The Slippery Map (8 page)

R
inget's apartment was the size of the nunnery's walk-in pantry. And, like the nunnery pantry, it was lined with oversized cans of soup on shelves (
Much too big and too plentiful for one person,
Oyster thought). But unlike the food in the nunnery's walk-in pantry, everything was covered in blue feathers.

“Iglits,” Ringet explained, while putting sheets on the sofa where Oyster and Leatherbelly would sleep. “They'd die out there, breathing in all that sugar.”

The Iglits were nervous birds. They hid in the rafters, darted around a little overhead. Some perched on the hat rack where everyone had hung his black cape and cap.

“When the factory started up full-tilt, they just fell from the trees,” Ringet said sadly.

“Ringet is softhearted,” Hopps explained. “Do you
know what these birds would go for on the black market? Fifty skids each, easy.”

“I had a bird that I brought back to health,” Oyster said, gazing up at the darting birds. “It learned to fly. I can see why people would want these as pets. They're so pretty and blue.”

“Not as pets,” Ringet said.

“They want to eat 'em,” said Hopps.

“How could anyone…,” Ringet said.

Hopps leaned into Oyster. “I heard there's an underground recipe for Goggle legs,” he whispered. “Now
that
I'd like to try!”

Ringet shook his head and
tsk-tsk
ed. The Iglits on his shoulders ruffled and took flight.

Hopps gave a small laugh that turned into a sigh. He looked tired. “We're all just lucky to be alive. It's worse what happened to the Wingers.”

“What happened to the Wingers?” Oyster asked, not having ever heard of Wingers before.

Ringet teared up and walked to the kitchen, busying himself at the counter with bread and jelly jars.

“What are Wingers?” Oyster asked.

“The smallest of Perths,” Hopps said. “But they had wings, and when they beat their wings, their chests lit up. Beautiful. But those early days, they couldn't breathe,” Hopps explained. “You would find them fluttering on
the streets. Their chests dull, just a small glow. Goggles ate most of them.”

Oyster imagined the lights flitting out inside of the Wingers' hearts. “That's awful,” he said.

“Stop,” Ringet called from the kitchen. “I can't think about it. We aren't supposed to be talking about them.”

“Right. As Dark Mouth would have it, the Wingers never existed. Nowadays, the kids are raised to believe they were just fantasy stories.” Hopps grew angry. “We need our freedom to choose what we think, what we want to do with our lives. We need our history, our past.” He sat down at the small table. He lowered his voice and whispered hoarsely to Ringet, “Show him the outlawed books, Ringet.”

“No, no,” Ringet said. “Hush.”

Hopps nodded to the row of soup cans. Oyster looked up at the oversized row. “They won't let us read anything but ‘Home Sweet Home' companions. All else is too dangerous.”

Ringet shook his head. “Don't look there,” he said nervously. “They might see you through a window.” Ringet walked to the curtains behind the sink and pulled them tighter. Oyster thought he could feel the Goggles' eyes staring through the darkness outside. He pulled his knees to his chest and sat there in a ball. He could feel his map in his pocket, but he couldn't even
remember having imagined that World. It was strange that his parents had invented
this
World! So rich! So fully imagined! So terrifying.

“So why did my parents imagine Goggles and Spider Wolves?” Oyster asked.

“Oh, their own worlds had problems,” Ringet explained. “And they couldn't leave all of the old world behind while imagining their own new one.”

Hopps went on. “They translated things from the old world into the new; the worlds influence each other sometimes.”

“Oh,” Oyster said. He had too much to think about. Where were his parents? How would he ever be able to find them, much less rescue them? “I can't save them,” he said.

“Sure you can!” Ringet said.

“You saved Fran Horslip,” Hopps added.

Oyster was proud of that. Even thinking about it now, he felt a quick smile dart across his face.

Ringet had made some jelly sandwiches and laid them out on the table. Oyster hadn't realized how hungry he was. Leatherbelly got a sandwich too and wolfed it down in a few quick gulps. The Iglits were getting bolder, lighting on the furniture now. Oyster imagined them flying around outside, living in the trees. “What was it like before Dark Mouth?” he asked.

“The Good Dozen,” Hopps said. “Twelve years of peace. Your parents had created us, and then found passage to and fro. They would come to visit.”

“What were they like?” Oyster asked.

Hopps reached into his pocket, pulled out a wallet. He reached into a zippered compartment and then, within that, a secret compartment. He took out a small picture trimmed to an oval and handed it to Oyster. “There they are,” Hopps said.

“I don't know why you carry that on your person!” Ringet said. “It's just too dangerous! If anyone knew…”

Oyster leaned in close. The two faces were smiling. The sun was in their eyes, so they were squinting some. His mother had a white veil on her head, and that seemed strange. He realized it was their wedding day; but the veil reminded him of the nuns' veils, and he had a sore heartache—for his parents, squinting into the sun, and for the nuns: he missed them terribly. He was homesick for his home at the nunnery and for the home he'd never known: the backyard with the swing set.

“They were taken from us shortly after you were born,” Hopps said. “But they made sure that you were saved.”

“But before that, they told us the legend of the land they'd come from,” Hopps explained. His eyes were bright, his expression dreamy. He liked this story,
Oyster could tell. “The City of Baltimore in the land of Johns Hopkins in a place called University Housing. Their parents were two sets of professors in this land. And University Housing consisted of damp, old stone homes with fireplaces. They were shushed children, told to be quiet, and with little to do, they made up the story of Perths and the Pinch-Eye Mountains and Boneland. Our origins.”

Oyster hadn't spent much time imagining his parents, much less thinking that they'd once been children themselves, about his age, lonesome and bored. He imagined University Housing. It seemed grand, but echoey, a place where it would be easy to get lost and restless—like the nunnery.

“And then one day, while in the dark basement of the library in the land of Johns Hopkins, just west of University Housing, they came across a Map Room and a keeper.”

“A Mapkeeper?” Oyster asked.

“Yes,” Hopps said. “And the Mapkeeper showed them around her treasures. And among her treasures, they found the map of their own imaginings. As luck would have it, a telephone rang at just that moment. Telephones are communication tools that often make people leave one room and go into another.”

“I know what they are,” Oyster said.

“Oh, yes, of course,” Hopps said. “Well, this is what happened, and they took this diversion to grab their map and run out of the basement of the library in the land of Johns Hopkins and back to University Housing.”

“That's what happened to me!” Oyster said. “The telephone and all. Except I wasn't in a basement. I was in a shop!” Oyster thought back to the Mapkeeper, how she'd told him to remember every detail, how she'd given him rules, how she'd told him all about the stolen map—and how loudly she'd labeled the stolen map in bright red pen. Had she meant for Oyster to steal his own map? Had she wanted Oyster's parents in the library basement to steal their own map too?

“Well, it so happens that they ripped the map weeks later. An accident. The girl had a small bucket, an item from a game of some sort. It was on the map, and when the boy accidentally stepped on the bucket, there was a rip. They learned that there was something on the other side of the rip. Wind and darkness. And through that, they found us here.”

Oyster thought of his parents as two kids dreaming up their World, and how it must have been for them to come across the Mapkeeper, and that first time when the bucket expanded and the map opened, the two of them sailing through the windy dark. “I am a shushed child,” Oyster said. “And I have a good imagination. Except I haven't unleashed mine yet.”

Hopps's dreamy expression changed sharply. “What do you mean?”

“You'll need your imagination,” Ringet said. “To defeat Dark Mouth.”

Hopps said, “Perths aren't blessed with imaginations as strong as humans like yourself have. We need you to make use of yours.”

“I'm sorry,” Oyster said. He pulled out the map in his pocket, the small scroll he'd stolen from the Mapkeeper. “This is all of my Imagined Other World,” he said.

Hopps reached out and took it. He flipped it open on his thigh. “This is it?” His cheeks flushed with anger.

“Yep,” Oyster said nervously.

Hopps shook his head and handed it to Ringet.

Ringet took a look. “But here is University Housing. How did you know that?”

Oyster jumped up. “What?” he asked. “Let me see.” Ringet handed it to him. His map had a tiny etching of a small square that had the words
The Library of Johns
Hopkins
written beside it. “Maybe I
just
imagined it when I heard about it!” He was astonished.

“He's already improving!” Ringet said to Hopps. “His imagination is inside of him. It's got to be. His parents are his parents, after all.”

Hopps looked doubtful, and Oyster squirmed. “I really will try,” he said, “to unleash it. I will!”

Ringet took the map, pulled an oversized soup can from a top shelf. “I'll put it here for safekeeping.” He dropped the map in the can. It made a hollow
thunk
. The can had no lid. Ringet simply put it on a high shelf.

“Are you sure it will be okay up there?” Oyster asked.

“If it isn't okay up there, then there still really isn't much to lose now, huh?” Hopps said sourly.

For the first time, Oyster really didn't like Hopps. “I guess not. Or well, not yet,” he said.

Ringet said, “Look, Hopps, stop it. I have faith in the boy.”

Hopps ignored him. “The first dozen years were wonderful. The refinery was operating, yes, but not with all of the heavy pollution, and we chugged along as a quiet town. We held elections and squabbled over our small plots of gardens. We fussed, yes, but we were allowed to fuss. And then we sang all day Saturdays.”

“And Orwise Suspar was an old, wealthy man,” Ringet said. “The spot where Dark Mouth now has his Torch
atop a tall thin tower, it used to be a garden with twenty-foot flowers: High-Tipping Bluebells and Rosy-Upsies. And when the petals fell off, they were as big as bedsheets, and they drifted down into the valley and lay like carpets.”

“And now do you want to know what happened after the Good Dozen?” Hopps asked.

Oyster nodded, though he knew it would be an awful story.

Hopps stood up and paced around the little room. Oyster guessed that this was the way he told the hard stories. “The old man in the tower died. And his son decided to
rule
over us. He'd once been a sweet little boy, standing behind his father in photographs; but after his father died, he became evil. The Foul Revolution was upon us—the vicious attacks of Dark Mouth's troops. Your parents fought alongside us. They were our leaders, and they were taken.”

“Why did Dark Mouth become evil? Why did he want to rule over everyone?” Oyster asked. “If everything had been going so well?”

“Do you think I understand him?” Hopps said.

Ringet shook his head. “It's not for us to know,” he said. “It's beyond us.”

“But we have to know,” Oyster said. “We have to understand what happened with Dark Mouth or we
won't ever be able to make things right.”

“Well,” Hopps said, a little huffy, “what's there to know? He wants to keep us down like we're just caged Wingers who need to be obedient. He wants the Map so that he can go through it and take over the land on the other side. His greed has no end.”

“And he turned his father's beautiful garden to bone. He killed it!”

Oyster didn't like the sound of any of this, but right now, his mind was stalled on a point of logic. “Why didn't my parents just imagine that everything was good again so it would go back?”

“The imagination is its own force. Once you fully imagine something, it is, in a sense, true. It exists. And, once in motion, it takes on a life of its own, Oyster. Your parents created us, but we go on of our own volition—the good and the bad. Your parents were trying to convince us that we have our own imaginations. And we believed them,” Hopps said. “But now they're gone and a lot of Perths have lost that belief in themselves. If we could all just imagine a better place here, we could make it ourselves. But I can't convince the Perths of this. They're all too terrified to try.”