My Diary from the Edge of the World (8 page)

At the top of the stairs we came to a wide wooden porch covered in old rockers, with cobwebs in the high corners and little wooden statues and straw dolls hung everywhere. Wind chimes and deer hides and all sorts of dried flowers and herbs hung from the rafters. (“For curses,” Millie whispered to me.)

A long, thick deer skull took the place of a door knocker.

Dad hesitated, looked at my mom uncertainly, and then rapped it against the wood. “Out of the frying pan, into the fryer,” I whispered back to Millie, which made her snort. She says I always get my sayings wrong.

Standing there in front of Grandma's front door waiting, I had a sudden mental picture of us in my head: the Lockwood family plus one orphan, all quiet and exhausted and dirty. What would we look like to someone who wasn't expecting us? We huddled together as we listened to the shuffle of feet approaching, the
click
and
squeak
and
scrape
of several latches being unlatched, and then the
creak
of the door giving way. And then there she stood, in a halo of warm orange firelight. She was dressed in overalls with a big tag on the front pocket that said
GAP
, and wore a crown made out of leaves in her hair, which was wild, curly, white, and circled her head like caterpillars. Her cheeks were saggy, and her hands were clawlike and veiny. She looked old, but her eyes were bright and wide-awake, and she smelled like nutmeg.

My mom took a hesitant step forward. “Mrs. Lockwood,” she said. “It's us.”

“Mom . . . we didn't know where else to go,” Dad added. “We need your help.”

Grandma eyed us up and down. She had one glass eye that trailed along behind the other one. A smile spread itself across her face. She grabbed my dad and pulled him in tight, pincering his arms against his sides.

“Well, you are welcome here!” Tears welled up in her one real eye, and she clasped and wrung her hands as she pulled back again to take us all in. A crow flew from somewhere inside the house and alighted on her shoulder, but she didn't seem to notice. “My son is home!” she cried, and then turned to hug my mom, who tried to pull away but failed. Another crow flew up and perched on Grandma's other shoulder, ignoring the chaos and pecking gently at my mom's hair.

I glanced at the others. Sam was squeezing behind my legs to hide. Millie had her arms crossed defensively in front of her. Dad looked rigid and uncertain, and Oliver had stiffened into his shy wanting-to-disappear posture. I was wondering what they were all thinking, because from the very first moment I had made my own mind up about Grandma Lockwood.

I
thought she was magnificent.

*  *  *

Inside, the house was bigger than it had looked from outside. But really it was hard to tell what was indoors and what wasn't: There were mostly screens instead of windows, jutting screened-in rooms surrounded completely by woods, and long hallways that led into elaborate, colorful cloth tents.

Grandma ushered us into the family room, which had a huge stone fireplace and walls hung with all sorts of fiddles and banjos and guitars, mobiles of hand-carved birds hanging from the ceilings, and plants growing from tiny pots lodged in every spare nook. Pages of poetry were taped above the doorways, there was a giant telescope pointed out into the backyard, and the high ceilings were covered in glinting copper. The only thing that kept running through my head was
My dad grew up here
. Never have two things fit together less than this magical place and my distracted, boring, mathematical father.

“Mom, you've done a lot to the house,” Dad said.

Grandma grinned. “Wait till you see what I've got in the grove.”

She opened a big wooden door at the back and nodded us forward onto a deck. It looked down onto a wide, grassy glade, wedged between two enormous boulders
that seemed to come together in a dark, deep opening at the middle. But when we saw what the glade contained, Millie screamed.

*  *  *

Sorry, I had to stop for a minute because of a hand cramp.

The glade was full of ghosts.

There was no mistaking them, of course, though I'd never seen one in real life. They were filmy, wearing morbid expressions and old-timey clothes and floating a foot or so above the ground. These particular ghosts seemed to be from about the 1800s, but I've never paid much attention in history, so I'm not sure. Millie took it as proof that Grandma meant to murder us and keep us as ghosts forever and ran for the front door. Sam asked if we had any food, wanting to throw it to them like he likes to do with geese at the petting zoo.

“Is that . . . ,” Oliver asked, pointing to the dark gaping hole that peeped out from between the two boulders, “a cave? Like, to the Underworld?” He'd gone so pale his scar stood out extra bright.

Grandma nodded. “Of course. Where else do you think they came from?”

Dad eyed her critically. “Mom, that was plugged up for years. What happened?”

“The poor things couldn't come out. So I unplugged it. I rented a jackhammer. Had somebody hike it up here from Lowe's for an extra fifty dollars.”

“This is very dangerous, Mom,” Dad stuttered. “Not to mention illegal. You know it needs to be refilled. Do you know any licensed contractors?” He shook his head, readjusting his glasses and rubbing nervously at his pointy chin that I wish wasn't pointy, just like mine. “What if they dragged you underground with them?”

Grandma put her hands on his cheeks and squeezed them. “You always liked rules,” she said, then kissed him on the forehead, making him blush. “They'd never hurt me,” Grandma went on. “They're mopey, not dangerous. There's a difference. This one's a bit of a pyromaniac. . . .” She thumbed downward in the direction of a dour-looking spirit who was playing with a book of matches and appeared to be singed on one side. He kept looking at us distrustfully—as if he didn't like the presence of strangers—a frown pulling at the corners of his pale face. “But with the nasty ones, I have my spells.” She winked at me.

“That's very reassuring,” Dad said dryly, trying to regain his composure.

Even standing this far above it, the cool air from the cave blew at my messy hair, and I could hear faint laughter, singing, and then a moan, coming from somewhere deep down in the darkness.

“Anyway, I'll get you all some tea while I whip up dinner,” she said, turning to Millie. “You guys look
awful
.” Millie crossed her arms tighter.

*  *  *

I think there was some kind of lizard eye in my tea, and Oliver pulled a feather out of his, and none of us could bring ourselves to take a sip from our mugs even though Grandma kept saying it would make us feel “like a million dollars.”

An enormous dinner was on the dining room table when we walked in, laid out in huge wooden bowls: fried chicken and steamed collard greens and mashed potatoes and iced tea (without eyes and feathers, thankfully). Grandma had cooked it all so quickly, and even though it seemed crazy, I eyed the crows with suspicion, wondering if they'd helped. Some perched on the shelves and a couple sat on the back of Grandma's chair, but they groomed themselves and stared back at me dumbly. Was I just imagining it, or was there a little flour on one's cheek? (Then again,
wouldn't crows boycott making fried chicken even if they knew how?)

“These are your cousins,” Grandma said to the two on her chair, dotingly. Millie looked at me and mouthed,
Crazy
, and then Mom, noticing, said under her breath that she really just loves her pets.

When Millie asked for the salt, it floated out from the kitchen and gently landed in front of her. She tried to act nonchalant about it, even though we only ever see people do magic on reality shows.

“Mom, can you just act like a normal person for once?” Dad said. (He's one to talk.) He didn't seem amused by any of Grandma's tricks, like the way she was making her glass eyeball roll around in its socket, or how she lit the fire in the family room fireplace just by doing something flourishy with her hand. As we ate, he kept glancing out the kitchen window in the direction we'd come.

Grandma watched him intently. “I don't think
you're
such a normal person,” she finally said. “A normal person would have at least thought to bring me some Taco Bell. Or a newspaper. Or would have written me a letter every once in a while in the past few years.” Dad dug into his food, looking sullen and angry, more like a kid than an adult.

“Dad's in trouble with his mom,” Sam said giddily to the table-at-large.

Finally, Grandma put down her fork. “Okay, let's have it. You know I'm not a mind reader. What's after you?” She looked first at Dad, then gazed around at the rest of us. “Tell me what we're dealing with here.”

Everyone turned serious and waited for Dad to speak, while Mom lifted Sam from his seat and brought him into the family room, out of earshot. And then, softening a little, Dad sank back in his chair, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and told Grandma about first noticing the Dark Cloud, and seeing it drifting closer and closer to the house until it came to rest in the backyard.

The color was gone from Grandma's cheeks by the time he finished speaking. Her eyes drifted to the window, then toward the family room.

“Oh, Theodore.”

“We didn't know what else to do but come here,” he said. “We think we may have left it behind. But if not, we need your help.”

A silence stretched across the table, then Grandma leaned back in her chair thoughtfully.

“You're bringing death here. The ghosts won't be happy.”

“But they're dead already,” I blurted out. “What do they have to be scared of?”

Grandma's eyes darted to mine; they were the color of amber and it felt as if they could see right into my soul. “Not scared. Jealous,” she said. Then she turned back to my dad. “We're well hidden. Anything can get lost in these hills, even the weather. And I've put a hiding spell on the house for eyes to pass over it, even the eyes of storms. You're all welcome here as long as you like. But”—she looked around the table—“I can't make a Cloud go away. There's no spell that can stop it, not once it's chosen what it wants. A Cloud picks one person, and one person alone. And eventually, it'll find its mark. It's coming, you can be sure of that.” I think we all must have felt the heaviness that came with her words.

“Well, I was thinking, actually,” Dad said tentatively after a few moments of silence, “of a different kind of help.”

Grandma gave him a sharp, appraising look.
Here it goes,
I thought. Dad would tell her his plan, and she'd look sorry for us—like people do sometimes when we get recognized walking through Cliffden. I braced myself.

“I was hoping you could tell us how to get to the Extraordinary World,” he said, so quietly it was barely above a whisper.

Grandma stared at him in shock for a long moment. She sank back in her chair as if she'd suddenly turned to Jell-O. And then she did something that shocked me. She smiled.

“That . . . ,” she said. “Now, that I can do.”

*  *  *

I can barely keep my eyes open and have fallen asleep twice while making this entry. More tomorrow.

Late into the night, Grandma
was telling us about the Extraordinary World. Not only did she agree that it exists . . . she told us she could prove it.

After dinner she brought us into the library, which juts out so that you're just looking out into thin air and treetops, and which is lined from floor to ceiling with shelves bursting with dusty old books, some of them so old their spines are crumbling: books on spells, on the special powers of various trees, on gemstones, some romance novels . . .

She went straight to a shelf at the far side of the room and extracted a book with a disintegrating yellow spine, then sank down cross-legged on the thick Oriental rug. We all gathered on the floor around her, Sam curled up
in my lap. As she opened the book, she blew on it, and a tiny puff of dust rose up from its pages.

“I haven't looked at this in years,” Grandma said. She spread it open on the floor so that we all could see, then turned page after page for us. It was full of illustrations depicting a beautiful round blue planet. There were orderly streets and clean, gleaming skyscrapers and shiny aeroplanes.

“There used to be aeroplanes
here
,” Grandma said. “When I was a girl. They were like beautiful metal birds.” I nodded. I'd seen old black-and-white photos of them; I'd always thought they were beautiful too.

“What happened to them?” Sam asked.

Grandma leaned toward him, and her caterpillar curls flopped. “The angels got jealous and broke them in half. Same thing with blimps, hot-air balloons, helicopters . . . People invented them and the angels knocked them down.”

“Did anyone take them to the edge of the world?”

Grandma shook her head. “Only the oldest, strongest angels have been to the edges of the earth, and
they're
not telling what they've seen there.”

Further into the book, there were drawings of rockets sent to the moon, people happily swimming in the ocean
(apparently unconcerned that a mermaid might drag them under), gleaming cities and highways that gave no sign of being devoured by forests. The skies were full of white puffy clouds—not one drawing of a Dark Cloud or a dragon. No sasquatches or ghosts. Grandma pointed to one picture of several round planets with arrows drawn to indicate they were moving in circles. “The Extraordinary World moves around the sun,” she said. “It's not at the center of the universe like we are.” (I can't imagine not being at the center of the universe. I can't imagine the sun not moving over the middle of our planet from west to east like it's on a belt.)