Into The Mist (Land of Elyon) (3 page)

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or trade, and sometimes she would return with a new boy or girl sitting in the cart where the junk had been. It was a grim introduction for the child to be hauled away like trash from the streets of Ainsworth.

I thought on these things as we made our way down the side of the hill with our itchy burlap bags in tow. Finch was there -- tall and skinny as a wire, with greasy hair and a greasy voice -- waiting with the dogs who'd gotten their courage back up and were growling at everyone who passed by. Finch could barely control Max and the Mooch when they were leashed, and relied almost entirely on screaming at them and hitting them with a stick in order to keep them from running off or jumping on top of someone.

When Thomas walked by Finch, the older boy gave my brother a nasty look and a tremendous push on the shoulder. Thomas rolled down the hill of garbage but made a game of it, tossing and turning until he landed square on his feet and performed a little dance, finishing with his arms outstretched and all of us cheering.

"You'll be cleaning my unders tonight," Finch sneered. "And the doghouse needs a good scrubbing. How does that sound?"

This took the smile off of Thomas's face and made the rest of us giggle under our breath. There

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was no worse job than cleaning Finch's undershorts, but cleaning up after the dogs came in close second.

"Get on with it!" yelled Finch, the dogs instinctively growling at his angry voice. "And you best have something worth selling in those bags of yours by midday if you want anything to eat besides a bowl full of salt!"

We worked all day for Madame Vickers, searching the hill of junk for anything we could find that was valuable enough to trade or sell. We found a great many articles of clothing that could be washed and sold to the boys' home or traded in the market. Sometimes we found jewelry, old books with torn pages, broken tools, and chipped dishes. But mostly we discovered only decaying food, old rancid hay from the barns, and things so broken they could never be repaired. It was a good day if you returned with half a sack of junk that might be sold, a bad day if you returned with nothing much and were rewarded with no dinner and a grumbling stomach when the lights were turned out for the night.

It was on that very day -- the day on which my story begins -- that I found something miraculous. So miraculous was this item that it charted the course of my life and the life of my brother for the rest of our days. It was the very beginning of an unimaginable, lifelong adventure.

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***

CHAPTER 3

At Work on a Hill of Garbage

Thomas and I moved away from the rest of the group with the new boy in tow.

"What's your name?" Thomas asked. The new boy was small, but his voice was even smaller, as if he'd crawled back into a cave and mumbled out of the darkness.

"Jeremy Jones," he said. "But everyone calls me Jonezy."

"All right, Jonezy it is." Thomas patted him on the back and pointed up the hill. "You see that piece of wood sticking out of the ground? The one with the rag hanging from the end?"

It was a long way off, but Jonezy could see it and nodded.

"Start your first day there," said Thomas. There was a familiar gleam in his eye. "That's a very good spot. You'll find some good clothes that won't need much cleaning up. And you might even find an old ring or two. Madame Vickers loves rings!"

Jonezy smiled in a bashful sort of way and started up the hill while Thomas and I scrambled

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down a crude path, kicking garbage off to the sides as we went.

"Very clever," I said as we walked.

"What?"

"Hiding things for the new boy," I answered.

"You never know when we'll need a favor. Better the new ones are indebted to us from the start."

Everyone was indebted to Thomas for one thing or another, which I had to admit was a comforting thought as we approached an area we'd been digging at for days. We settled in and began pulling at a block of stone we'd been at the day before, trying to free it from its hold in the stinking mud and filth.

Finch was a ways off at the top of the hill with Max and the Mooch, yelling at some of the other boys to get moving. I looked down the long, wide hill of debris below us and saw for the hundredth time that there was no place to go. The cliffs were near on one side, the Dark Hills went on forever on the other. Way off in the distance was Ainsworth, a city known for its cruelty and meanness toward homeless children. Somewhere far off on the other side of the hill lay the Northern Kingdoms, but I didn't know how far off they were. I looked up at the very top of the hill and could just see the bobbing head of Madame Vickers. She sat in a rocking chair on the wide porch that surrounded the old

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house. She would sit there all day, eating and drinking what she pleased, waiting for the junk to arrive.

"Roland - look here, I think I've got it loose." Thomas had been busy at the stone while I daydreamed. Now I looked down and saw that he had indeed begun to make some real progress. I knelt down and pulled on the edge of the stone with him, and it started to move with the sucking sound of thick mud. It smelled awful, and we looked at each other with sour faces.

"Maybe we should leave it," I offered. "Whatever we find under there is going to be rotten."

Thomas was undeterred. Once he set his mind to a task - especially one in which some curiosity was to be found -- it was impossible to stop him. We heaved on the rock again, and this time a great sucking sound was followed by a loud pop as the stone broke free. We tumbled down the hill and a truly magnificent stench poured forth from the hole where the stone had been.

We looked at each other for a long, silent moment, and then Thomas waved his arms, trying to clear the air, and strode back up the hill. I followed until we reached the stone, which had been turned over. It was crawling with worms and shiny beetles and every kind of creepy insect. The sight of it stopped me in my tracks.

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"Take a look at this," said Thomas. There was wonder in his voice, as if he'd found some kind of treasure, but I'd been fooled by him many times before and felt sure he was only trying to trick me now.

"What is it? What's there?"

"Come see for yourself."

I crept very slowly past the rock and stood next to my brother, holding my nose against the thickness of the air.

"I think it's a horse," said Thomas. "It's too big to be a dog."

It certainly was some sort of large animal, or what remained of it, and the more I looked the more convinced I was that it was indeed the remnants of a horse.

"So much for a lost treasure," I muttered, suddenly aware that we'd wasted an awful lot of time digging up something that wouldn't get either of us fed come dinnertime.

"Wait a moment," said Thomas. To my horror he reached down into the space where the decaying horse lay - his hand between the ribs and the squirming bugs - and took hold of something. It was a strap of some sort, made of leather. He pulled mightily on it until his hands slipped free and he nearly fell over backward. The strap did not move,

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but Thomas was back at it straight away, digging into the soggy muck around the strap.

Not to put too fine a point on the smell of things, but the more Thomas dug, the thicker the air became with the decayed odor of death. I had to turn away in order to keep from getting sick.

"Just leave it, Thomas," I begged, but he wouldn't listen. Before long I was shaking my head but digging with him, trying with all my might to get the thing free so I could convince Thomas to move away from the mess we'd uncovered.

"Okay, step back," said Thomas. We'd managed to claw a lot of mud away from the strap, and Thomas was wiping his hands on his pants, preparing to make another go of yanking what he'd uncovered out of the ground.

"Let me," I said. "I'm stronger than you."

These are the wrong words to use on a big brother, or any brother for that matter. We were virtually the same size, but the fact remained that he was a year older, and that meant something in a moment such as this. Thomas looked me up and down, pushed me aside, and grabbed the strap, pulling with all his might. There was a sound of breaking bones as something came free from the ground. Thomas fell back hard, hitting his head against the stone we'd moved. Whatever he had

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pulled from the earth flew over his head and tumbled down the hill behind us.

When Thomas sat up he was dazed, rubbing his head and looking all around for the object he'd found.

"It's there," I said, pointing down the hill. I could have beaten him to it, but it was he who had been determined to stay at it when I had wanted to walk away. I pulled my brother back up on his feet and followed him toward the object.

"What are you idiots up to now?"

It was Finch coming down without the dogs. He was sometimes like his mother in the way he sneaked quietly from place to place in order to surprise, a wicked habit with only one purpose: to catch someone doing something he or she shouldn't be doing. Lost in our struggle with the strap and the dead horse, we'd forgotten to keep a close eye on him. Finch was quite a bit older and bigger than we were, and he enjoyed pushing us down or punching us in the chest for no particular reason. His fists were clenched as he came, a sign that he was eager to inflict some abuse on both of us.

Finch sniffed the air.

"What's that stench?"

Thomas and I were standing down the hill from the place where we'd uncovered the remains of the

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horse, but we hadn't yet reached the thing that we'd pulled free. Finch kept walking toward us until he stumbled and slid right into the place where we'd been digging. He sank into the mess we'd uncovered and looked down at his feet. Before he could throw up, he pitched forward and made a heaving sound, but nothing came out. Jumping out of the hole, he ran a few paces back toward the top of the hill, then looked back at us with a growing fury. When Thomas started to laugh, I elbowed him in the side. Finch was in no mood to be ridiculed.

"That's the last time you make a fool out of me!" he screamed. "Just you wait until tonight. We'll see who's so funny!"

I could see that what Finch really wanted to do was to come down the hill and beat the both of us senseless, but the smell was too much for him and his full stomach. He made for the top of the hill, no doubt to tell Madame Vickers of our mischief. My heart sank at the thought of what the rest of the day would bring.

"He thinks we did that on purpose," I said. "We may have accidentally pushed him a little too far this time."

I looked to where Thomas had been standing beside me, but he had moved off, already kneeling by the thing that had been attached to the leather

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strap. I looked back toward Finch and saw that he was nearing the top of the hill, waving his arms at Madame Vickers.

"Roland, come quick!" shouted Thomas. I darted down the hill and crouched beside him. The strap we'd been pulling on was attached to a grimy old saddlebag with the name Mingleton branded onto it. Thomas had already opened up the bag and put his hand inside. I watched eagerly as he pulled out the one thing that lay hidden in Mingleton's saddlebag. It was a single piece of paper -- discolored, crumpled, and torn at the edges. But none of that mattered, for we both sat silent and stunned by the worn image and the words on the page before us. A symbol on the paper was something we'd seen before.

We drew our pant legs up and stared at our skinny legs. The symbol on the paper was that of a square and a teardrop put together as one, and the same marking was etched like a tiny birthmark at the top of both our knees. There were more markings on our skin -- many more -- but of this I will have to tell you later, for just now a bit of trouble had arrived in our midst.

"Give it to me this instant!" We turned our heads to find the bone-white face of Madame Vickers staring down at us, with Finch sneering behind her. The two of them were crafty as cats when they

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wanted to be, taking great joy in sneaking up on children who were sitting in the garbage when they ought to be working.

"Give it to me!" repeated Madame Vickers.

Thomas looked as though he was going to make a run for it, and feeling as if it would be a very bad idea if he did, I lurched forward and tore the paper from his hands, holding it out to Madame Vickers.

[ILLUSTRATION: The symbol of the square and teardrop put together as one.]

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"Not that, you fool!" She reached her pasty hand down toward us and pointed a long crooked finger at the ground. "That! Give me that!"

I looked at the ground and saw she was pointing to the saddlebag with the name Mingleton on it. Thomas grasped the strap and lifted the bag up toward Madame Vickers. She lurched forward with stunning quickness and seized it. Then she swung it back over her shoulder and belted me clean across the side of the head. The blow laid me flat out on the ground, and through the buzzing noise in my head I heard Finch's rapturous laughter. There was a smear of stinking mud on my cheek, which I tried to wipe away with the back of my hand as I stood up.

"Finchy!" cried Madame Vickers, holding the saddlebag out to him. "Take this and clean it up. It'll fetch a good price at the stables tomorrow." She pointed her awful finger at us again. "And you!"

Madame Vickers was positively outraged. Her eyes seemed about to jump clean out of their sockets and her hands were shaking with nervous energy. She could be very dramatic at times such as these.

"You two have been nothing but trouble since you came here!" she proclaimed. "Come to the thrashing post when the bell tolls. Count the desperate rings of the bell if you have the courage! That's how many lashings you can each expect!"