“He fits,” said Frederik, amazed.
“Of course he does,” said Rasmus. “Elephants have traveled on trains since trains were invented.”
A female followed. Then another.
“How many can get in there?” Frederik wondered.
“What is going on?” Edna’s flushed face appeared at a door. Her hat was askew. “Elephants? They’re banned from the railway. It isn’t even Thursday!”
Rasmus turned to her. She hadn’t noticed him. “We have to get them away from here,” he pleaded. “There are zombies. Zombies!”
Edna’s hat fell to the platform. Rasmus handed it back. Edna’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Rasmus,” she murmured.
Rasmus watched till all the elephants had squeezed onto the train. Then he climbed up into the carriage. Frederik followed.
“Rasmus Rasmussen,” he said, holding out his hand to Edna.
Her eyes had gone all vague, and her knees didn’t seem to be working properly.
“And who might you be, madam?”
“You know who she is,” Frederik said.
Rasmus let go of Edna’s hand with a final, formal shake. “Do I?”
“Yes. You do!”
“He doesn’t,” Edna said with finality. “My name is Edna Brink,” she told Rasmus. “Conductor on the Frederik’s Hill Municipal Underground Railway.”
“Charmed,” Rasmus said, though somewhat distracted.
“But you’ve met before,” Frederik said.
“We haven’t,” Edna told him. “No, we haven’t.”
“He was going to propose to you.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“Then who was the ring for?”
Rasmus wasn’t listening at all. The elephants were filing toward them along the shattered insides of the carriages. He hurried their way to calm them.
“I don’t understand,” Frederik said.
“You will when you’re older,” Edna said, and she patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s go back the other way. Counterclockwise. It’s quicker.” She blew her whistle—one unusually long blast followed by three short ones. The train jerked backward along the platform, heading the way it had come. “Nonstop to Municipal Hall.”
“Who was the ring for?” Frederik asked.
The train rattled and swayed.
Edna looked at him. Made to speak. Opened her eyes extremely wide. Shrieked! Fizzing liquid was washing under the carriage doors and across the floor and lapping at their shoes. She crouched and sniffed. “Lemonade?” She hurried to the window. “There’s lemonade up to the top of our wheels!”
“Actually,” said Frederik, “it’s Volcanade. With lemon, aloe, and acai.”
The train slowed between dripping walls, tangled pipes. The Cisterns station was half-submerged. There was a conspicuous lemony smell.
Edna, distraught, grabbed a fire bucket and tried to scoop the soda from the floor, but the bucket filled in no time, making little impact. A wave surged along the side of the carriage. Ripples and whirlpools spiraled out. And then darkness again. The flood receded as quickly as it had come, leaving the carriage floor wet and very sticky.
“What is going on?” Edna called above the din.
And standing still for the first time, Frederik started to worry. What had he done? What had he unleashed? An earthquake, a fizzy flood, and a train full of elephants, howling through the dark. How could this end well? The brewery flashed by. Darkness again. And then soft light broke around them once more. The brakes screamed. The train stopped. The doors clattered open. Municipal Hall.
Frederik ran to the next carriage, found Rasmus with the bull. It filled the whole of the space, its wives and sisters wedged along the carriages beyond. “This is it! We get off here.”
Rasmus looked at the elephant. The elephant didn’t move. Rasmus shrugged. “He goes wherever he wants. You’ve seen him. Can’t tell him anything.”
“Does he?”
“He does.”
“Right then.” Frederik walked boldly up to the bull and his lethal tusks and his powerful trunk, head squashed against the ceiling. “We must rescue Pernille,” he said. “My family. Please help me.”
The elephant blinked.
“Pernille! You remember Pernille? I thought elephants never forget.”
“Well,” said Rasmus. “That’s a slight misconception.”
The elephant blinked again. Didn’t move. Watched Frederik carefully with one big, black eye.
“And Venkatamahesh Ramasubramanian. He’s here too.”
The elephant lifted his head. There wasn’t any space for that. Ceiling boards snapped and fell away.
Edna shrieked. “My train! Calm that animal down.”
The elephant tried to turn. Couldn’t.
“Here,” Edna said. She hauled the heavy bucket of pop and placed it before the elephant. “Have a drink.”
“Oh, that’s not a good idea,” said Rasmus.
But the bull dipped the end of his trunk in the bucket, inhaled, and now the bucket was empty. He curled his trunk into his mouth.
“He’ll get a massive sugar rush,” Rasmus said, backing away.
The elephant’s eyes grew very wide indeed. He growled. He dipped his head, and then he rammed a tusk through the side of the railway carriage. He set a shoulder to the wall and spread himself to his full width and height. With a roar of ripping wood and breaking glass, the side of the carriage fell off, onto the platform.
Edna shrieked and buried her head in her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Frederik told her. “I’m really sorry.”
The bull elephant tore himself out of the train and marched along the platform. Rasmus ran after him. The females followed, one after another.
Frederik started after them. Stopped. Ran back to Edna. “Who was the ring for? Who did Rasmus want to marry, if not you?”
Edna looked up from the wreckage and sighed. “She was very attractive, that was the thing. All the young men fell for her.”
“Who?”
“Kamilla, of course. Kamilla Kristensen.”
“The mayor?”
“You should hurry, dear. You’ve got elephants wandering the corridors of power.”
“Rasmus was going to propose to the mayor?”
“She wasn’t the mayor. Not then.”
“I don’t know what to say.” On impulse, he gave Edna a hug. She shrugged him off, startled, straightened herself, and then grabbed him again. Squeezed the breath out of him.
“I have to go!” he mumbled, face buried in the rough wool of her uniform.
“Yes. Go. Come and see me again. Bring Pernille. She’s such a dear.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You weren’t to know.”
“I’m sorry anyway.”
“Thank you. So am I.”
He sprinted along the tunnel to the steep wooden escalator. It was very wide and the ceiling was high, but the trim was splintered now, dents in the walls. Four enormous, flabby, gray behinds blocked the way. Could elephants climb? The bull was trying to. Front feet a few steps up, throwing his head around, agitated.
“Turn the escalator on!” Frederik called to Rasmus. He slapped his hand on a fat, green button, and the escalator stuttered to life, bearing the bull elephant upward. Rasmus ran after it. And now there was a procession of elephants heading up the escalator. It groaned and complained but somehow kept going. Frederik jumped aboard and rumbled all the way up to the ticket hall.
The bull was pacing the wide, dusty space, tossing his weight from side to side. The floor shook, and not from any earthquake. The bull approached the locked fire doors. Set his head against them. Growled.
“Please,” Frederik said.
The bull stepped back and then forward again.
He flattened those doors like they were paper. The noise was terrific. Chunks of frame and wall went flying, and the bull kept going, ramming anything in his path—walls, doors, benches, tables—Frederik running behind. Into the bowels of Municipal Hall.
Chapter 22
A Firework
“We’re looking for a cell block,” Frederik said. “Or dungeons. Or the Department of Unwanted Offspring.”
Cleaning Supplies, said one door, Generator, the next. Nothing that resembled a dungeon. Narrow stairs led from the basement to glimpses of daylight somewhere above.
“The elephants won’t fit up there,” said Rasmus. “You’re on your own.”
At the top of the stairs, he found a polished lobby. Glass doors led out to Frederik’s Square. There was absolute silence. No traffic outside. No voices inside. A noticeboard listed offices. Arts. Education. Environment. Health. Housing. Nothing that helped.
He jogged down long, empty hallways. Peered through door after door. “Hello?” he called out, and his voice fell utterly flat. He climbed up and around to another shiny hallway. He knew what he was up against. Municipal Hall was a colossal cube, six floors high. There would be hundreds of rooms.
He tried a door. An empty office, papers on a desk. The next was the same. The next was locked. He knocked. “Is anyone there? Mother? Father? Pernille?” And not a sound. Just the thump of his own heart.
Around a corner, more doors. The first was open a little way. He gasped at the sign on the door. Department of Rules and Regulations. Father’s office. He pushed the door open, crept inside. A vast room, half the width of the building.
No one there.
Filing cabinets, silent computers, warm evening sunshine spilling through window after window. Rows of desks. He tried to find Father’s but couldn’t. Maybe Father didn’t have one any longer?
The windows faced toward home. He took a long look, across the parking lot, beyond the never-open gallery, the pond, the pub, the blue house, the yellow. Somewhere over there was his bedroom window. He had stared from there to here a million times, and here he was, looking back the other way, into the gradually dipping sun.
He glanced across Frederik’s Avenue. No cars, no bikes. Everyone was at the festival, or almost. A solitary woman with a dog was wandering the sidewalk. She came to the grubby window of the Ramasubramanian Superstore. She peered through the glass. Tried the door. Locked. She shrugged and wandered away.
“No! Come back!”
Who’d said that? Frederik twitched like a prairie dog, head snapping side to side. The voice had come from nearby. It was a wail of frustration in a strangely familiar accent. Frederik raced to the hallway. Tried a door. Rattled another. “Mr. Ramasubramanian?” he called, through each locked door. “Are you there? Venkatamahesh?”
“Who is that?” The voice again. Where was it coming from? This door? No. The next?
“Hello?” Frederik called. “Are you in there?”
“Are you out there?”
“Yes! Is there a key?”
“I am locked inside. With an agonizing view of the gradual, minute-by-minute ruin of the business I have striven to build over years despite the rejection of every—”
“Yes, yes. I know. Can you lever the door somehow?”
“They will hear me.”
“No one will hear you. No one is here. This is our chance. Venkatamahesh? Oh!” The door was wrenched open with an ugly ripping sound. Pieces of wood scattered onto the carpet. A face appeared—a browbeaten shopkeeper holding a long piece of metal that might have been part of a drawer.
“My entrepreneurial friend!” said Mr. Ramasubramanian. “How refreshing to see you. Why are you here?”
“I’m rescuing you.” He grabbed the shopkeeper’s arm and hauled him into the hallway. “Are you all right?”
“No. Not at all. I have been locked in this featureless office with nothing but a photocopier, watching customer after customer come to the door of my superstore, seeking refreshments, as you predicted, on the way to the international festival. And now they are all gone, and not so much as a thimble of chococcino has been sold. My one chance has gone. I am blighted at every turn. All is lost. My store is nothing but a burden on my back. How will I ever be rid of it?”
Frederik felt extremely guilty. The chococcino had been his suggestion. But there really wasn’t time for soul-searching. Only real searching. “Have you seen my parents?” he said. “Or Pernille?”
“Seen them?” said Venkatamahesh. “From the window?”
“No. Inside this building.”
“I have not seen them.”
“But they’re here. They must be. They were arrested too, soon after you.”
“Oh no. I hope they have not been deported already.”
“Deported?”
“The mayor’s instructions. Revealed to me during my lengthy interrogation. All interfering foreigners are to be sent back where they came from.”
“But they weren’t interfering! Well, Pernille was. But my parents were not.”
“The mayor will not see the distinction. She is a most unpleasant woman. I myself have only seen the beige inside of that office. Twice a day they brought me food. Pickled this and pickled that and tasteless as can be.”
“All right. Help me. Search this floor. Every door. Then the next floor up. I’ll go higher. The fifth and sixth. They’re in here somewhere and I am going to find them.”
He ran around the corner. Venkatamahesh waddled. Windows faced in on the center of Municipal Hall, and to his surprise, the center of Municipal Hall was a courtyard. Rays of amber sunlight tipped in the top and lit the edge of a lawn, shrubs, six floors of windows. All these years Frederik had thought this building was a solid cube. But no. “It has a hollow heart,” he said.
“Like the mayor,” Venkatamahesh replied.
The clock tower struck the hour, a peel and then a clang. Another. Frederik counted. Seven in the evening already.
“We must hurry,” he said. “Shout if you find her. Shout the building down!” And he was running up another flight of stairs. Where was she? Fifth floor. Another hallway, and lines of photographs. Portraits. Middle-aged men, bewhiskered and ancient. All the mayors of Frederik’s Hill. 1860, Carl Christian Falck. 1870, Søren Bramming. Stiff collars and stern expressions. Mustaches shrinking through the decades, hair lengthening, women here and there. The seventies, the eighties. Terrible ties and dreadful jackets. And then a face that struck a chill into Frederik’s stomach.
Edna was right. Kamilla Kristensen had been a striking young woman, with those cheekbones and those eyes and her hair so fair. And here she was again. And again, and again. Aging gracefully through the years, reelected and rephotographed every few, monopolizing the office of mayor for decades.
It took less than ten minutes to rattle the knobs and try the doors, and then he was up the wide marble stairs again. The final floor. The sixth and top. The doors were farther apart. He pushed one open and stared into an elegant corner office, golden with sunlight. An enormous, orderly desk at the center of an enormous, orderly floor, and the crest of the mayor of Frederik’s Hill on the wall.
This had to be the mayor’s room. He stepped inside. A window gave a sweeping view across Frederik’s Square and down Frederik’s Avenue. Another faced the setting sun. He could see his house. His bedroom window above the roofs. The factory chimney pointing skyward.
“I’m telling you I saw something.”
Frederik jumped. A voice!
“On the security camera?” Another.
Venkatamahesh? No. Deeper. Local. He threw himself under the enormous orderly desk. Footsteps. Coming along the hallway, closer and closer.
“A hippo, you said?”
“Something like that.” The detectives, Mortensen and Martensen.
“In Municipal Hall?” The voices paused at
the door.
“Who left this door open?”
“Her Ladyship?”
“She never leaves it open. She has a closed-door policy.”
Frederik stayed as still as one of the mayor’s marbles under the desk.
“No hippos in here.”
The door clicked shut. And then the voices were drifting away, along the hallway. He waited a minute, maybe more. Then he tiptoed to the door. Let himself out and crept along the corridor. A sudden wobble passed through the floor, the doors rattled, and voices were coming back.
“Did you feel that?”
“Yes, and I heard something too. What does a hippo sound like?”
“Similar to a tapir, I believe.”
“What does a tapir sound like?”
Frederik fled down the hallway, looking for somewhere, anywhere to hide. Reached a corner. A passage with an arched door, right at the end. He ran all the way. Tried the knob. Pulled. Nothing. Locked? No. Opened the other way. He threw himself through, and where was he now? At the foot of a flight of stairs, winding up and around. Up? How could that be? Wasn’t he on the top floor?
The voices echoed behind him. He had to climb. No choice. Up, right, up, right, up again. Another wall, another turn, spiraling higher and higher. He was utterly out of breath. Should he shout? Call for help? Where was he going? Light flooded in from the left. A french window. A balcony outside. And the most amazing view of Frederik’s Hill he had ever seen. Rows of rooftops, the station, the library. The observation tower, recently opened. And now he knew where he was.
“The lighthouse. I’m climbing the lighthouse.”
But that was no good. He started back down. And there was the detective’s voice again.
He wheeled around. Two stairs at a time, up and around, legs aching, chest burning, feeling dizzy. Vertigo. Nausea. Another old, arched door. A keyhole. A key sticking out. He turned the knob, but the door was locked. He twisted the key till it clicked, tugged it from the lock, slipped through, and locked it again from the other side. Pressed his ear to the wood and waited. The voices. Close. Right outside. The doorknob rattled.
Frederik Sandwich and the Mayor Who Lost Her Marbles Page 15