My Diary from the Edge of the World (19 page)

LOSE A BET.

The genie smiled politely, but his tongue darted out to lick his lips like he was ready to eat. His fingers wiggled and twitched, as if he were holding himself back from just reaching out toward us. Was this how a genie took your life, I wondered—just by reaching out and grabbing it? The three of us clustered around my dad protectively.

“Say your good-byes,” the genie said. “I'll wait.”

Dad turned to us, his face ashen, his freckles bright. He walked us a few feet away, toward the trees clustered in the entranceway. I felt the genie's eyes on our backs, and Dad talked fast.

“Get to LA,” he said. “Any way you can. You can hire a ship in Santa Monica. Don't linger too long before you set off.”

“Dad,” Millie said, shaking her head.

The world was spinning. Bright moonlight was filtering in from the hole above. Dad was feeling around in his pockets, handing Mom his wallet. He was counting on his shaking fingers, like he was running through his mind lists of all the practical things he needed to tell us so that we'd be okay.

“Dad,” Millie repeated. “No.”

“Girls, you'll have to take care of your mom. You'll . . .”

At that moment something hit me on the leg. I looked down to see it was a pebble. I glanced toward the cave entrance, and something—some tiny movement—drew my eyes into the trees clustered there.

The sight was so completely unexpected that at first I could only try to make sense of it. Hidden among the pines, panting and out of breath and practically invisible,
was Oliver, staring at me with big, intent eyes. He held out his hands as if to show me something. There was a rope in his hands, glinting like gold.

Just beyond him, outside, I saw one small flash of white move past the cave entrance.

I made the connections crookedly but fast. I knew almost at once what that golden rope would be attached to.

I glanced back at the genie, who watched us, but from an angle where he wasn't looking toward the cave door. And I was already gauging the distance: How long would it take to run from where we stood to the stand of evergreens? Five seconds at most? How fast was a genie? How far would you have to fly to get beyond his reach, beyond the city limits? Oliver met my eyes again when I looked back, and waved me forward.

I hesitated and glanced at Millie, and then Mom and Dad, trying to communicate to them with my eyes—but they were too deep in conversation. In the corner of the cave the genie was watching us and rubbing his lips with one hand. Finally, Millie noticed my expression and managed to follow my gaze. She looked questioningly at me, and I shrugged almost imperceptibly. I tried to think of a plan.

But Oliver wasn't waiting for a plan. It turns out, he
already had one. He emerged from the trees, and just as the others noticed him, he launched a hail of stones from both hands in the direction of the genie. It was only a futile gesture—for a moment the genie floated backward, surprised, though the stones went right through him. Still, it gave me the moment to grab Mom's and Dad's arms, each with one hand, and pull them forward. “We're going,” I said. “Run!”

By some miracle, they obeyed. We reached the trees just as the genie let out a screech and the ground beneath us coughed out a thick green mist that shaped itself into hundreds of filmy hands. They gathered toward my dad's feet and reached around his ankles.

It happened in seconds: We were running through the trees, we were outside with Oliver in the lead, and sure enough—there, in the little clearing of the gulch, were three pegasi, their muzzles fitted with golden bridles. Sam sat astride the tallest one, holding tight to its mane and waving us on with his other hand.

“Get on!” Oliver yelled. We hesitated for a moment, making sense of it. Then someone—either Mom or Dad—propelled me forward from behind.

There was a hungry scream from inside the darkness behind us as we flew into action, a sound I could never
have dreamed could have come from the quiet, seething genie. I threw myself up behind Sam, and Millie scrabbled onto the pegasus next to us. It bucked under her weight as I tried to figure out where exactly to put my legs.

Mom was already awkwardly astride the third pegasus, though Dad was trying desperately to clamber on behind her and kept sliding down. Throwing a glance at the cave mouth, I could see the mist licking toward us along the ground, a pair of long, impossibly long, green arms stretching like taffy toward Dad's heels. Dad looked back in terror as he tried again, this time flinging himself over the pegasus's back, legs on one side and arms on the other. The animal backstepped, but he managed to hang on, and in another moment, with Mom pulling at his belt and Oliver jumping behind me with a “Haiyah!” our mounts all turned away from the trees and launched into a run at once, clattering down the gulch away from the cave. Braving another look back over my shoulder, I watched the genie's hundreds of hands, like puddles of green smoke, grasping for my dad's feet just as he was carried out of their reach.

It was an uneven and terrifying liftoff, the pegasus's legs pumping underneath us as they ran first on the ground
and then on pure air. We burst up above the tree line and I dug my heels in to steady myself. I was only able to look down behind me one last time at the cave, its gaping hole glowing bright green and pulsating with rage.

*  *  *

We shot into the sky above Luck City in an upward spiral, bumpily at first. Within seconds we were high enough that the city lay beneath us in a patch of flickering light, getting smaller and farther away. By the time we leveled out, the city's light had fallen to our backs, only a shimmer peeking out of the canyon behind us, the Cloud a tiny dim shadow above it, being left far, far behind. The air grew cold quickly, the night dark. I could see, many yards away, the dim white glow of the other two pegasi and the figures astride them. Dad had finally righted himself so that he was properly astraddle behind Mom. I hugged tight to Sam and breathed deeply, my eyes throbbing, my throat aching with relief. “Thank you,” I whispered to no one in particular. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Below, the flat dark earth stretched in all directions, no towns or lights in sight. I turned to look behind us; I thought I might be able to see the dark bowl of the Grand Canyon, or where the dark patches of the continent
controlled by the monsters met the small pockets of light inhabited by humans, but there was nothing except Oliver, returning my gaze.

“Are you okay, Gracie?” he asked. “I'm trying not to hold you too tightly.”

“We're flying,” I said to him.

“Straight to LA,” he said.

Beneath our legs, our pegasus flapped her wings in powerful gusts, her white fur catching the dim moonlight.

I wish I could record the moment better. What I need to say about it has already started to get fuzzy in my head. I think it's something about being so far above earth, but I'm not quite sure what. I think maybe what I want to remember is how it felt to picture what we must look like to a person on the ground. Far away, like a little dot of light. I think we must have seemed to disappear into the heavens like a shooting star.

This morning I'm writing in
the bath with a towel around my head, and big drops of water and steam are rising all around. And I guess now I'll finally tell you where we are and where I've been writing the last couple of entries from. We're in LA!

The lamps here all burn with whale oil, and we had to boil my water over a smelly oil stove. I've taken two baths so far this morning, just to pass the time. We're all on tenterhooks (I'm pretty sure that's the word) waiting for Dad to get home from his big errand.

Millie is sitting on the counter and plucking her split ends. Since we've been here, she never leaves me alone when I'm in the bath—she still thinks I'm a little kid even though I've told her I need my privacy. She always
comes in to brush her hair in the mirror or clip her fingernails, but it's more like she just wants company. I've decided to ignore her and just keep writing until I'm finally caught up for real. Among other things, it's a good distraction.

*  *  *

The night we arrived here it was hard to believe that we were approaching a city at all—the valley was so dim and muted. The first whiffs of whale oil drifted up to us as we came in for a landing at the bottom of a place called Griffith Park, which Dad routed us to after spotting a strange domed building at the top of a big hill.

On the way Oliver had answered all my questions, explaining how on the morning he'd been feeding the pegasi carrots, he was actually spying on Medusa's house to figure out a way in to find the golden bridles . . . telling me how he knew things might go badly for us in the genie's cave, and he wanted to be prepared for it. I was shocked: He'd planned so much ahead, he'd risked his life for us, it was more than I ever could have hoped for, even from
him
. Not to mention how terrifying it would have been to be in Medusa's house. He said she was out grocery shopping when he did it, but even that sounds scary beyond words.

“I've already lost my parents,” he said with his chin on my shoulder, so that I could hear him over the soft whooshing of the air around us. “I'm not going to lose yours.”

*  *  *

The ground loomed up at us and we came in for a soft landing in a small clearing surrounded by thick trees. We all slid off our mounts and shook out our legs, regaining our footing as Oliver slipped the bridles off of the pegasi and rubbed their snouts. “You're free, guys,” he said. “Go find your herd.”

They snuffed and snorted and shook out their tangly manes, then turned away from us, launching into the sky the same way they had in Luck City—trotting a few steps on the ground before trotting on air and lifting up, up, and away.

“Where will the pegses go?” Sam asked, standing against Millie's legs.

“Probably to the Sierra Madres,” Dad said, “where they're supposed to be.”

Everyone gazed at Oliver then. Mom patted at her eyes with her fingertips, as if to push back tears. She kept clasping her hands together like she was trying not to reach out and grab him and hug him into oblivion. We all looked around at each other. I guess there were
no words to thank him enough for what he'd done, so none were said.

*  *  *

Anyway, there we were, standing in a park in Los Angeles. We could hardly believe we'd come so far. The air smelled wet and salty and thick, and a heavy, vibrating buzz came from deep in the trees: the deafening sounds of crickets and cicadas and tree frogs. There had to be millions of them. The shadows of the trees loomed large all around us.

Then the clouds above parted and the moon suddenly flooded our surroundings with light. We were all breathless to realize there were huge, beautiful mansions rising out of the thick woods of the park. They all looked to be abandoned.

“Old LA,” Dad said. It took us a few moments to take it all in.

“Now what?” Millie finally asked. “What was that building you saw at the top of the hill?”

Dad suddenly beamed. “Now, we climb,” he said, mysteriously excited.

He started picking a path up the mountain. Vines reached across our path and had to be ducked under or climbed over, and the ground was covered in slippery
moss, full of puddles and roots. Occasionally, when the breeze came in the right direction, I thought I could smell the ocean. I'd never gotten such a strong feeling of nature being
alive
. Even the leaves seemed to turn their faces up to the moonlight.

“When people were moving west,” Dad said, “and LA was a growing city with all sorts of promise, the neighborhood around Griffith Park was one of the prime pieces of real estate, very popular with celebrities. Giants built the houses, charging steep prices. There used to be soccer games and hiking trails and picnics all over the area. But as the forest took over again, the beasts—sasquatches especially—would rob the houses, attack people, or force them out so they could use the mansions as dens to raise their young. People began to head back east in droves. Some of the braver types lingered, and there's still a fairly busy port for sailors to reload on food and supplies. But most people, if they aren't in the shipping business, are long gone—and the angels have taken advantage of the emptiness to move in. The angels, and also someone you've heard of, who hired the giants to help him build the observatory at the top of this mountain back in the eighties.”

“Prospero,” Mom breathed in wonder. I knew immediately who she was talking about—the famous
astronomer, the one Dad went to college with. The one he'd made us all watch on
60 Minutes
.

Dad nodded. “I knew he'd built an observatory out here. I never dreamed we'd actually get to visit it. He's much smarter than I am, and knows just about everything. He'll have some ideas on getting to the edge of the earth.”

The moon continued to illuminate our slow trek upward: woods, bungalows, and mansions strangled by thorns, all dark except for the occasional glow behind one of the windows, bright white, so luminous we couldn't make out the shape of whatever it was that was glowing. “What's in those houses?” Sam asked. He was holding my hand and had insisted on walking for a while.

“Those”—Dad grinned at us over his shoulder—“are the angels. Hiding out from the gods.”

Millie and I gasped. Because of their brightness, angels can't be captured on film, though I
have
seen drawings of some. Though otherwise they look human, they are luminous and filmy . . . and often extremely attractive. I strained to catch a glimpse of one as we passed another cluster of houses, without any luck. Sam kept getting his shoes sucked off in the
mud, so I finally lifted him up and piggybacked him.

“Ew.” Millie pulled at a strand of moss that had just slapped across her face. Just then something blindingly bright crossed our path, speeding past us and disappearing back into the trees. Again, I'd missed my chance to get a closer look.