Northwood

by Brian Falkner

  “She’s wearing the crown,” Avery noted.

  So this was not Princess Annachanel, Cecilia realized. It was Queen Annachanel. Then the next portrait must be Queen Annachanel’s husband — a handsome young man wearing the King’s crown. The new King.

  On it went, down the wall. Each pair of paintings, a beautiful couple wearing the royal crowns. This was the royal dynasty that had started with Danyon and Natassia and disappeared somewhere in the mists of time.

  “Listen,” Rocky woofed. Cecilia took her eyes off of the portraits. The noise. It didn’t sound like a river now, and it definitely wasn’t a ghost.

  “Can you hear that?” she asked.

  “Come on,” Avery said. She led the way down past the ornate dining table to a set of double doors at the far end of the room.

  She stopped at the doors and listened.

  Rocky sniffed at them and shook his head to say that nobody was outside.

  Avery eased open one of the doors and the others followed her out.

  They entered a corridor, where the noise was even louder.

  “Quietly,” Avery whispered.

  They crept along the darkened corridor, trying not to breathe too loudly. The noise grew louder. Ahead of them, a thin line of light glowed from under another set of double doors.

  More doors were to the left and right of them. Above each door were signs. They were written in strange old characters, but they were still recognizable words: sitting room, living room, kitchen, parlor, nursery.

  The last door on their right, before the double doors at the end, had no sign. But it was here that the whirring, buzzing, humming noise was the loudest.

  Avery looked back at the others and raised an eyebrow. Evan and Cecilia both nodded (so did Rocky, but Avery didn’t see that).

  Avery reached down and grasped the old brass handle of the door securely, then pushed it open.

  The noise hit them immediately. It was much louder now: a chugging, throbbing sound that enveloped them.

  The door opened into darkness and Avery held up the lantern so they could see into the room.

  “What on Earth is that?” Avery asked.

  “I don’t believe it,” Cecilia said.

  21

  A SHOCK

  CECILIA KNEW WHAT it was immediately, because there was one in her house.

  It was a small engine, surrounded by a tubular stainless steel frame. On top of the frame was a red metal cover, while underneath were lots of bits and pieces that she didn’t quite understand.

  But she knew what it was called and what it did.

  It was called a gasoline generator.

  It was kind of like a car engine, but it didn’t make anything move. Instead it made electricity.

  A thick black cable snaked out of the machine and disappeared into a hole high in one of the walls. She told the others what it was and what it did.

  But why does the King need electricity? Cecilia wondered.

  She could tell that Avery and Evan were having trouble understanding the very idea of electricity. She realized that they had never in their lives seen an electric light, or a TV set, or any of the other wonderful inventions that electricity made possible.

  “Quick,” she said. “Shut the door before they notice the sound has gotten louder.”

  Avery pulled the door shut and they crept farther along the corridor, toward large double doors.

  These doors also had no sign, but they didn’t need one. Cecilia was sure this would be the royal chamber — the King and Queen’s bedroom.

  There was sudden laughter from inside the room, and another low background noise that she couldn’t identify.

  Rocky sniffed at the door, but said nothing.

  Light poured through a keyhole at about her waist height. Cecilia sank to her knees and put her eye up to it.

  “No way,” she whispered. Her legs felt like jelly and her eye slipped from the hole.

  “What is it?” Evan whispered.

  “Shhh,” Avery said.

  Cecilia put her eye back to the keyhole. Now she could see why the King needed electricity. Now she knew the truth about King Harry.

  Over by a wall a refrigerator sat next to a table. On the refrigerator was a microwave oven and thin cardboard boxes were stacked in a corner.

  Harold the Merciful, King of Storm and all its Environs, was sitting on a sofa with his back to her. Sitting with him on the sofa was Sergeant Lee, the big grizzly bear guard. The other guards were sitting in armchairs scattered around the room.

  None of them were looking her way. Their eyes were all glued to a corner of the room. To a glowing screen. A television set!

  They were watching an old TV show that Cecilia recognized, a comedy about a bunch of people who are trapped on a desert island.

  The King had a television set, a microwave, and a refrigerator, while his subjects lived the life of peasants, working their fingers to the bone in the fields and the mills!

  But what shocked her even more was what was in King Harry’s hands.

  In one hand he held a bottle of beer and, as she watched, he slurped merrily from it.

  In his other hand he held a slice of pizza.

  22

  A NEW PLAN

  IT IS A sad but true fact that there are always some people in the world who think they are better than the rest of us.

  Clearly King Harry was one of those people. He thought that he was better than Cecilia and Evan and Avery. He thought he was better than Mrs. Proctor and her beautiful daughter, Jazz, better than Tony Baloney and old Gimpy, and the two plumbers and the three astronomers, and all the other subjects in his kingdom.

  Better, even, than you and me.

  Some people might say, Of course he is better than the rest of us — he’s the King.

  And why shouldn’t a king have nice cold beer, stored in a nice cold refrigerator?

  And why shouldn’t a king have nice hot pizza, and a television set to while away all those long evenings when he was not engaged in kingly duties?

  Anyone could see that being a king, with all that responsibility and decision making, could be a very difficult and tiring job. As Evan might say: a very fugacious job (although that would be entirely the wrong word to use).

  Cecilia was more than a little annoyed that the King had beer and pizza and who knows what other luxuries hidden inside that refrigerator.

  But what really got her steamed up were three questions, which probably all had the same answer.

  Where did the King get the beer?

  Where did he get the gasoline for the generator?

  Where did he get the pizza?

  ***

  Evan and Avery shrugged in unison and looked blankly at Cecilia. They were seated in the lower courtyard by the waterfall. Cecilia stopped talking and tried to catch her breath. She had been jabbering at the twins for an hour.

  The problem was that they didn’t understand most of what she was trying to tell them.

  She had spent almost half an hour just trying to explain what pizza was, how it came from Italy, and how you called up the pizza place, and then the pizza was delivered it in a little red car.

  “All the way from Italy?” Avery had asked.

  Everything Cecilia tried to explain just led to more questions.

  “What’s electricity again?” Avery asked at one point, despite the fact that Cecilia had already explained that one three times.

  “Okay, okay,” Cecilia said finally, drawing in a deep breath. “It comes down to this,” she continued. “Those things that King Harry and his goons have hidden in the royal chamber —” she paused and looked around the courtyard, making sure nobody else was around “— they could only have come from outside the forest.”

  There was silence, except for the rushing water of the wate
rfall and the bubbling of the birdbath.

  “You mean King Harry knows a way out?” Avery said slowly.

  “Of course that’s what she means, dumbo,” Evan said. “Don’t be so effervescent.”

  Cecilia nodded her head. “And back in again. He probably sends his goons out to pick up supplies.”

  “They can leave any time they want?” Avery was still struggling to get her head around it, and Cecilia didn’t blame her.

  After a whole life spent trapped inside the forest, believing that there was no chance of escape, to find out that the King and his zoo just casually came and went as they pleased must have been a little too much to comprehend, really.

  “And they ordered pizza and a man came in a little red car and delivered it?” Evan was puzzled by that one.

  “Of course he didn’t just call and order it,” Cecilia said. “I’m almost certain that they don’t deliver to ancient castles in black forests. King Harry most likely had it delivered to a house near the forest, and they went and picked it up from there.”

  “But how?” Avery almost wailed.

  “They must know a way through the maze,” Evan said. “A shortcut. A path that even the lions don’t know.”

  “And why hasn’t he told everybody else?” Avery cried, but quietly, conscious of the dark windows of the castle above them. “Why make the rest of us think there’s no way out?”

  Rocky lifted his head and looked at Cecilia. He didn’t say anything, but she knew what he was thinking.

  Smart dog that he was, Rocky had figured it out before anyone.

  “Because King Harry likes being a king,” Cecilia said. “Here he’s royalty, ordering everybody around, and commanding us to do stuff. Like kiss his hand.”

  “Yuck,” woofed Rocky, and Cecilia tried not to laugh.

  Even a dog didn’t want to kiss that royal hand!

  “But out in the real world he’d be nothing,” she continued. “A nobody.”

  “What about his guards?” Evan asked, and then tried out the word that Cecilia had used. “His goons.”

  “He must pay them somehow,” Cecilia decided. “And not just with pizza and beer. Maybe he has a supply of gold or something.”

  She gritted her teeth and growled angrily, sounding surprisingly like a black lion.

  “Who should we tell first?” she asked. “How about your parents? Or Mrs. Proctor? We can call a town meeting, or whatever you do here, and let everybody else know.”

  The twins were looking at each other. They didn’t appear happy.

  “How about at dinner?” Cecilia suggested. “Everybody is together then.”

  “Matthew Skelly,” Evan said, shaking his head.

  Cecilia raised both eyebrows. “Who is he?”

  “Who was he,” Avery said.

  Cecilia just looked at them.

  “He was a boy. I think he was about twelve when he disappeared,” Evan said.

  “He broke into the royal quarters, for a dare,” Avery said. “When he came back, he was white as a ghost and wouldn’t talk to anyone about anything.”

  “They must have caught him and threatened him,” Cecilia said.

  “Two days later he disappeared,” Evan said. “Nobody worried too much. People sometimes just disappear around here.”

  “They are usually trying to find a way out through the maze,” Avery said. “Whether they make it or not, nobody knows.”

  Cecilia thought again of the lions and shuddered.

  “But maybe Matthew didn’t go into the maze on his own free will,” Evan said.

  Cecilia was horrified. “You mean they took him into the forest and left him for the lions?”

  “Nobody knows,” Avery said again. “But everyone thought that the King was teaching him a lesson.”

  “Well, we have to tell someone,” Cecilia said, her voice even softer than before, and her eyes flitting around constantly.

  “We’d just be putting them in danger,” Evan said.

  “Then we’ll tell everyone, at dinner, like I said,” Cecilia said.

  “King Harry will just deny it,” Evan said. “And the goons will back him up. And a few days later we’ll all disappear.”

  “Oh,” Cecilia said, not liking the sound of that at all. “So what can we do?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” Avery said. Evan shook his head sadly.

  “Of course there is,” Cecilia said, lifting her chin and straightening her shoulders. “All we need is a plan.”

  23

  TONY BALONEY

  THE NEXT DAY was not a good day for Tony Baloney.

  Every day Tony would leave the castle through the stone door and check on his tar traps in the tarblood trees around the clearing.

  A tar trap is a small tube painstakingly drilled into a tarblood tree. It took three or four days of drilling to make a hole in the tough bark of the trees, even for a big strong man like Tony Baloney. Then he would insert a tar tube, and a sluggish flow of precious tar, the sap of the tree, would drip through the tube.

  Each tube would run for only a week, sometimes less, before the tree would somehow heal itself and the tar would stop flowing. So Tony had a full-time job (except during harvest) drilling, checking the traps, and collecting the tar in a big wooden bucket.

  Being a tar man was not a popular job because it involved going out into the clearing, where there was always the danger of lions.

  Tony never seemed to mind it though. Some people said that the lions were scared of him, and not the other way around. There was a story that when Tony had first gotten lost in the forest, he had been attacked by a lion and Tony had won. But nobody knew if that was true, and Tony certainly wasn’t telling.

  “Boomphah!” he would shout as he strode into the clearing. “Boomphah!”

  Maybe the strange sound scared away the lions, or maybe they were afraid because they knew who was making the noise.

  Either way, Tony had never been attacked while working on the tar traps.

  Each night when he returned with his bucket full of tar, it was his responsibility to make sure that the big wooden door braces were replaced, locking the front door to the castle.

  The previous day he had helped with the harvest, then went out to check on the traps.

  Private Weasel had been doing his rounds just before lights out and had found the big stone door still unlocked.

  Tony insisted that when he had returned, he had locked the front door as usual. He kept saying this over and over, miming the action of closing the big stone and putting back the braces. But the guards did not believe him.

  “Nobody else would go out there,” Sergeant Lee said.

  “Big dumb oaf,” Private Weasel said.

  Tony was sitting on the naughty chair. At least that’s how Cecilia thought of it — they had one at school, where children who misbehaved had to sit until they could control their behavior. This chair was a large wooden one from the old days of the castle, and sat in a corner of the throne room.

  When the King wanted to interrogate or humiliate someone, he called for a Royal Court of Inquiry. The offending person was forced to sit on the naughty chair, in front of all the other citizens, while Sergeant Lee questioned the person.

  The King sat on his throne, watching from a distance, as if detached from the proceedings, but Cecilia saw his beady eyes glinting as he took in every detail.

  Tony looked genuinely scared of Sergeant Lee, which Cecilia thought was a little odd. Sergeant Lee might have been large, hairy, and grizzly-bearish in appearance, but Tony was even bigger.

  He looked like he could reach out and squeeze Sergeant Lee to a pulp. Yet he cowered, embarrassed, in the chair, protesting his innocence with his mimed movements, but knowing that nobody believed him.

  Nobody except Cecilia, Avery,
and Evan.

  “We have to say something,” Cecilia whispered to Avery and Evan as they watched Sergeant Lee bully Tony some more.

  “It wasn’t him who did it — it was us,” she continued. “We can’t let him be punished for something that we did.”

  Avery shook her head. “He’ll survive.”

  Evan agreed. “But if we own up to going out in the forest after dark, they’ll start asking lots of other questions and the next thing . . .”

  “Matthew Skelly,” Avery said.

  “No,” Cecilia said. “It’s just wrong.”

  Tony’s punishment was no dinner.

  That was always the punishment, according to Avery, and in a world where there was only just enough to eat at the best of times, to go without dinner was especially cruel.

  But not cruel enough for King Harry.

  Not only did the offender have to miss out on dinner, he also had to sit on a chair in the banquet hall and watch everybody else eat! Meanwhile, Tony’s stomach would probably be rumbling like a steam locomotive. Tonight’s meal was a special treat, as well: wild pork chops and honey roasted potatoes.

  “How about we each save him half of our dinner?” Evan suggested. “Three half kids’ meals would be almost as much as a full grown-up’s meal. We can sneak it out and give it to him later.”

  “Won’t he wonder why?” Cecilia asked.

  “We’ll just tell him we felt sorry for him,” Evan said.

  “It’s still not right,” Cecilia said, but she didn’t argue anymore.

  Especially with the thought of being thrown into the middle of the mazelike, lion-infested forest by Sergeant Lee and the rest of the zoo.

  ***

  After dinner, Cecilia and the twins went down to the cottage where Tony lived. His cottage was on the other side of the river from the castle, so they had to cross over the old stone bridge just down from the courtyard. It was quite secluded, screened from the castle by a stand of maple trees.

  They saw him through the window, sitting at his kitchen table with his head in his hands. Cecilia waved to get his attention. He held up a finger, letting them know he was coming.