by Colin Meloy
The way was far. They were forced to stop many times in their travels.
The rough-hewn stone, after a time, gave way to rougher brick as the construction of the tunnel system seemed to transform into the product of a distinctly more modern era. It began to remind Prue of the passageways she’d traversed in South Wood, when she’d gone to see Owl Rex. It gave her hope that they were making progress. However, judging from the kind of cast-off junk that the architect had brought to build his mole city, it was clear that he was sourcing from the Outside—from beyond the Wood. If this was the case, then the two of them seemed to be walking a conduit between the Outside and the Impassable Wilderness—something she believed even many of the older citizens of the Wood that she’d met didn’t know existed. Frankly, the implications seemed astonishing. She’d just about gotten around to considering whether the Periphery Bind extended into the underground when a loud clank disrupted her from her thinking.
“What was that?” she asked.
Curtis, in front of her, was bending down, inspecting something on the tunnel floor. He’d accidentally kicked it as he walked. “A bottle,” he said.
“What? What kind of bottle?”
“A beer bottle,” said Curtis. He handed it to Prue. She studied it in the glare of the lantern light.
“Pabst Blue Ribbon,” Prue read from the torn label. That, to her best recollection, was not of Woodian brew.
Septimus, at Curtis’s shoulder, began to wax somewhat pathetically about how he imagined a cool drink would taste right about now when suddenly they heard whistling coming from the darkness ahead. Prue lifted the lantern; the outer rings of its illumination revealed a crude open doorway. The whistling was persistent, growing closer. A click; light flooded in.
Prue’s eyes had grown so accustomed to the faint glow of their lantern that this new light, harsh and fluorescent, felt as if they were looking directly into the sun. They cringed and squinted. A figure came into view; he was carrying a box.
They moved forward cautiously. The figure must’ve heard them, because his whistling abruptly ceased. As they approached, they were better able to make out the man’s features. He was a young man, perhaps in his twenties, and he was wearing a bowler hat and a natty vest. He was clean shaven, save for a thick mustache which he’d pomaded into little curls on either side of his mouth. He looked like he’d emerged from another century—which made him a dead ringer for a citizen of South Wood.
“Hello?” called Prue.
The man had stopped and was peering down the passageway at the two of them; he seemed to be having trouble making sense of their presence.
“What are you doing down here?” he asked.
“We’d ask you the same,” said Curtis.
“I’m just working,” explained the man.
“Is this South Wood? How near are we to the Mansion?” Prue was tired from all the walking; her patience was stretched thin.
This question seemed to flummox the young man completely. “Huh?” was all he managed.
“South Wood. Are we below South Wood?” repeated Curtis, irritated by the man’s stupor.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is Old Town. Like, downtown Portland. I’m just stocking the reach-in.”
Now it was Prue and Curtis’s chance to be confused. “What?” they asked simultaneously.
“I’m getting beer. For the bar.” When this didn’t seem to satisfy his interrogators, he tried another angle. “Listen, I’m new. Started, like, a week ago. So if you guys are, like, messing with me …” Something seemed to occur to him; a bright recognition had descended over his face. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Were you kids on one of those, like, Shanghai Tunnel tours? Did you guys get separated?”
Curtis was still aghast; Prue made quick sense of their predicament. “Yeah,” she responded. “Sorry. Just a little confused. Did you see where the rest of the group went?” There was a tunnel system that ran under the oldest part of Portland; everyone called it the Shanghai Tunnels. Prue had gone on a tour of these tunnels with her parents last year; they’d taken the ghost-themed tour, and the guide, a curly-haired, mustachioed guy, had really laid it on thick about the spirits that haunted these subterranean passageways. Supposedly, the tunnels had been used to abduct drunken sailors, who would wake up from their drugged unconsciousness far out to sea on a clipper bound for the West Indies. That was the tale, anyway. In retrospect, that tour guide, with all his stories of trapdoors and revenge-seeking poltergeists, didn’t know the half of it.
“Man, I don’t know. I just got here. You can head up topside with me if you’d like. Though you’re gonna be too young to be in the bar.” Seeing Septimus, he added, “And we have a pretty strict no-pets rule.”
“I’m not a pet,” said Septimus.
The man blanched. “What?” he asked, very confused.
Curtis gave his shoulder a jerk in an attempt to admonish the rat. He then responded to the man’s question, saying, “I said, I’ll bet. As in: I’ll bet we won’t be let in.”
The man seemed unsatisfied with the explanation, but he evidently preferred it to having witnessed a talking rat. “I think we could find you another way out, if you’d like,” he said.
Prue glanced down at the architect’s green electrical cable on the floor; it stretched out into the distance, through another tunnel opening just beyond where the young man stood. “Nah,” she said. “We’ll find them down here somewhere.”
“Cool,” said the man. He looked over at Curtis. “Nice jacket, by the way. Where’d you get it?”
Curtis looked down; covered in a solid layer of dust and dirt was his military uniform, all brocaded cuffs and gold epaulets. He couldn’t really think of another answer: “From some bandits,” he replied.
The young man didn’t seem to bat an eyelash. “Oh,” he said. “Cool.” And then he was gone, his whistling resuming as he plodded his way up the rickety stairs to the above-ground.
“Septimus,” said Curtis when they were alone again. “You can’t do that.”
“What?” asked the rat.
“Talk. While we’re in the Outside. It’s just too … complicated.”
The rat harrumphed. “What am I supposed to say?”
Curtis thought about it for a second. “I don’t know. Squeak or something.”
“Squeak?” repeated the rat. “I’m not a squeaker.”
Prue put in, “Then keep your mouth shut. Whatever. We can’t be raising suspicions here.”
“Got it,” said the rat. “Squeak.”
Curtis put his hand against one of the brick walls of the tunnel, feeling the chill of the rough surface. “So I’m guessing we’re in Old Town, huh? Weird.”
“I know,” responded Prue. “Culture shock.”
“And these tunnels that we’ve been following—they connect with the Shanghai Tunnels?”
“It would appear that way.”
“I thought those tunnels were a hoax. Like, a touristy thing.”
Prue shrugged. “I thought so too. Maybe they still are. Obviously, people don’t know where they really lead. I guess folks just never thought to explore the tunnels farther.”
“I wonder if the Periphery…”
“I was wondering the same thing. If it protects the tunnels, too.”
“It’d be a shame if people figured it out.”
“Yeah,” said Prue. “Let’s keep this one a secret, how about that?”
“Agreed.” They shook hands.
They continued on; the tunnel ended abruptly at a brick wall. The green cable, however, soon pointed the way. It led to a small shaft just to the side of the wall, where an iron ladder gave access to the darkness below. They climbed down carefully; it deposited them in a cylindrical tunnel, easily twenty feet tall from floor to ceiling, that appeared to play host to a congregation of the city’s electrical wiring. The green cable spooled innocuously down from the shaft and became intermixed in the thousands of other multihued cables that sp
layed along the tunnel floor. A metal maintenance walkway had been bolted to the wall of the cylinder, and it was this that Prue and Curtis followed, always keeping an eye on their little green cable.
The cylinder was as straight as an arrow. At one point, Curtis said he could hear the rushing of water above them—though it was hard to tell. One thing was clear: They were crossing under the Willamette River, heading farther east. Both Prue and Curtis were of North Portland stock. The Southeast side was an undiscovered country to them, though they’d both spent plenty of afternoons as younger children mooning over the IMAX at the Museum of Science and Industry. Beyond that, it was a no-man’s-land as far as they were concerned.
They nearly missed it; thankfully Septimus had been scouting ahead, keeping a keen eye on the meandering cable. At a curve in the tunnel, it suddenly broke away from the mass of wiring and snaked up toward a ladder on the wall of the cylinder. Climbing this, they found themselves in another low tunnel that crawled along for what felt like several miles. Finally, a glimmer of light could be seen in the distance; it was the scant sunlight allowed between the cracks of a weathered old wooden door. Opening it, they found themselves bathed in daylight, breathing the clear, crisp air of the Outside.
Except that it wasn’t quite so idyllic, their reunion with the aboveground; they found themselves in the middle of a junk heap that extended as far as the eye could see. Tall towers of discarded rubbish were piled high in every direction: rusted, emptied-out car chassis, refrigerators with their doors yawning open, hubcaps, and bottle caps. There were reams of abandoned National Geographic magazines papering the ground; there were half-chewed, one-eyed stuffed animals, orphaned from their owners. White plastic bags floated like jellyfish on the air, and the ground was pockmarked with potholes, filled to the brim with oil-iridescent water. There was barely any snow remaining; the little that did was black with soot.
“Lovely place, the Outside,” said Septimus. “Nice to be home?” Prue glared at him, to which he replied, “Squeak.”
Curtis gave them both an unenthused look. “Let’s find this guy,” he said. “And get out of here.”
They all took the opportunity to take in their surroundings; it didn’t seem like the sort of place anyone would want to hang out in for too long. The horizon was all but blotted out by the towers of debris. It was clear: This had been the source of the building materials for the City of Moles. The green cable, the thing that had been their lifeline for the entirety of their journey to the surface, ended here. A stump of a post jutted from the ground; bolted to it was a small gray power box. It was to this that the cable had been tethered.
“I guess he could be anywhere now, huh?” noted Prue.
“Yep. Any ideas where to start looking?” asked Curtis.
“I guess the immediate vicinity would be a good starting point,” said Prue.
Curtis nodded. “Great idea.”
And so they began searching for this elusive architect, the one with two golden hooks for hands, so that they might convince him to rebuild some integral part of a mechanical boy prince—all at the behest of a clairvoyant, sentient tree. Prue, since first being introduced to Wildwood, had learned to not consider the minutiae of things, but rather take each episode as it came. Otherwise, she figured, the ridiculousness might fry some essential lobe of her brain—the sensible part. Taken as a whole, their quest seemed fairly ridiculous, but there wasn’t really anything strange about looking for someone in the midst of a waste dump. At least, she didn’t think so.
“Mr. Architect!” called Curtis as he began to scale one of the mountains of junk. Septimus was winnowing in and out of towers of metallic bric-a-brac, squeaking with all the energy he could muster.
“Esben!” yelled Prue, getting into the search as well. She was peering into the windows of a disemboweled Ford Focus. “Esben Clampett!”
He was not in the stack of cars; nor was he in the tower of washing machines that seemed to balance impossibly one on top of the other. He wasn’t in the claw-foot bathtub filled with thick, muddy water. And he wasn’t beneath the A-frame of corrugated metal that made, to Curtis’s estimation, a pretty nifty fort—it did look like it had given someone shelter for a time; the black remnants of a campfire marked the ground beneath it.
An hour passed. Then two. Prue was pushing aside a broken screen door to get at a little cavity in a heap of jumbled, broken bicycles when she heard Septimus mewling loudly from afar.
She looked up. The rat was standing at the far end of the dump, in the trough between two building-tall piles of garbage. He was pointing at the far horizon and squeaking with all the determination of a rocking chair in need of a good oiling.
Wiping off her jeans, she jogged over to where a pile of old tube televisions made a kind of staircase, and there she began to climb to where Septimus stood. “What is it?”
Curtis, hearing the commotion, found his way to their side. Septimus continued to squeak, running in circles and flailing his small arms in the direction of the city.
The two kids were flummoxed. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Septimus,” said Curtis icily. “I think you’re taking this whole squeaking thing too far.”
Finally, the rat stopped his game of charades and looked at Prue and Curtis with his hands on his hips. “So I can talk now?” he asked.
Prue rolled her eyes. “Yes, Septimus. You can talk.”
“I think we have our man,” he said, pointing.
From the height at which they stood, they could see that the junk heap ended just a few hundred feet on; there, a railroad track created a boundary between the dump and what appeared to be an amusement park. Prue was amazed that they hadn’t heard the noise before. Now it was clear: The singsong lilt of a pump organ colored the late afternoon air. The lights of the Ferris wheel were just winking on, and the sound of the park’s whirring, churning machines could be heard amid the occasional shouts from the few attendants who milled like ants about the grounds. In the center of the amusement park was a giant circus tent, colored garishly blue and yellow; a sign in front of the entrance boldly advertised the evening’s main event in a typeface so big as to be perfectly legible even from where the three of them stood. It read THE AMAZING, THE INCREDIBLE, THE ONE AND ONLY: ESBEN THE GREAT!
CHAPTER 21
Return to Childhood; A Cog in the Hand
The meeting was quickly convened at the cottage. Carol stood at the fireplace mantel, while the younger kids streamed down the wooden stairs from the attic; the older kids, those who’d been diligently setting about doing their afternoon chores, came in from the outside and stood, curious, in the large family room.
“Children,” said Carol, “we have some fascinating news to impart. Yesterday, while joining Michael and Cynthia on their trapping rounds, our newest family member Elsie Mehlberg found something. It was something that exists beyond the Periphery.”
A collective gasp met this revelation. Elsie, sitting on a bench by the fire, felt every eye in the room land on her.
“It’s a road.” Another gasp; the frenetic sound of excited children whispering to one another. Carol held up his hand. “Now, hold up. You should know that this road runs through the interior of this country. I’m not suggesting we follow it. However, it does make one thing perfectly clear: Elsie is not affected by the constraints of the Periphery Bind. It would appear that she—and her sister as well—are able to walk, quite freely, through it.”
Now the room could barely contain its excitement. The girl sitting next to Elsie was staring at her, as if she’d inadvertently sat down next to some Hollywood starlet and was only just now realizing it. There were a few hoots from the older kids in the back—also a few “Way to go, Elsie and Rachel!” Then it appeared that the realization dawned on the celebrating crowd. One kid asked, “That’s great for them. What about us?”
“That’s just the thing, isn’t it?” replied Carol. “I’ve asked myself the same question for a long time—how is it that those who
are unaffected by the Bind are able to come and go so freely? When I first was brought here, I was deposited by a group of the Mansion guards. And yet once they’d left, it was as if they’d thrown the lock on my cell door. And yet no door existed.”
Another voice took up the explanation. It was Michael. “What he’s saying is they can walk us out. We just need to be making physical contact with them.”
Everyone’s head had swiveled to face the new speaker. He continued, “They found out because they were walking Carol through the woods—might not’ve discovered this little trick otherwise. When they went and found us, me and Cynthia, we lost them as soon as they’d gotten very far. But if we all held hands, we were all able to make it to this road. Simple as that.”
Carol nodded. “Yep,” he said. “Simple as that. So simple, in fact, that it’s no wonder I hadn’t been able to figure it out. So all’s it took was someone of Woods Magic to come in here and we were free. Thing is, I don’t think the Mansion ever thought there’d be a couple kids born with it just wanderin into the Periphery.”
Now the girl sitting next to Elsie was looking at her as if she were a ghost; a look of surprise, intrigue, and not a little fear had fallen over her face.
“They’re, like, from there?” asked a boy, sitting cross-legged in front of Carol.
“No, no,” the old man replied. “But they were somehow born with it, this thing the Woods folk call Woods Magic. Other folks’d called it Woodblood. Whichever. My guess is, it runs in families. Somewhere in the Mehlberg family tree, there’s a Woodian, just keepin things quiet in the Outside world.”
Elsie and Rachel made brief eye contact from across the room. Rachel was sitting at the dining room table, idly drawing on the grain of the wood with her finger. She seemed uncomfortable with this new information. The room was awash with excited voices; everyone seemed to have a different opinion about what to do next.
“I want to go home!” a younger girl, Elsie’s age, cried plaintively.
