As Pepper described it, the science seemed distinctly vague. But What-the-Dickens deduced that in her last few days of pregnancy, a mother skibberee, weighed down by her egg sac, doesn’t usually get around much. Most often she settles in the notch of a tree limb. Then she gets to work. She gnaws through the filaments and netting of her sac to expose her eggs to light, so they can heat up enough to hatch.
By this point she is pretty exhausted. She’s happy to let sunlight finish the good job she started. When she feels peckish she nibbles on the discarded filaments, which are crunchy, like strands of celery string: stuffed with nutrition, and tasty besides.
Usually she looks over her eggs — thirty-nine here and seventeen there and twenty-four over there, and a funny leftover one clumped on the stem — her lovely eggs! Like a froth of soap bubbles. She can never quite add them up — seventy-nine, eighty-one, or was it seventy-seven? — but does it matter? She loves them all.
Sooner or later her hatchlings start to emerge. A whole new population of skibbereen appears almost at once. When the air hits them, they grow at once. Within a minute the skibbereen newborns are as tall as they’ll ever be: three inches, four max.
“But where did the rest of my hatchlings go?” asked What-the-Dickens. “Where did I come from?”
“Basically, no one ever knows the answer to that question,” said Pepper. “I mean, think of the Duty Pageant: skibbereen as a species ain’t got a clue where they came from. Your question is just a bit more personal than everyone else’s. You’ll get used to it. Don’t worry.”
She straightened her shoulders and wetted her fingers and pressed down the seams of her wing tips, working out the wrinkles. “Now mind your manners and look smart — at least as smart as you can, given your looks,” she whispered. “The doctor is a good old codger, but he’s formal, and he can’t stand an uppity skibberee. Gets on his nerves to be talked back to. And I can’t afford to frost him.”
What-the-Dickens squared his shoulders. I’ve survived the solitary interview, he thought. This should be a piece of cake. “Ready when you are.”
Pepper knocked. A cutting, superior voice responded. “Enter, at once!” The word enter came out more like Eye-YEN-ter!
They came through as directed. The room was a single shaft of blond wood tapering upward to a point, like a conical tent. Suspended on strings from the ceiling hung a wooden object, lovingly lit by fireflies penned into recesses. “What is that?” said What-the-Dickens.
Doctor Ill looked up from his desk. “Who are . . . ? — Oh, yes.” He consulted his notes. “A rogue tooth fairy, I’m told. How novel. How charming. You look perfectly ordinary, in a raffish, obliterated sort of way. But darling boy, you don’t ask the questions here. I do.”
“Oops. Sorry,” said What-the-Dickens.
Doctor Ill leaned his elbows forward on the padded leather patches that covered the worn spots on the sleeves of his shirt. Nearby in its cage, his muzzled mouse quivered and looked either timid or mortified, or both.
“Settle down, dear,” he said to it, withdrawing a fragment of shredded carrot from a stack of old small matchboxes piled one on top of another like a chest of drawers. “Here, Muzzlemutt, have a carrot. It’s just a skibberee you haven’t met yet.”
Doctor Ill fed the carrot to the mouse, who could hardly eat it due to the muzzle, but gummed it ferociously into carrot juice.
“Poor pet,” said What-the-Dickens. “Is he scared of me?”
“He’s scared of skibbereen who ask questions,” said Doctor Ill.
Pepper kicked What-the-Dickens in the calf, but not before he had pointed questioningly at the wooden object hanging over the Doctor’s desk.
“You’re amused by the premier piece in my art collection. You have taste, dear boy. What is your name?”
After a silence, Pepper muttered, “You can answer the Doctor now.”
“What-the-Dickens,” he said.
Doctor Ill picked up his cane from behind his desk and pointed at the sculpture. “That masterwork is said to be one of the original wooden teeth carved for the jaw of George Washington. Of course it could be a forgery, but it’s still impressive, no? ‘I cannot tell a lie: I have a false tooth!’” Doctor Ill laughed at his own joke, but no one else got it.
“It’s called the crown jewel,” whispered Pepper to What-the-Dickens, with a little bob in the direction of Doctor Ill. “And he who rules underneath it is the crown. That’s Doctor Ill.”
“Wow.” What-the-Dickens was amazed. “Where’d it come from?”
“Enough about that.” Doctor Ill turned to Pepper. “I don’t know where you picked up this vague fellow, but I suggest you bring him back where you got him. I’ve been advised he’s not a spy, and that is good. Still, he’s clearly not our sort at all.”
“I’m not?” said What-the-Dickens.
Doctor Ill looked displeased at the sound of a question.
“Please forgive him, sir,” said Pepper, attempting a curtsy, though it looked more as if she was delivering herself of a pressure of gas. “He don’t know any better. He’s an orphan, he tells me, who has never met another of his kind before yesterday. I’ve been trying to read him the riot act and all but he’s a bit, well, slow. He can’t put two and two together to come up with, well, whatever it is.”
“Interesting,” said Doctor Ill, “but not my concern. We take care of our own, Pepper, and we don’t fraternize with rabble.”
“What was I to do, sir? He just showed up —”
“No questions!” Doctor Ill was harsh with Pepper, perhaps because she ought to know better. “Now listen, Pepper. You had a job to fulfill. You arrived back at base a few minutes after sunrise. We don’t muck about here with excuses. You have violated your probationary period and failed to satisfy the committee. I will give you liberty to deliver this alien back to the wild, but when you return you must surrender your name and your hopes of a license. No Agent of Change appointment for you. You will learn to be happy in a menial task. That is your lot: you have shown us so yourself by your failure to follow the rules.”
Pepper hung her head.
“It was all my fault!” cried What-the-Dickens. “Don’t blame her, sir! She couldn’t help it that I discovered her and interrupted her in her mission. Don’t penalize her. Penalize me instead, why don’t you?”
Doctor Ill sighed and put his hand to his chest. “No one knows the private costs of being a public servant.” He fortified himself with a sip of something that smelled nutty-sweet. “You can’t be expected to understand, dear lad, the ways of our colony. Be grateful you weren’t slaughtered by skittish skibbereen manning the stump runway.”
“I am grateful, and I wasn’t slaughtered because Pepper was with me,” said What-the-Dickens. He was urgent and earnest both. “Please, sir. Good doctor. It isn’t right to punish her just because she was nice to a lost skibberee.”
The Doctor took another sip and studied the airborne tooth as if looking for guidance in its crevasses.
Finally he sighed, and shook his head as he spoke. “I am a kind soul. Kindness has always been my curse. So I will grant you one more chance, Pepper. I’ll give you an assignment tonight. But it will be harder than usual, because you must make up for your tardiness on the recent mission. You must prove yourself worthy.”
“You are totally kind,” said Pepper.
“Your assignment will come in over the network in the usual manner,” said Doctor Ill. He picked up the porcupine cane again and pointed it at Pepper. It looked like a long, treacherous stinger. “But you must take this interloper with you and lose him somewhere. That’s the price you pay for your extra chance. You must return to base with your next assigned tooth — alone.”
“Oh, now listen —” began Pepper, but she fell silent at the stern look of the Doctor.
“We cannot integrate with the likes of him,” said the Doctor. “He is a foreign element. As such, he is more risky to us than you know. Sweet fool that he is, he can have little
idea about how skibbereen colonies work. If he is an orphan, I regret it. But he is not one of us and he may not become one of us. I say this with passion and sorrow, for I am a tolerant creature, myself. (Everyone says so, and they’re right.) Still, that is my decision. Do you understand?”
“Do I have a choice?” replied Pepper in a small voice.
The Doctor didn’t answer. What-the-Dickens said, with as little bite in his tone as he could manage, “Well? Does she?”
“You know what happens if we make allowances,” said Doctor Ill. “No, of course you don’t, for you are innocent and stupid. Have you ever heard of decay?”
What-the-Dickens had not ever heard of decay.
“It threatens us,” said Doctor Ill in a short voice. “And if we should let up our guard, dear boy, all would be lost. We can’t and we don’t make allowances for . . . peculiarity. All stoutness of effect is lost if one starts accounting for peculiarity. Decay is softness, you see; permissiveness, cloudiness of thought, and sentimentality.”
All would be lost for you, maybe, thought What-the-Dickens. But I started out lost. I have just been found. I’ve just witnessed my first-ever Duty Pageant. I’m reporting for duty. That’s not softness. That’s strict obedience.
“I think,” said What-the-Dickens, “I deserve a chance to prove myself not especially peculiar. Isn’t that fair?”
“Oh, fair,” said Doctor Ill. “Well, if you’re going to talk about fair . . .” He looked at What-the-Dickens a little more closely. “Perhaps setting you your own task would be the appropriate thing to do. But I can’t afford to be fair to everyone. I’m done with this chatter. Accept the task, Pepper, and accept the price of my judgment, you What-the-Nutcase person. Accept it, or decline it and go about your business, in which case you would be stripped of your name at once and denied your license to fly abroad. As for What-the-Dickens — well, if you stick around here when I’ve told you to go, I can’t answer for what happens to you. You are dismissed.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Pepper in a hushed and startled voice. “I suppose we accept. We have no other choice, really.”
“Before we leave,” said What-the-Dickens, “may I ask one other thing? Even though I’m not supposed to ask anything?”
Doctor Ill didn’t deny the petition. He just closed his eyes and waited.
“What does skibbereen mean, even?”
The Doctor recited from memory. “Skibberee, singular; skibbereen, plural. From the verb intransitive, skibberow [Middle English skippen from Old Norse skeappa]: to skip about (archaic).”
“Thank you for that, anyway,” said What-the-Dickens.
They backed out. As they closed the door behind them so softly it hardly made a click, the mouse mewed in relief or regret; they couldn’t tell.
Pepper gripped his hand. “Thank you,” she said to him.
“Skibbereen don’t touch each other,” he reminded her, but grinningly. “Did I do okay?”
“You did swell. You did terrific. We’ll work out something. Your life is reprieved, and I have an extension of my license application: one more mission, one more chance. Let’s hurry up and launch. We’ll invent the rest as we go along.”
“Where are we hurrying to?” asked What-the-Dickens.
“First stop, the bank vault,” said Pepper. “We have to stock up with some change.”
“Change? Because you’re an Agent of Change?”
But Pepper was too excited to answer his questions. She hurried ahead, on tiptoes made swifter by the lift of an illegal wing swipe from time to time. He followed her deeper into the bowels of Undertree Common, toward the central bank. They hadn’t gone far when he —
“What’s that?” said Gage.
“What?” said Dinah.
“Get down!” said Gage. He threw out his arm and hit her on the shoulder. She slumped to the floor.
A flashlight shone through the window, and the doorknob rattled, and rattled again, harder. The noise of footsteps going around the corner of the house. The sound of something pausing.
Dinah was now sure that the wind had died down sometime during the night, when they were deep in the story of the orphan skibberee. It must have. She could hear so clearly, too clearly, the slick of feet on wet grass, and then the crunch of feet on gravel, and then the sound of the side door being tried. It was locked, but less securely so, and from the outside, someone put his weight against it and began to shove against it to break in.
One time, twice, another time.
Not to be scared. Don’t be scared. It could be
or even
But Dinah couldn’t imagine any help convincing enough to vanquish the terrors — in her mind and in the breezeway.
The sound of splitting wood. The sound of rain dripping off the eaves of the garage, suddenly louder once the lock gave way and the door opened.
“I —” SAID DINAH IN A WHISPER, but Gage clapped his hand over her mouth. He put his finger to his lips and pulled the blanket up to her chin. Pretend you’re asleep. At once!
But she couldn’t keep her eyes closed.
She tried again to organize the new fears storming her. She did a better job this time, though she wasn’t all that happy to come up with
a bear from the hills
a mountain cat, though could cats do doorknobs?
a juvenile delinquent
a tramp needing shelter
a scavenger
worse.
She got stuck at the “worse” notions. Then she couldn’t think her thoughts backward to the less scary ones, even though she tried.
Maybe her mother was right. Imagination was a dangerous talent. The disasters she could imagine all too well . . .
Gage was on his knees looking for something to use in defense. The closest thing to hand was an ornamental poker near the fireplace. He grasped this and whisked it in the air once or twice to judge its heft. Dinah could see the look of self-disgust on his face. As if he couldn’t believe what he seemed about to do.
And Dinah could hardly believe it either. He looked ridiculous. Decent, long-winded Gage! But he was getting ready. Ready for whatever.
She saw a scissoring of torchlights in the breezeway and she picked up a muttering of voices. Whoever was here was making an effort to be secret. So they must guess that the house was occupied — even though it was dark, even though the neighborhood had largely been evacuated. What had tipped them off?
And what could they want? There was no food to speak of. Looters wouldn’t look kindly on two jars of mashed carrots prepared for discriminating diners aged twelve to eighteen months.
Gage went from a kneeling position to a crouch. Dinah waved furiously at him to get his attention. Could he read her lips in the gloom? With two fingers, she mimed racing away. She didn’t need to whisper the words: Should we run out the front door? The wind’s died down. . . .
He only frowned and swept his hand toward where Rebecca Ruth and Zeke were lost in their blankets, dead asleep. He was right. They wouldn’t be able to rouse Zeke fast enough. And Rebecca Ruth would cry like the dickens.
What is the dickens, Dinah found herself wondering, somewhat excitedly, as if the answer to that question was the answer to everything.
She got up on her haunches, despite her cousin’s instructions. The only thing she could reach was Rebecca Ruth’s stuffed lamb, Tiger. Dinah grabbed it anyway and held it. If she had to, she would fling it in the face of the first intruder.
Dinah knew this action — tossing a stuffed lamb in the face of an invader — would be against the Ormsby family creed of charity to all. But it might buy them an eighth of a second. It was worth the risk.
“We’re going to have to wake them,” said a man’s voice, “since they haven’t heard us yet.”
“Well, talk to them from here, then,” came a woman’s voice, scratchy with fatigue, “or you’ll freak them into an early grave.”
“I’ll do it,” said a third voice — a familiar, testy voice. The hun
ched silhouette of Zeke showed up in the doorway.
“You!” said Gage.
Dinah looked over, and then kicked the heap of blankets that she had thought was Zeke. No Zeke.
“You’re awake,” said Zeke, sounding both relieved and guilty.
“What’s going on?” Gage’s voice was lower than natural. “Where have you been? Who’s there with you?” His voice got louder, a little throttled. Rebecca Ruth didn’t even stir, so Dinah checked again to make sure her sister was still there, too. She was.
“Deputy, county sheriff’s office,” said the man’s voice. “Name of Campbell. Frank Campbell. Sorry if we alarmed you. We did try to open your door from the outside but, uh, seems it had locked behind this young fellow when he left earlier.”
Deputy Campbell trudged in, a slope-shouldered older man in a windbreaker zigzagged with reflective tape. His brushy ivory-white moustache dripped with rain. An associate followed, a thickset, pint-size Hispanic woman in a yellow slicker. They both lugged industrial-strength flashlights that looked uncomfortably heavy.
“Um, my colleague, Rosa Herrera,” said Deputy Campbell. He sounded uncomfortable with the formality. Normally at this hour he probably was at home asleep with his TV on mute, thought Dinah. “We’re dispatched from the county sheriff’s office, like I said. On citizen patrol. This your boy, I guess? We found him across the road, finishing up a break-and-enter. You can drop the poker, by the way.”
“Ezekiel Ormsby,” said Gage. “What in the blazes do you think you’re doing? And when did you leave? And where did you go?” Gage was on his feet by now. He didn’t put the poker down entirely, but held it at his side like a rolled umbrella.
“Answer the question, sir,” Deputy Campbell said heavily to Gage. “Your kids?”
“He’s under my care, as ought to be obvious,” said Gage.
“You’re not the boss of me,” Zeke said to Gage.