Land of Verne (2 page)

It took almost no thought at all.

Grim marched forward and yanked on the rope.

The door popped open and the stairs glided down without a sound. He practically ran up and then pulled a lever that drew the steps back up again.

The door sealed. It didn’t shut out the sounds completely, but muffled them enough that he closed his eyes and relished the moment.

Quiet.

Sunlight penetrated through a small round window at the far end, warming his face. Grim removed his glasses.

More like goggles.

They were beastly things, akin to cutting the bottom of a pop bottle and gluing them to rubber bands. He could practically swim in them.

And they were dirty.

He wiped them on his shirt as he scanned the space around him. It was pretty much empty, with the exception of a large chest in one corner, over which sat the window. It was the perfect spot to perch and Grim did just that, leaning back against the wall. There was a lamp in one corner, but no plug to power it. A couple of small boxes sat in another corner, covered in dust.

Grim paused to wonder if he might get in trouble for being up here. Technically, their parents had never forbidden them to enter the attic. The few times Grim had gone up with his dads he had been instructed to make sure his glasses were on so the dust wouldn’t get in his eyes. Grim could see why, the place was coated with it.

Which made the footprints in front of him all the more obvious. They led only to the chest upon which he sat. They seemed to be fresh, high-heeled prints too.

Aunt Patrice.

Next to the door was the proof she’d been there. Her umbrella rested against the wall. She carried it everywhere.

“Never come unprepared, child,” Aunt Patrice would say. “You cannot get caught in the rain if you carry an umbrella.”

The woman was certifiably insane.

Grim crept off the chest and pulled it open. It made no sound and he sucked in his breath. It was filled with trinkets, ornaments and simple jewelry, among which were some stones covered in a metal encasing that looked like dead fingers clutching them.

He blinked his eyes. They itched from the dust. He put his glasses back on and everything in the chest suddenly disappeared.

“What the –”

He took his glasses off and then everything was there once more. He went back and forth, with and without his goggles, and the items disappeared and reappeared. He wondered why he had never noticed the items in the chest before, but realized that the few times he’d seen it open he’d been wearing his glasses.

It was a funny thing about the lot of them. They all wore them. Most people thought the children looked “interesting” in their goggles.

He hated that word.
Interesting.

Grim paused, listening for the sounds downstairs. The madness in the house continued. The twins barged through the house yelling at each other, Toby was still barking at Sam, and Ellen was yanking on the cords of her dolls to make them cry. It was like a symphony of wailing babies.

It was all overpowered by Aunt Patrice.

“Grimwald!” she called with her mouse-like shriek. “Come down. Pringles’ kitty litter needs changing and I can’t bend down very well. My migraine is acting up.”

Grim grumbled about how his Aunt used that excuse far too often and always seemed to select him for kitty duty.

See if she ever asks Rudy to do it
.

Grim slipped from the attic and marched downstairs to change the litter. He held his breath as he scooped it out. Aunt Patrice had a bad habit of feeding Pringles milk. The end result was not only extremely gooey, but far from fragrant.

Rudy came inside, saw what he was doing, and smiled. Mockingly.

Grim stuck his tongue out at her and then his fingers slipped into what he was picking up.

Ugh.

Rudy’s smile got bigger. Then she left to go upstairs.

Grim marched up after her.

But first. Washroom. Soap.

Lots of it.

Not wanting to seem too eager to run back to the attic, but feeling so impatient he wanted to explode, Grim waited while his Aunt was busy in the kitchen. Aunt Patrice would soon return to her nap and Grim had no choice but to wait.

Benny and Barny were in their room playing with some of Poppa’s gadgets, among which was a mechanical one-eyed robot. Rudy was sitting on her bed with Ellen, whispering to her while Ellen brushed the hair of the missing head from one of her dolls. Its eyes were open. Grim shook his head.

He went back to his own room where Sam sat on the floor.

Sam said nothing, but looked up briefly.

“Whatcha doin’?” Grim asked.

 “Machines,” he muttered.

It was always the same with Sam ― machines. Like Grim and Poppa, Sam was fascinated with mechanical devices. The biggest difference was that Sam was one most likely to take something apart to see how it worked where Grim was more likely to build things from out of his head. Pulleys, cogs, gears and metal pieces were strewn about the room.

“You going to stay inside all day?” he asked. Naturally, he didn’t want his plans interrupted.

“Maybe,” Sam said.

Grim almost always told Sam everything, but he wasn’t quite ready to share his discovery in the attic. And he
was
Rudy’s brother after all. He might tell her.

Sam then returned to his silent mangling of some device that Rudy had recently tried to build. It wasn’t bad, actually.

“Sam!” Rudy yelled at the door. Ellen was standing behind her. “I just built that!”

The pieces fell out of Sam’s little fingers and he hung his head.

Rudy pointed her finger at Grim. “You told him to do it!”

Grim shook his head. “No!”

“Yes, you did!”

“Get out of my room!” he yelled at her.

“It’s Sam’s room, too. I don’t have to get out, do I, Sam?”

Sam continued to look at his hands.

Grim smirked at her.
Score one for Grim
.

Rudy marched out of the room, her pigtails bouncing in fury. Ellen marched after her and the two headed downstairs and straight out the back door.

He looked at Sam. “It’s okay, Sam. I’ll fix it for you.”

Sam smiled, and then called Toby over. He, too, went outside.

That just left the twins.

Grim peered around the corner of their room. They were still busy with the robot. They were trying to teach it some kind of trick.

And Aunt Patrice was snoring in the front room.

Excellent.

Grim decided to take the risk. He yanked on the rope and the stairs glided down once more. He leapt up the steps and ran over to the chest and whipped off his goggles.

The colors of the stones were brilliant, but Grim was stumped as to what sort of stones they might be, especially with those creepy fingers clutching them. He had studied different types of minerals for a science project once, and these were nothing like what he had read about.

He lost track of time as he examined them, trying to sort out if they had any value.

Eventually, determining that they likely didn’t, he arranged them in a circle; green, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, and black. Grim leaned in to have a closer look when there was a heavy thud at the front door. Aunt Patrice’s blood-curdling voice shrieked from downstairs.

“Grimwald! Get the door!” she called in a loud clear voice. It wasn’t muffled. Which meant —

He turned to look at the stairs.

Gah!

Rudy was standing there watching him. The twins, Sam, and Ellen were all with her. As Grim tried to stand, he put his hand into the circle of stones.

There was a swirl of color and some strange symbols that circled about him.

And he now stood in a forest of crooked, gnarled trees with black bark that stretched to the sky.

The attic was gone.

The chest was gone.

And Grimwald was alone.

Chapter 2

Grim knew not to panic. There had to be a simple answer for this.

He scanned the giant trees, yet nothing was recognizable. It was certainly nowhere he had ever been before. The forest was cold and eerily quiet. He sat and thought things through.

The last thing he remembered was Aunt Patrice calling his name. He was going to hide the stones before he was caught with them.

‘Young gentlemen don’t play with stones that whoosh you away to bizarre places’, he could imagine his Aunt saying. Of course, with the others gawking at him from the attic staircase there was no chance of keeping the stones secret now.

Grim sighed and looked around.

If he got back
.

The same colored stones encased in the brass fingers sat in a neat circle before him.

What had he done? He put his hand in the center of the circle.

Nothing.

He stood up.

Still nothing.

A whirring sound interrupted his investigation. Grim craned his neck to find a giant structure sailing far above the trees. It was a sleek wood and metallic ship attached to the underside of a massive elongated balloon. At its aft end were propellers moving its great hulk through the sky. Grim sucked in his breath as he watched it go by, slow and powerful, like a whale.

Beside it flew smaller ships with a similar design and turbines that propelled them with ease around its great bulking weight like an escort.

Grim side-stepped as he watched, kicking the stones askew. The air ships soared toward a snow-capped mountain in the distance upon which he could see a great city with a large castle-like structure.

He exhaled.

Flying air ships.

Grim scanned the trees, wondering what sort of land he’d come to. He’d never of heard of flying galleons.

Then he jumped.

A person stood at the edge of the clearing. It was a girl close to his own size and age. She looked similar to their neighbor, Ming, with tanned skin and almond-shaped eyes. She wore a long, midnight blue dress with a white cape around her shoulders. A thick leather belt entwined her waist with pouches and odd gadgets hanging from it. Strapped across her head were goggles, not much larger than his own. Everything else would have appeared normal about the girl except she had bright purple hair that stood on end, in a higgledy-piggledy sort of manner. Grim could just imagine how quickly Aunt Patrice would pounce on her with a brush.

The young girl opened her mouth to speak and the words that came out were from a foreign language. Yet what was even more peculiar was that Grim completely understood her.

“Hello,” said the girl.

He tried to figure out how he was able to comprehend her. He wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Hi there,” Grim finally said, and his mouth dropped open. The words that came out of his mouth were in the same foreign language.

“MynmisTreena,” said the girl. She spoke rather fast and peered into the forest. Her hands and feet fidgeted like she needed to go to the bathroom.

Grim followed her gaze into the dark woods, but found nothing there.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“MynameisTreena.”

Grim blinked. “A little slower, please.”

The girl giggled. “My… name… is …Treena.”

Grim nodded.

Much better.

“I’m Grim.”

“What-a-funny-name,” she said, a little slower than usual, but not by much. “I once met a man who had an odd name. He was from the Southlands. They’re strange down there. Are you from the Southlands?” The girl sucked in her breath only at the end like she was rushing to get it all out at once.

“I don’t know where here is,” Grim said. “What language are we speaking, and you talk very fast.” Grim tried to casually kick the stones into a little pile behind him. He needed them to get back and didn’t want this girl fiddling with them.

She giggled, exhaled, and then spoke at a pace that might be considered more normal, but not by much. It was like listening to chipmunk-speak. “This is the Forest of Nothingness,” she said and glanced behind Grim’s legs. “And what do you mean ‘what language’? There is only the Common Tongue. Well, except for The Unseen. They speak a language of their own.”

This was all proving a bit much: stones that hurled you to strange lands, flying air ships, mysterious languages, and spiked purple hair.

“The Unseen?” he asked.

“Yes, the ‘Not Humans’,” Treena said with a definitive nod. “But you can see them if you wear these.” She pulled her goggles over her face. She looked around the forest and then jumped as she focused on Grim once more.

Grim looked skyward for more airships, but the skies were still, as were the trees. There were no birds or forest creatures around, making the woods uncomfortably quiet.

“Did you see the dirigible?” Treena asked.

“You mean that flying air ship?”

She nodded. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

Grim shook his head. “What country is this? Are you alone here?”

“I’m with the Resistance,” she said. “We’re fighting for our freedom. I’m not sure what a country is, but this land is in the Dominion of Simeon Manor.” She pointed to the snow-capped mountain.

“Then this isn’t Earth,” he muttered. He rolled his eyes after he said it.