Dandelion Fire (47 page)

When it hung well above the trees, Henry spoke.

“Could the faeren trap you again?”

Mordecai looked at his son. “Yes. With cleverness, deception, and betrayal, any man could be entrapped. The magic of the faeren is very powerful, though they take it for granted and are easily distracted. Their hill magic is the greatest they have. They can enclose whole
cities of theirs in a hill, and if you went to it with a shovel, you would never find it. The hill has not been hollowed out, but used to create a new place that is only connected to this world through certain doors, which they hide.”

“So they trapped you in a hill.”

“They trapped me in this hill. Its magic added to the binding, but they failed to kill you. A christening has its own pull, its own terrible potency. They would have been better off with chains than with magic in the face of a naming.”

Henry tasted the sunned air. “I'm not sure I understand.”

Mordecai laughed. “Do you understand how the ground pulls you down, or why the earth has never been drawn into the sun, or how a crawling worm morphs into a butterfly? We can give names to these things, but that is not understanding.”

“What was it like?” Henry asked.

“Like a lifetime of fitful, troubled sleep.”

When Mordecai believed the time was right, the two rose and entered the barrow beneath the great stone. Mordecai carried the bones of his faithful dog, savior to his infant son, and through his infant son, himself. Beyond the stone-carved green man, they entered a corridor that circled back on itself in a ring. Lining the walls were the stone beds of Mordecai's ancestors.

Henry stood where he would have been held as an infant and watched his father lay the bones of the dog to
rest. And then he listened to him sing. His father's voice carried through the halls and vaults and returned from distant chambers. Henry never knew the dog, except in his dreams and by its son that his uncle Caleb kept, but the song, and the memory of the song, made him feel as if he did. His father's words had been in a language he could not understand, but they had been words that he could see. Through those words, Henry loved that dog, the dog that had pushed him into the tree.

When the song had faded, the two reentered the living world and found the others already waiting for them.

One at a time, Henry's laughing family crawled through the crack in the great tree of Badon Hill and found themselves in the shattered old house and the empty world around it.

Henry, Kansas, is a town where lost people find themselves, or find that they are lost. In the summer, there are frogs to catch in the ditches, baseball to play in fields that no one mows, and three kinds of ice cream at the gas station.

On the edge of town, there is a barn, an old brown truck, and a steep-sided pond with a fence of plastic webbing around it.

Behind the barn, while the sun dropped, stood Henry York Maccabee and his uncle, Frank Willis.

In front of them, wheat rolled, impatient for the harvest. The air was fat with its smell. The heads shifted in the breeze, rolling gold, rasping bristles in a lie of
softness. The long grass around Henry was dry as well, all gone to seed.

There were no dandelions, but there was one wrinkled and stiff piece of paper.

Henry picked it up and read it. It was from lawyers, and it said that he would be reclaimed by the third of July.

Yesterday.

Uncle Frank filled himself with the rich air and looked at Henry. “A lot can happen in two weeks.” He smiled.

Henry blinked. Two weeks. That was all it had been? For a moment, he thought about dropping the letter back in the grass. Instead, he folded it up and slid it next to an envelope in his pocket.

Frank turned and walked slowly around the corner of the barn. Henry followed him.

It was only twilight, but in the minds of those who lived in Henry, Kansas, it was dark enough for fireworks. A small house, painted the same shade of dying green as the grass in its backyard, watched the fire in the sky and listened to the laughter of those around it. It was the house where Zeke Johnson lived, but he was thinking about moving. Though the backyard was small, it was crowded with people. There were three tall men laughing, and girls, and boys, and mothers. There was a man wearing a fresh police uniform, and a pleasant woman hanging nervously on to him, looking around at the
people she had heard so much about and which she hadn't really believed existed.

Monmouth was eating a hot dog and watching the blue screaming fire trail back down from the sky above the city's field. Caleb was standing next to Zeke, who had his arms around a slender blond woman, his mother. Caleb was laughing, somehow unable to watch the fireworks. The woman was smiling, and she did not want to stop.

But before the fireworks ended, while the streets of Henry would be free of prying eyes, all of the guests left, and Zeke and the blond woman followed them. A train of people carrying bulging pillowcases made their way down the street, seen only by a gray and white cat that hurried to catch them.

When they reached the barn at the edge of town, they walked around the pond, where the house should have been, and at the back, hanging in midair, there was a door, propped open with a baseball bat.

At the door, there were hugs, and the policeman and his wife said good-bye. Then sacks of clothes and old photos and peanut butter, but mostly mitts and bats and balls, as well as helmets, were passed through the door, and the policeman watched as it swung shut and disappeared. Then he looked at his wife, and they looked up at the fireworks. There were three exploding in the sky at once. They kissed and made it four. It was the Henry, Kansas, finale.

Sergeant Simmons was humming as they walked,
barely limping, back to where he'd left the car. In his hand, he held a letter that Henry had asked him to mail.

On the other side of the door, up two flights of stairs, through a cupboard and the byways of the faeren, things were different. The sun was low but shining after a slight rain, and a breeze was blowing in from the sea. A train of people crossed the bridge, but did not climb the cobbled hill. They turned down a side street and made their way to the city wall and then to the green fields beside the river.

Soon, the city heard the sounds that it would come to love. The crack of a bat and laughter, and the sound of the first ball hit far enough to reach the water.

Uncle Frank rounded the bases.

My parents for the treble-read
My wife for the treble-listen
Jim T. for the confidence
Random House for the making
You for the reading

At the age of twelve (and thanks to a house fire),
N. D. WILSON
spent nearly a year living in his grandparents' attic. The ceilings were low and baggy, and a swamp cooler squatted in a window at one end. Inviting crawl spaces ran the length of the attic on both sides. If there were cupboards in those walls, he never found them. But not for lack of trying. He loves barns, still checks walls for hidden doors, and is certain that dandelions are magic.

N. D. Wilson and his wife live in Idaho, along with their four young explorers. For more information, please visit
www.ndwilson.com.