It's not healthy for a ten-year-old to lie around feeling sorry for himself for too long, especially with young Thomas Warvold in such dire need of help. And so, before I describe more of the House on the Hill, I must get myself out from under my ratty blanket and show how I did my best to free Thomas from Max and the Mooch, the two very large, always hungry, and exceptionally vicious dogs under the care of Finch.
"You think you're funny, do you? I'll show you who's funny!" Finch's voice boomed off the walls and down the stairs once more, and the children around me started to wake.
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"It wasn't me! It could have been anyone!"
I ran up the stairs, followed by three or four children who'd been awakened by the racket, and when I reached the top I saw that the dogs had Thomas pinned down in the corner of the kitchen, growling and waiting for Finch to command them to attack. Finch had them each on a twisted old rope of a leash, but they were practically lifting him off his feet as they lunged toward my brother.
"Could you please call off your dogs, Finch?" I didn't yell the question, only spoke it. I'd learned long ago that Finch didn't respond kindly to being told what to do. He was fifteen -- a lot older than the rest of us -- and generally unwilling to listen to anything we said on our own or as a group. He was especially unfriendly when his mother was not in the house, which was the case on this particular morning.
Finch turned on me and jerked the dogs in my direction, sending me back toward the stairs to the musty old basement. The boys behind me gasped and darted a few steps down the stairs, turning back to the excitement above. They were at that awkward stage in life when curiosity nearly overcame fear, and the two emotions wrestled with each other at times such as these.
"Get back in the basement, or I'll set Max
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and the Mooch on you and close the door!" Finch threatened.
The thought of these two monstrous dogs loose in the basement, tearing everything to shreds and quite possibly taking a bite out of more than one child, was more than enough to quiet the group of us. But I had done my job already, for Thomas was not only crafty, he was quick. By the time Finch turned back to the kitchen, the space where Thomas had been was empty. He'd gone out the kitchen window into the open space of the hill.
"Sic 'em, boys!" Finch let Max and the Mooch off the leash and sent them running out the door in search of my brother. He turned to us before leaving.
"The rest of you, back in the basement!"
And we would have done as we were told, too, only it wasn't Thomas standing at the door when the dogs went out, it was Madame Vickers, her icy stare sending a wave of cold energy over the whole house and all that was in it. The moment was frozen and quiet, for the dogs never barked or made mischief when Madame Vickers was present. The only noise they were known to make when they saw her was a quiet whimpering as they waddled off to their beds around the side of the old house with their tails tucked between their legs.
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"Finchy," said Madame Vickers, "these boys should be at work by now. They'll need to skip their breakfast and get right to it."
Madame Vickers, like her son Finch, had sharp features - a straight nose that ended in a point far away from the rest of her face, hollow cheeks, thin lips, a long chin. She wore mean-looking boots, made for kicking (or so she said to frighten us), and she had the longest stride of anyone we'd ever seen. It seemed that every step was a yard, meaning that she would often appear before us much faster than we thought possible.
While we stood frozen at the doorway leading to the basement, Madame Vickers turned toward the cart and the horse she'd come in on.
"You there! Out of the cart and into the basement! This boy Roland will show you the way."
A small boy of six or seven emerged from the cart, frightened and in need of a bath. He raced past Madame Vickers and came up short before us.
"Go on then," Madame Vickers ordered. "They won't hurt you. It's me and Finchy you need to worry about." She had the palest skin imaginable, as though she'd never stepped foot outside to feel the warmth of the sun. Everything about her was cold - her voice, her bulging black eyes, and the frozen white skin. It gave kids the chills just to look at Madame Vickers.
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She slapped the back of the new boy's head, and he tumbled into the group of us.
"Go back to the basement and get your things," she said, addressing us all at once. From that moment on, the new boy no longer existed as far as our headmistress was concerned. He was one of a throng of boys and girls that held only one purpose for Madame Vickers: "There's money to be made!"
I shooed everyone down the stairs and closed the door, happy at least to have been rid of Finch for the moment and knowing what I would find when the group of us got to the bottom of the stairs.
"This means something good for breakfast!" whispered one of the boys, racing down the stairs with the rest of us following him. The new boy rubbed the back of his head and seemed about to cry, but he hurried down the stairs like the rest of us, wondering what he would find.
When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Thomas was awaiting us, holding out three loaves of bread. We all had hoped he would be there, for there was more than one secret way into the basement from the hill above. As children of the dumping ground, one of our most enjoyable endeavors was to plan and build passageways through the rubble and into the basement. The basement was the one place Madame Vickers would not go. It was dirty
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and smelly, filled with the stench of unkempt children. She would send Finch on occasion, but for the most part the basement was ours and ours alone.
The breakfast of bread was split into pieces while we dressed and got our burlap sacks for picking garbage. The questions flew at Thomas: What did you do? Were you seared the Mooch would rip your leg off? How did you get away so fast? As you may have guessed by now, Thomas was adored by everyone he met. I stood back in the shadows, wondering how long Thomas's luck could hold out. Sooner or later we'd be thrown out of Madame Vickers's House on the Hill too ... and there was no place else to go.
"Finch is always at the sugar in the kitchen. Have you seen him?" asked Thomas. Everyone nodded and agreed that Finch was notorious for filching spoonfuls of sugar from the bowl. Madame Vickers had been furious just the day before when she'd found the top off the bowl, with some of the sugar missing. It didn't cross her mind to question her beloved Finchy. Instead she set the blame on Thomas -- though she couldn't prove it -- and gave him a good long thrashing to the bottom with a broomstick.
"I woke early," continued Thomas. Everyone munched on their bread, pulling up their suspenders or buttoning their trousers. "The stairs creak an
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awful lot, so I used tunnel number two to avoid the dogs. I crept through the kitchen window and took that small sugar bowl -- the one Madame Vickers uses at the table when one of the merchants comes from town."
"Get to it, Thomas! We've got to be going," one of the girls said. Everyone was taking a last big bite of bread and hiding scraps under pillows made of old straw and weeds.
"I filled that little sugar bowl and set a spoon right next to it, then I hid in the cupboard and made a bit of a racket. Finch came in all alone, snooping around to find out what was the matter. I cracked open the cupboard a little and watched him notice the sugar bowl on the table. He looked all around, took the spoon, and filled it. Only the thing was, when he put it in his mouth, he coughed and gagged and nearly choked. It was salt I'd put in that sugar bowl, and when he ate it I tumbled out of the cupboard and laughed so hard I couldn't get up!"
"I bet you weren't laughing when he called Max and the Mooch," I added. "You're lucky you got out of there with all your limbs."
Everyone was so proud of Thomas, I didn't have the heart to tell them there would be a price to pay for the missing bread from the kitchen and the salt in the bowl. The trouble with pranks was that someone had
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to pay, and I was feelin
g some dread over how much Thomas's morning antics would cost us all.
"No more tricks for a while, okay?" I said as we made our way out of the basement.
Thomas waved me off in his usual way, and I could tell he was already planning some new way of torturing Finch and Madame Vickers.
Madame Vickers's house sat on a dirt hill which had, at one time, been the place where all the trash from Ainsworth was thrown. At some point in its past, the mound of debris began to smell awful enough that the leaders in Ainsworth declared it "officially filled with garbage" and found a new place to get rid of the things they no longer wanted. (The new place they chose was farther away, on the edge of the Dark Hills, where the wind blew steadily away from the town.) The old hill of garbage was covered with a layer of dirt and left to rot.
It was Madame Vickers, working as the disciplinarian of the boys' home in Ainsworth, who hatched the idea to build a house atop the garbage and bring parentless little children there to live. She was paid handsomely for taking these children and training them to do hard labor, removing them from sight so that those in Ainsworth could forget about them. Once a week she returned to Ainsworth with a cart full of trinkets found in the hill of trash to sell
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or trade, and sometimes she would return with a new boy or girl sitting in the cart where the junk had been. It was a grim introduction for the child to be hauled away like trash from the streets of Ainsworth.
I thought on these things as we made our way down the side of the hill with our itchy burlap bags in tow. Finch was there -- tall and skinny as a wire, with greasy hair and a greasy voice -- waiting with the dogs who'd gotten their courage back up and were growling at everyone who passed by. Finch could barely control Max and the Mooch when they were leashed, and relied almost entirely on screaming at them and hitting them with a stick in order to keep them from running off or jumping on top of someone.
When Thomas walked by Finch, the older boy gave my brother a nasty look and a tremendous push on the shoulder. Thomas rolled down the hill of garbage but made a game of it, tossing and turning until he landed square on his feet and performed a little dance, finishing with his arms outstretched and all of us cheering.
"You'll be cleaning my unders tonight," Finch sneered. "And the doghouse needs a good scrubbing. How does that sound?"
This took the smile off of Thomas's face and made the rest of us giggle under our breath. There
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was no worse job than cleaning Finch's undershorts, but cleaning up after the dogs came in close second.
"Get on with it!" yelled Finch, the dogs instinctively growling at his angry voice. "And you best have something worth selling in those bags of yours by midday if you want anything to eat besides a bowl full of salt!"
We worked all day for Madame Vickers, searching the hill of junk for anything we could find that was valuable enough to trade or sell. We found a great many articles of clothing that could be washed and sold to the boys' home or traded in the market. Sometimes we found jewelry, old books with torn pages, broken tools, and chipped dishes. But mostly we discovered only decaying food, old rancid hay from the barns, and things so broken they could never be repaired. It was a good day if you returned with half a sack of junk that might be sold, a bad day if you returned with nothing much and were rewarded with no dinner and a grumbling stomach when the lights were turned out for the night.
It was on that very day -- the day on which my story begins -- that I found something miraculous. So miraculous was this item that it charted the course of my life and the life of my brother for the rest of our days. It was the very beginning of an unimaginable, lifelong adventure.
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***
CHAPTER 3
At Work on a Hill of Garbage
Thomas and I moved away from the rest of the group with the new boy in tow.
"What's your name?" Thomas asked. The new boy was small, but his voice was even smaller, as if he'd crawled back into a cave and mumbled out of the darkness.
"Jeremy Jones," he said. "But everyone calls me Jonezy."
"All right, Jonezy it is." Thomas patted him on the back and pointed up the hill. "You see that piece of wood sticking out of the ground? The one with the rag hanging from the end?"
It was a long way off, but Jonezy could see it and nodded.
"Start your first day there," said Thomas. There was a familiar gleam in his eye. "That's a very good spot. You'll find some good clothes that won't need much cleaning up. And you might even find an old ring or two. Madame Vickers loves rings!"
Jonezy smiled in a bashful sort of way and started up the hill while Thomas and I scrambled
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down a crude path, kicking garbage off to the sides as we went.
"Very clever," I said as we walked.
"What?"
"Hiding things for the new boy," I answered.
"You never know when we'll need a favor. Better the new ones are indebted to us from the start."
Everyone was indebted to Thomas for one thing or another, which I had to admit was a comforting thought as we approached an area we'd been digging at for days. We settled in and began pulling at a block of stone we'd been at the day before, trying to free it from its hold in the stinking mud and filth.
Finch was a ways off at the top of the hill with Max and the Mooch, yelling at some of the other boys to get moving. I looked down the long, wide hill of debris below us and saw for the hundredth time that there was no place to go. The cliffs were near on one side, the Dark Hills went on forever on the other. Way off in the distance was Ainsworth, a city known for its cruelty and meanness toward homeless children. Somewhere far off on the other side of the hill lay the Northern Kingdoms, but I didn't know how far off they were. I looked up at the very top of the hill and could just see the bobbing head of Madame Vickers. She sat in a rocking chair on the wide porch that surrounded the old
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house. She would sit there all day, eating and drinking what she pleased, waiting for the junk to arrive.
"Roland - look here, I think I've got it loose." Thomas had been busy at the stone while I daydreamed. Now I looked down and saw that he had indeed begun to make some real progress. I knelt down and pulled on the edge of the stone with him, and it started to move with the sucking sound of thick mud. It smelled awful, and we looked at each other with sour faces.
"Maybe we should leave it," I offered. "Whatever we find under there is going to be rotten."
Thomas was undeterred. Once he set his mind to a task - especially one in which some curiosity was to be found -- it was impossible to stop him. We heaved on the rock again, and this time a great sucking sound was followed by a loud pop as the stone broke free. We tumbled down the hill and a truly magnificent stench poured forth from the hole where the stone had been.
We looked at each other for a long, silent moment, and then Thomas waved his arms, trying to clear the air, and strode back up the hill. I followed until we reached the stone, which had been turned over. It was crawling with worms and shiny beetles and every kind of creepy insect. The sight of it stopped me in my tracks.
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"Take a look at this," said Thomas. There was wonder in his voice, as if he'd found some kind of treasure, but I'd been fooled by him many times before and felt sure he was only trying to trick me now.
"What is it? What's there?"
"Come see for yourself."
I crept very slowly past the rock and stood next to my brother, holding my nose against the thickness of the air.
"I think it's a horse," said Thomas. "It's too big to be a dog."
It certainly was some sort of large animal, or what remained of it, and the more I looked the more convinced I was that it was indeed the remnants of a horse.
"So much for a lost treasure," I muttered, suddenly aware that we'd wasted an awful lot of time digging up something that wouldn't get either of us fed come dinnertime.
"Wait a moment," said Thoma
s. To my horror he reached down into the space where the decaying horse lay - his hand between the ribs and the squirming bugs - and took hold of something. It was a strap of some sort, made of leather. He pulled mightily on it until his hands slipped free and he nearly fell over backward. The strap did not move,
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but Thomas was back at it straight away, digging into the soggy muck around the strap.
Not to put too fine a point on the smell of things, but the more Thomas dug, the thicker the air became with the decayed odor of death. I had to turn away in order to keep from getting sick.
"Just leave it, Thomas," I begged, but he wouldn't listen. Before long I was shaking my head but digging with him, trying with all my might to get the thing free so I could convince Thomas to move away from the mess we'd uncovered.
"Okay, step back," said Thomas. We'd managed to claw a lot of mud away from the strap, and Thomas was wiping his hands on his pants, preparing to make another go of yanking what he'd uncovered out of the ground.
"Let me," I said. "I'm stronger than you."
These are the wrong words to use on a big brother, or any brother for that matter. We were virtually the same size, but the fact remained that he was a year older, and that meant something in a moment such as this. Thomas looked me up and down, pushed me aside, and grabbed the strap, pulling with all his might. There was a sound of breaking bones as something came free from the ground. Thomas fell back hard, hitting his head against the stone we'd moved. Whatever he had