by Colin Meloy
“Clear as windshield,” said Desdemona.
“And you’ll see that it’s been initialed, right there at the bottom, by a certain …” Unthank screwed up his face to decipher the writing. “D. M. Your father, I presume?”
“David,” said Elsie flatly. “Yeah. But I don’t really know what that all means. How could he know?”
“And besides, they were in a big hurry—they had to catch a plane,” said Rachel. “There’s no way they would agree to this. You’ll see.”
“Hmm,” hemmed Unthank. “We will see, won’t we? For example, we’ll see how much traction that line of argument gets in a court of law.” He shook the document in their faces briefly before returning it to the filing cabinet. Back in front of the line of girls, he clapped his hands.
“Now,” he said, “let’s get started. I’ll need a volunteer.”
The girls remained silent. Unthank was standing at the dentist chair, wiping imagined dust from the seat cushion. “Anyone?” he asked. “Very well.” His finger pointed at the girls, he began counting off: “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo.”
The last word landed on Martha. She steeled herself and said: “I’m ready.”
“Very brave,” said Unthank. “Very brave indeed. Now, if you wouldn’t mind climbing into this seat, we can begin.”
Desdemona stood guard over Rachel and Elsie as Martha did as the man instructed. Once she’d been settled into the chair, a worried look draped across her face, Unthank threw the clasps at her hands and feet. He smiled apologetically. “Just a precaution,” he explained. “Once bitten, twice shy, as they say. Can’t afford a runner.” His specimen confined to the chair, Unthank walked to the rows of bookshelves and began browsing the contents, murmuring to himself. He held a dog-eared black notebook in his hand and flipped the pages eagerly, his fingers dragging over the book’s words. Glancing back to the shelf, he grabbed a handful of bottles and returned to the desk, where he proceeded to combine the bottles’ contents with a mortar and pestle.
“What is he doing?” Elsie whispered, as if to herself. She was promptly shushed by Miss Mudrak.
Having made some sort of shiny green paste (he had lifted the pestle and studied the resulting mixture; he seemed satisfied with having made, to Elsie’s best approximation, toothpaste the color of snot), he stepped back to Martha in the chair. “Now,” he said, “I’m going to put this in your ear.”
Martha flinched, her eyes wild. She shuddered in her binds. “What is that stuff?”
“Relax,” said Unthank. “It’s just a mixture of thimbleberry, tannis root, and squirrel bile. With a little peanut butter to keep it binding.”
Elsie heard Rachel gag a little.
“Harmless,” Unthank said. “Perfectly harmless. I have a suspicion, though, that this impenetrable boundary that keeps swallowing my specimens is, at its root, a biological function. Applied to the ear canal, so as to be in contact with the tympanic membrane—which, as no doubt you know, is a center of balance and equilibrium and thus dictates navigation and direction—this salve should grant you the ability to pass beyond the boundary.” He spoke while he was applying the stuff to Martha’s ear; she wore a quiet grimace.
“What boundary?” asked Rachel. No sooner had the words left her mouth than Desdemona went to shush her; Unthank raised a hand to Miss Mudrak and responded.
“A very good question,” he said, scraping more of the paste from the bowl, “and one that has been my chief concern for these past many years. I think we’ve all, since time immemorial, assumed that the Impassable Wilderness was just that: an overgrown stretch of woods that no one would care to explore, let alone try to develop. We were all complicit in our ignorance. And those over-curious enough to make the journey were rewarded with being lost forever, or else journeying through a seemingly endless repetition of the same landscape for days and days before finally breaking through and finding themselves just where they’d started.” He added a final dollop to Martha’s other ear before standing back to study his work. “I’d heard the tales, I’d even interviewed some of the survivors. Yes, they are still around, a few of them. Takes a little bit of persuasion to get them to sing, but I have my ways.” Evidently satisfied with the amount of salve he’d applied to Martha’s ear, he returned to the desk and retrieved what Elsie saw to be a kind of shiny metal gun. “Now,” he said to Martha, “hold very still.”
Martha’s eyes widened. Unthank held the gun up to her earlobe and pressed the trigger. A little snap sounded, and Martha gave a shrill yelp. Unthank pulled his hand away and there, freshly affixed to Martha’s ear, was a small yellow tag attached to a silver stud.
“Next!” said Unthank.
The clasps were thrown open and Martha stumbled out of the chair. Back in line with Elsie and Rachel, she felt at the piercing she’d just been given. “What is it?” she asked.
“Looks like a price tag,” said Elsie.
“Careful,” said Desdemona. “It may infect. Don’t be touching.”
Unthank gestured Elsie to the chair. “Mademoiselle?” he said, affecting a gracious tone.
Rachel pushed Elsie aside. “I’ll go.”
“Good girl,” said Unthank. He helped Rachel to the chair. As he concocted a new salve, he continued his monologue. “Turns out, every survivor of the Impassable Wilderness has the same tale to tell: No matter how far they walked in the woods, they got the strange impression that they were not, in fact, going anywhere. Bizarre, huh?”
This question was directed to Rachel, who was confined to the chair. Unthank had come back from the desk with a bowl of brown mush, and he hovered the applicator above Rachel’s face as he spoke. “The olfactory sense. Very important.” He took a deep, dramatic inhalation through his nostrils. “Something we might take for granted. In all fairness, it tends to pale in comparison with the other human senses. However, I happen to have done extensive research on the importance of the olfactory, and I’m given to understand that the nasal cavity is a direct conduit to the brain. Ninety-three percent of our total perception relies on the way things smell. Did you know that? I sure didn’t. But armed thus, I’ve got a good sense that were we to somehow treat that conduit with natural elements, harvested from the Impassable Wilderness itself, the perception of confinement would be dramatically altered, and, hopefully, allow the specimen to cross over, beyond what I’ve termed the Impenetrable Boundary.”
With that declaration, he promptly scooped up a bunch of the brown slime and shoved it, rudely, up Rachel’s nose. She sputtered helplessly.
“Mwat ith that stunff?” she said, talking around her slime-plugged nose.
“All natural. One hundred percent organic,” replied Unthank. “Pureed oyster mushroom, slug residue, and bark dust.”
Rachel had a horrified look on her face. “Slung wesidue?”
“Now,” said Unthank, taking up the piercing gun, “I have firsthand accounts—based on somewhat hazy conjecture, mind you—that there is a world existing beyond this boundary. An entire, vibrant, living world. One that we could see if only we were able to open our eyes to it. I don’t know what’s going on, or who’s running things in this forgotten country, but I have every intention of introducing them to the modern miracle that is free market capitalism. There will unlikely be any dissenters; if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a Titan of Industry, it’s that people love capitalism.” Without warning, he stuck the gun to Rachel’s ear and—snap—pierced her lobe with a yellow-tagged silver stud, identical to the one he’d given Martha. Rachel winced. “Provided they’re given the right incentives,” he qualified. He then undid the restraints on the dentist chair, and Rachel was returned to Martha and Elsie’s side, her nostrils brimful of a brown, brackish paste and a yellow tag hanging from her right ear. She looked miserable.
Then, like a barber preparing his stall for another customer, Unthank swiveled the chair to face Elsie. She felt a little push at her shoulder; it was Desdemona. Dutifully, Elsie climbed up onto the seat. Unthank’
s back was now to her; he was studying the jars on the shelf. He selected a small blue vial and brought it over to where Elsie sat. After twisting the cap open, he shook a tiny white ball, the size of a cake sprinkle, into the palm of his hand and held it at eye level.
“I’ve taken a single mote of dust that once graced the barbule of a feather retrieved from the Impassable Wilderness and diluted its essence one thousand times over with sterilized water; a single drop of that water has been placed on this tiny sugar pill, endowing it with the very memory of the place from whence the mote came. It is as sound as science gets; should my other experiments fail me, I have every confidence that this will give you the power to walk beyond the boundary and into the heart of this Wilderness.” He held the pill to Elsie’s mouth. “Open up, dear,” he said.
Elsie did so; Unthank dropped the pill into her mouth. It dissolved in a matter of seconds, leaving the fleeting taste of something sweet on her tongue. She, too, was given a piercing on her right ear—the sting felt like a sharp pinch—and returned to stand in a line with Martha and Rachel.
“Desdemona, if you would,” said Unthank as he wiped his hands clean on a nearby rag.
Miss Mudrak walked to the shelf and grabbed three of the unlabeled white boxes. She brought them over to Unthank, who proceeded to fiddle with the small black knobs on their faces. Then, taking a roll of white gaff tape, he placed a little square of the tape on each of the boxes and scrawled a few letters on them with a black marker. He set them each, carefully, on the desk next to the girls.
“I know what those are,” said Rachel. “Those are initials you just wrote.” With the brown paste stuffed into her nose, she sounded like she had a particularly bad head cold.
“Very intuitive,” said Unthank.
“Where’s Carl Rehnquist?” asked Martha.
“Carl Rehnquist?” Unthank paused in thought.
“Yeah, you know: C.R.”
“Right. Carl. That was last week, wasn’t it?” He stared at the shelf of white boxes, as if using them to jog his memory. “Copper,” he said finally. “A kind of copper wire crown. He wore it on his head. Sadly, didn’t work.” He took up his black notebook, and flipping to the back pages, he began to read: “Cynthia Schmidt: pine resin inhalant. Promising, that. Let’s see: William Hatfield. Oh yes: This was a good one. Underwear made of grape leaves. Went a little bit out on a limb there. Jenny Tummel, weighted shoes. Awfully sure of that one. Went to a lot of trouble building those shoes. Didn’t work.” He snapped the book closed and placed it back on his desk. “Every misstep, though, has led me closer to the true answer.”
“Tremendously brave, darling,” said Desdemona.
Unthank registered the compliment with a wan smile. He then surveyed the three girls like a sergeant sizing up his platoon. “You girls,” he said proudly, “are the front line of science and exploration. I salute you.” He abruptly held his hand to his forehead, his back rigid. “And now, unto the breach!”
They marched in single file, with Unthank leading and Desdemona taking up the rear. The three girls walked between the two adults, sullenly shuffling their feet through the gravel of the road that led from the Unthank Home. Rows of chemical tanks, with weird twisted plumbing extending from them like spiders’ legs, lined the way. Occasionally, some exhaust pipe in the distance would emit a giant fireball into the air, and the girls would spook at the noise. The air was thick with the smell of melted plastic; a chemical haze hung in the air and surrounded them like a heavy blanket. Elsie found herself coughing every dozen steps or so; the smog was so dense it felt like her lungs had been lined with Saran Wrap.
Finally, they reached a tall chain-link fence topped with Slinky-like coils of concertina wire. A gate barred their exit. Unthank undid a padlock and swung the gate open, letting the procession through before shutting it behind them. The distinctly man-made features of the Industrial Wastes stopped abruptly here at the fence line; beyond it was a wall of absolute green. They were on the border of the Impassable Wilderness.
The trees seemed to blot out the sky; Elsie couldn’t imagine any living thing could grow so tall. The in-between spaces were filled with a botanical garden’s worth of leafy things, of every imaginable hue of green, all dipped in bright white snow and growing into everything, as if the whole forest was caught in some kind of wild, familial embrace.
Unthank walked up the side of a culvert, just before the first row of trees. He peered into the woods, his hands on his hips. Elsie thought maybe he was looking for his other lost specimens, the children he’d sacrificed to the forest and its so-called impenetrable boundary. Instead, he looked down at the bracken at his feet and revealed a wooden stake that had been hammered into the frozen ground. Pulling a ball of twine from his pocket, he began spooling it out, measuring the length by his forearm. He made three such pieces of twine this way, attaching one end of each to the stake. Returning to Desdemona’s side, he grabbed the first of the three white boxes and began to adjust the dials. “R.M.—Rachel Mehlberg,” he said, “please step forward.”
She did so, her arms shivering beneath the army-issue trench coat each of the girls had been given for the event.
“This experiment requires one thing of its specimens. That you walk fifty yards into the woods and attempt to return to the very place you entered. You’ll have this piece of twine to measure the distance as well as to guide you back. I will be tracking you via the transponders. Should you attempt a very inadvisable escape, I will track you down, using your transponder, and you will be very sorry for your transgression. You no longer exist to the outside world; you are lost children. Your admission data has been erased and your records interred. Escape is not a judicious choice. However: If you return to me after walking the requisite fifty yards using the twine, I will be happy to grant you your freedom.”
Rachel and Elsie exchanged a look. Martha breathed deeply.
“Yes, you will be freed from the shackles of your internment at the Unthank Home, no longer forced to clean, scrape, and assemble minuscule yet inordinately expensive machine parts. Join another orphanage! Find your long-lost auntie Myra! Do what you please; on top of this, whatever money I manage to gross in the harnessing of this vast swath of natural resources, I will cut you in fifteen percent. In a trust fund, under your name. Accessible only by you. Your reward for having helped in such an enormous scientific and cultural breakthrough. How’s all that sound?”
The girls gave no answer. They were all looking straight ahead into the wild of the tree line.
“I’ll take your silence as consent,” he said, holding up one of the white boxes. “Now, Rachel Mehlberg, please take hold of one of the coils of twine and begin walking. Good luck and Godspeed.”
Rachel gave a final look to her sister before she began to walk. Elsie saw her eyes through the strands of her black hair; they were bright and scared. “Rachel,” Elsie said, “I’ll find you.” Rachel shuddered and turned away from the group. Taking up the frayed end of the twine, she began walking into the woods.
CHAPTER 12
The Uninvited Guest
The Long Hall was filled to the brim with revelers when Prue arrived at the party. A simple jug band had set up in the corner, and they were just bearing down on a frenetic tune: a grizzly with a washtub bass thumped a propulsive beat, and a girl with a banjo sang something about the long and lazy Balch Creek. Prue stood in the doorway briefly until someone waved her inside and offered her a steaming tankard of spiced cider. She was still perplexed by her meeting with the tree and the strange young Yearling; it wasn’t until Curtis had arrived at her side and had smacked her affectionately between the shoulder blades that she was able to shake the feeling.
“Hey,” he said, “welcome to the party. Now this is the way to celebrate an incredible life.” He raised his own tankard in a toast.
Several partygoers were clearing away tables from one end of the hall for a dance floor; a boy was scattering sawdust on the worn floorboards as the younger me
mbers of the party gathered around excitedly. Prue smiled and took a sip from her cup; the warm liquid seemed to pour itself through her every vein, bringing much-needed heat to her cold and tired limbs. Suddenly, she heard her name being called. She turned to see Sterling Fox standing before her, an unhappy look on his face.
“Prue McKeel,” he said. “What are you doing here?” He then shot a glance at Curtis. “And you! Bandit Curtis! You’re supposed to be keeping her out of sight in your little camp.”
Curtis was speechless; he turned to Prue for support.
“It’s nice to see you, too, Sterling,” said Prue.
The fox glared.
“It’s okay,” she consoled. “We’re safe. We’re fine. We had to come see Iphigenia, to see the tree.”
Sterling, at the mention of the Elder Mystic’s name, looked down sorrowfully into the pewter mug he held in his paw. “Gods rest her soul,” he said. “I know she wouldn’t go in fer that claptrap, the gods and all, but I say it anyways. Gods rest her, she was a lovely woman.”
“Yes, she was,” said Curtis, hoping that the fox’s dour mood would distract him.
Sterling’s stern tone was renewed. “But that don’t change things a bit,” he said. He gave a worried look over his shoulder before whispering, “That was her instructions. Keep the kid at the camp. Simple and plain.”
Prue interjected, “It’s not Curtis’s fault. It’s me. I couldn’t stay put. I can’t explain it, but I felt Iphigenia’s, you know, passing. I felt it. And then I felt the intense pull to come to North Wood, to see the tree.”
“Well, did you do it?” asked the fox. “Did you see the tree?”
“I did, yes.”
“Then get back to that bandit camp. On the double. We can find you horses to ride if need be.”
“We will,” said Curtis. “We promise. Let us just get our bearings and rest a bit before we start back.”
