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“ STREET ENDS ”
THE BRIGHT ROLLING DOODLE stayed in Candy’s mind’s eye, even though her feet had obeyed its instruction and carried her out through the school gates and into the street. She briefly thought about going home, but the notion didn’t stay in her head for long. She had no desire to be back in Followell Street. Though her mom would be at work, her father would be up and about by now, and he’d want to know why she had returned from school in the middle of the morning.
So she walked in the opposite direction: down Spalding Street to the intersection with Lennox; over Lennox and on toward the Comfort Tree Hotel on Stillman Street. She had half a thought to call in at the hotel and tell Norma Lipnik exactly what had happened when she’d tried to tell the sad story of Henry Murkitt. Perhaps she could even persuade Norma to lend her the passkey so that she could go back up to Room Nineteen and look at the sextant again. Hold it in her hands and examine it; see if she got a clearer picture of poor Henry’s last hours when she did so.
But once she got to the hotel, she found the desire to see the sextant was not as important as another desire, one which she could not name or comprehend, but which kept her going, on past the hotel to the intersection of Stillman and Lincoln.
Here, for a moment, she stopped. The streets were busy in both directions, at least busy for Chickentown. There were four or five cars waiting at the lights every time they turned red. One of the drivers was Frank Wrightson, who had been a drinking buddy of her father’s until six months before, when they’d had a big falling-out. It had ended in a shouting match outside the house and a few blows half-heartedly exchanged. The men had not spoken to each other since.
“Hey, Candy!” Frank yelled as he drove by.
She waved, trying not to look too guilty for being out in the street in the middle of a Thursday morning.
“No school today?” Frank yelled.
Candy was just trying to figure out a way to answer this without lying to Frank Wrightson, when the woman in the car behind his truck honked her horn to hurry him on his way. Returning Candy’s wave, he drove off.
Which way now? she thought. She couldn’t wait at the intersection forever.
And then the decision was made for her. A gust of wind came down Stillman Street from the direction of the chicken factory. It stank of chicken excrement and worse. I’m not going to take Stillman Street, she thought to herself. So that left Lincoln. Without another thought, she turned the corner, and as soon as she’d done so she knew that was the decision she was supposed to make.
Not only did the foul smell disappear almost completely, but there—at the far end of the street, where Lincoln ran out of houses and gave way to the prairie—was a cloud, vast and shaped like some enormous flower, blossoming as the wind carried it south, away from town.
For some reason the sight of it—its golden color, its shape, its sheer size—put everything she’d left behind—Miss Schwartz and her stupidities, Deborah Hackbarth and the rest, even the smell on Stillman Street—out of her head.
Smiling as she walked, she headed on past the hotel and on down Lincoln Street toward the cloud.
The wavy lines in her head began to fade now, as though they had done their job by getting her out wandering until she came in sight of this blossom-cloud. She’d seen it; she had her destination.
The houses were thinning out now as she approached the end of Lincoln Street. She could remember venturing so far in this direction only once before, and that was because Patti Gibson, who’d been her best friend three years ago, had brought her down here to show her one of the few memorable front lawns in Chickentown. It had belonged to an old woman by the name of Lavinia White, known to all as the Widow White. In place of flowers, Lavinia had “planted” plastic pinwheels in the grass, the kind constructed of brightly colored plastic that made a whirring sound when the wind spun them. No doubt the Widow White was a little bit crazy, because she hadn’t simply put three or four of these things in her garden; she’d planted hundreds, in place of ordinary flowers. Some bright scarlet, some eye-pricking green, some striped or spiraled. It had been quite a sight, Candy remembered.
To her astonishment she found that they were still there. She heard them before she saw them, the massed noise of their whirring coming to meet her down Lincoln Street. When she came in sight of them, she found that they were all rather the worse for wear. Clearly the Widow White had not replaced the pinwheels with new ones over the last few seasons, and many had been knocked over by the wind, or had lost their plastic blooms, and she’d simply left the sticks in the dirt. But perhaps one in three of them remained operational, and that still provided a bizarre spectacle.
Candy glanced up at the house itself as she passed, and there in the upper window, sitting in a wheelchair watching the world go by (or as much of the world as would pass by the last house in the street before the grasslands began) was old Widow White herself. She had her eyes on Candy, so Candy gave her a wave and a smile. The Widow White returned neither.
There was no barricade or fence at the end of the street. Just a sign, placed at the limit of the asphalt that stated, with absurd redundancy:
STREET ENDS
“Oh really?” said Candy, looking up at the sign. Beyond it, there was just rolling prairie and the cloud. It had grown in size in the time that Candy had taken to walk the length of Lincoln Street, and it was no longer moving away from town. The wind had changed direction, and now seemed to be coming from the north. It had a curious tang to it, which was not the smell of the factory and its clotted drains. She didn’t know what it was.
She glanced back over her shoulder down the length of Lincoln Street. From here it was a half-hour walk home, at least. If the great gilded cloud was bringing rain, then she was going to get wet on her way back to Followell Street. But she had no desire to start the homeward trek, not for a little while, at least. She had no idea of what lay ahead of her besides the wild hills and the long grass, and the orange milkweed, the larkspur, and prairie lilies in among the grass.
But walking for a while where nobody (except the Widow White) knew she’d gone was better than going home to listen to her father in the first stages of the day’s drinking, raging on about the injustices of his life.
Without another thought she walked on past the STREET ENDS sign, catching it with her palm as she went so that it rocked in the shallow hole some lazy workman had made for it, and headed out into the gently swaying grass.
Butterflies and bees wove ahead of her, as if they were showing her the way. She followed them, happily. When next she looked back, the shoulder-high grass had almost obscured Chickentown from sight. She didn’t care. She had a good sense of direction. When the time came for her to find her way back, she’d be able to do just that.
Her eyes glued to the great swelling mass of the cloud, she walked on, her griefs and humiliations left somewhere behind her, where the road ended and the ocean of grass and flowers began.
5
A SHORE WITHOUT A SEA
AFTER PERHAPS TEN MINUTES of walking, Candy glanced back over her shoulder to see that the gentle swells and gullies she’d crossed to get to her present position had put Chickentown out of sight completely. Even the spire on the church on Hawthorne Street and the five stories of the town hall had vanished.
She took a moment and turned on the spot, three hundred and sixty degrees. In every direction the landscape presented the same unremarkable vista of windblown grass, with two exceptions. Some way off to her right lay a small copse of trees, and nearly dead ahead of her was a much more curious sight: a kind of skeletal tower, set in the middle of this wilderness of grass and flowers.
What was it? Some kind of watchtower? If it had been a watchtower then those who’d occupied it must have been very bored, with nothing to watch.
Though it promised to be nothing more than a near ruin, she decided to make it her destination. She’d get there, sit for a while, and then head back. She was getting thirsty, for one thing. She wanted a glass of water. Maybe on the return journey she’d pick up some soda from Niles’ Drug Store. She dug in her pocket, just to see what she had. Two singles, one five-and one ten-dollar bill. She pushed them down to the very bottom of her pocket, so they wouldn’t slip out.
The wind had become stronger in the time since she’d left the limits of Chickentown, and a little more bracing. There was still the smell of spring green in the air, but there was something else besides, something Candy couldn’t quite name, but which teased her nevertheless.
She walked toward the tower, her mind becoming pleasantly devoid of troubling thoughts. Miss Schwartz; letters threatening expulsion; her father in his drinking chair, staring up at her with that look of his, the look she knew meant trouble: all of it was left behind, where the street ended.
Then her toe caught some object so that it skipped ahead of her through the grass. Just a stone, surely. Nevertheless, she bent down to take a closer look, and to her surprise she saw that it was not a stone at all, but a shell. It was large too: about the size of her balled fist, and there were a number of short spikes on it. It wasn’t, she knew, a snail’s shell. For one thing it was too big, and she had never seen a snail’s shell with spikes. No, this was a sea shell, and it was clearly old. Its colors had faded, but she could still see an elaborate pattern upon it: a design that followed its diminishing spiral.
She turned it over, brushed what looked suspiciously like sand out of its crevice, and put it to her ear. It was a trick her grandfather had first taught her, listening to the sea in a shell. And though she knew it was just an illusion—the subtle reverberations of the air in the shell’s interior—she was still half persuaded by it; half certain she heard the sound of waves, as if the shell still had some memory of its life in the ocean.
She listened. There it was.
But what was a seashell doing out here?
Had somebody dropped it while walking here? That seemed highly unlikely. Who went walking with seashells in their pocket?
She looked down, wondering if anything else had been dropped in the vicinity. To her surprise, the answer was yes: there were a number of odd items scattered under her feet. More shells, for one thing, dozens of them. No, hundreds; some small, a few even larger than the one she’d picked up. Most were cracked or broken, but some were still intact, their shapes and designs more beautiful, more bizarre, than anything she’d ever seen in a book.
And there was more besides, a lot more. As she studied the ground, her eyes becoming accustomed to picking out curiosities, the curiosities multiplied. There were pieces of wood scattered among the shells, most smoothed into little abstract sculptures by the pale, freckled sand that was mingled with the dark Minnesota dirt. As she bent to pick one of the sculptures up, she saw that there was glass here too: countless fragments—green, blue and white—turned into smoky jewels. She picked up three or four and examined them in the palm of her hand, walking a little way as she did so.
There were more mysteries underfoot with every step she took. A large fish—its flesh pecked away by birds, and the remains baked by the sun. And even a piece of pottery, on which a fragment of an exquisite design remained: a blue figure staring at her with almost hypnotic intensity.
Fascinated by all this, she paused to examine her finds more closely. As she did so, she caught a movement in the long grass out of the corner of her eye. She dropped down onto her haunches, below the level of the tallest grass stalks, and there she stayed, suddenly and unaccountably nervous.
She brushed the last of the sand off her fingers and watched for whatever had moved to move again.
A hard gust of wind came through the grass, making it hiss as the stalks rubbed against one another.
After perhaps a minute, during which the only motion was the bending of the grass, she decided to chance standing up.
As she did so the thing she’d seen moving chose precisely the same moment to also stand upright, so that the pair of them, Candy and the stranger, rose like two swimmers emerging from a shallow sea.
Candy let out a yelp of shock at the sight of the stranger. And then, once the shock had worn off, she started to laugh. The man—whoever he was—was wearing some kind of Halloween mask, or so it seemed. What other explanation could there be for his freakish appearance? His left eye was round and wild, while his right was narrow and sly, and his mouth, framed by a black mustache and beard, was downturned in misery.
But none of this was as odd as what sprouted from the top of his head. There were large downy ears, and above them two enormous antlers, which would have resembled those of a stag except that there were seven heads (four on the left horn, three on the right) growing from them. Heads with eyes, noses and mouths.
They weren’t, she realized now, static, nor were they made of rubber and papier-mâché. In short, it was not a mask the man was wearing. These heads sprouting from the antlers were alive, and they were all staring at Candy the way their owner was staring at her: eight pairs of eyes all studying her with the same manic intensity.
She was speechless. But they were not. After a moment of silence the heads erupted into wild chatter, their manner highly agitated. Candy had no doubt about the subject of conversation. One minute the heads were looking at her, then they were facing one another, their volume rising as they attempted to outtalk one another.
The only mouth that wasn’t moving was that of the man himself. He simply studied Candy, his wild and sly expression slowly becoming one of tentative enquiry.
Finally, he decided to approach her. Candy let out a little gasp of fear, and in response he raised his long-fingered hands as though to keep her from running away. The heads, meanwhile, were still chattering to one another.
“Be quiet!” he ordered them. “You’re frightening the lady!”
All but one of the heads (the middle of the two on his right horn, a round-faced, sour individual) responded to his order. But this one kept talking.
“Keep your distance from her, John Mischief,” the head advised its big brother. “She may look harmless, but you can’t trust them. Any of them.”
“I said hush up, John Serpent,” the man said. “And I mean it.”
The head made a face and muttered something under its breath. But it finally stopped talking.
“What’s your name?” John Mischief asked Candy.
“Me?” Candy said, as though there was anybody else in the vicinity to whom the question might be directed.
“Oh Lordy Lou!” another of the heads remarked. “Yes, you, girl.”
“Be polite, John Sallow,” John Mischief said, reaching up (without taking his eyes off Candy) and lightly slapping the short-tempered head for its offense.
Then, having hushed his companion, John Mischief said: “I do apologize for my brother, lady.”
Then—of all things—he bowed to her.
It was not a deep bow. But there was something about the simple courtesy of the gesture that completely won Candy over. So what if John Mischief had seven extra heads; he’d bowed to her and called her lady. Nobody had ever done that to her before.
She smiled with improbable delight.
And the impish man called John Mischief, along with five of his seven siblings, smiled back.
“Please,” he said. “I don’t wish to alarm you, lady. Believe me, that is the very last thing I wish to do. But there is somebody in this vicinity by the name of Shape.”
“Mendelson Shape,” the smallest of the heads said.
“As John Moot says: Mendelson Shape.”
Before Candy could deal with any more information she needed a question answered. So she asked it.
“Are you all called John?” she said.
“Oh yes,” said Mischief. “Tell her, brothers, left to right. Tell her what we are called.”
So they did.
“John Fillet.”
“John Sallow.”
“John Moot.”
“John Drowze.”
“John Pluckitt.”
“John Serpent.”
“John Slop.”
“And I’m the head brother,” the eighth wonder replied. “John Mischief.”
“Yes, I heard that part. I’m Candy Quackenbush.”
“I am extremely pleased to make your acquaintance,” John Mischief said.
He sounded completely sincere in this, and with good reason. To judge by his appearance, things had not gone well for him—or them—of late.
Mischief’s striped blue shirt was full of holes and there were stains on his loosely knotted tie, which were either food or blood; she guessed the latter. Then there was his smell. He was less than sweet, to say the least. His shirt clung to his chest, soaked with pungent sweat.
“Have you been running from this man Shape?” Candy said.
“She’s observant,” John Pluckitt said appreciatively. “I like that. And young, which is good. She can help us, Mischief.”
“Either that or she can get us in even deeper trouble,” said John Serpent.
“We’re as deep as we can get,” John Slop observed. “I say we trust the girl, Mischief. We’ve got absolutely nothing to lose.”
“What are they all talking about?” Candy asked Mischief. “Besides me.”
“The harbor,” he replied.
“What harbor?” Candy said. “There’s no harbor here. This is Minnesota. We’re hundreds of miles from the ocean. No, thousands.”
“Perhaps we’re thousands of miles from any ocean you are familiar with, lady,” said John Fillet, with a gap-toothed smile. “But there are oceans and oceans. Seas and seas.”
“What on earth is he talking about?” Candy asked Mischief.
John Mischief pointed toward the tower that stood sixty or seventy yards from where they stood.
“That, lady, is a lighthouse,” he said.
“No,” said Candy, with a smile. The idea was preposterous. “Why would anybody—”
“Look at it,” said John Drowze. “It is a lighthouse.”
Candy studied the odd tower again.
Yes, she could see that indeed it could have been designed as a lighthouse. There were the rotted remains of a staircase, spiraling up the middle of it, leading to a room at the top, which might have housed a lamp. But so what?
“Somebody was crazy,” she remarked.
“Why?” said John Slop.
“Oh, come on,” said Candy. “We’ve been through this. We’re in Minnesota. There is no sea in—”
Candy stopped mid-sentence. Mischief had put his hand to his mouth, hushing her.
As he did so all of his brothers looked off in one direction or another. A few were sniffing the air, others tasting it on their lips. Whatever they did and wherever they looked, they all came to the same conclusion, and together they murmured two words.
“Shape’s here,” they said.
6
THE LADY ASCENDS
MISCHIEF INSTANTLY GRABBED Candy’s arm and pulled her down into the long grass. His eyes were neither wild nor sly now. They were simply afraid. His brothers, meanwhile, were peering over the top of the grass in every direction, and now and then exchanging their own fearful looks. It was most peculiar for Candy to be with one person, and yet be in the company of a small crowd.
“Lady,” Mischief said, very softly, “I wonder if you would dare something for me?”
“Dare?”
“I would quite understand if you preferred not. This isn’t your battle. But perhaps Providence put you here for a reason.”
“Go on,” Candy said.
Given how unhappy and purposeless she’d been feeling in the last few hours (no, not hours: months, even years), she was happy to listen to anybody with a theory about why she was here.
“If I could distract Mendelson Shape’s attention away from you for long enough, maybe you could get to the lighthouse, and climb the stairs? You carry far less weight than I, and the stairs may support you better.”
“What for?”
“What do you mean: what for?”
“Well, once I’ve climbed the stairs—”
“She wants to know what she does next,” John Slop said.
“That’s simple enough, lady,” said John Fillet.
“When you get to the top,” said John Pluckitt, “you must light the light.”
Candy glanced up at the ruined tower: at the spiraling spire of its staircase, and the rotting boards of its upper floor. She couldn’t imagine the place was in working order, not in its present state.
“Doesn’t it need electricity?” she said. “I mean, I can’t even see a lamp.”
“There’s one up there, we swear,” said John Moot. “Please trust us. We may be desperate, but we’re not stupid. We wouldn’t send you on a suicide mission.”
“So how do I make this lamp work?” Candy asked. “Is there an on-off switch?”
“You’ll know how to use it the moment you set eyes on it,” Mischief said. “Light’s the oldest game in the world.”
She looked at them, her gaze going from face to face. They looked so frightened, so exhausted. “Please, lady,” said Mischief. “You’re our only chance now.”
“Just one more question—” Candy said.
“No time,” said Drowze. “I see Shape.”
“Where?” said Fillet, turning to follow his brother’s gaze. He didn’t need any further direction. He simply said. “Oh Lordy Lou, there he is.”
Candy raised her head six inches and looked in the same direction that Fillet and Drowze were looking. The rest of the brothers—Mischief included—followed that stare.
And there, no more than a stone’s throw from the spot where Candy and the brothers were crouched in the grass, was the object of their fear: Mendelson Shape.
The sight of him made Candy shudder. He was twice the height of Mischief, and there was something spiderish about his grotesque anatomy. His almost fleshless limbs were so long, she could readily imagine him walking up a wall. On his back there was a curious arrangement of cruciform rods that almost looked like four swords which had been fused to his bony body. He was naked but for a pair of striped shorts, and he walked with a pronounced limp. But there was nothing frail about him. Despite the lack of muscle, and that limp of his, he looked like a creature born to do harm. His expression was joyless and sour, filled with hatred toward the world.
Having got herself a glimpse of him, Candy ducked down quickly, before Shape’s wrathful gaze came her way.
Curiously, it was only now, seeing this second freakish creature, that she wondered if perhaps she wasn’t having some kind of hallucination. How could such beings be here in the world with her? The same world as Chickentown, as Miss Schwartz and Deborah Hackbarth?
“Before we go any further,” she said to the brothers, “I need an answer to something.”
“Ask away,” said John Swallow.
“Am I dreaming this?”
By way of reply, all eight brothers shook their heads, their faces for once expressing the same thing. No, this is no dream, those faces said.
Nor, deep in her bones, had she expected the answer to be any different. They were all awake together, she and the brothers, and all in terrible jeopardy.
Mischief saw the sequence of thoughts crossing her face. The doubt that she was even awake, and then the fear that indeed she was.
“This is all Providence, I swear,” he said to her. “You’re here because you can light the light. You and only you.”
She did her best to put the fear out of her head and to concentrate on what John Mischief had just said. In a curious way it made sense that she was here because she had to be here. She thought of the doodle she’d made on her workbook; the way it had seemed to brighten in her mind’s eye, inspiring her limbs to move. It was almost as though the doodle had been a sign, a ticket to this adventure. Why else, after living all her life in Chickentown, should she be here—in a place she’d never been before—today?
This must be what John Mischief meant by Providence.
“So, lady?” Mischief said. “What is your decision?”
“If I’m not dreaming this, then perhaps it is Providence.”
“So you’ll go?”
“Yes, I’ll go,” Candy said simply.
Mischief smiled again, only this time, they all smiled with him. Eight grateful faces, smiling at her for being here, and ready to chance her life. That was what was at stake right now, she didn’t doubt it. The monster moving through the grass nearby would kill them all if he got his claws into them.
“Good luck,” Mischief whispered. “We’ll see you again when you come down.”
And without offering any further instruction, he and his brothers darted off through the grass, bent double to keep out of Shape’s sight until they were clear of her.
Candy’s heart was thumping so hard she could hear her pulse in her head. Ten, fifteen seconds passed. She listened. The grass hissed all around her. Strangely enough, she’d never felt so alive in her life.
Another half minute went by. She was tempted to chance another peep above the surface of the swaying grass, to see whether Mendelson Shape was limping in her direction, but she was afraid to do so in case he was almost upon her.
Then, to her infinite relief, she heard eight voices all yelling at the same time:
“Hey, you! Mendelson Shmendelson! Looking for us? We’re over here!”
Candy waited a heartbeat, then she chanced a look.
Shape, it seemed, had indeed been looking in her direction, and had she raised her head a second earlier would have seen her. But now he was swinging around, following the sound of the brothers’ voices.
At that moment, Mischief leaped up out of the grass and began racing away from the lighthouse, diverting Shape’s attention.
Shape threw open his arms, his huge, iron-taloned claws spread as wide as five-fingered fans.
“There. You. Are!” he roared.
His voice was as ugly as his anatomy: a guttural din that made Candy’s stomach churn.
As he spoke, the configuration of crosses on his back shifted, rising up like featherless, metallic wings. He reached over his shoulders and grabbed two of the blades, pulling them out of the scabbards in his leathery flesh. Then he started through the grass toward his prey.
Candy knew she could not afford to delay. The brothers were chancing their lives so that she could attempt to reach the lighthouse unseen. She had to go now, or their courage would be entirely in vain.
Candy didn’t watch the pursuit a moment longer. Instead, she set her eyes on the lighthouse and she began to run, not even bothering to try and conceal herself by staying below the level of the grass. Simply depending for distraction upon Shape’s terrible appetite to have the John brothers in his grasp.
As she raced through the grass, she became aware that the great rain cloud that had first caught her eye was now directly above the lighthouse, hovering like a golden curtain over the drama below.
Was this part of the makings of Providence too? she wondered as she ran. Did clouds also have their place in the shape of things?
By the time the thought had passed through her head, she had reached the threshold of the lighthouse. She chanced a quick look over her shoulder at Mischief and his pursuer.
Much to her horror she saw that her brief period of protection was over. Shape had given up chasing the brothers—realizing perhaps that the pursuit was just a diversion—and he had now turned his attention back toward the lighthouse.
His eyes fixed upon Candy, and he let out a bloodcurdling cry at the sight of her. He spread his arms wide, and with swords in hand, he began to move toward her.
He didn’t run; he simply strode through the grass with terrible confidence in his uneven step, as if to say: I don’t have to hurry. I’ve got all the time in the world. I’ve got you cornered, and there’s no escape for you. You’re mine.
She turned away from the sight of his approach and pushed on the broken door. The hinges creaked, and there were a few moments of resistance, when she feared that fallen timbers on the other side might have blocked it. Then, with a deep grating sound, the door opened and Candy slipped inside.
Though there were plenty of holes in the walls, and the sun came through in solid shafts, it was still far chillier inside than it was out. The cold air stank of rotting wood. Large fungi had prospered in the damp murk, and the boards beneath her feet were slick with mildew. She slipped twice before she had even reached the bottom of the stairs.
The prospect before her looked dangerous. No doubt once upon a time the spiral wooden stairs had been perfectly safe to climb, but that was decades ago. Now all but a few of the railings had collapsed, and the structure which had supported the staircase had been devoured by woodworm and rot, so that it seemed the stairs themselves had virtually nothing to depend on for their solidity.
She peered through one of the holes in the wall, just to confirm what she already knew: Mendelson Shape was still advancing toward the lighthouse.
Unlikely as a safe ascent seemed, there was no way back now. Shape would be at the front door in just a few seconds. She had no choice but to try the stairs. She put her hand on the shaky bannister and began her cautious ascent.
