To the left of the board of sketches was a small window that was partly over Bran’s bed, and as he sat shivering, he looked outside—cautiously, though, for still some part of him remembered the awful creature that had been outside just hours before. He sat there for a long while. When he couldn’t take it anymore, he found himself sitting at his desk, like so many times before, the soft light of the moon the only thing he dared let illuminate his face and his work.
He didn’t have any drawing paper, but had been lucky enough to snag an old roll of newspaper the printers had thrown out. It was warped on one side and caused jams in the presses, but Bran could easily rip off a clean sheet, though with time the paper had yellowed.
Sliding his pencil across the paper, Bran tried to summon the creature from memory, its rough face, its features, those eyes. His pencil scratched dark lines and sweeping curves on the page, his arm sliding around little pieces of paper that littered his desk, notes and drawings he had left unfinished. Bran had never had drawing lessons; it just seemed to come naturally to him. However, try as he did, he couldn’t seem to bring the creature out onto the paper. Usually when drawing, he could feel himself forgetting his troubles. But with every line he drew now, he only seemed to feel worse, until he finally crumpled up the whole page and threw it away. He sat in the darkness yet again, wishing it had all been a bad dream.
Why is this bothering me so much?
he asked himself. It was maddening. He could not get his mind off the creature and what he had said.
He finally scavenged underneath the bed for his bag of things. The bag was from Rosie and was lined with tapestry print colored with a mixture of dark greens and browns and mustard yellows. He kept all his things in it that he didn’t want the Wilomases getting into, like the torn note with his name they had found in the vault. He took the note out, reading the paper over and over. He ran his fingers along the edge, to where it was jagged and torn at the bottom and where the top corner was bent. He had studied it so many times he had every mark emblazoned in his mind.
Sometimes, as on that night, he liked to wonder about his mother and where she might be, or the reason she had left him in the vault. Had his father made her leave Bran behind? Bran never wondered about his father more than that—he didn’t know why, perhaps because his father was simply a person Bran could blame who wasn’t there to prove otherwise. Bran wondered if his mother might show up at the door one day, or if she was looking for him at that very moment. He knew he could convince her to take him back, if she would only hear him out. And even though the hope seemed like a thread when set against reality, Bran clung to it each day, to the feeling that he might get to see her face even once.
He had sketched out many things on paper, but the one thing he wished he could draw was his mother—anything that could make him remember her. The oldest memory he had was of waking up in the darkness of the vault, looking up just as Sewey was peering in. It was as if everything that had happened in the first six years of his life was gone: a wall in his mind he could not break through. And the only clue to any of it was the note.
He tried to go to sleep again, but it was little use.
Early the next morning, he got started on his usual routine. There were plenty of chores to do, like shining the shoes, starting the laundry, feeding the cat, and as Bran’s name did not end in Wilomas, he was expected to earn his keep by helping Rosie. As it turned out, the most exertion any Wilomas ever did in the morning was a pinky to the snooze button.
Rosie was rushing around the kitchen—frying eggs, cooking sausages, and making a whole lot of racket—when Bran came in to see if she needed anything.
"Good morning," she said cheerfully. "What a noisy evening!"
"What a
long
evening too," Bran said, yawning as he took plates out. "I hardly slept at all."
"Me either," Rosie replied, moving the eggs around and turning the stove up under the sausages. "I heard you two chased a gnome, right here in Dunce."
"Well, we
did
chase him," Bran said. "But we didn’t catch him."
"Oh, my!" Rosie said with a gasp. "It’s a shame, burglars coming to a nice city like this one."
"But why two nights in a row?" Bran asked.
Rosie just shrugged. She was a small, somewhat chubby woman of thirty-nine years, with brown hair in a bun and a face glowing with a smile most times of the day. For being Mabel’s distant cousin, she hardly bore any resemblance. The Wilomases kept her around because they wouldn’t dream of doing their own housekeeping, and they used her as a tutor because they didn’t trust the Dunce school system. Besides, they enjoyed feeling rich by having a servant and a tutor to boss around—probably the biggest reason of all.
The alarm clock went off upstairs like the Great Bell of Death, and commotion ensued. A furious sound started down the stairs, and that sound did not belong to an angry troll, as one might first expect, but to Mabel Wilomas. The kitchen door blew open.
"EEEK!" Mabel screamed, her voice shaking the very foundations of the house.
Bran winced. Rosie jumped and sent a fried egg flying into the air.
"What
are
you cooking?" Mabel demanded, staring in horror at the stove. Bran caught the egg with a plate a moment before it would have fallen to the floor.
"I’m cooking breakfast, miss," Rosie said quickly. "Like I do every morning."
"Every morning indeed." Mabel swept into the kitchen and dashed to the medicine cabinet.
"Look: eggs, sausage, toast," Rosie said, pointing to each one. "A meal fit for a king!"
"You mean a
queen,
" Mabel corrected, pulling medicines by the armful out of the cabinet and dropping them on the counter. She was only a bit taller than Sewey’s shoulders and had black hair with dynamic, burnt red streaks, like fire and smoke, piled in a mess on top of her head. She scrambled for a bottle of drops and started to squeeze it over her eyeballs.
"Make sure"—
drop
—"you cook those eggs"—
drop
—"to a crisp," she said, as she dripped the solution into her eyes. "They’ve got to be
blackened.
Don’t want us getting rispozita poisoning."
When she finished with the drops, she snatched a long pad of paper from across the counter. "Twenty-eight drops of Endgo’s
root, twelve teaspoons of slippery elm, two grams of crushed fiddlesticks…" She ran her finger down the list, piling dozens of things onto the counter and taking some of each. "…then Ingrid’s Elixir, then Snapping Leaf, then Yuletide Extract, then the antibodies, then antiantibodies…"
"And now for the grand finale," Bran said as she came to the last one.
"…and two hundred-forty drops of cloromorophlorosocillinium!" Mabel finished at the bottom. She took a gigantic rainbow-colored bottle out of the cabinet and began counting drops onto her tongue.
"The way you’re acting," Bran said, "one might think you were sick."
"
Toxic!
" she spluttered. "All the toxicity of this city is bound to kill us one of these days. All those people, stepping outside without even taking a dropper full of something! Why, I just read in the
Fitness Witness
magazine—" She slammed an inhaler over her mouth and nose. Her lips went on moving, but Bran couldn’t hear it behind the plastic, and she gave the canister three sprays, breathed deeply, and then went into a coughing fit.
"See, see?" she said, hitting her chest. "Toxins! In the air! And it’s getting worse!" She rushed to the telephone. "I need an appointment, a consultation, ear candling, I need—"
"A phone book?" Bran offered. She jumped.
"Throw it away!" she commanded. "That ink will make your ears fall off!"
He tossed it onto the table and gave up. "Don’t you care at all about the burglar last night?"
"The burglar?" she snapped. "I bet you didn’t wash after handling it. Get upstairs and clean your head, shoulders, knees, and toes, then wake up Balder, before he gets a whooping cold."
Rosie knew the drill: she took a sausage out of the pan, wrapped it in a napkin, and handed it to Bran, and he started up the stairs to Balder’s room. He made his way through the toys in the dark, flipping the blinds open to let the sunshine in.
"Rise and shine!" Bran said, pushing a few toys aside with his foot.
"Oh, no," Balder whined, throwing the sheets over his head. "Go away!"
"Time to get up," Bran said. "Mother’s orders."
"Get out!" Balder demanded. Bran waved the sausage in front of Balder’s nose a few times.
"Go aw—" Balder started but interrupted himself when he sniffed the air. Bran waved the sausage a few times, and Balder finally snatched it from him, poking his head out. In a second the sausage was down his throat, all in one stuff. When he finished, he licked his lips and sat up, pouting. "I don’t want to get up," he moaned. "I want to stay right here and rot."
"Well, go ahead," Bran said. "And when you’re through, you tell me how it feels."
"Blah!" Balder pouted. "I want that new television, the Megamus Maximus! I want it, and I’ll run away if I don’t get it!"
"Good luck," Bran said. "I heard they’re looking for underground mining boys up north."
"I won’t be a mining boy, I won’t!" Balder said, kicking the sheets off. He had the same dark hair as Sewey, freckles around his nose, and he was as chubby as ever. In all their lives, Sewey
and Mabel had never intended to make him the way he was, but it was just a plain and simple fact that he had turned out worse than a whole horde of selfish trolls.
"I want the Megamus Maximus!" he squealed.
"What about the one over there?" Bran pointed to the television dominating the far wall.
"It’s old," Balder snapped. "And the new one is twelve hundred times bigger. I want it!" He kicked his piggy bank off the dresser, then pushed a lamp, threw three books, and finally slid out of bed.
"You’re not going to watch television?" Bran asked with fake horror.
"The thought!" Balder spluttered. "I’m going for the big one in the living room."
"Baldretta’s got that one this week," Bran said, but Balder didn’t care.
"I’ll just wrestle the bloody remote from her grubby little hands," he sneered.
Bran shrugged and started to pick up Balder’s toys, preparing for the worst. It came eight seconds later.
"I don’t want to watch
Shink, Nok, and Foops!
" Balder hollered from down the hall.
Bran came to see what was up. Baldretta was in the living room, holding a bag of candy in her hands and sitting on the remote.
"Why does she get the big screen?" Balder demanded, trying to knock her over. Baldretta had flowing brown hair, big brown eyes, and a pretty face that was usually stuffed with some sort of candy. She hadn’t yet begun to talk much, and thanks to her perpetual chewing, only the Wilomases could understand her when she did.
"Mbwmbs buwithus," Baldretta smacked.
"But I’m the oldest, you little monster," Balder argued. "I get dibs on the biggest screen!"
"Mbwithis bwathis," Baldretta said, her lips moving in a circle as she chewed.
"I am
not,
" Balder screamed. However, Baldretta seemed quite sure he was. Bran didn’t care to interrupt, so he left them there and started out to set the table. He nearly ran into Mabel in the kitchen.
"Keep a distance!" she warned. "I found a trash can you forgot to empty last night."
"I’m sorry, I happened to be on the roof most of the evening," Bran explained.
"Don’t be snippy. You had best take it out now before rats come and we all get the Gray Plague and goodness knows what else."
"Maybe leprosy?" Bran suggested.
Mabel went pale. "I’ll have to dose up on some neoplytoplismo!" she choked, rushing for her medicine cabinet. Bran tied up the trash bag and started outside to add it to the pile next to the house.
The morning was cool, and the sun hovered just above the horizon, covering the neighborhood with soft light. The grass glimmered with dew. One of the neighbors was driving off for work. Bran saw the Schweezer sitting on the curb, as if nothing at all had happened the night before. Mr. Swinehic was feeding the birds and waved at him.
"Good morning, Bran!" he called, and Bran waved back as he started around the house. Mr. Swinehic threw another handful of seed and started toward him.
"I picked up a lot of trash in my yard this morning," he told Bran as he came forward. "There was a lot in your yard too, so I just bagged it up with the rest."
"What was it?" Bran asked, tossing the trash bag beside the house.
Mr. Swinehic shrugged. "Couldn’t tell," he replied. "Looked like a bunch of bank forms: evictions, overdue letters…"
Bran smiled but kept himself from laughing, remembering the night before. "Was it now?"
"Yep," Mr. Swinehic nodded and shrugged. "All of them ripped in half the same. Except for that scrap of paper I found over there."
He pointed toward the side of the house. "Wasn’t a bank form and it was all by itself—and it’s got your name on it, so I guess it’s yours."
"My name?" Bran asked curiously. He hadn’t dropped anything outside that he could remember. Mr. Swinehic dug in his pocket.
"I kept it just in case," he said, pulling it out. "It’s odd and doesn’t make much sense, either."
He produced a single slip of paper, torn at the top and the bottom. It was very plain but wrinkled and dirty, and Bran took it and read what was written there:
Meet me at midnight in Dunce to pick up Bran. Since I cannot save him, you must do it for me; and in return
The rest was torn off. Bran blinked at it and ran his fingers along the edge, very confused.
"See, doesn’t make any sense," Mr. Swinehic said. "Looks like it’s torn off something." Mr. Swinehic pointed to the edge. "Must go on from there, like part of a letter, but I couldn’t find the rest. Sounded important and odd, so I kept it."
"Th-thank you," Bran stammered, unsure of what to say. He turned the page over, but there was nothing on the back except some dirt stains. He looked up to ask more, but Mr. Swinehic had already started back for his house. Bran stood there dumbfounded for a minute, and he turned to look where Mr. Swinehic had said he found the paper.