Into The Mist (Land of Elyon) (6 page)

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"How bad does that hurt?" asked Thomas, staring wildly at the gash running down my leg.

"Pretty bad," I offered, rolling down my pant leg to cover the wound so I could begin forgetting about it. "What do we have for shoes down here?"

We sat in the middle of the hole, but we had dug a sort of cave on one side that held our treasure of found objects. Within that treasure were extra shoes of a size that fit one or the other of us. Thomas picked up the best of the bunch.

"Try this one," he said. I did, and found that it was too small. Thomas looked sideways at it, removed his own left shoe, and replaced it with the one he'd offered me.

"How about this one?" He held up a black boot that couldn't have been a worse match to the brown shoe I was already wearing. But it fit perfectly and I wasn't in a position to be picky about color or style in the things I wore on my feet. We were apt to have a long night ahead of us, and good traveling shoes were essential. The black boot would do just fine.

When I looked back, Thomas had his hand back in the hole where all the things we'd kept were hidden. He pulled out a small wooden box of a size that would fit in his pocket, which I'd seen many times before. The box sat atop his most prized possession, a journal he'd stolen from the House on the

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Hill. It had created quite a stir when the new journal - at the time filled with only blank pages - had gone missing from Madame Vickers's study. But Thomas was never caught with it and only showed it to me after the news of its disappearance had died down. He cherished every page, taking great care to use every square inch of space. I often saw him counting the blank pages that remained, so that he would know how many more paintings he could do before the journal was full. Thomas was extraordinarily gifted at painting pictures, and he loved to paint them whenever he could sneak away. He could draw something as big as Madame Vickers's house in great detail within the space of a few inches, such was his desire to paint everything he could while using the least amount of space in the journal.

The little wooden box he held contained the things he needed to make the paintings. He was fond of cutting bits of soft hair from all the children's heads. He found small sticks that fit his hand the way he liked, and made pasty white glue by mixing water with wheat flour and alum he stole from the kitchen. In this way he made crude brushes from the sticks, the glue, and the children's hair. His little wooden box also contained a dozen or more tiny pouches he'd made from old clothes and drawstrings found on the hill. One of the pouches

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was filled with hair, another contained a mix of dry flour and alum, and the rest were filled with colored powders of his own making. His color palette was surprisingly varied, for he had a way with mixing powdery red stone, dried wild flowers of every color, and burned black soot that gave him a rainbow of opportunity within the small cloth bags. He always mixed his powdery colors with his own saliva -- never water -- declaring that it made the images more personal, and he only used brushes made of hair from the children's heads, for he felt it infused his work with the powerful combination of sadness and vibrancy of those he loved.

For now Thomas tucked the small treasures safely away in his pockets, but we'd need more than a little wooden box and a journal to escape the House on the Hill.

"What else have we got in there that we can use?"

Thomas sniffed -- his nose was still running from the dust -- and he responded, "Well, there's no food, but there's some rope, two rusty knives, a flint and steel so we can make a fire when we want, three old candles...." He trailed off as he kept digging into the pile. I stayed quiet and rubbed my leg, wondering how in the world we were going to survive with such meager supplies.

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"There's a bag here we could throw over a shoulder, and I think it'll hold everything. And here's an old jug, but there's nothing in it." He popped the cork on the jug and turned it upside down. Nothing came out.

While we were looking through the things we'd saved up, I started thinking it wasn't quite as good a collection of treasures as I'd once thought it was. It was depressing to think that these were the best things we'd been able to save in all our digging through mound after mound of trash.

My self-pity in the hole under the tree stump was interrupted by the distant sound of Madame Vickers screaming from the porch of the house.

"There's no place to run where I won't find you!"

Thomas and I both froze in the hole at the cold sound of her words.

"Everyone knows where you belong! There's no town that won't ship you right back to my front door, and when they do ..." She seemed to hang on those words, to make us wonder what she would say. "Those clangs of the bell will still be here waiting for you. And worse! Much worse punishment than that!"

I stared at the floor of the hole, not sure what to do.

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"Maybe we should turn ourselves in," I said hesitantly. "Take our beating and maybe even get something to eat." I hadn't eaten all day and wras very hungry.

Thomas could see that I was rapidly losing courage. He reached back into the place where he'd been pulling things out and produced a cloth bag that was tied at the top. When he opened it and laid the cloth out flat on the ground between us, there were dozens of coins, rings, necklaces, and medallions lying there. They'd even been polished up some so that it really did look like a bag of treasures, things that we might actually be able to trade for food or water. I hadn't known he'd been hiding such things.

"These will take us a long way," said Thomas. "Maybe as far as we need to go."

Then he yanked up both his pant legs. I hiked up mine as well and we sat in the dim light of the hole, looking at the strange markings on our knees, thinking of the piece of paper we'd found, and knowing in our hearts that we had to leave Madame Vickers's House on the Hill and find the Wakefield House.

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***

CHAPTER 7

Avalanche!

Night had come to the hill several hours before, and still we waited. We held out some hope that one of the other children would bring us something to carry along with us -- some food or water or both -- and that we might hear some news of what Madame Vickers and Finch were up to. The time passed slowly in such tight quarters, and we whispered our plans until sometime deep in the night I drifted off to sleep.

I don't know how long I sat sleeping, but suddenly there was a finger poking into my ribs and I jerked awake, thinking of the Mooch and hoping he hadn't gotten ahold of me in the night.

"Wake up," Thomas said. "Someone's coming."

I was alert at once, listening carefully, hoping not to hear any growling or barking. For a moment it was quiet, only the sound of a soft breeze blowing in from the Lonely Sea -- but then we heard a tiny voice from the outside.

"Thomas? Roland? Are you in there?"

Thomas was on his feet in a flash, pushing up on the stump and beckoning me to help. Two boys

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were outside. Their names were Philip and Henry, and they struggled to hold up the old roots as we scampered out, all of our possessions in the one bag thrown over my shoulder.

"I thought you'd never come," said Thomas. "Where are the dogs?"

"They're chained up in the usual place," said Henry, the smaller of the two boys. "We thought Finch would stay up forever, but he finally fell asleep in the chair on the porch."

"And Madame Vickers?" I asked, certain that she was watching the four of us and would come around a corner at any moment.

"She's gone," said Philip. "Left hours ago with the horse and the cart. My guess is she went to tell everyone in Ainsworth about you two. Maybe she even doubled back to the north. You better be careful who you trust."

"Did you bring anything?" asked Thomas.

Henry held out a sack. "There's not much -- a little bread and half an apple, a few nuts, and a bottle of water. That's all we had hid in the basement, and there's no getting at the kitchen tonight. They have it locked down tight."

There was an awkward silence on the hill as the boy handed over the paltry bag of rations. It wouldn't last a day - in fact, it would probably be gone before we reached the bottom of the hill -- and

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it was not the way in which my brother and I had hoped to get our start.

"Where will you go?" asked Philip, a look of genuine concern on his face. "You can't go into town or to the sea, and there's nobody stupid enough to go into the Dark Hills. I'd sooner stay under the stump than go that way."

I looked at Thomas, but he seemed unwilling to give away our plans. Maybe he knew, as I didn't, that Madame Vickers would question the boys mercilessly. Better that they really didn't know where we'd gone and why.

"What's that sound?" asked Thomas, always the most perceptive in a group of any size.

"I don't hear anything," said Philip.

"You'd better get back by the secret way and quick," said Thomas. "Don't wake Finch, and stay clear of those dogs."

The boys looked at each other and nodded, then started back up the hill. Henry turned back for a final word. "Don't forget what you said, about coming back for us if you find a better place."

Thomas waved them off in the moonlight, and the two boys raced up the hill toward Madame Vickers's house. When their footsteps could be heard no more and we felt certain they were safely in the basement, I turned to Thomas.

"Are you ready?" I asked.

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"I am, but we'll need to swing wide. Madame Vickers is coming this way."

A shiver ran through me as I thought of her in the cart, moving toward the house with the horse before her. It was then that I heard the clomping of faraway hooves and knew that she had indeed returned and would soon come up the hill toward us.

We veered away from the noise, toward the Lonely Sea, to a place where there was no path and the way down was steep and dangerous. Slowly we crisscrossed down the side of a mountain of debris until we came near the bottom in the dead of night. I became careless when I could see the bottom of the hill and went more quickly than I should have, which started a very small garbage avalanche. But the small problem became much bigger when the avalanche I'd caused met with Thomas's feet, for he was in front of me as we went. His feet slid out from under him, and he began sliding down the hill. I jumped into the fray of moving junk to try to rescue him, and the two of us went head over heels down the side of a hill that was now sliding out from under us, making a tremendous racket that no two dogs within a mile could have slept through.

Sure enough, as we tumbled down the hill, we could both hear the distant echo of Max and the Mooch barking. We toppled along the hill, hollering as we went, bouncing off sharp and hard objects

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alike until we slammed into the bottom. A wave of descending garbage threatened to cover us. We scrambled to our feet, out from under the onslaught of an avalanche that sparked and flew as it hit the bottom of the hill. As quickly as we could, we ran and ran toward the cliffs that dropped off to the Lonely Sea.

"Hold up!" I yelled to Thomas after a time. "You don't want to run right off the edge, do you?"

Thomas pulled up, and we both tried to catch our breath. We were tired and scraped up, scared half to death, and we hadn't eaten anything all day.

"Give me that water bottle," said Thomas. "My mouth is so dry I can hardly swallow."

I dropped the bag to the ground and opened it up, taking out the bottle of water. It was lucky for both of us that it hadn't broken on the way down. I took out the cork and handed the bottle to Thomas, then watched him drink down half of it. He coughed and sputtered, handing it back and gesturing that I should finish it off. When I was through, I tossed the bottle aside, knowing we had a wooden jug in the bag that would work better if we lived long enough to find water again.

As we calmed down and our breathing slowed, we both heard the sound of Max and the Mooch from far away. Looking up the hill, we saw firelight

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snaking down the main path. There were two lights, one bobbing up and down as though the person under it were running, the other steadier and well out in front. It was Madame Vickers, racing down the hill in her horse-drawn cart with a torch in hand, and Finch in hot pursuit with the dogs.

"This is bad," I said. "Very bad."

Thomas smiled wryly in the moonlight, as if he expected some miracle to save us.

"Maybe not quite as terrible as it looks," he said. "You forget how many favors I was owed."

As if on cue, there came a crashing sound from somewhere up on the hill. It was hard to see exactly what was going on in the night, but the bobbing torch carried by Finch sped up, then abruptly stopped, the dogs barking incessantly and the sound of Finch's voice screaming at them to shut up.

"I was beginning to wonder when it would come off," said Thomas.

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

Thomas smiled, still catching his breath.

"One should never go whipping around sharp turns in a wooden cart without checking to make sure all the wheels are on tight. Don't you think?"

We laughed at the thought of Madame Vickers lying in the garbage and hoped she'd landed in a stinky mud hole full of the nastiest stuff from the hill. We only stayed a moment, listening to the