The Wonderling

by Mira Bartók

  “You — you want me to st-steal something? But Quintus, I never stole anything before,” said Arthur. “I — I can’t.”

  “You mean to tell me you never stole nothink?” Quintus narrowed his eyes. “Nothink a-tall?”

  “No, never. I mean — not like that.”

  “Never went ’ungry? Had to take somethink lest you starve?”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “Never took somethink t’eat ’twasn’t yours?”

  “But . . . well . . .” Arthur looked down at the floor, ashamed. After a long pause, he said quietly, “Once I . . . I st-stole a pie. . . . But just once!”

  “’Course ya did! Had to, din’t ya? Weren’t a-gonna go ’ungry. All right, then, Spike. Let ol’ Quintus ’splain you the ways of the world. There’s thems that ’ave and thems that ’aven’t. So it’s up to us” — he gestured to the group — “to set things right. We does a lit’le borrowin’ an’ tradin’, is all. Like Robin Hood an’ his merry lads. Listen,” continued Quintus. “This is how it works. We steals from the High Hats an’ gives to the poor, an’ the poor — them’s us!”

  The gang broke into squeals of laughter while Arthur stood wringing his hands.

  Quintus told him that, most important of all, he must act like a Duster. In fact, that had been one of his training games the day before. Quintus had called it playacting. He had made Arthur pretend he was a Duster. He had showed him how to carry the feather duster against his right shoulder, which was the way real Dusters carried them, and how to walk subserviently, with his eyes lowered and his head down. He was good at that part, and everyone had clapped, which had made him happy at the time. Everything was a game, Quintus had said, but the Duster game was the most important one of all. At least for him.

  Now he understood why.

  “Right then. Off with the two of you. Here ya go, tosh fer the toll monkey, to an’ fro. An’ fill yer pockets, Spike. There’s a good lad. Oh — an’ don’t lose that there feather duster!” Quintus patted him on the head and pushed him out the door.

  When Arthur and Goblin got to Stinkbottom Bridge, Goblin paid the toll monkey, for groundlings, and only groundlings, had to pay going both ways. On the other side, Constable Floop was standing there checking the tags of the privileged few groundlings that came and went.

  “A word, little man,” whispered Floop to Goblin. “Got a message for your mate Quintus. You tell him a changin’ o’ the guards is comin’ an’ I don’t know how much longer I can watch his back. You tell ’im that, right? He’ll know what I mean.” He tipped his hat and added, “Sorry, mate. New guv’nor an’ all. New world order, so to speak. Ta.”

  “Ta to you,” said Goblin, tipping his trilby. The policeman nodded, and Goblin and Arthur went on their way.

  “What did he mean, Goblin?” asked Arthur.

  “Never you mind,” said Goblin. “Just do the job, all right? And you make sure you’re in that alley by ten o’clock on the dot. You got one hour, understand?”

  “I promise,” said Arthur. “I’ll be back in time.”

  The house was on a street right by the market, and while the buildings weren’t made from lumenstone or marble, they were majestic all the same. The house he was to enter was very old and built from stone. It was covered with creeping jasmine that smelled intoxicating. In the front of the house was a peacock-blue door flanked by statues of winged animal gods and goddesses in tall stone niches. The front gate was open, and Arthur followed a path to the back of the house.

  The yard was small but beautiful, and a little bit wild. There was an overgrown herb garden, patches of flowers randomly planted here and there, and in the center, a blossoming apple tree in dire need of pruning. Next to the tree was a lovely stone fountain where several songbirds were splashing about.

  Quintus had told Arthur that he’d find the key beneath a stone bird by the back door. When he was sure no one was watching, he lifted the bird and grabbed the key. If he had known more about birds, he would have noticed that the stone bird was a nightingale. The thing he did notice was that the lock on the door was at groundling level. At the Home, where most everyone was a groundling, not a lock was within reach.

  He paused. I don’t like this, he thought. There could still be someone inside. Quintus had said no one would be there. He couldn’t hear anyone, but even so . . . What if the inhabitants were just asleep?

  Arthur froze, key in hand, unsure of what to do. Then he heard a shrill voice from across the yard. “You there! Groundling! Stop this instant!”

  He spun around. The voice came from a neighbor woman who had stepped out to trim her topiaries. She was wearing an absurdly large sunbonnet and carrying an enormous pair of pruning shears.

  The backyard of the woman’s house faced the backyard of the house Arthur was about to enter. The woman in the giant sunbonnet stomped across the row of rosebushes separating the two properties and marched across the yard over to Arthur. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” she said, pointing her shears down at his nose.

  He did exactly what he had been told to do if anyone saw him. He bowed his head and held up his feather duster. “If you p-please, ma’am. I’m — I’m the new D-Duster.”

  “Hah!” She sneered. “Likely story.”

  He tried again. “You see . . . I’m here to, well, to dust! Yes, that’s what I’m here to do. Me being a Duster and all.”

  “I know full well what a Duster is, you ninny. Let’s see your number, then. Come on, out with it.”

  He pulled his tag out from under his shirt. She grabbed the cord, yanking him forward, and examined his number and symbol. She released him in disgust. He stumbled backward, righted himself, and bowed again.

  Arthur was certain the woman was going to call the police or the D.O.G.C. — he still didn’t quite understand how it all worked — but instead she shooed him away like a fly and went back to trimming her large leafy cats: for every single topiary in her yard was a crouching, springing, or stretching cat.

  As he fumbled with the lock, Arthur could hear the woman muttering to herself as she walked back to her yard. “Keys to groundlings! What will that dreadful woman think of next? It’s the icing on the cake, it is. First, Cook gets sick and I must go to market. Next, the nanny quits and I am left to tend to Baby! Then, the gardener falls ill and I end up doing a laborer’s work! A laborer’s! And now I’m forced to talk to some hideously deformed freak! Disgusting. Right next door! There ought to be a law!”

  Arthur put the key back under the stone bird, closed the door on the woman’s voice, and stepped inside.

  Quintus had told him to search each one of the house’s three floors, every nook, cranny, and closet, and to take what he could in one hour. Take trinkets, he’d said. Arthur cringed. What would his Trinket think if she saw him now? He stood inside the entrance and listened; there was no one there. His thudding heart relaxed to a slow, steady beat, and he entered the parlor.

  All the windows had peacock-blue shutters and were draped with plush burgundy curtains. Richly pattered rugs covered the floors. On three of the walls were rows of daguerreotypes, engravings, and paintings of wild animals in faraway lands. He had seen only one real picture before, Linette’s engraving of her mother and Miss Carbunkle when they were young, and it was hard not to stop and stare at these. On the fourth wall hung a giant tapestry in blue, deep crimson, and ochre. It depicted a medieval scene of magical beasts: centaurs, dryads, and unicorns standing in a circle in a walled garden. Arthur recognized the unicorn from Trinket’s tales of King Arthur. A white horse with a horn, she had told him. The most innocent of all creatures.

  He couldn’t bring himself to put any of the precious objects in his pockets. Each was so unique and beautiful: a quill pen resting on a piece of creamy paper on a small polished table edged with gold, a clock in the shape of a swan, a set of miniature trees carved from jade that looked like they were dancing.

  In the middle of the room was a piano. Arthur had no idea what
it was, but he thought it must be something that made music, for it looked a little like the accordions he had seen people playing his first day in town. He climbed up on the bench and gently touched a key. A quiet note rang through the air.

  His heart beat fast. He touched another. Another note sang out. Arthur took a deep breath. His hand hovered over the keys. How he wanted to stay and coax out more sounds! But he heard the swan clock ticking away and forced himself to move on.

  Arthur crept through the first floor — the kitchen, dining room, and other rooms branching out from the parlor — all of them lavish and full of wondrous things.

  The second floor contained the library and several other rooms. Inside the master bathroom was a marble bathtub carved with sea nymphs and sea centaurs riding the waves. He ran his red furry hand over their figures. They were all animal-human hybrids, just like him.

  In another room, he came upon a wooden cabinet with many drawers. He opened one and found a walnut, inside which someone had carved a tiny city of bridges and spires. In other drawers were shells and precious stones and various treasures. On the wall across from the cabinet were shelves of relics, mostly ancient helmets, fragments of armor, crossbows, and swords. Arthur thought of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, but these helmets weren’t made for humans at all. They had been forged for animals: rabbits, horses, birds, elephants, and even one for a fox. Or were they made for groundlings like him? He ran his finger over the fox’s silver mask. What were these for?

  Next he wandered into the library. Lining three of the walls were shelves and shelves of books going up to the ceiling. Arthur had never seen so many books in his life. In fact, the only book he remembered ever seeing was Miss Carbunkle’s Essential Manual for the Vocational Training of Errant Groundlings. He picked one up — a leather-bound volume with gilded letters embossed on the spine. It was in a language he couldn’t understand, with words like those above the entrance to the City. He lifted the book to his nose and breathed in its delicious papery smell.

  A grand fireplace took up the remaining wall. The pillars framing the fireplace were creatures carved out of wood, guardian figures with horse legs and human bodies, their faces part goat, part man. Above the mantel were more standing figures, each one half human, half mammal or bird. In the center was a coat of arms. It bore the words House of Nightingale. On top was a knight’s helmet, shaped for a bird, with three large feathers protruding from each side. At the bottom were two entwined snakes. In the center of the shield was a picture of a tree, and inside the tree was an ancient lyre. The inscription floating above read Protector of the Sacred Grove.

  “What is this place?” he said aloud.

  He climbed up a narrow staircase to the top floor and entered a room filled with light.

  Arthur froze. There were musical instruments everywhere he turned. For a moment, his shoulders tensed as if he were going to be hit. He could see in his mind one of Miss Carbunkle’s signs, hanging on the wall of the dining hall: Music Is the Root of All Evil.

  “It is not!” he said aloud, as if the headmistress were in the room. “You’re wrong!” Saying that felt good, and his shoulders relaxed.

  He walked around the room full of instruments he didn’t know the names for, defiantly touching this and that, plucking a harp string, running his hand along the back of a viola da gamba. He saw another piano like the one downstairs, but this one had a pyramid of tiny pianos on it, each one stacked on top of another, from large to small. He also saw musical inventions, like a self-playing violin with a mechanical arm holding the bow and a hurdy-gurdy that played itself.

  Arthur started to leave — the clock in the room told him he had only twenty minutes left, and he had yet to put a single thing in his rucksack for Quintus — when he noticed colored light streaming under a door in the back corner of the room.

  He opened the door and walked into a rainbow.

  THE ROOM WAS SMALL, with tall, arched stained-glass windows depicting animals in elegant motion: red gazelles leaping over luminous green hills, bright-yellow birds soaring across an azure sky. The light illuminated everything, making the floor a patchwork of colors. He saw a rainbow of light glinting off something in the corner and turned to look.

  It was a machine of some kind; he could tell that much. It sat on a wooden table next to a small brass clock. The base, which was about two feet long and one foot high, was a black-and-red lacquered box decorated with intricately painted flowers, leaping stags, rabbits, and birds in flight. Along the edges of the base were flowers and vines painted in gold. Jutting from the top was a large scalloped brass bell like the bell-shaped horn of an old-fashioned phonograph.

  Below the bell was a drawer with a word painted in beautiful gold script. Arthur touched the word. Songcatcher. He felt a strange tingle surge through his body. Then he noticed some kind of dial with numbers on the side of the machine. Above the dial was the word Dreamometer.

  It was as if the machine were whispering to him, but the whisper was something he felt more than heard. The voice seemed to say one word: Listen.

  How does it work? Trinket would know. But Trinket wasn’t there. Nearby were two closets. He opened the one on the left and walked in. On one wall were hundreds of small black boxes stacked on shelves all the way up to the ceiling. Each box was numbered and labeled with a picture and the title of its contents. He perused the labels: Waterfalls, Night Birds, Nasty Storms, Tree Music, Gregorian Chants, Ancient Celtic Drowning Ballads, Bawdy Music Hall Ditties, Mozart: The Toddler Years, Italian Operas with Tragic Plots, Italian Operas with Silly Plots, Bear Cub Waltzes, Elephant Dirges, Mouse Anthems, Frog Symphonies, and so on. Across from the shelves was an enormous cabinet of many drawers. When Arthur opened one, he saw a row of cards. The cards seemed to correspond to the boxes, as each had a number and picture as well, along with a brief explanation of the sounds contained in each box.

  Hanging on the wall next to the cabinet was a framed piece of parchment; at the top, written in elegant script, were the words The Songcatcher: How to Listen in Four Easy Steps.

  What harm was there in listening for just a minute?

  The instructions to operate the Songcatcher were quite simple. The first thing Arthur needed to do was choose what he wanted to listen to by picking one of the boxes. There were so many, though, and he had so little time! After much deliberating, he finally picked a dusty one on the bottom shelf that didn’t have a picture or even a number, just a red question mark and the words Choose for Me.

  Inside the box was a hollow brown cylinder made of wax, its surface etched with fine grooves. Arthur opened the drawer on the machine inscribed with the word Songcatcher and placed the cylinder over a brass tube the way the instructions said to do. The tube was connected to a phonograph needle. According to the description on the wall, this was how the Songcatcher worked its magic. While the cylinder spun, the needle ran along its grooves, allowing songs and other sounds to flow into the listener’s dreams — for the listener had to be asleep in order for the machine to work. Once a sound slipped inside the sleeper’s mind, the memory of it remained.

  The next step was to set the Dreamometer. He didn’t have much time, so he turned the dial to five minutes. Next, he dragged a chair over to the table. He set it below the Songcatcher’s bell, sat down, and lowered the bell so it covered his head. Finally, the last step: he reached for the hand crank and turned it three times to the right, just as the instructions said. Then he closed his eyes.

  Time disappeared and the world fell away.

  Arthur sank into a deep, deep sleep. The Songcatcher entered his dreams and filled him with sounds — vibrating, lulling, soaring sounds — as if he had opened his heart like a door and the world poured in.

  It was one long Song of Life, flowing into him like a river. He heard the sound of a swan, its head falling toward slumber; he heard swallows grazing over the pinnacles of the City, a spider weaving a silken web. He heard the night music of a tangled wood, moist with
rain. The rain became a carillon of bells, the cry of a distant seal, a crashing wave, the formation of an ice crystal on the forest floor. He heard a boy playing a shofar in the desert, its wail transforming into the plaintive howl of a wolf to its mate. He heard a creation song from a faraway land, then a simple bone flute, a woman singing an aria, and someone leafing through the pages of a book.

  The music of the world entered his heart and made a place for itself: a young man’s tear splashing on piano keys after he has played a sonata, the warble of a thrush rising from a creek, a snail gliding over leaves, a child humming to herself, crickets, frogs, and waterfalls. He heard someone playing an Andalusian guitar, the drumming of a thousand bat wings inside a dark cave. He heard an ancient lyre, the last leaf of autumn falling to the ground, someone whispering I love you. He heard the sound of wind, a beating heart, a mother saying good night to her child.

  Finally, Arthur heard his own steady, beautiful breath. He let out a gasp and awoke.

  He felt serene. And something else he didn’t quite understand.

  Arthur’s heart ached. But it wasn’t that he was terribly sad. It just simply ached, as if it were too full and the contents had nowhere to go.

  He looked at the clock next to the Songcatcher. He couldn’t believe that only five minutes had gone by. It was ten to ten. He grabbed his duster and empty rucksack and ran downstairs and out the door.

  When he and Goblin returned to Wildered Manor, Arthur tried to explain to Quintus why he hadn’t taken anything from the house, but he kept muddling up his words. It was as if he were in shock from so much beauty.