Up From Jericho Tel

by E. L. Konigsburg

  WE BEGAN walking to and from the bus stop together, studying the ground to find candidates for a funeral service. Nothing turned up on either Thursday or Friday, and on the following Monday just when we reached the steps of my trailer, Malcolm said that he would see me at the burial ground, and I said sure, and we gave up pretending that we needed to bury something to spend time together.

  Malcolm Soo had been born in Korea but didn’t remember the language. He was a half-orphan. He had gone to Milton Road Elementary before Singer Grove, which meant that he knew one-third of the sixth grade clones, but he hardly paid any attention to them. He didn’t even realize they were clones. Malcolm Soo was five weeks younger than me but just as bossy. He also considered himself a future famous person, but, unlike me, he was perfectly willing to talk about it. He had decided that he would win a Nobel Prize in science. He had not yet decided whether he would win it in chemistry or physics, but whatever he discovered, he would name after his dear dead mother, Chin-i. He was neat, methodical and had an opinion about everything. I was not neat, not methodical and had an opinion about everybody. He had opinions about things I had never even thought about. I had opinions of people he had never even noticed. I did not find Malcolm Soo as boring as afternoon television. I did not find him boring at all.

  MALCOLM was alone when he found the next victim. He carried it over to my place and knocked on my door. “We need another funeral,” he said. He ceremoniously unwrapped the neat folds of the aluminum foil (broiler-strength) package and showed me what I thought was a black caterpillar with a glandular problem. “A mole,” he said.

  We walked to the clearing on the edge of the Park and dug a grave. Malcolm took up the pen and asked me what the mole’s epigraph was to be.

  “Write That was light at the end of the tunnel. Sorry. Put two n’s in tunnel, and remember to put the e before the l.”

  “I know a tunnel when I see one,” Malcolm said.

  “I have no doubt that you would know one when you see one. I’m not sure you could spell one.”

  “O-n-e,” Malcolm said.

  “No one likes a smartass, Malcolm,” I replied.

  “It takes one to know one.”

  We hung the weathergram from the same tree that held the other two. “Imagine living your whole life underground,” Malcolm said. “Imagine finding the light at the end of the tunnel, and then, zap! you’re dead.”

  “I don’t expect to let that happen to me,” I told him. “I want to be like the luna moth. I want to fly before I fall.”

  “But the moth also lives in the dark.”

  “And so do the stars,” I said.

  “I like the stars,” he said. “I like astronomy. I’d like to discover a star some day.”

  “Good. Then I’ll let you discover me.”

  “What kind of star do you want to be?”

  I had never told anyone that I wanted to be a great actress. No one in Texas. Not even my mother. And yet that wanting took up most of my dream life. I had never told anyone and had never done anything about it. I had never even tried out for the Fifth Grade Christmas Pageant. It was as if trying for it would show everyone some secret, hidden part of myself that they could make fun of and hurt.

  Since the day when we had buried the blue jay, I knew that I would tell Malcolm. I knew that I could trust him. Friendships and funerals may begin on common ground, but they have to go deeper. Friendships and funerals both require faith. Faith is a kind of bond, a kind of trust. I knew that Malcolm would not make fun of me if I told him my secret. And he would never tell anyone; I wouldn’t even have to ask him not to.

  So I told Malcolm Soo that I dreamed of becoming an actress. I told him that I wanted to be a great one, one they would name theaters after.

  “You may not be pretty enough, but you sure are peculiar enough.”

  “Great actresses don’t have to be beautiful; it’s more important to make people think you’re beautiful than to be beautiful. I told you I want them to name theaters, not hairstyles, after me. What do you want to have named after you?”

  “A planet, an atomic particle and ten bastard sons.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  Malcolm laughed. “What have you done about becoming an actress?”

  “Telling you is the first thing.”

  I THOUGHT that we ought to give the burial place a name. Malcolm suggested Pet Cemetery, but I complained that the name was ordinary and besides none of the animals we had buried had been pets. “I’ll think of what to call it,” I said. I knew that something would come to me, something that was as appropriate as Coca-Cola and as dignified as IBM. There was a name buzzing in the back of my head, and one day when we were just sitting there, a day when we weren’t burying anything, just holding our heads up to the sun to catch some rays, I heard a voice saying, “Jericho Tel” and was surprised to recognize the voice as my very own.

  “We’ll call this place Jericho Tel,” I repeated.

  Malcolm liked the sound of it. Jericho Tel seemed right to him, too, even though at the time I couldn’t tell him what it meant. There was no logic to the name, but it seemed right, and the fact that it seemed right without reason to Malcolm made me all the more certain that it was.

  When I got home, I looked up Jericho Tel. Jericho was the oldest inhabited city in the world. Tel meant hill. But the land in our clearing was flat. I wondered if the clearing was the top of a buried hill. Could we be standing on top of something that lay deep, deep under us? Something as old as civilization. I was excited by that thought.

  THE BABY SQUIRREL that had fallen from its nest was next, and when we buried it, I composed, and Malcolm wrote the following weathergram: By dying young, you have missed a lot of nuts.

  Malcolm complained that not only did that poem not rhyme, it was the most non-poetic poem he had ever heard. I did not have a high opinion of it either, but I said, “The word count is accurate. Write it anyway.” And Malcolm wrote.

  When we hung the squirrel’s weathergram from the tree, I noticed that our first one, the blue jay’s, was only a tatter, and all the letters had faded away. Our first message had been delivered. I didn’t say anything to Malcolm. He would want to know who had gotten the message, and I wouldn’t be able to tell him. I didn’t want to defend without proof something that I knew as certainly as I knew that.

  Tallulah says, “Exercise is good for the heart, the lungs and the unemployed.”

  two

  TWO DAYS LATER we found the dog. It was a Dalmatian, and it was lying near the edge of Jericho Tel. It was the most pitiful looking of all the creatures that we had found, not only because it was the largest and not only because it had died with its eyes open but also because there was something majestic about it.

  “I’ll bet it’s purebred,” I said.

  Malcolm leaned over the corpse and studied it. It was the first time I had thought of one of our dead creatures as being a corpse. “This dog belonged to someone,” he said. He motioned for me to come join his inspection. I stood by the side of the dog but did not bend over. Malcolm pointed, “Look where the fur around the neck is worn. That’s where she wore a collar. I think someone killed her and threw the collar away so the dog couldn’t be identified. There’s no drag marks, so they probably dumped her here.”

  “Him,” I said.

  Malcolm looked. “Him,” he said.

  Besides not liking the idea that someone had murdered a dog and dumped it, I did not like the idea that someone else knew about Jericho Tel. “I guess a soup spoon won’t do this job,” I said.

  “Of course not,” Malcolm said. “We’ll need shovels.”

  “I don’t have a shovel.”

  “We keep one in our storage room. You probably do, too.”

  “I don’t know how to get into ours.”

  “The same key that opens your trailer opens your storage.”

  “You’re a great detail man, Malcolm.”

  “It’s another one of my talents.” />
  We walked to the far corner of Empire Estates where the storage lockers were located. Malcolm told me that they were numbered the same way as the lot numbers, and I told him that I had a sufficiently logical mind to have figured that out. I found storage room A-10. I didn’t want to go inside. The air stuck to you like jelly. I may not have been a neat person, but I can say that I hated having dirty hands more than any one who was. I found the shovel, tied together with a rake and a grass edger, standing in the corner next to Mother’s wedding dress sealed in a Keepsake Box. Everything in that storage room was as dusty and as useful as the wedding dress in the Keepsake Box. The shovel was rusty. I hated touching rusty things. They could give you lockjaw. Lockjaw started with the symptoms of the common cold.

  The tools were tied together with a length of old rope. I could not loosen the knot, and I had nothing to cut it with, so I stood there in the hot windowless space and tried pushing the loose ends of the rope up through the knot, getting hotter and more resentful of the Dalmatian for dying on our Jericho Tel. I knew that I was going to rot before the Dalmatian, and I kicked the shovel and hurt my toe and screamed and swore.

  Malcolm heard and headed in my direction.

  He stood by the storage room door and asked, “Can I be of assistance?”

  “Isn’t it obvious that you can. Do you have a knife to cut this stupid rope?”

  He walked to the corner where I was wrestling with the rope and picked up the whole packet of tools and lay them down flat on the floor. He then pulled the shovel out lengthwise as I watched. He handed me the shovel.

  “Let’s get going,” I said.

  “If you had done that for me, I would have said thank you.”

  “You probably would have,” I replied. “I don’t have a talent for good manners.”

  “Good manners are training, not talent.”

  “Listen, Malcolm, I’m not anybody’s trained monkey, and I probably have gotten brown lung disease from all the dust in here.” I marched in front of him toward the door. He didn’t move. “I’m locking this place up,” I said. Malcolm stormed out, saying nothing.

  By the time we reached Jericho Tel, the silence between us had become so hostile that I started thinking of nice things to say to break it, and I would have said the one nice thing I had thought of if, after we got to the center of the Tel, he had not put his shovel down and said, “That’s some kind of mouth you have,” so instead of saying something nice, I said, “It’s congenital.”

  “I’ve got to be some kind of wonderful to put up with it.”

  “Being wonderful must be congenital,” I said. Our argument could have grown to a full-scale fight if at that moment I had not caught sight of the dead dog and said, “I hate to bury him naked.”

  Malcolm said, “I’ll start digging while you go home and get a plastic garbage bag.”

  “A garbage bag! You can’t treat a dead Dalmatian like garbage!”

  “Okay. I’ll start digging while you go home and get a plastic burial shroud.”

  “Where will you start?”

  “Dead center,” he said.

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m serious. You pace it off in one direction. I’ll pace it off in the other, and we’ll meet dead center.”

  So we did. Malcolm counted the number of steps of one diameter, and I the other, and then we met halfway. Malcolm pushed aside the thin layer of pine needles and scuffed the dirt making an X with his foot. He told me that he would start digging there, and I started home to get the plastic shroud.

  I was walking back toward Jericho Tel when the sky changed. It was the time of year when the air was announcing a change of seasons, and the sky seemed too weak to hold any heat a minute past sundown. But suddenly the sky changed from blue to a combination of lilac and green, and the clouds became caramel-colored. It was a stained glass sky; parts of it seemed unwilling to let light through. I peeked through the trees and saw the Dalmatian lying on its side and saw Malcolm push the edge of his shovel into the ground with his foot. I had glanced away for only a second, when I heard “H-E-L-L-L-L-P” and saw Malcolm disappearing into a hole in the ground.

  I threw the garbage bag down and raced around to the opening in the circle of trees. I was barely at the edge when I felt myself being pulled into its center—where X had marked the spot—and before I could say or do anything, I was sucked down into the hole that Malcolm had dug.

  Malcolm had hit a sinkhole or an old elevator shaft, I thought. There was a logical explanation for what was hap pening, and I would only have to wait to hear it from Malcolm. He would have a logical explanation. The trouble with logical explanations was that they only made sense. They never explained senses. And at the moment, when I should have been feeling frightened at being sucked down off the face of the earth, I was not. I was feeling calm, watching myself, listening to my thoughts and allowing myself to enjoy this swimming/floating/pulling feeling; it seemed safer than picking up rusty shovels. It seemed a perfect way for things to happen. I had always known that Jericho Tel had a logic all its own.

  The force pulling me down stopped suddenly, and I was sitting on top of a lavender-colored metal box. The top was covered with what looked like the lead points of thousands of sharpened pencils pointing outward. None pricked. I didn’t expect them to. I was deep in a hole, but I could see everything clearly. The light was not natural; it was as bright as our cafetorium except it did not have the harsh look that comes from a ceiling full of fluorescent lightbulbs. Neither was it like the light that comes from the sun. It was soft, rosy and blond—a blend of the whispered colors of the rainbow: rose, not red; mauve not purple; aqua, apricot and lavender, all dusted with gold.

  I began crawling over the surface of the box looking for a trapdoor, for my powers of reason had begun to work, and I thought that since Malcolm and his shovel had not greeted me at the bottom of the hole, he must have fallen inside the lavender box. He must have hit the latch on its trapdoor. A trapdoor on a lavender box seemed as logical as a lavender box itself, so I began tapping the surface with my elbow or knee, but not in any systematic way.

  Just when I thought I had probably covered every square inch of the box—my elbow was feeling tender—I decided to rest. I did not panic. I did not even hurry. I simply sat on the box with my feet stretched before me and rested my head in my hands. I thought that I ought to try to think what Malcolm had done. Had he pounded on the lid? Had he jumped up and down? Had he tried to climb out? No. He had disappeared more easily than that. There had not been enough time between my seeing him being sucked into the hole and my arriving at the scene for him to have done anything.

  So I sat on the top of the lavender box and waited. I examined my fingernails under the mysterious light; they seemed to glow with a soft blue light like a television screen that has just been turned off. If I looked up, I didn’t see the sky. I saw an endless shaft filled with the same pastel golden glow. I did a quick check of my pulse and found that it was normal. I felt my armpits for sweat: none; my forehead for fever: none. I waited, pleased with my patience and my calm.

  I stood up, and without warning I felt myself falling, falling, falling, feeling the way the astronauts look when they walked in space. It was a pleasant feeling, except for my stomach, which seemed to want to stay put while the rest of me twirled. Then with a fast triple spin, I landed feet up. Before I could get my eyes to focus or my bowels to settle, I heard a female voice, deep with impatience say, “Close the door before you let all that disgusting fresh air in.”

  I did as I was told and then walked forward into a room bathed in the same amber-rose light that had filled the shaft. The room was no larger than Jericho Tel itself, and sitting on an enormous sofa piled high with satin pillows in every pastel shade you could think of was a tall, slender woman with long straight red hair—a red that was as natural as lipstick—and a big red mouth (also as natural as lipstick). Her eyes were outlined in black pencil in addition to wearing such heavy false eyela
shes that they looked as if she had glued a millipede over each. Her eyes were green and had that same shimmering look as the lavender beads on the box. Her fingernails were half the length of her fingers and were the same firecracker red as her mouth. She was wearing blue satin pajamas and was smoking a cigarette that she held in a long, black cigarette holder. That and her eyelashes were the only streaks of black in the soft glitter of the room.

  Malcolm was standing at one end of the long sofa, leaning on his shovel.

  “This is Tallulah,” he said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, extending my hand.

  “She doesn’t shake hands.”

  Tallulah took a long drag from her cigarette and blew out the smoke. Malcolm waved his hand in front of his face. “You’ll get used to it,” Tallulah said. She took another puff of her cigarette and blew the smoke into the space between Malcolm and me. “Being invisible will make your assignments easy, darlings.”

  “Are we invisible?” I asked.

  “Not yet. You have to go through the Orgone.” She lifted her eyes to the ceiling so that her eyelashes rested against her eye sockets like two small furry animals that Malcolm and I might have buried.

  “Assignment?” Malcolm asked. “Assignment? How can you talk about an assignment when I haven’t yet found out what I am doing here or how I got here or even what I am.”

  “What you are is an amateur, darling.”

  “Less than an hour ago, I was a kid ...”

  “Kids are amateur adults,” Tallulah said.

  “But . . .” Malcolm began protesting.

  “Shut up, Malcolm,” I said. “Let’s listen to the woman.”

  Tallulah smiled and nodded. “Your first assignment is Carl A. Vogel,” she said. “Exit upstage left. That should take you straight through the Orgone.”

  I started to leave, but Malcolm held back. “What are we supposed to do about Carl A. Vogel?”