My Diary from the Edge of the World (7 page)

“My dad worked at McCormick spices—they import cinnamon and nutmeg and things like that. My mom was an accountant, but really she thought of herself as an amateur naturalist. That's why she's wearing the net over her face. She loved to take us into the woods behind our house and collect butterflies and bugs.”

“Sounds risky,” I said. “All that time in the woods.”

“Mom said if you want to enjoy the wilderness, you have to take risks.” There was an awkward silence while I wondered if it was her belief in risks that had gotten her tangled up with the sasquatches.

“Oliver . . . ,” I said, wishing there was more privacy on the Winnebago, “why did you decide to come with us? I told you where my dad wants to go. Surely you could have picked some people less . . .” I glanced toward my dad in the driver's seat and then lowered my voice. “. . . um . . . destined for failure?”

Oliver smoothed down his hair, thinking. He was quiet for several moments. I was just about to give up, when he finally spoke. “I want to get as far away as possible . . . from them.” He looked up at me, his green eyes extra bright in the dim afternoon light.

“From those sasquatches?” I asked. He shook his head.

“No. I know it sounds bad, but I mean . . . from my parents, and where we had our life, in Connecticut. I just want to be far away from that. The Extraordinary World sounds like it's about as far away as you can go.” He ran his fingers along the edges of his photo, looking sheepish. “I shouldn't want to forget them, but I do. I wish I could forget I ever knew them and
that they ever loved me.” His hair sprang up again from where he'd smoothed it down. “Though, so far being with you guys actually makes me think about them more. My mom loved road trips—she had all these Irish traveling songs she liked to sing. The weird thing is,” he went on, looking out the window, “she loved animals—all kinds. Even the beasts and monsters. She always said you can't blame animals for doing what's in their natures. She would have said not to blame the sasquatches.” I could tell by the angry way he said it that he didn't share the sentiment.

We were silent for a while. I was thinking to myself how we're going to the Extraordinary World to protect someone, and Oliver is going to forget the people he couldn't protect. I thought of how I'd looked at him when he'd first arrived at school, how I thought he'd looked like a fish. But really he just looked sad, I guess.

*  *  *

Mom is driving today, and instead of spending time with us, Dad has his nose stuck in a book (of course) called something ridiculous like
Einstein's Cat
or
Einstein's Cricket
or something like that. Sometimes I'm tempted to pull down the lucky penny on my wall
that's dedicated specifically to keeping him safe and throw it out the window.

Millie just poked her head up into my bunk, her brown curls sticking to the flannel of the blue sheet I've hung around it for privacy.

“Do you know we're broke?” she whispered. “Nobody's made an offer on the house, and Mom and Dad are almost out of money.”

“But they have savings.”

Millie shook her head, ducked out for a moment to make sure we weren't being listened to, then appeared again. “Not as much as you think. We may have to sell our hair like in
Little Women
.” She then gazed at me appraisingly, taking in my messy dishwater-blond mop. “Well,
mine
at least.” She looked almost sorry for me, and then she disappeared again.

Millie can be dramatic, but I think she must be telling the truth, because yesterday Mom was adding length to my jeans with some scrap fabric and a needle and thread instead of just promising to get me a new pair. Also, when we stopped at a rest area for lunch earlier today, we were only allowed to order one thing each off the McDonald's dollar menu.

I've just poked my head out of the cubby to see if our
surroundings are shabbier than I've had the chance to notice, but it all looks pretty much how I thought—pretty shabby generally, but not
destitute
. Dad's still reading, and Millie's looking out the window and stroking her hair, as if she's thinking it may be one of the last times she has the pleasure of doing so.

Outside, the landscape has changed a lot over the past few hours, but there is still no sign of the Cloud. We're surrounded by dipping valleys full of mist, like bowls of milk—fog rising off creeks and riverbeds and leaking up into the hills to hide the mountaintops. It's witch country, for sure.

Witches tend to like their privacy, and the hills give them lots of places to keep their lives and their secrets hidden. That's what Millie says. I guess the only bad thing is that they have to share the hills with all manner of beast—not only sasquatches, but also ghosts.

The thing with ghosts is that they pop up wherever there are caves, and the Smokies are just
riddled
with caves. Ghosts use them to come and go from the Underworld, even though that's not technically legal. They have a tendency to try to snatch people into the Underworld. That's one main reason why they aren't
allowed up here aboveground, and why—if your house does end up being haunted—you have to “disclose” that before you sell it. (I overheard Barbara the real estate agent mentioning that to Mom.) They're only supposed to officially interact with humans at the Mausoleum Headquarters in Florida, where there are psychic mediums on call twenty-four-seven to handle their concerns, but they're sometimes seen floating into towns to visit relatives. It's hard for the police to keep them completely contained—especially in hills like these or out on the open sea, where they're hard to catch. I suppose the witches tolerate them somehow.

I guess, knowing all that, it's no surprise these hills give me an eerie feeling—I can barely see through the thickness of the trees, and the houses are all surrounded by tall wooden fences, as if to keep creatures out. The deeper we get into the Smokies, the more wild the woods become.

*  *  *

PS: The most disturbing thing about ghosts is that they're the souls of people who were never
taken by a Cloud at all. Either they died too suddenly and unexpectedly, or somewhere too remote to be reached. So they drift around in Limbo. As terrible as it is to be taken by a Cloud, it's supposed to be even worse to die
without
being taken by one.

Luckily, neither is going to happen to Sam, because he's going to get better. Just to prove it, I looked out the window a second ago, and the sky behind us is perfectly clear.

I can't believe where I'm
writing this from. My fingers are freezing, and Millie says I'm crazy for working on this diary so obsessively. She may have a point. Right now there's barely enough firelight to see the words. Because here I am in a sleeping bag in the woods, in the ghost-infested, witch-infested, sasquatch-infested Smoky Mountains.

This morning we parked the Trinidad in a dusty lot, climbed out, and saw the sign marking the trailhead that Dad said led toward Grandma's:
WELCOME TO THE SMOKY MOUNTAIN STATE FOREST! WARNING: HIKING AND CAMPING MAY RESULT IN DISMEMBERMENT BY SASQUATCH, WITCH, OR BEAR, AND POSSIBLE KIDNAPPING BY SPECTRAL INHABITANTS. PLEASE RESPECT DESIGNATED WILDLIFE AND WITCHCRAFT AREAS.

It was far from encouraging.

“I hiked these woods a million times as a boy,” Dad said brightly. “I wouldn't take you if I wasn't sure I could protect you.” I just blinked at him, my heart sinking with trepidation. My dad is pretty spindly, and since he's always muttering and nudging at his glasses, and always looking disheveled because of his stubble, he is pretty much the last person you'd expect could protect anyone from any of the things we saw listed on that sign.

Millie and I exchanged a doubtful glance, then I popped into the Winnebago to search for weapons. All I found was a corkscrew, a skewer, and a spatula, all of which Mom confiscated from me as soon as I emerged with them.

Still, she too seemed to hesitate on the verge of boycotting the whole thing. She looked in the direction we'd driven, as if searching for the Cloud. Then she sighed, turned to the trailer at the back of the camper, and began unpacking: sleeping bags, a gas stove, pots and pans, and her portable violin case that attaches to her back. (She's always prepared for anything, even remote musical interludes.) “I've read there are lots of witch villages up in the hills,” she said, putting on a
brave face. She stuffed sleeping bags into knapsacks and attached pots to straps. “That'll be interesting. I'm sure they're charming.”

Once Mom and Dad are united on something, there's no amount of protesting that will change their minds. So I hefted a knapsack onto my back, and Millie and Oliver did the same. Sam only grabbed Jim the bear while Mom gathered his things.

We left the Winnebago locked up and abandoned at the foot of the trail. It looked a little forlorn there with no other cars in the lot to keep it company. And then we were off . . . Dad at the front, then me and Oliver, then Millie, and Mom and Sam bringing up the rear.

*  *  *

Luckily, our first day's hike was pretty uneventful. We saw a few openmouthed caves to the Underworld—but no ghosts—and possibly the shadows of a few tree demons slipping through the woods. (Tree demons are timid and especially scared of humans—supposedly they only pick fights with angels, and there are barely any angels in the east.) We did see our first witch village, though we didn't really get to see much of it. It was positioned off to the right of the trail and had a big unmarked wooden gate at the front with an elaborate silver lock. It was surrounded
by a spiky wooden fence too high to see over. But from one spot farther up the trail, we could make out the tip-tops of pointy black hats bustling back and forth beyond the gates, and we could smell the cookfires, and hear the occasional cackly laughter and the sound of someone playing a fiddle.

All day, taking advantage of his captive audience (we were too out of breath not to be), Dad went on and on about physics. “There's no reason we should think time
only
moves forward, just because it looks that way to
us
,” he expounded over his shoulder. “The only thing that really tells us time has a direction at all is entropy. Entropy is when things move from order to disorder. The universe gets more disorderly all the time.”

I looked helplessly back at Millie, who caught my glance and pantomimed fainting from boredom, and then over at Oliver, who was listening with his head to one side as he walked. When he noticed me watching him, he smiled. “Your dad's really interesting,” he said.

I suppose one person's most-boring-lecture-of-all-time can be another person's “interesting.” I guess stranger things have happened than somebody finding my dad worth listening to.

*  *  *

Now we're camped beside the trail not far above the village. Mom's pulled out her violin and is playing something soothing to distract us from the eerie sounds of the forest all around us, her fingers moving on the strings like elegant spiders. Sometimes I nearly forget she's a classically trained musician and that she ever had a life before being our mom.

I can still hear the creaks and distant howls (possibly ghosts, hopefully not sasquatches) and nearby croaks, but she says the fire will keep them all away. Dad is smoking a pipe and staring at the sky. He probably prefers being here in the woods rather than being boxed into the house with all of us, where he has to have table manners and talk to us at dinner. I'd like to ask him if he thinks we've lost the Cloud for good, but Sam is curled up against me in my sleeping bag like a hot water bottle, and I don't want to wake him or risk him overhearing me.

Millie is reading by flashlight. Oliver has been working on something mysterious across the fire. He always has to be doing something, and everything he does, he does
just so
.

*  *  *

Oh, he just came over and gave me what he was working on. It's a wooden whistle. He said it's a safety whistle.

“Just blow on it if you ever get lost or in trouble, and I'll hear you,” he said. I don't know what good a whistle would do me if something really bad happened . . . like, say, if my legs were in the process of being gnawed off by a tree demon. But I thanked him politely. Sometimes I think Oliver's weirdness is just weird, and other times it's sort of touching. I can't figure out which way I feel about the whistle.

In other news, I found some dry raccoon poo earlier, which I picked up with a tissue and put in a pocket of my knapsack. I'm planning to put it in one of Millie's hiking boots once she falls asleep.

I've decided that next time I write, I'll just continue right where I've left off so this feels more like an actual book and I seem more like a real author.

We knew we must be
getting close to a witch's house yesterday when, around dusk, we started seeing the charms hung along the path: wooden chimes and star-shaped bells and twirly mobiles made of fine little bird bones hanging from branches. There were whistles lodged in the crevices of trees that made low moaning noises as we passed, and all sorts of dangling symbols made of twigs. I couldn't decide whether it was all enchanting or eerie, and decided it was both. “Not much farther,” Dad said, getting visibly more tense. We stumbled along under a thick shelter of trees until, all of a sudden, we emerged into a clearing, and the Crow's Nest came into view.

It was an astonishing sight—resting on enormous boulders at the peak of the mountain, made of dark logs
and planks of wood, and lit up brightly from inside by firelight. It looked half wild and half civilized, sort of crooked to one side, old and breathtaking, with attachments and additions veering off this way and that and poking over the sides of the boulders and low cliffs. There was one high room built up to the left side and one low porch to the right that
did
make the whole thing resemble the shape of a crow—with the highest point being the head and the lowest being the tail. It was surrounded at the bottom by a large, wide fence made of spiky pine trunks carved to points and facing upward, which had a nestlike appearance but was clearly built to keep the wild beasts out. Beyond the fence, high enough so we could see,
THE CROWS' NEST
was burned into a cedar sign, and a set of stairs curled up, up, and up past it, lit with candles at each small landing. My dad fiddled with the elaborate latch on a tall wooden gate for a few minutes and then let us inside, one by one.