The Wonderling

by Mira Bartók

  One night, a pipe broke near the Crookery, and a deluge of black filthy water, dead rats, and debris flooded the passageway that Arthur normally took to the mines. He had to find an alternate route the next morning. But he was so new to the place, and there were so many confusing twists and turns, that he — along with some of the others — soon became lost.

  He found himself along Black Slug Lane, aptly named, for the street (which was really a giant sewer pipe) was known to be populated with thousands of large, black slugs.

  A rowdy group of Badger border officers had just gotten off their shift and were about to head into the Dung & Shovel before placing their bets on the first rat fight of the day. Gaffer, the Badger who had assigned Arthur his job and hole in the wall, grabbed him by the arm. “Where you headed, Foxy? Shouldn’t you be in the pit? Sneakin’ away, are we? Heh, heh.”

  “C-Crookery Row got flooded last night, sir,” explained Arthur. “I’m just trying to find another way there.”

  The Badger motioned with his head to go left and went into the pub, cackling away.

  Arthur was about to leave, but something he saw out of the corner of his eye stopped him: a long caravan of slugs coming toward him from the right, leaving a glowing silver trail in their wake. Even in his despair, Arthur was struck by how beautiful the stream of silver light was in the midst of so much darkness.

  And then, another curious thing — the slugs seemed to be carrying tiny bits of food on their backs. Where were they coming from? He had heard about the Night Market, but since he had no money to buy anything, he hadn’t bothered to look for it. But now he had something to barter with. The poem about the Mouse King!

  And so, instead of turning left toward the mines, he turned right and followed the slugs’ silvery trail.

  At the end of Black Slug Lane, the trail went down a long tunnel, up a circular set of stairs carved from black rock, and down another tunnel. From inside the tunnel, Arthur could hear the echoes of many creatures talking at once, bartering, calling out prices, and arguing about the quality of goods.

  He thought, So I miss work one day and don’t get a rotten piece of moldy bread. Maybe I’ll get something better at the market anyway. And maybe, just maybe, someone might be kind to him, like that baker woman at Lumentown Market, and offer him a nice warm roll for free.

  Arthur thought of rolls and began to salivate. Then he thought of soup, and Quintus’s Soup for Kings. How he wished he were back at Wildered Manor! But he pushed the thought away and followed the silver trail right into the Gloomintown Night Market.

  The market was a hubbub of trade, mostly rotten food discarded from the City above and sold at black market prices. There were carts of spoiled meat, rotten fruit, and decaying fish heads. A woman was selling loaves of bread, but Arthur could see that the crust was tinged with green and the loaves looked like they were made mostly from sawdust. He perused the carts pulled by beaten-down groundlings rather than horses or donkeys, and searched for something to eat.

  Naturally, he looked for pies, but there weren’t any to be had. There were, however, cabbages. And they didn’t look half bad.

  Arthur approached the cabbage seller, a short, plump man with a sour, pimply face.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said politely, and made a little bow. “If you please, sir. Might I have a word?”

  The man scowled at him and grunted out something resembling “Whot you want?”

  Arthur asked the man if he would kindly consider trading a cabbage in exchange for an abridged recitation from the highly acclaimed Once and Future Mouse King — in verse form, of course, for Arthur still couldn’t sing except in his sleep.

  The cabbage seller stared at Arthur as if he were out of his mind. “A mouse for a cabbage? Are you loopy or what?”

  Arthur was about to speak when he spied a shocking flash of orange.

  A woman in a towering orange wig, followed by a tall gray Rat, ducked into a sloping passageway that branched off from the marketplace. A man Arthur didn’t recognize was leading them somewhere.

  What in the world were Miss Carbunkle and Wire doing in Gloomintown? They were up to no good, he was certain of that, but it was none of his business. His business was to run away before they saw him and dragged him back to the Home. He ducked under the cabbage cart, then crawled under a long table stacked high with fried sewer eels. Arthur was stealthily making his way back toward the tunnel when he caught the word Songcatcher. He stopped in his tracks. And then Miss Carbunkle said, in her shrill, clipped voice, “When I’m done, there won’t be a single song left on this planet. Music is the root of all evil, and don’t you forget it!”

  Arthur had no choice but to follow them. He simply had to find out what she was talking about.

  He kept his distance and crept along in shadows, which was easy to do in Gloomintown. He overheard the headmistress and the Rat speak in hushed tones about a meeting they were heading to with a very important man. Apparently Miss Carbunkle had already met him once before.

  “And when His Excellency speaks, you just keep quiet and stay out of the way, understand?”

  “Of course, madam. As you wish,” said Wire, bowing his head.

  Their guide led them down twisting pathways, through a dark, narrow tunnel that opened up into a street lined with factories.

  Arthur saw them enter the back of one of the buildings. Above the door was a sign with a picture of a green hat and the name of the company: TRILBIES & NOTHING ELSE! Arthur immediately thought of Goblin and felt a pang of guilt.

  He waited a few moments and followed them in. Next to the door, he found a pile of discarded hats in a rubbish bin. Arthur silently thanked Quintus for his training in “blending.” He picked out the largest hat he could find. He put it on, smashing his ear down so it would fit over his head. It wasn’t like his red hat from Pinecone, which had more room for his big pointy ear. But it worked just the same, and with no ear sticking out and his face and fur black from coal dust, he hardly looked like himself.

  Miss Carbunkle, Wire, and their guide made their way down a long hallway to the factory’s assembly room. Arthur could hear the foreman berating one of the workers, who had apparently made something other than a green trilby. The foreman was screaming at the top of his lungs, as a poor wombat groundling cowered, “We have always made green trilbies! And we will continue to make green trilbies till the end of time. What you have made, groundling, is a big blue CAP ! With a feather in it! OUTRAGEOUS!”

  Arthur wished he could help the groundling, but what could he do? And he had to follow Miss Carbunkle.

  The room was filled with hundreds of groundlings, bent over long tables making trilby after trilby as fast as they could. While the foreman was hollering at the worker, Arthur slipped under a table and crept from one table to the next, sliding along the floor until he was at the back of the room, where Miss Carbunkle and her entourage had gone.

  The headmistress and Wire waited while their guide knocked on the door of an office. Another man opened the door and ushered them in. When Arthur caught a glimpse of the headmistress as she entered the room, he cringed. Her face was just as he remembered it, a frozen expression of pinched irritation, bordering on rage. He noticed Wire, who was wearing his tag on the outside of his shirt, probably to protect himself from being snatched and kept below. But he was also wearing something else: a yellow silk scarf. Since when did groundlings wear fancy scarves at Miss Carbunkle’s Home? He also caught a glimpse of the person they were meeting — a tall, pale man wearing a monocle and white gloves.

  The smashed trilby on Arthur’s head muffled the sound, so he carefully lifted the hat and let his ear work its magic.

  WHILE ARTHUR LISTENED intently outside the room, someone inside the room was listening with equal fascination.

  Wire stood off to the side, his eyes lowered in mock submission. But his eyes saw everything. He noted the man’s cat torturing a small mouse in the corner, and how the man glanced over and nodded in approval. An
d he watched Miss Carbunkle very carefully as she and the man discussed her business proposal, what she referred to as Operation Songcatcher, or O.S.C.◆

  ◆ Miss Carbunkle and those who governed the City shared a particular fondness for acronyms. This is clearly evident in Miss Carbunkle’s infamous educational tome, The Essential Manual for the Vocational Training of Errant Groundlings (E.M.V.T.E.G.), which includes, among other things, a long list of acronyms for just about every activity of the day.

  The man with white gloves sat down in a chair several inches higher than Miss Carbunkle’s, which was so small and low to the ground that she was forced to sit with her legs sticking straight out in front of her. Miss Carbunkle was used to being higher than everyone else and shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

  The man looked down at the headmistress with soulless eyes and a bored expression. “I see Reginald got you here on time, Miss Carfunkle.” He checked his pocket watch and said, “May I offer you some tea?”

  “No, thank you,” said Miss Carbunkle. “It’s . . . ah . . . Miss Carbunkle, by the way. But never mind.” She cleared her throat. “And yes, your servant was quite helpful. I never would have found this” — she paused — “this place without him.”

  “Ah, Gloomintown, our charming little city with all its charming little citizens,” the man said, laughing darkly. “If I had my way, these monstrous, misshapen freaks would be wiped off the face of the planet. But my brothers find the vermin useful in our factories and our mines. I suppose they have a point. But, God, I long for the day when we can eliminate them altogether and replace them with machines.”

  Miss Carbunkle flinched.

  It was barely noticeable — just a slight movement in her right cheek and a stiffening of her neck. Wire smiled to himself, for he knew Miss Carbunkle’s deep, dark secret. That she too — at least a part of her — was one of the vermin: the monstrous, misshapen freaks of the world.

  The man flicked a minute piece of dust off his lapel and went on. “I told you at our last meeting that I would consider the matter in due course. I don’t have an answer for you yet. I must say, your pushiness is beginning to irritate me, Miss Carfinkle, and I do not appreciate being irritated. And I am very short on time today. I am visiting all of my factories, and I own nearly all the factories down here, so you can see, Miss Carbungle, how I am always short on time.”

  “Please, Your Excellency, hear me out. It was a long journey by coach. . . . If you could just give me a few minutes of your time. Last we met, I didn’t fully explain my plan. If I could only explain myself better, I believe you would be quite interested indeed.”

  The man sighed heavily, flared his nostrils, and lit a long ivory pipe. “Very well. You have exactly five minutes to speak your piece.” He opened a drawer and removed a special kind of hourglass that contained only enough sand for five minutes. He turned it over and said, “Speak.”

  Miss Carbunkle’s face flushed, and she said, “Oh, thank you, Your Excellency. Thank you!” and proceeded to discuss her plans.

  Outside the room, Arthur listened in horror from his hiding place as Miss Carbunkle explained, in detail, how she was nearly ready with stage one of her two-part plan called Operation Songcatcher — a plan that was absolutely diabolical.

  Her idea was to build thousands of Songcatchers that looked just like the original one her father had made, but the cylinders would be devilishly different. Each one would contain an electromagnetic beetle, the very same widgets Arthur and the others had helped to make at the Home. Once activated, the machine would coax the listener to sleep, just like the original Songcatcher, but instead of embedding beautiful songs and sounds in one’s memory, it would efficiently erase all of the music and wonder of sound from the listener’s mind.

  Forever.

  The listener would be left with no desire to listen to music or delightful sounds ever again, not even a bird’s song, a cricket, or the patter of summer rain. No more arias or waterfalls or waltzes, no mouse hornpipes and reels or music of snow. And certainly no lullabies.

  “And the wonderful thing about it,” said Miss Carbunkle enthusiastically, “is that the listener won’t even remember what happened. All he or she will recall is that there was something about the machine that was absolutely marvelous. I guarantee you, with my darling little beetles, our customers will tell all their friends to run out and buy one.”

  Miss Carbunkle explained that she would give the so-called Songcatchers and cylinders away for free to groundling orphanages and workhouses for the poor. But her greater vision was to sell them all over the world. She would destroy music forever and make a phenomenal profit while doing it. What could be more brilliant than that?

  “All I need now,” she said to the man in white gloves, “is the money to finish what I started — the funds to build the fake Songcatchers — and the groundlings to build them. We have enough cylinders and beetles to begin. But I cannot move forward without those machines and more groundlings to do the work. Right now, the plans are gathering dust in my closet. I need slave labor now and lots of it.”

  “But you already have groundlings,” said the man. “You run an orphanage, for heaven’s sake.”

  “My lord, with all due respect,” said Miss Carbunkle, “I simply do not have enough for the scope of this project. And you, most Honorable Excellency, you have told me yourself that you seek, shall we say, to limit the population. If the D.O.G.C. can transport more orphaned groundlings to my Home, there will be that many fewer polluting the streets of Lumentown. Perhaps acquiring them from Gloomintown would be the easiest way, since here they aren’t tagged and registered. And,” she added, “your financial investment would serve us both well. Very well, I assure you. It’s a brilliant, fail-safe, and lucrative plan. That is all I have to say. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  “Do not dare to assume,” said the man sharply, “that what you deem so brilliant and lucrative would be brilliant and lucrative to me.”

  “But my lord . . .” began Miss Carbunkle.

  The man glared at her with his steel-gray eyes and hissed, “Silence!” Arthur could hear him puffing on his long pipe and walking back and forth across the room. Finally, he said, “I see from my hourglass that our time is up, headmistress. Till next we meet. Good-bye.”

  “Please, my lord. Wait just a moment,” pleaded Miss Carbunkle. “Your Excellency is a true visionary. One who wields enormous power. Think of my project’s potential. You use the groundlings you need and send the rest of them to me. Then share in the extraordinary profits. My bleeding-heart idiot of a sister’s plan was to build more Songcatchers and give them away for free to the poor — groundlings and humans alike — or so her naive twit of a daughter said. That would only serve to create hope in the . . . the vermin, as you call them. But imagine a machine that can squelch the very thing that groundlings hold most dear. We can crush it right out of them. Think what that can do! If you crush their hopes and dreams, why, they’ll do anything; trust me.”

  Arthur listened as Miss Carbunkle thanked the man for his time and stood up to take her leave. As she and Wire were walking out the door, the man called her back. “Wait. Perhaps . . . perhaps I have been a bit too hasty. It does seem possible that your plan has, shall we say, untapped potential? I shall consider your proposal, Miss Carbunkle. My brothers and I meet next Monday. I shall let you know of our decision. Have a pleasant journey back, madam. Good day.”

  “Good day, Your Excellency!” said Miss Carbunkle. “And thank you! Thank you ever so much!”

  “Yes, yes,” said the man in white gloves. He waved her away dismissively, went back into the office, and shut the door.

  Arthur felt as if someone had punched him in the gut. A machine that would erase all of the music in the world? Destroy hope inside everyone who ever longed for something else — for wonder, for beauty, for love? Erase the song that still, after all these years, nestled deep within his heart?

  He thought of the magical Songcatc
her and all of its beautiful sounds. There was only one thing to do.

  He had to go back to the Home. He had to find a way to stop her.

  ARTHUR WENT STRAIGHT BACK to his crookery hole, tapped on the wall near the corner, and whispered Peevil’s name. After a few seconds, his friend’s tiny gray face popped out of his mousehole, followed by the rest of him.

  Arthur’s words came tumbling out of him in urgent fits and starts until he was done. “Well, Peevil? What do you think?”

  “It is quite obvious what you must do, Arthur. You must go on a quest. And I’m just the one to help you. Every mouse needs a quest, and this shall be mine.”

  Peevil solemnly placed his right paw on his chest and knelt before Arthur. In the cold, dark crookery hole, the mouse pledged allegiance to Arthur and his cause. “We shall save the music of the world!” cried Peevil. “We must go at once!”

  Arthur was quite touched. He was at a loss for words. Finally, he spoke. “There’s one small problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We don’t know how to get out of here.”

  “Oh. That,” said Peevil. “Definitely an obstacle. Hmmm. What to do? What to do?”

  The mouse scurried back and forth until he finally stopped, pulled on his whiskers, and rubbed his paws together exceedingly fast. “I feel an idea coming on,” he said.

  “Well,” said Arthur, “please hurry up, because I have no ideas at all. We certainly can’t go the official way — on the Night Train up through Lumentown. I’m not allowed that way, and besides, as far as D.O.G.C.’s concerned, I’m a criminal, and the second I go above, they’ll throw me in a groundling prison, which I hear is even worse than this place, if you can imagine.”