Green paused.
“I’m really sorry about Lewis,” he said. “I wish I could have met him.”
“All the other rats are gone now too,” said Carly. “They left this morning for the new cave.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“Not really. Breeza Meezy told me, but I’m not sure I could find it. And even if I could, I don’t think I can walk there and back in one night. It’s very far away.”
How she would spend the lonely, wakeful nights that awaited her now that the rats were gone, Carly had no idea.
“It must have been the griddlebeast!” said Green with a scowl on his face. “What else could make the animals act like that? And what do you think made the whistle root tree ring? I thought they all had to ring together.”
“Me too,” replied Carly. “But I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe it was the whistle roots. Maybe if you blow enough of them, you can make a tree ring. Nothing like if there was a Crank and you turned it and all the trees were ringing. But maybe you can make one tree ring, for a little bit, in an emergency, like we did last night.”
“We could test it!” said Green. “Tonight at the cave. I’ll meet you there. We’ll get a bunch of whistle roots and see if we can make it ring again.”
“But what about your grandmother? She’ll be alone in the cabin.”
“She’s alone right now,” said Green. “There’s really nothing I can do for her when I’m there. But if this works, then maybe we could help her. We could get her out of the cabin and near a whistle root tree and make it ring. Maybe that would break whatever spell the griddlebeast put on her.”
THAT NIGHT, CARLY WAITED for Green outside the cave, which she had told him how to find. She was nervous. She had realized it was a mistake for them to meet here. The griddlebeast knew where the cave was. What if it sent the animals back for another attack? Or what if it snuck up on Carly and Green with its whispers? If the griddlebeast put Green to sleep, Carly wouldn’t be able to blow enough whistle roots by herself to make the tree ring. And she didn’t think she was strong enough to carry Green all the way back to the cabin. What would she do then?
An owl flew by and startled Carly. But the owl didn’t stop and silently disappeared into the darkness of the woods.
“Stupid owl,” said Carly, and then felt bad because she knew Breeza Meezy and Lewis would have been upset with her for saying it.
She sat down and was about to snap off some whistle roots for Green when she heard something. It was faint and sounded as if it was coming from very far away.
“What’s that?” she said softly.
“What’s what?” a voice in the darkness replied.
Carly jumped to her feet, lifting her whistle roots to her mouth so fast they knocked against her teeth.
“Whoa, hey, it’s just me.” Green jumped over the creek. “Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to scare you. What were you doing?”
“I heard something,” said Carly, lowering the whistle roots.
“Was it me?” asked Green. “I tried to walk quietly but it’s hard to do in the dark. I must have tripped fifty times on my way here, mainly on whistle roots.”
“No, I don’t think it was you,” said Carly. “Listen, do you hear anything?”
Green was quiet and listened to the sounds of the woods at night.
“I don’t really know what I’m listening for,” he said. “But I don’t think I hear it.”
“I don’t hear it anymore either.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know. I mean it could have been . . . let’s just forget it. Are you ready?”
“Before we do that, could I take a look in the cave?” asked Green. “I’ve been dying to see it.”
Carly hesitated because she didn’t want them staying any longer than necessary. But then she agreed and took Green around the whistle root tree and into the cave. She handed him her flashlight since he didn’t seem to have one.
“Wow,” said Green, as he swept the light over the abandoned little houses. “This is amazing. It’s just like you described it.” He walked slowly through the village, admiring the whimsically carved windows and the artful chimneys made of small stones, snail shells, and mortar; one even twisted into the air like a cat’s tail.
Carly stood at the entrance and felt as though she was looking at a ghost town, or maybe a display of empty dollhouses in a toy store. Until she’d actually seen it, she’d been able to imagine that the rats were still there, tending their fires and going about their lives as they normally did.
But now she knew—the rats were really gone.
Once they were back outside, Green pulled some cotton balls out of his pocket. “I thought we could use these,” he said. “No sense in us going deaf.” He had also brought some whistle roots because he hadn’t thought it wise to walk through the woods without them. They had thirteen whistle roots between them, the exact number Carly and the rats had used the night before.
“Ready?” asked Carly, after they had stuffed the cotton in their ears.
Green nodded.
They began to blow and the sound was again shockingly loud. It was only slightly muffled by the cotton. Carly looked at Green and could tell he was feeling the same pain that she was. But he didn’t stop, and they both watched the leaves of the whistle root tree.
There wasn’t any movement.
Carly snapped off another whistle root to bring the total to fourteen, but still nothing happened.
“Should we try again?” asked Green, struggling to get air back into his lungs when they had finally stopped blowing.
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” said Carly, disappointed and also breathing hard. “Something else must have made the tree ring last night.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. But I think we need to get out of here.” The griddlebeast would have surely heard the noise they made. “C’mon, I want to check something anyway.”
Carly led Green through the woods toward the white cradle. When they reached it, she lifted the red hat and looked inside.
“Is there a new message?” asked Green, who was holding the flashlight. He hadn’t seen the hat before, but Carly had told him about it. He studied the hat just as closely as he had the houses in the rats’ cave.
“No, it’s just the note I left the other night.” Carly stared at what she’d written and suddenly realized something: Maybe her note was too long. The notes she’d found in the hat had always been so short. She asked Green if he had something to write with. He pulled a short pencil out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her.
Carly tore a strip of paper from her original note and wrote a single sentence:
How do we make the whistle root trees ring if there is no Crank?
She put the note in the hat and then put the hat back in the cradle. They immediately heard a sound like a single kernel of corn popping. She lifted the hat; her note was gone.
Carly and Green waited, not knowing what to do. Then they heard the popping sound again. Carly still had the hat in her hands and when she looked down, there was a new note inside. She grabbed it and she and Green read it together:
Wherever there are whistle root trees there is always a Crank.
Carly and Green read the note together.
They looked at each other in astonishment. Carly tore off another strip of paper and wrote another note:
Well, where is it?
“Isn’t that a bit rude?” asked Green.
Carly shrugged. She was tired of the hat never telling her exactly what she needed to know. She put the note in the hat, and the hat in the cradle, and they heard the same popping sound. Then they waited again. They waited for almost an hour. Carly kept lifting the hat to check it, but this time, they didn’t receive any response.
“Well, at least we know there’s a Crank,” said Green, trying not to yawn. It was very late, which of course wasn’t a problem for Carly. But Green still had to walk back to the cabin and get a
t least some sleep before waking up for school.
Carly went part of the way with him. Then she checked that he had his whistle roots and made him promise to blow them if he heard the faintest hint of a whisper. Still, she worried as he walked off through the dark woods.
She didn’t want to lose another friend.
Walking home by herself, Carly noticed how lonely and threatening the woods felt with the rats gone. She was thinking about how much she missed them when she heard the same sound she had heard earlier at the cave. It still sounded far away, and she couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. She strained her ears to hear it more clearly.
Breezes rustled the leaves in the trees and insects chirped and whirred. The sound was so faint that Carly kept losing track of it, but she was always able to find it again. And all of a sudden, she realized what it was.
It was the sound of a fiddle.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SOMETHING IN THE CHIMNEY
THE GRIDDLEBEAST HAD ALWAYS planned to chop down the whistle root trees. Not with his own spindly hands, of course. His whispers would take care of it, when the time came. He should have done it before now, he knew, but there had been so many distractions! Aside from whispering to the owls, the creek, and Granny Pitcher, there had been all of those delicious rabbits to eat! And his beautiful feathers—he was constantly losing them and having to intrude upon the owls in their tree holes to steal more.
But the ringing whistle root tree at the rats’ cave had changed everything.
It had been such a difficult attack to plan. He had whispered to every snake, weasel, and fox in the woods and beyond. He had even set up a fire near the rats’ cave to catch the breezes. Breezes loved to play with smoke; he knew that from watching them around the dead whistle root tree at his burrow. And when the breezes flew in to play with the smoke at his fire, he whispered that they should avoid the rats’ cave. And they had, as far as he could tell, for he watched everything and none of the rats had been able to fly away.
But then the whistle root tree had rung and the spell of his whispers had been broken. He hadn’t known that anything could do that. He was at least glad to find it hadn’t affected all of his whispers. The owls were still flying off with rats, although not the rats he wanted them to catch—just regular rats. The other rats, the ones who lived in the cave, had flown away the next morning, and he knew he would have to search for them soon.
But still, it worried him that the whistle root trees could ring unexpectedly and break his whispers. And so the next night, while Carly and Green were waiting for messages from the red hat, he had crawled down every chimney in the town of Whistle Root, sat on every pillow next to every sleeping head, and whispered the same words to each of them: “Chop down the whistle root trees.”
He didn’t lose any owl feathers in the beds he visited that night. For, oddly enough, when he heard the whistle root tree ring, the quills had pierced his skin. It had hurt just for a moment. And then, it was as if the feathers had been part of him all along, and not merely stolen from the sleeping owls.
He couldn’t help admiring himself in the mirrors of the houses he entered.
A small child woke up while he was looking at his feathers and asked him who he was. The griddlebeast just laughed, and the child screamed when she heard the terrible griddles coming from his mouth.
He leaped onto her bed and whispered, “Chop down the whistle root trees.” Then, tired of her screaming, he hopped out her bedroom door, pretending to be a rabbit. But she apparently didn’t like rabbits, because she kept screaming, and the griddlebeast clambered back up the chimney onto the roof to escape the sound. There, he spread his arms wide, ready to fly into the night—but he didn’t go anywhere. For although he had feathers, he couldn’t fly, and had to settle for scrambling down some vines that grew up one side of the house.
He knew the rats flew on breezes, but he didn’t know how. He tried whispering to the breezes, ordering them to carry him, but they had only been able to drag him painfully over the ground, which wasn’t like flying at all. Even though he wasn’t very big, he was bigger than a rat, and he assumed that was the problem.
He ran into the woods on all fours on his way to the next house. The woods, he thought happily, would soon be gone forever.
“Very busy tonight,” he called to a small group of rabbits as he ran hurriedly past. They were sitting in the moonlight and it had seemed polite to explain why he hadn’t stopped to eat them.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE AXE THIEF
THE NEXT MORNING, there was no school in Whistle Root.
It is Tuesday, isn’t it? Carly asked herself as she peered through the windows of the locked building. The halls were empty and the lights were off. She didn’t see a single teacher or student. She tried the front doors but they were locked, so she walked to the cafeteria and tried the door she had used on Saturday night; it was still open. She slipped inside and made her way through the empty halls to the library, and down the ladder to the cabin.
“Where is everybody?” she asked Green when he lifted the wood board from the fireplace.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was up there earlier and couldn’t find anyone. It’s not a holiday, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” said Carly. “Unless they made an announcement on Friday that we missed. But you’d think they would have announced it again yesterday.”
“Maybe the substitute forgot,” said Green. “But look over here—I grabbed as many books as I could from the library this morning. Want to go through them with me?”
Carly looked toward the corner where Green kept the books and immediately noticed that something was missing.
“Where’s Elzick?” she asked.
“Oh, I tripped the other night and fell and knocked him off his perch. He’s around here somewhere.”
They both sat down and started looking through the books, but Carly’s eyes were already closing. She had sat at her window the rest of the night listening to the sound of the fiddle, trying to figure out where it was coming from. She desperately wanted it to be Lewis, but how could he still be alive? None of the other musicians had survived the owl attacks. And a part of her mind couldn’t help thinking about the stories of the King of Endroot wandering through the forest playing his fiddle. She knew it wasn’t likely, or really even possible, but what if the Moon King . . .
“Carly,” said Green. “Why don’t you lie down on the couch and sleep. I’ll get something from the garden later and wake you for lunch.”
Carly was so tired, she knew it was pointless to refuse. She walked to the couch and was asleep within seconds.
WHEN CARLY WOKE UP, GREEN was gone. She had no idea how long she’d been asleep. It was impossible to tell the time of day down in the cabin.
In the dim light of the lanterns, she saw Green’s grandmother sleeping in the bed. She also saw Elzick’s empty perch and wished she knew exactly where he was. She knew it was silly—he was stuffed, after all—but she couldn’t help fearing he was about to swoop out of some dark corner (of which there were many in the cabin) and attack her.
She went to the front door, opened it cautiously, and looked out into the tunnel. “Green?” she called, but there was no answer. She remembered he’d said he was going to the garden. And not wanting to stay in the cabin by herself, she grabbed a candle and set out after him.
When she finally reached the end of the tunnel, she found Green, lying at the foot of the ladder.
He was asleep just like his grandmother.
Carly dropped to the ground beside him and shook his shoulder. She said his name again and again, but knew it wasn’t any use.
She hadn’t been there to protect Lewis when the owls took him. And now she had failed Green because she was sleeping, like always. She could’ve helped him if she’d been there, blown her whistle roots, maybe have scared the griddlebeast off. What if Green was asleep forever now?
“I’ll find the Crank,�
�� she told him, trying not to cry. “Don’t worry, Green . . . I’ll find it . . . I’ll make the whistle root trees ring . . .” She knew the ringing whistle root tree at the rats’ cave hadn’t woken Green’s grandmother. But that had been only one tree, and it wasn’t near the cabin. Surely if she could make them all ring . . .
She looked up at the door and saw darkness through the keyhole. It was night again—the griddlebeast wouldn’t be able to make her sleep.
Finding Green’s key, she climbed up the ladder and emerged into the light of the moon.
CARLY KNEW IMMEDIATELY THAT something was terribly wrong in the woods.
She rushed toward firelight, toward sounds that sickened her. A group of people from the town were crowded around a whistle root tree. They all had axes and were chopping at the massive old trunk.
They were chopping at the massive old trunk.
To Carly’s horror, she saw that several of the ancient trees had already fallen.
They can’t! thought Carly. If they chop down the whistle root trees . . .
Without hesitating, she pulled out her whistle roots and blew them at the townspeople, many of whom dropped their axes right away to cover their ears. Others simply stood there, dumbfounded at finding themselves under attack by a small girl with what appeared to be a pan flute.
Gathering as many of the dropped axes as she could carry, Carly ran off and hid them in the rats’ cave. She didn’t know where else to put them. And she hoped the griddlebeast wasn’t watching the cave as closely now that the rats were gone.
Then she ran back into the woods, blowing her whistle roots at everyone she found.
The Mysterious Woods of Whistle Root Page 8