise and disheartening behavior was really driving her crazy. It almost drove her to fall further away from what her parents and teachers wanted. For the first time in her life, she was feeling the nagging pull of adulthood, and she did not like it one bit.
She cut a corner across an empty lot, heading west, and suddenly she found herself where she’d often been finding herself, these many long, listless weeks: standing on the bluff overlooking the Willamette River and the Impassable Wilderness just beyond.
She laughed to herself; the Impassable Wilderness. A thick blanket of towering green trees covered this long, ambling expanse of land, stretching out in either direction. A haze of low clouds settled amid the branches, and a wind blew chilly through the gorge the river made. From this distance, their voices were too far off to make out. The trees’ voices.
That had been a change; on returning from the Wood, after that great adventure she’d been thrown into at the beginning of the fall, she’d expected her life to return to a level burble of normalcy. Mac was home, their family reunited—all should be fine, right? It wasn’t long, however, before she began to notice the murmuring. The voices were familiar; they were the same timbre and pitch as the voices that had come to her at that frenzied moment, those months before, as the Dowager Governess had held Mac in her hand and had come so close to ending his life and beginning the ravage of the ivy. They were the mumblings of the natural world around her. The chiming voices of the trees and the plants.
She’d expected to leave this incredible new insight behind, once she’d left the boundary of the Wood, but she soon found that even her family’s most dormant and unassuming houseplants, when appropriately provoked, were happy to speak to her—even if their “speaking” was totally unintelligible. They were half-throated, wordless whispers, these voices, and they seemed to originate deep within the recesses of her ear canal. And while the voices did not codify into understandable words, after a time Prue found she was able to intuit a kind of emotion in the noises. A quick census of her house’s many leafy occupants showed a dizzying array of personalities: the succulents gave a kind of grumpy and standoffish PHHHT; the palm in the bathroom, an ebullient KRRRRK! The sword fern in the living room had a sort of lonesome whistle, while the potted vinca that sat on top of the bookshelf in the dining room was always snippy (VRT! VRT!) when approached, though Prue chalked that up to the infrequency with which her parents remembered to water it. Much to her chagrin, Prue’s mother brought home a basket of ivy over Christmas, and the stuff had positively hissed at Prue.
All in all, however, the plants mostly kept to themselves, and it didn’t take long for Prue to go from feeling almost certain that she was going crazy to a kind of surrender to her new (and much weirder) reality.
She nestled her scarf to her cold cheeks and watched the mist filter down through the weave of trees on the far side of the river. That would be Wildwood, she thought. She wondered what had transpired since she’d left, what incredible shifts and changes had occurred to forward the fate of that miraculous place. Her eyes followed the snow-dappled ridgeline down, across a field of chemical tanks in the Industrial Wastes, and over the river to a tawny field directly below the bluff. There, she saw something very strange.
Initially she thought it was just a weird shadow, cast from a puff of smoke or from a high-flying bird. But as the mists curled and cleared, she could tell the shadow was in fact the form of an animal. Yes: The more she squinted, the clearer the thing came into view.
It was a jet-black fox.
And it was staring right at her.
A violent noise suddenly exploded in her ears, the unmistakable sound of the rackety fauna. It came from the thicket of Scotch broom that sprouted from a rocky outcrop below the bluff’s edge. No words formed; the noise was abstract, a deafening raspy shushing, and it seemed to wipe out all hearing, like a crashing wave or television static pushed to its highest volume. Prue’s hands went instinctively to her ears, though it did little to lessen the sound. She stumbled backward, feeling her mouth issue a muted scream, her every nerve shocked by the intensity of the noise as it grew louder and louder. Something caught her heel, and she was pinwheeling downward, footless. A jolt of pain shot up her spine as her tailbone made contact with the rough ground.
The noise blotted out everything; Prue promptly lost consciousness.
All was darkness.
All was darkness.
This was because Curtis had his eyes squeezed as closed as they possibly could be. His mouth was fixed in a rictus grin, so great was his effort to keep any visible sunlight from getting past his eyelids. That way, he stood a chance of pretending that he wasn’t flying. He could more easily pretend that the wind that was currently ruffling the fur of his chin-strapped ushanka and whipping at his clothing and chilling his cheeks was not from flying; no, it was just a heavy wind blowing—it was February, after all. And that feathery texture that he had gripped in his fingers so tightly? Perhaps it was a pillow—a cozy, goose-down pillow—giving up its dander. And that bit of turbulence? That certainly wasn’t from flying. It was…
He peeked his eyes open.
He was flying.
“RAMMING SPEED!” hooted Brendan as his mount, the long, lithe egret who’d accompanied the heron, took a sudden dive to buzz Curtis’s furry hat. Curtis panicked and gripped his fingers tighter to the heron’s neck. They were far above the trees now; those towering Douglas firs looked like leafy, snow-covered toothpicks from this height. The vista stretched on into the distance; the sun, setting low behind a deep veil of clouds, graced these high flyers with the day’s last light.
“Ouch!” shouted Maude, the heron. “Not so tight around the neck, please.”
“I’m s-sorry!” Curtis shouted back, tears streaming down his face. He couldn’t tell whether the tears were from the wind or from his very genuine fear. “I’m just not that good with heights!”
“Why didn’t you say that before we left?” the exasperated bird replied.
“It didn’t seem appropriate!�
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“It didn’t seem what?” The wind was very loud. It made for difficult conversation.
“It didn’t seem …,” Curtis began, but he was cut off by another of Brendan’s loud, celebratory WOOPS! The egret and the bandit had flown ahead by several bird lengths and had just executed a terrifying-looking loop-the-loop; they again fired directly over Curtis’s head, causing him to bury his face into the down of the heron. “I wish he would stop doing that,” said Curtis.
“Just relax!” said Maude. “You’re too tense! It’s throwing off my pitch!”
A clutch of song sparrows erupted from a mist-shrouded piece of the canopy, causing Maude to bank sharply to the right. Curtis squealed.
“GAH!” he cried. “Can you not do that, please?”
“You mean this?” asked Maude. She banked again, this time more severely. They were now just skimming along the highest tips of the trees. A sputter of snow sprayed across Curtis’s clenched face.
“YES! THAT!” he responded.
The heron, tired of the game, ascended to a more comfortable cruising altitude and began to glide. The turbulence passed, and Curtis was able to relax his grip on the bird. “So where are we going again?” he asked.
“To the Great Hall in North Wood,” replied Maude. “A clandestine meeting has been called.”
“A meeting with who?”
The bird sighed. “If I knew that, it wouldn’t be terribly clandestine, now would it?”
“But why us?” asked Curtis, perplexed.
The egret pulled up alongside the heron. “Yes, waterbird,” called Brendan, “why have we been summoned? Why should bandits be called to a secret meeting among the North Wooders?”
The heron looked over at Brendan. “How quickly you forget the lessons of the Battle for the Plinth!” she scolded. “Are you not still a Wildwood Irregular?”
