Figgs & Phantoms

by Ellen Raskin

  Trembling with excitement, Mona lunged for Las Hazañas Fantásticas, thrusting Fido off-balance. He crashed to the floor as Mona, with a desperate effort, caught the edge of the high shelf and hung, feet dangling in space. Fido picked himself up and dashed out of the shop.

  Her fingers slipping, her feet groping for a foothold on a lower shelf, Mona peered over her shoulder at the grumpy shopkeeper. The bald spot was gone. Old man Bargain had raised his head and was waving a notebook at her threateningly. It was her Figg-Newton composition. Uttering a cry of surprise, Mona dropped to the floor and, clutching the long cloak around her waist, ran out of the store, down the street, around the corner, and through the used-car lot into Newt’s office.

  “Hi, princess, look what I discovered.” Smiling triumphantly, Newt held up the open pamphlet of Yeoman of the Guard. “It wasn’t ‘pickles sister keeps’ at all. Look, it says:“Tears that trickle, tears that blister—

  ’Tis but mickle sister reaps!”

  Mona slid to the floor, pulled her knees up to her chest, and buried her face in her arms. Pickle, mickle, Conrad, Supuesto, Phoebe, Fido. She raised her head and shouted, “That rotten Fido. That dog of a rotten Fido. That rotten dumb-headed dog of a Fido!”

  “I wonder what ‘mickle’ means,” Newt replied.

  Sissie and Newt were singing a duet from the pamphlet. Stretched out and sunk in the broken springs of the couch, Mona was trying to read “Heart of Darkness” from one of her auction purchases. Mona loved to handle books, to examine and catalogue them, but reading them was difficult, particularly with the silly noises her parents were making:“Like a ghost his vigil keeping—

  Or a spectre all-appalling—

  I beheld a figure creeping.

  I should rather call it crawling.”

  Fido stood in the doorway unnoticed. He blew his nose softly.

  Mona read and reread each phrase with care, weighed every word for a clue.

  “It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt ... that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams....”

  “ ‘He was creeping,’ ” Sissie sang.

  “ ‘He was crawling,’ ” Newt sang.

  “ ‘He was creeping, creeping,’ ” sang Sissie.

  “ ‘Crawling!’ ” sang Newt, lunging toward Mona with clawlike hands.

  Mona screamed.

  “Gee, princess, I didn’t mean to scare you,” Newt said sheepishly, but Mona was more frightened by a sentence she had just read:“We live, as we dream—alone.”

  Mona slammed the book shut. She refused to believe it had anything to do with Capri.

  Fido joined in the apologizing. “Mona, I’m really sorry about this afternoon at Bargain’s.”

  The Newtons spun around, surprised to see a visitor.

  “Fido, you’re a ... ,” Mona paused. “Fido, you owe me a lot of favors.”

  Fido nodded in agreement.

  “‘Sing me your song, O!’ ” Newt sang in a booming bass-baritone. Sissie had found another duet and was thumping out the melody on the piano, waiting for her own solo.

  Heads together, Mona and Fido entered into a new conspiracy. Mona talked; Fido nodded. He promised to read the Conrad books and report on each one to her. Mona explained, with some pride, that the books were rare and expensive first editions. Fido promised to handle them with care and not take them out of the house.

  “It is sung to the moon

  By a love-lorn loon,

  Who fled from the mocking throng, O!”

  Fido looked up to watch Sissie singing lustily and dancing an energetic soft-shoe.

  “Go wash your hands and wipe your nose, Fido,” Mona commanded.

  Fido obeyed his new mistress. When he returned, she presented him with Lord Jim.

  Fido read, and Mona thought. She had to find a way of getting Las Hazañas Fantásticas off that top shelf. Suddenly Newt sang his chorus with such ear-shattering enthusiasm that they both jumped.

  “Heighdy! heighdy!

  Misery me, lackadaydee!”

  “That’s supposed to be a sad song,” Mona suggested. “Sad and quiet.”

  “I like it that way, Uncle Newt,” Fido said. Mona glared at her slave, who cast his eyes down on Lord Jim.

  “I like it that way, too,” Sissie said. “I think you’re doing just fine, Newt.”

  “You mean it?” Newt asked. “But maybe we should find a different song for Mona.”

  All was quiet while Sissie riffled through the score. Then the singing began again.

  “The prisoner comes to meet his doom;

  The block, the headsman, and the tomb.

  The funeral bell begins to toll—

  May Heaven have mercy on his soul.”

  “Oh no,” Mona moaned.

  “Well, you asked for a sad song,” Sissie said.

  “It’s sad, all right,” Fido said, tears streaming down his cheeks. He decided he would have to do his reading somewhere else.

  Days passed. Days devoted to poring over secret books and skulking around Bargain Books. Mona was desperate. She expected to fail English if she wasn’t first arrested for tampering with the mails or embarrassed to death during the Founders’ Day parade when her parents would sing and dance down Hemlock Street before the smirking people of Pineapple.

  It was more than Mona could bear. She missed Uncle Florence more deeply every day. She had to find Capri, and soon.

  If only Fido could read faster, she thought. He had finished one book, Lord Jim, and his report consisted of one word: Jump.

  Mona stared at one of the secret books opened to a colorplate of a ruby-throated hummingbird. If only she could get the copy of Pirata Supuesto’s Las Hazanas from old man Bargain’s top shelf.

  That was it! A copy! She didn’t need a first edition; a second printing, a later edition, a facsimile, any copy would do.

  4. A GARISH FACSIMILE

  FIDO WAS sprawled out at a table reading a later edition of Typhoon when Mona burst into the library and descended on the card-catalogue cabinet. She yanked out the drawers, one by one, and anxiously thumbed through the listings.

  STA—SUZ .... No “Supuesto.”

  LAB—LED .... No “Las Hazanas.”

  HAB—HEX .... No “Hazanas.”

  FAL—FRO .... No “Fantasticas.”

  One more try and then she would have to ask the librarian’s help and involve still another person in her dream search.

  MAB—MAR. Maps. Maps, Spanish.

  There was no reference to her book, but she found one promising title.

  526.8

  G

  MAPS. Spanish.

  Five centuries of Spanish maps.

  Compiler and editor: J. Garcia y Lopez.

  London. Paradise Press, 1912.

  Facsimiles of Spanish maps from books

  of the fourteenth through nineteenth

  centuries. i-viii. 640 p. 532 illus.

  Mona jotted down the code number and with a trembling hand presented it to Miss Quigley. “Why hello, Mona. I haven’t seen you in ages. You don’t look well, dear,” the librarian said.

  “I’ve been sick,” Mona replied, pale with impatience.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Miss Quigley read the request. “No one has asked for this book in a long time. I’ll have someone look for it in the stacks. You’d better sit down; it may take a while.”

  Mona didn’t want to sit down. Knuckles white from clutching the edge of the desk, she stood, waiting, waiting, for the map book to appear. Miss Quigley finished stamping some books and returned to chat.

  “I didn’t know you were interested in maps.”

  Mona turned her back on the librarian with a pretense of coughing, trying to think of a convincing fib. She saw Fido, his nose running, his lips moving as he read, and sp
un around.

  “Miss Quigley, would you, by any chance, have a book by Joseph Conrad called Children of the Sea?”

  “Children of the Sea? No, I don’t think so.” The assistant librarian emerged from the stacks and handed the book of Spanish maps to Miss Quigley, who was still musing on Conrad titles. “I think you must mean Mirror of the Sea.”

  “No, that’s a different book,” Mona replied curtly, her eyes riveted on the map book in the librarian’s hand. “I want Children of the Sea, or Nigger....”

  Mona spit out the hateful word and with a horror of sudden awareness, recognized that Miss Quigley—Miss Quigley, who had read stories aloud to her before she could read, Miss Quigley, who had recommended books to her, had searched for books for her, had discussed books with her—that Miss Quigley was black.

  Rebecca Quigley’s face froze in pained shock. Mona grabbed the book of Spanish maps from her hand and fled from the library sobbing.

  The Chamber of Commerce was tapping to “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

  “Hi, Mona, look at me,” shuffling Flabby Benckendorf shouted.

  Mona stumbled up the stairs, still sobbing, and flung herself onto her bed. She sobbed out of loneliness and fear and confusion; and for once she sobbed for someone other than herself. Unthinkingly she had hurt Miss Quigley. She could never face the librarian again. “I wish I were dead,” she moaned aloud. “I wish I were with you, Uncle Florence. I wish I were in Capri.”

  Capri.

  Mona sat up and fumbled for the book of facsimile maps. Drying her eyes with her sleeve, she searched the table of contents.

  Nineteenth century: Las Hazañas Fantásticas. 374.

  The Chamber of Commerce had given way to the Horticultural Society, tiptoeing through the tulips. The Horticultural Society had given way to thirty kindergarten children tap-dancing and screeching “On the Good Ship Lollipop.”

  Mona lay across her bed, her chin cupped in her hand, her eyes smarting, a finger tracing and retracing every outline on the garishly colored facsimile map. She pored over each line, each speck, wishing, hoping. At last her finger came to rest on a tiny, irregularly shaped island. On it was a tree. A palm, a pink palm.

  Mona read the name: Capri.

  “Mona, wait!” Fido shouted, bursting into her room, waving the book Miss Quigley had lent him: The Nigger of the Narcissus. “Mona,” Fido cried, “the book says: Wait! ”

  “Mona, wake up, wake up.” Fido shook his sleeping cousin.

  Sissie, standing in the doorway, screamed.

  V

  1. THE PINK PALM

  MONA FLOATED through a swirling nothingness, through doorless doors and windowless windows, into the eye of a windless storm. Then all was still.

  Colors pulsated from orange to pink as she gazed up into the fronds of a palm tree.

  “‘The tree that is wild and free,’” she murmured. “Capri. I am in Capri.”

  The palm tree replied with a blaze of pink.

  Weary from her long, roadless journey, Mona leaned against the palm, waiting for the familiar figure of her Uncle Florence, or the form he had now taken as his own, to appear on the horizon.

  There was no horizon. The gray sky, if there was a sky, was bound to the gray land by an invisible seam. All was silent.

  “An island that’s surrounded by the sea,” Mona remembered, and then she heard the sea washing unseen rocks on an unseen shore. Undulating. Surging. Pounding. Faster, faster the waves crashed and thundered; the ground shuddered, beaten by an angry foam.

  Orange blotches again mottled the palm’s thrashing fronds, spreading its color as if to devour the pink. Lashed by the winds, Mona wrapped her arms around the swaying trunk. Some invisible power was trying to tear her from the tree. Some force was trying to blow her back into endless space. Mona refused to go.

  “Pink palm, pink palm,” she cried over and over as she hung on to the one tangible reality in her unformed dream. At last the storm subsided; the waters calmed. The orange blight faded, and once again the palm stood tall and pink.

  Exhausted and confused, Mona sank to her knees and rested her head against her palm tree. Where was Uncle Florence? Who was trying to frighten her? Was she really in Capri or was she lost in her own nightmare? Lost.

  “It was night. I was lost.” As Mona remembered the words of the diary, the gray darkened to starless night. Black, impenetrable night that only magnified her fears. She tried to think of something to free her mind from the terrors that lurk in the night. She remembered a small book in the secret hoard; she remembered the blue in the illustration bordering a poem; she remembered trying to decipher the cramped lettering. And then she remembered these words: Frowning frowning night,

  O’er the desart bright,

  Let thy moon arise

  While I close my eyes.

  Mona opened her eyes to the dark blue of the sky. A full moon nested in the “welcoming arms” of the pink palm. From afar she heard the lapping sea, and from farther still, the faint tap-tap-tapping of dancing feet.

  “Uncle Florence,” Mona shouted, but no figure crossed the moonlit sands. The tapping faded away.

  Mona rose and started across the desert in search of her phantom uncle.

  The moon glowed brightly, hotter and hotter, until it blazed into the ball of a scorching sun.

  Mona squinted back at the far-off palm, now suffused with orange light, then slogged on through the heat and glare. Her feet sank deeper into the sand with each step; a searing wind penetrated her every pore. Something more than the blistering heat and sucking sand was trying to hold her back.

  Defiant, her mouth parched, her tongue swollen, Mona shouted her mother’s song:“ ’Twas on the Isle of Capri

  That I met her,

  ’Neath the shade

  Of an old apple tree....”

  Mona shouted—and remembered. There had been an apple tree in her yard at home, an old, twisted apple tree no longer bearing fruit. She knew it well, having stared at its leaves so often from her bedroom window.

  Now she stared at the apple tree again as it rose in all its knotted glory before her.

  The grass was long and cool in the shade of the old apple tree. Mona wished for a tall glass of lemonade, and it appeared in her hand. She took a tasteless sip, then recalled the tart, thirst-quenching flavor and drank deeply.

  Leaning back refreshed, reveling in her new-found power of wishes-come-true, Mona laughed with delight. She knew what her next wish would be.

  Mona gazed into the desolation bordering her apple-tree world, wishing. Wishing. Wishing.

  Slowly he appeared, a four-foot six-inch shadow shaped by remembered details: the round face, the sad smile, the graying hair, the gnarled hands. The yellow sleeve garters.

  Mona hid her face in her hands and dismissed the vision. Uncle Florence had not taken his sleeve garters with him; he had long arms now, he was taller, different. She had to find him as he was now, as he looked now, in his own dream, in his own Capri.

  Mona set one foot on the scorching sand and withdrew it. Her journey might be a long one; she needed one more wish.

  Closing her eyes, she wished for a horse, a big, black stallion to carry her over the boundless desert. Then she opened her eyes. Before her limped a formless black mass with flowing mane, a misshapen body on misplaced legs.

  Mona quickly erased the hideous animal from sight and tried again to picture a horse. Straining her memory, she tried to visualize where the eyes were in relation to the nostrils, how the head joined the neck, where the legs met the body. It was hopeless. Mona had looked at many horses, but she had never truly seen one.

  She would have to travel on foot, tomorrow. Another frowning night was blinding the desert, still burning under a darkened sun. Again Mona closed her eyes, recited the Blake poem, and opened them to a full moon—and words, suspender in space.

  “I won’t, I won’t go back,” she shouted.

  An ominous cloud crept over Mona’s m
oon, shrouding her in blackness. The sign vibrated like a banged sheet of tin and shattered. Its drumming echoes bounced off the wall of night.

  “Uncle Florence, where are you?”

  The answer was a deafening thunderclap that rocked the ground. A bolt of lightning tore the sky and set fires dancing in a circle around her refuge.

  Sobbing in defeat, Mona stumbled back toward the distant palm, her path lighted by the apple tree burning behind her.

  2. THE GREEN DUNGEON

  THE PINK-ORANGE PALM had multiplied into a green jungle. Orchids burst from mossy trunks; a cockatoo called. Mona stood in awe before the nameless fruits and perfumed flowers. She had never seen such wild beauty, not at home, not in books ... and then she remembered the words Uncle Florence had written in the diary:... a gentle world, peopled with good people and filled with simple and quiet things.

  This exotic paradise had not been created by Uncle Florence. Terrified, Mona spun around. Her way was barred by a thicket of tortured mangroves. The green dungeon was guarded by strangler vines and domed by a web of locked branches.

  Mona was trapped in someone else’s dream!

  Triangles of apple-tree fire flickered through giant ferns; a parrot mocked her sobs. Suddenly something grasped at Mona’s ankle, and she fell among the tangled vines. Among the writhing roots. Among the snakes.

  Choking with terror, she felt the snakes creeping, crawling over her legs.