“So what did you do about it?” Douglas asked.
“Oh, a lot of things,” Max said, having no idea at all.
“Like what?” Ira asked.
“Well, one thing is that we yelled a lot. We yelled out in the air a lot because then we didn’t hear the chatter.”
This didn’t seem to impress anyone.
“And the other thing was that we stomped on the ground really hard. We stomped like we did at the parade. We did that all the time, to let the sounds know how big we were. Sometimes with heavy boots.”
This was somewhat more convincing to the beasts.
“Okay,” Judith said. “So you scared it with the boots. What else? I’m assuming you got rid of it?”
“Oh yeah, pretty quickly. It was easy,” Max said.
“How?” Carol asked, his eyes pleading.
Now Max was up a creek. He couldn’t see or hear the thing they feared, but he had to think of a way to kill it. He was sure he could find a way to kill anything in the world if he could see it — especially with seven giants on his side — but if he knew nothing about it? He was stuck. He had to stall for time.
“I can’t tell you today …” he said, “but tomorrow I can. Tomorrow I will.” It was lame, Max knew it was lame, but it was working. They were nodding, as if acknowledging that such a problem needed a day of kingly consideration. He added the finishing touches to the lie. “I just need to stay here awhile, testing the ground and, uh, seeing which one of my killing methods will work best.”
They all nodded vigorously, picturing the many killing methods they knew themselves.
“You heard the king,” Carol said, shooing everyone away. “He needs time to think. Let’s give him some room.” He hustled them out of the meadow. Before he left Max by himself, Carol turned back to him.
“I really hope you kill it, Max,” he said. “It would really help us a lot. I feel like I haven’t slept in years.”
And with that, he left.
CHAPTER XXX
Max took off his heavy crown and sat in the many-colored meadow, alone, trying to piece together exactly how he came to be sitting in the many-colored meadow, alone.
There had been the parade, and that was good. Then the different route with Katherine, which was also very good. But when he arrived at the lagoon, Carol had not been happy about him leaving the parade. Carol seemed upset about Max’s time alone with Katherine. Max had to be careful about that in the future. He also needed to be careful about Ira and water — Ira definitely didn’t seem to like bellyflopping down a waterfall. And Judith didn’t like sitting down on command; she liked to sit when and how she wanted to sit. That seemed easy to remember.
All Max had to do, then, was to make sure that he didn’t upset Carol by spending time alone with Katherine, or upset Katherine by being alone with Carol, and he had to make sure Judith was being entertained and that Ira was being kept from the void. He wasn’t sure what the Bull wanted, but he knew for his own safety he needed to steer clear of Alexander, who’d had a very personal problem with Max from the start. Was that everything he needed to think about?
Oh, food. There was food to think about. Could it be that he hadn’t eaten since he’d left home? He really hadn’t. Nothing the beasts had eaten so far was edible for Max, and on his own he had no idea where to get food, or how to recognize it. And he couldn’t go into the woods looking for it, because it was getting dark quickly, and he’d seen snakes in the trees, and spiders the size of his fist, and knew there were countless other dangers unseen.
He felt reasonably safe in the middle of the meadow, though, and he realized that to remain safe all he needed to do was stay awake until the dawn. Easy. And while waiting for the sun, he only needed to solve the problem of the sounds in the ground that Carol heard whenever he was worried about something else.
Not expecting to hear anything, Max put his ear to the grass. Indeed, he heard nothing. There was no sound at all. But Carol knew this island far better than he did, and Carol’s ears might be better than his — and anyway, whether Max heard the sound or not, he needed to find it and kill it, or at least get the beasts to stop thinking about it.
He had faced similar challenges at home, with his mom, a dozen times. She would come home drained, collapsing on the couch or sometimes even the floor, and Max would find a way to entertain her or soothe her or somehow bring her to a different, happier, place. Sometimes he brought her a piece or two of his Halloween candy. Sometimes he would put the candy in the music box on the mantel. He’d get it down and turn the crank and present it to her, so when she opened the top the music started and the candy was there, always something she liked, like Bit o’ Honey. Sometimes he drew her something — a dragon getting its head cut off by a knight or a whale with arms and a mustache. There were a bunch of ways, he was sure, to lead someone out of a dark corridor of the mind.
Just then a sound came from the encircling woods. It was a high-pitched sound, something like a hyena’s laugh crossed with a woodpecker’s knocking. It was terrifying and arrhythmic, and growing louder. At any moment Max expected some animal to burst from the woods and bee-line toward him.
He knew he wouldn’t sleep this night. He would wait until first light and then go looking for Carol or Katherine, or anyone, really. And then he would have to set down some rules about leaving him, the king, alone in the middle of a meadow all night. He had to do so without implying that he was afraid of the dark, which he wasn’t, but that instead it was for their own good. They needed to be together, all of them, for together they were safer and happier. Or he hoped they would be.
He sat up in the meadow, scanning the forest for movement. Just then another sound came from the opposite woods. This one was a rough, zig-zagging call, trilling upward before ending with a loud sigh, like a truck at rest. It was just as threatening and eerie as the other sound, and soon the first sound and the second were trading calls, as if in a heated conversation full of threats and recriminations. Max had to spin back and forth, following the sounds, looking for anything moving. The fighting, if that’s what it was, seemed to be happening far away and didn’t involve him, but then again, how could he be sure? He might be the cause of it and very well might be its victim. And so he had to stay alert.
It was exhausting, but he knew the argument going on was useful in that it would certainly keep him awake — he couldn’t possibly think of resting while it was all going on. And that’s how he got the idea that he got. He smiled to himself, laughing even, knowing he’d come up with the best solution possible to the problem of the underground whispering plaguing the consciences of the beasts. He couldn’t wait till morning to announce the plan and put it into action. It was so good he found himself cackling all night, in sudden and helpless bursts. It was the best plan, the only plan.
CHAPTER XXXI
Max woke up before dawn, cold and wet with dew. He had somehow fallen asleep, and now he was hungry and thirsty and, he realized with a shudder, he hadn’t moved his bowels since he’d left home. His fur smelled terrible and now had a green tint to it — the lagoon water had been full of algae and had gifted Max its thick stench.
And there was no sign of anyone.
But he knew, at least, that he would make everyone happy this day. He had a plan and only had to find the beasts to enact it.
In the pre-dawn light Max could see the tracks they’d made, and could clearly make out Carol’s huge footprints, leading out of the meadow and toward the cliff. He followed them across the meadow, through a narrow stand of trees, and into a clearing covered with a strange moss, black and yellow, alternating like a checkerboard. Beyond it, the ocean was a frenzy of white. Max scanned the electric blue horizon until he saw what seemed to be a figure sitting on the edge of the cliff, the same cliff where they had howled together on Max’s first night.
He ran toward the figure, and when he got close he knew it was Carol, sitting forward, seeming tense.
“Carol!” Max yelled as he ap
proached.
Without turning around, Carol raised his hand, demanding silence. Max stopped about twenty feet away, not knowing what to do next.
Carol remained staring out at the ocean, as if looking for a sign in the ripening sky. As it grew lighter, a crescent-shaped band of orange appeared above the line of the sea. Carol leaned forward, getting dangerously close to the very edge of the cliff.
And then, finally, when the liquid yellow of the sun at last broke through, Carol’s body relaxed, and then shook in waves, as if he were laughing or crying. Max couldn’t tell. But the spell, whatever it had been, was broken.
Carol turned around.
“Hey Max! You were wrong about the sun dying. Look, it’s right here.”
Max didn’t know how to explain.
“Don’t scare me like that again, okay buddy?” Carol said. He spoke cheerfully, as if the distant, rigid Carol of moments before had been illusory, that here was the real Carol, the one who loved Max’s brain and who knew how things were supposed to feel, who wanted only the right things to happen.
“How are you, King Max?” Carol asked, putting his hand on Max’s shoulder. “What happened to your fur? It’s kind of green.”
“Algae maybe? I don’t know,” Max said distractedly. He couldn’t worry about his fur at that moment. He wanted to know where all the others were.
“Well, Douglas is over there,” Carol said, pointing to a lump in the near distance. Max had walked right past him, thinking his body was an outcropping. “But I don’t know where anyone else is. Why do you want to know?”
“I have a plan,” Max said.
CHAPTER XXXII
Everyone was gathered around Max. Carol had woken up Douglas and Douglas had raised back his head and had made a bizarre and screeching sound of summoning. The beasts had arrived within minutes from all corners of the island. Everyone, that is, but Katherine. Max decided to proceed without her.
“Okay,” he said, “I have the perfect plan. What does everyone here want?” he asked, though the question, for him, was rhetorical.
“We don’t have homes,” Douglas said. “We’ve been sleeping outside because you wrecked them.”
Max was about to quibble with this claim, but he didn’t. He knew his plan would eclipse small concerns like Douglas’s. “Okay, fine,” he said.
“Some of us are hungry,” Alexander said.
“Okay, sure,” Max said. “What else? What do you want?”
“We want what we want. We want all the things we want,” Judith said, matter-of-factly. She brushed Ira’s mouth off her shoulder. He’d been chewing again, more than ever, it seemed. There were patches, purple and blue, all over her now, where the fur had been gnawed off.
Ira whispered something in her ear. She nodded. “Oh, and we want no more want.”
Max grinned. He really felt like he had the perfect idea to not only address all these concerns, but also those he had recognized himself — the need for togetherness, for camaraderie and entertainment and a sense of purpose. He had expected everyone’s first need to be fun, and guessed that they had simply forgotten that this was the first and foremost need of all. When he mentioned it, they would all smack their foreheads in an expression of Aha!
“What about fun?” he asked.
They all looked confused.
“Fun, like that lagoon business?” Judith asked. “If that was fun, I’d rather have someone eat my head.”
“No, no,” Max protested. “I mean real fun.”
“Oh. Real fun,” she said, nodding. “Wait. What’s that?”
“It’s like fun,” Max said, “but much better.”
They all thought about this, wondering if fun would be the solution. No one spoke up. Each was waiting for someone else to ask the obvious questions. There was a long silence, finally broken when Ira cleared his throat and spoke softly to his toes.
“I’m confused about fun,” he said.
Judith exhaled loudly. “Thank god someone said it. I was thinking the same thing. What does want have to do with fun, and what does all of this have to do with the void? Right, Ira?”
Ira shrugged. He was more confused than ever.
Carol shushed them both. “Fun sounds fine. We just need some clarification. Tell us what to do, Max.”
Now Max warmed up. He had come up with the whole plan in the many-colored meadow, and now he got to do something he was good at: explaining the game and outlining the rules. He was so convinced that his idea would bring everyone together and put them all in a near-permanent state of bliss that he was hesitant to just blurt it out. He decided to heighten the drama.
“You ready to hear the plan?”
They all nodded, hushed in silence.
“You sure?”
They nodded again. They were sure.
“We’re gonna have …” he said, his eyebrows rising and falling conspiratorially, “a war.”
“A war? Like a fight?” Ira asked.
Max nodded. “Yeah, we’ll pick sides and then battle.”
Douglas tilted his head and squinted. “And then everyone will feel better?” he asked, as if just confirming the obvious logic at work.
“Yeah,” Max said. “Pretty much.”
“And we won’t be hungry?” Alexander asked.
Max didn’t know, exactly, if a war would make Alexander less hungry. But then again, he thought, if Alexander was having great fun in the middle of a war, how could he possibly be thinking of food? “You won’t be hungry at all,” Max said confidently.
“And the void?” Ira asked.
“This is the opposite of a void,” Max said, though he still didn’t know what Ira meant by void. But if a void was an absence of something — or everything — then Max could assure him that the battle was anything but that. A void was small, and a war was big. A void was silence, and a war was loud, all-encompassing, full of astounding things to see and think about. If they were at war, how could they think about the void? Impossible.
Now Judith and Ira and Douglas and Alexander were all very interested. They thought a war sounded like a very good idea. Behind them, the Bull was glaring at Max in the most intense way. If Max could read his expression, he would have to think that of all the beasts, the Bull was least in favor of the plan. But because he didn’t talk — he hadn’t said anything since Max had gotten to the island — the Bull didn’t really have a vote in the matter.
“Okay,” Max said. “Who wants to be the Bad Guys?”
No one raised their hand.
Max pointed to Judith. “You can be a Bad Guy.” Now he pointed to Alexander. “And you. You’re a Bad Guy.” Alexander’s shoulders slumped. Max almost laughed. How could Alexander have expected to be a Good Guy? Ridiculous. “And now …” Max said, thinking he was being very gracious, “you guys can pick another.”
“Okay,” Judith said. “We pick you.”
Max was taken aback, but only momentarily. It was so loony that he laughed.
“No, I’m a Good Guy. I’m the king. I can’t be a Bad Guy. I’ll pick.” He pointed to Ira. “You’re a Bad Guy too. And you … um … And you should have one more …”
Max looked up at the Bull, who looked down menacingly at Max. Max looked to the Bad Guys and indicated the Bull with his thumb. “And he’s on … he’s with you.”
Just then, Katherine emerged from the forest.
Judith scoffed. “Look who’s arrived with her aura of mystery and aloofity! She’s come to honor us with her presence.”
“Don’t worry, Judith,” Katherine said, not breaking stride. “No one’s honoring you.”
“Katherine, you’re on our team,” Max said.
Katherine smiled. She walked over to Max as if she would never have guessed at any other arrangement.
“I got you this,” Katherine said, presenting Max with a tangled mess of seaweed. “A gift from me and the sea.”
“Uh, okay, thanks …” he said.
“What are we having teams for?” sh
e asked.
“A war,” Max said, grinning. “It’s gonna be amazing. We’re the Good Guys.”
“Who else is on our team?” she asked.
Max explained that it was the two of them, and Carol and Douglas. With this, Katherine’s smile evaporated.
“Oh,” she mumbled.
By now, Carol, Katherine, Douglas, and Max were standing on one side, Judith, Alexander, Ira, and the Bull on the other. Max got ready to explain the rules. He was in his element, inspired by the upcoming battle. “Okay. Now here’s the ammunition,” he said, picking up a dirt clod. “We’re trying to kill the Bad Guys, and what you have to do is find the biggest pieces, the ones that’ll stay toge—”
And with a loud thwack, his vision went grey. He’d been hit in the head with a dirt clod as big as a pumpkin. He turned to see that Alexander — he who threw it — was getting another clod ready.
“Was that too soon?” Alexander asked. “Not the kind of war you had in mind?”
CHAPTER XXXIII
Max was briefly stunned by the blindside, but steadied himself. “Run!” he yelled, darting across the clearing and toward the woods, his team in tow. They were chased by a relentless volley of dirt and rocks thrown by the Bad Guys. The element of surprise, which Max thought he knew something about, had given his opponents a great advantage.
Max dove behind a giant tree, which stood in front of a dry and narrow riverbed. It was a perfect bunker from which to plan and execute a counterattack.
Douglas arrived first, jumping into the bunker headfirst and coming up smiling. He had been hit repeatedly on the way, but he was okay. Next was Katherine, panting and wiping dirt from her hair and face. Finally Carol slid into the bunker, grinning and sweating. Now all four of them were in the ditch together, breathing heavily and feeling very alive, with a very clear sense of purpose to their lives — live and throw dirt clods or get hit by dirt clods and die. Explosions continued everywhere above them but Max’s head was spinning with the incomparable thrill of battle. There really was nothing, he thought, as good as a war.