“So you won the Game last time, and had to set this one up for us?” Gregory asked.
Uncle Max looked up. He stood and tossed his cigar into the fire. He leaned wearily against the wingback chair. He reached up to massage his scalp. The hair flexed beneath his fingers.
He lifted up the top of his head. Wheels and gears spun there, glinting in the light.
“No,” said Prudence. “I did.”
What?!?” gasped Gregory.
“I stumbled onto the Game when I was traveling around the world, after my parents died. I was in Crete, walking along the beach, when a centaur approached me and showed me the way to the Labyrinth. I won there. I decided to come back and see the ruins where the Norumbegans had originally lived, and I found the Ceremonial Mound out there, and the rock with the carving all over it. Finally, the remaining Norumbegans agreed to show me the City of Gargoyles. So I decided to do the five-hundredth anniversary match here, like Mr. Grendle just explained. I moved into a house nearby—the house you found—and I started to make creatures and obstacles with them. Like Mr. Grendle—we made him first. I had always liked Victorian novels, Gothic novels especially. So that was what my Game was like. I got the Norumbegan craftsmen to make the things I needed, the servants and so on. You’ll have to do it, too, Brian. It’s one of the privileges of winning. The winner of your Game will determine who gets these mountains. Then the Game will end, I guess. The spirits can wait.”
Gregory said, “So you knew about it all along?”
“Yes, of course. Mr. Grendle and the Speculant took care of watching how things were going, and I just relaxed—oh, please, Gregory, did you really think I was as sweet and boring as I pretended to be?” She laughed.
“Well…I guess…um, when I’d seen you before, years ago, I’d sort of gotten that impression…”
Prudence laughed once again. “What did you expect me to do, my dear? We only met at Thanksgivings and Christmases—uncomfortable times of the year for someone whose parents have died. If you were faced with some eight-year-old who kept making dumb jokes and hitting you with his Tinkertoys, I don’t think you’d exactly be dazzling and charming…”
“But—” Brian protested, “But how about the way the Thusser were threatening you when we came back to the house to get the perfume?”
“They’re not nice, if that’s what you’re asking. But mainly, that was all a show for your benefit. We were anxious it was taking you so long. You were running out of time. The two of you refused to separate. You wouldn’t play against each other. We wanted to speed things up, and we decided that if you thought I was in danger, you’d take the whole thing more seriously.”
Gregory was shocked. “You knew we were coming? How did you know?”
Prudence reached out and cupped her hand over his knee. “Honey, honey, you walked across an acre of lawn in broad daylight.”
“You weren’t really crying?” said Gregory.
She smiled. “Sweetie, you were already so frightened and confused, I could have said, ‘Boo hoo, boo hoo,’ and you would have believed me.”
“So we were supposed to be competing against each other the whole time?” asked Brian.
“Your friendship,” said Prudence, “was a real obstacle. But now the whole thing’s over.”
Uncle Max turned from the fire and stolidly sat. With a soft screech of metal on metal, he screwed the top of his head back on.
“Well, dears,” said Prudence, “you’ve won. Congratulations! Now it’s time that we cleared out. Why don’t you go up and see if there’s anything you want out of your room. I shipped my things off earlier. I’m going to change out of this dress.”
The two nodded and stood. They went upstairs to the nursery as if in a daze. The beds were stripped bare. The toys were gone. Brian looked out the window at the woods. There was nothing unusual there.
Below, in the front hall, Prudence, now dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a heavy sweater, sorted through the things in the boys’ backpacks until she found the Game board. She rose and took it into the parlor. She stood before the fire, Uncle Max staring blankly past her, and cradled the board in her slim arms. She brought it briefly up to her lips. “Good-bye,” she whispered. “It has been fun.” Her arms went slack. She opened the board up, glancing across the bright colors of the completed paths…the Dark Wood, the Troll Bridge, the Club of Snarth, the Ceremonial Mound, the City of Gargoyles itself. She closed the board slowly and let it slide from her cool fingers into the flames. For a moment, it squelched them, but then they recovered. They licked the edges and, finally, they grabbed hold of one corner of the board and blackened it, and began the slow crawl across the surface.
The boys were at the foot of the steps, their hands dangling at their sides. “Wrap up warmly,” she said softly. “It’s snowing very hard, and it will be a long way to the station.”
She darted back and kissed her uncle Max on the forehead before she left. “Good-bye, Mr. Grendle. Thank you for all of your help.”
He patted her lightly on the shoulder and nodded. He could not speak. She left him sitting by the fire.
She opened the door. Outside, the snow was falling thickly but slowly, drifting down to settle on every edge, to cover every branch. “Out now, you two.” The boys stepped out onto the veranda. Prudence called back in, “Burk, will you extinguish the lights and lock everything up? Thanks, you’re a sweetie. Good-bye.”
She pulled on her coat and put on her gloves. “Come on,” she said. She closed the doors, and they walked down the steps.
The troll was leaning against one of the pillars by the front porch.
“Kalgrash!” exclaimed Brian.
“Hiya. The Speculant mentioned that you’d won the Game. Hey, congratulations.” He blew a bugle noise through his fist. “And sorry to hear about you, Gregory.”
Gregory dipped his head. “No sweat.” He extended his hand. “Well, it was nice knowing you.”
“Yeah. Nice knowing you, too.” He shook the boy’s hand.
Brian said, “We’re sorry. Again. About.”
The troll shrugged. “Oh. No. Well. Had to happen sometime. Now I know. That’s it.”
There was a silence. Finally, Gregory asked, “So…so what will you do now?”
“Oh, lots of things. There are leaves to rake…croquet to play, and tea cozies to knit…and there are dams to build downriver, and trees to plant near the highways. There are always a lot of chores to do in the wintertime. Maybe someday I’ll go on a trip. I’m thinking about it.” He smiled. “I’ll get along. I know the worst now. I know I’m not alive. So now I can start to live.”
“Well…we’ll write sometime,” said Brian.
“Okay. That’d be nice. I’d make up what the words mean.” The troll grinned. “See, it’s much better if you don’t know how to read. Then you can make the letter say a different thing every day. It’s like a whole lot of letters.” They stood in silence, the snow falling all around them.
“Well, bye then,” said Brian, shaking the troll’s claw.
“G’bye.”
“Good-bye,” said Gregory again.
“G’bye.”
The troll waved, turned, and walked behind the house, his great feet crunching through the thick snow. His dark green skin faded into the night itself as he wandered back out through the woods to his warm home beneath the bridge.
Prudence, Brian, and Gregory continued to walk out toward the road. The sleigh was waiting for them. They got in and sat side by side. Prudence pulled a blanket over their legs.
The house was dark behind them, snow piling on the peaked roofs and shingled turrets. Brian looked back toward it. Prudence said quietly, “The house will fade soon. It’s not real. None of it’s real.” The horses pulled, and the sleigh started off toward the road.
“I feel horrible about Kalgrash,” whispered Brian.
“Yeah,” agreed Gregory.
“Now, now,” Prudence said softly. “Don’t worry yourselves ab
out it. It’s just a silly game. Just a silly game.” Prudence stroked Gregory’s cheek and bent to kiss him gently on his head.
The house was falling to pieces silently behind them, as if the walls were soaked toilet paper, ripping and sagging beneath their own drenched weight. The snow tumbled in to bury the remains.
They turned for the last time from the house. Prudence put her arms around the boys’ shoulders and shook the reins, and the three of them started along the road back into town.
After a time, she started singing, and for a long while, her carols drifted back through the leagues and leagues of dark forest, and of softly falling snow.
M. T. Anderson grew up in a small town outside of Boston. He spent much of his childhood walking in the woods, sitting, standing, and lying down. Also in those years he started writing, which at that point in history meant holding a sort of ink-stick in one hand and wiggling it around on paper. His handwriting was so bad that he was asked to stop. Shortly thereafter, he began typing.
Since then, he has typed music reviews, stories for literary journals, and picture books. He has typed several novels for young people: the National Book Award-winning Printz Honor books The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party and The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves, as well as this title, Feed and Thirsty.
Mr. Anderson’s interest in the Norumbegan language and culture largely derives from a course he took, taught by a grubby man who never took his hat off and who arrived at each session in a different manner—most memorably, delivered by pigeons and riding on giant snail-back. Since then, Mr. Anderson has translated a number of works from the original Norumbegan. These are not, unfortunately, in print yet, all efforts to publish them being frustrated by the intervention of translucent, jackal-headed ninjas.
M. T. Anderson lives near Boston.
Q: What inspired you to write The Game of Sunken Places? Which ideas came to you first?
A: As a kid, I loved fantasy novels, especially novels like Susan Cooper’s and C. S. Lewis’s, in which kids on vacation end up having to defend themselves against big fangy things from other worlds. Also, I loved role-playing games, both ones played on paper like Dungeons and Dragons and computer text-adventures. (It was the eighties.) Really, it was the joy of these early imaginative experiences that I wanted to catch—that feeling of camaraderie and exhilaration when you and your friends are sitting up until three in the morning, trying to solve some riddle, and everything smells like Doritos.
So I thought of the game first, and the friends. I thought of the empire—I love fallen empires—and the troll. From there, I just started writing.
Q: The final chapters contain some truly jaw-dropping surprises. Did you know from the start how everything was going to end?
A: Well, therein lies an interesting story. The whole first draft of the novel didn’t have many of those “jaw-dropping surprises”!
I first wrote this novel when I was about eighteen years old. It was much longer and the plot was much more obvious. At the time, as I recall it, I sent it out to publishers, but of course received nothing but rejections—because it was far too clearly the work of someone who didn’t know what he was doing.
Several years passed. I graduated from college, went to graduate school, and published a couple of other novels. But I always remembered The Game of Sunken Places as a project that had really captured my imagination.
When I went back and read it over, I still loved it, even though it was incredibly incompetent. The humor was clumsy, the pacing was terrible—long, heartfelt discussions between the boys about ethics, video games, food allergies, and how to survive summer camp.
I wrote the story over again, typing it in anew so that I didn’t feel too attached to anything which had been there previously. As I typed, I realized that there were some opportunities for surprise that I hadn’t considered before. In the draft I wrote as a teenager, Brian and Gregory were pitted against Jack Stimple, pure and simple. I changed all sorts of things to complicate the situation, setting in place the seeds of new conflict.
So no, for several years the manuscript existed without some of those “surprises”! They were a surprise to me, too.
Q: Do you resemble one boy more than the other? Or are they simply two lobes of the author’s brain, as Gregory might say?
A: I think I probably sound more like Gregory, because I am loud and goofy; but I always understood myself to be more like Brian—more reserved, slightly mopey, and anxious about ethical niceties. If I’m loud, it’s because I’m so shy.
More than anyone, I resemble the troll.
Q: Did you find it difficult to write from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old?
A: Yes, occasionally, since that forces me to demonstrate a kind of emotional maturity I have not yet achieved. What helps me, however, is that I still very much have a boy’s sense of the “cool” in fantasy. I love weird, macabre scenes with bizarre monsters, interesting equipment, and impossible architecture. For example, I was incredibly excited when my editor showed me the cover of this book—it was exactly the kind of thing I had pictured, just the right balance of classic boys’ novel and fantastical vista.
Also, I think that I still have a strong sense of what friendship feels like when you’re young—the intensity of it—the drama of learning about the world together and creating a world together. That is one of the things this book is about.
Q: Some of the most moving moments in The Game of Sunken Places involve Kalgrash and his struggle to accept his mechanical origins. Do you see any parallels between Kalgrash’s search for meaning and the boys’ mission to win the game?
A: Hmm. Interesting idea. I guess it is all about searching for meaning and discovering that in some way, you have to create your own meaning. We all receive a game board without instructions—and it’s up to us to figure out how we want to play.
Q: Do you think it will be very long before all of us are hanging out with hi-tech clockwork creatures who think they’re real?
A: Every time I go out dancing, I meet more of them.
Q: When you conceived of the Norumbegans, was their exile inspired in any way by the native tribes who originally inhabited the Green Mountain State?
A: Funny you should ask that—Norumbega is the name of a mythical New England city sought by European settlers in the early seventeenth century. It was probably, in actuality, a Native American community of some kind—though of course the Europeans believed it was a fabulous place full of gold and miracles.
Q: What kinds of games do you enjoy the most?
A: I’ve heard it said that in the olden days, when people used to talk about the emperor of Japan, instead of saying, “He ate,” they had to say, “He play-ate.” Instead of saying, “He slept,” they had to say, “He play-slept.” And so on. The idea was that all of life was a game for the emperor, something he was pretending to do, that at the same time, he performed activities and just acted like he was performing them.
A lot of my favorite people are like that.
descended of the Empress Danann and the Emperor Donn of the House of Nuada and Gwynn Ap Nudd
915—723 B.E.—King Durnwyth Gwarnmore the Navigator
723—692 B.E.—Epoch of the Seven Dukes
692—579 B.E.—King Cadmun Three-Eyes
579—564 B.E.—King Llewellyn the Asthmatic
562—560 B.E.—Unidentified Low Voice1
560—491 B.E.—Queen Elspeth I (“The Granite Queen”)
491—372 B.E.—King Taskwith the Architect
372—240 B.E.—Queen Elspeth (II) the Bitter
240—178 B.E.—King Drone
178 B.E. (Early August)—King Polyactus the Anarchist
178—164 B.E.—The Interregnum
164—132 B.E.—The Rule of the Narcolepts
132—1 B.E.—The Republic of the Chasm
1—184 A.E.—Emperor Dainsplint Gwarn
more I
184—325 A.E.—Empress Qui I
325—333 A.E.—Emperor Dainsplint (II) the Coward
333—392 A.E.—Glorious Reign of the Three Unintelligible Spheres
395—537 A.E.—Empress Qui II
537—582 A.E.—Empress Madge
582—702 A.E.—Emperor Wesley Fendritch the Baker
702—745 A.E.—Emperor Loxmoore
745—801 A.E.,—Empress Lucy the Traveler
392-395 A.E.,
713—712 B.E.,
564-562 B.E.,
942-801 A.E.
942—1012 A.E.—Emperor Durnwyth of the Seven Ecstasies
1012—1096 A.E.—Ghudge the Pious (“The Brittle Theocrat”)
1096—1224 A.E.—Emperor Nimrod Fendritch the Squat
1224—1279 A.E.—Emperor Randall Elismoore Fendritch
1279 A.E.—Exile to the Realm of the Broken Globe following the Third War of Thusserian Aggression
* * *
1 During this time, all matters of state were decided by a large mouth upon the wall.
THE LIVES, ILLUSTRIOUS DEEDS, AND LAMENTABLE DEATHS OF THE EMPERORS OF NORUMBEGA
by Lord Vespusian Dainsplint, Knight of the Order of the Crippled Claw
ON THE LAST WORKS AND DEATH OF THE EMPEROR NIMROD FENDRITCH.
Accused often by his enemies of stubbornness, whimsy, and vanity, Nimrod the Squat, in his final years, became even more sublime in his excesses. It was in these years that he instituted public stooping, distributed lenses to the court which made their eyes reflect him at all times, traveled by means of seventeen acrobats and an egg-shaped throne, and launched the clockwork stormclouds that eventually flooded the slums of Tattertown. He demanded that all mechanical servants throughout the city be re-tuned for insomnia and plagued with nightmares, publicly issued.