Into The Mist (Land of Elyon) (15 page)

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around her neck up and out from under her dress to reveal a bright blue stone as big as my thumb.

"Miner Mingleton," said Miss Flannery.

"Miner?" asked Thomas. We were both staring at the incredibly large and beautiful stone dangling from her neck.

"That's what he called himself, Miner Mingleton," she continued. "He went into the deepest caves he could locate in search of rare stones. He discovered many, but this was his greatest find. It's a star sapphire. You see how it makes a six-pronged starlight at the center?"

She held the sapphire and moved it ever so slightly back and forth. There really was a bright white star gleaming inside.

"This was his price," she said, tucking it back under her dress.

I looked around the room more carefully now, wondering how many of the objects were things that someone had once cherished, but were now lost to the Wakefield House. There were a lot of valuable-looking things on the shelves around the small room - books, artifacts, vases, paintings. It made the room look less like a home and more like a museum of stolen treasures.

"Why don't they just leave and take their possessions with them? These things you have, they don't seem to be well protected," said Thomas. I was

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aware as he said it that she was not a very fierce-looking woman. There were no weapons and the door remained wide open.

This seemed to amuse Miss Flannery, for her lip curled up on one corner ever so slightly and her eyes twinkled.

"Some have tried such a trick on me," she said slyly, letting the words hang in the air. "None have succeeded."

I wanted to ask why no one could betray her, but she was a mysterious and oddly frightening woman, and I didn't get the feeling she would tell us anything more. Her words were enough to scare me into thinking two boys from Madame Vickers's House on the Hill were no match for her.

I heard Thomas's spoon clang against the bottom of his bowl. Looking down, I realized that his bowl was not the only one that was sadly empty. I managed to scrape one more half bite off the bottom, and then the soup was gone.

"Follow me," said Miss Flannery. She stood up and walked out the door, down the path, and past the horse tied to the post. We followed her, passing houses with gardens for front yards and people busy at work or play. They were as cool as Miss Flannery, looking up without interest and returning to whatever it was they were doing without much hesitation.

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When we reached the door to the Wakefield House, she turned and stood motionless while Thomas and I craned our necks into the sky, trying to find the top of the towering structure. The supremacy of its height was alarming, doubled by the closeness of the slabs of stone and beams of wood rising from the ground. It was not a pretty structure, and lacked the feel of something made by a craftsman. There was a hastiness to its design, as though it might topple over at any moment from the sheer weight of itself. And yet, there was also something brilliant about the completeness of it. The parts were crude -- chunks of stone and blocks of wood -- but the whole was astonishingly solid and intricate. It was at once a profound masterpiece and a reckless pile of rubble.

Thomas started for the door, overcome by the power of the moment and dying to get inside. There was no fear in him, no concern that the Wakefield House might topple over while we were inside or that we might become hopelessly lost in its winding interior. My thoughts ran to more practical matters, such as the total lack of success for all who'd faced the Wakefield House before us, and the fact that we were going nowhere until we gave Miss Flannery our most prized possession. I knew what the possession was, but I wasn't sure Thomas did,

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and this worried me as I watched him advance toward the door.

"You're going the wrong way." Miss Flannery said this in such a way that it made me think she had said the same words to a hundred visitors already and was mildly annoyed at having to say them again. "That's the way out, not the way in. In all my years as the keeper of the Wakefield House, that door has never been opened."

She walked up next to Thomas, and I followed. As I came closer, I realized that it was an iron door, shaped in much the same way as the iron door that led away from Mister Clawson's lair. A chill ran through me as we got to Thomas on the dirt path.

"It only opens from the inside," Miss Flannery explained, "and no one -- including me -- has ever made it anywhere near this door from the other side."

The whole affair was beginning to sound like a very bad idea to me, and I was about to tell Thomas we should sit back and think it through before proceeding, but I was too late. Thomas already had our most prized possession out in the open, holding it out to Miss Flannery.

"What's this?" she asked, taking the objects from Thomas with uncharacteristic interest. When

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it came to the cost of entering the Wakefield House, she was at once full of curiosity.

"The box has my brushes and glue and powders to make colors. The journal has my paintings and my notes. Our whole lives are in there -- everything we've seen and done -- it's all there in pictures and scribbles."

She flipped open the small wooden box and looked inside, carefully touching the bags of dried flowers and dust, running her finger across the myriad colors on the inside of the lid. Closing the box, she opened to the first page of the journal and studied it. A smile grew on her face as she went to the second page, then the third. She was engrossed in the tiny paintings, lost in the world of my brother's making.

"You may go," she said without looking up from the page. "Around that way, to the front, the door will be open." She lifted her chin to the left of the Wakefield House but would not take her eyes from the journal as she slowly turned, walking away toward her house.

"What if we get lost and can't find our way out? What do we do then?" I asked.

"Find a window to the outside and yell down. There are many along the way. But don't yell at night. I hate to be awakened."

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Miss Flannery meandered farther away from us, and I looked up into the mass of beams and stones of the Wakefield House. Here and there were openings, surrounded by stone, and it gave me some comfort to know that, when we failed in our attempt to reach the top and had to come back down again, we could find one of these openings and scream for help. I looked at Thomas.

"You do realize you may never get the journal back," I said. "All that work and all those memories will be lost forever."

Thomas smiled and waved me on. "Come on, Roland. There's a great adventure to be had here today, and we're going to have it!"

It struck me then that Thomas understood something I didn't. The journal was a nice thing to look at, but everything in it was old and growing older. It was a record of our past, of things done before, of good and bad memories alike. Our journey was into the future and the adventure it held, and today that journey had led us to the foot of the Wakefield House.

This was one place where my character matched up with that of my brother. We were both fully alive at times such as these, when a seemingly impossible task lay before us and everything was at stake. I was more afraid and cautious than Thomas,

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but there was not an ounce less electric joy in my view of the circumstances.

The Wakefield House would be conquered or it would conquer us, and this was just the way we liked it.

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***

CHAPTER 18

Through Haunted Passages

The Wakefield House rose so high into the air that it was easy to assume it wasn't very big around at the bottom. As we made our way to the other side, we were increasingly aware that this was a false notion. It was a six-sided structure, with sharp corners leading to each new side. The stones and beams looked more and more as though they'd been dropped out of the sky all at once and had only happened to fall in such a way that they all stood on top of one another. Colossal sharp rocks jutted out violently on every side and all the way up into the sky, with chunks and slabs of unfinished wood smashed in between. I was afraid to touch the Wakefield House, for fear that I might push it over and demolish the whole town in its crashing wake.

"There it is!" said Thomas, pointing down the side of the fourth outside wall we'd come around. He ran ahead, and when I came up beside him we both stood staring into a gaping hole big enough for a cart to fit through. There was no door, only the opening, which led directly to a set of stone stairs hidden in the shadows. The inside had a

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quality I couldn't place at first. It was murky in there, and it smelled cold and alone. We stepped inside and walked seven or eight steps to the foot of the stairs, where it felt as if we'd arrived deep in the belly of the Wakefield House.

It was both quieter and louder. When we'd stepped inside, the Wakefield House wasn't creaking and there was no sound at all. Every noise from the outside world was gone. But when the Wakefield House swayed ever so slightly, the sound we'd heard outside became a roar of echoes. It began at the top -- somewhere far over our heads -- and descended toward us, moving through unseen halls and passageways, growing louder until the sound crashed into us at the bottom of the stairs like a screaming mouthful of hot air.

The coming fury of the sound reminded me of when Madame Vickers came swiftly up the hill on her horse and cart, clamoring violently toward her house. She would pass us on the hill very close, as if to scare us with the sound of hooves and rolling metal. My heart would race with visions of my fingers being crushed beneath the wheels of the cart, but then she would pass, and the sound would weaken, and I would listen until it died altogether at Madame Vickers's front door.

"This place feels haunted," I whispered, finally finding the right word to describe how the Wakefield House felt inside.

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"That's exactly what I was going to say," said Thomas, who stood beside me craning his neck in every direction for a look around. It felt like a lot of lonely memories had been made here. If the walls could speak, I was sure they would bring a gathering gloom, a weight that could not be held up, like the very weight of the Wakefield House itself, and everything around us would come crashing down.

"Are we sure we want to do this?" Thomas said. I was surprised to hear him ask such a question, though his tone betrayed his motive. It was stated more as a taunt than a concern, and I thought the proper words out of his mouth given their meaning ought to have been, "You're not too afraid to go in, are youT

Brothers often have a language all their own, propelled by a complicated mix of rivalry and love.

"There's a reason we're here," I stated flatly. "A reason not like all the rest who've tried. And besides, we've no place else to go."

Thomas looked at the rising stairs before us and clapped his hands together loudly, as if to shoo away all the bad feelings and prove that we were the only ones there, that there was nothing to be feared that lay sleeping and hidden in a corner. The sound of the clap echoed as I expected it would, but it died coldly and quickly as we marched toward

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the first of many steps we would encounter in the Wakefield House.

The pitch was far steeper than I'd imagined, more like a ladder than a set of stairs, and it went on far enough that we both had to rest before reaching the top. There was more light as we went, and as we came off of the last stair and onto the first landing there were two open windows, one on either side of us. We had entered a room that surprised and horrified us both. The surprising thing about the room was that we were suddenly in a place that was nothing like the outside of the Wakefield House. Gone were the sharp stones and clumps of wood clashing together unevenly, replaced by smooth stone walls and a perfectly even wooden floor. It was as if the builder had thrown the entire thing up solid -- without an inside -- then magically cut his way through, crafting it perfectly as he went. The center of the room was solid stone, and we had to walk around it to get a good look at both windows.

"This is amazing," I said.

"And worse than we could have imagined," added Thomas.

The horrifying thing about the room was the number of doorways. On either side of the two stone windowsills were eight openings, each one leading in a different direction along the outside of the

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room. We went all the way around the stone center and saw that some openings shot up on steep stairways while others headed back down. Still others turned sharply in one way or another. And there was something else, something worse still.

To the left or right of every single doorway, etched into the stone, were two harrowing words.

Wrong way.

It seemed as though different people had tried and failed at each door, found their way back, and left the little message to warn others, carving the words with a rock into the flat stone.

"But how can they all be the wrong way?" I asked. "That can't be right."

"Let's find out for ourselves," said Thomas. He walked through the nearest doorway, turning sharply to the right when he entered and moved out of sight.

"Thomas, wait!" I yelled. "The last thing we want to do is lose each other in here. We must stay close together."

We spent the next hour winding up and down passageways that turned nearly pitch-dark, then rose slowly with light as an approaching window came near. Every so often the Wakefield House began to roar from above, and we covered our ears until the frightening sound passed through. Sometimes we found ourselves higher off the ground,