Far Far Away (35 page)

“The old hag took a long time in dying. The boy stayed by her side, watching each small step in her slow progress until at last she was dead. The boy baked the
Prinsesstårta
and fed into the fire the crystals that turned the smoke green. He ran the bakery to its former standards, and even higher, which won him the admiration of the villagers. And then one day, he sold the business, and a week later he was gone with the widow’s fortune, never to be seen in that country again.”

The baker regarded his pipe, which he had allowed to go out. “The end,” he said. “A wonderfully strange story, don’t you think?”

He looked expectantly from one cell to the other.

“Yes,” Frank Bailey said.

“Yeah,” Jeremy said in a low voice.

“I guess,” Ginger murmured.

The baker was smiling and nodding, for he had done as he had hoped to do—he had pulled his prisoners into his story and carried them along its dark path. He stood and began collecting dishes. When he began rolling the cart away, Ginger said, “What did the baker and his wife die of?”

The baker, as if he had not heard, continued his unhurried exit.

When the groaning wall had swung shut and the dungeon fallen quiet, Jeremy gathered the peas from beneath his pillow, washed them in the basin, and held them in his open hand for Ginger to see.

“Hope you’re not trying to pass those off as magic beans.”

He shook his head. “It’s our calendar. We don’t have a way to mark days down here, so every day I’ll give you a pea and we’ll know how many days have passed. Up to twenty-seven, anyhow. Because that’s how many peas we have.”

Ginger’s eyes filled with alarm. “You think we’re going to be down here twenty-seven days? You don’t think we’re going to be rescued?”

“I do,” Jeremy said. “But—”

“Keep your peas,” she said. “If we’re still down here after twenty-seven days, I don’t want to know it.”

Soon thereafter, the lights dimmed slowly, as to suggest dusk and nightfall, and one by one, the prisoners fell into the heavy breathing of sleep. Sometime later—how much time had passed, I could not have said—Ginger began to make fearful, murmuring noises that awakened Jeremy.

“Hey!” he said in an urgent whisper. “Ginger! Are you okay?”

Her murmuring stopped, and she said, “Oh. Yeah. Bad dream. Sorry.”

“And you’re okay now?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Except, you know, that we’re
here
.” A few moments passed. “That story he told. Didn’t it sound like he poisoned the baker and his wife?”

“Yeah, it did,” Jeremy said quietly. “And took the money and came here.”

“What I was thinking about was how he made the green smoke when the baker and his wife died. It’s like that’s what he does after he’s—you know …” She let her voice trail off. “He’s worse than the villains in those stories of yours.”

Jeremy gave a small laugh. “It depends. In one story, the stepmother chops up her stepson and puts him in a stew that she feeds to the boy’s father.”

“Okay, that’s worse,” she said, yawning. “Not that it’s much consolation.”

After a time, Jeremy whispered, “The thing is, in fairy tales, when the heroes are chopped up or eaten by the wolf, they still come back to life at the end and live happily ever after. But this isn’t like that. If we die, we stay dead.”

But Ginger could not reply, for she had given in to sleep.

Slowly the days passed. Often I imagined slipping out with the baker in order to try somehow to find help in the village, but I could not break my pledge to Jeremy to stay. Ginger did accept the pea that Jeremy gave her every morning—she now had seven of them. The prisoners listened to the baker’s dark stories, and they ate the baker’s food (all of which, it must be admitted, looked delectable). They exchanged their soiled clothes for clean, their spent flowers for fresh. They wondered who might be looking for them, and they discussed ways of escape. Nothing offered much hope. Jeremy and I continued telling the tales, one after another, always with happy endings. Often I would embellish, or even add episodes, that they might divert the others a little longer. When I did this, Jeremy would hesitate and cock his head but then go on with the amendments I provided. He and I could not talk during the day, but at night, when the others were asleep, he would whisper, “You there?” and I would say,
Yes, Jeremy, I am here
.

And there was someone else, too, making pleas in secret. Whenever she found that the others were momentarily paying her no attention, Ginger would cover her eyes with her hands and her lips would softly move. And once, when the others were in their baths and she was completely alone, she placed her hands to her eyes and whispered softly, “Please watch over Jeremy and Frank and me, too, and please help someone see the baker for what he is and discover that we’re here, wherever we are, and, most of all, don’t let us all die here without ever getting to—”

But she did not finish the thought. The sound of Jeremy’s shower had suddenly ceased, so she whispered, “Amen,” and fell silent.

Without ever getting to
 … what? I wondered. What might she
be regretting not having the chance to do? And a darker question yet: If in this dungeon she were to slip free of her mortal self, would she, too, be destined to drift through eternity searching for the thing undone? It did not seem impossible. Nothing, it seemed, was too cruel to be true.

One night, when the day had seemed endless and the prisoners’ stomachs were rumbling with hunger, the baker rolled in his cart and announced that he had news from the outside world. “Yes, yes,” he said cheerfully, “and so much of it hitting so close to home!”

The prisoners watched him as he set the cart and uncovered a stewpot and a beautifully browned loaf of freshly baked bread.

“I will begin with my visit with our dear Sheriff Pittswort, who came in for crème-filled pastries. As we chatted, I could not keep myself from asking about our missing young people. ‘Oh, them,’ he said. ‘They’re just out adventurin’. They jumped a train. The girl wrote her grandpa telling him so.’ ” The baker’s eyes glistened with pleasure. “The sheriff told me he did a little investigating and, lo and behold, they found Jeremy’s and Ginger’s bicycles near the siding, an ideal place, according to the sheriff, to catch a train.” A laugh rumbled up from the baker’s ample belly. “
Lo and behold!
Our Sheriff Pittswort has solved the case!”

The baker lifted the lid from the pot, stirred his stew with
a wooden spoon, and sampled it appraisingly. “Yes, I think this will meet with your approval.” He took out his carving knife and began drawing a flat file back and forth across its long blade.

“What other news?” he said. “Oh, yes, Dauntless Crinklaw. Our good mayor. Once he heard about Jeremy’s train adventure, he said he had no choice but to start legal proceedings against Jeremy
in absentia
for his nonpayment of debt.” The baker held up the knife—its blade gleamed when turned to the light. “
Lo and behold! In absentia!
What phrasemakers our villagers can be!”

He began slicing the bread—its splendid aroma spread through the chamber.

“Oh! But I forgot the most interesting news of all! There is one person in town who believes something is wrong with our narrative. Our dear Deputy McRaven believes that Miss Boultinghouse has met with foul play, and he says so to one and all. But no one pays him any attention, and do you know why?” The baker’s face swelled with happy expectation.
“Because no one listens to a dwarf!”

The baker laughed so hard that his great stomach shook.

“No,” he said, catching his breath, “the deputy will never uncover our secret, but he has revealed his own!” The baker nodded to himself. “Just think of it. Our deputy isn’t worried about Jeremy or Frankie, and he has never worried about all the other missing children over the years. But now he is worried sick about Miss Boultinghouse. Yes, worried sick! So what has he inadvertently announced to the town? That our poor, sad, solitary dwarf has been enchanted by a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl!”

Again the baker’s stomach shook with laughter.

Could it be true? Could Deputy McRaven have been following Ginger because he was lovesick?

Yes. I saw it at once. It not only could be true but most certainly was.

“A laughingstock,” the baker said. “That is what our deputy has become.”

He began to ladle thick beef stew into bowls. “Oh,” he said. “One last thing! Jeremy’s show was on the air last night, but I’m afraid the ending did not change. A pity, really, because just think of it—if he had answered that last question and won all that money, he would not have needed to sneak away to work on a wood crib in the forest and then”—he gave his broadest smile—“we would not all be together now.”

He set the food on the ledge of each cell and was about to open the little doors when Ginger said, “They’re going to find us, you know.”

The baker stilled his hand.

Frank Bailey said hurriedly, “But you’ve been nice to us, Mr. Blix, so even if they did find us, we wouldn’t tell them anything.”

The baker kept his eyes on Ginger. “And how will they find you, dear girl? You do not even know where you are.”

“We’re in your dungeon,” Ginger said.

The baker laughed. “Oh, ho! Is that where you think we are? In a dungeon?”

“Yeah,” Ginger said, “that’s what we think.”

“But you might be anywhere, dear child. You might be in a converted silage bin on a deserted farm. Or in a concrete chamber out in the woods. Or in a secret vault under the old quarry.”

At these suggestions, all darkly possible, Ginger fell quiet.

The baker’s voice softened. “But do you know?—it doesn’t matter where you are, because no one is ever going to find you.”
He smiled. “Now, my dear child, if you will just apologize for your outburst, you may all have your dinner.”

If eyes could kill, Ginger’s stony glare would have struck the baker dead.

The dungeon filled with silence.

Then, in a low voice, Jeremy said, “We’re beneath your house.”

The baker’s eyes danced merrily toward Jeremy. “Oh! Do you think so?”

“Yes,” Jeremy said. “I do. You drugged us, and you drove us back to town and left us in the back of the van while you went into Elbow’s Café and ate and even talked with my father. Then you drove into your garage and slid us down the chute and carted us through the third room and swung open the back wall and brought us here.”

It took Jeremy perhaps a quarter of a minute to say these words, and in that time the color had drained completely from the baker’s face. He stared in disbelief, and when he spoke, it was almost to himself. “You were awake? But if you were awake, why didn’t you call out?” Wildly, his eyes flew everywhere, and then alighted again on Jeremy. “But you were not awake. You were cataleptic. How could you see?” His voice climbed in register.
“How did you see?”

Tell him nothing
, I said.

The baker’s eyes turned to ice, and so did his voice. “How did you see?”

“I don’t know how I saw,” Jeremy said. “I just saw what I saw.”

The baker held his gaze on Jeremy, and then a smile slowly returned to his lips. “Your eyes were open,” he said. “You were cataleptic, but your eyes were open. That is how you saw.”