The Last of the Gullivers (11 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

WHERE
THE
WIND'S ALWAYS BLOWN

H
orace Ackerby was at his usual table at Folk-in-the-Clover, looking out on the windy graveyard and thinking, only thinking. As the news about Michael moved through the town, so did the calls for the Chief Magistrate's resignation. He was about to lose his job and all the things he cared about, but he wasn't going to give up his dinner. The wiry cook brought the pig's nose with parsley-and-onion sauce and Horace said:

“I am remembering myself, Bertram, as a little boy, fishing with my father. I feel a strong tug at my line, and another. Quite fierce. I know I've hooked the biggest fish ever to swim the river. I know this in my heart. I see the creature in my mind's eye, a monster, something from a myth, from a lost race of river-giants. They'll put my picture in the paper, I'm sure. I nearly have it reeled in, so close I can see its silver shadow flash under the water! And then . . . then my line drops back, empty and useless. The fish has got free, Bert, it's gone.”

And he added:

“My life's been pretty much downhill since.”

The cook, not knowing what to say, said nothing and left. Ackerby stared at the food, but his hunger was gone.

He remembered how his Dad began taking him fishing when some schoolmates joined a gang. Ackerby-the-Father wasn't going to see that happen to his son. He took young Horace to football games, went camping with him, made him take piano lessons. It was the music that worked. Horace Ackerby II loved music and spent his spare hours at practice. He and some friends started a band—The Restless Ones, they called themselves—and they were really quite good. True, as he grew, he slowly forgot about music and the piano sits in his home, unused. But there was a day, once, when a band kept him out of a gang.

Horace realized he'd invested more of himself in Michael than he'd imagined. He had thought, had
hoped
, he could keep Michael out of a gang, too. But he'd been let down, absolutely.

Maxine Bellknap, sure the whole thing was her fault, resigned from the court and took her retirement at last. As Ackerby went back to his lonely meals at Folk-in-the-Clover, she went back to her home and let the hours drift away, unused. Her garden went wild: chickweed and dandelion began to fill the flower beds.

Mr. Fenn spent long lonely hours sitting quietly in his office, lost in aimless dreams. The shelves of his store went un-straightened for day after day.

They were still cleaning up in Lesser Lilliput. The weasels had done real damage to the Great Hall—the dome was near collapse—but the G.P. was sure it could be brought back.

“My friends—” he began, when a louder voice drowned out his.

“Friends
,
you say?” Hoggish was calm and confident this night. He smiled to the smallish crowd. “With friends like him, we don't need enemies, do we?”

“Now, Hoggish,” one of them warned, “we don't want another war.”

“Exactly!” Hoggish said, clapping and smiling. “That's the
LAST
thing we want.”

“If only,” added Dr. Ethickless Knitbone, “we had a Grand Panjandrum who could keep the peace
and
keep us safe, from weasels and floods and fires!”

“Precisely,” said Hoggish. “Someone bold, decisive, someone like . . .”

“Someone like Hoggish Butz!” called Knitbone, alone in her zeal.

There were mutterings among the crowd: Topgallant
had
been G.P. for a while, hadn't he? Maybe he needed a rest.

The Reader will be spared details of the campaign that followed. But it was a horrible thing. Hoggish and Dr. Knitbone used their printing press to spread horrible rumors about Burton Topgallant and he wasted too much time denying these. They hinted that he wasn't one of them, but
Blefuscudian
by birth. They called him “
nobbulous
and
griffic
,” meaning “old and cranky,” implying dementia.

A few days later, with each vote counted at least once, Hoggish won the election, 284-191. They said that the cemetery vote put him over the top. In a hasty ceremony, the Golden Helmet was set on Hoggish's head at last.

And what sort of leader was he? How would one define the Grand Panjandrumcy of Hoggish Butz? These questions will be left for some distant historian to answer.

Because his reign lasted only twenty minutes.

As soon as tables had been laid out with Hoggish's beloved éclairs, the coronation began. “Friends, Citizens—!” he bellowed.

But a louder voice drowned out his.

“Look at that, look at them!”

“I beg your pardon, whoever you are,” Hoggish sniffed at the crowd. “You're interrupting what's going to be a very good speech. Now, listen and learn. Ahem. Friends,
CITIZENS
—”

“What
are
those things?” again, the new voice.

“Well, excuse me!” Hoggish was on his feet, red in the face, waving a fat finger. “
WHO
dares speak when the Grand Panjandrum speaks? Don't you see this beautiful Golden Helmet on my head!?”

He happened to look up then. He happened to see Nick Bottoms and Robby towering over the city, like two Colossi.

“Well . . . Great Ghost of
BOLGOLAM.
”

Days ago, Robby had tracked Michael here to the stone cottage. Tonight, he had brought Nick.

“You ever seen anything like 'em? What do you figure they are?”

“Must be some sorta Spriggans or Leprechauns, Dobbies,” said Nick. “I guess I don't much care. They got to be worth a fortune.”

“All right, Panjandrum,” Evet Butz turned to his brother. “What do we now?”

Poor Hoggish was speechless and bits of spit dribbled from his open mouth. It was Topgallant who called for everyone to, “Run! Run, Brothers, run, Sisters, run!” And they ran, fast, but Nick and Robby were faster. The giants scooped up one Lesser Lilliputian after another. There was complete, hopeless panic in the Garden City, all of them running and screaming and crying.

The Architect made it to his studio, but Robby kicked out a window and snatched him up. The Accountant hid under his office desk, but Nick smashed the building front and found him. Another of them dashed into her store and locked and chained and blocked the door, but Robby ripped off the roof and got her.

In all the madness, Slack and Frigary Tiddlin were separated from their mother. They'd run to the Farmer's field and Robby saw them there. He went for them, clumsily slipping in mud, crashing through yards, fences, houses, overturning trees, but Thudd Ickens got there first. Much more agile than the Giant, he escaped with the young Tiddlins through the patch in Flestrin's Wall. Burra Dryth, Mumraffian Rake, Philament Phlopp, these few also made it through the wrecked Wall.

Some others reached shelters, but the Giants used picks and shovels to dig them out. Most of Lesser Lilliput was laid to waste and the nightmare ended only when Nick was happy they'd got all of them. The boys stashed the Little Ones in a rubbish bin, boxes, whatever they could find.

“A few of them got away, over the wall,” Robby told him.

“They won't last long out there. Something'll eat 'em.”

“What're we going to do with these?” Robby wanted to know.

“Let's get 'em back to my house. We'll start spreadin' the word, start building up some interest, right? We'll let everybody know we got something special, something Lyall Murphy will
never
have,” said Nick. “We'll split 'em up, they'll bring more that way. We'll sell the squits, one by one, for a million pounds.”

At the Wall-edge, Philament Phlopp heard it all.

“These little things are going to make me big,” Nick laughed.

The market was closed and dark and still. Fenn sat in his office, with time slowly passing around him. On his desk sat the nearly 400 pounds that Michael had stolen.

Fenn picked up the money and counted it, as he had many times. But tonight, in the stillness and the desk lamp glare, he saw something he hadn't seen. He took a closer look and saw that each of the pound notes was lightly, slightly smudged. Gooey, grubby, chubby-fingered peppermint smudges.

Ickens, Phlopp, the others—refugees of the blitz—gathered in the stone cottage and considered their dismal future.

They needed help.

They needed Quinbus Ooman.

And Burra Dryth had the number.

When they called to tell her what happened, Jane knew she had to get to them, grounded or not. She wrote a note for her father: “Michael needs me—will explain—love—Jane.” She grabbed what money she had and hurried to Lemuel's house. The few survivors were waiting on the porch when she got there.

“Do you know where he is?” Jane asked them. “Do you know how to find him?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE
KEY
TO
ALL
LOCKS

F
enn went to his brother's house, a run-down Tudorbethan, and asked to see Myron. “In the kitchen,” his sister-in-law told him, “having a little snack.”

The grocer set the pound notes on the table, smudgiest on top, and Myron looked up from a dish of peppermint ice cream he was sharing with the cat. “Look at that,” Fenn said simply. “Three hundred and ninety-eight pounds.”

Myron said nothing, but kept eating.

“But you knew that of course.”

Myron shrugged and ate.

“Did you count it—before you hid it in his schoolbook?” Fenn asked.

Myron didn't answer.

“You can tell me. I'm not going to kill you,” Fenn went on. “I just want to know the truth. I saw how the notes had peppermint on 'em and I thought to myself—nahhh, Myron isn't as clever as that.”

Myron grinned. “Oh, I'm as clever as that.”

“You set him up. He never stole anything. It was clever little Myron, all along.”

“Clever little me,” Myron's grin grew wider, “all along.”

Fenn grabbed him by the thick throat and started choking him. His mother screamed, the cat squealed, ice cream went flying, and Myron gagged for air. It took both father and mother to pull the son free.

The taxi driver had a stubbly beard and teeth browned from cigarettes. Jane asked him to stop down the block from the YOI gate. She gave him an extra ten and told him he could take her back to Moss-on-Stone in a few minutes. He wanted to know,
What's going on?,
and she told him,
Just wait, please
, and he took her money and waited.

Jane carried her rucksack to the chain-link wall around the lockup. The driver watched her through the mirror. This wasn't the sort of fare he had every day.

Away from the cabdriver's eyes, she helped the Little Ones from the backpack—Ickens, Phlopp, Mumraffian Rake, Burra Dryth, the Tiddlin children—and begged them to find Michael as quickly as they could. The guard in the Gatehouse saw her and asked what she was doing.

“Nothing,” she called back.

“Then go do it somewhere else,” he told her.

The Little Ones slipped through the fence and across the dew-damp Recreation Yard. They reached a dark corner of the first housing block, next to the Reception Building, and Slack spotted an open vent in the Chaplaincy. “That's just what we need,” said Ickens.

They had nearly made it to the vent when a dog ran at them, a dusk-colored mammoth, snapping and snarling. Jane saw it from the fence and screamed, sure it was the end of them.

“What d'you have over there, Buster?” the guard called. “Find a li'l snack? Rat, weasel, what?”

Slack took a step, straight toward the dog, as the guard left the Gatehouse.

“Slack Tiddlin!” Phlopp yelled, a whisper.

“Settle . . . settle . . . ,” the child told the mountainous dog.

And the dog did settle and little Slack moved closer. He began to rub the giant, gently, a spot between ear and eye, and the beast grew calm and peaceful.

The guard stopped. “Got away from you, huh, Buster? Don't worry. The yard is fulla little things for you. Come on back with me.”

When Julien Mallery found his daughter's note later that night, he made three telephone calls. First he called the police, who began a search and sent an alert through the county. The second call went to his friend at the local television station; the newsman got Jane's picture on the air quickly, with a plea for information on her whereabouts. And last, he called Horace Ackerby to say he'd be out of a job in the morning.

But Ackerby didn't answer his phone.

He was on the front walk with Mr. Fenn. “I'll let it ring,” he told the grocer as the phone rang and rang inside. “Please. Go on with your story.”

And Fenn went on. “When I saw the goo all over the money, I went to my brother's house and had a—had a talk with that brat and I was right. It was the fool Myron did it, tryin' to get the boy fired. Michael never stole a thing.”

Horace Ackerby said nothing. It had been a long while since he'd heard good news.

“Michael's got no business in YOI,” Fenn went on. “Should be Myron in there. You can get him out?”

“Wilson, the prison governor, has gone home by now,” Ackerby answered. “But I'll be in Ambridge in the morning and see to it myself.”

Even as he spoke these words, three Lesser Lilliputians were crawling through a battered grate and into the Chaplaincy ductwork. The ventilation system was like a carnival maze, a catacomb, and they had no idea where to turn. “We could spend eternity here,” said Mumraffian Rake, “and never find him.”

“I have a thought,” from Frigary Tiddlin.

She began to sing their one song, the ever-same, never-same song, and its melody drifted through the vent tunnels. The others joined her, whistling, humming, singing, tapping out a rhythm on the walls. Their music grew louder and louder in the endless ducts, echoing through the whole prison.

Plenty of boys heard it, but only Michael knew what it was. He stood on his cell bed, close to a vent, and began to whistle along with the tune.

“I hear him,” said Ickens, “down this way,” and he led them through a vent-tunnel. Frigary's torch lighted a path, past webs full of dust and the broken husks of long-dead bugs. The Little Ones rounded a junction and found themselves facing a mangy mouse, big as a draft horse by their standards. Thudd Ickens didn't want a fight, but the mouse was more frightened of them and it scampered off into ductwork.

Their journey was almost done now. Michael's song was coming from the next vent, not far ahead.

They crawled through the clover-shaped grille and Michael set each of them on the rank old bed. Burra Dryth explained, in as few words as she could, all that had happened and all that was going to happen. As she spoke, Mumraffian Rake, the little locksmith, made fast work of the cell door. In a matter of seconds, the group was moving down the corridor, under dim portraits of past prison governors. There was one last lock to pick and then they were outside, in the main yard.

Mr. Phlopp easily sabotaged the prison's power lines—it took only a paper clip—and every transformer within five miles went up in showering sparks. The baffled guard ran to the darkened forecourt, as the front gate's lock fell open behind him.

One minute more and Michael was out of the Young Offenders Institute and climbing into the cab. “Jane,” he said when he saw her. “How did you—?”

“Just get in,” she said and he did. The Little Ones slipped into her rucksack and she told the driver, “You can take us back to Moss-on-Stone.”

“How'd you get me out—?” Michael started to ask her.

Jane told him to be quiet and he was. She wanted to tell him everything, but the taxi driver was listening to each word. She gave him a shirt she'd brought, one of her Dad's, to cover the Institute's T-shirt.

The driver watched them in the mirror and finally asked, “What're you two up to? What's going on? Who's the boy?”

“Let us out here,” Jane told him when she saw a petrol station and coffee shop.

“You want me to drop you off, two kids, this late at night, middle of nowhere. You said you wanted to go back to Moss-on-Stone.”

“Yeah, but I need a toilet,” Jane lied and nudged Michael and he lied, too. “And me. Really do. Right now.”

The driver grumbled, “
Kids
,” and pulled into the station and the children got out of the cab.

“Hold on,” the man said. “Maybe I'm going in with you.”

Jane took her rucksack and they hurried into the shop. The driver went to the counter and ordered a coffee and waited while Michael and Jane stepped around a corner to the lavatory. They could hear the driver chatting up the counter girl, and they could hear a news report from the small television on the wall, broadcasting a story about Jane: she'd been missing since six o'clock and anyone with information should call the police, right away.

“You see that?” said the driver.

“Been showing her picture all night,” the counter girl told him. “Hope they find her, the poor thing.”

“She was in my cab,” the driver grunted. “And a boy with her, too.”

“TV said there's a reward.”

The driver was on his feet, fast as that. “They're in your loo right now.” He sent the counter girl in to get them.

But they weren't there. When they heard the report, Michael and Jane slipped out a side door and into the night.

“It's empty,” the counter girl told him and reached for a phone. “Better call the police.”

“No,” the driver grumbled. “I'm going to find those kids myself and see I get that reward.” And he, too, went into the night.

With the Little Ones still in the backpack, Michael and Jane started down a farm road from Ambridge to Moss-on-Stone. Jane told him what she knew and the Lesser Lilliputians told the rest, about the giants, the wrecked city, the kidnapping of the People.

When they heard a car coming, the children jumped into a wheat field and hid. The taxi passed once, slowly, but the driver never saw them. It was going to be a long walk back and the night wind was cool and getting cooler.

The sun rose behind morning fog as Horace Ackerby II pulled into Ambridge and through the gates of YOI. He met with Governor Wilson at nine and together they found that Michael had escaped.

Ackerby shut his eyes and said nothing. The boy was blameless—hadn't robbed the market—hadn't done a thing—but none of that mattered. Now Michael had committed a serious and unforgivable crime.

Wilson threatened to fire the prison staff then and there. No one,
no one!
had broken out of the Institute during his time as Governor. He wanted to put out an APW, an All Ports Warning, but Ackerby talked him out of it.

When they reached the city, the children kept to alleys and side streets. Michael went for the bike at Fenn's and they made their way to Nick's house.

He remembered the old shed, grown over with weeds and vine. Its door was clear now, and padlocked, and Michael was sure the Little Ones were in there. He found a piece of rusted pipe and, with Jane helping, pried the door off its hinges as softly as they could. They crawled inside, over mountains of junk. “I'll look on this side,” Michael whispered. “Check that box over there.”

“Just toys,” Jane whispered back.

“Nick's stuff, I guess.”

“It's dolls,” she told him. “Must be his sister's.”

“Nick doesn't have a sister.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well then.”

They soon found the Lesser Lilliputians, in the farthest corner, trapped in boxes and bins, huddled together, terrified and terrorized, but unhurt.

“It's okay,” Jane told them. “We're going to get you home.”

They worked quietly, quickly, and loaded the Little Ones into the bike's delivery baskets and wire-framed trailer. “It's going to be a little cramped,” Michael whispered.

“No need to worry about us, Brother Ninneter!” said Topgallant. “We'll get by.”

Michael and Jane were ready to go, but, once more, they found their path blocked.

“You trying to steal my Spriggans?” said Nick.

Robby was at his side. “Told you, you couldn't count on him.”

“I tried to help you, Michael,” Nick seemed mad and hurt at the same time, “but you always thought you were better than us. I tried to show you the way, but you never listened.”

When he was younger, Michael thought Nick's gang was the family he was seeking. Now he looked again and saw wasted lives. “I guess my way went somewhere else.”

There was something new in Michael's voice, and Nick heard it. There was a confidence, a certainty, a BIGNESS that hadn't been there before.

“You're not going anywhere,” from Robby.

“Out of the way, you Blefuscudian Lump.”

“What'd he call me?” Robby asked, just as Michael threw himself at them.

He caught Robby by surprise and they both fell to the gravel. While Robby was catching his breath, Michael punched Nick once in the face and felt a tooth break. Jane grabbed the rusty pipe and started swinging.

Nick and Robby backed away, and Michael told Jane to run. As she went for the street, he leapt onto the bike.

“You can't have 'em!” Nick cried out. “They're mine!”

Robby started off, but Nick held him back and spat out a mouthful of blood and tooth and said, “We'll take my Dad's car.”

Nick gunned the old Victor and Robby said, “I'm going to beat that eejit to a pulp. I'll show him who's a lump.”

Michael was flying up Grub Street when he heard the car tear around a corner. He turned the bike, fast, and nearly went down, the trailer close to tipping, and he yelled to the Lesser Lilliputians, “Hold tight!” Nick and Robby and the Victor were almost on him and there was no way to outrun them. He might have a chance if he got one more block, but the car was barreling at him.

He jumped the bike onto the walk and the car stayed with him, smashing street signs as it went. They passed the Daniels' bookshop, Tiswas Electric, and the Victor blasted through Gadbury's sidewalk display. A chair, plow, clock, boxes of magazines flew into shattered shreds.

The car was going to run him down, but there was another turn, a few feet farther, and Michael made it a half-second before the Victor would have hit him.

Nick jammed the brake and the car slid to a stop in a blue fog. He reversed, full speed, and made the turn. Michael was halfway down the block now and Nick had the accelerator flat to the floor. The old Victor was going 45, 50, 55 mph, before Robby saw where they were.

“Sheep Street, Nick, it's Sheep Street!” But it was too late.

The brick walls closed in on them and squeezed the car, and sparks showered in the narrowing roadway. The old Victor hurtled to a stop, crumpled and stuck.