The Chamber in the Sky Page 11

  They looked over at their food supply. The bags had been torn open and bits of brown paper were smeared all over the place. Gregory leaned over and looked through the bags. The meat was gone. The vegetables were scratched to pieces. The cereal was all over the place.

  Gwynyfer shouted, “That little vermin! Your little monster!” She shoved Brian in the shoulder.

  “Hey!” he said. “You wouldn’t let me feed him!”

  She stuck her head out of the wagon’s bonnet. “Not a sign of it! It flew the coop! Great Manannan! I’d like to wring its chitinous neck!” She popped back in. “And don’t you tell me this happened because I didn’t let you feed it! We’d still have a wagon full of food if you hadn’t petted a bacterium and coaxed it and made googly eyes at it, and convinced it we wanted nothing more than for a piece of six-legged filth to crawl along with us!”

  Brian was stinging. He was furious with Gwynyfer, but afraid of her. And he couldn’t believe that little Tars had turned on him like this — just eaten everything and run. At the same time, he knew it was true. They should have put the food away, but they hadn’t. And Tars didn’t know right from wrong. He just knew salted from unsalted.

  Gregory still was going through the food bags. “There’s almost nothing left,” he said. “If Tars didn’t eat it, he ruined it.” He made a disgusted noise. “It looks like he ate the fish while he sat in the onion dip.” He put his hand over his mouth. “There’s a butt-print.”

  They had to get ready and keep going. They all knew it. The Thusser would be sending out more search parties through the Volutes.

  “So now,” said Gwynyfer as she harnessed the thombulants, “we have to go into Three-Gut — into Thusser territory — with absolutely no food and nothing to protect us but a few party costumes. This really is ripping.”

  She climbed into the wagon and set the thombulants walking.

  “Topping,” she said.

  Brian sat, meek and miserable, in the back of the wagon. He looked into the darkness, hoping he’d see a glimmer of Tars Tarkas’s eyes. He felt guilty and angry all at once.

  The other two hardly talked to him. They passed through burned-out villages. Now they were close enough to Three-Gut that the villages had belonged to the mannequins. They saw a few smashed clockwork people who had tried to resist as the Thusser swept down from the stomach.

  Now Gwynyfer leaned against Gregory and held his hand. Brian could hear her laughing at Gregory’s jokes. Brian could tell that Gregory wasn’t standing up for him.

  They were approaching the stomach of Three-Gut. A wind blew through the tubes.

  Everyone was starving, but there was nothing to eat but fragments of flatbread and cucumbers with claw marks in them.

  Brian sat dolefully, munching half of a green pepper.

  They didn’t have any food left for dinner.

  After they’d been traveling ten hours with Brian hiding, disgraced, in the back of the wagon, Gregory and Gwynyfer decided they wanted to stop to rest. The thombulants were tired. They stopped by a huge statue of St. Miach, the patron saint of the mannequins. He had a halo and was holding a platter of replacement hands.

  Gwynyfer clambered down and went to tie the beasts up.

  Brian approached Gregory. He just said, “Gregory …”

  Gregory looked at him but didn’t say anything.

  Brian couldn’t even finish his sentence. Instead, he murmured, “I’m going to go off and go to the bathroom.”

  He climbed down and wandered off into the dark, carrying a lantern.

  Gwynyfer looked up from the thombulants. She saw Brian’s light receding, stopped what she was doing, and began harnessing the beasts again. When she was done, she ran back and climbed up.

  “Where’s your greasy, chubby little friend going?” she asked Gregory.

  “Whiz.”

  Gwynyfer smiled at Gregory, pinched his cheek, and shook the thombulants’ reins.

  “What are you doing?” said Gregory.

  “Prank,” said Gwynyfer. “Imagine when he gets back and we’re gone.”

  “You can’t just leave him!”

  “We’re coming right back!” She giggled with her lips very close to Gregory’s face. She whispered, “Cowardy custard.”

  Suddenly, she slapped the thombulants and they flew forward. Gregory almost tumbled backward. “Whoa!”

  She started laughing, so he started laughing, and soon they were laughing together.

  When they had gone about a quarter of a mile, Gregory said, “Okay. Okay, G. Stop. Let’s wait here. We’ll give it ten minutes, then go back.”

  “Why wait?” said Gwynyfer. She kept going. “G, we’re not going back for Mr. Thatz at all. Off instead to the scenic Globular Colon! For lovely afternoons spent bathing and eating strawberry ices.”

  Gregory hoped she was joking. He made a kind of stiff laughing sound. “Sure,” he said.

  “You know, G, you have not always the spirit of waggish fun one likes to see in a boy.”

  “But, I mean, we’re going back for Brian, right?”

  “So he can look tense and wounded while we do Ping-Pong tournaments? I think not.”

  “Gwynyfer …”

  “Do you think we should go left here?”

  “We’ve got to turn around.”

  “Indeed we do, to avoid that smelly, old Three-Gut. But if we turn around here, see, we’ll run into Bri-Bri.”

  “We can’t just leave him!”

  “You’re the living end.”

  “We can’t!”

  “Was he ever fun? No, G, he was not. No hoot was he.”

  “He’s sitting back there, thinking that we abandoned him!”

  “And he’s not wrong! Do you want your friend to be wrong? No. We like him to be right. So do we go left? Or straight on? Tell your fetching charioteer.”

  “Gwynyfer!” Gregory shouted. “Brian is my friend! I know you don’t like him! But he’s my friend! And we’re going back right now! I can’t believe you’d actually abandon him.”

  She slowed the thombulants. She was thoughtful. “This is too bad,” she said. “Really too bad. I thought I’d found my equal in you.” She started to turn the thombulants around. “But you, too, when push comes to shove, are a drip. A safe little boy. A human.”

  She shook the reins. The thombulants began pacing back up the tunnel toward Brian.

  Gregory said, “Gwynyfer … you know I like a joke.”

  Gwynyfer shrugged. “It was just an idea,” she said. “Just a little idea.”

  They rolled back toward the statue of St. Miach and his dish of hands.

  Brian stood amazed, looking at the statue of St. Miach picked out in his lantern. The stone face gazed down at him, kind and concerned. Brian was sure this was where the wagon had been. There was no sign of it now.

  He walked a ways down the tunnel. Nothing.

  He went back to the roadside shrine of St. Miach. His stomach was falling.

  They hadn’t abandoned him. They couldn’t have. Gregory was acting like a jerk sometimes lately, but he wouldn’t do that to his best friend.

  Then he thought about the way Gregory had been behaving the last year in school. A lot of times, he did stuff without Brian. He went off with cooler friends.

  And Gwynyfer … Brian knew she was, at heart, a Norumbegan, and that meant she could never be trusted. They didn’t feel things the way humans did.

  Brian, leaning against the saint’s robed knee, felt supremely sorry for himself. There he was, alone in the tunnel, close to a vast, empty stomach, facing a world of unknown terrors. He didn’t even have his gun.

  He heard a clank.

  They were back. It had been a joke. A stupid joke. He stood up and shouted, “I can’t believe you’d just go off like that! It’s not funny!”

  “So sorry,” said a voice. “We promise we won’t leave you again.”

  The figures filed into the light from Brian’s lantern.

  Men in dark, long coa
ts; men with black eyes.

  He did not have a chance to run.

  Gregory stared astounded at the statue of St. Miach in their headlights. Brian was not there.

  They had searched farther up the tunnel. Nothing. No one.

  “Pity,” said Gwynyfer. “Now off to the Globular Colon!”

  “We’ve got to stay here in case he comes back,” said Gregory.

  “Comes back? I don’t, frankly, think that’s going to happen. He couldn’t have just wandered off. Someone with a thomb or a carriage must have picked him up. He’s gone, G.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “He wanted to go to Pflundt. Why, he’s doubtless well on his way by now. With a whole new set of glittering Thusser friends.”

  “You think he’s a prisoner?”

  “Oh, or dead. How do you expect me to know? Don’t be trying. Now there’re more food scraps for the rest of us. Bags I the carrot heel.”

  Gregory demanded they wait by the statue. For hours, they sat there. Gwynyfer was furious.

  Brian did not return. Gregory felt an awful, growing certainty that the whole time they were sitting there, Brian was getting farther and farther away.

  After a while, Gregory said it was time to give up and start hunting for him.

  Gwynyfer didn’t agree. “Is it really that time? I would a good deal rather we do our grieving — so young, so sad — and then move on to the portion of the week where we swim and go downhill skiing.”

  “We’ll go this direction,” said Gregory. “Back where we came from originally. He obviously didn’t pass us in the tunnel, so whoever took him must have gone back that way.”

  They rolled down the corridor, shouting Brian’s name. There was no answer. They reached a fork in the intestine. They did not know which way to go. They followed another route that led toward the stomach of Three-Gut.

  They saw they were coming to another one of the burnt villages. This time, there were figures moving about there.

  “Thusser,” whispered Gwynyfer. “Get the disguises.”

  Gregory slipped back and grabbed their little metal cloaking devices. Brian’s was right there beside the other two. Gregory shook his head. He couldn’t believe Brian had left his disguise behind. He handed one to Gwynyfer. They flicked the switches.

  Immediately, they were Thusser. Their eyes were black, they wore long military coats, and Gregory’s ears now were pointed.

  Cautiously, they rolled into the village. It had been turned into a depot for the Thusser Horde. Soldiers went past in lines, carrying camera-like devices on long poles.

  Men looked up at the two kids, but they did not excite attention. Gregory and Gwynyfer rode slowly through the village. They stared straight ahead.

  In one of the burned-out houses, now just a few portions of brick wall, Brian Thatz looked up from his torture. He opened his eyes, panting. He was sitting on the ground with his wrists and ankles shackled behind him.

  He saw his wagon.

  He saw Gregory and Gwynyfer looking like Thusser.

  The wagon was just going past. It didn’t stop.

  He started to shout Gregory’s name.

  And then the Thusser torturer touched Brian’s forehead again and said magical words, and pain seared along the boy’s every vein. He felt like his skin was burning off. He felt the muscles sear. He rolled on the ground, slamming his head against the bricks again and again to make the pain stop.

  The wagon was gone. Gregory and Gwynyfer hadn’t seen him.

  The wizard clapped and the pain ceased. Brian collapsed. His head was bleeding where he’d hit it against the wall.

  “Please don’t … again …” he said.

  The wizard did not speak to him.

  The wagon was out of town.

  “Well,” said Gwynyfer, “thank goodness our disguises held. That was really rather nervous-making. But here we are, on the other side.”

  Gregory nodded.

  They rode on toward the stomach of Three-Gut.

  In the dark hills of Vermont, the Thusser worked all night. Troops and machines rumbled out of the red, angry hole that led to their world from the center of a warped suburban lawn. Platoons of soldiers marched through the streets in their long, black coats. The houses that lined the avenues were Thusser nests, moving gently and sweetly in the light breeze. Occasionally a corner or a roofline of a human house would catch the white, shifting fabric of the nests. There was no sign of the human owners, though. They were sunk deep within their homes, dreaming. Thusser families stood on their lawns, watching the soldiers pass.

  In the City of Gargoyles, far beneath Norumbega Mountain, army formations were on the move. They manned the battlements of the old Imperial palace. They waited in the square outside the gates of St. Diancecht’s cathedral. Upon orders, they marched through the dark nave of the cathedral. Their boots clapped loudly on the stone floor. They marched down the steps to the crypt. There, past the tombs of all the dead kings and emperors of Norumbega, lay the doorway to the Great Body. Thusser streamed through. Wizards clutched the edges of the black portal between worlds, exhausting themselves to keep it open and to send so many bodies passing through.

  For twenty or thirty miles around that spot, Thusser skulked through the streets of small Vermont villages. They set up tall poles that broadcast thought and that sped up time.

  People sleeping in their beds had strange dreams and did not protest when figures crawled through their windows.

  A man stood by his refrigerator, mouth open. He was in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. The refrigerator door was open, and the light inside was bright, reflecting off the plastic of cheeses, the cling wrap around gray meat, and a six-pack of beer. He did not move. A Thusser man sat at his table, whispering to him in words no human could understand.

  On Interstate 89, there were few cars. A girl rode in the back seat of one of them, half asleep. Her mom and dad were taking her to Montreal. Her dreams were troubled. She could not get out of her head scenes of men with blackened eyes. She opened her eyes, dropping the book she had been reading earlier.

  Fir trees and pines ran in a jumble past the car windows. The lone car’s headlights lit the dotted lines for lanes in regular rhythm.

  Distant mountains glowed under a partial moon. The car was passing the exit for a town called Gerenford.

  Suddenly, there was a man standing by the side of the road. He did not wave his arms or try to hitchhike. And yet the girl saw her father slow down, put on his blinker, and start to pull over.

  “Andy, don’t,” said the mother. “What are you doing?”

  He came to a stop. The man in the long coat walked to their car.

  The mother locked her door.

  The father stared straight ahead.

  “Andy, lock the doors. Lock the doors!”

  The girl scrambled to click the locks in the backseat, but the man in the long black coat had already strolled to her father’s door and opened it. He waited while the father got out.

  The girl stared frantically into the front seat — wondering whether to stay in the car or to run — but her mother shouted, “Duck, Carlie!” and threw herself over into the driver’s seat to slam the door shut and lock all the doors automatically. “Andy!” the mother screamed. “What’s going on?”

  Now there were more of the men coming out of the woods.

  The father stood without moving.

  The car was surrounded by men and women with black marbles for eyes. They came closer. They touched the metal of the car, the glass of the windows.

  Helplessly, the mother reached forward, whispering, “Don’t …”

  “Mom?” said the girl.

  The mother was staring straight ahead. She touched a button, and with a clunk, all the doors in the car unlocked at once.

  The little girl started to yell.

  Two hours later, there was a traffic jam on the highway. It looked like a traffic jam, but it was silent. The cars were empty. Their headlights were o
n. Their engines were off. Their doors were open, where people had been dragged out. Soldiers in long black coats carried them on stretchers off into the woods.

  The girl stared into the trees flowing above her. She could not remember a time when she had not been carried like this by men and women in long, dark coats with black marble eyes. She would always be carried. There would always be branches above her. There would always be part of a moon.

  She closed her eyes happily and went to sleep.

  A day after Brian disappeared, Gregory and Gwynyfer emerged from the Volutes and found themselves in the great stomach of Three-Gut.

  Far above, the gray, cavernous ceiling was broken by the dull, glowing veins of the lux effluvium. Flat, swampy plains stretched far into the distance. Around the entrance to the intestines, there was a small village of crumbling brick. It was now occupied by a few Thusser who sat in lawn chairs, smoking cigarettes and tapping the ash into a rusted coffee can.

  They raised their hands as Gregory and Gwynyfer, disguised, went past.

  There was a single causeway that led off into the marshy distance. Gregory and Gwynyfer followed it, since that was the only way to go; they didn’t have one of the sleighs that mannequins drove straight across the sea of muck.

  The wagon rolled slowly along the causeway. Gwynyfer didn’t bother steering. She was bored and angry and sat with her arms crossed.

  Once they crossed paths with a small detachment of Thusser soldiers riding in wagons. Gwynyfer and Gregory clicked on their disguises. They waved and pulled to the side of the road. The soldiers saluted them and drove on toward the entrance to the Volutes.

  Both the kids were starving. They had barely eaten anything for a whole day. Gregory couldn’t sleep because he was too hungry.

  Just as the veins were beginning to lighten, they came to a tall, gabled inn that rose up beside the causeway. They stopped for a meal. Before they went in, they made sure they were disguised.

  “You look awful,” Gwynyfer said playfully.

  Gregory was in no mood to play. He didn’t say anything.

  The taproom was paneled in dark wood, or something that looked like it. A square-shaped Thusser with short, silver hair scrubbed mugs and whistled.