Keeper of Dreams (38 page)

“It’s also on the other side of the world. Did you swim the Pacific Ocean or did you crawl a hundred feet through a cave under a second-rate toy store?”

“If you’re not going to shoot me with that thing, would you mind pointing it somewhere else?”

She didn’t point it somewhere else, which worried Enoch a little. “What did you follow me for, buddy?”

“Why not? It got me to this place, didn’t it?”

“Don’t give me that,” she said. “You already knew the way.”

“Did not.”

“You got across the abyss in the dark, without knowing it was there?”

“The what?”

“The abyss. The space between the two walls.”

“I kicked the far wall and straddled.”

“Lucky for you. There are rats down there. If you live through the fall, and don’t drown in the water, the rats will eat you alive.”

“Don’t try to scare me,” Enoch said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because I scare real easy so it isn’t even worth the bother. As a matter of fact, I’m scared right now. Would you mind pointing that somewhere else?”

She grinned. “I never met a boy who’d admit that he was scared of me.”

“Who wouldn’t be? You look like a freak.”

She let go of the shank of the slingshot and touched her hair. “If my mother would let me have short hair, I wouldn’t have to do this. I need it out of my face so I can aim.”

“At me? You could be blind and hit me.”

“At squirrels.”

“You shoot at squirrels?”

“I get them, too. Dead as doorknobs.”

If there was anything Enoch hated, it was kids who killed animals for fun. “That really makes me sick, you know that?”

“Sure,” she said. “I bet you just love all the little animals.”

“If it isn’t hurting you, why should you kill it?”

“You’re so sweet,” she said. “I bet your mommy and daddy just love you to pieces.”

The reference to his parents didn’t make Enoch’s mood any nicer. “Why don’t you just take that slingshot and stuff it in your ear?” he asked.

“Why don’t I stuff it in yours?” she answered. “Now there’s an idea.”

Just then a little bearded man about nine inches tall ran past through the grass, shouting, “Squirrel, squirrel!” That was when Enoch decided that this place was definitely not Dowagiac.

The Squirrels and the Little People

A squirrel came scampering along the ground after the nine-inch man.

“They’re getting downright careless these days,” the crazy girl said. She took aim with the slingshot.

Almost by reflex Enoch reached out and jostled her arm. The stone she was shooting struck the ground ten feet behind the squirrel. The squirrel ran away.

“You jerk!” she shouted at him.

“Squirrels! Squirrels!” shouted the little man.

“He got away, thanks to Bambi, here,” the crazy girl said. The little man kept jumping up and down, pointing at the branches overhead, shouting. So Enoch looked up. Just in time to see two squirrels jumping down toward his face.

By reflex Enoch struck out at the animals before they hit him. But instead of falling to the ground and running away, the squirrels jumped right back onto his pants and began gnawing at his legs. He might have been more upset by this if a third squirrel weren’t on his shoulder, biting savagely at his neck, probing for the jugular. These were no ordinary squirrels.

“Your eyes!” shouted the crazy girl. “Protect your eyes!”

“I’m working on saving my neck just now, thank you very much!” Enoch shouted back. He tore the one squirrel off his shoulder, but he lost a good deal of skin in the process. And now the squirrel was writhing in his hands, trying to bite off his fingers or scratch open his wrists, and Enoch hadn’t the faintest idea how to kill it.

“Bash it into a tree!” the crazy girl shouted.

Enoch bashed it into a tree. It obligingly dropped like a stone to the ground and lay there. Soon he had done the same to the squirrels on his legs. Then he began prying extras off the crazy girl—she had nearly a dozen of them on her, and it took a good little while before they were all taken care of.

When the squirrels finally lay in neat little piles at the bases of nearby trees, Enoch stood and looked at the crazy girl.

“I definitely approve of squirrel-shooting,” Enoch said.

“I figured you were probably on my side now.”

“Excuse me,” Enoch said, “but I think I hear someone clapping.”

It was about a hundred of the little people. They were gathered around the squirrel bodies.

“Excellent work, O mighty one!” said a very short man in a Robin Hood cap.

“It was a trap,” said the crazy girl.

“The nasty old squirrels can’t fool
you
,” said the little man. “Mind if we cart off the corpses?”

“Whatever you like,” said the crazy girl.

“My neck hurts,” Enoch said. “I don’t mean to mention it, but those squirrels might have rabies.”

The crazy girl looked at his neck. He could see that her face and neck were pretty scratched up, too. “Yeah, he was really going for you,” she said.

“Excuse me, O Great Hunter,” said the man in the Robin Hood cap. “This one isn’t dead.”

“Kill it yourself,” the crazy girl snapped.

The little man shuddered and walked back to the pile of corpses. “We’ve got to do it ourselves,” he said. “Our so-called friend won’t help us.”

Enoch was outraged. “Won’t help you! We just stopped an
invasion
—”

“Never mind,” said the crazy girl. She led him a few dozen yards into the woods, out of earshot. “Just forget them,” she said. “They’re ungrateful, and they aren’t likely to change. Let me get something on your neck.”

Something
turned out to be a daub of mud that stung like hot mustard. “What are you trying to do, kill me?”

“I don’t have any bandaids,” she said. “This will have to do until we can get to the Healing Dust.”

“Dust?”

“This place has its own system. No doctors, but the mud can make you feel a little better. And the Healing Dust can cure anything.”

The mud
was
making him feel better. And the words “cure anything” gave Enoch a funny feeling. He didn’t even recognize it, but the funny feeling was hope.

“How far is it to the Healing Dust?”

“I don’t know. I’m not equipped with a speedometer or anything.”

“How long does it take to get there?”

“That depends, doesn’t it?”

“On what?”

“How many adventures we have along the way.”

“I don’t want any adventures. I just want the healing dust.”

“Well, I’ve got bad news for you, buddy. The adventures are the way things work here. Nothing around here comes free. Only instead of paying with money, you pay with sweat and blood and courage. Got any of that?”

“Blood, anyway,” Enoch said.

She grinned. “My name’s Maureen, but if you call me that I’ll kill you. I go by ‘Mo.’ ”

Enoch wasn’t a bit surprised.
Mo
was a perfect name for her. “I’m Enoch.”

She giggled. This struck him as inappropriate, considering how silly
her
name was. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It isn’t your
name
. It’s your
nickname
.”

“I don’t have a nickname.”

“Eeny,” she said. “Short for Enoch. Eeny. And I’m Mo. Don’t you get it?”

Enoch got it. “All we need is Meeny and Miny.”

Mo held her slingshot up to the sky. “O noble slingshot, I christen thee ‘Minotaur-slayer.’ ” She looped her belt over the slingshot. “I’ll call it Miny for short. You can come up with Meeny.”

“I don’t have any weapons.”

“You’ll come up with something. You’ll kill some evil knight and take his sword, or something.”

Enoch doubted it. This place was more dangerous than he liked. But the pain from his neck and legs told him that the place was real enough, and there was a chance that there might really be something to this Healing Dust. If there was, it was worth some danger to get it. He fingered the key to the apartment in Arizona. The Healing Dust might save them from everything.

“OK,” he said. “Take me to the Healing Dust.”

“Why should I?” she asked.

“Because I helped you with the squirrels,” he said.

“After you made me miss my first shot.”

“All right, forget it. I don’t need you to take me.”

“Then how do you figure to get there?”

“I’ll get one of those fairies to take me.”

“Not a chance. Especially if you call them fairies. They
hate
that.”

“In the stories the fairies always help you.”

“The stories are all lies. This is real life. In real life, the little people are only out for themselves. They probably set up that little ambush, you know.”

“I thought they were afraid of the squirrels.”

“Oh, they
were
. Till I started killing the squirrels for them. Now it’s been months since the squirrels have even come near the little people. So they aren’t afraid anymore.”

“But why would they set up an ambush, if you’re the one keeping them safe?”

“They probably figured they could turn my skin into a five-year supply of leather.”

“Are they so stupid they’d kill their protector for
leather
?”

“They’re only nine inches tall, Eeny. How much brain do you think will fit into those teeny little heads?”

“Not very bright, is that it?”

“They’re dumb as your thumb. And jerks, too. Rude and crude. Ungrateful. Disgusting little people.”

“So why do you bother saving them from the squirrels?”

“Because it’s the duty of a good knight to protect the weak and defenseless. Even the weak and defenseless who have no manners.”

“You can’t be a knight,” Enoch said. “Knights are men.”

And suddenly the discussion was over. Mo walked away from him into the woods. With her went his hope of finding the Healing Dust. “I’m sorry,” he shouted, but she didn’t turn back. He followed her, but in an amazingly short time she had managed to lose him. This wasn’t a toy department in Oglethorpe’s. This was a forest where Mo knew her way around and Enoch didn’t. In a short time he discovered that he didn’t even know the way back to the cave that led to Oglethorpe’s. He was hopelessly lost.

When you are lost, his father always said, don’t keep wandering around. Sit still in once place until you are found.

Well, fine, Dad, Enoch answered silently. But what if you’re lost in an impossible forest where squirrels are killers and fairies actually exist, even if they
are
jerks. I could sit here until I starve to death before anybody finds me, except Mo, of course, and she isn’t likely to be looking for me, since she’s the one who lost me in the first place.

So Enoch began to wander around, searching for the Healing Dust or the cave entrance, whichever he found first. He kept a good lookout up in the branches overhead; he wasn’t going to let a squirrel jump on his neck
again. He was looking for squirrels, in fact, when Mo appeared out of nowhere and spoke to him.

“Not another step,” she said.

“Hi,” Enoch said. “Were you lost?”

“Very funny,” she said. She walked over to him and pulled him back from the edge of a small clearing that was covered with last year’s dead leaves. Then she bent and picked up a fallen branch and tossed it into the middle of the clearing. It did not bounce the way thrown branches usually do. Instead it splashed and almost immediately sank out of sight.

“Quicksand,” said Mo.

“You can be a knight if you want to,” Enoch said. “I can’t think of a single reason why a girl shouldn’t be a knight if she wants to be.”

“You’re welcome,” she said.

“You saved my life.”

“It’s the duty of a knight to save the small and the stupid from destruction.”

Enoch decided not to ask whether she considered him small. “I want to go to the Healing Dust,” he said. “Will you take me there?”

“On two conditions.”

“What are they?”

“First, Eeny, I am the knight and you are my squire. No, not even a squire. You’re my
page
, and you must do everything that I command you. Otherwise, you’ll mess everything up. I’m used to the way things work around here, and you’ll have to get used to obeying me without asking
why
first. Like just now about the quicksand.”

“Agreed.”

“And the second condition is that if I take you to the Healing Dust, you’ll go with me on my Quest.”

“What’s your quest?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how am I supposed to go with you if you don’t even know where we’re going?”

“I know
where
it is. I just don’t know
what
it is. There’s a door I haven’t been able to get through.”