Summerland (16 page)

"No," Aunt Shambleau said. "You're right. It was in my dream last night that Pap was telling me all this stuff."

"We should listen to him," Ethan said, taking himself and everyone else by surprise. They stared at him. Jennifer T. looked the most surprised of all.

"Should we, now?" said Gran Billy Ann, one eyebrow raised. Her eyebrows were just painted-on lines of brown makeup and therefore looked extra skeptical.

"When the ferishers wanted to get me here to Clam Island," Ethan said, "they sent dreams to my father. To put the idea of Clam Island in his head. Mr. Brown told me they did. So maybe someone or something sent that dream to you, Aunt Shambleau."

"Interesting theory," Uncle Mo said. "So what would this someone or something be trying to say."

"I remember the dream now!" cried Aunt Shambleau. "There was that pool, like I told you, all boiling cold. And then Pap and me was watching, and he said, look at that, here comes Coyote. And there was a coyote, and it was going along. It saw the pool, and all at once it gets this guilty face on it, like it's having a good, mean idea. And then right while Pap and me are watching, it goes over to the water and then just lifts its leg and has itself a big old whiz right into that pretty blue water. I was so mad!" She shook her head in disgust, remembering. Then she pointed at her grand-niece. "You got to get yourself to that Well, girl. Before that Coyote gets there." Her voice rose to a shout. "Don't let him get there first." The soft-looking brown flesh of her arm trembled as she jabbed at the air. "Don't let him spoil that water!"

Ethan and Jennifer T. looked at the old man, who was looking at his sister and shaking his head.

"You frighten me, Shambleau," he said. "You always have."

"Is that right, Uncle Mo?" said Jennifer T. "Do we have to go to that Well thing?"

"I don't remember anything about that. I'm racking what little there is left of this brain to rack. All I know is about Coyote cutting those knots in the worlds. Sorry, kids." He reached for one of Billy Ann's cigarettes. As you might imagine, he was not supposed to smoke anymore, either. "I don't have the faintest idea how you would get to that Well. I was only over to the Summerlands one time."

"What in the heck are you talking about, Morris?" Gran Billy Ann said. "You spent every summer of the first twenty years of your life over to Summerland."

"Not that Summerland, Billy Ann. That Summerland is just a shadow of the real Summerlands."

"This is getting too deep for me," said Gran Billy Ann. With a good deal of grunting and moaning, and some help from Ethan, she managed to creak forward in her red recliner and to get herself up onto her big feet. Then she headed for the kitchen. "You better have left me some of that pie, Beatrice Casper."

Aunt Beatrice bunched up her mouth and tried to look innocent. "I ain't saying anything," she said. "I plead the Fifth."

"As I recall, it takes a special kind of creature to guide you from one world to another," Uncle Mo said. "A regular person just can't manage the trick."

"A shadowtail," Ethan said.

"It's something neither fish nor fowl, you know. A little bit of this, a little of that. Always half in this world and half in the other to begin with."

"Like a werefox."

"Like Thor Wignutt," said Jennifer T.

CHAPTER 5

Escape

THEY AGREED TO SPLIT UP.
Jennifer T. would go recruit Thor Wignutt to the cause, while Ethan went home to ask his father to help them find a way to stop Coyote from bringing an end to the Story of the universe, if necessary by venturing into the Summerlands themselves. Jennifer T. had been to Thor's house twice, two times more often than any other child on the island who had lived to tell the tale. (Mrs. Wignutt, as has been mentioned, was herself a figure of island lore.) In the meantime, Aunt Shambleau and Uncle Mo were going to pack camping gear, lunchmeat, flashlights, fishing tackle, and anything else they could think of that would not unduly weigh the children down. It was five o'clock now. Ethan promised to return at seven, having made his arguments to his father. What Coyote was trying to do sounded an awful lot like maximum entropy, the heat death of the universe, and other grim ideas from physics that his father had told him about over the years. Maybe if he put it more that way, he had explained to Jennifer T., he could help his father take an interest in the project. And if the worst happened, and Mr. Feld could not be moved? In that case, Ethan would wait until his father went to bed, whenever that was, even at the crack of dawn. Then he would sneak out of the house.

Jennifer T. took off on her bicycle, and Ethan on an old Schwinn that had belonged to a whole bunch of different Rideouts over the years. It had a bad chain that kept falling off, and between that and riding one handed because of his big stick, it took Ethan nearly an hour to reach home.

When he turned into the gravel drive his heart lurched, and his nerve failed him: he saw the orange station wagon. Skid was like a droll, slightly battered symbol of sensible Mr. Feld himself, the color of a warning sign:
Stop, Ethan. You have gone too far
.

What was he
thinking
? There was no way in the
world
that Mr. Feld was going to believe any of it: baseball-playing fairies, bat-winged goblins that hurled their own exploding heads, Ragged Rock. To convince his father of something, as Ethan well knew, you needed to offer proof. What proof of Summerland's existence did Ethan have, beyond a weathered gray tree-branch and a tiny book that claimed to have been printed at a place called Duyvilburg, in the Summerlands, in the year 1320th Hoptoad?
How to Catch Lightning and Smoke
was something—it was pretty hard to explain away—but Ethan doubted it would be enough.

He dropped the old Schwinn in the drive and walked up to the house. It was dark, though the back door was unlocked. His father must still be sleeping; sometimes he didn't wake until dusk. Ethan walked through from the kitchen to the front door, checking his father's bedroom.

"Dad?" he said. His voice sounded thin and lost and he switched on a light. There was a scrap of paper in the middle of the table, a white business card that read

ROB PADFOOT
BRAIN + STORM AERONAUTICS

with a Seattle address and telephone number, and the e-mail address [email protected], and the fancy white ski-bum sunglasses. His father must have finally gotten around to calling back that Padfoot guy. Perhaps something the man said over the phone had fired Mr. Feld's imagination, and he had wanted to get an early start on his work. Ethan picked up the sunglasses and tucked them into the back pocket of his jeans. Then he walked out the back door again, headed for the packing shed, his heart sinking. Now it was going to be even tougher to persuade his father to leave the island. If he were caught up in his work, hoping to impress a possible investor, leaving would be the last thing Mr. Feld would want to do.

As soon as Ethan saw that the workshop, too, was dark, he knew that something was wrong. The high glass doors were shut but, like the house doors, unlocked. Mr. Feld never left for any length of time without locking up the workshop. It contained, as he often said, his life's savings. It would seem, then, Mr. Feld had wandered away from the house sometime, expecting to return very soon, and had not yet returned. Mr. Feld had never done anything like that before, but you never knew. No, that was untrue. You knew. You knew how it felt to come home and have everything feel somehow wrong. Too quiet. Too neat. And a smell in the air that was no smell at all, yet somehow not the proper smell of your home.

"Dad?" Ethan called again, the fine hair rising on the back of his neck. Outside the shed, the shadows had gathered, and were pressing against the windows, blotting out the world beyond. In the windowpanes Ethan could see only his own small, staring reflection. "Oh, my God."

Victoria Jean
was gone. Ethan had been so focused on looking for his dad that he had failed to notice it before. In the place where the creamy white gondola usually rested there was only bare cement floor, mottled with oil and dust. The fuel cell unit was still there, but the envelope, tethers, and moorings were all gone, too. As he took this in, two certainties occurred to Ethan, one hard on the heels of the other. The first thing he knew for certain was that Rob Padfoot was responsible. The young man with the briefcase and long brown hair had come to the island again—had perhaps never left—and this time taken both his father and
Victoria Jean
away. The second certainty—he felt this one in the pit of his stomach—was that Padfoot and Brain + Storm were nothing but guises or operatives of Coyote. He remembered the way Padfoot had gone out of his way to praise the picodermal fibers of his father's envelope. Was that just a ploy? Or did Coyote really
want
Mr. Feld's ultrastable, nonconducting envelope material, for some reason? For the very reason, whatever it might be, that he wanted Mr. Feld, too? If any last doubt—of his own sanity, or the wisdom of his plan—had remained in the heart of Ethan Feld, it now fled. Everything, as Albert Rideout always said, was true.

Ethan heard a faint rattle of leaves. Something was moving in the ivy just outside the doors of the packing shed. He turned, wishing he had his stick, but he had left it leaning against the bicycle. There was a low moan, the clatter of steel. And then Cinquefoil stepped into the shed. He seemed to be hiding something behind his back. There was an orange gash on his forehead, thick orange streaks on his cheeks and throat. It was the orange of apricot jam, deep and shining. There was a spreading sticky circle on his buckskin shirt. The haste of his flight across the gap between Branches had left a thick rime of ice on his shoulders and the tips of his ears. He drew himself up to his full height of perhaps sixteen inches, swept the cap from his head, and bowed low to Ethan.

"At yer service," he said. From behind his back he produced the old catcher's mitt that Ethan's father had dug out of a box that morning. "I believe this might be yers."

Then he pitched forward and fell flat on his face.

Ethan picked up the ferisher—he weighed as much as a big cat, and his body felt like a slumbering cat's in Ethan's arms—dense and loose at the same time. He carried him over to an old couch in the corner where Mr. Feld often abandoned his researches to a few hours' sleep, and laid him gently down on the cushions. Then he stood back, and wondered if he was about to watch the beautiful, battered little creature die.

"Not yet," Cinquefoil said, without opening his eyes. "Not this side a the Winterlands."

"The Winterlands," Ethan said. "Is that where he lives?"

"The Changer? He don't live anywhere. He's got no home. No home would have him, and there's none that'd suit him fer longer than a day. But he's fond a the Winterlands, they say, and all that crew of shaggurts and stormbangers and frost giants. They say his wife is a great gray shaggurt named Angry Betty. It won't surprise me none ta go looking and find him there, camped with all his Rade around him, his contraptions and contrivances, his hags and harridans and hobgoblins." Cinquefoil opened his eyes. "But I don't know fer sure; I've never set foot in the Winterlands my ownself, nor ventured inta the circle o' his wagons when he halts in his wandering fer a night. Nor has anyone I know that ever returned ta tell of it. Not in any form that I cared ta know them." He closed his eyes again.