by Colin Meloy
They heard Roger barking madly behind them, “Forget the children! Get the old man! Get the maker!”
The tide of children had crested; only a few straggled behind, limping and nursing their bruised limbs, as they all made their way deeper into the heart of the Industrial Wastes. Elsie and Rachel tried to urge Carol on, but he was old and blind and his steps were slow and faltering. A discomfited look played across his face; the sound of the stevedores’ loud footsteps in the gravel was growing closer.
Michael, his eye blackened and his coverall in tatters, stopped in his retreat to yell at them. “Hurry!” he shouted.
Elsie, desperate tears pouring down her face, yelled back, “We can’t!”
“Carol, can you go any faster?” pleaded Rachel, her voice quick and frightened.
Carol shook his head dolefully. He stumbled a little, and the girls labored to keep him upright.
The sounds of the stevedores’ boots grew closer.
A figure broke away from the retreating pack of orphans ahead of them. It was goggled Martha, who grabbed Carol’s arm from Elsie’s grip and began to tug him, urgently, forward. She then yelled at Elsie and Rachel, “Get going! I’ll stay with Carol. We can’t let them get you guys, too.”
The Mehlberg sisters stared at her, dumbstruck. The idea of abandoning the old man seemed impossible. Besides, wouldn’t Martha also be captured? Martha guessed their feelings, shouting, “Better me than you. You have the whatever, the Woodsblood. You have to go.”
“No, Martha,” protested Elsie.
“Children,” said Carol. “She’s right. We can’t afford to let them have you. Your gift is too great.”
Rachel saw their reasoning. She grabbed Elsie. “C’mon, sis,” she said. “It’s true. We won’t be safe with them. We have to go.” It was the first admission she’d made regarding this extraordinary thing the two of them shared.
Martha smiled through the fear that was now descending on her face. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll be with Carol. I’ll look out for him.”
And so the Mehlberg sisters broke away from the old man’s side and ran, as fast as their feet could carry them, toward the busily escaping pack of children in the distance. Once they’d pulled far enough away, Elsie hazarded a look backward and saw the mob of stevedores fall on the old man and his young companion. Martha was whisked up in their strong arms, while two of the men roughly accosted Carol, pinning his arms behind him as the rest of the crowd arrived at the scene. But she couldn’t watch any more beyond that. It was too heart-wrenching. She turned and faced the road ahead: a long, winding path that led farther and farther into the unknown pale of the Industrial Wastes. She ran as fast as she’d ever run in her life.
The next thing Prue knew, she was lying cradled in what felt like a sheepskin rug. The far-off city lights reflected against the deep layer of clouds in the dark sky; the fall of rain had grown heavier, though she seemed to be sheltered from the worst of the weather by the body of the thing that held her in its arms. The face of a bear, its eyes weary and warm, looked down at her. She could feel the metallic chill of his prosthetics against her side.
“Esben?” she managed.
The bear did not respond. Prue’s right side, just above her hip, felt like someone had taken a jackhammer to it; her face was laced with an intense, needling pain. A low whistle sounded from afar and the bear looked up, steam jetting from his wide nostrils. This noise was followed by the whine of a train heaving itself into movement.
“The circus,” Prue managed. “They’re leaving.”
The bear only nodded; he shifted his arms under her body and carried her the few yards to a small lean-to made of corrugated metal. There, she was gently set down on a ratty blanket while the bear began stacking salvaged pieces of wood in the guttered fire pit.
“Why aren’t you with them? Why aren’t you going?” she pressed.
The bear paused in his labors, as if registering the girl’s question, before continuing (somewhat awkwardly, owing to his hooks) to attend to the fire.
Prue groaned as she tried to move; the pain was immobilizing. She laid her hand gingerly on her hip and felt that her clothes were wet with her blood. The moments prior to her rescue came back to her in fits and starts—the sudden and tremendous power she’d had over vegetation, the chiming of their voices, the roar of the creature who’d been somehow stretched between the animal and human world.
“Darla …,” Prue sputtered. “What’s happened to her? Is she dead?”
The bear only nodded.
“So you understand me. But you don’t talk?”
The bear stared at her, hard. He set down the remaining bits of wood in his hooks and took a deep breath. He then spoke, in a low, sonorous voice that sounded to Prue as if it was being emitted from the exhaust pipe of a car that hadn’t been driven in fifteen years. “No,” he said, before clearing his voice and saying, “I can talk. Though truth be told, I hadn’t expected I’d need to. Not till you came along.”
“But why?” asked Prue.
“Because maybe sometimes folks just want to be the things that they are. I wanted to be a bear. Not a Woodian. Not an Overdweller. A bear. That seem strange to you?”
“No,” said Prue. “Sorry.” She paused as the bear returned to his fire making; a stack of kindling had been built, and the bear began to fumble with a box of matches. “Here,” said Prue. “Let me help with that.”
The bear, huffing a quick thanks, tossed the matchbox to Prue, and she held a lit flame to the crumpled paper below the kindling. Soon, a glowing fire radiated warmth into the modest lean-to. Prue watched the bear as the flames cast glowing shadows across his broad face. She tried to move into a seated position, but the pain at her side proved unbearable.
“Don’t move,” said Esben. “You’re pretty badly worked over there. That was a nasty creature you angered. Not wise.” Reminded, he began rifling through a duffel that he had strapped over his shoulder, pulling a worn T-shirt from within. “I’ll see to those wounds. Best do it quickly.”
“But why?” asked Prue. “Why’d you come back?”
As if in answer, he reached into his duffel and retrieved something else: Zeke’s smiling face on the badge gave Prue, in her swimming vision, a cheerful thumbs-up. “A city of moles saved my life once; it occurred to me I had a calling to do the same for someone else.” He put the badge down and, picking up the T-shirt, stepped over to where Prue lay. He began dabbing at the dark heart of the wound at her side with the cloth wrapped around his right hook.
“I’ve got some wrongs to right of my own, half-breed,” said the bear. “And I figure falling in with you is the first step forward. No sense in running away.”
The pain ratcheted upward; Prue grimaced and turned her head to the opening of the hovel. The rain was slashing sideways; the lights flickered against the haze of clouds. The last of the circus trains sounded in the distance, heralding its progression along the wide iron tracks that ran along the river and out of town. The circus was leaving, the ringleader having not yet realized that one of the animals’ cages stacked in the middle car, the one formerly housing his star, lay empty. Instead, the star was here, in the trough of garbage, seeing to the health of this one injured child. Here, in this bent lean-to, where a fire burned quietly in the deep dark.
CHAPTER 25
Season’s End
Listen.
The snow has stopped; the rain has begun.
Listen.
Through the checkerboard neighborhoods of his former world, the boy is walking away. He can hear the lowing of the train in the distance. The blackness of the night hides him. He is a stranger to the world. He is still wearing the outfit he wore at the beginning of his journey. The rat remains perched on his shoulder, his snout pointed ever outward, a sentinel on the bow of a storm-plowing ship. The boy is intent on one thing: to find his adopted family, the one to whom he’d given his oath, his vow. He silently curses himself for having disregarded that vow f
or so long. He will make it right, he swears. The trees loom far on the horizon, over the river and through the sleeping city. This is where he means to return.
Listen.
A man in a dirty and ash-smeared argyle sweater is kneeling in front of a building on fire, his plump tears making clean tracks down the soot on his cheeks. The smoke from the conflagration is billowing into the air; there are sirens sounding in the distance, but the man knows that it is far too late, the fire is far too progressed, and that the salvation of the building and all his beloved machines within is beyond reach. He can only kneel there, in the wet gravel, and watch the thing burn. He’s been left by his compatriots: the woman in the gown, the man in the tight-fitting suit, the man with the pince-nez. They’ve left him to watch his building burn; they are walking away with a young, parentless Korean girl and the blind man whose side she refuses to leave. They have their quarry; they have no more need for the man with the goatee and the argyle sweater. He swears mightily under his breath; a deep vengeance is growing in his heart.
Listen.
Farther into this nest of silos and smokestacks there is a wide expanse of lonely, abandoned buildings, their windows empty, their roofs collapsed. It is a quiet place; no one lives here. Even those who toil inside the Industrial Wastes have no reason to tread in this desolate land; the avenues are pocked with potholes, the sidewalks splintered and broken. But now a group of tired children have entered it, searching for shelter. They have run a great distance to arrive here, their pursuers having given up the chase long ago. They walk with slow, heavy steps. They have lost two of their number, the Korean girl and the blind man, and their hearts are heavy at the loss. At the front of the pack are two girls, one older than the other, one with straight hair and one with curly. They are holding hands. The younger girl, the curly-haired one, is holding a doll that has been rescued from the burning building by one of the other children. The reunion was gleeful—she’s only just stopped pressing the button on the doll’s back and making her talk—but now she’s fallen into a deeply thoughtful reverie as she considers what lies ahead. She looks at her sister; she is encouraged by the determined look on her sister’s face. They have learned a strange secret about themselves, one that may lead them to find their brother, long lost. But first, they’ve decided, they must save their friends. A building, its roof intact, comes into view of the crowd of children. It stands in the center of a large square. Seeing it, the children walk toward it, as if drawn by the building’s gravity. Perhaps this will be their home.
Listen.
Far off, beneath a shanty roof made of discarded sheet metal, a bear is stoking a small campfire and warming the quiet body of a young girl. She is awake and staring at the flames. The rain is falling on the metal of the roof; it’s falling on the heap of garbage beyond their vestibule. The girl is thinking of all that she must do; she is wondering at how impossible it all seems. She is wondering about her parents, about her brother. She is wondering about the words the plants spoke to her; how she was able to speak to them so clearly in return. But most of all, she is wondering about the iron-and-brass chassis of a mechanical boy who lies in state, a mausoleum his home, far away in a very different land. They have much work to do, the girl and the bear. But she is confident that their actions are correct. The tree has decreed it.
Listen.
Looming over the city landscape, the burning building, the forgotten trash heap, and the abandoned square is an expanse of deep green, of sky-tall trees and vast carpets of moss and fern. Inside, a world is alive.
In the southernmost region of this deep wood, a city sleeps. The windows on a mansion are drawn closed, and a quiet murmur descends on all the region’s denizens, animal and human. Their daily struggle, the tenuousness of their lives in the vacuum of power that has remained in the wake of a revolution, can wait until tomorrow.
And over the spiny range of a mountain chain, beyond a patchwork of tidy farm plots, a massive tree, its gnarled limbs snaking against the cloudy black sky, sits rooted to the loamy ground. A young boy sits in meditation at its foot, communing with the tree’s silent spirit. All of this: the boy and the rat crossing the Outside, the crying man in front of the burning building, the captive child and her blind friend, the lost children in search of a new home. The bear in the metal lean-to, the quiet, thoughtful girl pondering the road ahead, the sleeping town—all of this, he sees.
The snow has stopped falling; the rain has come.
Winter is passing.
A Spring will soon arrive.
The End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR
COLIN MELOY once wrote Ray Bradbury a letter, informing him that he “considered himself an author too.” He was ten. Since then, Colin has gone on to be the singer and songwriter for the band the Decemberists, where he channels all of his weird ideas into weird songs. With the Wildwood Chronicles, he is now channeling those ideas into novels.
As a kid, CARSON ELLIS loved exploring the woods, drawing, and nursing wounded animals back to health. As an adult, little has changed—except she is now the acclaimed illustrator of several books for children, including Lemony Snicket’s The Composer Is Dead, Dillweed’s Revenge by Florence Parry Heide, and The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart.
Colin and Carson live with their son, Hank, in Portland, Oregon, quite near the Impassable Wilderness.
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COPYRIGHT
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Under Wildwood
Copyright © 2012 by Unadoptable Books LLC
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meloy, Colin.
Under Wildwood / Colin Meloy ; illustrations by Carson Ellis.
p. cm. — (Wildwood chronicles ; bk. 2)
Summary: “Prue and Curtis are thrown together again to save themselves and the lives of their friends, and to bring unity to the divided country of Wildwood”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-202471-8 (hardback)
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780062119636
[1. Fantasy. 2. Animals—Fiction. 3. Portland (Or.)—Fiction.] I. Ellis, Carson, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.M516353Und 2012
2012019040
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
* * *
12 13 14 15 16 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
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