Horns & Wrinkles (20 page)

"Can you read it?"

"It's upside down."

"Concentrate."

I did. This was what I saw:

Ask for Floyd.

Tell him to hurry up.

Finally I pieced it together by mouthing the letters out loud, one by one, until they made sense as words.

Ask for Floyd.
Tell him to hurry up.

After repeating it to myself two or three times, I read it louder for the others.

"Who's Floyd?" I asked.

"If memory serves," the old lady said, "you have a great-great-great-granduncle named Floyd Bridgewater."

"That's right!" I remembered. "Grandpa B told us about him. He grew a horn and disappeared. But how am I going to ask for him? He's been gone for a hundred years or better."

"I don't know," the old lady said thoughtfully, "but something tells me we'll find out."

"Do you mind if I have a look?" Stump asked the old lady. "In your eyes, I mean. Please?"

He really did have exceptionally good manners for a troll, and good manners are awfully hard to turn down, especially when they're least expected. The old lady waved him closer.

The way Stump approached her, he might have been trying to look at the sun. He squinted at the old lady's eyes a long time before stumbling back, in shock.

"What is it?" I asked. "What'd you see?"

"Your cousin." He shook his head to clear his vision.

"Huh?"

"All I see is your cousin," Stump repeated forlornly. "How's he going to help with my troubles?"

"You're sure it was Duke?" I said.

"He's pretty hard to miss, don't you think?"

"Was he doing anything?" the old lady asked.

"Not that I could see," Stump complained. "Other than eating. He sure wasn't writing me any messages in the sand, if that's what you mean."

"Where was he?" I asked.

"In the dark."

"What was he eating?" I was hoping to find something that might cheer Stump up and be useful at the same time.

"It was too dark to tell. All I could see for sure was that he was chewing and chewing and chewing."

"Was he alone?" the old lady asked.

"I couldn't tell."

"Was he still a rhinoceros?"

"Yes, yes," Stump answered, turning away dejectedly. "Just the way we left him."

After that, the old lady fed us supper, dishing out raspberries and cream to me, Princess Trudy, and herself; more willow cats for Stump, who remained in a funk; and an apple seed or two for Reliable St. John. When done eating, the old lady seated Stump and me at the store's big front window to watch for her brother. Behind us, she went about closing up her shop. She sprinkled dry food on the fish tanks, flipped an enormous hourglass, and wound up the engine of a toy train. The train chugged off down wooden tracks, hauling a line of cars filled with sunflower seeds. Just before the train disappeared into a wall hole, a fat mouse, dressed in a blue conductor's uniform, stepped onto the caboose's back platform to wave farewell. The old lady waved back and stepped over to a refrigerator, where she filled her apron pockets with sparkly powder from a canister. Then she joined us at the front window.

Nobody felt like talking, especially not Reliable St. John. The old lady had removed him from his cage and set him on Stump's shoulder, saying we needed to travel light, which meant no cages. The closest any of us came to talking was grinding our teeth. Stump and I took turns doing that.

Finally, near dusk, headlights pulled up in front of the store and a horn honked twice. The old lady hustled us out the door to her brother, who had driven over to Big Rock.

"Farmer Bailey's pasture?" the old man guessed.

"By the back way," the old lady said. "And when you hit the Sweeny place, would you mind turning off your headlights?"

"It seems to me," the old man groused, "that I'm always driving you somewhere with my headlights off."

We turned off the highway onto a narrow blacktop road that wound up the far side of a long valley. Just one night ago I'd been carted up the same valley while hanging from a pole. Curving away from the woods and the rock face that Bodacious Deepthink had stepped out of, the road continued climbing.

A little past an abandoned farmhouse, which must have been the Sweeny place, the old man flicked off his headlights and we drove silently on in the gathering darkness. The higher the road went, the slower the old man drove, till at last we were barely creeping. Glancing at his hands on the steering wheel, I noticed a silver ring identical to the one the old lady wore. The ring was frosting up, but when I looked at the old man's high forehead, I saw beads of sweat. What the old lady had said about magic folk burning up if they left the valley came back to me. But still the old man drove on. Just below a final crest out of the valley, the old lady said, "This should do."

Her brother dropped us off beside a black ditch, turned his pickup around, and headed back down with Princess Trudy and Pumpkin, whose whiskers were frosty. When passing us, he rolled down his window.

"You've still got that stone glove?" he asked.

"Of course." The old lady patted a bulge in her apron pocket.

"Well, don't lose it."

And off the old man drove. I was hoping the pickup would lift off the ground and fly away—it did belong to a blue-wing fairy, after all—but it stuck to the road. If the old man turned his headlights back on, I never saw them.

"It won't be long now," the old lady told us.

"What are we waiting for?"

"Farmer Bailey. He knows the way, or has always claimed to. We'll see."

She walked up to the barbed-wire fence fronting the road, crawled underneath it, and motioned for me and Stump to follow. I didn't have any trouble skinning under the wire, but it was a tight fit for Stump. First he tried sliding on his stomach, but his tail stuck up too high. Then he tried on his back, but his gut wouldn't go. Finally the old lady tossed a handful of sparkly dust on him and floated him over.

We stopped right on the other side of the fence in a thinly wooded pasture. So that he wouldn't drift away, Stump clung to an oak standing barely twenty yards from the top of the ridge. While hanging on, he grumped about a chill in his tail. Though the night was warmish, I could hear the old lady's teeth chattering from time to time too, and every once in a while Reliable St. John would say with a shiver, "Don't start a fire. Don't start a fire. Don't start a fire."

Which let you know how cold he was.

Beneath these small complaints, I kept imagining that I heard low and distant voices. Finally I couldn't take it any longer and whispered, "Who's talking?"

The old lady pointed to the matted brown grass beneath our feet and whispered back, "Our friends."

An hour passed. If I told you it got darker during that hour, I don't see how you could believe me. A lump of coal didn't have anything on that night.

The voices kept jabbering below us. They might have been singing or arguing. From the little I knew of trolls, it was probably both.

Finally two headlights came slowly bouncing over the crown of the hill. With them came a noisy tractor pulling a hay wagon that we crept after, stumbling in the dark. Fifty yards later the tractor came to a stop near a clump of trees that dipped lower than the surrounding pasture.

"A-ha," said the old lady.

When the rock in a place is limestone, like around here, it's easily hollowed out by water. There's hardly anything groundwater loves to eat more than limestone. Sometimes so much limestone gets washed away that top layers of rock collapse, making a sinkhole, and that's where the clump of trees was growing, in a sinkhole. Of course what goes hand in hand with sinkholes and hollowed-out limestone is caves.

By the light of the tractor, Farmer Bailey used a hand-held hook to snag bales of hay and drop them down an opening at the sinkhole's center.

"What's he doing?" I whispered.

"Paying tribute."

"I thought tribute got paid with gold and things."

"Bo prefers hay," the old lady answered. "And if she doesn't get it, the first thing Farmer Bailey knows, he's missing some cattle or sheep."

"What's Bo want with hay?"

"Shhh."

The voices beneath us had inched closer.

As soon as Farmer Bailey left, we crept into the sinkhole, which sat in the pasture like a bowl the size of a house. Inside the bowl was grass, moss, a small grove of stunted oaks, and—near the center—a hole the shape of a narrow bathtub that gave off a weak, purplish white glow. Peeking over the hole's edge, we could see a pair of rock trolls loading hay bales on an old two-wheeled cart. They were bickering, and we were now close enough to catch most of what they had to say.

"Smack noodles and gumboil soup. I'm sick of 'em."

"Watch your tongue or it might go missing."

"All I'm saying is, her highness could snag us a calf or piggy now and then, couldn't she? For variety. But no, she wants this hay for her pets, so Farmer Bailey's livestock is off-limits. Is that fair?"

"Maybe yes. Maybe no. It ain't for the likes of us to..."

About then I quit listening. Why? Harnessed to the cart was Duke.

I recognized my cousin by the black zipper coat still hanging on him. Though the coat's seams had split open to make room for the rhinoceros he'd become, it still clung to him around the shoulders, like a cape. He was busy munching on a bale of hay set before him. Back home a brass band would have started playing if he so much as touched his greens.

Two shooting-star lanterns on poles lit the scene. Around the cart stretched a shadowy cavern that looked big enough to swallow a whale.

With the cart filled, the trolls led Duke away by spreading handfuls of hay every few feet in front of him. Progress was slow, but eventually they moved out of sight, and the lantern light below us paled.

"We'll float down," the old lady said.

"We will?"

She reached into a pocket and sprinkled me with dust that felt like fine sand, only alive and sparkly. Right away I turned sort of bubbly and light-footed. Looking down, I saw why. I wasn't touching the ground.

"You'll need a rock." The old lady handed me a head-size one.

After that, she gave Stump another sprinkle of dust, gave him a rock, and pushed him toward the hole too.

"I'm not scared, I'm not scared, I'm not scared," Reliable St. John chanted from Stump's shoulder.

The old lady pointed a finger at him, shutting him up, but now Stump was balking. He leaned over the hole, gazing down into the purple glow as if facing his doom.

"It's the only way to save Biz and Jim Dandy and find your father," the old lady reminded him.

"I know," he squeaked miserably.

Touching the middle of his back, the old lady gave him a shove. It was a tight fit, but he went down the hole without a sound, though his mouth was open almost as wide as his eyes.

The old lady tossed some dust above herself, snatched up a rock, and hopped into the hole after him. I followed, knowing better than to start thinking about what I was doing.