Choke

by Obert Skye

  My father looked up. “Yes, I know him.”

  “And?”

  “Our family is mad,” my father said needlessly.

  “That’s not comforting,” I complained.

  “I shouldn’t have come back,” he said in a panic.

  “What?”

  “I was wrong to return,” he insisted. “I was wrong to come back. This is a mistake, Beck. I have to go.”

  I was so flabbergasted I could barely be sarcastic. Somehow I managed. “You want me to help you pack?”

  “Yes, grab that book,” he said, pointing at a large weathered atlas.

  “No way,” I shouted. “I was joking. You can’t just go.”

  “I must.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t understand, Beck,” he said, flustered.

  “I really don’t,” I replied. “Tell me what’s going on. What do I do?”

  “I can’t help you here,” he told me. “There’s too much at stake.”

  “So what do I do?”

  He shrugged.

  “I can’t believe it,” I moaned.

  He didn’t seem to even hear me.

  “I must go.” He grabbed his leather satchel and shoved the atlas into it. He then threw open the door to the stairs.

  “You can’t run away,” I argued. “I need you.”

  My father looked torn between the thoughts in his head and the instructions of his heart.

  “It’s all I know,” he said with shame.

  “What about the strudel?” I asked disgustedly.

  My father turned to look at me. “Tell Millie I’m sorry.”

  “Well, what about me?”

  He looked me in the eyes again, and I could see that the storm was building. “I love you, Beck,” he said kindly, and with that he was gone.

  I just stood there. I tried to recall every word my father had ever said to me in the past. I think one time he admitted that he liked me, and he may have said he wasn’t bothered that I was around, but, “I love you?” If he wasn’t so complexly flighty and confusing, I would have almost been touched.

  I looked out the dome windows and watched the wind pick up. It had been quite some time since I had felt so alone. It started to rain and the fat drops beat down upon the copper dome like small, flat rocks.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  I climbed down the stairs and made my way to the kitchen. Millie was still there, but instead of humming she was grumbling.

  “What happened?” she asked, her one crooked eye looking over my left shoulder. “He ran out of the manor.”

  “I have no idea,” I replied. “We were talking and he freaked out.”

  “Something’s not right,” she said sadly.

  I couldn’t have agreed more—my stomach felt like it was going to implode. In fact I was so uncomfortable that it took everything I had to finish off three full helpings of strudel.

  Lightning and thunder struck, and the new rain turned into a torrential downpour.

  Illustration from page 27 of The Grim Knot

  CHAPTER 14

  Rain Must Fall

  I was pretty used to it raining in the Hagen Valley. It didn’t rain that terribly often where I had come from, but here it was a rare day that didn’t include some sort of drizzle. We were currently, however, experiencing so much rain I was beginning to think that I should start building an ark.

  The rain just wouldn’t let up.

  Kingsplot was becoming a lake, and the mountains that surrounded us were experiencing incredible mudslides and flooding. Huge waterfalls were running off the sides of cliffs, and massive rivers surged over the banks.

  Thanks to the rain, Kate was unable to come over at all. The only time I saw her was on the school bus and at lunch. Our school bus had actually gotten stuck twice because of the mud and rain. And just yesterday, the road leading from the mountains into Kingsplot had washed out. There was no longer any way for us to get to town. It was nice to have a break from school, but it also meant no Kate and no Wyatt and no fun.

  I braved the rain once to go visit Kate, but it took me almost an hour and a half to trudge over the mushy, muddy ground. Plus, when I made it to her house, her mom and dad were both there, and Kate couldn’t use the excuse that she was going for a walk to get out. So I had to hike back, which took about two hours.

  As difficult as it was to get to Kate’s, it was even more of a challenge to visit the cave. The forest was like a swamp and the water running down the stone stairway was so constant that moving up each stair was a major accomplishment. I had gotten up there only twice to check on the stone. The leafy cocoon was huge and throbbing when I last saw it. I figured I’d look in on it again once the clouds stopped ruining everything.

  So for the most part I just stayed indoors, searching the manor for more hidden secrets and bugging Millie and Thomas and Wane. I did spend a little time in the basement. It was still buried, but the parts we had used previously were open. I couldn’t take the tunnels all the way to the conservatory because water had filled most of the passageway.

  I did find a metal ladder hidden in a chimney of one of the large fireplaces in the middle of the manor. It was a fireplace that we never used, and when I climbed up the ladder it ended in a closet just below the top floor. It was obvious that there were a number of ways to get around the manor. It made me both excited and nervous. I figured if I could get around, then so could anyone else.

  The secret passages were cool, but I could only waste so much time in them. That meant I found myself spending way too much time just sitting in the kitchen willing the rain to stop and talking to Millie.

  “This stinks,” I said to Millie as I sat at the counter and

  nibbled at a piece of pie she had given me.

  “That’s the mold from all the rain,” she replied.

  I almost smiled. “I mean it stinks to be trapped indoors.”

  “Oh,” she said, sniffing dryly and rolling out some more dough.

  “Has it ever rained like this before?” I asked.

  “It always rains,” she informed me.

  “I’m aware of that,” I said. “But it doesn’t always rain this hard.”

  “True, I can’t remember such rain,” she mused. “I hope your father’s all right.”

  “Me too.”

  Millie cut the dough into circles and then placed them into pie tins. “Do you want to help me crimp them?” she asked.

  I wanted nothing to do with crimping.

  Wane came in and challenged me to a game of chess. I challenged her to find something less boring for me to do, and she failed. So, I halfheartedly played chess with her in one of the formal dining rooms. At first I could kind of tolerate it, but then it got so amazingly dull I felt forced to shake things up by spilling what I knew.

  “Did you know that there are secret passages in this house?” I asked her.

  “Check,” she replied.

  “You did?”

  “No, check, as in your king’s in trouble.”

  “Is the king the one with the cross on top?”

  Wane nodded.

  “So you don’t know about the passages?” I asked again while moving my king to the left and out of immediate danger.

  “I’ve discovered one or two passageways over the years as I have helped take care of this place,” she replied. “This manor’s full of surprises. I use a secret passageway to get up to the second floor.”

  “What passageway is that?” I asked.

  “You enter it through the large kitchen cabinets where the brooms are,” she whispered sounding secretive. “Check.”

  “Oh yeah, I gotcha,” I winked.

  “No,” she laughed. “The check part was for the game again.”

  “Right,” I waved, moving one of my little pieces to the opposite corner of the board.

  “You can’t do that,” she laughed.

  I moved my piece back and shifted my king. “Why didn’t you tell me about the passag
eways?”

  “It’s not like you need more things to distract you,” she answered.

  “That’s true, but doesn’t that interest you, all the secret things here?”

  Wane looked up from the board. “I learned years ago that this place is more amazing than I will ever know. Secret passages are great, but even greater things have happened here.”

  “Have you seen the slides?”

  Wane appeared confused.

  “There are slides in some of the secret passages,” I explained.

  She looked back at the chess board and shrugged. “Check.”

  I moved my castle to block her pointy guy. “Does my father know about the passageways?”

  “I’m not sure what your father knows,” she answered. “Until you came along, it was always an unwritten rule that we not talk about these things.”

  “Is it written down now?” I joked.

  “Check.”

  I sacrificed one of my horses. “I don’t understand you,” I said honestly. “You and Millie and Thomas and Scott move about this place like it’s no big deal. Certainly all this stuff means something.”

  “It means it’s distracted you enough to help me win—check.”

  I wanted to tell Wane about the cave and the new stone I had planted. I wanted to truly confide in her. But not only would she probably just say something like, “Been there, done that,” but it just didn’t feel right to inform her yet. I figured I would wait until I had done something really nice before I sprang it on her.

  I took out one of her horses with my queen. “You haven’t won yet.”

  Thunder shook the windows and rattled the chandelier above us.

  “Have you ever seen it rain like this?” I asked.

  “Never.”

  “Do you think something’s askew?”

  “Askew?” Wane asked.

  “Cool word, huh? It means wrong.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think anything’s askew. But I think they’d better repair the washed-out road so you can go back to school.”

  “You don’t enjoy my company?” I smiled.

  “You know I do,” she smiled back. “But how can you really appreciate someone if they’re always around?”

  I moved one of my castles, and she took it out with one of her short pieces.

  “Why are you asking about the manor, Beck?” she questioned. “You’re not planning anything we’ll need to take out extra insurance for, are you?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Check.”

  Wane looked at the board closely. “What do you mean check,” she asked. “You can’t get my king.”

  “You’ve been saying it,” I complained. “I just wanted to say it too.”

  Wane shook her head.

  “Who invented this game anyway?”

  Wane started into some long, drawn-out story about the history of chess and how it was such a wonderful, brilliant game. She listed famous people and countries who revered it. I wanted to take my question back, but I thought that might be rude.

  “Your turn,” I said, hoping that would distract her from talking.

  Wane moved her queen as the rain grew audibly louder.

  “Don’t you think we should build a boat or something?” I said nervously.

  “Checkmate,” was her only reply.

  My sentiment exactly.

  Illustration from page 31 of The Grim Knot

  CHAPTER 15

  The White Queen

  It’s hard to keep track of time when you have no school to go to and you’re being held captive by Mother Nature in your own house. It also doesn’t help when you can’t see the sun. I wasn’t completely sure what day it was anymore.

  And still the rain kept coming.

  Moments before I thought I was going to rip my ears off because of the constantly falling water, it stopped. Two days after it stopped, the clouds moved out, and a marvelous sun began to dry up the mess its nemesis had made.

  Knowing Kate’s parents still didn’t want me talking to her, I called her up using star sixty-seven to hide my number on their caller ID. I pretended I was a girl from school named Jessica.

  It was sort of embarrassing that her parents believed me so easily.

  Having no school to attend and nothing but time on our hands, we made plans to meet behind the garage and check on our stone. I put on a sweatshirt and went to wait for her. It wasn’t long before she showed up.

  “Hi,” I said coolly, as she came around the garage house corner.

  I know it’s not really great for my street credibility to admit this, but every time I saw Kate, things inside my stomach sort of jumped around, and my hands got sweaty. I mean, she was attractive, and I was heavily in like with her.

  Kate hugged me and then asked where I had gotten such an ugly sweatshirt. I would have felt bad, but she was right. Thomas had bought the sweatshirt for me a couple of weeks before. It was yellow with light blue streaks across the top and a violin on it.

  “Thomas bought it for me,” I explained. “Every day he asks me when I’m going to wear it.”

  “I feel really lucky that today’s the day,” Kate smiled.

  “He thinks I play the violin,” I told her.

  “Why does he think that?” she asked.

  “Because I told him once that I needed to go practice the violin,” I said. “I wanted to avoid cleaning a bunch of jars Millie needed for canning.”

  “Serves you right then,” Kate said, staring at the sweatshirt.

  We walked through the still-damp forest filling each other in on the boring things we had done since we last saw one another. When we reached the base of the mountain where the tracks and stairs went up, we had pretty much caught up on each other’s life.

  “I didn’t miss these stairs,” I said as we climbed.

  “Me neither.”

  After we had hiked up and were inside the cave, I flipped the lights on. I wasn’t surprised to find that everything was just as it was when I last left it. The large steel door leading into the massive cavern where the stone had been planted was still closed. I had shut it to make sure that nothing got in or out.

  I ran to the big door and lifted the latch up. The larger cavern was lit, and I could see the four posts in the center of it. The huge, leafy cocoon was lying on the ground, split open.

  “Kate!” I yelled.

  “I’m right behind you,” she whispered back.

  “The dragon’s gone.”

  “I can see that,” she replied.

  “Where is she?” I looked behind a tall pile of crates but she wasn’t there. “How big do you think she is?”

  “The others weren’t too small,” Kate answered while heading to the back tunnel door to make sure it was still locked.

  I jumped onto one of the many barrels and glanced down. I couldn’t see anything other than crates, barrels, and poorly lit dirt. The large cage that was carved into the wall was empty as usual. I looked down into the small spring, but there was nothing in the water.

  “The back door’s still locked!” Kate shouted.

  “Is she in a box?” I asked. “Did she dig down into the dirt? Wait, what about those crates?”

  I ran to the far side and searched behind a wall of boxes that were too high to see behind. It was the last place she could possibly be, and I was fully expecting to see her crouched down hiding behind them.

  There was nothing but shadows.

  Both Kate and I walked back to the center of the massive cavern, figuratively scratching our heads. I looked down at the split cocoon. There was an imprint in the large cocoon, and thick yellow goo ran out of it.

  “How could she get out of here?” I asked.

  “What about your father?”

  “I told him about the cave, but he wouldn’t take . . . I mean why would he . . . I guess he could have,” I moaned.

  “Does your book say anything about what a queen dragon does once she’s born?”

  “I can’t remember.
”

  “That was a problem last time as well,” Kate complained. “You’ve got to read.”

  “How about I give it to you and you read it?”

  “That’s not how it works,” Kate reminded me.

  “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  I put my hands over my face and sighed heavenward. When I took my hands off my eyes, my head was tilted back, and something flashed briefly from the high ceiling of the cavern. I stepped back.

  “Um, Kate,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Look up.”

  Kate craned her head back and looked toward the ceiling. There was nothing but darkness there.

  “Why am I doing this?” she asked.

  “I thought I . . .”

  Two eyes suddenly looked down at us. Kate actually screamed, and I gasped in air the wrong way and began to hiccup.

  The eyes disappeared.

  I know we had been trying to find her, but for some reason both of us turned and ran away. We actually had a pretty good reason. There was a dragon hanging over us on the ceiling. We crouched behind two empty barrels and whispered rapidly.

  “Did you see that?” I hiccupped.

  “No,” Kate sassed back. “I just screamed for the fun of it.”

  “What do we do?”

  “I have no idea.”

  We both stared up at the ceiling, looking for another sign of the dragon. There was some movement in the darkness, and a bit of white dropped from the black and then disappeared back up.

  A huge hiccup sprang from my mouth. “Sorry,” I said embarrassed. “I think that was part of her tail.”

  “All I saw was something white.”

  “We should get her some food,” I suggested. “Maybe she’ll come down for that.”

  “We’re going to carry food up those stairs?” Kate whined. “That’ll be awful.”

  “We could get the train working,” I suggested again. Sure it was a hundred years old, and, yes, there was a forest growing over its tracks. But I remember some adult once saying something like, ‘trying is good.’ And even though it was an adult who said it, it still seemed like half-decent advice—at least in the case of trying to get a cool, old train running.