The Children of Hamelin

by Danny Lasko

  “Son, why didn’t you talk to us about this?”

  “Because, Dad! Do you even have to ask?! Annie needs to keep breathing, maybe even more than I do. As long as Pock is alive, he can find another prince to finish the job.”

  They won’t admit it—they’re good friends—but they all know I’m right.

  “You’re a good boy,” says my dad, finally. “A good boy.”

  “So playing is dangerous. What are our other options?” asks Linus.

  “We’ll have to break in, find the Auravel, open the Looking Glass, and hope Berebus Pock is on the other side waiting to greet us.”

  “But we have to restore the Soul. How do we—”

  “Pock didn’t ask me to restore the Soul,” I say, interrupting Linus. “He asked me to return the Auravel.”

  “But the Grey told you that without Annie’s Aire, the Soul could not be restored.”

  “Which is why Annie must stay alive. To do that, we need to find her. And I know of only one person who can do that.”

  “Your mother,” answers Dad.

  “But the Soul!”

  “Linus,” I say to him calmly. “It’s what everyone wants, including me. But it is not what we were asked to do. We can’t see the whole picture. We either believe we’re not alone or we don’t, and I choose to believe. What?” I ask my dad, who’s smiling far too big for me.

  “My son,” he says. “The soothsayer is choosing to believe without seeing.”

  “If I can, bring Berebus back with me. With the Synarch and the wizards, we’ll need all the help we can get.”

  “What about Allen?” asks Linus.

  I don’t know what to say. I know the right thing to do. But it just doesn’t seem fair to say it.

  “Okay, let’s not worry about that now,” says Dad. “We’ll get Mom, find Annie, keep her safe until midnight. You find the Auravel.”

  We say our goodbyes.

  “Be careful, son.”

  “Yeah, Dad. You, too.”

  The Jolly Roger silently slides away with the wind toward the Cellar. With no contact over the last few days, none of us know if they’re safe or even how many are left. This could all be for nothing.

  The game starts at seven-thirty. More than eighteen hours away. We scurry around like rats looking for a small hole to climb into Boxrud’s stadium. The monstrous gates are not only locked but guarded. And without my Soul, we’re not about to mix it up with them. It’s an odd setup. Usually, League stadiums are built in prominent locations in Citizen cities. Not this one. The arena, or Magic Kingdom, as Boxrud calls it, seems to have been built right in the middle of ruins, most of which were swallowed by the sea at the time of the quake. What remains are husks of broad buildings and broken streets, twisted iron and massive, faded signs, busted and lying crooked among the wreckage I can’t begin to understand. Only a single wide path of newly laid road directly to the front gates breaks up the shadows of the past. We climb into every nook and cranny of the stadium’s borders to find a way in. We try to climb the wall and bust through it, but the whole place is sealed tight. We find a rusted-out train track that seems to lead under the walls of the stadium. We search the wall for any sign of a secret opening. Nothing. I slam my fists against the stone. We’ve come so far, spanned oceans, fought cruisers and wolves and wizards. We’ve escaped death, and now I almost feel ashamed that it’s nothing but a wall of rock that gets the best of us.

  “We could hijack a cruiser,” thinks Linus out loud.

  “We’d be discovered too soon. And we don’t want to leave the Looking Glass vulnerable when I go in to get Pock. What about impersonating wizards?”

  “Your face is way too recognizable. What about Mrs. Sterling? She could jump us in.”

  “Can’t reach her in time. Hang on,” I say, latching onto a desperate thought. But is it? It has helped us many times in the past. Why not now? After everything we can do, why wouldn’t the blue eagle help us find a way in?

  “I need your help,” I say out to the empty air in front of me. Moments later, the fluttering of wings announces the eagle’s arrival, filling the void, landing gracefully on a broken beam next to me.

  Its eyes lock onto mine, its feathered body so still that it’s hard not to wonder if it’s real. It flicks its head to the left, waiting for me.

  “We can’t find a way in. Will you help?”

  The blue eagle studies me for a moment and shoots off into the sky. It circles above the stadium. But with each lap, the bird widens out, covering more ground until it flies out of sight for stretches at a time before coming back into view.

  Linus and I can’t sit doing nothing. So we start digging where the train track meets the base of the wall, hoping to find a gap in the armor.

  Suddenly, the blue eagle appears.

  “Follow me,” it whispers and shoots back into the sky.

  With the darkness beyond it, the blue eagle is difficult to see. I look away, searching for Synarch police or wizards or even debris in our way, but each time I do, I lose the eagle. Linus, however, never takes his eyes off of it.

  Even now, there’s so much to learn from him.

  “There,” Linus says, pointing.

  I finally take a deep breath and commit myself to the eagle, trusting that it will not lead us into the middle of a Synarch patrol or even to a rock that will stub my toe.

  It leads us two or three hundred yards from the front gate to a pile of junk and rubble on the edge of the shoreline. The seawater crashes and seeps into the crags and crevices of the rubble with each swell.

  “Follow the water,” the eagle says.

  I hesitate, wondering how much I should already know, whether it’s stupid to ask.

  “You’re an ally,” I say finally. The eagle’s stoic frame and piercing eyes remain still, calm. “You’re my ally.”

  “Yes.”

  I smile. Laugh even. The kind of laugh you make when you feel like the burden you carry just got a little lighter.

  “You did right by the SongKeeper, Prince of Mira. You did right.”

  I breathe deep, taking in the approval of the blue eagle. He turns his attention to Linus.

  “Do not doubt the value of your efforts, Linus Sob. Your intent is pure. Your faith will see you through.”

  At once, my heart burns within. I look over to Linus, whose eyes barely hold onto the welling tears. The two of us watch as the eagle flies and fades into the darkness. Linus offers one last deep sigh, wipes his eyes, and starts pulling chunks of debris from the pile of junk. I immediately join him.

  It doesn’t take long for us to carve a small hole into the pile and realize it covers a deep underground cavern of some kind. Linus pulls out a couple of lights from his pack and hands one to me. Looks like it’s at least fifteen feet down. I grab his hand, lower him down as far as I can, and, with a head nod from him, drop him. I hear the splash and the gasp for air and see a thumbs up.

  “I wouldn’t go headfirst or anything,” he tells me.

  I flinch. I feel my chest flutter. It’s going to take some time to do things like this without being able to flash forward. I wonder about the other possibilities—if there are any—that might get us into the stadium faster or less wet. I wonder if there’s another way to enter the cavern than just jumping into the water. All of a sudden, I stop wondering. My foot slips, and I scrape past the debris and into the open air of the cavern, finally splashing down into three feet of seawater. I fling my head up, gasping for air and wiping the leftover water from my eyes. When I blink them clear, my eyes meet those of a severed head an inch away.

  I kick it away and turn to find a rotting corpse—no, several rotting corpses! Another flick of the light reveals the skeleton of some kind of animal, a dog, maybe, still standing upright as though it were froz
en. Another flick and dozens of tombstones and stone caskets litter the pool of water.

  “A graveyard!” I yell. “What the—”

  “They’re synthetic,” calls Linus. “It’s not real.”

  “What?” I find Linus with my light and watch as he examines one of the corpses. He peels off the skin from its cheek and rubs it between his fingers. I’m still trying to find my breath.

  “And very old,” he continues, looking around. “Whatever it is, it’s been here a lot longer than the stadium.”

  “Who builds a fake graveyard in a hole?”

  “Someone with an incredible imagination,” answers Linus, scanning the ghostly cadavers.

  “Gives me the creeps. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Looks blocked that way,” says Linus, pointing his light toward a collapsed tunnel.

  “There,” I say, pointing the opposite way to a large opening at the top of a wide winding path, a narrow groove carved in the middle of it.

  With only a few steps, we learn that nothing we see is real, though someone went through a lot of effort to make it look so. Some of the “corpses” are posing in the weirdest positions, many of them appearing to play musical instruments, others embracing each other, drinking mugs of something, and all of them dressed in ragged clothes from centuries ago, as though someone was portraying a party for the dead. The tangled trees house red-eyed ravens and owls in their branches, with the whole scene watched over by an impish old man with an outstretched lantern and his emaciated dog—all of it, even what must have been a hundred years after the quake, looks incredible. I can’t make sense of any of it.

  We slip through the door and into an even odder scene, a low-ceilinged room, dusty and cobwebbed with old pieces of furniture, boxes, and chests, clutter everywhere. And strangest of all, portraits of couples dressed in fine clothes are set up along the path through all the junk. Portraits of the same woman, always dressed in white but with different men in each of them, at least five, telling the story of some dark past.

  “It’s a show,” says Linus, shattering the silence so fiercely I jump. “Like a movie set or something. It’s telling some kind of story, but I believe we’re seeing it backwards.”

  Makes sense. But the interruption brings me back to the present. I’m afraid the details in here could be explored for hours, something both of us would probably enjoy under different circumstances. Time’s wasting.

  “Come on.”

  We hurry along the path, crawling along a ledge overlooking a dusty, ornate room, one wall sporting a cold fireplace, another a massive pipe organ. But the main attraction is the long dinner table that seems to be set for a birthday party under a cobwebbed chandelier.

  After we pass a huge crystal ball surrounded by dangling musical instruments, an eerie conservatory, and a long hall with a strange clock marked with thirteen hours, we spot a foreboding gallery with odd tattered paintings set along the wall that veers off the path. With no reason not to, we take it, passing a painting of a sailing ship, a portrait of a young woman, and another of a medieval knight on horseback. Linus jumps at a couple of busts whose eyes seem to follow us. I bust one by reflex and immediately regret it.

  But the hallway simply ends. Just a big brown wall blocks our way. No, not a wall. A door. A big door. I feel my fingers up and down the groove in the middle of it.

  “I think we can pry it open. Give me a hand,” I call to Linus. It takes some doing and a little help from one of the light fixtures in the hallway, but we get the door to crack. It screams at us as though we were ripping open its belly, and I’m wondering if we’re on the right track. What we find inside assures us we are.

  Clean. And powerful. A large round tower with a sleek, dark gray casing singing a low hum stretches two stories up. Maybe more. Its base is as big as the room it’s housed in and narrows to a point at the top. Every ten feet around its diameter, a streak of white light shoots up to the tip. I know what this is.

  “We’re in one of the arena’s pillars,” I say. “This thing will shoot light a thousand feet into the air when it’s activated. We’re in.”

  We spot a door about twenty feet up and climb a maintenance ladder that leads right to it. The door opens from the inside without a problem. I take a deep breath to suck in the fresh air. It’s still too dark to see the detail of the arena, but the familiar smells swirl around me. While every arena is different, they all have the combination of metallic electrostatic scent from the pillars and the organic blends of grass, dirt, or trees. This one has all three. And more. Blacktop and concrete. Rust. It’s the smell of new and old, alive and dead. Already I can tell that it’s unlike any arena I’ve ever seen. I can make out silhouettes of man-made structures and trees almost too perfect to be real. I smell water, fresh and flowing, large quantities of it. But there’s something else I feel here. Something strong. Inspiring. Magical. Something I haven’t felt before anywhere. The closest I’ve come was after winning the first game of the season in Allen. I feel happy. What is this place?

  I turn to get a bearing of where we’ve just come. I wasn’t expecting a dilapidated old house.

  Turns out to be a large home, a mansion, the kind we’ve read about or seen pictures of in Southland, but in much worse condition. Still, even in its current state, it emits an aura of foreboding I can almost taste, as though it were home to a thousand ghosts unwilling to accept death.

  “Where will the trove be kept?” asks Linus, snapping me away from the mansion.

  “The center of the arena.”

  The stadium’s seating bends around us on the south and west with humongous video screens interwoven, so we head in the opposite direction, trying to find the middle of the maze. And if inside the mansion was weird, then the outside is plain crazy. Though completely in ruin, the area of the mansion looks like they transported a town square of the dead city of Nola, a Southland legend for the raucous way it lived and how the floods tried to swallow it whole more than once, but it just wouldn’t give up. At least until early in the twenty-first century, when the sea claimed her completely, swallowing the inhabitants and their will to live whole. We know about Nola—the name they gave the city after its death—because the Synarch forces every student in their academies to learn that story as a cautionary tale about the futility of defiance.

  A short walk away, the path forks. To the east, a jungle of trees and shrubbery mixed with thatched roof buildings and ancient stone temples replace the red brick walkways and fancy balconies of the Nola square. We choose the other way, a wide-open street along the banks of a winding river and find ourselves in what I immediately recognize as the Old West. I’ve seen it a thousand times in my dad’s old movies. Saloons and wooden sidewalks. There’s even a beached and battered stern-wheeler twisted on the banks of the far side of the river.

  “What Dad wouldn’t give to see this,” I whisper under my breath.

  We take a road east just at the base of a red rock mountain, reminding me of our run-in with the Nomads. I’m starting to feel the anxiety of not being my whole self.

  “This could have been a bad idea,” I mutter.

  “I’m inclined to agree with you on this one,” adds Linus, not giving me the encouragement I was hoping for. Past a shooting gallery, through an old frontier compound fence, and over a shoddy planked bridge we spot the trove in the middle of a plaza, as though it were built for it. Each trove is different. But there’s no mistaking it, even if you’ve never seen it before.

  The Magic’s trove—or at least its cage—is half an orb of glowing, translucent silver with swirling streams of fire crawling along its surface. I creep up and peer inside. It’s tough to tell exactly what it is hiding through the fire and glow, but I can see the frame of a man. Must be a statue, with one hand outstretched in front of him, the other holding something below, something I can’t make out, but it
almost looks like a short, stubby creature but without the golden glimmer. In the statue’s outstretched arm, I see its outline, long and slender made of old dark wood. Pock’s Auravel. But with the trove’s cage activated, there’s no way in.

  “We would have to find the control box, know the code, and shut down the entire power system to get in there. But even then I don’t think this is a normal cage. I’m betting the wizards made something special for it. What do you think, Linus? Linus? Where’d he—”

  Turning around, I find Linus as still as the statue, gaping at it as if he just found a long-lost brother.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Disney,” he says.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Walt Disney. He built this place.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a park. A place people came to play when people were free to play. Disney built rides—attractions, he called them—that allowed people to leave the troubles of the present and transport themselves into worlds of ‘yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.’ I think that’s how it goes. It was a place of imagination and dreams. A place that made you believe in the impossible.”

  “Like a world that exists beyond this one?” I ask, now joining Linus, peering through the electric globe, trying to see as much detail as possible of the statue within. “And he built it on top of the Looking Glass?”

  “It can’t be a coincidence,” says Linus, almost talking to himself. “Given the evidence that other storytellers knew, at least in some degree, of the existence of Mira—Baum, Barrie, Carroll—I think Disney knew more than any of them. He studied these authors. Reinvented their stories, almost to the extent that he was considered the authority on them. Even more than the authors themselves. Maybe he saw a pattern or at least a connection between the stories. I think he found the Looking Glass, but instead of exposing it, he hid it from the world.”

  “Why would he do that?”