Geek Fantasy Novel (8 page)

“Come on, man, hold on a sec,” Ralph said, but Cecil sprinted to the tree, raggedly panting, only to be teleported away again. Ralph could see the outline of Chessie’s dress at the far side of the tree trunk as she waited for Cecil, could hear the distant moans of her frustration. He would block the door next time Cecil tried to pass, Ralph decided, would bar it with the couch … or he would go fetch Gert or Gideon, before Cecil fainted.

But when Cecil next ran by, Ralph did nothing.

He realized, then, that he had already made his decision: He wanted the wish to be granted.

He ducked into the hall, opened the glass door of the curio, and placed his face before the porcelain milkmaid. She was sulking in the corner, where she had propped her crook in front of her to keep the ducks at bay. “What do
you
want?” she asked.

“A Parental Protection Ward,” Ralph said urgently. “How do I remove one?”

“Oh, you’ve come around, I see,” she said, huffing as she stood. “Aren’t you the morally ambiguous one?”

“Enough. Give me details. What do I have to do?”

“It’s simple, really. A family member has to take something the child handled before the ward was ever placed, say he wants the ward removed, and mean it.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, it has to be in French. That was the official language of the English court when the Passive Magic Act was enacted.”

“Do you know any French?”

“I’m a milkmaid, love. I don’t even read English.”

“Okay, I’ll figure something out. I have to handle something they touched a long time ago, you say?”

“I’d suggest these iron ducks. They were all fascinated by them as kids. It would tickle me that I’ve been shepherding the keys to dispelling their protection. Come on, give me some irony to ponder in my lonely hours.”

Ralph scooped all three ducks off the shelf, clenched them in his sweaty fist, and ran back to the patio.

Ralph stood on the patio, gripped one of the metal ducks in his fist, and did his best to cobble a sentence from his memories of Mrs. Nelms’s seventh-grade French class. He could remember how to ask whether the elevator went to the fourth floor, but little more.

As Cecil clambered past him toward the tree, Ralph tried
“warde pas, s’il vous plaît”

The patio chandelier dimmed, as if someone had flipped on an air conditioner elsewhere in the castle. Ralph raced outside.

Chessie and Cecil were beside the massive tree. She had her arm about him, and he was whispering to her. As Ralph barreled out onto the patio, she smiled toward him — a quick, kindly parting of her lips — and ducked, with Cecil under her arm, into the gatehouse.

Ralph raced forward to join them, but then halted in shock.

The very idea was preposterous, but nonetheless he was sure of it: The giant tree had moved. It had taken him a minute’s walk to reach it earlier that day, but now it dominated the clearing just beyond the perimeter of the castle, its trunk mere steps from his gatehouse. In the evening light the tree’s form was a ragged black shape cut out of the sky, its huge branches galaxies gone dark within the swaths of stars. It swayed in a breeze Ralph couldn’t
otherwise detect, and those flicks of its branches seemed preparations for a grander movement, the pawing of a bull.

Ralph broke into a sprint toward the gatehouse, watching as the tree’s rapidly doubling girth grew to meet him. He threw open the front door and dashed inside just before the tree’s fluid trunk surrounded the gatehouse entirely.

The gatehouse interior was absolutely black. When he flicked on the switch by the door, no light came on.

“Hello?” Ralph risked calling. But there was no answer. He listened for footfalls — nothing. He wished, suddenly, that he had gone to the Battersby parents for help before dashing into the gatehouse.

He groped the dusty floorboards until his fingers curled around the flashlight he had packed (like any enterprising techie) into his luggage. He flicked it on.

Though nothing was missing, and nothing added, the gatehouse had nevertheless changed. The walls, for one thing. Where they had been perfectly vertical before, they now bowed in at the top, as if the rectangular house had recently made a slapdash attempt at becoming a cone.

Ralph did a visual circuit of the diminished borders of his room. The ceiling had been pinched closed like a pastry crust. The curtained windows had twisted and narrowed but not shattered; the bookcases — and, yes, Ralph gasped to discover, even the books on them — had shrunk at the tops. He gripped the flashlight between his teeth and opened a worn Forster. The book fell open with trapezoid pages. Even the dust he blew away from the top seam was a degree finer than that at the bottom.

It was unquestionably bizarre, but he wasn’t totally unnerved. His life over the past week had twisted so rapidly that this latest happening seemed
merely the next progression into oddity. But he did feel that if an adventure was so clearly beginning, he ought to change out of his smelly T-shirt before going any further. He donned his whitest pair of underwear, slacks, and a dress shirt, tried to brush his teeth until he realized there was no water (the bathroom spigot had pertly turned up its nose during the transformation), and applied fresh deodorant before trying the front door.

It wouldn’t open. Not only wouldn’t it open, but it didn’t offer any of the slight budge even locked doors give. Ralph stared groggily at the offending door. How else did one leave a gatehouse, if not by the exit? There was the chimney, but peering up with the flashlight, he saw it had narrowed to a handsbreadth at the top, and that wherever the opening led, there was no daylight. That left the windows. Ralph approached one and threw back the curtain.

Wood.

It was dynamic, all waves and crests, like the tree had bubbled into the frame and frozen there. Ralph tried to open the window, but the warped panes of glass shattered and fell away. He reached a hand out to the exposed wood. It was moist with sap and as sharp as the end of a freshly broken branch. Ralph retreated from the window, huddled on the floor against a windowless wall, and hugged his knees to his chest, all the time nervously circling the room’s dim corners with his flashlight.

Eventually he regained the presence of mind to use his cell phone. Of course there wasn’t any reception from within a tree. Regardless, he wrote a text, using a macro he had programmed to have it sent automatically should the phone ever get reception:

Much as he tried to control them, his breaths came quicker and quicker. He had seen Chessie and Cecil enter this very gatehouse, and if they were no longer here, there had to be
some
way out.

The only room Ralph hadn’t investigated was the bathroom. When he carried the flashlight inside, raised the blind, and forced open the window, he found a narrow opening in the wood. It was like a branch turned inside-out, lengths of bark facing into an envelope-sized void. And at the end was a patch of stars, seen as if at the end of a telescope.

Ralph stood on the toilet seat and tried his shoulders against the narrow window frame. He would just fit. After rushing back to the bed and extracting his pet rock Jeremiah from under the mattress, he stuck his head in the tunnel, experienced a wave of claustrophobia, and decided to go feet first.

The shimmy out the window wasn’t too unpleasant, actually — the tree helped him along in small contractions. By the time he was halfway out, though, he could no longer see anything of the gatehouse. Ralph was comforted by a breeze on his ankles. Once he could kick his feet in the air, he slid forward and let himself come free.

He experienced a second’s terrifying freefall. Instead of hitting earth at the end of it, as he had expected, he hit a branch. He fell heavily on his ribs and barely wrapped his arms around the broadly curved surface in time to prevent himself from falling again. He looped his arms more firmly around the branch and peered down.

The tree had gone from merely enormous to gigantic. The base of its circumference would now take minutes to walk around. The top of the trunk formed a horizon with the starry sky, disappearing at the limits of Ralph’s vision.

The Battersby castle was gone, just gone. There weren’t even ruined foundations where it had once been; it was as if the whole building had been sucked into the tower of wood.

A dozen feet above his head, he could see the ragged exit from his bathroom and then, even higher, a brick corner of the gatehouse emerging from between mottled bark lips.

He looked back down. The Battersbys’ cars had been hurled to their sides next to the tree, submerged up to their hoods in the trunk. The gravel road twisted where it neared the chaotic scene, broken into shreds like the tines of a mashed fork.

Gazing back up, all Ralph could see was a highway of bark.

Steeling himself, he grasped the next higher branch. Once he had secured his footing, he grasped the next branch and nervously heaved himself over. The limbs came frequently enough that he would be able to climb the entire tree this way, proceeding from branch to branch, rungs on an overgrown playground toy.

His muscles soon began to ache (for few boys who set up wireless networks are also made for climbing trees), and by the time he was a half minute’s fall from the earth, his arms and legs were burning.

As he continued climbing in the summer air, Ralph noticed the trunk narrowing — he was a mile into the sky, but nearing the top.

He looked up and saw clouds eclipsed by the silhouette of a large boxy building perched among the branches near the top. Cement and stones hung beneath its foundation like veins of a dismembered limb. The trunk swayed more and more violently as Ralph neared the Battersby castle.

By the time Ralph had struggled through a thin cloud layer to the bottom edge of the castle, he was swinging as much as a star slapped on a Christmas tree. He choked back vertigo as he crawled along a branch into a hole in the building’s basement. After cautiously shimmying up the end of the bending limb, Ralph hurled himself onto the broken floor.

He breathed against the stone and mortar, enjoyed the swell of relief to once again be on solid footing.

The basement was freezing, and crossed by strong winds that snaked in through the hole in its side. Ralph backed away from the branch, crawled across the crumbling masonry, and unlatched the door to the foyer.

The central chamber was as he remembered it — draftier and much cooler, but mostly the same. The furniture was in the same positions, the
internet cables still lay tangled in a corner. He began to call out “hello,” but then stopped himself, realizing he had no idea what manner of creature might be inside. Besides, no one could probably hear his voice above the wind roaring against the walls.

An especially powerful gust struck the castle, pitching it to one side and back, like a ship in a tempest. As Ralph nervously mounted the stairs to the second floor, gripping the banister against the rocks and buffets of the castle, he passed into Beatrice’s wing, and the sound of the wind subsided. He knew by the hollow echoes of his footfalls that there was nothing else still living in the castle. The children’s bedrooms: empty. The servants’ and parents’ rooms: nothing but mussed bedspreads and scattered silk pillows.

Ralph called out as he wandered. But he never heard any response beyond the howls of the wind. He threw back the curtain and opened a window only once; when he did, the castle pitched forward and he was swaying over open air, clouds rolling against the castle, the ground distant below.

He sat on the floor for a minute, waiting until he could banish the sight of all the open space from his mind.

Once he’d calmed himself, he realized there was only one area left to try.

He creaked open the trapdoor leading to the roof, and in the narrow space he opened could see Chessie and Cecil standing at the battlements.

It was hard to make her out, as the freezing wind caused Ralph’s eyes to water and warped everything he saw. She was dressed in full godmother regalia, hair done in a triple bouffant, with strips of stiff, colorful fabric girding her bosom. In her fist she clenched a smart-looking brushed steel wand that might have been purchased in an upscale cookware department. Cecil had donned a half-dozen sweatshirts, the necks of which collected at his throat like a turkey’s wattle. Chessie had just finished saying something, to
which Cecil responded, “Yeah, yeah, okay.” Ralph craned forward to hear better as Chessie began to speak again.

“— has already prepared for it, but I need to hear it one official time, before the magic begins.”

“Okay: I wish to help all the little people.”

“Isn’t that so charmingly proletariat? Fine. I do solemnly grant thee thy wish, dreaming, in accordance with the fine tradition of Royal wish-granting, that you find thy greatest desire, and in so doing come to know thyself.”

“Uh-huh. So it starts now?”

Chessie rubbed an elbow and squinted. “Yes, I imagine everything must be ready by now.”

“Is there a code word I can say to get back out, if I’m stuck or in trouble?”

“Um, no.”

“And it just finishes once it’s done?”

“Once you’ve ‘helped all the little people,’ yes.”

“Who gets to decide that I’m done?”

“There has to be a fair amount of mysticism to all this, dear. I can’t tell you everything.”

Cecil ran his palms down the front of his pants. “So now do I get to start?”

“Yes, now you get to start.”

“Can I bring —” Cecil’s words were cut short as Chessie grabbed Cecil’s waist, gave him a heave, and sent him hurtling over the side of the battlement. He didn’t even have time to scream before he was gone. Chessie stood at the void beyond the wall and called: “Break a leg!”

There wasn’t any thinking involved: Ralph just ran. With our greater leisure, we can see that he must have felt concerned that he had been the cause
of this whole risky wish-granting. We also know that he had grown to hate the lack of wonder in his life. Both of these came together in the ooze of Ralph’s skull to make him “unthinkingly” rush to the battlement.