“I think I did. It’s why my eye veered to the back porch.”
“We’ll have to go even more slowly. All right, let’s move out.”
They circled through the formal parlor, where on a side table a hand-carved chess set was displayed. It was so neatly set that it looked as if no one was allowed to play with it. What-the-Dickens wanted to pet the mane of the knight’s piece, which was carved like a horse’s head, but he could see by the look in Pepper’s eye that he had better just shadow her.
They caught a slight draft of heated air eddying up the stairwell to the second floor. Several doors gave out onto a landing. One was a bathroom with a night-light, and that door was slightly open. Other doors were open, too, a few inches each. Pepper’s intincts said the door on the left, and her instincts were wrong — there was a smell of sour adult breath — so then they tried the door on the right.
Gage was sleeping in his bed. He was an only kid — only and lonely, both, because his parents had other obligations besides child rearing, and reminded him about this on a daily basis. He couldn’t have brothers or sisters, they told him: life was tough and he should just get on with it.
His room was spare, like the downstairs rooms — not so much as a comic book collection, or baseball cards, or drawings taped up on the walls — the tape would leave marks, he was told — or books. Only a desk with his homework ready for the morning. Stacked on the paper blotter.
“He’s a solid sleeper — I can tell by the way his adenoids are whistling,” whispered Pepper. “Let’s hope he’s not a deadweight on the pillow. Those are the worst. You got to tickle them exactly right, enough to make them stir but not enough to awaken them. It’s a dicey business and the first place that things can go very, very wrong.”
“Why can’t you just wake him up and do this transaction in public?” asked What-the-Dickens.
She shot him a look. “And be seen? And be caught? And be caged? And be sold? And maybe be tortured? And betray our colony? And our mission? And deprive the world of the possibility of wishes that really might come true? What kind of world do you want to live in, anyway? That’s the big question, ain’t it?”
“I thought you said to shhh,” he answered, cowed by her intensity and ashamed of his own ignorance.
She led him to the mattress. They landed gently on the edge of the sheet. Gage’s head was turned toward the wall, so at least they weren’t in danger of his suddenly opening his eyes and seeing them.
Pepper tugged at the pillow, looking for the tooth. It was a heavily compacted pillow made out of duck feathers. That sort doesn’t have the airy bounce of its foam rubber cousin, but tends to flop at rest as if exhausted by its own muscular weight.
The skibbereen both began to burrow, but they had to beware of suffocation. Then, too, there was the slim chance that, while they were halfway under the pillow, the sleeper would roll over and crush them.
After a while, having no luck, What-the-Dickens turned and stood with his spine against the pillow and tried to walk backward, inching the pillow up along his wings to widen the space between pillow and sheet. It was hard work, and dangerous, but he managed well enough for Pepper to dive face-first into the linens.
She scissored her arms back and forth in the dark seam. By the digging in of her knees, What-the-Dickens could tell that Pepper had found something. She was reaching for a fingerhold of the buried treasure when the bedroom door cracked open an extra inch.
The strip of light from the upstairs hall widened.
What-the-Dickens was facing the door. He couldn’t move, or he’d risk killing Pepper by the collapse of the heavy pillow. But he could see what was approaching.
Who was approaching.
“Look!” he shouted — he couldn’t help himself. His heart fizzed and sputtered and his eyes watered. He felt less like the mistake that Pepper had called him and more like a miracle.
Gage stirred at the noise; Pepper panicked and came up at a clip, hugging the tooth. “Look,” said What-the-Dickens again. “It’s im possible. It’s McCavity.”
“I don’t get it. What was McCavity doing there?” asked Dinah.
“McCavity was my cat,” said Gage. “I guess I hadn’t told you that part yet.”
They thought about it. “So your home wasn’t all that chilly, if you could have a cat,” said Zeke.
“Yes, well,” said Gage, “but, I mean, really: McCavity? Not especially your coziest specimen of cat, as cats go. Vain, self-centered, and aggressive. Hardly a boy’s best friend. Still, she was mine: my responsibility. I had begged for a pet and begged for a pet, and she was my punishment for all that begging.”
“If your parents were so mean, how’d you learn to be nice?” asked Dinah.
“That’s how,” he explained.
“Hey,” said Zeke, figuring it out. “McCavity was your cat, so you were the one who picked her up and shook the skibberee out of the old tin can. Right?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” said Gage.
Dinah thought two things almost at the same time:
Gage
Gage
Only the first one was Gage at ten, and the second was Gage at twenty-one and a half — the Gage stifling yet another yawn as Dinah studied him in the shadows.
“Then you were the one who gave What-the-Dickens his name,” said Dinah at last.
“Bingo,” said Gage.
Pepper froze for only an instant, and then, as she jettisoned herself in the air a foot above the bed, she whispered, “Scoot!” Not to the cat, but to What-the-Dickens.
The weight of the pillow rested on the orphan skibberee’s shoulders, and so he had to inch forward slowly. But he was in no hurry, either. Once he got out, he scrambled to the edge of the bed.
He no longer thought that McCavity would understand his words — that was yet another mistake of his very recent and silly youth. Still, in the presence of that furry face, in the gleam of her calibrating eyes, he felt compelled to speak. “McCavity, I once hoped to be your pet. I hoped I could buy my way into your heart with a perfect present. I dreamed of it. To see you again — even though all that is behind me — well, it’s like magic. Of all the houses in the world, to be assigned this one.”
He couldn’t tell if that was a wink on her face, or a smirk, or merely a lip lifting in disbelief. You never can be sure with cats. Anyway, an eyebrow arched.
Pepper hissed at him, “What-the-Dickens, are you nuts? Are you a match without a sulfur head? Are you a cream soda about to get creamed? We don’t talk to the enemy! We gotta get outta here! This whole place is gonna blow sky-high!” This wasn’t strictly true but Pepper wasn’t wasting any time being selective about her figures of speech. That’s what panic can do. “Fat hairy girl’s gonna pounce!”
McCavity swiveled her behind on the floor, centering herself for launch. Her whiskers trembled, marking the parameters of her peripheral vision, helping her to aim.
“What-the-Dickens! This ain’t a suicide mission! Scat!” shouted Pepper again.
Gage, in his bed, turned. Even little tiny voices can wake up a sleeping human. He began to sit up in bed just as McCavity sprang.
What-the-Dickens was frozen, caught between what he had once believed and what Pepper was saying. He wanted to move, but he stood with arms opened wide. Even if McCavity was a murderess, how wonderful she looked, how dedicated, every whisker a tremble with excitement, and her coppery eyes narrowing on him as if he were the one in the world she most desired.
Pepper dove and grabbed What-the-Dickens by his hair. She hoisted him two, three, six inches over the edge of the bed.
“You’re insane!” she bellowed. “You’re off your rocker.” The cat’s razor claws sank into the pillow behind where What-the-Dickens had stood, paralyzed with devotion.
The cat struck again. A sudden squall of duck down, released from the pillow, complicated her attack, and she missed What-the-Dickens. She caught Pepper, though — one sharp claw right through her wing — and bro
ught her down under her paw.
Defeated, Pepper lost her hold of What-the-Dickens, who dropped back on the rumpled bedclothes.
“No, no,” said What-the-Dickens, coming to what was left of his senses.
“Hey,” said Gage, rubbing his eyes, “you mad cat, what’ve you got there? Let it go.”
Pepper screamed once or twice and she belted the cat square in the face with her coin purse. McCavity wasn’t giving up, though. She hissed and snarled and snapped open her pink little mouth, a mouth well supplied with teeth designed to do serious damage.
What-the-Dickens scrambled back and forth. What have I done? What should I do?
He leaped onto the cat’s head and sat down. Then he slid down her glossy forehead, stretching his legs to either side so as to drive her eyelids shut, blinding her.
Gage didn’t notice What-the-Dickens. He was too busy grabbing at McCavity’s forepaws. That cat nipped at him in rage, and not for the first time. The boy was brave, though. He didn’t let go. He took McCavity’s left paw in his hand and held it up in the air. Gravity did its work. Pepper’s wing slipped off the claw without tearing further, like a loose blouse falling off a hanger.
Gage caught her before she collapsed underfoot on the floor.
“You dreadful cat, you’ve snagged a beautiful moth. Shame on you,” said Gage. He grabbed the cat under her belly and hoisted her across the room. McCavity twisted, but Gage was bigger and stronger. What-the-Dickens had barely managed to leap aside off McCavity’s face before Gage tossed the cat out into the hallway and closed the door on her.
What-the-Dickens ran under the dresser and watched from the gloom. His stomach heaved. That grey cat: that had been stark-white McCavity all along — McCavity, darkened by shadows.
“What have we got here?” said Gage, bringing Pepper back to his bed, and flipping on his bedside lamp.
Pepper blinked her eyes and tried to curl her wings over her head, imitating an autumn leaf in the act of drying out. But the damaged wing wouldn’t curl, so she lay exposed in Gage’s hand.
Terror, shame, pain, rage?
All of the above, maybe.
Hidden, forbidden, thought What-the-Dickens. She must be mortified.
“I don’t believe my own eyes,” said Gage. “McCavity has caught me a flying worm.”
“I ain’t a worm, you worm!” screamed Pepper, too terrified to play by the rules.
“A very skinny flying mouse?” Gage’s voice was husky with disbelief, as if he thought he might be having some sort of psychotic episode.
“Let me go!”
“A very noisy, very skinny, sort of nasty, pint-size flying angel who speaks English?”
“Lemme go, you big ugly brute. You — ogre! You monster! You human being!”
“Oooh, got me there,” said Gage. “Well, you’ve got my number. You’ve cracked my disguise. I am a human being. A kid. A boy. Now it’s your turn. You look like a reject from the pages of some lady’s book of simpery fairies of the garden. Are you the Spirit of Springtime or something?”
“If I give you some guesses and you can’t guess, will you let me go?”
“Okay.”
“Well, you’ve already guessed enough times: a worm, a mouse, an angel, and your bonus guess was a garden sprite of some disgusting sort. Wrong, wrongedy wrong. So let me go.”
“Well, but you guessed me right,” said Gage. “I’m a human. So I don’t always keep my promises.”
“Fiend,” said Pepper, her face dropping. “Then everything they say about your kind is true.”
“What do they say? And who says it?”
“That you’re vicious, vain, and blind to the world. That you lie, cheat, and steal, and call it courtesy, cunning, and thrift. That you think cats like you. Hah! As if. And that you don’t believe in wishes.”
“Well, you’re mostly right,” said Gage. “Only we kids don’t have too much chance to lie, cheat, or steal, and we try not to. I don’t really know what adults do yet because I’m not an adult.”
“I am right about humans,” said Pepper, as much to herself as to her captor. “I seen more of them than you have. I’m, like, totally right.”
What-the-Dickens thought, Is she giving a message to me? Not to trust that boy whatever he says?
“I believe in wishes, though,” said Gage. “I mean, come on: I would, wouldn’t I? I’m here having a debate with a cranky little exile from some fairy tale? Talk about your alternative reality.”
“You’re having a dream,” said Pepper in a suddenly sweet, dippy voice, as if she intended to lull Gage back to sleep. “A lovely dream. Ain’t I lovely?” She flinched in a spasm of pain but tried to look lovely while flinching.
But he was having none of that.
“I used to have a dog, too,” he said. “It was named Winnie-the-Poodle. McCavity chased her into the street and she got run over. Then I got three little parakeets called Orville and Wilbur and Charlotte. McCavity ate them all when I was at school. My parents said I can’t get any more animals unless I get rid of the cat. But I can’t get rid of her. You can’t just disown a cat, even an evil cat you never liked.”
What-the-Dickens dug his fingers into the splintery old oak of the dresser leg. To hear the word evil used to describe the creature he’d loved first and best . . .
“I take it back,” said Pepper. What-the-Dickens could see she was trying every angle. “I’m impressed. Maybe you’re a kind human. I didn’t know they came in that variety. If you’re so kind, will you let me go?”
“Not till you tell me who you are and where you came from,” said Gage. “I just saved your life. You owe me.”
Pepper couldn’t give away the secrets of Northwest Sector, Division B — she couldn’t. She looked resigned, and her spine curled a little as she folded her arms and shook her head. Then she closed her lips and pretended to lock them with an imaginary key, and throw the key over her left shoulder.
“Well, I have to go to the bathroom,” said young Gage. “To keep you safe, I’m going to have to put you in here.” He carried Pepper to a bamboo cage that sat on the top of a chest of drawers. “McCavity is sneaky. She can imitate a shadow very well. She can slip into the room at ankle-height when I’m just opening the door. That’s how she got Orville and Wilbur and Charlotte, and I don’t want her to get you. This is for your own protection, Sprite of the Night.”
He opened the door and set Pepper in. She sank her teeth into the meat of his palm and tried to escape, but Gage closed the door and just rubbed his hand on his pajama top as if he’d gotten a mosquito bite.
“Don’t worry,” he told Pepper. “McCavity can’t open this latch, believe me. I’ve seen her try. Just stay well toward the middle of the birdcage floor in case she gets in somehow. She’s got a long leg fitted with nasty claws. I’ll be right back.”
He left. Pepper and What-the-Dickens both watched the door like a hawk. The cat did not slink in — not this time.
What-the-Dickens flew up to the cage and threw his weight against the latch, but he wasn’t strong enough to move it. He gasped, “What’ll we do? Are you badly hurt? Can you fly?”
“Look,” said Pepper, “this is a disaster. Total disaster. But I ain’t gonna give the colony away. The rule drummed into us in nursery school is ‘hidden and forbidden.’ We remain hidden, but if we get caught, we are forbidden to squeal. Now Doctor Ill may have thrown me a coupla curve balls, but I’m not gonna sacrifice the whole compound just for revenge. Tempted though I might be. You’re gonna have to do my final assignment, and then go back to the colony. Tell them I am missing and presumed croaked.”
“What’ll they do? Mount a rescue mission?” asked What-the-Dickens.
“No. I’ll die in captivity very quickly. My body will shrivel up within a day. I’ll look a whole lot like the dead leaf I was trying to imitate. By the end of the week, this boy-kid will begin to think he imagined the whole thing. But, What-the-Dickens! Are you listening?”
He was, bu
t he was crying, too, and sniffing so loud he could hardly hear what Pepper was telling him.
“Listen closely. Nobody will care about this but me. Even so, it’s what I want. This is my dying wish. Take this coin and finish the mission. Go to Lee Gangster’s house and do the trade. Then rush back to the colony with both teeth: Gage’s and Lee’s. Complete my final mission in my name. Maybe they’ll make me an Agent of Change posthumously.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll get my license even though I’m dead.”
“What good is that kind of license?”
“Don’t argue! He’ll be back any second. Do you understand?”
“Pepper,” said the orphan skibberee, “you forget I don’t know how to navigate. My wings give me feelings. They give me impulses. They give me a bit of a lift, if you don’t mind my saying so. But they don’t give me any important news about anything. Just hints, suggestions, ideas. How am I going to carry out this mission without any instinct for it?”
“You’re going to do it the old-fashioned way,” said Pepper. “Pay attention, and I’ll tell you what I know, and then, in more ways than one, you’ll just have to wing it.”
She described the very night-place in which this Tavenner house sat primly behind its fences, squarely on its lawns. What-the-Dickens tried to fasten the images in his head:
Draw back, draw higher into the sky. See the ground as a map beneath you. Tavenner house in the center: got it? Find a road to the south. Find a stand of beech trees on a knoll. Now draw higher, lean southwest, and center the beech trees in your mind. You’ll see a slice of highway making a gentle curve at the southwest edge of the knoll. Follow the highway south to the next exit. Head east along the trunk road, second house on your right. If you hit the zoo, you’ve gone too far. A dingy white house with chimneys. Can’t miss it. Got that?
What-the-Dickens repeated the instructions.
“Now, go,” she said.