Dormia (2 page)

"Well done! That was quite a climb for a young boy," the man with the scar said. His voice sounded ancient and raspy, as if he had not exercised his vocal cords in a very long time.

"Uh, thanks," Alfonso said nervously. He swallowed hard and his heart began to pound.

"Perhaps my eyes deceive me, but you appeared to be sleeping as you climbed," observed the man. "Is this true?"

Alfonso nodded.

"Very impressive," the man said slowly. He coughed. It sounded like the growl of a truck. "
Very
impressive."

Alfonso wanted to run, but something kept him rooted in place. "All I did was fall asleep," he said.

"Nonsense," replied the man in a friendly manner. "All a runner does is run, yet does he doubt the value of his talents—or hand over his gold medal at the end of a race—because all he did was place one foot in front of the other?"

"Sleeping is different," began Alfonso.

"Yes it is," interrupted the man. He smiled again. As he did, the coiling scar along his jaw twisted awkwardly, like a wounded snake. "Sleeping, or rather the
manner in which you sleep,
is the rarest of gifts and should not be taken lightly. I've seen a few exceptional sleepers in my day, but to climb this massive tree in the dead of winter at the age of ... How old are you?"

"Tw-twelve," said Alfonso.

"Yes, at the age of twelve, well, that is something most unusual."

"Oh," said Alfonso rather softly, almost to himself.

"I suppose you have other sleeping skills?" asked the man. He took a step closer. Alfonso shivered and took a step back.

"Don't be alarmed," said the man softly. "My name is Kiril. I am a stranger to this area, but rest assured, I mean you no harm. I have nothing but admiration for your sleeping skills. What else can you do?"

"I don't know," stammered Alfonso. "But I really must be going."

"Indeed," replied the man. Neither he nor Alfonso moved. "Just out of curiosity," the man asked, "are you a green thumb? Isn't that the phrase in your country? A skilled gardener?"

"Sir, I'm not sure what you mean," replied Alfonso. "And I really must—"

"Please," interrupted the man again, "let us converse as friends. What I mean to say is this: are you interested in plants? Unusual ones? And have you grown any plants in your sleep? That would be
most
interesting."

Alfonso said nothing.

"Hmm," said Kiril. "You should know that I am a
passionate
collector of unusual plants. Such specimens interest me—and they interest my father as well."

"Your father?" inquired Alfonso. "Who's that?"

"Let's save that discussion for a later time," said Kiril. He smiled. "For now, let us talk—as friends—about the plant that you may have grown in your sleep. Such specimens are of considerable interest to me and I am willing to pay handsomely, though, I should warn you, I will be forced to pay you in gold bars. My resources are vast. You and your family—your mother is Judy, yes?—will never need to work again."

Alfonso stared at Kiril, who was now standing so close that Alfonso could feel the heat of Kiril's foggy breath.

Kiril smiled again. "You have such a plant, don't you?"

"No," said Alfonso. "I never bother with plants or flowers when I'm asleep."

The wind howled through the Forest of the Obitteroos. Snow fell from the tree branches and pattered thickly onto the ground. Kiril nodded. "Well," he said, "I did my best to help you and to give you a fair deal. Be careful. Someone far less trustworthy than I may soon come knocking on your door."

Kiril looked as if he were about to say something else, but at that very moment, the wind gusted violently and lifted Kiril's wide-brimmed hat from his head. Alfonso gasped and an icy tingle of fear crept up his spine. The wind had revealed Kiril's eyes: they were large, vacant, and
entirely
white.

Alfonso stumbled backwards, snatched up his cross-country skis, and ran off in a terrified sprint. In his haste and fear, he never once turned around to see if he was being followed.

I
T WAS PITCH-BLACK
and bitterly cold when Alfonso arrived at the cluster of small, snow-covered houses that made up World's End, Minnesota. He was wide awake now and therefore his skiing was labored and awkward. Gradually, Alfonso made his way along the shore of a small body of water, known as Lake Witekkon, and then continued up a curving, snow-covered driveway to the ramshackle cottage where his family lived. The windows were coated with frost, but he could still see a roaring fire in the cottage's large stone fireplace. The air was ripe with the scent of burning wood. By the time he made his way into the kitchen, dinner was already on the table and his mother, Judy Perplexon, appeared both worried and annoyed.

Judy was a plain woman with thinning blond hair. She always wore sensible shoes and ankle-length skirts. The only jewelry she owned—besides a plain gold wedding band—was the small, wooden medallion that hung by a copper chain around her neck. Leif, her husband and Alfonso's father, had whittled the medallion for her just before he died. Judy never took it off.

Judy hadn't been the same since Leif passed away. Leif, like Alfonso, had been a very active sleeper and was famous for swimming the local lakes in his sleep. Three years ago, as he was in the middle of the lake taking one of his sleep-swims, a freak lightning storm passed overhead. The storm lit up the lake with blast after blast of lightning and Leif Perplexon was never seen again.

After her husband's death, Judy had given up her job as a librarian at the local public library and stayed close to home. Most days she helped her father, Pappy Eubanks, tend to the flowers and vegetables he grew in the enormous greenhouse nursery next to their cottage. Pappy grew most anything, but he specialized in rare flowers that he then sold all over the world. These flowers were the family's main source of income. Ever since he was a boy, Pappy had a knack for raising flowers that no one else could seem to grow. Over the years he had grown Tanzanian Violets, Weeping Carpathian Clovers, Giant Birds of Paradise, King Leopold Roses, and Manchurian Moonglow Tumblinas. These plants didn't make the family rich, but they paid the bills and gave Pappy and Judy something to do.

"Where have you been?" asked Judy as Alfonso walked into the kitchen.

"I fell asleep on the way home from school," Alfonso replied with a shrug of his shoulders. "I ended up climbing that tree and feeding the falcons."

"Again?"

"That's right," said Alfonso. "And then I couldn't get back to sleep, so it took me forever to get home."

For a moment, Alfonso considered telling them about his encounter with Kiril, but he quickly decided against it. His mother was already in a depressed state and Alfonso didn't want to get her all upset about some spooky guy who was lurking in the woods.

"Never mind how slow you went," said Pappy Eubanks, who was already sitting down at the kitchen table, a fork and knife sticking out of each fist. "I'm glad to see you awake on your skis. That is a long journey, a hard journey, and you should be proud of yourself that you made it with your eyes open." For his part, Pappy had absolutely no interest in what Alfonso did in his sleep. Alfonso was quite glad about this, and he always smiled when Pappy griped, "All that sleep craziness is nothing more than tomfoolery."
Tomfoolery.
That's what Pappy called everything that Alfonso did in his sleep.

Pappy smiled approvingly at Alfonso and revealed a set of crooked, jack-o-lantern teeth. Pappy was a small man with a large potbelly framed by a pair of old leather suspenders. His face was dominated by an enormous pair of reading glasses that magnified his pupils to the size of golf balls. Traces of potting soil sat in small clumps on his bald, gleaming head. "Sit down my boy," beckoned Pappy. "Let's have a nice meal, shall we? How were the baby falcons today? Hungry, I bet! It's the dead of winter!"

Alfonso nodded. The three turned to the food on the table and ate dinner in silence. Afterward, Alfonso went to the greenhouse to do his evening chores. He wasn't particularly fond of them. It took him almost an hour to sprinkle teaspoons of Pappy's special, homemade, fluorescent red plant food into each of the two hundred or so potted flowers in the greenhouse. The one bright spot was that he could spend time with the strange plant that he had recently grown. Neither Alfonso, nor Judy, nor Pappy Eubanks, nor the botanist from the University of Minnesota who had once paid them a visit, had the slightest idea what type of plant it was.

The plant was about a foot tall and very skinny. It had seven dark green leaves that looked too big for the long turquoise stem. And just recently, it had grown the most amazing flower. The flower's petals changed colors every few minutes so that, over the course of an hour, they went from green to blue, to violet, to red, to pink, to yellow, to orange, to maroon, to purple, and then back to green.

A long-time client of Pappy's from Greenwich, Connecticut, offered Alfonso ten thousand dollars on the spot for the plant. Alfonso refused. Without a moment's hesitation, the man upped his offer to twenty thousand dollars. This was an awful lot of money. It was about half of what Pappy's flower and vegetable business made in an entire year. Both Judy and Pappy begged Alfonso to accept the deal, but Alfonso still refused. He was obstinate because, through a most unusual turn of events, Alfonso was convinced that the plant was his father's.

As it turns out, Alfonso had always loved a particular family heirloom—an old wooden maraca, or rattle. The rattle had belonged to Leif, who had carried it with him from the Ural
Mountains, in northern Russia, where he had been born. Very little was known about Leif's journey from the Urals to North America; in fact, all that Judy knew for certain was that Leif arrived at an orphanage in Vancouver, Canada, at the age of eight. The records also noted that Leif had an older brother named Hill, who was sent to a different Canadian orphanage in Winnipeg. Hill didn't stay there long. Shortly after his arrival in Winnipeg, he ran away and was never heard from again. Judy said Leif had tried to find his brother, but had never succeeded.

After Leif's drowning, Alfonso treasured the small rattle, with its hand-carved foreign writing, as the strongest connection he had to his father. And then, one night a few months ago, something terrible happened. While Alfonso was sleepwalking around his room, he accidentally stepped on the rattle and cracked it open. The next morning, Alfonso discovered the broken toy. He was beside himself with anger. It was bad enough that his sleeping-self was constantly upstaging him at school, but now it had gone and broken his most treasured possession.

As he examined the broken rattle, seven large yellow seeds fell onto the floor. Alfonso picked up the seeds in his hand, but when he opened his fingers, he noticed that the seeds had turned orange. A few moments later they turned maroon, then purple, then green. Alfonso placed the seeds in an old pickle jar beneath his bed for safekeeping. The following night, however, his sleeping-self took the seeds, brought them down to the greenhouse, and planted them in a large clay pot. The night after that, Alfonso sleepwalked to a nearby creek, retrieved three small, crescent-shaped stones, and placed them in the pot.
The next night, Alfonso sleepwalked to a nearby hilltop, collected two pinecones and a small bag of wolf droppings, and then placed all of this into the pot as well. All told, these nightly missions went on for almost three weeks. It was almost as if Alfonso's sleeping-self were following the directions to some strange recipe, and for once, Alfonso didn't resent these sleeping escapades. Somehow they left him feeling closer to his father. Of course, he had no idea what would come of all of this until, on the fourth week, the seeds he planted sprouted into the remarkable plant that now proudly sat in Pappy's greenhouse.

After Alfonso finished his chores, he walked over to his plant to admire it for a moment. The petals were turning from violet to red. The change came in a ripple, as if someone had spilled a jar of ink across the face of the flower. Moments later, a loud sound interrupted his observation of the plant.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

It sounded as if someone were smashing a plank of wood with a hammer. He grabbed a flashlight that was resting on a nearby bench and walked cautiously toward the noise. The greenhouse was quite large—more than three times larger than the cottage in which the Perplexons lived—and as Alfonso walked along the concrete floor, his footsteps echoed across its cavernous ceilings.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

The noise grew louder. Alfonso flicked on his flashlight and let the beam roam over the greenhouse's plant-filled tables until it fell upon a large wooden crate sitting in a dusty corner.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

The entire crate was rattling and shaking as if it contained a wild animal. Slowly, Alfonso took a step closer. To his surprise, he realized that the top of the crate was broken and almost completely yanked off. His flashlight shone on the black writing stenciled into the wood:

FROM
:

BLAGOVESHCHENSK SHIPPING & HANDLING
34 NORIL'SK
CITY OF BARSH-YIN-BINDER
URAL MOUNTAINS, RUSSIA

TO
:

MASTER ALFONSO PERPLEXON
WORLD'S END
STATE OF MINNESOTA IN
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Alfonso was confused. When did this package arrive? Where was Barsh-yin-Binder? And what was making such a racket? Before Alfonso could begin to answer these questions, he heard another strange noise—a loud engine sputtering its way up the Perplexon's driveway. Alfonso glanced at his watch. It was almost nine. No one ever visited the Perplexon home at this time of night. Alfonso rushed back to the door of the greenhouse. In the distance, he saw a man with a flowing mane of white hair riding a motorcycle. The man was taking the icy turns of the Perplexon driveway at such great speeds that Alfonso felt certain he would wipe out. But he didn't. He rode expertly to the front door of the cottage and dismounted. Then, without a moment's hesitation, he turned toward Alfonso and waved.