by Susan Cooper
They hustled us up a step and into the back of the van. The doors swung shut, and the van started off again so abruptly that we half-fell sideways onto a bench along the side wall. It was like being in a little room. There were four small TV screens, high up, two in each side wall, and each of them showed a different picture, of planes or buildings or that same flat concrete desert. One of them showed a van with flashing lights, moving fast; perhaps it was the one we were in.
The man was muttering into a telephone. The woman stood looking down at us, swaying, clutching a bar set into the ceiling. “However did you get here?” she said. “Where did you come from?”
“We got lost,” I said.
She didn’t think much of that for an answer. She frowned, and looked at Lou.
“What’s your name, little one?”
Lou gazed up at her, big-eyed.
“He’s called Lou,” I said. “He can hear you, but he doesn’t talk. I’m Trey.”
The van was moving really fast. There was a distant roar outside as another plane took off.
The woman said, “What do you mean, he doesn’t talk? He’s sulking?” She wasn’t as fierce as the man, and she was quite young, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“He can’t talk. He never has.” I cut the words off as short as I could; I never like saying much about Lou, specially when he’s there to hear.
The man turned back from the telephone. “We’re heading for the tower office,” he said to the woman. He was very square and broad-shouldered; his muscled arms filled his sleeves to bursting. He scowled at me. “You trying to kill yourself, kid? How did you get over the fence?”
I said quickly, “There was a place with a hole.” I didn’t want gaps in the conversation, for them to have too much time to wonder about us. Lies were better than silence.
“What kind of hole?”
“A ... a break. Looked as though something had smashed through. A car, maybe.”
The woman was peering closely at Lou, her face softer, friendlier, almost worried. Her eyes were an interesting shape; I thought she might be Chinese, though I’d never seen a Chinese person except in pictures. “How can the boy never have talked? That can’t be true, in this day and age. Which is your hospital region?”
I couldn’t dream up an answer to that one. Luckily the van gave a great lurch and stopped, and the doors at the back swung open again, letting in a jumble of noise. They took us down the step, out of the van, and then we had to wait for a moment while a big tanker truck chugged by.
In that moment I looked up and saw the whole airport spread out before us, and it was awful. A dark haze hung over the place, turning the sky a yellowish brown, misting the outlines of everything I saw. Buildings were blurred on the horizon, and on the runways crisscrossing the airport, dozens of the immense planes crawled in lines, so far from us that they looked like fuzzy insects. Far away, you could see a blur of light rise or fall as a plane landed or took off. It was like a huge nightmare version of our little single-runway airport at home—but at home, the air was clear. Here, it was so thick with fumes and smoke that even taking a breath made me want to cough.
Then we were hustled in through two tall metal doors, into bright light and shiny white walls and a bustle of people. They were a mix of people, just like at home, assorted shapes and sizes and complexions, but there was something odd about them. They reminded me of a crowd of ants, rushing to and fro, pausing sometimes for an instant but never really making contact with each other. Nobody took much notice of us, as the square-shouldered man led us through; they all kept glancing instead at television screens set at intervals high on the walls. These weren’t tiny security screens like the ones in the truck; they were huge, and they all seemed to be showing pictures of war.
Images were flicking by one after the other on those screens: streets full of tanks, airplanes streaking across the sky, buildings exploding and vanishing into clouds of smoke. A man desperately dragged a body across a street, and the body had lost a leg. There was a flash of an anguished face, with blood running down its cheek. Then a shot of two soldiers firing machine guns through an open door. Though all the images were violent, there was no sound at all. The ant-like crowds were watching a war that looked as if it was being conducted in silence.
Then we were pushed into a room where the screens were not just here and there, but all around the walls. There were long banks of screens, all bright and flickering, on three sides of the room; it made me dizzy to look at them. Lou stood still, staring, fascinated. Three men sat at control panels, one before each bank, and in the middle of the room another was getting out of his chair beside a big desk. He was very tall, and had a close-cropped black beard; he looked down at us.
“How did they get there?” he said to the woman with the ponytail.
“Through a hole in the fence, apparently.”
He gestured at the screens. One whole bank of them seemed to have pictures of the airport. “There are no holes.”
“We’re having the perimeter checked,” said the broad-shouldered man who’d brought us in.
The bearded man came close, and stared at us. He had a long scar on one cheek, that made a divide in that side of his beard.
“Just kids,” the woman said.
“But in such oddly old-fashioned clothes.” He was looking at my sneakers. I couldn’t see his own shoes.
She said lightly, “Retro’s always fashionable. You know how kids are.”
He said to me suddenly, “Don’t you know what danger you were in? You and your little friend?”
“My brother,” I said automatically.
“That makes it the more stupid.”
I thought suddenly that it might help if I tried to seem really stupid. I let my mouth gape open a little, and blinked at him foolishly.
“Please mister, we wanted to see the planes,” I said.
“Where do you live?”
I gazed at him even more vacantly. “Wanted to see the planes,” I said again.
The woman moved restlessly. She said, “Sir, they’re just children. And not too bright—probably castoffs from the projects. I don’t think you need bother with them. We’ll get them some medical attention, put them in a home—the young one seems to be an interesting speech-loss case.”
The man turned his staring eyes on Lou, who was still gazing at the screens. He reached out and tilted Lou’s chin toward him; then turned his head from side to side. He said slowly, “I’ve seen this face before.”
Lou smiled at him serenely, and shook his head.
The man turned and spoke briefly to a woman at one of the banks of screens; she pressed some buttons and in a few moments we were looking at two dozen images of a tree, seen from above, with a small figure next to it. The picture widened, and now there was a dark ring all round the tree; the figure turned to cross this ring, and the camera zoomed in on his face. It was Lou, crossing the ditch full of giant millipedes.
Voices murmured in the room.
The bearded man took hold of Lou by the shoulders; his face was tight and angry. He said, “Two of my men were killed trying to rescue you from the Wilderness that day, little boy. They died, and you disappeared. Now suddenly you come out of nowhere again. What is going on?”
He gave Lou a shake. Lou whimpered, and I could hear his breathing getting louder, on the way to the start of a seizure. I forgot about trying to seem stupid, and I jumped forward. “My brother can’t talk,” I said.
“Then you talk for him. Who sent you?”
He let go of Lou, but he looked even angrier; his mouth was a mean straight line now. I knew he wouldn’t believe me if I told the truth, but I didn’t know what else I could do.
I said, “Nobody sent us. We just found ourselves here, for no reason. We come from a different world.”
He shook his head impatiently. I’d been right. “Not too bright, huh?” he said to the woman with the ponytail. “Bright enough to invent fairy-stories. These two are from
the Underground.”
EIGHT
I never did discover what he was, this man with the scar-divided beard. Some kind of Head of Security, I suppose—a top policeman. He had us taken to his own office, an amazing big room full of expensive-looking furniture. It was high up, with enormous windows overlooking the whole airport. The daylight was beginning to fade, and you could see lines of different colored lights crisscrossing out there, reaching into the distance. I’d never looked down from somewhere so high, except in the airplane going to Nassau.
The woman who’d picked us up from the runway came too. He called her Nora; she called him Sir. It obviously wasn’t his name, but it’s the only label I have. On the way in, she gave us each a sort of candy bar, and I wondered if it was safe for us to eat it, but Lou instantly bit into his, and the smell of it made me so hungry that I did the same. It tasted wonderful, like a mixture of mango and orange and chocolate.
“Wow!” I said, swallowing. “I wish we had this at home.”
“Where’s home?” Nora said casually.
I didn’t know what to say to that. Earth? The twenty-first century? I said, “The islands.”
“Sit down here,” Sir said to me. His voice was quiet; he seemed to have put away his angriness. He pointed to a weird chair made of shiny metal, with black padding on the seat and back. I looked at it doubtfully; it was rather like the dentist’s chair in our island clinic.
But suddenly Lou started making his happy sound, the excited series of little grunts that always makes everyone smile, and we all looked at him. He was hopping about in front of a wall filled with shelves and pictures. The pictures seemed to be photographs of trees and flowers and animals, and on the shelves a few brilliant objects were set here and there, each on its own, illuminated by a small intense beam of light. One of them looked like a gleaming white piece of brain coral, another a spray of blue flowers. A third, at which Lou was staring, was a tiny jeweled bird.
“Ooo, ooo,” went Lou. He half-reached for it, then glanced up enquiringly at Sir.
For once, Sir’s grim bearded face was relaxed, almost smiling. “All right,” he said. “You can pick it up.”
Lou reached out, and I came over to see. There on his palm was a little copy of a hummingbird, painted in bright enamels, set with jewels, wonderfully done. It was really beautiful, except of course that it wasn’t real.
Nora was looking over my shoulder. “Exquisite,” she said.
Sir said, “Beauty is transient.” His voice was much softer, less rasping. “I make a point of paying tribute to the extinct species.”
Extinct. I looked back at the hummingbird, then round the walls at the pictures. I saw an eagle, a tiger, a leopard, a rhinoceros; lots of brilliantly colored fish, a sequence of small birds, a beautiful little frog. Extinct.
Lou put the enameled bird back in its place. He’d stopped making his happy sound.
“Sit down,” Sir said to me again, and he moved me to that sinister chair. “Don’t be afraid. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
I was frightened all the same. I could feel my hands shaking, and I felt sick. I sat down on the chair, and Nora came closer. She smiled at me.
“It’s all right, Trey,” she said.
Then she put a strap over each of my arms, not tight, just enough to keep it against the arm of the chair, and another across my chest. And Sir put a kind of metal circle on my head, round my forehead. It rested there lightly. It felt cold.
He said, “That’s it. All I want is to ask you a few questions. Who do you live with, you and your little brother?”
“Our grandparents,” I said.
I heard Lou give an odd little gasp, and when I turned my head, I saw him staring at a broad flat screen that filled part of the wall opposite the pictures and shelves. It was like a huge television screen; I hadn’t noticed it before. On the screen I saw Grand and Grammie, in their kitchen: Grand at the table with some papers, Grammie at the stove. They were very fuzzy, and they moved very slowly as if they were underwater, but it was definitely them. As I looked, they flickered and were gone.
Sir said softly, “And where is that?”
“Lucaya, in the Bahamas,” I said. And there on the screen was our island, just as it flashed into my mind: green casuarinas and silver-top palms, white beach, blue-green sea. It was fuzzy again, but beautiful. Again, in the instant that I looked, it was gone.
“Very remote,” Sir said to Nora. “Extraordinary. Most places like that have been under the sea for decades.”
She said, “They’ve brought them a long way.”
Sir reached out and swung my chair round a little, so that the screen was just out of my view. He said casually, “Who first took you Underground, Trey?”
The answer to that was “Bryn” and there was no way I could keep it out of my mind. I said nothing, but I knew that this mind-reading machine, or whatever it was, must now be putting a fuzzy image of Bryn on the screen. Perhaps they wouldn’t recognize him.
But they did. I heard Nora take a sharp breath. And Sir said softly, “Ah yes. Of course.”
I tried hard to think just about Bryn, so that I wouldn’t give them the faces of any of the others. I didn’t know whether it worked; I couldn’t see the screen.
Sir said, “Can you tell me where any of the entrances are?”
“No,” I said truthfully.
He sighed. “No. They’re too sharp for that. They just took you. How did they get you into the Wilderness?”
The last question was so quick and quiet that I knew my brain must be showing them the answer in a picture, so there was no point in hiding anything. “From underneath,” I said. “From a tunnel. It was full of water, fast water. They said someone was trying to drown them.”
Sir gave a short, cold laugh. “They were right,” he said. “And why had they brought you all that way from your little island? Why did they take you to the Wilderness?”
“It was just the nearest place, I guess,” I said. “They were trying to escape from the water.”
“Come now, young Trey,” Sir said. There was a chilly edge to his voice. “They had reasons. We saw you, remember? And your brother, with that ditch of mutant creatures. Why did they want you there?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
Sir sighed. He leaned over and turned my chair back, and with the other hand took the metal circlet off my head. As I caught sight of the screen again I saw the thick green undergrowth of the Wilderness, and the twisted, ancient tree in the clearing—and then they were gone. Nora pulled the straps off my arms and chest, and as she did, I saw tiny gleaming pads of metal on the underside of the fabric.
“That will do,” Sir said. He looked over at Lou and patted the seat of the chair. “Come here, small one. Your turn.”
Lou stood still, gazing at him, and my heart sank. If they tried strapping him on that chair, he’d start gasping and grunting and go into a seizure; he didn’t mind children, but he hated being touched by any strange adult. Grammie hadn’t yet been able to get him to go to school; it was the main reason why he couldn’t yet read or write, though we were all trying to teach him.
I said quickly to Sir, “Please don’t—he just can’t do that. He’s not like ...”
But my voice trailed away, because Lou was already trotting over to the chair, hoisting himself up into it. Sir gave him a helpful boost. I stood there gaping. Lou caught my eye, and grinned, as they put the bands over his arms and chest, and the metal circlet on his forehead. Nora had to shorten that, to keep it from dropping down onto his nose.
Then Sir began talking to him, and very soon I understood why Lou was so unconcerned. Always I kept forgetting, here in this Otherworld, that although I was still the same person I’d always been, my little brother was different. A hundred miles different, a whole world different. I hadn’t the remotest idea of the things that he could do, here.
Sir said, quiet and friendly, “Are you homesick, Lou?”
Lou cocked his head t
o one side and then shook it, no.
I looked at the screen. It was blank.
“Are you hungry?”
Lou promptly nodded, and on the screen there was a fuzzy image of the candy bar Nora had given each of us. We all laughed.
“Those black creatures in the Wilderness,” Sir said, in the same calm voice, “why weren’t you afraid of them?”
Lou smiled at him, but on the screen there was nothing but lines of crackling static, the way a TV set looks when the programs are all done.
Sir took a quick breath, and paused for a moment. “I see,” he said slowly. Then he said, “They killed two of my men, Lou—how come they didn’t hurt you?”
The screen was still crackling and blank, and Lou turned his head to peer at it. He looked curious, as if he was checking to see whether it would show anything.
Nora checked the straps on Lou’s body, and the metal circle round his head, but the screen didn’t change. “There’s nothing wrong,” she said.
“No. Once in a great while, it meets its match,” Sir said. “This is pointless—take those things off him.” He stood looking down thoughtfully at Lou for a moment while Nora disconnected him. He said, almost to himself, “You’re the one they want, aren’t you? Something happened to you in the Wilderness. Something they’ve been waiting for. We just have to find out what it is.”
Then he glanced over at me again. “Where did they take you, after my men died?” he said. “Back down the tunnel?”
I said, “I don’t suppose you’ll believe me, but we were back where we came from, in the very next second.”
Maybe he did believe me. He stood there looking into space, rubbing one forefinger up and down his cheek. Then he moved to a panel under the big screen and pressed some buttons. “For your interest,” he said, “here is the Wilderness as the Underground left it that day.”
The picture that filled the screen must have been taken from one of those helicopters. We were high up, looking down at a blackened, lumpy landscape from which the tall, burned stumps of trees jutted upward like black spines. Here and there a curl of smoke rose into the air. We moved to one side, then the other, then rose higher. All around, there was nothing but cinders and ash. The Wilderness had been burned into nothing. Of the lush green growth we had seen the last time, all that remained was a black desert.