Blue in the Face

by Gerry Swallow

  Before Elspeth could answer, Earl Grey shouted, “Quiet!” He was pressing his left ear firmly to the ground, with his eyes closed tightly.

  “What is it?” asked Jack, ignoring the plea for silence. “What’s the matter?”

  “Horses,” said Earl Grey. “Perhaps a hundred or more. And they’re coming this way. Fast.”

  Star light, star bright,

  First star I see tonight;

  I wish it weren’t, with all my might,

  A large torcano, burning bright.

  Chapter 19

  Though crossing Torcano Alley in darkness may have been a foolhardy venture, to just sit around and wait for Krool’s soldiers to show up and arrest them would be stupidity in its purest form.

  The half moon, hanging in a clear night sky, provided some light but also created long, dark shadows that could be mistaken for the seemingly bottomless cracks in the earth.

  The other travelers followed Jack and Jill, crisscrossing and sidestepping, while placing all their trust in the unpredictable ground beneath their feet. Again Gene demonstrated firsthand the usefulness of sticks when Jill used him to tap at the ground in front of her as she walked, testing it for stability.

  The silk slippers provided Elspeth’s feet with little comfort on the rocky ground as she followed behind Jill and directly in front of Jack, while Winkie and the trio of tailless mice rode upon Jack’s broad shoulders. Georgie, at the end of the group, stopped to make frequent checks of the cliffs behind them.

  It was hard to tell in that faint, blue moonlight, but after an hour without incident it looked as if they’d made it nearly halfway across. That was when Georgie turned, stood silent for a moment, and said, “Uh-oh.”

  There they were, one hundred strong, lined up along the edge of the cliff—dark, spear-holding silhouettes that, from this distance and in this light, strongly resembled a wrought-iron fence.

  “It’s okay,” said Jack in a less than convincing voice. “They’ll never come after us while it’s still dark.”

  No sooner had Jack uttered those words than Krool’s men began guiding their horses down the zigzag trail and into Torcano Alley, where they would have a distinct advantage over their prey.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Jill. “What do we do? They’re sure to catch us on horseback.”

  “There’s only one thing we can do,” said Earl Grey. “We’ve got to pick up the pace.”

  Without discussing it further, Jill continued, this time faster and less certain than before. “Watch it here,” she cautioned, while using Gene to point out a large crevasse hidden in the shadow of a petrified oak tree. By the time they’d gotten around it safely, they could hear the sounds of horses’ hooves, some four hundred strong, clip-clopping across the desert floor.

  “We’re not going to make it,” said Georgie, glancing over his shoulder.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Elspeth. “Of course we’ll make it.”

  “Only if we run,” said Jill.

  “Then let’s run,” said Elspeth, confused as to why any discussion of it was necessary.

  “But if we run,” said Jack, “we could fall to our deaths.”

  “Seriously,” said Elspeth. “You people are absurd.” Elspeth pushed her way to the front, hiked up her gown, and broke into a jog. Not surprisingly, she was in no better shape now than she had been several hours earlier when running from the castle to the forest. As before, a searing pain developed quickly across her abdomen as she sucked in more oxygen than her atrophied lungs could process. Just when she thought she could continue no farther, the ground beneath her feet crumbled and she began to fall.

  She barely had time to scream when her arm was nearly dislocated at the elbow as she found herself dangling above a large sinkhole, rocks and pebbles plopping into a bright-orange bed of magma some fifty feet down. The only thing that had stopped her from plunging into it herself was Jack, who held firmly to Elspeth’s wrist, while Winkie clung tightly to her hair. When Jack had seen the girl falling, the lunge he’d taken to save her had caused Winkie to tumble off his shoulder, roll down his arm, and land squarely on Elspeth’s head.

  “Sorry,” said Winkie, though he did not loosen his grip on Elspeth until Jack had hoisted her up and placed the shaken girl on more solid ground.

  “Thought we’d lost you there,” said Jack. “Again.”

  “I hate this place.” Elspeth panted, breathless from both the near-death experience and the running that had preceded it. Then, remembering that her life had just been saved, she added, “Thank you, Jack.”

  “No problem. You know, you can call me Dad, if you want,” Jack said hopefully. His face exposed the disappointment he felt when Elspeth replied only with “I know.”

  The sinkhole, in addition to having nearly been the end of young Elspeth Pule, also allowed Krool’s men to close the gap even farther. The healthy head start that Elspeth and her friends once enjoyed had withered and wasted away to a mere five-minute lead, while the forest was still a good hour away.

  “I’m afraid it’s over,” said Georgie.

  They stood and watched the horsemen moving nearer and nearer, and while Georgie and the others hung their heads in defeat, Elspeth did what she did best. She got mad. “No!” she growled with fists in the air. “It’s not going to end this way! We’re not going to take this! Do you hear me? We are not going to take it!”

  The longer she yelled, the louder she got. Strangely, however, the louder she got, the more difficult she was to hear. A competing noise was rising up across the desert. From this distance it could have been a large, twinkling star hanging just above the horizon. But of course it wasn’t.

  “Torcano,” said Jill as it grew closer, larger, and hotter.

  “It’s a big one,” said Jack, now yelling because, in addition to the whirring of rocks and lava, there was the sound of a hundred panic-stricken horses, rearing up, snorting, whinnying, and throwing riders to the ground.

  “We should run,” said Georgie.

  “No,” said Jill. “We don’t know what path it will take. We’re better off to stay where we are and hope it spares us. Trust me. Jack and I have been through a few of these in our time.”

  “Easy for you to say,” said Gene. “You’re not made of wood.”

  “Maybe it’ll hit Krool’s men,” said Barry White.

  “If there’s any justice in this world,” Jack added while taking his wife’s hand and squeezing tightly. He felt someone gripping his other hand and looked down to see that it was Elspeth, her eyes lost in the fiery funnel racing toward them.

  Those few who have seen and survived it will tell you there’s nothing quite so beautiful and mesmerizing as a torcano at night. Like a towering bonfire of gas and stone spinning across a darkened sky, it would seem certain that this is what the birth of the universe or the beginning of our galaxy must have looked like.

  For the record, Jack had been right. This was a big one, the narrow end of its funnel nearly as wide as the gap separating Elspeth and her friends from Krool’s men and their terrorized horses. But neither the horses nor the soldiers had need to worry because the torcano had chosen its path. When it became all too apparent which direction it would favor, Jack yelled, “Run!”

  But running was of no consequence to a monster of this size and speed. Those of Krool’s men who had not been thrown to the ground sat atop their horses and watched as the torcano quickly chased down the escaped prisoners and mercifully (if nature can show mercy) swept across them in an instant.

  The soldiers took no joy in what they had seen as the torcano continued on its path. Once the terrible noise had faded and the horses were again relatively calm, the large man with the Van Dyke beard led his horse to the site where Elspeth and the others had last been seen.

  He climbed down from his mount, and when the dust had settled sufficiently he spotted on the ground a single slipper, its once-pink silk now charred black and still smoldering.

  As a roost
er crowed somewhere far off in the distance, the man knelt and plucked the shoe from the ground. “That’s it then,” he said in a quiet voice. “That’s the end of her.”

  Cock-a-doodle-doo!

  My dame has lost her shoe.

  Or if you prefer, her shoe lost her

  When away she flew.

  Chapter 20

  “Are you certain?” Krool demanded while clutching the blackened slipper. He brought it to his nose and breathed in the sour, smoky smell.

  “That’s all that’s left of her,” said the man with the Van Dyke, the other three of Krool’s most trusted guards by his side. “That’s all that’s left of any of them.”

  Krool walked across his sleeping chambers and peered out through the East Tower window. When he turned away from the window, the look on his face made the guards fear that they had failed him somehow. They would have expected a smile or some look of satisfaction. “I would have preferred her head,” he said, looking at the slipper resting upon his open palm. “But I suppose this will have to do as souvenirs go.”

  He returned his gaze to the sunrise and said nothing for such a long time that the guards quietly slinked out of the room without further words among them.

  Elspeth was the first to regain consciousness. Lying on her back, it took her several minutes to realize exactly what she was looking at. It was pure blackness, punctuated by a thin stripe of orange and pink running down the middle. The stripe, she eventually determined, was the sky, while the darkness was provided by the steep walls of the crevasse in which she lay.

  She felt a dull ache, not in any specific place but all over. Slowly, she sat up and the sound of her movement and the pained groans she emitted began to stir the others lying nearby.

  Jack and Jill, Georgie, Gene, Winkie, and the mice—they were all there, and each remarkably intact for having suffered such a fall. There were bumps, bruises, and partly singed clothing, not to mention a missing slipper, but no broken bones or fractured skulls. Looking up, Jack estimated the drop at no less than a hundred feet. “The upward pull of the torcano must have slowed us down,” he said. “We’re very lucky to be alive.”

  “Yes, but for how long?” said Winkie, giving voice to what they all were thinking. Even for the most accomplished of mountaineers, outfitted with the best equipment money could buy, climbing out would be impossible. “Better that we had died from the fall than from starvation.”

  “Starvation?” said Barry White, worried that his plumpness might qualify him as a food source should it come down to that.

  “There must be a way out,” said Elspeth, looking this way and that along the dark, stone alleyway.

  “Perhaps tunneling downward, we might come out on the other side of the earth,” said James Brown.

  “That’s absurd,” said Georgie. “We’re doomed.”

  The situation did seem quite hopeless and did not become any less so until Elspeth noticed a strange noise at her feet. Squinting into the darkness, she soon realized the scratching sound was the result of Gene, lying on the ground, wiggling uncontrollably.

  “Gene?” she asked, kneeling next to him. “What is it?”

  “Water,” said Gene. “Somewhere nearby. Please, take me away from it.”

  But Elspeth did just the opposite. Quickly, she picked up the quivering stick and pointed him first in one direction and then the next. “This way,” she said.

  Jack and Jill looked at each other and shrugged. Then Jack placed Winkie and the mice aboard his shoulders, and they all followed Elspeth through the narrow passageway, groping the walls for guidance in the dim light of early dawn.

  “I fail to see how this is helpful in any way,” said Georgie. “We can’t survive on water alone.”

  “If there is water,” said Elspeth, “it had to down get here somehow.”

  With each step, Gene grew more and more animated until finally there came the unmistakable sound of someone stepping in a puddle. That someone was Elspeth, and the puddle actually proved to be a small stream, running across their path from another crevasse that intersected their own at a right angle.

  “Yes,” said Elspeth. “Good job, Gene.”

  “What can I say?” Gene replied. “I do what I do.”

  “But which way now?” asked Jack, turning in a full circle to consider all four directions.

  “Water runs downhill,” said Elspeth. “This way.”

  She took a sharp right, leading them upstream. As they walked, the small trickling of water slowly became faster, deeper, and wider. In ten minutes’ time the underground creek covered Elspeth’s ankles, and in ten more it reached nearly to her knees. She bunched up the soaking-wet gown and trudged onward, badly missing her old tennis shoes and her favorite pair of jeans. The rushing water directed them to another right turn and then a left. By now it was waist deep, and moving through it was slow and difficult work, especially for Jack with his injured foot and the combined weight of four hitchhikers upon his shoulders.

  “Come on, Jack,” his wife urged. “Keep moving.”

  “I’m doing my best,” the man grunted.

  But as the water became swifter and deeper it also became brighter. In fact, it began to sparkle like a starlit sky. Elspeth stopped and looked up to see a brilliant amber sun reflecting off a bubbling waterfall, which cascaded into the crevasse from the surface just twenty feet above.

  “We made it! You did it, Elspeth,” said Winkie. The praise caused Gene to clear his throat. “Yes, you too, Gene. You both did it.”

  Though climbing up a twenty-foot waterfall may have been easier than trying to scale the walls of a crevasse five times that height, it was still no simple task. The rocks were smooth and slimy in places, and a firmly planted foot could easily slide off or be forced away by the rushing water.

  Elspeth had a particularly tough go of it, being that her left hand was full of bunched-up execution gown while her right hand was full of Gene. One foot was bare and the other was covered by a nearly useless silk slipper. Still, determination and anger spurred her on once more until finally her eyes were hit with a flood of sunshine, spreading out above the tops of the trees that stood less than a hundred feet away.

  “The forest!” she cried.

  Before she could climb any farther, Winkie called out, “Hold on! Krool’s army. They could be waiting for us.”

  In her excitement to be out of that crevasse, Elspeth had not considered this. She turned slowly like a groundhog looking for its shadow and was happy to report that she could see no sign of Krool’s army or of any other living thing—unless you count rocks, sticks, and bushes, of course. “They’re gone,” she announced.

  “Maybe the torcano reversed course and got them,” said Winkie.

  Elspeth pulled herself out of the hole, and one by one the others joined her, each of them overjoyed to once again be on the surface of the earth. For some time they all just stood in the bright sunshine, allowing their wet clothes and cold bodies to draw in its warmth, while at the same time considering the horror that some of the king’s horses and some of the king’s men might have endured.

  “Well,” said Jack. “If the torcano did get them, that’s one hundred fewer we’ll have to fight.”

  “Come on,” said Jill. “The suburbs are this way.” They followed her into the shadows of the trees, and just before entering the forest Elspeth took one look back for friend or foe and came away both disappointed and relieved.

  As Elspeth trudged on, it became increasingly difficult to stay focused and awake. She pined for her lavender room back home and her soft, spongy bed with its smooth sheets and pillow that sometimes smelled of West Coast rain. She even missed the mildewed, water-stained carpet.

  The longer they walked, the more familiar the path became, until finally Elspeth recognized a particular willow just ahead.

  “Hello, Manuel,” said Jill to the guardian tree.

  “Señora!” he exclaimed. “I was afraid I would never see you again.”

&nbs
p; In Elspeth’s world, people sometimes used the term “tree hugger” to describe one who advocates for the environment. This was the first time she had ever seen a tree doing the hugging. Manuel wrapped his wispy branches around Jill and gave her a hearty squeeze. “Little Robin Redbreast said you’d been sentenced to life in prison.”

  “We were,” said Jill. “And we’d still be there if King William hadn’t arranged for our rescue.”

  “King William the Umpteenth?” Manuel replied.

  As Jack stepped forward, Manuel immediately noticed the small man perched upon his shoulder. “His Majesty returns,” he said with a gasp. “Long live the king.”

  “Thank you,” said Winkie, pleased to have been addressed by that title for the first time in many years. “But I won’t officially be king again until this young lady rids us of that evil Krool.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Manuel. “Are you saying she’s . . . ?”

  “Our daughter,” Jack said proudly.

  “Your daughter?” said Manuel. “But I thought that Krool . . .”

  “He did,” said Jill. “But she survived. And here she is.”

  “This is little Jacqueline?” said Manuel.

  “My name is Elspeth, not Jacqueline,” said Elspeth. “And I’ve only agreed to any of this because apparently it’s the only way for me to get home. Speaking of which, before we get started I’m going to need some sleep.”

  Winkie nodded to Manuel. The tree pulled back his branches, and there was the encampment just as Elspeth had last seen it only two days prior. Loitering about was the same group as before with one noticeable addition. Winkie was the first to lay eyes upon the newcomer.

  “Who, pray tell, is that?” he asked, wide eyed and loose jawed.

  When Elspeth caught sight of Dolly Dew Eyes, sitting on a tree stump and playing chess with Bo-Peep, she was initially angry. That anger was soon mixed with admiration as she watched the doll now known as Farrah step onto the board and lug her queen knight to c6, which immediately prompted Bo-Peep to capture it with her king rook.

  “Yes,” Elspeth muttered. “Now queen bishop a3.” And when Farrah did just that, Elspeth said, “Boden’s mate. Absolutely brilliant.”