Northwood

by Brian Falkner

“Lie down,” Cecilia yelled. “It’ll be safer.”

  Rocky obediently lay down on the floor of the basket, curling up to fit in the tight space.

  “That dog!” Jana said, laughing. “It’s almost like he understands you.”

  Cecilia laughed back, but didn’t say a thing as she tugged on the string.

  Nothing happened.

  She tugged a little harder, and again, nothing happened.

  She pulled it a third time, and when there was no result, she turned to Jana with a worried look in her eyes.

  “You wanna go fishing for dog?” Jana said. “You gotta be much stronger than that.”

  Jana stretched her hands out in front of her, interlacing her fingers and cracking her knuckles. She took the string from Cecilia’s hand and gave it a sharp yank.

  Below them, the basket wobbled and Rocky gave a little whimper.

  Jana jiggled the line as if she really was catching a fish. “Gotta shake out the sand,” she said.

  One edge of the basket seemed to rise up a little. As it rose, more sand must have fallen out, because it lifted even higher off the ground.

  “Bam, bam, bam!” Jana shouted in Cecilia’s ear.

  Then, to Cecilia’s great joy, the whole basket began to float up, very slowly at first, but she could see the constant trickle of sand falling out from beneath it.

  As the sand fell, the basket got lighter, so it rose higher and faster. It climbed over the fence and past the second-story windows of the balloon house, past the third floor, the fourth, and the fifth. As it climbed up toward the attic balcony, Jana began to reel the string in, pulling the basket closer and closer until it was right up alongside them. She reached out with a strong arm and pulled the basket toward her.

  Rocky, by now, had overcome his nervousness and was standing up in the basket with his paws on the edge, barking with excitement.

  “Sit down, Rocky!” Cecilia called out. “You’ll tip the basket over.”

  Together they pulled the basket, with Rocky inside, over the edge of the balcony.

  Cecilia quickly reached up to untie one of the balloons, letting it escape. She released another balloon, and another, until the basket was sitting firmly on the floor of the balcony.

  Rocky hopped out of the basket and straight onto Cecilia, knocking her over backward and licking her face like they were long-lost friends.

  “That’s one happy fella!” Jana exclaimed.

  “We did it!” Cecilia shouted, more than a little surprised that her plan had gone so well.

  She looked down at Mr. Proctor’s yard. There was a small mound of sand where the basket had landed, and a trail of sand leading up over the fence, but even as she watched, it stirred and began to disperse in the breeze.

  “We did it,” she said again.

  5

  SAFE AT LAST

  THEY DIDN'T HAVE any dog food in the house, but Jana sorted that out with a bowl full of cut-up leftover steak and vegetables. Cecilia gave Rocky some water in one of her mother’s best ceramic bowls, and Rocky ate and drank like a king.

  Afterward he wiped his mouth with his paws — very politely, Cecilia thought — and woofed a short but heartfelt thank you.

  “You’re welcome,” Cecilia said, and caught a quick glance from Jana out of the corner of her eye.

  Jana went off to carry on with the housework because housework won’t do itself, and Cecilia took Rocky up to the attic to play.

  He wasn’t very playful though. He really just wanted to sleep, which Cecilia understood quite well because she often felt the same way after a big meal. She also knew that Rocky would be weak from months of near starvation.

  Just then, the doorbell rang. Even that didn’t wake Rocky. Cecilia left him sleeping and bounded down the stairs to see who it was.

  The doorbell sounded a second time before she even got down to the third level of the house, so the person must have been in a real hurry. It must be something very urgent, Cecilia thought, or maybe they are just impatient.

  She got to the door as the bell sounded for a third time. How rude, she thought, and opened the door.

  Standing on the doorstep in a shiny black suit was the loose-skinned, bony frame of Mr. Proctor. The expression on his face was enough to curdle your milk and curl your hair.

  “Where’s my dog?” he demanded. “I want my dog back.”

  “Hello, Mr. Proctor,” Cecilia began, because her parents had taught her always to be polite when answering the telephone or the front door.

  “I know you took him, you interfering little busybody.”

  Cecilia was shocked. Even though she had already experienced Mr. Proctor’s temper once that day, it was quite another thing to be confronted on your own doorstep.

  “Where is my dog?” Mr. Proctor repeated, narrowing his eyes again.

  “Have you considered the possibility that your dog got so thin and dehydrated that he just crumbled into a pile of sand?” Cecilia asked. She thought it was a fair question to ask and, being a question, was not at all dishonest.

  “Don’t try to be clever,” Mr. Proctor said. “My aunt saw the whole thing. Now, where is my dog?”

  “I don’t believe he is your dog,” Cecilia said firmly. “Rocky really belongs to your wife.”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wished she hadn’t said them. Partly because she’d said something that she shouldn’t have known, but mostly because as soon as she mentioned Mrs. Proctor, she realized it was the wrong thing to say. It was like lighting a match near a box of firecrackers.

  “How dare you!” Mr. Proctor shouted. “You cheeky little brat!” Words started to bubble out of his mouth with no real sense or meaning, and his face was again the color of a sun-ripened tomato.

  “Get out of the way,” he finally managed to say. He reached out and gripped Cecilia’s shoulder with long, bony fingers, shoving her to one side.

  “Ow!” cried Cecilia, reaching up and trying to pry his fingers out from where they were digging into her shoulder. She was stunned. Grown-ups should never hurt children!

  “Where is he?” snarled the raging monster on her doorstep. Then the expression on his face changed abruptly, and he looked up and past Cecilia.

  From behind her, Cecilia heard a cracking of knuckles and a quiet voice.

  “You take your hand off that child, else I gonna break your fingers.”

  Mr. Proctor’s hand loosened, then slipped from Cecilia’s shoulder.

  “Cecilia, child, you go upstairs while I talk to Mr. Proctor.”

  Cecilia needed no urging. She turned and ran up five flights of stairs to the attic, where she found Rocky wide awake, lips drawn back, growling at the noise from below.

  “You stay here,” Cecilia said. “We need to stay away from him.”

  Rocky stopped growling, but he circled the room nervously.

  Cecilia’s heart was beating fast and she wiped her hands on her clothes again and again.

  The front door slammed and Jana’s heavy footsteps sounded up the stairs. She arrived in the attic with a phone in her hand.

  “I phoned your daddy,” she said, “and your mama. They’re coming home now.”

  She drew Cecilia into her large bosom and wrapped her huge arms around her. Cecilia almost felt that she had been swallowed up by the large woman, and the terror flowed out of her.

  “That man — he’s got no love in his heart,” Jana said. “Something done sucked all the love outta him.”

  ***

  For the next ten minutes there was silence. It’s like the eye of a storm, Cecilia thought, when all seems calm, but the worst is yet to come. And she was right in ways that she couldn’t possibly have imagined.

  Her father arrived home first, his sleek sports car appearing like a splash of red paint at the end of the road, then getting bi
gger and bigger until it turned into a car with a set of golf clubs sliding around in the backseat.

  Next, Cecilia heard the sound of an engine nearby. A big engine, Cecilia thought, like that of a tractor, or a . . .

  Bulldozer!

  She rushed across to the other side of the room and stared down as the big yellow machine on the other side of the fence began to move, turning slowly and inching forward.

  It was clear that whoever was driving the machine did not really know how to, because the driver kept going forward and backward as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing.

  Eventually, though, it completed the turn.

  To Cecilia’s horror, it began to advance, like a lumbering yellow rhinoceros, directly toward the balloon house.

  The high wooden fence was the first thing in its way, but that was no more than an irritation to this huge beast.

  Inside the vehicle, Cecilia could now see the spindly shape of Mr. Proctor in his neat, black suit.

  The bulldozer disappeared from view as it got closer to the house, but she could still hear it: the grinding rumble of the engine and the metallic jangling and sharp squeals from the tracks.

  Then she heard her father’s car at the front of the house, followed by the thud of Jana’s footsteps running down the stairs.

  The entire house shuddered.

  There was a gasping, tearing sound and the floor beneath her feet dropped suddenly as all the balloon-like globes shifted position and settled into slightly different places.

  Cecilia screamed a little scream that stopped halfway out of her mouth as the bulldozer crashed into the house again.

  Outside, she could hear her father and Jana shouting at Mr. Proctor, although only bits of words escaped over the roaring of the bulldozer engine.

  The entire house shook again, knocking Cecilia to the floor. Suddenly, there was a soft cushion over her, and she realized that Rocky had thrown his body over hers to protect her.

  And then the most amazing thing happened.

  6

  HELIUM

  THE ARCHITECT WHO built the Undergarment house, Mr. Landon Relfe, had always been a little worried about the design. It was so tall, he had said, and such a strange shape, that it could easily collapse in an earthquake.

  He had been particularly worried about the attic, because it was so high off the ground, so he built in a safety feature. There were special tanks and valves that injected helium gas into the skin of the attic in the (unlikely) event of an earthquake.

  The idea was simple. If there was an earthquake, the helium tanks would quickly inflate the attic balloon and give it lift — not a lot, but enough to allow it to float gently down to the ground, instead of falling and crashing from six stories up. It was a great idea.

  And it worked! As the house shuddered and wobbled, the special valves opened. There was a huge hissing from all around Cecilia as the walls of the attic began to inflate with the helium gas. There were two layers in the walls, she suddenly discovered: an inner one and an outer rubber one. The outer one began to puff out as all the gas poured into it.

  The house sagged some more, and suddenly the attic was free of the rest of the house. The door to the attic, which had been open, automatically slammed shut in order to prevent anyone from falling out. Now all that was left to happen was the attic balloon needed to float gently to the ground, as Mr. Relfe had intended.

  However, what Mr. Relfe had not planned for was the weight of the occupants. When he had done his calculations about the amount of gas required to stop the attic from falling, he had anticipated that it would be holding at least two grown-ups . . . not a little girl and a dreadfully thin Samoyed dog.

  So instead of floating gently down, the attic started to float gently up.

  7

  UP, UP, AND AWAY

  AFTER SHE GOT over the initial shock and the fear that the attic would suddenly plummet from the sky like a stone, Cecilia found herself actually enjoying the ride. The sky was lovely and blue, and she floated along like a bubble in the breeze, drifting well below the few wisps of cotton-ball clouds.

  Looking back at her house, Cecilia saw Jana and her father staring at the sky after her, and she waved to let them know that she was all right.

  Even crazy Mr. Proctor had stopped attacking the house and was gaping up at her.

  Poor Rocky was running around in circles like a windup toy until Cecilia caught him and stroked his fur to calm him down, after which he lay in the center of the room with his paws over his eyes.

  The wind was constantly changing its mind, but it mostly seemed to be coming from the northeast, pushing them southwest toward Lake Rosedale. Cecilia was a little alarmed as they began to drop toward the water.

  “The warm air off the land makes the balloon rise,” she told Rocky, trying to sound calm. “But the colder air above the water makes us go lower. It’s just physics.”

  It might have been just physics, but the farther they went out across the lake, the lower they got. Cecilia thought they would land in the lake and wondered if the balloon would float.

  But they stayed airborne as they floated over the island where the ancient stone Church of the Yellow Bird stood. They were so low now that Cecilia feared the balloon might impale itself on the church’s sharp spire. But they drifted past it, and over the even older ruins of the monastery, slowly rising as they crossed the warm land of the island.

  They dropped again once they were past the island, and the balloon was almost touching the water when they reached the far sandy shore of the lake.

  Cecilia thought about throwing open the door and jumping down to the soft, warm sand, but by the time she had thought this and got to the door, they were already past the sand, and rising higher and higher every second.

  Cecilia stared down at the tops of people’s houses. She had thought that most houses just had boring metal or tiled roofs, but in fact she found that some roofs were quite interesting.

  One large brick house had a vibrant green garden on its roof, complete with a small stream that wound its way through rocks and shrubs and over a small waterfall into a blue pond.

  Another house had a big circle painted on its roof, like a helicopter landing pad. In the center was painted in large yellow letters, UFOs WELCOME HERE. A middle-aged man and woman, both wearing silver overalls that looked like spacesuits, climbed out onto the roof through a trapdoor and waved up at the balloon with both arms, beckoning to Cecilia and Rocky.

  But the attic balloon clearly had no intention of landing on the UFO pad. It drifted right past it, heading toward an old man sitting in an armchair on the roof of his house, playing the violin. He stopped playing and gawked up in amazement as they drifted above him.

  Farther and farther they went, over office buildings, factories, and eventually over the wide-open spaces of Mr. Jingle’s Wild West Show and African Safari Park.

  An elephant trumpeted, raising its trunk into the sky, as they flew overhead. To the untrained eye, it seemed like a greeting. But Cecilia, although she didn’t speak Elephant very well, knew that it was really saying, “What the heck is that?”

  Two giraffes munching on leaves stopped eating and turned their heads in unison, watching Cecilia and Rocky float by.

  The wind changed its mind again and they drifted toward ProctorMart. The balloon began to settle as they neared the large superstore. A big grassy meadow beckoned and Cecilia went back to the door, ready to leap out. But before they got low enough to even think about jumping, they drifted past the soft green grass and over the big black asphalt parking lot of ProctorMart, where hundreds of cars lined up in well-behaved rows.

  The heat from the asphalt hit them immediately. It was as if the balloon was a soccer ball and a giant foot had kicked it upward. They shot up into the sky, so high that even the huge ProctorMart looked like a toy shop far below.

 
As they rose, the wind seemed to change its mind one more time. Cecilia felt the balloon start to move northward, and ProctorMart slipped from her view.

  The balloon stopped rising, but the wind pushed at them, batting them through the sky like a child playing with a toy.

  The wind had made up its mind. North was the way to go.

  Right toward the dire, brooding, breathing, malevolent, mist-shrouded forest of Northwood.

  Cecilia gasped.

  Perhaps the forest sensed she was coming. Or maybe it was just a trick of the breeze. But at that moment, two edges of the mist curled up and a gap opened in the middle. And if you looked at it a certain way and used just a little bit of imagination, you could almost say that the mist was smiling a dark and unpleasant smile.

  8

  THE CANOPY

  THE MIST SEEMED to reach up to them as they passed over it. Cecilia pressed her fingers against the wall of the balloon.

  What unknown dangers awaited them in the dark forest?

  The trees, like the lake, were cold, and the balloon dropped rapidly once they were over the forest.

  Cecilia looked farther to the north, hoping to see an end to the forest, praying that they might keep floating long enough to go right over the top of Northwood and emerge to farmland, or whatever was on the other side. But all she could see in that direction were trees, gesturing and grasping, dancing a macabre waltz in the gusting breeze.

  They dropped farther, but so did the forest, descending into a low valley that seemed to grow colder and darker with every foot.

  They were down in the mist now. Trees stretched up with bony branches, scratching and scraping at the underside of the balloon.

  Farther and farther they flew, each moment carrying them farther away from the edge of the forest. Farther away from home.

  A blue bird — a kind Cecilia had never seen before — appeared alongside the balloon. It hovered for a moment as if watching them, then took off into the valley in a sudden blur of movement.