Into The Mist (Land of Elyon) (2 page)

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whole way. Roland smiled as he spun the wheel hard to the right and the wind caught with a snap in the sails overhead. The Warwick Beacon pitched into the wind, and Yipes howled as the hot tea spilled over the edges of the three cups.

"He'll never learn," said Roland, turning the wheel back to where it had been.

When Yipes arrived, he was very happy with his effort and didn't seem to mind at all that he'd spilled some of the tea on his hands. He set the cups on the worn wood of the deck and stood straight up.

"Mighty hot tea this morning," he said with a smile. "Mighty hot!"

"It would be best with a bit of morning bread, don't you think?" asked Roland. I took my cup of hot tea in hand and waited while Yipes darted back to the cabin for one of the loaves we'd cooked up the night before. To be fair, I loved to watch Yipes go zinging from place to place on the Warwick Beacon. He was very fond of climbing the high masts that held the sails as though they were trees from the forest back home. He would zip from the stern to the bow in the most precarious ways imaginable, never taking the obvious route, and always providing entertainment for both me and Roland.

Roland now smiled at me knowingly, shook the ink from his pen, and began to put his writing things away. By the time Yipes returned with the bread, the little wooden

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door was shut on the inkwell, the journal and the pen had been pocketed away, and our captain stood silently at the wheel of the Warwick Beacon, wisps of gray hair catching on the morning wind.

"Another day, maybe two, and you'll see land once more," he announced.

The answer to my first question had finally come. Twenty-five days on the Lonely Sea would soon come to an end.

Now I repeated my second question. "Where are you taking us, Roland?" I asked. I feared the wink and the nod, that he had changed his mind and would not tell us as we sat holding our warm cups and nibbling at the bread. But I was wrong to fear old Roland would clam up once more, for at last he was ready to take us on an adventure that would last through the day and into the night.

"I have thought a great deal about how to tell you," he began. "It must come in the form of a story -- one that finds its beginning when I was near your age. I will tell it just as I remember it, as it happened to my brother and me when we were boys of only ten and eleven."

He looked my way, then off into the sky, as though he were trying to actually see his long-forgotten childhood.

"I do love a good story!" said Yipes, tearing a piece of bread off the loaf with his mouth and wiping the crumbs from his mustache. I held the cup of warm tea close and settled in for a perfect day at sea with my closest friend

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seated next to me, our shoulders touching to keep warm, and a good long story about to be told.

Roland looked directly into my eyes and moved the wheel ever so slightly.

"We begin with two angry dogs, the boy who owned them, and my brother."

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***

CHAPTER 2

Madame Vickers's House on the Hill

"Get back from there!" The dreadful voice echoing down the stairs into the basement where I slept was familiar. It belonged to a boy named Finch, the son of Madame Vickers, the woman who ran the House on the Hill. As I lay on the dirt floor, I felt a bug crawling along my foot and flicked it away, thinking (as I often did on waking) of the awful situation in which I found myself.

The House on the Hill was the kind of place one might wish on their worst enemy, full of terrible jobs to be done, bad food to be eaten, and regular beatings to be had. I lived there with my brother Thomas because we'd been thrown out of the boys' home in Ainsworth for pulling a wild prank. (A box full of spiders, two snakes, and the headmaster's sleeping wife were all involved.) For years we'd gotten away with such behavior because we'd never been caught, but Thomas had brawled with an older boy and won the day before, and older boys turn to snitching when their status is threatened by someone a year or two beneath them. We were implicated in a series of other similar behaviors and the headmaster's wife -- a

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woman with a near fatal fear of snakes and spiders -insisted my brother and I be gotten rid of.

And so it was that Thomas and I came to Madame Vickers's House on the Hill at the ripe old ages of ten and eleven -- myself being ten and Thomas being eleven. The House on the Hill was reserved primarily for children younger than us, children between the ages of six and nine who could be (according to Madame Vickers) "molded into useful laborers." By the time they turned ten they'd be moved off elsewhere to do even more work. Since Thomas and I were the oldest, we were leaders of a band of misfit boys and girls several years our junior, and we prided ourselves on taking care of them as best we could, given the grim conditions.

It's not healthy for a ten-year-old to lie around feeling sorry for himself for too long, especially with young Thomas Warvold in such dire need of help. And so, before I describe more of the House on the Hill, I must get myself out from under my ratty blanket and show how I did my best to free Thomas from Max and the Mooch, the two very large, always hungry, and exceptionally vicious dogs under the care of Finch.

"You think you're funny, do you? I'll show you who's funny!" Finch's voice boomed off the walls and down the stairs once more, and the children around me started to wake.

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"It wasn't me! It could have been anyone!"

I ran up the stairs, followed by three or four children who'd been awakened by the racket, and when I reached the top I saw that the dogs had Thomas pinned down in the corner of the kitchen, growling and waiting for Finch to command them to attack. Finch had them each on a twisted old rope of a leash, but they were practically lifting him off his feet as they lunged toward my brother.

"Could you please call off your dogs, Finch?" I didn't yell the question, only spoke it. I'd learned long ago that Finch didn't respond kindly to being told what to do. He was fifteen -- a lot older than the rest of us -- and generally unwilling to listen to anything we said on our own or as a group. He was especially unfriendly when his mother was not in the house, which was the case on this particular morning.

Finch turned on me and jerked the dogs in my direction, sending me back toward the stairs to the musty old basement. The boys behind me gasped and darted a few steps down the stairs, turning back to the excitement above. They were at that awkward stage in life when curiosity nearly overcame fear, and the two emotions wrestled with each other at times such as these.

"Get back in the basement, or I'll set Max

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and the Mooch on you and close the door!" Finch threatened.

The thought of these two monstrous dogs loose in the basement, tearing everything to shreds and quite possibly taking a bite out of more than one child, was more than enough to quiet the group of us. But I had done my job already, for Thomas was not only crafty, he was quick. By the time Finch turned back to the kitchen, the space where Thomas had been was empty. He'd gone out the kitchen window into the open space of the hill.

"Sic 'em, boys!" Finch let Max and the Mooch off the leash and sent them running out the door in search of my brother. He turned to us before leaving.

"The rest of you, back in the basement!"

And we would have done as we were told, too, only it wasn't Thomas standing at the door when the dogs went out, it was Madame Vickers, her icy stare sending a wave of cold energy over the whole house and all that was in it. The moment was frozen and quiet, for the dogs never barked or made mischief when Madame Vickers was present. The only noise they were known to make when they saw her was a quiet whimpering as they waddled off to their beds around the side of the old house with their tails tucked between their legs.

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"Finchy," said Madame Vickers, "these boys should be at work by now. They'll need to skip their breakfast and get right to it."

Madame Vickers, like her son Finch, had sharp features - a straight nose that ended in a point far away from the rest of her face, hollow cheeks, thin lips, a long chin. She wore mean-looking boots, made for kicking (or so she said to frighten us), and she had the longest stride of anyone we'd ever seen. It seemed that every step was a yard, meaning that she would often appear before us much faster than we thought possible.

While we stood frozen at the doorway leading to the basement, Madame Vickers turned toward the cart and the horse she'd come in on.

"You there! Out of the cart and into the basement! This boy Roland will show you the way."

A small boy of six or seven emerged from the cart, frightened and in need of a bath. He raced past Madame Vickers and came up short before us.

"Go on then," Madame Vickers ordered. "They won't hurt you. It's me and Finchy you need to worry about." She had the palest skin imaginable, as though she'd never stepped foot outside to feel the warmth of the sun. Everything about her was cold - her voice, her bulging black eyes, and the frozen white skin. It gave kids the chills just to look at Madame Vickers.

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She slapped the back of the new boy's head, and he tumbled into the group of us.

"Go back to the basement and get your things," she said, addressing us all at once. From that moment on, the new boy no longer existed as far as our headmistress was concerned. He was one of a throng of boys and girls that held only one purpose for Madame Vickers: "There's money to be made!"

I shooed everyone down the stairs and closed the door, happy at least to have been rid of Finch for the moment and knowing what I would find when the group of us got to the bottom of the stairs.

"This means something good for breakfast!" whispered one of the boys, racing down the stairs with the rest of us following him. The new boy rubbed the back of his head and seemed about to cry, but he hurried down the stairs like the rest of us, wondering what he would find.

When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Thomas was awaiting us, holding out three loaves of bread. We all had hoped he would be there, for there was more than one secret way into the basement from the hill above. As children of the dumping ground, one of our most enjoyable endeavors was to plan and build passageways through the rubble and into the basement. The basement was the one place Madame Vickers would not go. It was dirty

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and smelly, filled with the stench of unkempt children. She would send Finch on occasion, but for the most part the basement was ours and ours alone.

The breakfast of bread was split into pieces while we dressed and got our burlap sacks for picking garbage. The questions flew at Thomas: What did you do? Were you seared the Mooch would rip your leg off? How did you get away so fast? As you may have guessed by now, Thomas was adored by everyone he met. I stood back in the shadows, wondering how long Thomas's luck could hold out. Sooner or later we'd be thrown out of Madame Vickers's House on the Hill too ... and there was no place else to go.

"Finch is always at the sugar in the kitchen. Have you seen him?" asked Thomas. Everyone nodded and agreed that Finch was notorious for filching spoonfuls of sugar from the bowl. Madame Vickers had been furious just the day before when she'd found the top off the bowl, with some of the sugar missing. It didn't cross her mind to question her beloved Finchy. Instead she set the blame on Thomas -- though she couldn't prove it -- and gave him a good long thrashing to the bottom with a broomstick.

"I woke early," continued Thomas. Everyone munched on their bread, pulling up their suspenders or buttoning their trousers. "The stairs creak an

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awful lot, so I used tunnel number two to avoid the dogs. I crept through the kitchen window and took that small sugar bowl -- the one Madame Vickers uses at the table when one of the merchants comes from town."

"Get to it, Thomas! We've got to be going," one of the girls said. Everyone was taking a last big bite of bread and hiding scraps under pillows made of old straw and weeds.

"I filled that little sugar bowl and set a spoon right next to it, then I hid in the cupboard and made a bit of a racket. Finch came in all alone, snooping around to find out what was the matter. I cracked open the cupboard a little and watched him notice the sugar bowl on the table. He looked all around, took the spoon, and filled it. Only the thing was, when he put it in his mouth, he coughed and gagged and nearly choked. It was salt I'd put in that sugar bowl, and when he ate it I tumbled out of the cupboard and laughed so hard I couldn't get up!"

"I bet you weren't laughing when he called Max and the Mooch," I added. "You're lucky you got out of there with all your limbs."

Everyone was so proud of Thomas, I didn't have the heart to tell them there would be a price to pay for the missing bread from the kitchen and the salt in the bowl. The trouble with pranks was that someone had

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to pay, and I was feeling some dread over how much Thomas's morning antics would cost us all.

"No more tricks for a while, okay?" I said as we made our way out of the basement.

Thomas waved me off in his usual way, and I could tell he was already planning some new way of torturing Finch and Madame Vickers.

Madame Vickers's house sat on a dirt hill which had, at one time, been the place where all the trash from Ainsworth was thrown. At some point in its past, the mound of debris began to smell awful enough that the leaders in Ainsworth declared it "officially filled with garbage" and found a new place to get rid of the things they no longer wanted. (The new place they chose was farther away, on the edge of the Dark Hills, where the wind blew steadily away from the town.) The old hill of garbage was covered with a layer of dirt and left to rot.

It was Madame Vickers, working as the disciplinarian of the boys' home in Ainsworth, who hatched the idea to build a house atop the garbage and bring parentless little children there to live. She was paid handsomely for taking these children and training them to do hard labor, removing them from sight so that those in Ainsworth could forget about them. Once a week she returned to Ainsworth with a cart full of trinkets found in the hill of trash to sell