Into The Mist (Land of Elyon) (19 page)

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cloth strips dance in the air behind him. He took his pipe out of his pocket and began tamping tobacco into it.

"Why did Armon call it the way of yesterday?" I asked. There was a long, dreamy pause in which Roland lit his pipe and looked thoughtfully out to sea.

"Because it leads to the past."

And then he told us about finding Sir Alistair Wakefield in the secret realm beyond the way of yesterday, in the very heart of Mount Lay then.

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CHAPTER 21

Sir Alistair Wakefield

There came a point when we reached the end of the very difficult climbing and Armon set Thomas and me down on the ground. There were blue and white patches of ice-encrusted snow scattered amidst the uneven rocks, and before us lay a path that went back and forth like crude stitching along a rising hemline.

"I believe I've carried you far enough," said Armon. He was, at last, showing a hint of weariness. I looked down the side of the mountain and off into the distance, seeing the Valley of Thorns like tiny pins far below and the wasteland of the Dark Hills beyond. Armon had carried us a long way in a short time, but it fell to me and Thomas now to finish the task.

"Let's keep going," said Thomas, already on the move up to the first switchback on the path. As we walked along, I passed a sheet of white snow and put the heel of my old black boot through the crusty ice covering. I reached down and dug into the hole I'd made and pulled out a fresh clump of snow, eating it as we kept on. It was the first time I could

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remember putting something so cold in my mouth. Chewing it up, I felt the sting of ice on my teeth and my tongue. I told Thomas he should try some, and we both ate snow and ice where we passed it here and there on the way up the path, looking back over our shoulders at the shrinking world below.

There had been a rising ledge as we went -- the mountainside -- but after a time we seemed to turn straight into the mountain itself, no longer switching back and forth along its edge. When the path turned once more, ice walls began to rise up on both sides. We were engulfed in what felt like a glowing tunnel of blue and green.

"We're close now," Armon said from behind us. I looked back and saw that he had to crouch down very low in order to make his way through. There was a chill in the air, and I could see my breath. Cold water was dripping everywhere and the ground was wet and slippery beneath my feet. Looking up, I saw a slick ceiling of clear icicles pointing down at me.

"It's growing lighter here," said Thomas, looking back from up ahead. He had turned a slight corner and I couldn't actually see him, but I hurried to catch up, watching my breath with some amusement. Soon I, too, noticed our way was filling with light.

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"Roland, come quickly!" Thomas called. I broke into a slipping, sliding run until I came to a sharp turn and found my brother standing alone, looking down into a valley of green and blue and gold. Armon came up behind us licking a huge icicle he'd torn from the ceiling, and the three of us stayed there together, observing the world we'd crept up on. It was as if a giant bowl had been cut into the mountain, hidden on all sides by rock walls crawling with bright green moss, orange mushroom patches, leaves of yellow and gold. Near the bottom there were trees shooting up everywhere, and in the middle was a bright blue lake of cold mountain water.

"I know this place," whispered Thomas. And the way he said it sounded ghostly, as though he'd seen it in a dream and wasn't sure if it were safe or not. I felt something deep inside as well, some knowledge of the place before us, as though I'd lived an entire life here before but couldn't remember what I'd done. There was a boat sitting at the far edge of the lake, and this object in particular inspired something in my mind. I knew that boat, though I couldn't have said why.

"Armon, what is this place?" I asked. He was slurping the water off the icicle, and with his free hand he pointed down and to the left, near the line of trees that edged up against the blue lake. There

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was a home, or a building of sorts -- I couldn't decide which. It was tucked in tightly to the trees as if it were hiding there.

Armon tossed the icicle aside and it broke into a thousand pieces. "Down we go. The rest of the way is easy."

And it was easy, a winding path through trees that wasn't too cold and wasn't too hot. The sound of birds was everywhere, and they flew from tree to tree in a jumble of noise as we went. There were small animals darting up the sides of trees -- squirrels of a sort I'd never seen before. They were entirely gray or black, and they looked at us curiously as we came down into the realm of Sir Alistair Wakefield.

"He won't be like anyone you've met before," Armon said as we approached the blue lake and walked along its wide belly.

"How do you mean?" asked Thomas, pulling his paints from his pocket and stopping to make a picture. I think he was a little nervous to go on and was looking for an excuse to stop.

Armon didn't answer Thomas, but he didn't seem to mind that my brother had stopped to paint a picture. It rather seemed the most natural thing in the world to rest a moment, breathing the sharp, cool air, watching the rings from the feeding fish

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blip on the surface of the water. I glanced at the page Thomas was painting and saw that he'd gone back in his memory and was drawing the cave of ice and the view from above. He drew them both at once on two adjoining pages, moving back and forth between the images as he changed colors, swishing his brush in the water of the lake. The lake was so blue I half expected the wet brush to come out the same color, and everything Thomas painted to come out infused with sapphire.

"We should be going," said Armon after a short time. "We don't want to keep the old man waiting" too long." It was our first clue as to what we should expect: He would be old. This pleased me, for I had a certain sense that someone old would be gentle with age, would be kinder than someone young. Thomas put away his things and we walked on.

Soon we came to the thing we'd seen from above, and looking straight ahead we saw that it wasn't a house at all. It was a vast wooden terrace, held above the ground on a complicated system of fallen trees. It was leaning wildly in different directions, as though it might fall over in ten ways all at once, and somehow this very fact made it stand up and seem indestructible. And what was more, the terrace went back into the standing trees behind it in a way that looked untamed. It rose and fell,

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higher and lower in the trees, and there were rooms up there - small houses, if you will - wrapped around the larger trees at odd intervals along the way.

"It's a little like the Wakefield House," I said. "Like it should fall to pieces, but it doesn't."

"It looks familiar, don't you think?" said Thomas. I didn't think so - not really - but it did have a certain power over me, like it was drawing me to it. There wasn't very much time to wonder about the sprawling wooden structure before us, because right after Thomas asked his question, someone came out onto the high terrace and looked down at us.

"I was beginning to wonder if you'd gotten lost." It was a man, leaning over the railing from above. His voice was gravelly but clear, and it was filled with a sense of loneliness being drawn away, like he'd been by himself a long while and suddenly everything about him had changed with our arrival. It wasn't the words he said, but the way he said them that betrayed his happiness at our arrival.

"These boys have grown," said Armon. "They're not as easy to carry as they once were."

What did he mean? Had he carried us before? The time to ask about such things seemed wrong, and I held my tongue.

"Grindall will be looking for me," Armon

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continued. "Better I return home and put aside any suspicions."

"Stay for something to eat, then go," said the man on the terrace. Then, looking at us, he added, "Bring me the boys, won't you?"

Off to one side there were stumps of trees that served as a stairway, rising higher as they went with nothing to hold on to. Armon was first to go and we followed, hopping through the air from one stump to another until we were even with the terrace above. When we reached the top I was concerned the structure wouldn't hold Armon's full weight, and to my further alarm he didn't step onto the terrace, he leaped onto it, as if he were actually trying to crash into it and knock it down. But the terrace didn't so much as sway under the monstrous pressure of our giant friend.

"The Wakefield House hasn't fared as well," said Armon as Thomas and I stepped onto the long, open landing ourselves. "It's lucky there were no houses in its path."

"How I would have loved to see it tumble over!" said the man with a longing sort of smile. He looked at Thomas and asked, "Did it fall over just when you two opened the iron door?"

"Almost," answered Thomas. "It swayed a little at first -- so we could get out of the way - and then it fell over."

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While Thomas talked, I observed the man on the terrace. He wasn't as old as I thought he would be -- maybe fifty. He had a physical strength about him that made me wonder if he could wrestle Armon to the ground. It wasn't that he was big -- rather he was solid, like a rock, like you could drop a house on him and he would walk away unbroken.

"I planned it that way, so that once the deed was done, the Wakefield House would stand no more," said the man. "And it would only fall the one way, the way in which Miss Flannery was not to allow anything to be built."

"Are you Sir Alistair Wakefield?" I asked, my voice shakier than I'd expected it to be.

He looked upon my brother and me, nodding, smiling a happy smile. "I am he."

Thomas started to open his mouth, undoubtedly to ask the first of many questions, but Sir Alistair Wakefield silenced him with a raised finger.

"First we must eat and get Armon on his way," he said, and with that he turned from us and walked along the wooden terrace into the thick of the trees. Thomas and I followed with Armon close behind us, crouching under branches as we went.

"You will enjoy this," said Armon, laughing just a little. "He has a way of welcoming visitors that you won't soon forget."

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We went along, rising and falling on the wooden path beneath us, looking out over the rail to the ground below until we came to an egg-shaped platform with one large tree shooting up the middle. There at the base of the tree waited Sir Alistair Wakefield, and around him was a feast like nothing I'd imagined in my past at the House on the Hill. There were platters of cooked fish, breads with sweet spreads of honey and jam, pitchers of things to drink, and cheese with crusts of colors I'd never seen before.

"It's all been sitting here a little longer than I'd planned," said Sir Alistair, sitting down among the bowls and plates. "But I think it will be all right."

We sat together under the big tree -- eating and drinking -- and very quickly we came to call Sir Alistair Wakefield simply Alistair, for he insisted on ridding our first meeting of formality. Soon we began to ask him questions, and he, being a kind man and wanting to enlighten us, was happy to sit beneath the tree for hours and hours and tell us all we wanted to know.

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***

CHAPTER 22

THE STORY OF OUR BEGINNING

Roland pulled his logbook out of his pocket and looked at it thoughtfully as midnight approached. We had brought more candles onto the deck of the Warwick Beacon and lit them, so that it felt like a small cathedral on the rolling sea. I couldn't remember the last time I'd sat silently listening for so long, the rising and falling of quiet water trying but failing to lull me to sleep.

"And here we come to the whole of the matter," said Roland, "the unraveling of the past. This part of my story is best told as a tale within a tale, unhindered by the fullness of a hundred questions from two brothers on that cool, crisp day on Sir Alistair Wakefield's terrace."

"A tale within a tale," said Yipes. "That sounds good to me."

Roland glanced once more at the logbook in his hand and seemed to grip it more firmly. There was a hesitant look about him for an instant, and then he held the logbook out to me over the pale light of candles, as if he wanted me to take it from him. Yipes lunged for it, wanting to see the ever-secret logbook for himself and overcome with a desire to have it. But I was quick when I needed to be, and I

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snatched the secret treasure from Roland's fingers and clutched it to my chest. I expected Yipes might wrestle me onto the deck for it, and I envisioned the two of us rolling around under the sails, battling over the prized logbook we'd never been allowed to see inside of. But Yipes only sat wide-eyed, staring at me, his breathing a little heavier than it had been.

"You may open it," said Roland, a twitch of excitement in his sandpapery old voice.

Feeling a little sorry for Yipes but still uncertain whether he might try to take it from me, I held the logbook out in the open air above the candles, gripping it tightly. Yipes moved close to me where he could see, and we both read the words on the cover.

Into the Mist

The words were burned into the old leather, but they were black and clear as day. Into the Mist.

"Why, it's Thomas's journal!" exclaimed Yipes. "You've had it all this time and have never shown it to us?"

Yipes was reaching for it, trying to pry it open or out of my hands, so I clutched it once more to my chest. This was a treasure beyond all imagination, a connection to Thomas Warvold that would help me understand him, that would draw me nearer to him. Part of me was angry Roland hadn't given it to me sooner, knowing what he knew about my link to his brother Thomas. I didn't want to look just yet; I wanted to savor each page, to