The Slippery Map (9 page)

“Who could blame them?” Ringet said, obviously terrified himself.

“And the last thing Dark Mouth wants is for us to go
about having imaginations. He wants to control everything. The artists and storytellers—well, they were the first to be imprisoned. Dark Mouth hands us his ‘Home Sweet Home' programming and has us eat our sugars and thinks, ‘That will satisfy them. Keep them from rising up. Give them enough to chew on.' But it isn't anything to chew on!”

“Oh,” Oyster said. He didn't understand his imagination himself, except how to keep a lid on it, but…Suddenly it was there in his mind: the green lawn and the blue-and-white striped swing set, and his father in a garden with a hose and his mother putting a checkered cloth on a picnic table, some shirts gusting on a clothesline behind her…and he and the boy from the Dragon Palace, still holding his blue umbrella, were laughing on the swings, the wind in their hair. His own Imagined Other World. It was the most he'd ever let himself imagine about that World.

“That's why we need you, Oyster,” Hopps said. He spread the Slippery Map on the floor. He said, “Okay, now we won't be here in the morning when you head out. We'll have to head to the refinery early.”

“I'm going off by myself?” Oyster asked. “With the Map?”

“You've got the beast,” Ringet said.

Oyster looked at Leatherbelly, who was nearly
asleep, his jowls resting on his black paws. “I don't think he'll be of much use to me,” Oyster said.

“He's your beast, though,” Hopps said.

“He's not a beastly beast, and he's not really mine,” Oyster explained.

“If we don't show up at the refinery, it'll alert the Goggles.” Hopps took off the necklace of the silver bucket on a string. “Listen. You'll have the Slippery Map, too. When you need us, you take off the necklace.” He touched a spot on the Map with the bucket and the Map enlarged in that spot, showing the layout of Ringet's apartment. “Here's the sink. Scratch at it like this.” He used the rim of the bucket like a paring knife. There was a small black gash, an opening. A cold breeze poured through it. The wind also kicked up through Ringet's sink, batting around his kitchen curtains. “Talk to us through the wind. We'll be here after five thirty.”

“You're giving me the Slippery Map?” Oyster asked.

“Actually, I'm returning it. It belongs to your family,” Hopps said.

Oyster again thought of his parents as shushed kids in University Housing. “But,” Oyster said, after a little thought, “isn't Dark Mouth after the Map? I mean, won't I be even more of a target if I've got it with me?”

Ringet and Hopps glanced at each other nervously.

“Well,” Hopps said, “as a matter of fact, that's true.”

Ringet's eyes teared up. “And those Perths at the Council meeting, they're bound to gossip. It's bound to be leaked out!”

“We have no choice now but to go forward,” Hopps said. “You'll have to find Ippy first off.”

“She'll know how to take you through,” Ringet said. “She's the toughest person we know. And she'll help you. She has to!”

There was something about the way Ringet said that she had to help that made Oyster think that she might not help. And what if she didn't? He wasn't sure. “How will I know where to find Ippy?” Oyster asked. He was more than scared. He wasn't sure how to use the Map or if he could make it work. Sister Mary Many Pockets had taught him only a little bit about maps—that the bumpy ones are topographical and that maps have keys and four directions: N, S, E, and W. He didn't want to wander around in this place without a native.

“Ippy lives among the Doggers most of the time,” Hopps said. “Go here,” he pointed to the edge of the Valley of Quick-Eyes. “That's where Flan was coming from when you saved her. She's got a brother down there. She leaves the food off right here.” Hopps pointed to an enlarged section of the map. There was a hollowed-out tree tilting near a river. “After that you'll
have to cross the Breathing River to get to Ippy in the valley.” He pointed to a winding, gray waterway. “You swim? Know anything about Water Snakes?”

“The nuns aren't allowed to swim,” Oyster said. “So I never learned.”

“You'll be able to follow the sound of the whining Growsels; they're bog beasts deep in the valley but noisy this time of year,” Hopps went on.

“You're the boy,” Ringet said with hushed reverence. “You'll know what to do!”

Oyster felt like he'd been lying. These people thought he was someone else, and he'd let them. He'd even said it himself, “I'm the boy!” and maybe at the Council meeting he'd actually meant it. But now he couldn't believe it anymore.

“This isn't right. I mean, maybe I'm not the boy. Really, all I know is that I'm just
a
boy. I'm not really fit for any of this. I collect moths in shoe boxes. I look out windows. That's all. I thought that a billboard of teeth was smiling its love down on me, but I was wrong.” And now tears slipped from his eyes. “I'm a reject,” Oyster said. “A reject. Mrs. Fishback told me so. I'm just Oyster R. Motel, a stupid name for a stupid boy.”

“Oyster, your parents are brave people,” Hopps said. “They can't paralyze with their stare like the Goggles.
They can't breathe fire like Dragons. They're not venomous, eight-legged wolves. They have only brave hearts, true hearts, and good imaginations. And when they speak from their hearts and tell us the World that they imagine could one day be the one we live in, well, people are inspired.”

“Your parents have led us in the past, and they will lead again,” Ringet said. “You, Oyster, are born from them. You have their kind of heart.”

Oyster wasn't convinced. “How do you know?”

“You've already saved Flan Horslip,” Ringet said. “You've spoken to the Perths at Council. They believe in you.”

“They do?”

“Yes,” Ringet and Hopps said.

“Oh,” Oyster said quietly.

“Give him the silver bucket,” Ringet told Hopps.

“Oh, yes.” Hopps lifted the silver bucket and placed its string around Oyster's neck. “There you go. Yours now.”

Oyster patted the bucket, now as small as a charm. He felt a little better, but mainly he was tired. He put his head down on the sofa and propped up his feet. Leatherbelly curled up on Oyster's stomach. Oyster missed his own bed. He missed his window that overlooked the Dragon Palace and Gold's Fancy Pawn Shop
and Cash Store. He even missed Dr. Fromler's billboard, even though he knew Fromler was a fake. But most of all, he missed the quiet shushing of the nuns, the padding of their rubber-soled shoes, the way they moved around in their bell-shaped black habits; and Sister Mary Many Pockets—he missed her sorely. He thought of the times they kicked back from textbooks and propped up their feet and ate peanuts, how Sister Mary Many Pockets had shown him the small, dusty cloud that would sometimes puff right when you cracked a shell. He knew that she was worried about him, that she was fretting. He hoped that she wouldn't be swallowed up in sorrow. But he was needed here in this strange place. He was the boy.

Hopps was moving the Map this way and that, looking for the best routes, griping about Vicious Goggles under his breath. And then, at one point, he looked up. “Who's Mrs. Fishback, anyway?” he asked, to himself more than to Oyster.

And Oyster was going to say, “Nobody. Just this person I used to know.” But he didn't have the energy. He fell fast asleep.

W
hen Oyster opened his eyes, Leatherbelly was covered in blue feathers, snoring beside him. Iglits were beating lazily around the rafters. He found a note from Ringet on his chest:

Oyster hopped out of bed. Blue feathers drifted to the floor. He glanced around the little room.
Ringet and Hopps,
he thought,
they've already headed off to the refinery for work.
He glanced out of the window. Hopps had been right about the powder snowing down from
Orwise Suspar and Sons Refinery and how it would only get worse. The window was a blur of white, a sugary blizzard.

He looked inside of the bag of figs. Ringet had packed way too many. Oyster didn't even
like
figs. He sat forward on the bed, the bottle of menthol drops digging into his leg. Child-Calming Menthol Drops and figs? And they expected him to defeat Dark Mouth?

Suddenly, he had a heroic idea. He opened the bag of figs and the bottle of menthol drops. He filled the dropper and then wedged it into one of the figs and squeezed, filling the fig with Child-Calming Menthol. He did this to a dozen more of the figs and then got another paper bag out of Ringet's kitchen. He wrote
Menthol-Flavored Figs
on the bag that he'd doctored up. He might be able to defend himself if the Goggles came at him. He could render them listless and dull. In any case, it didn't hurt to have the figs on hand.

Oyster looked at his feet, and there was the leather bag on casters. Oyster knelt, unbuckled it, and looked inside. The Slippery Map was snugly rolled up on two short cane poles, just as Hopps had said.

“Ippy.” Oyster said her name out loud. “Today I'll meet Ippy—who will lead me to my parents.” He liked the sound of the words
my parents
. He'd never had much of a use for the words before, but now he did. It
was still strange to him that he really had parents.

Oyster pulled out the Slippery Map and rolled it out across the floor. He stuffed the figs—regular and menthol-flavored—inside the leather bag. He took off the necklace with the silver bucket and held it tightly in his fist. On the Map, he could see Boneland and, to the west, the edge of the Valley of Lawless Beasts, where he had to go to find Ippy. He looked at the valley below the Bridge to Nowhere and, on the other side, Dark Mouth's Torch. In east Boneland was The Antique Shop, The Figgy Shop, and beyond that, Orwise Suspar and Sons Refinery; and east of that was what Oyster thought was an ocean. But written in tiny, somewhat messy handwriting was this:
The Gulf of Wind and Darkness.
It was kid's handwriting. And Oyster realized that it was either his mother's or his father's when they were little and living on the same street in University Housing, two bored kids making things up.

Oyster rolled the Map to reveal what was on the other side of the Gulf of Wind and Darkness:
The City of Baltimore.
Oyster saw the Inner Harbor ringed with boats, a zoo. Johns Hopkins and University Housing, where his parents had grown up. He recognized the names of streets: Pratt and Charles and, most importantly, York Road. He let his finger drift along York until he came to his very own side street. There he found the
Dragon Palace and Gold's Fancy Pawn Shop and Cash Store, and, of course, the nunnery. Oyster wondered how far the Map would go. It still had a thick roll of paper around each of the cane poles. Did it go to China? Russia? Toledo? Jerusalem? He was curious, but for now, he couldn't stop gazing at one spot: the nunnery.

Oyster knew that it was around the time of morning prayers. He imagined the nuns in the chapel. Were some of them so very happy that he was gone that their prayers were of thanksgiving? Oyster knew that Sister Mary Many Pockets's prayers wouldn't be. She would want him back, wouldn't she? She was worrying. He was sure of it. He could feel her heart talking to his heart about grief and worry.

He put the silver bucket to the nunnery on the Map. The Map widened to include the nunnery kitchen, the pantry, the back stairs to the bedrooms. Oyster led the bucket to the chapel. What would happen if he opened up just the smallest portal through the Map? Maybe he could speak through the Gulf of Wind and Darkness. He wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do or not. But he needed to practice, didn't he?

Oyster used the edge of the bucket like Hopps had taught him, cutting a small slit in the Map. It let out a gust of air. Maybe Sister Mary Many Pockets would be there. Maybe he would be able to tell her that he was okay.

He leaned his head over the gusty hole and shouted, “Hello! It's me! Oyster! I'm okay, Sister Mary Many Pockets! I'm doing fine! Don't worry!” He paused to listen for some sound to come back—a sneeze, a harumph, a screech. For a moment, there was silence, and then he heard something: a low sound and high sounds all at the same time. Some awful music? Was it the old organ that sat in the chapel's dusty corner? Oyster listened as the notes got faster—highs and lows all at the same time. It was the chapel organ; there was no mistaking its loud old wheeze.

The noises woke up Leatherbelly, who started to howl mournfully. This startled the Iglits, who squawked and batted around Oyster's head.

“I'm okay!” Oyster shouted again into the hole, though he didn't sound as sure as he had the first time. “Sister Mary Many Pockets! Are you there? Don't worry! Don't be swallowed up in sorrow!”

As he spoke, the hole grew wider and gustier. When Oyster reared up, afraid he might fall into the darkness again, he saw he was no longer holding a small string. It had thickened into a rope, and the silver bucket was full-size. The organ was playing only one low, mangled chord. It wouldn't let the chord go. The bucket rolled across the floor, as if it had a mind of its own and knew just what to do. It rolled toward the hole. But Oyster
couldn't lose the bucket down the hole. He couldn't! He got up and yanked the rope as hard as he could, making the bucket pop up, fly across Ringet's apartment, and skid along the floor.

He raced to the Map and rolled it up as quickly as he could. This muffled the hole, and it sealed. The wind stopped. Oyster shoved the Slippery Map into the leather bag, sat back on his heels, and sighed. He was breathless, his heart charged and racing.

Did she hear me?
Oyster wondered.

Leatherbelly hopped off the sofa and licked Oyster's nose while the Iglits lighted down, staring at Oyster, cocking their bright blue heads.