"Did you ever see Thorn again?" I asked.
"I did not," said Roland. "But I see her every day in my memory. I see her standing at the foot of the mountains, restored to her parents and her home. She said she would watch over us, from a distance, and that she would never forget what we'd done for her. And I do feel her watching over me, sheltering me as she once did on that first perilous journey into the wild. Without her, the rest of our story would have gone unwritten."
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Roland sat down upon a three-legged stool we'd brought out for him hours ago.
"Her spirit remains," he concluded, "ever watching, ever protecting an old man at sea."
"I'm ready then," said Yipes, surprising both Roland and me with his quick and unexpected resolve. "Let's leave her behind if we must, but do go on with the story. I'm wide-awake and it's so still on the water tonight. You must tell us the rest. You must tell us right now!"
"How right you are," said Roland, laughing momentarily at the enthusiasm of our companion. "I must tell you the rest before dawn comes to the Lonely Sea, whether you like it or not."
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***
CHAPTER 17
The Wakefield House
As we drew farther away along the cliffs, I felt Thorn watching us from somewhere atop the mountain, and I felt that other set of eyes watching us -- the ones that were larger and scarier -- from somewhere in the hidden realm of the wild. Whatever it was had stopped moving with us, and it seemed as if it was watching us from a hidden place in our past, not wanting us to escape into a new day. For a long time I had wondered when it would choose to pounce on us. Now, with the feeling of its presence weakening on each step out of the mountains, I began to think the feeling of being watched had been only a dramatic figment of my imagination. As much as I'd loved the thrill of our flight through Fenwick Forest and over Mount Norwood, I was glad to be free of this unseen fear that had haunted our movements.
Out in the open along the cliffs it seemed far less wild, as though we were at a threshold between the tamed and the untamed world. We'd come only a short distance away from the base of the mountain and were without Thorn to protect us. Thomas
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and I walked that way and stopped many times so that he could paint pictures of what he saw. He painted the forest and mountains from memory and the clouds over the Lonely Sea and the Dark Hills off in the distance. From that point on, he was most fond of using a brush made from Thorn's fur rather than any from the children at the House on the Hill.
"You'd better slow down," I said, watching him busy at his work. "If you keep it up you might run out of pages."
He scowled at me, but he knew it was true and couldn't help flipping his fingers through the remaining pages of the journal... as if he didn't already know the exact number that remained. He put his things away and looked off in the direction we were heading.
"Do you see that?" he said, pocketing his journal and box of supplies.
"What?" I didn't know what he was talking about.
"Don't you see it there? That tall thing. It's the same color as the things behind it, but it sticks up high in the air."
I still couldn't see what he meant, and thought he might be either making it up to play a trick on me or seeing some sort of mirage in the rising heat of the morning. But as we walked on I, too, began
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to see the extraordinarily high, thin structure in the distance, as well as the small houses scattered at its base.
The Western Kingdom was before us, and we couldn't help but believe that the tall spire that rose into the sky was the Wakefield House. We had come at last to the place we'd been searching for.
We quickened our pace and talked nervously about what we would do when we arrived at the edge of town. I was convinced we should wait until dark, then go in for a look around. But Thomas didn't understand the logic of such an idea.
"Why would we want to do that?" he asked. "We're so far from home, nobody will have a clue where we've come from. We've endured a lake of fire, a swarm of giant bees, a pack of hungry wolves, and a monstrous bear, not to mention all the blisters on my feet. I'm going right in there. You can stay back if you want."
Of course, I wasn't about to stay behind and let him go alone. His mind was made up, and I knew better than to try and change it. So we walked the rest of the way with a heightened exhilaration, knowing we were about to stand at the foot of the Wakefield House. We stopped only once, about a quarter of a mile from the Western Kingdom, so that Thomas could paint the rising house from a
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distance. It was an extraordinary sight, as much for its height as its location. The Western Kingdom, it turned out, had been improperly named, probably by someone living there who wished it were worthy of such a title. It would be hard to refer to this place we'd stumbled upon as a town, let alone a kingdom, because once you got past the grandeur of the Wakefield House there wasn't much of anything else to see. It was like looking at a single gray tree trunk soaring into the sky, surrounded by a scattered collection of pebbles and dirt clods at its base.
When Thomas was finished painting, we quietly walked the last of the cliff-side trail into the Western Kingdom, watching the Wakefield House get taller and taller as we went. There was no gate to pass through, and I noticed right away there couldn't have been more than a hundred stone houses in all. There were no cobblestone streets, only dirt pathways with cart-wheel gutters worn into them.
There was a horse tied to a fence post outside the first house we came to, and there was a woman sitting in its doorway eating something soft, squishy, and yellow out of a bowl. She looked up at us uninterestedly and spoke as if we were nothing special.
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"Come a long way, did you?" she asked, slurping some of the contents of the bowl from her spoon. My stomach growled.
"A very long way," answered Thomas, saying the words in a way that conveyed a craving for something to eat. "We've come to look at the Wakefield House."
"Figured as much," the woman said. "Same reason everyone else comes here."
She had a detached way about her, as if she'd endured this conversation before, and we weren't making it any more interesting than the last time she'd had it. My stomach growled again, and she looked up from her bowl.
"You might as well come over here and get some soup," she offered. "It looks like you two have been living on berries and river water and not much else."
I wasn't entirely sure I wanted what the woman was offering, but she'd spoken the truth about our recent breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Anything at this point would be better than a bowl of berries. She stepped through her front door and acted like she expected us to follow her.
"If you want something to eat, you'll have to come inside," she said. "That's the way it works."
Thomas barely hesitated before making his way past the horse, down the very short path that lay
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before the house, and through the door. I reluctantly followed, though I had a feeling we were making a mistake following someone we didn't know into a house we'd never seen before.
"Mine's the first house people find in their search for the Wakefield House," she said, dropping a ladle into a small pot sitting on a table and pouring the thick soup off into two bowls. I didn't want to say it, but it looked an awful lot like the stuff Thomas blew out of his nose in the morning without the aide of a handkerchief, aiming for a tree and laughing his head off while everyone around him including me cried eeeeeewwwww.
We took the bowls and the spoons, and Thomas -- always the more reckless between the two of us -- had the spoon filled and into his mouth before I'd finished giving the yellowy, thick soup a good sniff.
"Saaaaaaay," he said, drawing out the word as he filled his spoon again. "This is very good."
"Better be," said the woman. "I got the recipe from a well-to-do chef who traveled all the way over here from the Northern Kingdoms to try his luck at the Wakefield House."
There was a deep pause, and then she said something more.
"He failed, just like all the rest."
I slurped up a spoonful of soup and couldn't help letting out a soft mmmmmmm. It was creamy
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and sweet, with a tang at the end that made me smack my lips as I drew another spoonful out of the bowl. I looked at the woman across the table and found that it was hard to say how old she was. She was of a sort that no matter her age you couldn't help imagining what she'd looked like when she was nine or ten. She had the bright eyes and pug nose of a child, but the crow's feet and graying temples of a woman of fifty or more. She wore a white, sunny-looking dress that left her long brown arms bare. They were arms of summer, of days in the garden baked by the heat.
"Why did he give you the recipe?" my brother asked. It was a logical question, one that had eluded me for some unknown reason as I gulped down spoonful after spoonful of the wonderful soup.
"When you fail to find the top of the Wakefield House, there is a price to pay," she said. Then, after a slow slurp of her own and a drawn-out pause, she added, "I set the price, and the price for the chef was his most secret recipe, one that had been handed down to him by his mother and her mother before, one that was a family treasure of great worth. The only recipe he wasn't supposed to share with anyone. That's the kind of price I like."
The image of the paper we'd found on the hill of garbage flashed in my mind.
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Western Kingdom -- Wakefield House -- Miss Flannery -- FAILED!
"You don't by any chance know of a woman named Miss Flannery?" I asked. "We're looking for her, because of a piece of paper we found back home."
The woman reached behind her and pulled a piece of paper off a stack an inch high. It was in the form of a certificate, clean and laced with gold ink. The same four words and the circle and square image we'd seen on the piece of paper from the hill were now before us on the table.
"I'm Miss Flannery," she said, holding out the paper. "Was the sheet you saw one of these by any chance?" she asked.
"It was," I answered. "We found it in a saddlebag attached to an old dead horse. The saddlebag had the name Mingleton branded onto it."
"Mingleton?" she asked, very nearly sounding interested ... but not quite. "I remember Mingleton. That was years ago."
She went back to her soup. It was maddening how she remained so detached, so uninterested.
"So he tried to reach the top of the Wakefield house, but failed?" asked Thomas, trying to draw her out once more.
"He did," said Miss Flannery, flipping a chain
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around her neck up and out from under her dress to reveal a bright blue stone as big as my thumb.
"Miner Mingleton," said Miss Flannery.
"Miner?" asked Thomas. We were both staring at the incredibly large and beautiful stone dangling from her neck.
"That's what he called himself, Miner Mingleton," she continued. "He went into the deepest caves he could locate in search of rare stones. He discovered many, but this was his greatest find. It's a star sapphire. You see how it makes a six-pronged starlight at the center?"
She held the sapphire and moved it ever so slightly back and forth. There really was a bright white star gleaming inside.
"This was his price," she said, tucking it back under her dress.
I looked around the room more carefully now, wondering how many of the objects were things that someone had once cherished, but were now lost to the Wakefield House. There were a lot of valuable-looking things on the shelves around the small room - books, artifacts, vases, paintings. It made the room look less like a home and more like a museum of stolen treasures.
"Why don't they just leave and take their possessions with them? These things you have, they don't seem to be well protected," said Thomas. I was
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aware as he said it that she was not a very fierce-looking woman. There were no weapons and the door remained wide open.
This seemed to amuse Miss Flannery, for her lip curled up on one corner ever so slightly and her eyes twinkled.
"Some have tried such a trick on me," she said slyly, letting the words hang in the air. "None have succeeded."
I wanted to ask why no one could betray her, but she was a mysterious and oddly frightening woman, and I didn't get the feeling she would tell us anything more. Her words were enough to scare me into thinking two boys from Madame Vickers's House on the Hill were no match for her.
I heard Thomas's spoon clang against the bottom of his bowl. Looking down, I realized that his bowl was not the only one that was sadly empty. I managed to scrape one more half bite off the bottom, and then the soup was gone.
"Follow me," said Miss Flannery. She stood up and walked out the door, down the path, and past the horse tied to the post. We followed her, passing houses with gardens for front yards and people busy at work or play. They were as cool as Miss Flannery, looking up without interest and returning to whatever it was they were doing without much hesitation.
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When we reached the door to the Wakefield House, she turned and stood motionless while Thomas and I craned our necks into the sky, trying to find the top of the towering structure. The supremacy of its height was alarming, doubled by the closeness of the slabs of stone and beams of wood rising from the ground. It was not a pretty structure, and lacked the feel of something made by a craftsman. There was a hastiness to its design, as though it might topple over at any moment from the sheer weight of itself. And yet, there was also something brilliant about the completeness of it. The parts were crude -- chunks of stone and blocks of wood -- but the whole was astonishingly solid and intricate. It was at once a profound masterpiece and a reckless pile of rubble.
Thomas started for the door, overcome by the power of the moment and dying to get inside. There was no fear in him, no concern that the Wakefield House might topple over while we were inside or that we might become hopelessly lost in its winding interior. My thoughts ran to more practical matters, such as the total lack of success for all who'd faced the Wakefield House before us, and the fact that we were going nowhere until we gave Miss Flannery our most prized possession. I knew what the possession was, but I wasn't sure Thomas did,
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and this worried me as I watched him advance toward the door.
"You're going the wrong way." Miss Flannery said this in such a way that it made me think she had said the same words to a hundred visitors already and was mildly annoyed at having to say them again. "That's the way out, not the way in. In all my years as the keeper of the Wakefield House, that door has never been opened."
She walked up next to Thomas, and I followed. As I came closer, I realized that it was an iron door, shaped in much the same way as the iron door that led away from Mister Clawson's lair. A chill ran through me as we got to Thomas on the dirt path.
"It only opens from the inside," Miss Flannery explained, "and no one -- including me -- has ever made it anywhere near this door from the other side."
The whole affair was beginning to sound like a very bad idea to me, and I was about to tell Thomas we should sit back and think it through before proceeding, but I was too late. Thomas already had our most prized possession out in the open, holding it out to Miss Flannery.
"What's this?" she asked, taking the objects from Thomas with uncharacteristic interest. When
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it came to the cost of entering the Wakefield House, she was at once full of curiosity.
"The box has my brushes and glue and powders to make colors. The journal has my paintings and my notes. Our whole lives are in there -- everything we've seen and done -- it's all there in pictures and scribbles."
She flipped open the small wooden box and looked inside, carefully touching the bags of dried flowers and dust, running her finger across the myriad colors on the inside of the lid. Closing the box, she opened to the first page of the journal and studied it. A smile grew on her
face as she went to the second page, then the third. She was engrossed in the tiny paintings, lost in the world of my brother's making.
"You may go," she said without looking up from the page. "Around that way, to the front, the door will be open." She lifted her chin to the left of the Wakefield House but would not take her eyes from the journal as she slowly turned, walking away toward her house.
"What if we get lost and can't find our way out? What do we do then?" I asked.
"Find a window to the outside and yell down. There are many along the way. But don't yell at night. I hate to be awakened."
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Miss Flannery meandered farther away from us, and I looked up into the mass of beams and stones of the Wakefield House. Here and there were openings, surrounded by stone, and it gave me some comfort to know that, when we failed in our attempt to reach the top and had to come back down again, we could find one of these openings and scream for help. I looked at Thomas.
"You do realize you may never get the journal back," I said. "All that work and all those memories will be lost forever."
Thomas smiled and waved me on. "Come on, Roland. There's a great adventure to be had here today, and we're going to have it!"