Summerland

Summerland Michael Chabon ???? HarperCollins MICHAEL CHABON Summerland Contents Cover (#u50c3bf38-de78-53b6-9f7b-7161bba2da0f) Title Page (#u086c1dc4-7c53-5c92-8af8-ed9ebd771af1) First Base (#litres_trial_promo) The Worst Ballplayer in the History of Clam Island, Washington (#ulink_82bad1c6-e324-5665-8bfc-221e9f13b4aa) A Hot Prospect (#ulink_764bf627-dbf1-5c48-b4b8-65e296b6a2fe) A Whistled-up Wind (#ulink_c4efd81a-db58-526b-a2aa-8325fae3484d) The Middling (#ulink_c414ee0d-60c4-5164-8d42-364c076864e8) Escape (#litres_trial_promo) Second Base (#litres_trial_promo) Thor?s Crossing (#litres_trial_promo) The Eighteenth Giant Brother (#litres_trial_promo) Taffy (#litres_trial_promo) A Game of Catch (#litres_trial_promo) Mr. Feld in the Winterlands (#litres_trial_promo) The Herald (#litres_trial_promo) The Royal Traitor (#litres_trial_promo) The Housebreakers of Dandelion Hill (#litres_trial_promo) A Mother?s Tears (#litres_trial_promo) Grim (#litres_trial_promo) A Rat in the Walls (#litres_trial_promo) The Research of Mr. Feld (#litres_trial_promo) On Three Reubens Field (#litres_trial_promo) Third Base (#litres_trial_promo) The Lost Camps (#litres_trial_promo) Rancho Encantado (#litres_trial_promo) Jennifer T. and the Wormhole (#litres_trial_promo) The Bottom-Cat (#litres_trial_promo) The Conquest of Outlandishton (#litres_trial_promo) Applelawn (#litres_trial_promo) A Game of Worlds (#litres_trial_promo) Home (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Praise (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) FIRST BASE (#ulink_936a9ce5-2aa2-5314-82c6-46fd573f3b43) 1 The Worst Ballplayer in the History of Clam Island, Washington (#ulink_e7298bd4-5e62-57ed-baa0-4425203717aa) ETHAN SAID, ?I hate baseball.? He said it as he followed his father out of the house, in his uniform and spikes. His jersey read ROOSTERS in curvy red script. On the back it said RUTH?S FLUFF ?N? FOLD. ?I hate it,? he said again, knowing it was cruel. His father was a great lover of baseball. But Mr. Feld didn?t say anything in reply. He just locked the door, tried the knob, and then put his arm around Ethan?s shoulders. They walked down the muddy path to the driveway and got into Mr. Feld?s Saab station wagon. The car?s name was Skidbladnir, but usually they just called her Skid. She was oranger than anything else within a five-hundred-mile radius of Clam Island, including traffic cones, U-Haul trailers, and a fair number of actual oranges. She was so old that, as she went along, she made squeaking and rattling noises that sounded more like the sounds of a horse buggy than of an automobile. Her gauges and knobs were all labelled in Swedish, which was not a language that either Mr. Feld or Ethan, or for that matter anyone in Ethan?s family going back twenty generations on both sides, could speak. They rolled, squeaking and rattling, down from the little pink house where they lived, atop a small barren hill at the centre of the island, and headed west, towards Summerland. ?I made three errors in the last game,? Ethan reminded his father, as they drove to pick up Jennifer T. Rideout, the Roosters? first baseman, who had called to say that she needed a ride. Ethan figured that his father was probably not going to let him out of playing in today?s game against the Shopway Angels; but you never knew. Ethan felt that he could make a pretty good case for his staying home, and Mr. Feld was always willing to listen to a good argument, backed up with sound evidence. ?Danny Desjardins said that I directly caused four runs to score.? ?Plenty of good ballplayers have made three errors in a game,? Mr. Feld said, turning onto the Clam Island Highway, which ran from one end of the island to the other, and was not, as far as Ethan was concerned, a highway at all. It was an ordinary two-lane road, lumpy and devoid of cars like every other road on the lumpy, empty little island. ?It happens all the time.? Mr. Feld was a large, stout man with a short but unruly beard like tangled black wool. He was both a recent widower and a designer of lighter-than-air dirigibles, neither a class of person known for paying a lot of attention to clothes. Mr. Feld never wore anything in the summer but a clean T-shirt and a ragged pair of patched blue jeans. In the wintertime he added a heavy sweater, and that was it. But on game days, like today, he proudly wore a Ruth?s Fluff ?n? Fold Roosters T-shirt, size XXL, that he had bought from Ethan?s coach, Mr. Perry Olafssen. None of the other Rooster fathers wore shirts that matched their sons?. ?I hate it that they even count errors,? Ethan said, pressing on with his case. To show his father just how disgusted he was by the whole idea of counting errors, he threw his mitt against the dashboard of the car. It kicked up a cloud of infield dust. Ethan coughed energetically, hoping to suggest that the very atoms of dirt on which he would be standing when they got to Ian ?Jock? MacDougal Regional Ball Field were noxious to him. ?What kind of game is that? No other sport do they do that, Dad. There?s no other sport where they put the errors on the freaking scoreboard for everybody to look at. They don?t even have errors in other sports. They have fouls. They have penalties. Those are things that players could get on purpose, you know. But in baseball they keep track of how many accidents you have.? Mr. Feld smiled. Unlike Ethan, he was not a talkative fellow. But he always seemed to enjoy listening to his son rant and rave about one thing or another. His wife, the late Dr. Feld, had been prone to the same kind of verbal explosions. Mr. Feld didn?t know that Ethan was only ever talkative around him. ?Ethan,? Mr. Feld said, shaking his head in sorrow. He reached over to put a hand on Ethan?s shoulder. Skid lurched wildly to the left, springs squealing, creaking like a buckboard in an old western movie. Her noticeable colour and Mr. Feld?s distracted style of driving had, in the short time that the Feld men had been living on Clam Island, made the car a well-known local road hazard. ?Errors? Well, they are a part of life, Ethan,? he tried to explain. ?Fouls and penalties, generally speaking, are not. That?s why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that?s all I do in life, keep track of my errors.? ?But, Dad, you?re a grown-up,? Ethan reminded him. ?A kid?s life isn?t supposed to be that way. Dad?look out!? Ethan slammed his hands against the dashboard, as if that would stop the car. There was a small animal, no bigger than a cat, in the westbound lane of Clam Island Highway ? they were headed right at it. In another instant they would mash it under their wheels. But the animal just seemed to be standing there, an alert little creature, rusty as a pile of leaves, sharp-eared, peering directly at Ethan with its big, round, staring black eyes. ?Stop!? Ethan yelled. Mr. Feld hit the brakes, and the tires burped against the blacktop. The car shuddered, and then the engine stalled and died. Their seat belts were made of some kind of thick Swedish webbing material that could probably stop bullets, and the buckles were like a couple of iron padlocks. So the Felds were all right. But Ethan?s mitt flew out of his lap and banged into the glove compartment door. A huge cloud of dust from the mitt filled the car. Maps of Seattle, Colorado Springs, Philadelphia, and a very old one of G?teborg, Sweden, came tumbling out of the glove compartment, along with a Band-Aid can filled with quarters, and a Rodrigo Buend?a baseball card. ?What is it? What was it?? said Mr. Feld, looking wildly around. He wiped the inside of the windshield with his forearm and peered out. There was nothing in the road at all now, and nothing moving in the trees on either side. Ethan had never seen anything emptier than the Clam Island Highway at that moment. The silence in the car, broken only by the chiming of Mr. Feld?s key ring against the ignition, was like the sound of that emptiness. ?Ethan, what did you see?? ?A fox,? Ethan said, though even as he said it he felt that he somehow had it wrong. The animal?s head and snout had been like a fox?s, and there had been the fat red brush of a tail, but somehow the, well, the posture of the animal hadn?t been?vulpine, was the word. Not foxlike. The thing had seemed to be standing, hunched over, on its hind legs, like a monkey, with its front paws scraping the ground.? I think it was a fox. Actually, come to think of it, it might have been a lemur.? ?A lemur,? Mr. Feld said. He restarted the car, rubbing at his shoulder where the seat belt had dug in. Ethan?s shoulder was feeling a little sore, too.? On Clam Island.? ?Uh-huh. Or, no, actually I think it was a bushbaby.? ?A bushbaby.? ?Uh-huh. They live in Africa and feed on insects. They peel the bark from trees to find the tasty and nutritious gum underneath.? Ethan had recently seen an entire programme devoted to bushbabies, on the Fauna Channel. ?Maybe it escaped from a zoo. Maybe someone on the island keeps bushbabies.? ?Could be,? said Mr. Feld.? But it was probably a fox.? They rode past the V.F.W. hall, and the obelisk-shaped monument to the Clam Island pioneers. They drove alongside the cemetery where the ancestors and loved ones of almost everyone now living on Clam Island, except for Ethan and his father, were buried. Ethan?s mother was buried in a cemetery in Colorado Springs, a thousand miles away. Ethan thought of that nearly every time they went past the Clam Island cemetery. He suspected that his father did, too. They always fell silent along this stretch of road. ?I really think it was a bushbaby,? Ethan said at last. ?Ethan Feld, if you say the word ?bushbaby? one more time?? ?Dad, I?m sorry, I know you?re mad at me, but I?? Ethan took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds. ?I don?t think I want to play baseball anymore.? Mr. Feld didn?t say anything at first. He just drove, watching the side of the road for the turn-off to the Rideout place. Then he said, ?I?m very sorry to hear that.? As Ethan had heard many times, the first scientific experiment that Mr. Feld had ever performed in his whole life, back when he was eight years old, in Philadelphia, PA, was to see if he could turn himself into a left-handed pitcher. He had read that a kid who could throw left-handed had a better chance of making it to the big leagues. He hung an old tyre from a tree in his grandmother?s backyard and every day for a whole summer tried to throw a baseball through the tyre a hundred times with his left arm. Then, when he could throw it straight and hard, he taught himself to throw a knuckleball, a slow pitch that travels without spinning, and makes its way towards the hitter like a butterfly over a bed of flowers, fluttering. It was not a very good knuckleball, though, and when he tried to throw it in real games, the other boys jumped all over it. Yet its crazy motion interested him, and Mr. Feld had begun to wonder about the shapes of things, and about the way air went over and around something that was round and moving very fast. In the end he had given up baseball for aerodynamics. But he had never forgotten, to this day, the way it felt to stand on the top of that small, neat hill of brown dirt, in the middle of a green field, holding on to a little piece of something that could fly. ?Dad?? ?Ethan?? said Mr. Feld. Now he sounded a little annoyed.? If you don?t want to play anymore, then that?s all right with me. Forget it. I understand. Nobody likes to lose every time.? The Ruth?s Fluff ?n? Fold Roosters had, as a matter of fact, lost all of their first seven games that season. In the opinion of most of the Roosters, and of their coach, Mr. Perry Olafssen, the presence of Ethan Feld on the team went a long way to explaining their troubles on the field. It was agreed by nearly everyone who watched him take the field that Ethan Feld was the least gifted ballplayer that Clam Island had ever seen. It was hard to decide, really, why this should be so. Ethan was a boy of average height, a little stocky, you might have said, but healthy and alert. He was not a terrible klutz, and he could run pretty well, if something worth running from, such as a bee, was after him. Yet every time he put on his uniform and stepped out onto the dusty grey dirt of Jock MacDougal Field, something seemed to go dreadfully wrong. ?But I?m afraid, son,? Mr. Feld continued, ?you can?t just not show up for today?s game. The team is counting on you.? ?Yeah, right.? ?Mr. Olafssen is counting on you.? ?Counting on me to make three errors.? They had reached the ramshackle assortment of roadside mailboxes that marked the entrance to the Rideout place. Ethan sensed that he was running out of time. Once Jennifer T. Rideout was in the car, there would be no hope of escape from today?s game. Jennifer T. didn?t have a whole lot of patience in general for listening to Ethan?s arguments, however good they might be, or how solid his evidence. She just thought what she thought, and got on with it. But this was especially true when it came to baseball. Ethan was going to have to work fast. ?Baseball is a stupid game,? he said, going for broke. ?It?s so dull.? ?No, Ethan,? his father said sadly, ?it really, really isn?t.? ?I find it quite boring.? ?Nothing is boring, son?? his father began. ?I know, I know,? Ethan said. ? ?Nothing is boring except to people who aren?t really paying attention.? ? This was something he had heard from his father many, many times. It was his father?s motto. His mother?s motto had been, ?People could learn a lot from llamas.? His mother was a veterinarian. When the Felds lived in Colorado Springs, she had specialised in caring for the vigilant, fierce, and intelligent guard llamas that Rocky Mountain sheep-herders use to protect their flocks from dogs and coyotes. ?That?s right,? his father said, nodding in agreement with his own familiar wisdom. He turned into the long, ruined gravel track that led to the tumbledown houses in the woods where all the Rideouts lived. ?You have to pay attention, in life and in baseball.? ?But nothing happens. It?s so slow.? ?Well, that?s true,? his father said.? Everything used to be slow. Now almost nothing is. But are we any happier, son?? Ethan did not know how to answer this. When his father was at the controls of one of his big, slow sky-whales, sailing nowhere in particular at a top speed of thirty-five miles per hour, the smile never left his face. If he ever managed to sell the idea of the Zeppelina, the affordable family airship,* it would be on the basis of that smile. Mr. Feld pulled into a wash of gravel-streaked mud in front of the house where Jennifer T. lived with her twin brothers Darrin and Dirk, her grandmother Billy Ann, her two great aunts, and her uncle Mo. Everybody in the house was either very old or very young. Jennifer T.?s father did not seem to live anywhere at all ? he just showed up, from time to time ? and her mother had gone to Alaska to work for a summer, not long after the twins were born, and never come back. Ethan wasn?t too sure who was living in any of the three other houses scattered like dice in the green clearing. But they were all Rideouts, too. There had been Rideouts on Clam Island for a very long time. They claimed to be descended from the original Indian inhabitants of the island, though in school Ethan had learned that when the first white settlers arrived on Clam Island, in 1872, there was no one living there at all, Indian or otherwise. When Mrs. Clutch, the social studies teacher, had informed them of this, Jennifer T. got so angry that she bit a pencil in half. Ethan had been very impressed by that. He was also impressed by Jennifer T.?s great-uncle Mo. Mo Rideout was the oldest man Ethan had ever seen. He was a full-blooded Salishan Indian, who, Jennifer T. said, had played in the Negro Leagues, and for three seasons with the Seattle Rainiers in the old Pacific Coast League, long, long ago. Mr. Feld didn?t need to honk; Jennifer T. was waiting for them on the sagging porch. She picked up her huge equipment bag and came down the porch steps, taking them two at a time. She could never seem to get away fast enough from her house. There had been times in Ethan?s life ? when his mother was dying inside it, for example ? when Ethan had felt the same way about his own house. As usual, Jennifer T.?s uniform was spotless. Her knit trousers, her jersey, her sanitary socks, were always somehow whiter than anybody else?s. (Jennifer T., as Mr. Feld never tired of reminding Ethan, did all of her own washing.) She had tied her long blue-black hair in a ponytail that was pulled through the gap at the back of her ball cap, where you snapped the plastic strap. She threw her bag onto the backseat and then climbed in beside it. She carried into the car the lingering stink of her grandmother?s cigarettes and a strong odour of bubble gum ? she chewed the shredded kind that pretended to be chewing tobacco in a pouch. ?Hey.? ?Hey.? ?Hello, Jennifer T.,? Mr. Feld said. ?Buckle up and let me tell you what my son has been attempting to convince me to let him do.? This was the moment that Ethan had been dreading. ?I saw a bushbaby,? he said quickly. ?An African bushbaby, at first I thought it was a fox, but it walked like a monkey, and I?? ?Ethan says he wants to quit the team,? said Mr. Feld. Jennifer T. snapped her gum a few times. She unzipped the ragged old equipment bag, patched with duct tape and stained by decades of grass and Gatorade. She took out her first-baseman?s mitt, which she kept carefully oiled with a mysterious substance called neet?s foot oil and wrapped in an Ace bandage, with a tennis ball tucked in the pocket to maintain its shape. The glove was much older than she was and had been printed with the signature of someone named Keith Hernandez. Jennifer T. unwound the bandage tenderly, filling the car with a pungent, farmyard kind of smell. ?I don?t think so, Feld,? she said. She gave her gum another loud snap. ?Not going to happen.? And that was the end of the discussion. CLAM ISLAND WAS a small, green, damp corner of the world. It was known, if at all, mostly for three things. First was its clams. Second was the collapse, in 1943, of the giant Clam Narrows Bridge. You might have seen an old film of that spectacular disaster, on TV: the long steel bridge-deck flapping and whipping around like a gigantic loose shoelace just before it falls to pieces and splashes into the chilly waters of Puget Sound. The Clam Islanders had never really taken to the bridge that connected them to the mainland, and they were not sorry to see it go. They went back to riding the Clam Island Ferry, which they greatly preferred. You could not get a cup of coffee or clam chowder, or hear all about your neighbour?s sick cousin or chicken, on the Clam Narrows Bridge. From time to time, there would be talk of rebuilding the span, but a lot of people seemed to feel that maybe there just ought not to be a bridge connecting Clam Island to the mainland. Islands have always been strange and magical places; crossing the water to reach them ought to be, even in a small way, an adventure. The last thing that Clam Island was known for, along with its excellent clams (if you liked clams) and its falling-down bridge, was its rain. Even in a part of the world where the people were accustomed to drizzles and downpours, Clam Island was considered uncommonly damp. It was said that at least once a day, on Clam Island, in winter or summer, it rained for at least twenty minutes. People said this about Clam Island on Orcas Island, and on San Juan Island, and down in Tacoma and Seattle. But the people of Clam Island knew that this saying was not entirely true. They knew ? it was one of the first things they learned as children about their home ? that at the westernmost tip of the island, in the summertime, it never rained. Not even for a minute and a half. A tiny, freak weather system ensured that this zone of the island, perhaps a square mile in all, knew a June, July, and August that were perfectly dry and sunshiny. Clam Island, seen on a map, looked like a boar that was running west. It had a big snout ? called the West End ? tipped with a single long jagged tusk. Most of the locals called this westernmost spit where it never rained in the summer the Boar Tooth, or the West Tooth, or just the Tooth; to others it was always known as Summerland. The Tooth was where the island?s young people went to while away their long vacations, where the club picnics, league barbecues, and summer weddings were put on, and, above all, it was where the islanders went to play baseball. They had been playing there since shortly after the arrival of the Clam Island pioneers in 1872. At the back of Hurley?s Hardware, in town, there was a photograph of a bunch of tough-looking loggers and fishermen, in old-time flannels and moustaches, posing with their bats in the shade of a spreading madrona tree. The picture was captioned CLAM ISLAND NINE, SUMMERLAND, 1883. For a long time ? so long that men were born, grew up, and died in the arms of the game ? baseball flourished on Clam Island. There were a dozen different leagues, made up of players of all ages, both male and female. Times had been better on Clam Island in those days. People were once more partial to eating raw shellfish than they are now. An ordinary American working man, not so long ago, thought nothing of tossing back three or four dozen salty, slippery bivalves at lunch. The Clam Boom and the universal love of baseball had gone hand in hand for many years. Now the clam beds had been mostly spoiled by plankton blooms and pollution, and as for the young people of Clam Island, even though some of them could hit, run, and catch the ball, the sad truth was that none of them really cared for baseball very much. Many preferred basketball, and others preferred riding dirt bicycles, and some just liked to watch sports on television. By the time of the season I want to tell you about, the Clam Island Mustang League was home to just four teams. There were the Shopway Angels, the Dick Helsing Realty Reds, the Bigfoot Tavern Bigfoots ? and the Roosters, who had, as has already been mentioned, lost all of their first seven games. In the grand scheme of the universe, losing the first seven games of the season is nothing too grave, but to the Roosters it felt awful. Ethan was not the only one who had contemplated quitting the team. ?Now, listen, you kids,? Mr. Olafssen said, that afternoon, gathering the Roosters around him before the game. Mr. Olafssen was a very tall, thin man with hair the colour of yellowed newspaper, and a sad expression. He?d had the expression even before the season began, so Ethan knew that it was not his fault that Mr. Olafssen looked so sad, but nevertheless whenever he looked at his coach, Ethan felt guilty. Kyle Olafssen, Mr. Olafssen?s son, played third base, and he was also the Roosters? second-best pitcher after Danny Desjardins. He could throw pretty hard for a kid, but without much control, and since he was always in a bad mood the kids on the other teams were a little afraid of him. That was probably the best thing that Kyle had going for himself as a pitcher ? he was a sourpuss, and wild. ?I know some of you left the last game feeling a little down,? Mr. Olafssen continued. ?And it was a tough loss.? Ethan could feel, like a kind of magnetic force acting on the fillings of his teeth or something, how hard Mr. Olafssen was trying not to look at him, and his three errors, with those sad pale eyes. Ethan was grateful to Mr. Olafssen ? nothing made Ethan Feld happier than the knowledge that nobody was looking at him ? but he blushed all the same. ?Now, you look at our record, you see oh and seven, I know it?s hard not to feel a little down. But what is a record? It?s just some numbers on a piece of paper. It doesn?t reflect who we are as people, and it doesn?t reflect who we are as a team.? ?Actually,? said a deep voice, ?if you had enough data, you could reduce every human being to a series of numbers and coordinates on a piece of paper.? The Roosters, who had been listening to Mr. Olafssen with a certain amount of trust, hope, and willingness to believe him, now burst into derisive laughter. Mr. Olafssen frowned as his point was spoiled. He turned, looking very annoyed, towards Thor Wignutt, who stood, as ever, just outside the circle of kids. Though he was the same age as all of them, Thor towered over the other Roosters and was, in fact, the tallest eleven-year-old on Clam Island, as he had been the tallest nine-year-old, and the tallest five-year-old, and the tallest toddler, too. The top of Thor?s head reached almost to the base of Mr. Olafssen?s throat, and he was, if anything, broader in the shoulders. Thor was a kind of prodigy of growth in every way. He had a voice like stones rolling in a metal drum, and dark hair on his lips and cheek. He wore heavy black glasses and was generally regarded as smart, but unfortunately he was under the impression ? most of the time ? that he was a synthetic humanoid named TW03. TW03, as Thor never tired of explaining, was the most sophisticated and marvellous piece of machinery in the history of the universe. But of course like all synthetic humanoids, for some reason he wanted nothing more than to be human. Thinking of himself as somebody who was not human, but was trying very hard, as you might imagine, often got in the way of Thor?s relations with other kids his age. With his big arms and shoulders, he looked like he would be a fabulous power hitter, but usually he was out on three pitches. ?Thor,? Mr. Olafssen said.? What have I told you about interrupting me to make these ridiculous statements of yours without offering the slightest shred of evidence to back them up?? During the last game, Thor had distracted everyone with his theory that there was an active underground volcano directly beneath the Tooth that was responsible for keeping the place dry in the summertime. He claimed to be able to detect seismic disturbances with his ?logical sensor array.? His constant reiteration of ?one of these days that thing is going to blow this entire quadrant to atoms? had irritated Mr. Olafssen nearly as much as Ethan?s poor play in the field. ?Can you prove it, Thor?? Mr. Olafssen wanted to know. ?Have you got a piece of paper with me written on it?? Thor blinked. He was standing right behind Jennifer T., who was the only person on the team, and perhaps on the entire island, who ever bothered to treat Thor like a more or less normal person. She had even been over to his house, where, it was said, Mrs. Wignutt, immensely fat, lived inside a clear plastic tent breathing air out of a tank. According to Jennifer T., however, there had been no sign of any tent, or of Thor?s gigantic mother, for that matter. ?It?s true,? Thor insisted finally. He was very stubborn in his ideas, which Ethan supposed was the case with synthetic humanoids, given the fact that they were, well, programmed. Ethan was probably the person, after Jennifer T., who was the friendliest with Thor, but he never treated Thor like a more or less normal person. It was clear to Ethan that Thor was not. ?Have you brought us any charts, Thor?? Mr. Olafssen pressed on. He seemed determined to beat Thor at his own game.? Do you have any proof at all?? Thor hesitated, then shook his head. ?Then I?ll thank you to keep your chipset occupied with solving calculations involving balls and bats.? ?Yes, sir,? Thor said. ?Now, then,? Mr. Olafssen began, glancing across the field at the Angels, whose coach, Mr. Ganse, was passing out a pair of wristbands, in the Angels colours of red and blue, to each of the boys on his team. The Angels had told everyone about the wristbands that they would be receiving that afternoon, as their reward for having won all of their first seven games that season. They were each ornamented with a picture of the great Rodrigo Buend?a, the star slugger for the big-league Angels, in Anaheim. ?Here is what I would like us to do this afternoon. I want us to focus?? ?Dad?? ?Quiet, Kyle. Now. The focus for the game today is going to be on?? ?Dad!? ?Kyle, darn it, if you don?t let me talk?? ?We just want to know something.? Danny Desjardins and Tucker Corr, who were standing on either side of Kyle, looked at Ethan, who froze. He could feel the question that was coming like a trapdoor opening at the bottom of his stomach. ?What is it, Kyle?? ?Are you going to play Feld today?? Mr. Olafssen could prevent it no longer. His sorry gaze wavered, then swung around and fastened, with a snap that you could almost hear, on Ethan. He ran the tip of his tongue around his lips. Ethan could feel all the other kids on the team watching him, hoping and praying with all of their might, that Ethan would be benched. And the worst of it was that Ethan too prayed that Mr. Olafssen would say Well, no, he sort of thought maybe Ethan had better sit this one out. Ethan hated himself for hoping for this. He glanced over to the bleachers, where his father sat, in his size XXL Roosters jersey, among the other fathers and mothers. Mr. Feld noticed Ethan looking at him, and raised one hand in a fist, as if to say Go get ?em, Slugger, or something doofusy like that, and smiled a great big, horrible, hopeful smile. Ethan looked away. ?I think you?d better shut your mouth, Kyle Olafssen,? Mr. Olafssen finally said. ?Before I bench your narrow behind.? The Angels took the field. The Roosters came together and built a tower of their hands, slapping them, one by one, into a pile. Then they yelled, all together, ?Break!? They did this before every game; Ethan had no idea why. But he figured that everybody else must know, and he was too embarrassed to ask. He had missed the first five minutes of the first day of practice and assumed that it had been explained then. All the Roosters sat down, except for Jennifer T., who batted lead-off, and Kris Langenfelter, the shortstop, who was on deck. Ethan found a spot at the very end of the bench and waited, cap in his lap, to learn his fate. Things got off to a good start, at least from his craven and shameful point of view, when the Roosters proved unable to score Jennifer T., who led off the game with a signature double, a seed that squirted off her bat over the shortstop?s head and into left field. Then in the bottom of the first, the Angels got on the scoreboard right away with a pair of runs. Ethan relaxed a little, secure in the knowledge that Mr. Olafssen would never risk dropping further behind by putting him in. He sat back on the bench, folded his hands behind his head, and looked up at the blue Summerland sky. Over the rest of Clam Island the sky, as usual during the summer months, was more pearly than blue, grey but full of light, as though a thin cotton bandage had been stretched across the sun. Here in Summerland, however, the sky was cloudless and a rich, dark, blue, almost ultramarine. The air was fragrant with a beach smell of drying seaweed and the tang of the grey-green water that surrounded the Tooth on three sides. The sun felt warm on Ethan?s cheeks. He half closed his eyes. Maybe, he thought, baseball was a sport best enjoyed from the bench. ?You better be ready, kid,? said a voice just behind him. ?Pretty soon now you going to get the call.? Ethan looked behind him. On the other side of the low chain-link fence that separated the ball field from the spectator area, leaned a dark little man with bright green eyes. He was an old man, with white hair pulled back into a ponytail and a big, intelligent nose. His skin was the colour of a well-oiled baseball glove. The expression on his face was half mocking and half annoyed, as if he had been disappointed to catch Ethan napping, but not surprised. There was something in his face that said he knew Ethan Feld. ?Do you know that guy?? Ethan asked Thor in a low voice. ?Negative.? ?He?s looking at me.? ?He does appear to be observing you, Captain.? ?Excuse me, sir?? Ethan said to the old man with the ponytail. ?What did you just say?? ?I was merely observatin?, young man, that sooner than you think you goin? to find yourself in the game.? Ethan decided that the old guy was joking, or thought that he was. An informal survey that Ethan had once conducted seemed to indicate that fully seventy-three per cent of the things that adults said to him in the course of a day were intended to be jokes. But there was something in the man?s tone that worried him. So he adopted his usual strategy with adult humour, and pretended that he hadn?t heard. In the top of the fourth, Jennifer T. came up to bat again. She carried her slim blond bat over her shoulder like a fishing pole. She stepped up to home plate with her gaze at her shoetops. You could tell that she was thinking, and that what she was thinking about was getting a hit. Jennifer T. was the only member of the Roosters ? maybe the only kid on the whole Island of Clam ? who truly loved baseball. She loved to wear a bright smear of green grass on her uniform pants and to hear her bat ringing in her hands like a bell. She could hit for average and with power, turn a double play all by herself, stretch a base hit into a triple and a triple into an inside-the-park home run. She never bragged about how good she was, or did anything to try to make the other players look bad. She did, however, insist that you call her ?Jennifer T.? , and not just ?Jennifer? or, worst of all, ?Jenny?. Bobby Bladen, the Angels? pitcher, came in low and outside to Jennifer T. Jennifer T. had long arms, and she liked her pitches outside. She reached out with her slim bat and once again sent the ball slicing over the shortstop?s head and into left field. The left fielder had a good arm, and he got the ball right in to the second baseman, but when the dust settled Jennifer T. was safe with another double. ?Here it come, kid,? said the old man. ?Get ready.? Ethan turned to give this annoying elderly person a dirty look, but to his surprise he found that there was nobody there. Then he heard the crack of a bat, and the Roosters and all their parents cheering. Sure enough, Jennifer T. had started something. Troy Knadel singled, scoring Jennifer T., and after that, as Mr. Feld later put it, the wheels came off Bobby Bladen. The Roosters batted all the way around the order. The next time that she came up that inning, Jennifer T. drew a walk and stole second. When Kyle Olafssen finally made the third out, the Roosters had taken a 7?2 lead. ?Mr. Wignutt,? barked Mr. Olafssen. His face was all red and his pale eyes were just a little crazy looking. Five runs was the biggest lead the Roosters had had all season. ?Take third.? ?But, Dad,? said Kyle Olafssen. ?I?m third.? ?You?re third something, all right,? said Mr. Olafssen. ?Third what, I have no idea. Have a seat, son, you?re out of the game. Wignutt, get your synthetic hiney out onto the field.? He started to give Thor?s shoulder a shove in the direction of third base but then glanced at Ethan, and hesitated. ?Oh, and, uh, upload your, uh, your infielding software.? Thor leapt instantly to his feet. ?Yes, sir.? Ethan?s heart began to pound. What if the Roosters were able to hold the lead? What if they added a few more runs? If Mr. Olafssen felt comfortable putting Thor into the game with a five-run lead, how many runs would the Roosters need before he would consider putting Ethan in? Ethan had not the slightest doubt in his ability to erase a six-, seven-, even an eight-run lead, single-handedly. Every time he looked over towards the bleachers and saw his father sitting there, squinting, with that big carnation of a smile wilting on his face, the feeling of dread grew stronger. Then, in their half of the fifth, the Roosters added two more runs, and Ethan really began to panic. Mr. Olafssen kept glancing his way, and there were only two innings left to go after this one. The Angels put in a new pitcher, and Jennifer T. came to the plate again. This time she hit a soft line drive deep into the grass of left-centre and lighted out for second. There were two men on: that made it 11?2. Ethan stole another look at his father and saw that the strange little old man had reappeared and was sitting right beside Mr. Feld now, and staring, not at the action on the field, like the normal people in the bleachers, but right at Ethan. The old man nodded, then fit his fists together as if they were stacked up on the handle of a bat, and swung. He pointed at Ethan, and grinned. Ethan looked away. His gaze travelled around the field, towards the parking lot, then out beyond that to the edge of the woods. There, atop a fallen birch, he caught a glimpse of something quick and ruddy, with a luxuriant tail. That was when Ethan did something that surprised him. He got up from the bench, muttered something to no one in particular about needing to pee really bad. He didn?t stop to think, and he didn?t look back. He just took off into the woods after the bushbaby. Jock MacDougal Field occupied only the lower portion of the Tooth ? the part where it met the boar?s jaw. The rest of the long, jagged spit was all forest, five hundred acres of tall white trees. These were paper birches, according to Mr. Feld. He had told Ethan that they were also called ?canoe birches? because the Indians had once used the inner bark for boat building as they had used the outer bark, like a peeling pale wrapper, for writing and painting on. On a rainy day in winter, when the birches stood huddled, bare and ghostly, the birch forest at the very end of Clam Island could look extremely eerie and cold. Even on a bright summery afternoon, like today, when they were thick with green leaves, there was something mysterious about the tall, pale, whispering trees. They surrounded the ball field, and the parking lot, and the grassy slope with the flagpole where the wedding receptions were held. They stood, pressed together like spectators, just on the other side of the green outfield fence. Any ball hit into the birch wood was a home run, and lost forever. Ethan ran across the parking lot and up over the log where he had caught a flash of bushy red tail. He found a clear trail leading away from there to the north side of the Tooth. At first he ran along the trail, hoping to catch sight of the bushbaby as it skittered through the woods. But, after a while, the dim heavy light filtering through the green leaves of the birch trees seemed to weigh him down, or tie him up in shadows. He slowed to a trot, and then just walked along the path, listening for something he kept thinking that he heard, a sound that was rhythmic and soft. He told himself that it was just the sound of his own breathing. Then he realised that it must be the waves, slapping against the beach at Summerland. That was where this particular trail headed: to Hotel Beach. Hotel Beach was popular with teenagers, mostly, but Ethan and his father had been there once. During the Clam Boom there had been some kind of resort, called the Summerland. You could still see the ruins of some cabins, a collapsed dance hall, the bones of an old pier. Just now it seemed like an inviting kind of place to go and feel ashamed. He would sit there for a couple of hours, hating himself, and then by the time the police found him, his father would be so worried that he would have forgotten and forgiven Ethan?s cowardice, and his failure as a ballplayer. He would see how upset and afraid Little League was making Ethan. ?What was I thinking?? he would say. ?Of course you can quit the team, son. I only want what?s best for you.? By the time Ethan reached Hotel Beach, he was feeling almost happy in his sadness, and had forgotten all about the bushbaby. He came out of the woods onto the sand and stood for a moment. Then he walked out onto the beach. The sand was dense and crunchy under his shoes. He sat down on the great gnarled log of driftwood where he and his father had sat to eat their lunch the day they visited. It was a real grandfather log, the wreck of some enormous old tree, spiked with snapped branches. He had just noticed the strange, cold sting of the wind, and the grey clouds that were blowing in from the Olympic range, when he heard voices nearby. He ducked back into the trees, listening. They were the voices of men, and there was a raucous note in them that struck Ethan as harsh and somehow hostile. Carefully, keeping low, he inched his way towards the ruined cabins. A big Range Rover was parked in the clearing beside the dance hall. The words TRANSFORM PROPERTIES were written on the side of the car. Four men in suits stood around the front of the car, looking over some plans that they had unrolled across the hood. Although the day was perfectly dry, all four men were wearing bright yellow raincoats over their suits, and big rubberised leather rain boots, the kind that had steel toes. He did not know why ? it was just four guys with neckties in raincoats ? but he felt as if they had come here to do something very bad. The men seemed to be disagreeing about something. One pointed at the ground, threw up his hands, and walked around to the back of the car. He opened the hatch and took out a heavy shovel. With a stern look at the three other men, he walked several paces up away from the beach, towards the dance hall that for the last forty years had been sinking back into the woods. The man pointed again at the ground, as if to suggest that whatever he found here was going to prove whatever point he had been trying to make. Then he raised his shovel, and the blade bit into the carpet of weeds and yellow flowers at his feet. Someone at Ethan?s elbow sighed. It was a bitter, long, weary sigh, the way someone sighs when the thing she has most dreaded finally comes to pass. It was right in his ear, unmistakable and clear. Ethan turned to see who had sighed, but there was nobody there. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end. The breeze was cold, and as sharp as the tooth of a shovel. Ethan shivered. Then the man with the shovel cried out. He reached up and slapped the back of his neck. Something ? it looked like a little stone ? went skipping off into the grass behind him. Ethan looked up and saw, in the branches of a nearby birch, the little red animal with the mocking eyes. It was much more like a fox, he saw, than a bushbaby. But it was not a fox, either. It had hands, for one thing, sharp-looking little raccoon hands, one of which was holding on to a forked slingshot. And apart from its pointed snout it had a human face, whiskered and long-eared and just now wrinkled in amused satisfaction. It saw Ethan, and seemed to raise the slingshot in a kind of salute. Then, solemn-faced again, it scurried straight down the tree and took off into the woods. Ethan must have made some kind of a noise of surprise, because all four of the men looked up at him. He froze, and his heart kicked and thudded so hard he could hear it in his teeth. Their eyes were concealed by narrow sunglasses, and their mouths were thin and nearly lipless. They were going to come after him. He turned to run back into the woods, and immediately crashed into the old man with the Indian ponytail. For a little old guy he felt amazingly solid. Ethan fell backwards and landed on his behind. The old man just stood there, nodding his head. ?Told you,? he said. ?Do I?is it my turn? Did they put me in the game?? ?They sure would like to,? the old man said. ?If you willin?.? Ethan just wanted to get away from the TransForm Properties men. ?I don?t blame you for that,? said the old man, and it is a measure of just how spooked Ethan was that it did not occur to him until much later that the old man had read his thoughts. ?Come on, best get out of here.? ?Who are they?? Ethan asked, following along behind the old man, who was dressed in a suit, too, but a baggy woollen one cut from a weird orange plaid that would not have looked out of place upholstering one of the old couches on the Rideouts? front porch. ?They the worst men in the world,? the old man said. ?My name is Chiron Brown, by the way. When I pitched for the Homestead Greys, they called me ?Ringfinger?. ? ?Do you have a big ring finger?? Ethan reasoned. ?No,? the old man said, raising his leathery right hand. ?I doesn?t have no ring finger at all. You would not believe what kind of crazy motion I could put on a baseball without no ring finger.? ?Did they send you to come get me?? Ethan said, as they approached the parking lot. He could already hear the shouting of parents, the shrill mocking voices of boys, the raspy pleading of Coach Olafssen. ?As a matter of fact, they did,? said Ringfinger Brown. ?A long time ago.? IT WAS THE strangest moment in what had so far been a fairly strange morning. When Ethan got back to the bench, nobody turned around, or even seemed to notice that he had ever left. But the very instant his butt touched the smooth pine surface of the bench, Mr. Olafssen looked over at him, and gave him a big fatal wink. ?All right, Ethan. Big Ethan. Let?s get you in the game.? Things, it turned out, were no longer quite so rosy for the Roosters as when Ethan had left. The Angels had managed to come back with six more runs, and now the score was 11?8. But it was the top of the seventh and final inning, and Mr. Olafssen was pretty much obliged, by the laws of decency, fair play, and the Clam Island Mustang League, to play every able-bodied kid on the team for at least half an inning of every game. There were two out, two on, and no runs in, and it was going to be up to Ethan to pad the Roosters? lead. ?Get in there, now,? Mr. Olafssen said, just the way he always did. ?Get in there and take your hacks.? Ethan, however, did not want any hacks. Usually, when he came to the plate, Ethan Feld tried to swing his bat as little as possible. He just kept the bat on his shoulder, hoping for a walk. The truth is, he was afraid of trying to accomplish anything more, at the plate, than a walk. And he was afraid of being hit by the ball. But mostly he was mortally afraid of striking out swinging. Was there any worse kind of failure than that? Striking out. It was the way you described it when you failed at anything else in life, the symbol of every other kind of thing a person could possibly get wrong. Often enough, the opposing pitching was not too good in the Mustang League. Ethan?s strategy of just standing there, waiting for four bad pitches to come across the plate before three good ones did, frequently worked. But it was a strategy that was not at all respected by the other players. Ethan?s nickname in the Mustang League, in fact, was ?Dog Boy,? because of the way he was always hoping for a walk. He trudged up to the plate, dragging his bat behind him like a caveman in the cartoons dragging his club. He hoisted the bat to his shoulder ? it was still sore from when his father had stopped short to avoid hitting the little fox-monkey thing ? and looked over at his father, who gave him a big thumbs-up. Then Ethan stared out at Per Davis, who had taken over the pitching for the Angels. Per looked almost sorry to see Ethan. He winced a little bit, then sighed, and went into his stretch. A moment later something troubled the air around Ethan?s hands. ?Her-ite one!? cried out the umpire, Mr. Arch Brody of Brody?s Drug. Mr. Brody prided himself on the authentic-sounding way he called the balls and strikes. ?Come on, Dog Boy,? called Kyle. ?Get that bat off your shoulder.? ?Come on, Dog!? called the other boys. Ethan let another blur colour the air between him and Per Davis. ?Her-ite TWO!? Mr. Arch Brody yelled. Ethan heard the gravelly voice of Ringfinger Brown. ?When the time come,? the old man said, ?you best be ready to swing.? Ethan searched the crowd but could not find the old man anywhere, though the voice had sounded as if it were just at his elbow. But he saw that Jennifer T. was looking right at him. ?Breathe,? she suggested, moving her lips without speaking. Ethan realised that he had been holding his breath from the moment Mr. Olafssen had looked his way. He stepped out, took a breath, then stepped back in, resolved at last to take a hack. Playing the odds was one thing when the count was even at 0; with two strikes on him, maybe it made more sense to swing. When Per Davis reared back to let fly, Ethan wiggled his fingers on the shaft of the bat, and worked his shoulders up and down. Then, unfortunately, just before he swung the bat he did something kind of questionable. He closed his eyes. ?Her-ite her-REE!? shouted Mr. Brody, sealing Ethan?s doom. ?That?s all right,? Jennifer T. told him as they walked out to the field. ?We?ll hold ?em. At least you took a hack.? ?Yeah.? ?It was a nice-looking swing.? ?Yeah.? ?Just a little early, is all.? ?I shut my eyes,? Ethan said. Jennifer T. stopped at first base, which was hers. She shook her head, not bothering to conceal her exasperation with Ethan, and then turned towards home plate. ?Well, try to keep them open in the field, huh?? In the field ? Coach Olafssen always stuck Ethan out in right, a region of the diamond to which boys who prefer to remain invisible have been sent since baseball was invented ? the situation was, if anything, even worse. Forget about catching the ball; Ethan never seemed to see it when it was headed towards him. Even after a fly ball landed in the grass, and went skipping happily along towards the outfield fence for a triple at least, Ethan often took quite a while to find it. And then, when, finding it at last, he threw the ball in! Oy! An entire row of fathers, watching from behind the backstop, would smack their foreheads in despair. Ethan never remembered to throw to the cut-off man, who stood waiting, halfway between Ethan and home, to relay the throw to the catcher. No, he just let loose, eyes screwed tight shut: a big, wild windmill of a throw that ended up nowhere near home plate, but in the parking lot behind third base, or, once, on the hindquarters of a sleeping Labrador retriever. Ethan wandered into right, hoping with all his heart that nothing would happen while he stood there. His hand felt sweaty and numb inside his big, stiff new fielder?s mitt. The chill wind he had felt at Hotel Beach was blowing across the ball field now, and clouds were covering the sun. The grey light made Ethan squint. It gave him a headache. An echo of the old man?s voice lingered in his mind in a way that he found quite irritating. He puzzled for a while over the question of whether there was really any difference, as far as your brain was concerned, between hearing something and remembering how something sounded. Then he worked for a while on possible theories to account for the presence on Clam Island of a rare African primate. His thoughts, in other words, were far removed from baseball. He was dimly aware of the other players chattering, pounding their gloves, teasing or encouraging each other, but he felt very far away from it all. He felt like the one balloon at a birthday party that comes loose from a lawn chair and floats off into the sky. A baseball landed nearby, and rolled away towards the fence at the edge of the field, as if it had some place important to get to. Later it turned out that Ethan was supposed to have caught that ball. Four runs scored, making the final total Angels 12, Roosters 11. In other words, eight losses in a row. The Angel who hit the ball that Ethan was supposed to have caught, Tommy Bluefield, was angry at Ethan, because even though his hit had brought in all three baserunners and himself, it did not count as a grand slam home run, since Ethan had committed an error. He ought to have caught the ball. ?You stink,? Tommy Bluefield told him. The magnitude of Ethan?s failure, the shame that he had brought down on himself, ought to have been the focus of everyone?s thoughts, just then, as Ethan dragged his sorry self off the field to the bleachers, where his father was waiting with the crumpled flower of his smile. His teammates ought to have lined up on either side of him and beaten him with their mitts as he was made to run a gauntlet. They ought to have ripped the patch from his uniform shoulder, broken his bat, and uninvited him to come have post-game pizza in Clam Centre with everybody else. Instead they seemed quickly to lose interest in the shameful saga of Ethan Feld, and to turn their wondering faces to the sky. On Jock MacDougal Field, at the Tooth, where every summer for as long as white men could remember there had been an endless supply of blue sky and sunshine, it had started to rain. *?The Darndest Way of Getting from Here to There? ? slogan, Feld Airship, Inc. 2 A Hot Prospect (#ulink_a66d2465-1ec0-5e98-a154-47d5f191d94f) THE NEXT MORNING Ethan awoke from dreams of freakish versions of baseball where there were seven bases, two pitchers, and outfields beyond outfields reaching into infinity, to find the little red fox-monkey sitting on his chest. Its thick fur was neatly combed and braided, and the braids on its head were tied with bright blue ribbons. And it was smoking a pipe. Ethan opened his mouth to scream but no sound emerged. The creature weighed heavily on his chest, like a sack of nails. Whoever had bathed it and tied its hair in bows had also doused it in rosewater, but underneath the perfume it stank like a fox, a rank smell of meat and mud. Its snout quivered with intelligence and its gleaming black eyes peered curiously at Ethan. It looked a little dubious about what it saw. Ethan opened and closed his mouth, gasping like a fish on a dock, trying to cry out for his father. ?Calm, piglet,? said the fox-monkey. ?Breathe.? Its voice was small and raspy. It sounded like an old recording, coming through a gramophone bell. ?Yes, yes,? it went on, soothingly. ?Just take a breath and never be afraid of old Mr. C., for he isn?t going to hurt not the tiniest hair of your poor hairless piglet self.? ?What??? Ethan managed.? What??? ?My name is Cutbelly. I am a werefox. I am seven hundred and sixty-five years old. I have been sent to offer you everlasting fame and a fantastic destiny.? He scratched with a black fingernail at an itch in the dazzling white fur of his chest. ?Go ahead,? he said. He pointed at Ethan with the stem of his pipe. ?Take a few deep breaths.? ?Sitting?? Ethan tried. ?On? my? chest.? ?Oh! Ha-ha!? The werefox tumbled backwards off of Ethan, exposing him to the startling sight of its private parts and furry behind. For Cutbelly was quite naked. This had not struck Ethan as odd when he was under the impression that he (Cutbelly was definitely a he) was an animal, but now Ethan sort of wished that Cutbelly would at least wear some pants. After completing his back flip, Cutbelly landed on his long bony back paws. The feet were much foxier than the quick black hands. ?My apologies.? Ethan sat up and tried to catch his breath. He looked at the clock on his nightstand: 7:23 A.M. His father might walk in at any moment and find him talking to this smelly red-brown thing. His eyes strayed to the door of his bedroom, and Cutbelly noticed. ?Not to worry about your pa,? he said. ?The Neighbours worked me a sleeping grammer. Your pa would not hear the crack of Ragged Rock.? ?Ragged Rock? Where is that?? ?It isn?t a place,? Cutbelly said, relighting his pipe. It had been worked from a piece of bone. Ethan thought: Human bone. On the bowl was carved the bearded likeness of Abraham Lincoln, of all things. ?It?s a time. A day, to be precise. A day to wake anybody who might be sleeping, including the dead themselves. But not your pa. No, even come Ragged Rock he will sleep, until you return safely from speaking with the Neighbours, and I tuck your little piglet self snug back into your bed.? In a book or a movie, when strange things begin to happen, somebody will often say, ?I must be dreaming?. But in dreams nothing is strange. Ethan thought that he might be dreaming not because a nude werefox had shown up making wild claims and smoking a pipe that was definitely not filled with tobacco, but because none of these things struck him as particularly unexpected or odd. ?What kind of a fantastic destiny?? he said. He did not know why, but he had a sudden flash that somehow it was going to involve baseball. Cutbelly stood up and jammed his pipe between his teeth, looking very foxy. ?Aye, you?d like to know, wouldn?t you?? he said. ?It?s a rare chance you?re to be offered. A first-rate education.? ?Tell me!? Ethan said. ?I will,? Cutbelly said. ?On the way through.? He blew a long steady jet of foul smoke. It smelled like burning upholstery. Cutbelly sprang down from the bed and crept with his peculiar swaggering gait towards the window. He reached up with his long arms and dragged himself up onto the sill. ?Wear a sweater,? he said. ?Scampering is cold work.? ?Scampering?? ?Along the Tree.? ?The Tree?? Ethan said, grabbing a hooded sweatshirt from the back of his desk chair. ?What Tree?? ?The Tree of Worlds,? Cutbelly said impatiently. ?Whatever do they teach you in school?? WEREFOXES HAVE LONG been known for their teacherly natures. As they started down the drive from the Feld house, Cutbelly lectured Ethan on the true nature of the universe. It was one of his favourite subjects. ?Can you imagine an infinite tree?? Cutbelly said. They turned left at the mailbox that read Feld Airship, Inc., ducked under a wire fence, skirted the property line that separated the Felds from the Jungermans, and wandered west a little ways. ?A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything? And whose outermost tippity fingers stretch as far as anything can possibly reach?? ?I can imagine anything,? Ethan said, quoting Mr. Feld, ?except having no imagination.? ?Big talk. Well, then do so. Now, if you?ve ever looked at a tree, you?ve seen how its trunk divides into great limbs, which divide again into lesser limbs, which in turn divide into boughs, which divide yet again into branches, which divide into twigs, which divide into twiglings. The whole mess splaying out in all directions, jutting and twisting and zigzagging. At the tips of the tips you might have a million million tiny green shoots, scattered like the sparks of an exploding skyrocket. But if you followed your way back from the thousand billion green fingertips, down the twigs, to the branches, to the boughs, to the lesser limbs, you would arrive at a point ? the technical term is the axil point ? where you would see that the whole lacy spreading mass was really only four great limbs, branching off from the main trunk.? ?OK,? Ethan said. ?Now, let?s say the tree is invisible. Immaterial. You can?t touch it.? ?OK.? ?The only part of it that?s visible, that?s the leaves.? ?The leaves are visible.? ?The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million million places where life lives and things happen and stories and creatures come and go.? Ethan thought this over. ?So Clam Island is like a leaf?? ?It isn?t like a leaf. It is a leaf. This tree is not some fancy metaphor, piglet. It?s real. It?s there. It?s holding us all up right now, you and me and Bulgaria and Pluto and everything else. Just because something is invisible and immaterial doesn?t mean it isn?t really there.? ?Sorry,? Ethan said. ?Now. Those four limbs, the four great limbs, each with its great tangle of branches and leaves ? those are the four Worlds.? ?There are four Worlds.? ?And all the twigs and boughs are the myriad ways among the leaves, the paths and roads, the rambles and routes among the stars. But there are some of us who can, you know, leap, from leaf to leaf, and branch to branch. Shadowtails, such creatures are called, and I myself am one of them. When you travel along a branch, that?s called scampering. We?re doing it right now. You can?t go very far ? it?s too tiring ? but you can go very quickly.? The werefox scrabbled up a low bank, in a spray of dead leaves and pebbles, then leapt through a blackberry bramble headfirst. Ethan had no choice but to follow. It was briefly very dark inside the bramble, and cold, too, a dank chill, as if they had leapt not through a blackberry bramble but into the mouth of a deep cave. There was a soft tinkling like the sound of the wind through icy pine needles. Then somehow or other he landed, without a scratch on him, at the edge of a familiar meadow, beyond which lay the white mystery of the birches. ?Hey. How?d we?? Is this??? They had been walking for a few minutes at most. Now, Ethan had done a fair amount of ranging alone through the woods and along the gravel roads of Clam Island. But he had never considered trying to walk all the way from his house to the Tooth. It was just too far. You would have to walk, he would have said, for more than an hour. And yet here they were, or seemed to be. The broad sunny meadow, the birch trees, the brackish green Sound that he could smell just beyond them. ?Now, there?s one last thing I want you to imagine,? Cutbelly said. ?And it?s that because of all the crazy bends and hairpin turns, because of all the zigs and zags in the limbs and boughs and branches of this Tree I?m telling you about, it so happens that two leaves can end up lying right beside each other, separated by what amounts, for a gifted shadowtail like myself, to a single bound. And yet, if you were to follow your way back along the twigs and branches, back to the trunk, you would find that these two leaves actually grow from two separate great limbs of the Tree. Though near neighbours, they lie in two totally different Worlds. Can you picture that, piglet? Can you see how the four Worlds are all tangled up in each other like the forking, twisting branches of a tree?? ?You?re saying you can scamper from one world to another?? ?No, I can leap. And take you with me into the bargain,? said the werefox. ?And the name of this World is the Summerlands.? It was the Summerland Ethan knew; yet it was different, too. The plain metal bleachers and chain fences of Jock MacDougal Field at the far side of the meadow had been replaced with an elegant structure, at once sturdy and ornate, carved from a pale yellow, almost white substance that Ethan could not at first identify. It was a neat little box of a building, with long arched galleries through which he could see that it was open to the sky. It looked a little like the Taj Mahal, and a little like a big old Florida hotel, towers and grandstands and pavilions. There was an onion-shaped turret at each corner, and along the tops of the galleries rows of long snaky pennants snapped in the breeze. ?It?s a ballpark,? Ethan said. ?A tiny one.? It was no bigger than a Burger King restaurant. ?The Neighbours are not a large people,? Cutbelly said. ?As you will soon see.? ?The Neighbours,? Ethan said. ?Are they human?? ?The Neighbours? No, sir. Not in the least. A separate creation, same as me.? ?They aren?t aliens?? Ethan was looking around for possible explanations for Cutbelly. It had occurred to him that his new friend might have evolved on some distant world of grass where it might behove you to work your way up from something like a fox. ?And what is an alien, tell me that?? ?A creature from another world. You know, from outer space.? ?As I thought I had made clear, there are but four Worlds,? Cutbelly said. ?Though one of them, I should mention, is lost to us for ever. Sealed off by a trick of Coyote. Yours, including everything that you and your kind call ?the universe,? is just one of the three remaining ones, though if I may say, it?s my personal favourite of the lot. Just now you and I are crossing into another one, the Summerlands. And this is where the Neighbours most definitely dwell. Now as I was saying, they are not very grand. In fact they are quite literally Little People.? ?Little People?? Ethan said. ?Wait. OK. The Neighbours. They are. Aren?t they? They?re fair?? ?Fair Folk!? Cutbelly cut him off. ?Yes, indeed, that is an old name for them. Ferishers is the name they give themselves, or rather the name that they?ll consent to have you call them.? ?And they play baseball.? ?Endlessly.? With a roll of his eyes, Cutbelly threw himself down in the grass and weeds, of which he began gathering great handfuls and stuffing them into the bowl of his pipe. ?In that little building over there?? ?Thunderbird Park,? Cutbelly said. ??The Jewel of the Chinook League?. When there was a league. It?s a drafty old barracks, if you ask me.? ?What is it? what is it, uh, made of?? Even as he said it the thought strayed once more into his mind: human bones. ?Ivory,? Cutbelly said. ?Whale?? ?Not whale.? ?Walrus?? ?Nor walrus, besides.? ?Elephant?? ?And where would anyone get hold of that much elephant ivory around here? No, that ballpark, piglet, was carved from giant?s ivory. From the bones of Skookum John, who made the mistake of trying to raid this neighbourhood one day back about 1743.? He sighed, and took a contemplative puff on his pipe. ?Ah, me,? he said. ?Might as well have a seat, piglet. They know we?re here. A moment will bring them along.? Ethan sat down beside Cutbelly in the grassy meadow. The sun was high and the tall green grass was vibrant with bees. It might have been the loveliest summer day in the history of Ethan Feld. The birch forest was loud with birds. The smell of smoke from Cutbelly?s pipe was pungent but not unpleasant. Ethan suddenly remembered a similar afternoon, bees and blue skies, long ago? somewhere? at the edge of a country road, beside a grassy bank that ran down to a stagnant pond. It must have been at his grandparents? house, in South Fallsburg, New York, which he had heard his mother speak of but, until now, never remembered. The country house had been sold when he was still a very little boy. His mother crouched down behind him, one slender hand on his shoulder. With the other she pointed to the murky black water of the pond. There, hovering just a few inches above the water, hung a tiny white woman, her hummingbird wings all a-whir. ?That was a pixie, actually,? Cutbelly said, sounding more melancholy than ever. This time Ethan noticed that his thoughts had been read. ?And you were lucky to see one. There aren?t too many of them left. They got the grey crinkles worse than any of them.? ?The grey crinkles?? In the trees to their left there was a sudden flutter, like the rustle of a curtain or a flag. A huge crow took to the sky with a raucous laugh and what Ethan would have sworn was a backwards glance at him and Cutbelly. ?It?s a great plague of the Summerlands,? Cutbelly said, his bright black eyes watching the crow as it flew off. ?More of Coyote?s mischief. It?s horrible to see.? Cutbelly puffed dourly on his pipe. It was clear that he didn?t care to say anything more on the sad subject of the vanishing pixies and the dreadful plague that had carried them off. As is so often the case when one is in the presence of a truly gifted teacher, Cutbelly?s explanations had left Ethan with so many questions that he didn?t know where to begin. What happened when you got the grey crinkles? What did coyotes have to do with it? ?What?s the difference?? Ethan began. ?I mean, between a pixie and a fair?a ferisher?? Cutbelly clambered abruptly to his feet. The plug of charred weeds tumbled from the bowl of his shinbone pipe, and Ethan?s nostrils were soon tinged by the smell of burning fur. ?See for yourself,? Cutbelly said. ?Hear for yourself, too.? They travelled, like the ball clubs of old, in buses ? only these buses could fly. They came tearing out of the birch forest in ragged formation, seven of them, trying to keep abreast of one another but continually dashing ahead of or dropping behind. They were shaped more or less like the Greyhound coaches you saw in old movies, at once bulbous and sleek. But they were much smaller than an ordinary bus ? no bigger than an old station wagon. They were made not of steel or aluminium, but of gold wire, striped fabric, some strange, pearly silver glass, and all kinds of other substances and objects ? clamshells and feathers, marbles and pennies and pencils. They were wild buses, somehow, the small, savage cousins of their domesticated kin. They dipped and rolled and swooped along the grass, bearing down on Ethan and Cutbelly. As they drew nearer, Ethan could hear the sound of laughter and curses and shouts. They were having a race, flying across the great sunny meadow in their ramshackle golden buses. ?Everything is a race or a contest, with the Neighbours,? Cutbelly said, sounding fairly fed up with them. ?Somebody always has to lose, or they aren?t happy.? At last one of the buses broke free of the pack for good. It shot across the diminishing space between it and Ethan?s head and then came, with a terrific screech of tyres against thin air, to a stop. There was a loud cheer from within, and then the other buses came squealing up. Immediately six or seven dozen very small people piled out of the doors and began shouting and arguing and trying to drown each other out. They snatched leather purses from their belts and waved them around. After a moment great stacks of gold coins began to change hands. At last most of them looked pleased or at least satisfied with the outcome of the race, and turned to Cutbelly and Ethan, jostling and elbowing one another to get a better look at the intruder. Ethan stared back. They looked like a bunch of tiny Indians out of some old film or museum diorama. They were dressed in trousers and dresses of skin, dyed and beaded. They were laden with shells and feathers and glinting bits of gold. Their skins were the colour of cherry wood. Some were armed with bows and quivers of arrows. The idea of a lost tribe of pygmy Indians living in the woods of Clam Island made a brief appearance in Ethan?s mind before being laughed right out again. These creatures could never be mistaken for human. For one thing, though they were clearly adults, women with breasts, men with beards and moustaches, none stood much taller than a human infant. Their eyes were the colour of cider and beer, the pupils rectangular black slits like the pupils of goats. But it was more than their size or the strangeness of their pale gold eyes. Looking at them ? just looking at them ? raised the hair on the back of Ethan?s neck. On this dazzling summer day, he shuddered, from the inside out, as if he had a fever. His jaw trembled and he heard his teeth clicking against each other. His toes in his sneakers curled and uncurled. ?You?ll get used to seeing them in time,? Cutbelly whispered. One of the ferishers, a little taller than the others, broke away from the troop. He was dressed in a pair of feathered trousers, a shirt of hide with horn buttons, and a green jacket with long orchestra-leader tails. On his head there was a high-crowned baseball cap, red with a black bill and a big silver O on the crown, and on his feet a tiny pair of black spikes, the old-fashioned kind such as you might have seen on the feet of Ty Cobb in an old photograph. He was as handsome as the king on a playing card, with the same unimpressed expression. ?A eleven-year-old boy,? he said, peering up at Ethan. ?These is shrunken times indeed.? ?He goin? to do fine,? said a familiar voice, creaky and scuffed-up as an old leather mitt. Ethan turned to find old Ringfinger Brown standing behind him. Today the old man?s suit was a three-piece, as pink as lipstick, except for the vest, which was exactly the colour of the Felds? station wagon. ?He?ll hafta,? said the ferisher. ?The Rade has come, just like Johnny Speakwater done foretold. An? they brought their pruning shears, if ya know what I mean.? ?Yeah, we saw ?em, din?t we, boy?? Ringfinger said to Ethan. ?Comin? in with their shovels and their trucks and their steel-toe boots to do their rotten work.? ?I?m Cinquefoil,? the ferisher told Ethan. ?Chief o? this mob. And starting first baseman.? Ethan noticed now that there was some murmuring among the ferishers. He looked inquiringly at Mr. Brown, who gestured towards the ground with his fingers. Ethan didn?t understand. ?You in the presence of royalty, son,? Mr. Brown said. ?You ought to bow down when you meetin? a chief, or a king, or some other type of top man or potentate. Not to mention the Home Run King of three worlds, Cinquefoil of the Boar Tooth mob.? ?Oh, my gosh,? Ethan said. He was very embarrassed, and felt that a simple bow would somehow not be enough to make up for his rudeness. So he got down on one knee, and lowered his head. If he had been wearing a hat, he would have doffed it. It was one of those things that you have seen done in movies a hundred times, but rarely get the chance to try. He must have looked pretty silly. The ferishers all burst out laughing, Cinquefoil loudest of all. ?That?s the way, little reuben,? he said. Ethan waited for what he hoped was a respectful amount of time. Then he got back to his feet. ?How many home runs did you hit?? he asked. Cinquefoil shrugged modestly. ?Seventy-two thousand nine hundred and fifty-four,? he said. ?Hit that very number just last night.? He pounded his mitt, which was about the size and colour of a Nilla wafer. ?Catch.? A small white sphere, stitched in red but no bigger than a gumball, came at Ethan. The air seemed to waver around it and it came faster than he expected. He got his hands up, just, and clutched hopefully at the air in front of his face. The ball stung him on the shoulder and then dropped with an embarrassing plop to the grass. All the ferishers let out their breath at once in a long deflated hiss. The ball rolled back towards Cinquefoil?s black spikes. He looked at it, then up at Ethan. Then with a sigh he bent down and flicked it back into his mitt. ?A hot prospect indeed,? said Cinquefoil to Ringfinger Brown. This time Mr. Brown didn?t try to stick up for Ethan.? Well, we got no choice, an? that?s a fact. The Rade has showed up, years before we ever done expected them, and yer about ten years shy o? half-cooked, but we got no choice. There ain?t no time ta go looking for another champion. I guess ya?ll hafta do.? ?But what do you need me for?? Ethan said. ?What do ya think? To save us. To save the Birchwood.? ?What?s the Birchwood?? The little chief rubbed slowly at chin with one tiny brown hand. It seemed to be a gesture of annoyance. ?This is the Birchwood. These trees ? ain?t ya ever noticed them? They?re birch trees. Birch wood. These woods is our home. We live here.? ?And, excuse me, I?m sorry, ha, but, uh, save it from what, now?? Cinquefoil gave Ringfinger Brown a hard look. ?Ta think that we done paid ya half our treasure fer this,? he said bitterly. Ringfinger suddenly noticed a bit of fuzz on his lapel. The ferisher chief turned to Ethan. ?From Coyote, o? course,? he said. ?Now that he done found us, he?s going ta try ta lop our gall. He does that, that?s the end o? the Birchwood. And that?s the end o? my mob.? Ethan was lost, and embarrassed, too. If there was one thing he hated more than anything else in the world, it was being taken for stupid. His natural tendency in such situations was to pretend that he understood for as long as was necessary until he did understand. But whatever the ferisher was talking about ? lop our gall? ? it sounded too important for Ethan to fake. So he turned for help to Cutbelly. ?Who is Johnny Speakwater?? he said miserably. ?Johnny Speakwater is the local oracle in this part of the Western Summerlands,? the werefox said. ?About ten years ago, he predicted that Coyote, or the Changer as he is also known, was going to find his way to the Birchwood. Listen, now, you remember I was telling you about the Tree ? the Lodgepole, as these people call it.? At these words, a groan went up from the assembled ferishers. ?He don?t even know about the Lodgepole!? Cinquefoil cried. ?Stop givin? me the fisheye,? Ringfinger Brown snapped. ?I done told you they was slim pickin?s.? ?Shrunken times, indeed,? the chief repeated, and all his mob nodded their heads. Ethan could see they were already very disappointed in him, and he hadn?t even done anything yet. ?Every so often,? Cutbelly went on patiently, ?two branches of a tree will rub right up against each other. Have you ever seen that? Every time there?s a stiff enough wind. They do it so long, and so furious, that a raw place, a kind of wound, opens up in the bark on each limb where it?s been rubbing. And then, over time, the wound heals over with new bark, only now, the two limbs are joined together. Into one limb. That joining or weaving together of two parts of a tree is called pleaching. And the place where they are joined is called a gall.? ?I?ve seen that,? Ethan said. ?I saw a tree in Florida one time that was like that.? ?Well, with a tree as old and as tangled-up as the Lodgepole, and with the Winds of Time blowing as stiff as they like to blow, you are bound to have some pleaching, here and there. By now it?s been going on so long that these galls are all over the place. Galls mark the spots where two worlds flow into each other. And they tend to be magical places. Sacred groves, haunted pools, and so forth. Your Summerland is just such a place.? ?So, OK, Summerland is in my world and this one,? Ethan said, to Cinquefoil as much as to Cutbelly, hoping to demonstrate that he was not totally hopeless. ?At the same time. And that?s why it never rains there?? ?Never can tell what?s going to happen around a gall,? Cutbelly said. ?All kinds of wonderful things. A dry sunny patch of green in a land of endless grey and drizzle is just one of the possibilities.? ?And now this Coyote wants to cut the worlds apart again?? Cutbelly nodded. ?But why?? Ethan said. ?Because that?s what Coyote does, among a thousand other mad behaviours. He wanders around the Tree, with his Rade of followers, and wherever he finds the worlds pleached together he lops them right apart. But this local gall is tucked away in such a remote corner of the Worlds that he?s missed it until now.? ?OK,? Ethan said. ?I get it. I mean, I sort of get it. But, I mean, you know, I sort of agree with the whole idea of how I?m a, well, a kid. Like, I don?t know how to use a, what, like a sword, or even ride a horse, or any of that stuff, if that?s what I?m supposed to do.? Nobody said anything for a long time. It was as if they had all been hoping in spite of themselves that Ethan was going to rise to the occasion and come up with a plan for saving Summerland. Now that hope was gone. Then, from the edge of the meadow, there was a scornful laugh. They all turned in time to see a crow ? the same great black bird, Ethan would have sworn, that he and Cutbelly had seen earlier ? take to the sky. Some of the ferishers unslung their bows. They nocked arrows to their bowstrings and let fly. The arrows whistled into the sky. The black bird took no notice of them. Its wings beat slowly, lazily, with a kind of insolence, as if it thought it had all the time in the world. Its rough laughter caught the breeze and trailed behind it like a mocking streamer. ?Enough o? this,? the chief said, at last, his face grim and his tone gruff and commanding. He tossed the tiny baseball to Ethan again. This time Ethan just managed to hold on to it as it came stinging into his palm. ?Let?s go talk ta that crazy old clam.? THEY TROOPED ACROSS the meadow, past the gleaming white ballpark, and down to the beach. Here in the Summerlands, in the Birchwood, there was no ruined hotel, no collapsed dance hall or pier. There was just the long dark stretch of muddy sand, with the ghostly trees on one side of it and the endless dark green water stretching away on the other. And, in the middle of it all, that big grey log of ancient driftwood, spiky and half-buried, on which he and his father had once sat and shared a lunch of chicken sandwiches and hot chicken soup from the thermos. Was it the same log, Ethan wondered? Could something really exist in two different worlds at the same time? ?That bristly old chunk of wood is the gall, some say,? Cutbelly told him.? The place where the worlds are jointed fast.? They seemed in fact to be headed right towards it. ?But I thought you said the Tree was invisible, and untouchable,? Ethan said. ?Immaterial.? ?Can you see love? Can you touch it?? ?Well,? Ethan said, hoping it was not a trick question. ?No, love is invisible and untouchable, too.? ?And when your pap puts on that big Roosters jersey of his, and sits there watching you in the bleachers with the smile never leaving his face? And slaps palms with you after a game even though you struck out four times looking?? ?Huh,? Ethan said. ?Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.? They had reached the driftwood log. At a gesture from Cinquefoil a dozen or more ferishers got down on their knees and began, slowly and with a strange tenderness, to dig in the sand underneath it. They were digging separately, but all of them stayed in the area shadowed by the upraised, snaggled roots of the log. They slipped their small hands into the sand with a hiss and then brought them out, cupped, with a soft, sucking pop. The sand they removed in this way they drizzled through their fingers, writing intricate squiggles on the smooth surface of the beach. The driblets of sand made daisies and cloverleaves and suns. At last one of the ferishers cried out, pointing at the pattern her wet handful of sand had formed, like a pair of crossed lightning bolts. The other diggers gathered around her, then, and with vigour, they began to dig all together at the spot. Before long they had dug a hole that was three times taller than any of them, and twice as wide. Then there was another cry, followed by what sounded to Ethan like a loud, rude belch. Everyone laughed, and the diggers came clambering up out of the hole. The last three struggled out under the shared burden of the largest clam that Ethan had ever seen. It was easily as big as a large watermelon, and looked even bigger in the ferishers? small arms as they staggered up onto the beach with it. Its shell was lumpy and rugged as broken concrete. The rippled lip dripped with green water and some kind of brown slime. The ferishers set it down on the beach and then the rest of the mob circled around it. Ringfinger Brown gave Ethan a gentle push at the small of his back. ?Go on, boy,? he said. ?Listen to what Johnny Speakwater gots to say.? Ethan stepped forward ? he could almost have stepped right over the ferishers, but he felt instinctively that this would be rude. He arrived at the innermost edge of the circle just as the ferisher chief was going down on one knee in front of the clam. ?Hey, Johnny,? Cinquefoil said in a low, soft voice, calling to the clam like a man trying to wake a friend on the morning of some long-awaited exploit ? a fishing trip or camp-out. ?Whoa, Johnny Speakwater. All right now. Open up. We need a word with ya.? There was a deep rumble from inside the clam, and Ethan?s heart began to beat faster as he saw the briny lips of the shell part. Water came pouring out and vanished into the sand under the clam. Little by little, with an audible creak, the upper half of the clamshell lifted an inch or so off of the lower half. As it opened Ethan could see the greyish-pink glistening muscle of the thing, wet and slurping around in its pale lower jaw. ?Burdleburbleslurpleslurpleburbleburdleslurp,? said the clam, more or less. Cinquefoil nodded, and pointed to a pair of ferishers standing nearby. One of them reached into a leather tube, a kind of quiver that hung at his back, and pulled out a rolled sheet of what looked like parchment. The other took hold of one end, and then they stepped apart from each other, unrolling the scroll. It was a sheet of pale hide, like their clothing, a rectangle of deerskin marked all around with mysterious characters of an alphabet that Ethan didn?t know. It was something like a Ouija board, only the letters had been painted by hand. The ferishers knelt down in front of the clam, and held the unfurled scroll out in front of him. Cinquefoil laid a hand on the top of the clam?s shell, and stroked it softly, without seeming to notice what he was doing. He was lost in thought. Ethan supposed he was trying to come up with the right question for the oracle. Oracles were tricky, as Ethan knew from his reading of mythology. Often they answered the question you ought to have asked, or the one you didn?t realise you were even asking. Ethan wondered what question he himself would pose to an oracular clam, given a chance. ?Johnny,? the chief said finally.? Ya done warned us that Coyote was coming. And ya was right. Ya said we ought ta fetch us a champion, and we done tried. And spent up half our dear treasury in the bargain. But look at this one, Johnny.? Cinquefoil made a dismissive wave in Ethan?s direction. ?He?s just a puppy. He ain?t up ta the deal. We been watching him for a while now, and we had our hopes, but Coyote?s done come sooner than ever we thought. So now, Johnny, I?m asking ya one more time. What are we ta do now? How can we stop Coyote? Where can we turn?? There was a pause, during which Johnny Speakwater emitted a series of fizzings and burps and irritable teakettle whistlings. The letter-scroll trembled in the ferishers? hands. From somewhere nearby came the disrespectful cackling of a crow. Then there was a deep splorp from inside Johnny Speakwater, and a jet of clear, shining water shot from between the lips of his shell. It lanced across the foot or so of air that separated the clam and the letter-scroll, and hit with a loud, thick splat against a letter that looked something like a curly U with a cross in the centre of it. ?Ah!? cried all the ferishers. Cinquefoil scratched the U-and-cross into the sand. One letter at a time, slowly, with deadly accuracy, Johnny Speakwater spat out his prophecy. As each wad of thick clam saliva hit the parchment, the letter affected was copied into the sand by Cinquefoil, and then wiped clean. The clam spat more quickly as he went along and then, when he had hawked up about forty-five blasts, he stopped. A faint, clammy sigh escaped him, and then his shell creaked shut again. Ferishers gathered around the inscription, many of them murmuring the words. Then one by one they turned to look at Ethan with renewed interest. ?What does it say?? Ethan said. ?Why are you all looking at me?? Ringfinger Brown went over to take a look at the prophecy in the sand. He rubbed at the bald place on the back of his grey head, then held out his hand to Cinquefoil. The chief handed him the stick, and the old scout scratched two fresh sentences under the strange ferisher marks. ?That about right?? he asked the chief. Cinquefoil nodded. ?What did I tell you, then,? Ringfinger said.? What did I say?? Ethan leaned forward to see how the old man had translated the words of the oracular clam. FELD IS THE WANTED ONE FELD HAS THE STUFF HE NEEDS When he read these words, Ethan felt a strange warmth fill his belly. He was the wanted one ? the champion. He had the stuff. He turned back to look at Johnny Speakwater, flush with gratitude towards the clam for having such faith in him when no one else did. What he saw, when he turned, made him cry out in horror. ?The crow!? he said. ?He has Johnny!? In all the excitement over the words of the prophecy, the prophet had been forgotten. ?It ain?t a crow,? Cinquefoil said.? It?s a raven. I?d lay even money it?s Coyote himself.? When their backs were turned, the great black bird must have swooped down from the trees. Now it was lurching his way skyward with the clam clutched in both talons. Its wings beat fitfully against the air. It was a huge and powerful bird, but the enormous clam was giving it problems. It dipped and staggered and listed to one side. Ethan could hear the clam whistling and burbling in desperation as it was carried away. Something came over Ethan then. Perhaps he was feeling charged from the vote of confidence Johnny Speakwater had given him. Or perhaps he was just angered, as any of us would be, by seeing an outrage perpetrated on an innocent clam. He had seen birds on the Fauna Channel making meals out of bivalves. He had a vision of Johnny Speakwater being dropped from the sky onto some rocks, the great stony shell shattered and lying in shards. He saw the sharp yellow beak of the raven ripping into the featureless, soft greyish-pink flesh that was all Johnny Speakwater had for a body. In any case he took off down the beach, after the raven, shouting, ?Hey! You come back here! Hey!? The raven was not making good time under all that weight. The nearer he got to the robber bird, the angrier Ethan got. Now he was just underneath the struggling pair of wings, right at the edge of the trees. A few seconds more and he would have run out of beach. The whistling of the clam was more piteous than ever. Ethan wanted to do something to help Johnny Speakwater, to justify its faith in him, to prove to the ferishers that he was not just a raw and unformed puppy. There was something in Ethan?s hand, round and hard and cool as a sound argument. He looked down. It was the ferisher baseball. Without considering questions of air resistance or trajectory, he heaved the ball skyward in the direction of the raven. It arced skyward and struck the bird with neat precision on the head. There was a sickening crack. The bird squawked, and fluttered, and let go of Johnny Speakwater. A moment later something heavy as a boulder and rough as a brick smacked Ethan in the chest, and he felt a blast of something warm and marine splash across his face, and then he felt his legs go out from under him. The last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was the voice of the ferisher chief, Cinquefoil. ?Sign that kid up,? he said. 3 A Whistled-up Wind (#ulink_8c76906c-fcd6-5543-b734-754c647ae9e8) ETHAN OPENED HIS eyes. He was lying in his bed, in his bedroom, in the pink house on top of the hill. From the singing of the birds and the softness of the grey light at the window, he guessed that it was morning. He sat up and took his wristwatch from the nightstand beside his bed. His father had designed and assembled the watch for him, using parts from a store down in Tacoma called Geek World. The face of the watch was covered in buttons ? it was like a little keyboard ? and there was a liquid-crystal screen. Mr. Feld had loaded the watch with all kinds of interesting and possibly useful functions, but Ethan could never figure out how to do anything with it but tell the time and the day. Which was 7:24 A.M., Saturday the ninth. Only a little more than a minute, then, since a foul-smelling werefox who called himself Cutbelly had appeared, squatting on Ethan?s chest, to extend an invitation from another world. He heard the familiar Saturday sound of his father banging around down in the kitchen. If this were a work of fiction, the author would now be obliged to have Ethan waste a few moments wondering if he had dreamed the events of the past few hours. Since, however, every word of this account is true, the reader will not be surprised to learn that Ethan had no doubt whatsoever that in the company of a shadowtail he had leaped from one hidden branch of the Tree of Worlds to another ? to the realm that in books was sometimes called Faerie ? for the second time in his life. He knew perfectly well that he really had met a sort of fairy king, there, and seen a ballpark made from a giant?s bones, and rescued an oracular clam with one lucky toss of a ball. Ethan could tell the difference between the nonsensical business of a dream and the wondrous logic of a true adventure. But if Ethan had needed further proof of his having passed a few hours in the Summerlands, he need have looked no further than the book that was lying on his pillow, just beside the dent where his slumbering head had been. It was small ? of course ? about the size of book of matches, bound in dark green leather. On the spine was stamped, in ant-high golden letters, How to Catch Lightning and Smoke, and on the title page the author?s name was given as one E. Peavine. The print inside was almost too small for Ethan to make out. He could tell from the diagrams, though, that the book concerned baseball ? specifically, the position of catcher. Of all the positions in the game, this was the one, with its mysterious mask and armour, to which Ethan had always felt the most drawn. But the fact that to play catcher you really had to understand the rules of the game had always scared him away. He got up and went over to his desk. At the back of a drawer, under the detritus of several fine hobbies that had never quite taken, among them stamp collecting, rock collecting, and the weaving of pot holders from coloured elastic bands, Ethan found a magnifying glass his father had given him for his eleventh birthday. Mr. Feld was a passionate collector of both stamps and rocks. (He also wove a pretty decent pot holder.) Ethan climbed back into bed, pulled the blanket up over himself, and, with the help of the glass, began to read the introduction. ?The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball,? Peavine?s book began, whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled. Peavine, Ethan learned, was a ferisher from a region of the Summerlands that, as Peavine put it, ?brushed up to? Troy, New York. He had learned the fundamentals of his position during the summers of 1880, ?81, and ?82 by secretly observing the play of a catcher for the Troy Trojans, a human (?reuben? , was Peavine?s term) named William ?Buck? Ewing. ?These summers spent at the shoulder of the cool and elegant Buck,? Peavine wrote, ?as fine a reuben as I have ever encountered, in the dusty green bowl of Trojan Field, remain among the happiest memories of all my long, long life.? When an outbreak of the grey crinkles devastated Peavine?s native mob, he had wandered west and taken up the mask, mitt, and chest protector for a mob of ferishers living at a place called Snake Island ?an easy leap from Coeur d?Alene, Idaho.? It was here, playing for the Snake Island Wapatos amid the cottonwoods and wildflower glades of the seventy-two-team Flathead League, that he had first begun, in his words, ?to grasp the fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.? ?Eth?? There was a knock at the door to Ethan?s bedroom. He slid the book under his pillow and sat up as his father opened the door and poked his head into the room. ?Breakfast is?? He frowned, looking puzzled. ?Ready.? Ethan saw that he had neglected to dispose of the magnifying glass. He was clutching it in his left hand, with absolutely nothing around him that he might plausibly have been using it to examine. Lamely Ethan held it up to the window next to his bed. ?Spider,? he said. ?Really tiny one.? ?A spider!? said his father. ?Let me see.? He came over to the bed and Ethan passed him the magnifying glass. ?Where?? Ethan pointed; his father leaned in. A circle of empty air wavered in the watery lens. Then, to Ethan?s surprise, a face emerged, grinning a yellow-toothed grin. A grey face, with a grey mosquito-stinger of a nose, equipped with a twitching black set of wings. Ethan?s tongue seemed to swell in his mouth; he could not utter a sound. He watched in horror as the creature winked at him, waiting for his father?s cry of alarm. ?I don?t see any spider,? Mr. Feld said mildly. He stood up again and the horrible grin vanished; there was nothing at the window but misty Clam Island morning. ?The wind must have blown it away,? Ethan said. He climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of underpants under the extra-large Hellboy T-shirt he slept in, and followed his father out to the kitchen, to confront the weekly sadness of flannel cakes. His father set a tall stack in front of him and then sat down with a stack of his own. They were enormous things, Mr. Feld?s flannel cakes, each nearly the size of the plate itself, and there were invariably five or six of them that Ethan was expected to eat. During the week Ethan fixed his own breakfast ? cold cereal, or an English muffin spread with peanut butter. This was necessary because Mr. Feld stayed up till all hours in his workshop. This in turn was because the night-time was when Mr. Feld felt the most inventive. Or so he said. Sometimes Ethan suspected that his father simply didn?t like to see the light of day. When Ethan got ready for school or, now that school was out, for a morning walk in the woods or a bike ride over to Jennifer T.?s, Mr. Feld was usually asleep. But on Saturday mornings, no matter how late he had worked, Mr. Feld always woke up, or stayed up, as the case might be, to cook a pancake breakfast for him and Ethan. Pancakes ? she called them flannel cakes ? had been a specialty of Dr. Feld?s, and the Saturday breakfast was a Feld family tradition. Unfortunately, Mr. Feld was a terrible cook, and his own flannel cakes never failed to live up to their rather unappetising name. ?Well,? Mr. Feld said, tipping the bottle of maple syrup onto his stack. ?Let?s see how I did this week.? ?Did you remember the baking powder?? Ethan said, with a shudder. He was still feeling unnerved by the memory of the ugly grey face, with the pointed nose and wicked grin, swimming in the lens of the magnifying glass. ?The eggs?? His father nodded, allowing a large puddle of syrup to form. One of the unspoken but necessary ground rules for eating Mr. Feld?s flannel cakes was that you could use as much syrup as you needed to help you get them down. ?And the vanilla?? Ethan said, pouring his own syrup. He preferred Karo; he had seen a movie once of men in fur hats driving long, sharp steel taps into the tender hearts of Canadian maples, and ever since then had felt too sorry for the trees to eat maple syrup. Mr. Feld nodded again. He cut himself a fat wedge, pale yellow pinstriped with dark brown, and popped it, looking optimistic, into his mouth. Ethan quickly did the same. They chewed, watching each other carefully. Then they both stared down at their plates. ?If only she had written down the recipe,? Mr. Feld said at last. They ate in silence broken only by the clink of their forks, by the hum of the electric clock over the stove and by the steady liquid muttering of their old refrigerator. To Ethan it was like the tedious soundtrack of their lives. He and his father lived in this little house, alone; his father working sixteen hours a day and more perfecting the Zeppelina, the personal family dirigible that was someday going to revolutionise transportation, while Ethan tried not to disturb him, not to disturb anyone, not to disturb the world. Entire days went by without either of them exchanging more than a few words. They had few friends on the island. Nobody came to visit, and they received no invitations. And then, on Saturday mornings, this wordless attempt to maintain a tradition whose purpose, whose point, and whose animating spirit ? Ethan?s mother ? seemed to be lost forever. After a few minutes the humming of the clock began to drive Ethan out of his mind. The silence lay upon him like a dense pile of flannel cakes, gummed with syrup. He pushed back in his chair and sprang to his feet. ?Dad?? Ethan said, when they were most of the way through the ordeal. ?Hey, Dad?? His father was half dozing, chewing and chewing on a mouthful of pancakes with one eye shut. His thick black hair stood up in wild coils from his head, and his eyelids were purple with lack of sleep. Mr. Feld sat up, and took a long swallow of coffee. He winced. He disliked the taste of the coffee he brewed almost as much as he hated his pancakes. ?What, son?? he said. ?Do you think I would ever make a good catcher?? Mr. Feld stared at him, wide awake now, unable to conceal his disbelief. ?You mean? you mean a baseball catcher?? ?Like Buck Ewing.? ?Buck Ewing?? Mr. Feld said. ?That?s going back a ways.? But he smiled. ?Well, Ethan, I think it?s a very intriguing idea.? ?I was just sort of thinking? maybe it?s time for us?for me?to try something different.? ?You mean, like waffles?? Mr. Feld pushed his plate away, sticking out his tongue, and smoothed down his wild hair. ?Come,? he said. ?I think I may have an old catcher?s mitt, out in the workshop.? THE PINK HOUSE on the hill had once belonged to a family named Okawa. They had dug clams, kept chickens, and raised strawberries on a good-sized patch that ran alongside the Clam Island Highway for nearly a quarter of a mile in the direction of Clam Centre. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Okawas were put onto a school bus with the three or four other Japanese families living on Clam Island at the time. They were taken to the mainland, to a government internment camp outside of Spokane. The Okawa farm was sold to the Jungermans, who had neglected it. In the end it was the island itself, and not the Okawas ? they never returned ? that claimed the property. The strawberry patch was still there, badly overgrown, a thick black and green tangle of shadow and thorn in which, during the summer, you could sometimes catch, like a hidden gem, the glimpse of a bright strawberry. When Ethan and his father had arrived on Clam Island, they had chosen this house, knowing nothing about its sad history, mostly because Ethan?s dad had been so taken with the glass and cinder-block hulk of the old Okawa Farm strawberry packing shed. It had wide, tall doors, a high ceiling of aluminium and glass, and ample space for all of Mr. Feld?s tools and equipment and for the various components of his airships, not to mention his large collection of cardboard boxes. ?It?s got to be in one of these,? said Mr. Feld. ?I know I would never have thrown it away.? Ethan stood beside his father, watching him root around in a box that had long ago held twelve bottles of Gilbey?s gin. It was not one of the boxes left over from their move to Clam Island, which were all stamped MAYFLOWER, with a picture of the Pilgrims? ship. There were plenty of those still standing around, in stacks, up at the house, corners crisp, sealed with neat strips of tape. Ethan tried never to notice them. They reminded him, painfully, of how excited he had been at the time of the move; how glad to be leaving Colorado Springs, even though it meant leaving his mother behind forever. He had been charmed, at first, by the sight of the little pink house, and it was enchanting to imagine the marvellous blimp that was going to be born in the hulking old packing shed. He and his father had rebuilt the shed almost entirely themselves, that first summer, with some occasional help from Jennifer T.?s father, Albert. For a while the change of light, and the feeling of activity, of real work to be accomplished, had given Ethan reason to believe that everything was going to be all right again. It was Albert Rideout who had told Ethan, one afternoon, about the Okawas. The son, Albert said, had been one of the best shortstops in the history of Clam Island, graceful and tall, surefooted and quick-handed. To improve his balance he would run up and down the narrow lanes between the rows of strawberry plants, as fast as he could, without crushing a single red berry or stepping on a single green shoot. After the Okawas were interned, the son was so eager to prove how loyal he and his family were to the United States that he had enlisted in the Army. He was killed, fighting against Germany, in France. It was just a story Albert Rideout was telling, as they put a final coat of paint of the cement floor of the workshop, punctuating it with his dry little laugh that was almost a cough. But from that moment on, especially when Ethan looked out at the ruins of the strawberry patch, the sky over the old Okawa Farm had seemed to hang lower, heavier, and greyer than it had on their arrival. That was when the silence had begun to gather and thicken in the house. ?It?s really a softball mitt,? Mr. Feld was saying. ?I played a little catcher in college, on an intramural team? hello!? From the box he was digging around in, he had already pulled the eyepiece of a microscope, a peanut can filled with Canadian coins, and a small cellophane packet full of flaky grey dust and bearing the alarming label SHAVED FISH. Like the others in the workshop, this box was tattered and dented, and had been taped and retaped many times. Sometimes Mr. Feld said that these boxes contained his entire life up to the time of his marriage; other times he said it was all a lot of junk. No matter how many times he went to rummage in them, Mr. Feld never seemed to find exactly what he was looking for, and everything that he did find seemed to surprise him. Now, for the first time that Ethan could remember, he had managed to retrieve what he sought. ?Wow,? he said, gazing down at his old mitt with a tender expression. ?The old pie plate.? It was bigger than any catcher?s mitt that Ethan had ever seen before, thicker and more padded, even bulbous, a rich dark colour like the Irish beer his father drank sometimes on a rainy winter afternoon. Partly folded in on itself along the pocket, it reminded Ethan of nothing so much as a tiny, overstuffed leather armchair. ?Here you go, son,? Mr. Feld said. As Ethan took the mitt from his father, it fell open in his outspread hands, and a baseball rolled out; and the air was suddenly filled with an odour, half salt and half wildflower, that reminded Ethan at once of the air in the Summerlands. Ethan caught the ball before it hit the ground, and stuffed into the flap pocket of his shorts. ?Try it on,? Mr. Feld said. Ethan placed his hand into the mitt. It was clammy inside, but in a pleasant way, like the feel of cool mud between the toes on a hot summer day. Whenever Ethan put on his own glove, there was always a momentary struggle with the finger holes. His third finger would end up jammed in alongside his pinky, or his index finger would protrude painfully out the opening at the back. But when he put on his father?s old catcher?s mitt, his fingers slid into the proper slots without any trouble at all. Ethan raised his left hand and gave the mitt a few exploratory flexes, pinching his fingers towards his thumb. It was heavy, much heavier than his fielder?s glove, but somehow balanced, weighing no more on one part of his hand than on any other. Ethan felt a shiver run through him, like the one that had come over him when he had first seen Cinquefoil and the rest of the wild Boar Tooth mob of ferishers. ?How does it feel?? said Mr. Feld. ?Good,? Ethan said. ?I think it feels good.? ?When we get to the field, I?ll have a talk with Mr. Olafssen, about having you start practising with the pitchers next week. In the meantime, you and I could start working on your skills a little bit. I?m sure Jennifer T. would be willing to help you, too. We can work on your crouch, start having you throw from your knees a little bit, and?? Mr. Feld stopped, and his face turned red. It was a long speech, for him, and he seemed to worry that maybe he was getting a little carried away. He patted down the tangled yarn basket of his hair. ?That is, I mean?if you?d like to.? ?Sure, Dad,? Ethan said. ?I really think I would.? For the first time that Ethan could remember in what felt to him like years, Mr. Feld grinned, one of his old, enormous grins, revealing the lower incisor that was chipped from some long-ago collision at home plate. ?Great!? he said. Ethan looked at his watch. A series of numbers was pulsing across the liquid crystal display. He must have accidentally pushed one of the mysterious buttons. He held it out to show his father, who frowned at the screen. ?It?s your heart rate,? Mr. Feld said, pushing a few of the buttons under the display. ?Seems slightly elevated. Ah. Hmm. Nearly eleven. We?d better get going.? ?The game?s not until twelve-thirty,? Ethan reminded him. ?I know it,? Mr. Feld said. ?But I thought we could take Victoria Jean.? ONE WINTER MORNING about three months after the death of his wife, Mr. Feld had informed Ethan that he was quitting his job at Aileron Aeronautics, selling their house in a suburb of Colorado Springs, and moving them to an island in Puget Sound, so that he could build the airship of his dreams. He had been dreaming of airships all his life, in a way ? studying them, admiring them, learning their checkered history. Airships were one of his many hobbies. But after his wife?s death he had actually dreamed of them. It was the same dream every night. Dr. Feld, smiling, her hair tied back in a cheery plaid band that matched her summer dress, stood in a green, sunny square of grass, waving to him. Although in his dream Mr. Feld could see his wife and her happy smile very plainly, she was also somehow very far away. Huge mountains and great forests lay between them. So he built an airship ? assembled it quickly and easily out of the simplest of materials, inflated its trim silver envelope with the merest touch of a button ? and flew north. As he rose gently into the sky, the mountains dwindled until they were a flat brown stain beneath him, and the forests became blots of pale green ink. He was flying over a map, now, an ever-shrinking AAA map of the western United States, towards a tidy, trim bit of tan in the shape of a running boar, surrounded by blue. At the westernmost tip of this little island, in a patch of green, stood his smiling, beautiful wife, waving. It was Ethan who had eventually gone to the atlas and located Clam Island. Less than a month later, the big Mayflower van full of boxes pulled into the drive between the pink house and the ruined strawberry packing shed. Since then the shining little Victoria Jean, Mr. Feld?s prototype Zeppelina, had become a familiar sight over the island, puttering her lazy way across the sky. Her creamy-white fibreglass gondola, about the size and shape of a small cabin cruiser, could fit easily in the average garage. Her long, slender envelope of silvery picofibre composite mesh could be inflated at the touch of a button, and fully deflated in ten minutes. When all the gas was out of it you could stuff the envelope like a sleeping bag into an ordinary lawn-and-leaf trash bag. The tough, flexible, strong picofibre envelope was Mr. Feld?s pride. He held seventeen U.S. patents on the envelope technology alone. Mr. Arch Brody had arrived early at Ian ?Jock? MacDougal Regional Ball Field to see to the condition of the turf, and he was the first person to hear the whuffle and hum of the Zeppelina?s small motor, a heavily modified Mitsubishi boat engine. He stood up ? he had been dusting the pitcher?s rubber with his little whisk broom ? and frowned at the sky. Sure enough, here came that Feld ? no more or less of a fool than most off-islanders, though that wasn?t saying much ? in his floating flivver. As the ship drew nearer, at a fairly good clip, Mr. Arch Brody could see that the gondola?s convertible top was down, and that the Feld boy was riding beside his father. They were headed directly towards the Tooth. Mr. Brody was not a smiling man, but he could not help himself. He had seen Mr. Feld tooling around over the island many times, making test flights in his blimp. It had never occurred to him that the crazy thing could actually be used to get someplace. ?I?ll be darned,? said Perry Olafssen, coming up behind Mr. Brody. The players and their parents had started to arrive for today?s game between the Ruth?s Fluff ?n? Fold Roosters and the Dick Helsing Realty Reds. The boys dropped their equipment bags and ran to the outfield to watch the Victoria Jean make her approach. ?I don?t know if I?d want to be flitting around in that thing today,? Mr. Brody said, resuming his usual gloom. ?Not with this sky.? It was true. The hundred-year spell of perfect summer weather that had made the Tooth so beloved and useful to the islanders, seemed, to the astonishment of everyone, to have mysteriously been broken. If anything the clouds were thicker over Summerland than over the rest of the island, as if years of storms were venting their pent-up resentment on the spot that had eluded them for so long. It had been raining, on and off, since yesterday, and while the rain had stopped for now, the sky hung low and threatening again. In fact Mr. Brody had arrived at Jock MacDougal that day prepared to execute a solemn duty which no Clam Island umpire, in living memory and beyond, had ever been obliged to perform: to call a baseball game on account of rain. ?I bet that thing?s what?s makin? it rain,? said a voice behind them, muttering and dark. ?God only knows what that shiny stuff on the balloon part is.? Everyone turned. Mr. Brody felt his heart sink; he knew the voice well enough. Everyone on Clam Island did. ?That man?s been messing with our sky,? said Albert Rideout, sounding, as usual, absolutely sure of his latest ridiculous theory. He had turned up again two nights earlier, bound for someplace else, come from who knew where, with seven ugly stitches in his cheek. ?What do you know about it?? said Jennifer T. to her father. ?Are you an aeronautical engineer who studied at M.I.T., like Mr. Feld? Maybe you?d like to explain to us about the Bernoulli principle?? Albert glowered at her. His battered, pocked cheeks darkened, and he raised his hand as if to give his daughter a swat. Jennifer T. looked up at him without ducking or flinching or showing any emotion at all. ?I wish you would,? she said. ?I?d get your butt thrown off this island once and for all. Deputy sheriff said you?re down to your last chance.? Albert lowered his hand, slowly, and looked around at the other parents, who were watching him to see what he was going to do. They had an idea that he was probably not going to do anything, but with Albert Rideout, you never knew. The fresh scar on his face was testimony to that. They had known Albert since they were all children together, and some of them still remembered what a sweet and fearless boy he had once been, a tricky pitcher with a big, slow curveball, a party to every adventure, and still the best helper Mr. Brody had ever had around the drugstore. Mr. Brody had even cherished a hope that Albert might someday follow in his footsteps and go to pharmacy school. The thought nearly brought a tear to his eye, but he cried even more rarely than he smiled. ?I ain?t afraid of the deputy sheriff,? Albert said at last. ?And I sure as hell ain?t afraid of you, you little brat.? But Jennifer T. wasn?t listening to her father anymore. She had taken off at top speed across the field to catch hold of the mooring line as Mr. Feld tossed it down to the grasping, leaping hands of the children. Before anyone had any idea of what she was doing, or could have begun to try to stop her, she tugged herself up onto the rope, twisting the end of it around her right leg. The Victoria Jean rolled slightly towards the ground on that side, then righted herself, thanks to her Feld Gyrotronic Pitch-Cancellation (patent pending). Going hand over hand, steadying herself with her right leg, Jennifer T. pulled herself quickly up to the gleaming chrome rail of the black gondola. Mr. Feld and Ethan took hold of her and dragged her aboard. They were both too amazed by her appearance to criticise her for being reckless, or even to say hello. ?Hey,? Ethan managed finally. ?Your dad?s here?? Jennifer T. ignored Ethan. She turned to Mr. Feld. ?Can I bring her in?? she asked him. Mr. Feld looked down and saw Albert Rideout, red in the face, standing with his arms folded across his chest looking daggers at them. He turned to Jennifer T. and nodded, and stepped to one side. Jennifer T. took the wheel in both hands, as he had taught her to do. ?I was going to set her down by the picnic tables,? Dr. Feld said. ?Jennifer T.?? Jennifer T. didn?t answer him. She had brought the tail of Victoria Jean around, so that they were facing southeast, towards Seattle and the jagged dark jaw of the Cascade Mountains beyond. There was a funny look in her eye, one that Ethan had seen before, especially whenever her dad came around. ?Do we have to?? she said at last. ?Couldn?t we just keep on going?? IT WAS A weird game. The rain came soon after play began, with the Roosters as the home team taking the field in a kind of stiff mist, not quite a drizzle. The Reds? pitcher, Andy Dienstag, got into trouble early, loading the bases on three straight walks and then walking in a run. The Reds? pitching seemed to get worse as the rain grew harder, and by the fifth inning, when they halted play, the score was 7?1 in favour of Mr. Olafssen?s Roosters. Then came a strange, tedious half hour during which they all sat around under their jackets and a couple of tarps fetched from the backs of people?s pickups, and waited to see what the weather and Mr. Arch Brody wanted to do. Mr. Olafssen still had not put Ethan in the game. For the first time this was not a source of relief to Ethan. He was not sure why. Mr. Olafssen had met Mr. Feld?s announcement that Ethan wanted to learn to play catcher with a thin smile and a promise to ?kick the idea around a little?. And it was not as if this were the kind of long, slow, blazing green summer afternoon that, according to Peavine, baseball had been invented to help you understand. It was miserable, grey, and dank. But for some reason he wanted to play today. ?I have been accessing my historical database,? Thor said. He was sitting between Jennifer T. and Ethan, holding up the tarp over all of their heads. He had been holding it like that for twenty minutes, straight up in the air, without any sign that his arms were getting tired. Sometimes Ethan wondered if he really were an android. ?The last reported precipitation at these coordinates was in 1822.? ?Is that so?? said Jennifer T.? And what does all this rain do to your big undersea volcano theory?? ?Huh,? said Thor. ?Maybe,? Jennifer T. suggested, ?you?re experiencing the emotion we humans like to call ?being full of it?.? She clambered out from under the tarp and stood up. ?Shoot!? she said. ?I want to play!? But the rain went on, and on, and after a while the tiny spark of interest in the game that Ethan had felt kindle in him that morning, reading Peavine?s book, had all but been extinguished by the dampness of the day. He saw Mr. Brody check his watch, and puff out his cheeks, blowing a long disappointed breath. This was it; he was going to call the game. Do it, Ethan thought. Just get it over with. Suddenly Jennifer T. turned and looked towards the canoe birch forest. ?What was that?? she said. ?What was what?? Ethan said, though he heard it too. It sounded like whistling, like a whole bunch of people all whistling the same tune at once. It was far away and yet unmistakable, the tune lonely and sweet and eerie, like the passing of a distant ship way up the Sound. Jennifer T. and Ethan looked at each other, then at the other kids on the bench. They were all watching Mr. Brody as he poked a finger into the grass, measuring its wetness. Nobody but Jennifer T. and Ethan seemed to have heard the strange whistling. Jennifer T. sniffed the air. ?Hey,? she said. ?I smell?? She stopped. She wasn?t sure what she had smelled, only a difference in the air. ?The wind,? said Albert Rideout. ?Comin? from the east now.? Sure enough, the wind had turned, blowing in crisp and piney from over the eastern Sound, and carrying away with it, as it flowed over the field at Summerland, all the piled-up tangle of grey clouds. For the first time in days the sun reappeared, strong and warm. Curls of steam began to rise from the grass. ?Play ball!? cried Mr. Brody. ?Feld,? said Mr. Olafssen. ?You?re in the game. Take left.? He stopped Ethan as he trotted past. ?At Monday practice maybe we can put you behind the plate for a little while, all right? See how it goes.? ?OK,? said Ethan. Running out to left, feeling almost ready to catch a fly ball, he looked up as the last low scraps of cloud were carried west by the softly whistling breeze. He was sure that it was the ferishers he had heard whistling. They were near; they were watching him; they wanted to see him play, to see if he was willing to follow in the footsteps of Peavine and apprentice himself to the game. They wanted to see him play. So they had whistled the rain away. ETHAN CAME UP to bat in the bottom of the seventh, the final inning, with the Reds ahead 8?7. The change in the weather had proven more helpful to the Reds than to the Roosters ? Kyle Olafssen, who was on the mound as six of the last seven Red runs came in, said the sun was in his eyes. Ethan walked over to the pile of bats and started to pick up the bright-red aluminium Easton that he normally used, because it was the one Mr. Olafssen had told him to use, back on the first day of practice. He could feel the eyes of all his team-mates on him. Jennifer T. was on first base, Tucker Corr on second, and there were two outs. All he had to do was connect, just get the ball out of the infield, and Tucker, who was fast, would be able to make it around to home. The game would be sent into extra innings, at least. If there was an error on the play, as was certainly not out of the question, then Jennifer T. would be able to score, too. And the Roosters would win. And Ethan would be the hero. He let go of the red bat and stood up for a moment, looking towards the birch wood. He took a deep breath. The thought of being the hero of a game had never occurred to him before. It made him a little nervous. He bent down again and this time, without knowing why, chose a wooden bat that Jennifer T. used sometimes. It had been Albert?s, and before that it had belonged to old Mo Rideout. It was dark, stained almost black in places, and it bore the burned-in signature of Mickey Cochrane. A catcher, Ethan thought. He was not sure how he knew this. ?You sure about that, Feld?? Mr. Olafssen called as Ethan walked to the plate, carrying the old Louisville slugger over his shoulder, the way Jennifer T. did. ?Hey, Ethan?? called his father. Ethan tried not to notice the tone of doubt in his voice. Ethan stepped up to the plate and waved the bat around in the air a few times. He looked out at Nicky Marten, the Reds? new pitcher. Nicky wasn?t that hot a pitcher. In fact he was sort of the Ethan Feld of his team. ?Breathe,? called Jennifer T. from first base. Ethan breathed.? And keep your eyes open,? she added. He did. Nicky reared back and then brought his arm forwards, his motion choppy, the ball plain and fat and slow rolling out of his stubby little hand. Ethan squeezed the bat handle, and then the next thing he knew it was throbbing in his hand and there was a nice meaty bok! and something that looked very much like a baseball went streaking past Nicky Marten, headed for short left field. ?Run!? cried Mr. Feld from the bench. ?Run!? cried all the Roosters, and all of their parents, and Mr. Olafssen, and Mr. Arch Brody too. Ethan took off for first base. He could hear the rhythmic grunting of Jennifer T. as she headed towards second, the scuffle of a glove, a smack, and then, a moment later, another smack. One smack was a ball hitting a glove, and the other was a foot hitting a base, but he would never afterwards be able to say which had been which. He couldn?t see anything at all, either because he had now closed his eyes, or because they were so filled with the miraculous vision of his hit, his very first hit, that there was no room in them for anything else. ?Yer OUT!? Mr. Brody yelled, and then, as if to forestall any protest from the Rooster bench,? I saw the whole thing clear.? Out. He was out. He opened his eyes and found himself standing on first base, alone. The Reds? first baseman had already trotted in and was exchanging high fives with his teammates. ?Nice hit, son!? Mr. Feld was running towards Ethan, his arms spread wide. He started to hug Ethan, but Ethan pulled away. ?It wasn?t a hit,? he said. ?What do you mean?? his father said. ?Sure it was. A nice clean hit. If Jennifer T. hadn?t stumbled on her way to second, you would have both been safe.? ?Jennifer T.?? Ethan said. ?Jennifer T. got out?? His father nodded. ?Not me?? Before Mr. Feld could reply, there was the sound of raised voices, men shouting and cursing. They looked towards home plate and saw that Albert Rideout had decided to give Mr. Brody a hard time about calling Jennifer T. out at second. ?You are blind as a bat, Brody!? he was saying. ?Always have been! Wandering around half blind in that drugstore, it?s a wonder you ain?t given rat poison to some poor kid with asthma! How can you say the girl?s out when anybody with half an eyeball could see she had it beat by a mile?? ?She stumbled, Albert,? Mr. Brody said, his voice a little more controlled than Albert?s. But just a little. The two men were standing with their faces less than a foot apart. ?Forget you!? Albert said. ?Man, forget you! You are worse than blind, you?re stupid!? Albert Rideout?s voice was rising to a higher pitch with every second. His jacket was falling off his shoulders, and the fly of his dirty old chinos was unbuttoned, as if he were so angry that he was bursting out of his pants. Mr. Brody was backing away from him now. Albert followed, lurching a little, nearly losing his balance. He might have been drunk. Some of the other fathers took a couple of steps towards Albert, and he cursed them. He reached down and picked up an armful of baseball bats, tossed them at the other men. Then he fell over. The bats clattered and rang against the dirt. ?Yo!? Albert cried, catching sight of Ethan as he picked himself up. ?Ethan Feld! That was a hit, man! A solid hit! You going to let this idiot tell you the first hit you ever got wasn?t nothing but a fielder?s choice?? All the boys, Roosters and Reds, turned to look at Ethan, as if wondering what tie or connection could possibly link Dog Boy to crazy, drunken, angry, wild old Albert Rideout. It was too much for Ethan. He didn?t want to be a hero. He had no idea how to answer Albert Rideout. He was just a kid; he couldn?t argue with an umpire; he couldn?t fight against ravens and Coyotes and horrid little grey men with twitching black wings. So he ran. He ran as fast as he could, towards the picnic grounds on the other side of the peeling white pavilion where people sometimes got married. As he ran, he told himself that he was leaving a ball field for the last time ? he didn?t care what his father loved or hoped for. Baseball just wasn?t any fun, not for anyone. He cut through the wedding pavilion, and as he did his foot slipped on a patch of wet wood, and he went sprawling onto his belly. He thought he could hear the other kids laughing at him as he fell. He crawled out of the pavilion on all fours, and found his way to the picnic tables. He had hidden underneath picnic tables before. They were pretty good places to hide. A few minutes later, there was a crunch of gravel. Ethan peered out between the seat-bench and the tabletop and saw his father approaching. The wind had shifted again ? there was no more whistling. Once again it was raining on Summerland. Ethan tried to ignore his father, who stood there, just breathing. His feet in their socks and sandals looked impossibly reasonable. ?What?? Ethan said at last. ?Come on, Ethan. We calmed Albert down. He?s all right.? ?So what?? ?Well. I thought you might want to help Jennifer T. She ran off. I guess she was upset about her dad and the way he was behaving. Or maybe, I don?t know, maybe she was just mad about getting called out. I was kind of hoping?? ?Excuse me? Mr. Feld? Are you Bruce Feld?? Ethan poked his head out from under the table. A young man with longish hair was standing behind the car. He had on shorts, a flannel shirt, and sporty new hiking boots, but he was carrying a leather briefcase. His hair, swept back behind his ears, was so blond that it was white. He wore a pair of fancy skier?s sunglasses, white plastic with teardrop-shaped lenses that were at once black and iridescent. ?Yes?? Mr. Feld said. ?Oh, hey. Heh-heh. How?s it going? My name is Rob. Rob Padfoot? My company is called Brain + Storm Aerostatics, we?re into developing alternative and emerging dirigible technologies?? Wow, Ethan thought. This was exactly the kind of person his father had been waiting to have show up. A guy with long hair and a briefcase. Somebody with money and enthusiasm who was also a little bit of a nut. It seemed to Ethan that in the past he had even heard his father use the phrase ?alternative and emerging dirigible technologies?. ?Yes,? Dr. Feld repeated, looking a little impatient. ?Oh, well, I heard about your little prototype, there. Sweet. And I?ve read your papers on picofibre-envelope sheathing. So I thought I?d come up here and see if I could, heh-heh, catch a glimpse of the fabled beast, you know? And then, like,I?m driving around this gorgeous island and I look up in the sky and? and?? ?Look, Mr. Padfoot, I?m sorry, but I?m talking to my son right now.? ?Oh, uh, OK. Sure.? An expression of confusion crossed Rob Padfoot?s face. Ethan saw that his hair wasn?t blond at all but actually white. Ethan had read in books about young people whose hair went white. He wondered what unspeakable tragedy Rob Padfoot might have undergone to leach the colour from his hair. ?Hey, but, heh, listen, let me give you my card. Call me, or e-mail. When you have the time.? Ethan?s father took the card and stuck it in his pocket without looking at it. For an instant Rob Padfoot looked incredibly angry, almost as if he wanted to hit Mr. Feld. Then it was gone, and Ethan wasn?t sure if he had seen it at all. ?Dad?? he said, as Padfoot went slouching off, swinging his briefcase at his side. ?Forget it,? Mr. Feld said. He crouched down in the gravel beside the picnic table. ?Now, come on. We have to find Jennifer T. I have a pretty good idea that you might know where she went.? Ethan sat for a moment, then climbed out from under the table into the steady grey rain. ?Yeah,? he said. ?Actually I sort of probably do.? JENNIFER T. RIDEOUT had spent more time amid the ruins of the Summerland Hotel than any other child of her generation. It was a thirty-seven-minute hike, through woods, fields and the parking lot of the county dump, from the Rideout place to the beach. There was no road you could take to get you there; there had never been a road to the hotel. That was something she had always liked about the place. In the old days, her uncle Mo had told her, everything came to the hotel by steamship: food, linens, fine ladies and gentlemen, mail, musicians, fireworks on the Fourth of July. Though nowadays it was a popular spot for teenagers in the summer, on grey winter afternoons Hotel Beach could be pretty forlorn. As if in payment for the miracle of its summer sunshine, in the winter it was tormented by rain and fog, hailstorms, icy rain. Green stuff grew all over everything, this weird cross between algae and fungus and slime that settled like snow over the piles of drift and anything else that was made out of wood. On a damp, chilly winter afternoon she often found herself to be the only human being on the whole Tooth. Another thing she liked, besides the solitude, were the stories. A boy from up by Kiwanis Beach wandered into one of the abandoned beach cabins at dusk and came out stark raving mad, having seen something he could never afterwards describe. Ghosts of the hotel dead, ghostly orchestras playing, phantoms doing the Lindy Hop in the light of the full moon. Sometimes people felt someone touching their cheek, pinching their arm, even giving them a kick in the seat of the pants. Girls had their skirts lifted, or found their hair tied in intractable knots. Jennifer T. didn?t necessarily believe these legends. But they gave Hotel Beach an atmosphere that she enjoyed. Jennifer T. Rideout believed in magic, maybe even more than Ethan did ? otherwise she could not have been a part of this story. But she also believed that she had been born a hundred years too late to get even the faintest taste of it. Long ago there had been animals that talked, and strange little Indians who haunted the birch wood, while other Indians lived in villages on the bottom of the Sound. Now that world had all but vanished. Except on the ball field of Summerland, that is, and here at Hotel Beach. So when Albert made an ass of himself in front of her team-mates, that was where she ran. But she saw, as soon as she got there, that something terrible had happened, and that all of the magic of the place was gone. The clearing along the beach was crowded with bulldozers and earthmovers. They were carefully parked in three rows of three, next to a foreman?s trailer. She wondered how they could possibly have gotten there ? by helicopter? Affixed to the side of the trailer was a large white sign that said TRANSFORM PROPERTIES and under this KEEP OUT. There were signs that said KEEP OUT everywhere, actually, as well as KEEP OFF, NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and NO GATHERING MUSHROOMS. The cabins ? there had been seven of them, in a shade of faded blue ? were all gone. Now there were just seven rectangular dents in the ground. The tumbled remains of the great fieldstone porch of the hotel, the fortress, galleon and prison house of a million children?s games, had been packed up and carted off ? somehow or other ? leaving not a stone. And, God, they had cut down so many of the trees! The slim pale trunks of a hundred birch trees lay stacked in an orderly pile, like the contents of a giant box of pencils. The ends of each log had been flagged with strips of red plastic, ready to follow the porch and the cabins and the last ghosts of the Summerland Hotel into oblivion. With so many trees gone, you could see clear through to the dull grey glint of Tooth Inlet. Jennifer T. sat down on the big driftwood log that was her favourite perch. The desire to cry was like a balloon being slowly inflated inside her, pressing outward on her throat and lungs. She resisted it. She didn?t want to cry. She didn?t enjoy crying. But then whenever she closed her eyes she would see Albert running around, waving his arms, spitting when he talked, cursing, with his zipper undone. She heard a scrape, someone?s laboured breathing, a rattle of leaves, and then Ethan Feld emerged from the trees that still screened Hotel Beach from the ball field. ?Hey,? he said. ?Hey.? She was very glad she wasn?t crying. If there was one person she did not want feeling sorry for her, it was Ethan Feld.? What?s going on? Did the police come?? ?I don?t know. My dad said?Oh, my God.? Ethan was looking now the devastation of Hotel Beach. He stared at the bulldozers and backhoes, the neat depressions where the cabins had stood. And then for some reason he gazed up at the sky. Jennifer T. looked, too. Here and there ragged flags of blue still flew, holding out against the surge of black clouds. ?It?s raining at Summerland in June,? Jennifer T. said. ?What?s that about?? ?Yeah,? Ethan said. ?Weird.? He seemed to want to say something else. ?Yeah. A lot of? weird stuff? is happening.? He sat down beside her on the driftwood log. His spikes still looked almost brand-new. Hers, like all the furnishings of her life, were stained, scarred, scratched, their laces tattered. ?So I hate my dad,? said Jennifer T. ?Yeah,? Ethan. She could feel Ethan trying to think of something to add to this, and not finding anything. He just sat there playing with the strap of his big ugly watch, while the rain came down on them, pattering around them, digging little pits in the sand. ?Well, he was always, I don?t know, nice to me and my dad.? That was when the balloon of sadness inside Jennifer T. finally popped. Because of course while she did hate her father, she also, somehow, managed to love him. She knew that, when he was in the mood, he could be surprisingly nice, but she had always assumed she was alone in that knowledge. She tried to cry very quietly, hoping that Ethan didn?t notice. Ethan reached into his uniform pocket and took out one of those miniature packages of Kleenex that he carried around because of his allergies. He was allergic to pecans, eggplant, dogs, tomatoes, and spelt. She wasn?t really sure what spelt was. The plastic crinkled as he took out a tissue and passed it to her. ?Can I ask you a question?? he said. ?About Albert?? ?No.? ?OK, then.? ?Do you believe in, well, in the, uh, the ?little people?? You know.? ? ?The little people?, ? Jennifer T. said. It was not the question she had been expecting. ?You mean? you mean like elves? Brownies?? Ethan nodded. ?Not really,? she said, though as we know this was not strictly true. She believed there had been elves, over in Switzerland or Sweden or wherever it was, and a tribe of foot-high Indians living in the trees of Clam Island. Once upon a time. ?Do you?? ?Yeah,? Ethan said. ?I?ve seen them.? ?You?ve seen elves.? ?No, I haven?t seen any elves. But I saw a pixie when I was like, two. And I?ve seen fer? some other ones. They live right around here.? Jennifer T. moved a little bit away from him on their log, to get a better look at his face. He seemed to be perfectly serious. The chill wind blowing in from the west again raised gooseflesh on her damp arms, and she caught the faint echo of the whistling she had heard before, coming from somewhere off beyond the trees. ?I?m sceptical,? she said at last. ?You can believe the boy,? said a voice behind them. Jennifer T. jumped up from the log and spun around to find a small, stout black man standing there. He wore a suit of dark purple velvet, with a ruffled shirt, and the cuff links in his shirt-cuffs were shaped like tiny baseballs. His ponytail was white and his beard was white and there was a kind of white fuzz on the rims of his ears. ?You do believe him. You know he ain?t lying to you.? There was something familiar about the man?s smooth, dark face, his wide green eyes, the missing third finger of his right hand. She recognised him, in spite of the passage of many, many years, from a grainy, washed-out photograph in the pages of one of her favourite books, Only the Ball Was White, a history of the old Negro leagues. ?Chiron ?Ringfinger? Brown,? she said. ?Jennifer Theodora Rideout.? ?Your middle name is Theodora?? Ethan said. ?Shut up,? said Jennifer T. ?I thought you said it didn?t stand for anything.? ?Are you really him?? Mr. Brown nodded. ?But aren?t you, like, a hundred years old by now?? ?This here body is one hundred and nine,? he said, in an offhand way. He was eyeing her carefully, with a strange look in his eye. ?Jennifer T. Rideout,? he said, frowning, giving his head a shake.? I must be gettin? old.? He took a little notebook from his breast pocket and wrote in it for a moment. ?I don?t know how,? he said. ?But somehow or other I done missed you, girl. You ever pitch?? Jennifer T. shook her head. Her father had been a pitcher; he claimed to have been scouted by the Kansas City Royals, and blamed all his problems in life on the sudden and surprising failure of his right arm when he was nineteen years old. He was always threatening to show her ?how to really ?bring it?? one of these days. She supposed she ought to welcome his attempts to share with her the game she loved most in the world. But she didn?t; she hated them. She especially hated when he used baseball lingo like ?bring it?. ?I don?t want to be a pitcher,? she declared. ?Well, you sure look like a pitcher to me.? ?Missed her for what?? Ethan said. ?I mean, uh, well, who are you, anyway? Like, OK, I know you were in the Negro Leagues, or whatever.?? ?Most career victories in the history of the Negro Leagues,? Jennifer T. said. ?One book I have said it was three forty-two. Another one says three sixty.? ?It was three hundred an? seventy-eight, matter of fact,? said Mr. Brown. ?But to answer your question, Mr. Feld, for the last forty-odd years I?ve been travellin? up and down the coast. You know. Lookin? for talent. Lookin? for somebody who got the gif?. Idaho. Nevada.? He eyed Ethan. ?Colorado, too.? He took something from his hip pocket. It was an old baseball, stained and scuffed. ?Here,? he said, handing it to Jennifer T., ?you try throwin? with this little pill sometime, see how it go.? Jennifer T. took the ball from him. It felt warm from his pocket, hard as a meteorite and yellow as an old man?s teeth. ?I done used it to strike out Mr. Joseph DiMaggio three times, in a exhibition game at old Seals Stadium, down in Frisco, away back in 1934.? ?You mean you?re a scout?? Ethan said. ?Who do you scout for?? ?Right now I?m workin? for those little folks you met, Mr. Feld. The Boar Tooth mob. Only I don?t scout ballplayers. Or at least, not only.? ?What do you scout?? Jennifer T. said. ?Heroes,? Mr. Brown said. He reached into his breast pocket again and took out his wallet. He handed Ethan and Jennifer T. each a business card. PELION SCOUTING MR. CHIRON BROWN, OWNER-OPERATOR champions found ? recruited ? trained for over seven eons ?A hero scout,? Ethan said. It was the second time the word hero had passed through his mind in the last hour. It did not sound as strange to him as it had at first. ?Or,? Jennifer T. said, ?you could just be some kind of weird guy following us around.? But she knew as she said it that there was no mistaking this man, from the intent, wide, slightly popeyed gaze to the fabled missing finger on the pitching hand. He really was Ringfinger Brown, ace pitcher of the long-vanished Homestead Greys. ?Mr. Brown,? Ethan said. ?Do you know what they?re doing here? What it is they?re building?? ?What they buildin??? As if for the first time, Ringfinger Brown turned to study the devastation of Hotel Beach. His bulging eyes were filmed over with age or tears or the sting of the cold west wind. He sighed, scratching idly at the back of his head with the four fingers of his right hand. ?They buildin? theirself the end of the world.? Ethan said something then, in a soft voice, almost an undertone, that Jennifer T. didn?t understand. He said, ?Ragged Rock.? ?That?s right,? Mr. Brown said. ?One at a time, cutting apart all them magic places where the Tree done growed back onto itself.? ?And you really scouted me?? Ethan stood up and began backing towards the woods. ?When I lived in Colorado Springs?? ?Before that, even.? ?And the ferishers put all those dreams into my dad?s head, about the airships and my mom?? ?That?s right.? Jennifer T. heard voices coming through the trees, and recognised one of them, at least, as that of Mr. Feld. ?Because of me?? Ethan said.? What do I have to do with the end of the world?? ?Maybe nothin?,? Mr. Brown said. ?That is, if my conjure eye? ? here he touched a trembling old finger to the lower lid of his left eye ? ?done finally gone bad on me.? The milky film that was covering the eye, like the clouds of a planet, seemed momentarily to clear as he looked at Ethan. Then he turned towards the sound of men approaching. ?Or maybe, if I still know my bidness, you goin? to be the one to help put off that dark day for just a little bit longer.? Jennifer T. was not following the conversation too well, but before she had a chance to ask them what in the name of Satchel Paige they were talking about, Mr. Feld emerged from the trees, along with Coach Olafssen, Mr. Brody, and a sheriff?s deputy named Branley who had arrested her father three times that she knew about. ?Ethan? Jennifer T.? Are you all right?? Mr. Feld slipped on a slick pile of leaves as he approached them, and lost his footing. Deputy Branley caught him and hauled him to his feet. ?What are you kids doing?? ?Nothing,? Ethan said. ?We were just standing around talking to?? Ethan raised a hand as if to introduce Ringfinger Brown to the men. But Ringfinger Brown was not there anymore; he had vanished completely. Jennifer T. wondered if such a very old man could possibly have gotten himself hidden behind one of the earthmovers so quickly, and if so, why he should want to run and hide. Hiding didn?t seem in character for him, somehow. ?Huh,? said Ethan. His face went blank. ?To each other.? ?Come on.? Mr. Feld put an arm around Ethan?s shoulders, and then draped the other across Jennifer T.?s. ?Let?s go home.? As she pressed into the warmth of Mr. Feld?s embrace, a shudder racked Jennifer T.?s entire body, and she realised for the first time that she was soaked to the skin and freezing. Mr. Feld started to lead them back towards the ball field, but then he stopped. He looked at the heavy equipment, the stacked corpses of the trees, the empty, torn-up patch of earth on which, a hundred years ago, there had once stood a great hotel with tall pointed towers. ?What the hell are they doing here?? he said. ?They?re putting out the last little candles, one by one,? Ethan said, and even he looked surprised as the words came out of his mouth. 4 The Middling (#ulink_f30feca1-9ae5-5d94-b131-68b9ff5ea1b6) AN UNEXPECTED RESULT of Ethan Feld?s determination to become a catcher was the discovery, by Jennifer T. Rideout, of a native gift for pitching. The two friends met, on the morning after the loss to the Reds, at the ball field behind Clam Island Middle School, which was closer to either of their houses than Jock MacDougal Field. Ethan brought his father?s old mitt and, in the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, Peavine?s book on catching. Jennifer T. brought an infielder?s glove that she had turned up someplace, and the baseball that Ringfinger Brown had given her. When Jennifer T. rocked back and let it fly, it came whistling and fizzing towards Ethan?s mitt as if it were powered by steam. ?Ouch!? cried Ethan, the first time the ancient baseball slapped against the heel of his mitt, sending a crackle all the way up his arm to his shoulder. It hurt so much that he did not at first notice that he had held on to the ball. ?Hey. You can throw.? ?Huh,? said Jennifer T., looking at her left hand with new interest. ?That was a fastball.? ?Was it?? ?I?m pretty sure.? She nodded. ?Cool.? She waved her glove at him and he half rose, and arced the ball back to her. His throw was a little high but close enough. She caught it, fingered the ball, then concealed it once more inside her glove. ?So, catcher,? she said. ?Call the pitch.? ?Can you throw the slider?? ?I?d like to see if I can,? said Jennifer T. ?I know how to put my fingers. I saw it on Tom Seaver?s Total Baseball Video.? She checked an imaginary runner on first, then turned back to Ethan. He put two fingers down, extending them in an inverted V towards the ground. He was calling for the slider. Jennifer T. nodded, her black ponytail flickering behind her. Her wide, dark eyes were unblinking, and she narrowed them in concentration. She reared back again, her right leg lifting and flexing in a high jabbing kick, then stepped down onto her right foot, bringing her whole body forwards and lifting her back leg until it stuck straight out behind her and hung there, wavering. Ethan saw the snap of her hand on the hinge of her wrist. Her fingers blossomed outward and the ball flew towards him in a long, straight line. At the very last second it broke abruptly downward, and he just barely got his glove down and under it in time. By the time you got your bat, if you had been the batter, to the spot at which you hoped your bat would meet it, the ball would have long since dropped away. ?Nasty,? Ethan said. He had a sudden protective feeling towards Jennifer T., an urge to encourage and reassure her. This was not because she was a girl, or his friend, or the child of a scattered and troubled family with a father who was in jail yet again, but because he was a catcher, and she was his pitcher, and it was his job to ease her along. ?The bottom fell right out of it.? ?You caught it real nice,? said Jennifer T. ?And you had your eyes open all the way.? Ethan felt a flush of warmth fill his chest, but it was short lived, for in the next instant there was a sharp snapping in the blackberry brambles that made the edge of near right field such a terrifying place to find yourself during a game of kickball or softball. Cutbelly appeared, stumbling onto the field. He limped towards Ethan and Jennifer T., dragging a leg behind him. His coat was matted and filthy, and his sharp little face bled from three different cuts around the cheeks and throat. On his snout and on the tips of his ears there lay a dusting of what looked to Ethan like frost. The glint of mockery was all but extinguished from his eyes. ?Ho, piglets,? he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. ?I?m very thirsty. Thirsty. Thirsty and cold.? He shivered, and hugged himself, then brushed the powdery ice from his ears. ?I scampered here much too quickly.? Ethan dug a half-empty squeeze bottle out of his knapsack and passed it to the werefox. Then he took off his sweatshirt and draped it over Cutbelly?s furry shoulders. Jennifer T. had not moved from the pitcher?s mound. Her glove dangled by her side. Her mouth hung open. Cutbelly tipped back the squeeze bottle and drained it in a single draught. He wiped his mouth on the back of his bloodied arm. ?Thank you,? he said. ?And now, perhaps it may be for the last time, I?m to ask you to hurry along with me. You?re needed.? ?What can I do?? Ethan said. ?I can?t fight. I can?t play baseball. I can?t do squat.? Cutbelly sagged, and sank to the dirt of the infield. He buried his face in his hands. ?I know it,? he said, rubbing at his long snout. ?I told them as much my own self. But we have something less than a choice. It may be too late already as it is.? He held out a tiny paw to Ethan, who pulled him to his feet. ?We must cross over, now. The other piglet, too, it?s unfortunate she saw me, but there?s no helping it now.? For the first time since Cutbelly?s appearance, Ethan remembered Jennifer T. She was still standing on the pitcher?s mound, a little behind the rubber now, as if to keep something between her and Cutbelly. Her mouth was twisted into a strange half-smile but her eyes were wide and empty. Ethan saw that she was afraid. ?It?s OK,? Ethan said, using his newfound catcher?s voice. ?He?s a friend of mine. I tried to tell you yesterday, but?? ?Little people,? Jennifer T. said, in a thick voice. ??but you didn?t believe me.? ?She believed you,? Cutbelly said. ?Come on, girl. See what you?ll see.? THEY LEAPED ACROSS to the Summerlands through deeper shadows than Ethan remembered, the frost of the crossing streaking their hair and dusting the brims of their caps. The darkness was only partial but thick and deep. It reminded him of the false night that had fallen on Colorado Springs during a solar eclipse, one winter day back when he was in the first grade. Cutbelly hurried along as quickly as he could on his wounded leg, looking all around him as they went, his bright orange eyes darting from left to right. From time to time he would stop, and motion for the children to do the same with a curt gesture, and stand motionless, his long ears quavering, studying the air for a sound they alone could detect. Though Ethan was filled with questions, Cutbelly refused to listen to them, or to reply. He would not say how he had been injured, or what was happening in the Birchwood. ?Two thirds of all the shadows you are seeing around you are not real shadows at all,? was all he would say, in a low whisper. ?Try to keep that in mind, piglets.? They looked around; the shadows twisted like smoke, billowed like curtains, dangled like Spanish moss from the limbs of birch trees; then they looked again and all was still. Jennifer T. bumped up against Ethan and they walked that way for a while, shoulder to shoulder, holding each other up as they lumbered after the werefox through the silent woods. Great slow wheels of crows turned in the grey skies overhead. Rain was falling all around. And then they stepped out of the trees, into the clearing where Ethan had met Cinquefoil and the other Clam Island ferishers, to find that the final lines of the first paragraph of the last chapter in the history of the world had already been written. ?Too late!? Cutbelly cried. ?Too late!? The clearing was filled with grey smoke and hissing jets of steam. The turf was trodden and torn. And the Birchwood itself was gone; all the trees had been cut down and apparently hauled away. All that was left of the great mass of tall white trees were splintered stumps and tall piles of stripped branches. The beautiful little ballpark, made from the bones of a giant, lay in ruins, the towers torn down and scattered, the stands collapsed in on themselves. In the midst of the field that had once surrounded the ballpark, churned up in a muddy tumult of earth, lay an overturned vehicle of some kind, a twisted hulk of black iron with heavy leather treads, cruelly spiked. Here and there around this ruined hulk lay a number of small bodies. They might have been children, or even ferishers, but for their pale grey skin. In all this expanse of waste and wreckage nothing was moving but the twisting curls of steam. Except? ?Hey,? Ethan said.? What?s that?? Down on the beach, where the ferishers had gone to consult Johnny Speakwater, one final skirmish was taking place. A ferisher stood on top of the great driftwood log, while around him crowded half a dozen winged creatures that Ethan recognised, even from a distance, as the same one that had grinned at him through his bedroom window. Cutbelly cried out. ?That?s Cinquefoil! The skrikers are on him!? ?Skrikers,? Ethan said. ?What are they?? ?Ferishers changed by the Changer,? Cutbelly said. ?They hate what they are and even worse what they once were. Help him, piglet!? ?What should I do?? Ethan said. ?Just tell me.? Cutbelly turned to him, his black-tipped snout quivering, his eyes wide and lit with what looked to Ethan like a surprising glimmer of hope. ?Search your heart, piglet!? he said. ?You were dug up by old Chiron himself! The wight that scouted up Achilles! Arthur! Toussaint and Crazy Horse! You?ve got to have the stuff in you somewhere, piglet or no!? Ethan felt something catch inside him at Cutbelly?s words, like the scrape of a match against the rough black stripe of a matchbook. He looked around, something bright and dense and hot kindling inside him. He started, trotting at first, towards the beach. ?Ethan!? Jennifer T. said. He looked back at her. She was standing behind Cutbelly. Her gaze was as blank and strange as before, but now the crooked half-smile was gone. ?What are you going to do?? Ethan shrugged.? I guess I?m supposed to save him,? he said. He didn?t really believe that he could do it, in spite of Cutbelly?s words. But he felt he ought to try. After all, it was just a question of saving one ferisher, not a whole tribe. Maybe he could do something to draw them off, and give the ferisher a chance to recoup his strength. He was clearly an excellent fighter, much better than Ethan could ever hope to be. Ethan ran towards the driftwood log. Cinquefoil leapt and ducked, thrust and slashed, hacking at a swarm of the bat-things with a long, wicked knife. His hair blew back from his head and his knife arm lashed and flailed and held steady. The sight was inspiring. That was a hero. That was how you did it. Ethan ran up, yelling and screaming, hoping to distract the skrikers for a moment. Cinquefoil turned, and smiled faintly, and then three of the skrikers looked Ethan?s way. They grinned yellow grins, and the bridges of their sharp little noses wrinkled with a rank pleasure that snuffed out the little flame of purpose which Cutbelly?s words had kindled in Ethan. They flew at Ethan, scattering themselves around him, their wings jerking and spasming. Ethan saw that the wings were not a part of them but queer machines, affixed to their backs by means of brass-red screws. Ethan ran past them, ducking underneath their spindly legs, and then when he turned they were on him. He looked around for something to use to defend himself, but all he could see were the spiky stumps of broken limbs that jutted from the driftwood log. Most of them were much too short to be of any use, but there was one that was longer, and nearly perfectly straight. He clambered up onto the log and grabbed hold of the limb, and pulled. It made a dry, cracking sound, but held firm. ?Glad you could make it,? Cinquefoil said, and then there was a muffled explosion, and the ferisher cried out and tumbled from the log. One of the skrikers, Ethan noticed, seemed to have lost its head, and was wheeling crazily around in the air. Cinquefoil must have decapitated it just before he himself fell. The skrikers hovered over his motionless body, now, poking and prodding it with their steel-tipped toes. Ethan threw his weight against the limb, putting his whole shoulder into it. With a great crunching snap it broke loose, and came away free in his hand. It was about the size and length of a baseball bat, more or less straight, but knotty and weathered grey. He lifted it, and hefted it, and gripped it at one end in both hands. It felt good and solid. He swung it over his shoulder and came after the skrikers that were molesting the dead ferisher. One of them reached up and took hold of its own ears, one in each hand. Its grin grew wider and yellower. Ethan saw that its teeth were made from jagged shards of what looked like quartz. There was a series of ratcheting clicks, a nasty wet sound of ripping. And then the face with the dirty crystal grin was no longer atop the neck at all. It perched on the skriker?s left hand like an old grey mouldy peach. The skriker had removed its own head, and was cackling at him now from this weird vantage. The severed neck was tipped with a black ball that gleamed like a bead of wet ink. Ethan recoiled, and then the bat-thing reared back and tossed its head at him. Without thinking he swung his big stick at the head as it spun towards him. ?Breathe!? he heard Jennifer T. call. He kept his eyes open, too: and connected. There was a burst of white flame, a whoomp shot through with a crackle, and a sweet, unpleasant smell like burnt cheese. Another head came spinning at him, and he swung, and there was another sharp blazing whoomp. He fought off three more of the head-bombs, swinging wild and hard, and then, it seemed, there was a power failure in Ethan?s head somewhere. RED AND BLACK. Blood and sky. Jennifer T. was looking down at him, with the heavy sky spread out behind her, a nasty cut on her cheek. Then a gamy, butcher-shop smell: Cutbelly. And finally, something jabbing at his cheek: Cutbelly, again, poking him and poking him with one of his sharp little fingers. ?Wake up, piglet!? Ethan lay on his back, in the doomed green grass of the Summerlands. ?I?m awake,? he declared, sitting up. ?Come,? Cutbelly said. ?The Rade has carried away the Boar Tooth mob. They have felled all the trees on either side of the gall. We have only a short while to leap through or be forced to find another route back. That could take a while. Come! Failed or not, we must get out of here.? Failed. The word resounded in his mind. He had struck out, swinging. Some kind of marvellous opportunity had been granted to him, and before he could even begin to understand what was happening to him, he had blown his chance. He could already taste the regret of the lost moment, how it would haunt him for the rest of his life. ?Will they?are they all dead?? he said. ?What about Cinquefoil?? ?I?m all right,? said a gruff voice behind him. ?You get back to the Middling now. No telling what Coyote?s up to there.? Ethan rolled over and saw the little chief crouching on the ground beside him. He was filthy, and his hair dripped pale streaks down his grimy cheeks. The coat of rough mail he wore over his buckskin had been slashed through and through. It hung in tinkling strips from his shoulders. His tan leggings sagged, his feathered cap sat askew, its savage green feather snapped in two. And his quiver of arrows was empty. ?I?m in yer debt,? the ferisher said, sounding unhappy about it. ?Nice work with that stick o? yers.? ?You were amazing.? ?I weren?t nothing. I done nothing. I saved nothing and no one and all was lost.? ?Did he get your? your family?? ?Those in the mob what aren?t my sister or my brother are my child, my mother, or my aunt,? he said. His voice broke with sorrow. ? And all o?them ta be changed. Twisted inta the things ya saw, them skrikers.? ?Greylings, too,? the werefox pointed out, in a morose tone. That must be the name of those horrible little grey children whose bodies littered the field. ?And greylings.? Cinquefoil shuddered. ?And then sent back, no doubt, ta take their revenge on the chief that failed ta keep ?em whole.? There was that word again: failed. ?I wish I could have done more,? Ethan said. ?We were too late.? ?There weren?t nothing ya coulda done. Coyote and the Rade, they grown stronger and swifter in the last one thousand years, as we have grown scattereder and few.? ?Did he get them all? Everyone?? ?I don?t know, but I fear it?s so. Go, g?wan back. I mean to take off after them a ways, see if some got left behind.? ?We?ll come with you,? said Jennifer T. ?We?ll help you find them if they?re there.? But the ferisher shook his head. ?Go,? he said. ?Ya heard Cutbelly. There ain?t much time.? So they said goodbye to the little chief, and he turned and wandered through the charred ruin of the Birchwood off into the green fields beyond. Ethan could see that the fields were rutted with deep muddy tracks, as if some kind of heavy vehicles had passed that way. The farther away he got, the faster his pace became, and he was soon lost to view in the dim green haze of the Summerlands. ?Come on,? Cutbelly said. They turned back towards the ordinary forest of firs and pines through which they had come. Ethan followed after Jennifer T., who followed the scurrying shadowtail. They had not been walking long when Ethan became aware of a low, steady rustling in the trees around them. ?What?s that noise?? Jennifer T. said. Cutbelly?s earlier warning, about the shadows? not being shadows, had made little sense to Ethan at the time. Now he understood. The thick shadows that filled the woods with the half-night of an eclipse had detached themselves from the trees and hollows. They were following him and Jennifer T. and Cutbelly. They fluttered in great gauzy sheets, now drifting like a piece of rubbish caught by the wind, now flapping steadily with great vulture wingbeats. They passed through the limbs and trunks of trees, some weird cross between fishnet and smoke. And though Cutbelly was leading them as fast as his short legs could go, scurrying back to the world where such things were not, the false shadows were gaining on them. They ran for home, so fast that snowdust began to drift and swirl around them in glittering white gusts. Cold burned the inside of Ethan?s nose. The air in his ears tinkled like ice. Ethan saw Jennifer T. trip over a root, and go flying forwards. He stopped and reached down to grab her hand. As he did so he heard a soft flutter of drapery, a curtain parting, and looked up to see one of the false shadows settle down over him and Jennifer T. Burning cold, a smell like rust on a cold iron skillet. Ethan reached up to fight it off and saw that he was still holding his stick. It caught on something inside the shadow, something at once springy and hard, and when he yanked it out there was a sickening wet sound. The shadow faded at once and was gone. Jennifer T. was back on her feet by now. She grabbed Ethan by the elbow and pulled him along the path they had been following. There was no sign of Cutbelly ahead, and Ethan looked back and saw, to his horror, that one of the false shadows had taken, lazily, to the sky. From its shifting silk depths there protruded the white tip of a bushy red tail. There was silence, and Ethan thought, They got him. Then there was the rumble of an engine in the near distance. ?Harley,? said Jennifer T. ?Big one.? They were standing at the edge of the Clam Island Highway. They were home. The motorcycle roared downhill and then pulled onto the line for the Bellingham ferry. ?How?d we get here?? Jennifer T. said. There was Zorro?s Mexican restaurant, the ferry dock, and the long green smudge of the mainland. Somehow they had come out of the Summerlands at the southern tip of Clam Island. The Harley-Davidson growled on down the hill to the lanes where you waited for the next ferry. A moment later they heard another engine, and a car appeared, a big, old, finned monster, peppermint white with red roof and trim. It slowed as it passed by Ethan and Jennifer T., then stopped. Mr. Chiron Brown rolled down his window. He looked surprised but not, Ethan would have said, happy to see the children. He shook his head. ?Well,? he said. His eyes were shining and for a moment Ethan thought he might be about to cry. ?Let this be a lesson. Don?t never listen to a crazy old man when the old Coyote be workin? one of his thangs.? A tear rolled down his cheek. ?I let them poor creatures down.? No, Ethan thought. I let them down. ?I struck out,? he said. ?Nah,? Mr. Brown said. ?Don?t blame yourself. It?s like you said. You too young. In the old days, not so long ago, we used to be able to afford to bring ?em along a little bit. Season ?em up. Hell, it took U. S. Grant most of his natural life to finally find his stroke.? ?Hey, where are you going?? Jennifer T. said. A pickup truck appeared at the top of Ferrydock Hill and came down towards them, slowing as it neared the white Cadillac. ?Are you leaving?? Ringfinger admitted that he was headed for home. ?Where is your home?? Ethan said. ?Oh, I doesn?t have no fixed abode, not here in the Middlin?. But lately I?ve been livin? down in Tacoma.? ?What?s the Middling?? Jennifer T. said. ?The Middlin?? You standin?in it. It?s everythin?. All this here local world you livin? in.? The pickup had settled in behind Mr. Brown?s car. Its driver tried to be patient for a few seconds, then began irritably to honk. Mr. Brown ignored or seemed not to hear. Another car rolled in from the top of the hill, with a third right behind it. ?So is it? is it all over?? Ethan said. ?Well, I ain?t as up on my mundology as I ought to be, which is a word signifyin? the study of the Worlds. I ain?t sure how many galls we started out with, back before Coyote?s mischief commenced. And I couldn?t say how many we got left now. But there wasn?t never very many, even in the glory times. And Coyote been hackin? and choppin? on ?em for a long, long time now.? ?And so now, what? Now the whole universe is going to come to an end?? ?It always was goin? to,? Mr. Brown said. ?Now it?s just happenin? a little bit sooner.? ?Ethan? Jennifer T.?? The driver of the second car, behind the pickup truck, had rolled down her window now. ?You kids all right?? ?Yeah,? said Ethan and Jennifer T. Ethan saw how they must look to Mrs. Baldwin, one of the secretaries in the office at school, hanging around the southend ferry dock, talking to some weird old guy in a Cadillac. ?Well,? Mr. Brown said, rolling his window up most of the way.? Look like I?m holdin? things up.? He put the car in gear with a lurch. The big engine coughed and roared. ?You kids enjoy the rest of your summer.? ?Wait!? Ethan said, as the drivers, angry now, swerved around Mr. Brown?s car and took off one after the other down the hill. ?Isn?t there anything we can do?I can do?to stop it?? ?You doesn?t know magic. You doesn?t know baseball.? Mr. Brown looked at Jennifer T. ?You knows a little about both of them, I reckon, but not much besides. ?He shook his head. ?Plus, you children. Tell me how you going to stop Ragged Rock?? Ethan and Jennifer T. had no reply to this. Mr. Brown rolled his window all the way and drove off. Ethan and Jennifer T. started the long walk back to her house, which was closer to Southend than Ethan?s. For a long time they didn?t say anything. What can you say, after all, about the end of the world? Ethan was deeply disturbed by the memory of the ruined Birchwood, and by the thought of all those ferishers carted off to be made into horrible little grey bat things. And every time he closed his eyes, he saw the tip of a little red tail, disappearing into a world of shadows. But he could not help being cheered by the fact that when asked, Mr. Brown had not said, There is nothing to be done. Merely that he didn?t think there was anything Ethan and Jennifer T. could do. Ethan tried to imagine how the conversation would go when he tried to explain to his father about the ferishers, and Ragged Rock. Few things made Mr. Feld truly angry, but one thing that did was when people insisted that there was more to the world than what you could see, hear, touch, or otherwise investigate with tools and your five good senses. That there was a world behind the world, or beyond it. An afterlife, say. Mr. Feld felt that people who believed in other worlds were simply not paying enough attention to this one. He had been insistent with Ethan that Dr. Feld was gone forever, that all of her, everything that had made her so uniquely and wonderfully her, was in the ground, where it would all return to the elements and minerals it was made of. This satisfied Mr. Feld, or so he said. He would not look kindly on tales of fairies and skrikers and shadows that could come to life and carry off werefoxes into the sky. And yet Ethan could think of no one else to go to for help. He decided he was going to have to tell his father some version of the truth. And then Mr. Feld would call Nan Finkel, the therapist that Ethan had been seeing on and off since their arrival on Clam Island, and Nan Finkel, with her two thick braids that were so long she could sit on them, would have him put in a hospital for disturbed children, and that would be that. ?Jennifer T.,? he said. They had been walking for half an hour in silence, and were nearly to the Rideout place. ?Nobody is going to believe us.? ?I was thinking that.? ?You know it?s true, right?? ?Everything is true.? Jennifer T. spat on the ground. Her spitting was as professional in quality as the rest of her game. ?That?s what Albert always says.? ?I know. I?ve heard him say it.? They had reached the gap in the trees where a teetering old mailbox, perforated with bullet and BB holes, was painted with Jennifer T.?s last name. One of the dogs came tearing towards them, a big black mutt with his pink tongue flying like a flag. There was a little green parakeet riding on his shoulder. ?We can tell the old ladies,? Jennifer T. said. ?They believe a lot of even crazier stuff than this.? THE HOUSE WHERE Jennifer T. lived had two bedrooms. In one slept Jennifer T. and the little twins, Darrin and Dirk. In the other slept Gran Billy Ann and her sisters, Beatrice and Shambleau. The toilet was attached to the house and had a roof over it, but it was outside. You had to go out the back door to get to it. There were seven to nine dogs, and from time to time the cats became an island scandal. You came in through the living room, where there were three immense reclining chairs, so large that they left barely enough room for a small television set. One chair was red plaid, one was green plaid, and one was white leather. They vibrated when you pushed a certain button. The old ladies sat around vibrating and reading romance novels. They were big ladies, and they needed big chairs. They had a collection of over seven thousand five hundred romance novels. They had every novel Barbara Cartland ever wrote, all of the Harlequin romances, all the Silhouette and Zebra and HeartQuest books. The paperbacks were piled in stacks that reached almost to the ceiling. They blocked windows and killed houseplants and regularly collapsed on visitors. Island people who knew of the Rideout girls? taste in fiction would come by in the dead of night and dump grocery bags and liquor boxes full of romances in the driveway. The old ladies despised other people?s charity, but the free books they seemed to accept as a tribute: they were the oldest women on Clam Island, and entitled to a certain amount of respect. They happily read the abandoned books. If they had already read them before, they read them again. If there was one thing in life that didn?t trouble them, it was having heard the same story before. ?The Little Tribe,? said Gran Billy Ann. She was sprawled in her chair, the red plaid one, her feet up in a pair of big black orthopaedic shoes, vibrating away. ?How about that! I remember Pap had stories about them. One time when he was a boy they stole a silver pin right out of his sister?s hair. Over at Hotel Beach that was. Before it was a hotel there. But I never heard of this Ragged Rock thing.? Gran Billy Ann lit a cigarette. She was not supposed to smoke. She was not supposed to drink, either, but she was drinking a can of Olympia beer. That kind of thing was all right if you were one of the three oldest women on Clam Island. ?I don?t like the sound of that.? ?Ragged Rock,? Aunt Beatrice said. ?Ragged Rock. I don?t remember Pap having anything to say on that score.? ?I saw one of them, once,? said Aunt Shambleau, in a low voice, almost to herself. ?It was in the summertime. 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