Under Wildwood Read online

  “Are they still good luck if you wear them on your forehead, off your eyes?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Give it a shot.”

  “Okay.” They continued down the empty staircase. In a short time, they arrived at the office door. Martha kept an eye on the long hallway while Rachel pulled the key from her coverall pocket and fit it into the keyhole. The door unlocked with a low click. Martha heard the sound and watched as Rachel slowly opened the door; it gave a wheezy creak. A dim glow shone from within and illuminated the checkerboard tile of the hallway with a long, thin column of light. Rachel looked inside the room and sucked in her breath.

  “What?” asked Martha, craning her head over Rachel’s shoulder to try and see past the crack in the doorway.

  “What are all those things?” rasped Rachel, despite herself.

  “What? I can’t see!” whispered Martha.

  Rachel cracked the door open wider; Martha peered in. The sight was astounding. It was a large room, large enough to easily accommodate a huge wooden desk and, facing it, a set of leather chairs. The desk was cluttered with sheaves of paper and what looked to be glass vials. What was remarkable about the room, though, was the fact that the walls were lined with tall shelves, shelves that held a dizzying array of jars, bottles, and crocks. The setup reminded Martha of some wizard’s apothecary or an ancient Chinese pharmacy. There was, however, one section of shelving that was empty of these bottles and vials but instead stored about three dozen white metal boxes. A small red light on each of the boxes blinked intermittently, out of time from its neighbors, so as to resemble a Christmas decoration gone haywire.

  In the center of the room, just in front of the shelf with the metal boxes, sat what appeared to be a dentist’s chair from some forgotten century. The imposing chair was built of a series of stiff-looking white cushions, all held together by a twisting black metal framework. On either armrest, an iron cuff lay ominously open; likewise, two similar clasps extended from the chair’s footrest. It would seem that whatever dentist had used this chair in the past, he had had to confine his patients to it by force. Martha, as if out of fear, pulled her goggles back over her eyes.

  “Oh … my … God,” she said.

  Rachel was silent. It was tacitly understood between the two girls: However much frightening stuff had been crammed into Joffrey Unthank’s office, there was one thing that was conspicuously absent: Carl Rehnquist.

  Rachel waved the all clear. The two girls crept into the office and quietly shut the door behind them. The only light in the room came from a dim desk lamp. Martha wandered over to three windows in the wall behind the desk: The view beyond looked down onto the dormant factory floor. Rachel looked at her watch. “We’ve got ten minutes,” she said.

  The desk brought that of a school principal’s to mind: It was industrial green and made of polished metal. Martha idly picked her way through the glass vials on the desktop, peering into their mouths; they were all empty. Her attention then fell on a stack of paper in the center of the desk, what looked to be a collection of maps. She leafed through the stack. The maps seemed to be from a variety of eras: Some were ancient-looking, their paper long turned tawny from age and their edges foxed with mildew. Others looked like contemporary topographical maps, with contours written in spidery lines. Martha didn’t recognize any of the places they served to illustrate; one looked to be a wide continent—almost European-looking—with a mountain range surrounding a central peak to the southeast. Another was of a long peninsula, its northern border marked by a rocky defile; a train track cutting through the canyon wall seemed to be the only thing connecting this strange country with its neighbors. One map caught Martha’s eye, its corner jutting out conspicuously from the bottom of the pile. Pulling it out, she saw that it was an older map (it was dated 02.24.75) and was titled “Impassable Wilderness (Conjecture).” Martha recognized a careful drawing of St. Johns’s grid of streets on the side of the page, the lazy sway of the Willamette River next to it, the little smokestacks and chemical tanks of the Industrial Wastes. But most of the page was dedicated to the Impassable Wilderness, set off from the world by a dotted border labeled “Impenetrable Boundary.” Martha had seen the I.W. labeled on maps before, but it always existed as a nameless, featureless oblong green rectangle. In this map, someone had included actual points of interest. A canyonlike gorge cut through the wilderness; a curious turreted house was drawn in the middle of the southerly section. To the north, the cartographer had drawn a gnarled tree and had scribbled little figures standing around it in a circle. A road, somewhat arbitrarily drawn, connected this northern part to its southern border. The map seemed to Martha the work of someone suffering from a fantastic bout of dementia.

  Stepping away from the desk, Martha milled around the dentist’s chair, studying its lockable clasps with a knot in her throat, before she wandered over to the bookshelves and began browsing the many jars and canisters. She murmured the names, all neatly labeled in a fine cursive hand, as she went: “Bovine Adrenal, Myrrh Resin, Belladonna, Nux Vomica—bleagh. What is this stuff?” She grabbed one of the jars off the shelf and twisted open the lid. She took a quick whiff and her nose was filled with a smell not unlike a dog show’s worth of wet canines in an underarm deodorant factory. She quickly screwed the lid tightly closed. “Sorry,” she said.

  Rachel was crouched down, studying the little metal boxes and their flashing red lights. Martha knelt down beside her. Each box had a kind of meter on the face of it, protected behind glass. It reminded Martha of a car’s gas gauge, but on each of the boxes, the needle was firmly buried in what would be the EMPTY position. A small black line made an arc across the gauge, and it was dotted with numbers: 1, 1.5, 3, 5, 10. Occasionally, a needle on one of the gauges would give a little flutter, and the red light below it would flicker dimly. Above the meter window on each of the boxes was a little square of white tape with two letters inscribed on it. H.K., one read. G.W., read another.

  “I could not be more confused,” said Martha. Rachel was silent; she was tapping her finger against her upper lip in thought. Suddenly, her eyes lit up and she pointed at one of the boxes.

  “Look at this!” she said. The box was labeled C.R. The writing was significantly less faded than that on the other boxes. It seemed to be freshly scrawled.

  “What?” asked Martha, trying to puzzle it out.

  “What do you think that stands for? C.R.?”

  Martha puzzled. “Cranky Robot?”

  Rachel rolled her eyes. “These are initials.” She tapped her finger against the tape. “That must stand for Carl Rehnquist!”

  A chilly gloom fell over Martha. She began looking at the other boxes, their needles quivering and their red lights quietly winking; she started deciphering the names. “Harold Klein,” she intoned, “Leslie Brumm. J … Josh? Josh Tennyson. Greg Wheeler. Cynthia … Smith? No: Schmidt. Cynthia Schmidt.” She remembered them all, all their names. “Oh my God, Rachel. These are all the Unadoptables. As long as I’ve been around, anyway. Probably a bunch from before I came.”

  Just then, there was a noise from the hallway. Martha and Rachel made quick eye contact as they heard the doorknob turning. They dove for the desk on the other side of the room; the noise of the door opening must have cloaked their scrambling, because they arrived at the shelter of the desk’s underside undetected. Huddled there, they listened as footsteps sounded into the center of the room and stopped. “Hello?” came the voice. It was old Mr. Grimble, the night watchman. “Mr. Unthank?”

  Martha and Rachel refused to breathe.

  Mr. Grimble grumbled (it was a hallmark of his—the Grimble Grumble, as the kids called it—and it sounded like the grunt of a hibernating bear with sleep apnea) as he surveyed the room. Satisfied, he turned and left, shutting the door noisily behind him. The two girls waited until the sound of his footsteps faded away before they let out their breaths.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Martha.

  Rachel no
dded. “I’ll meet you in the hall.”

  Martha crept to the door and slowly opened it, keeping her eyes intently on the space outside the room. When she saw there was no one there, that the hallway extended into quiet darkness, she pushed the door open and began tiptoeing out onto the checkerboard parquet of the hallway floor. It was a few moments before she noticed Rachel was not behind her.

  “Rachel!” she whispered. “Are you coming?”

  The girl appeared from around the office door; she silently closed it and threw the bolt with the key. She then turned to Martha and nodded. “Let’s go,” she said. Together they padded back to the dormitory, and Martha whispered a sigh of thanks to the heavens once she’d stowed herself underneath her blanket. In the rush, she hadn’t noticed that Rachel had left the office with something small and square tucked under her arm.

  Elsie had just delicately removed a nut from the mouth of the RBO—an action that was almost involuntary now that she’d been in the machine shop for over a week—when Unthank came storming down the stairwell with a strange white box in his hand. Desdemona Mudrak, in tall heels, stepped gingerly after. Elsie hadn’t initially thought anything of it, but her mind quickly put two and two together. Both Martha and Rachel had been very quiet that morning over their hasty breakfast in the cafeteria; they hadn’t divulged anything from their late-night recon mission. They promised they would fill Elsie in that night, when there were “fewer prying eyes around,” as Martha had described it.

  “Girls and boys!” shouted Desdemona. “Please to listen closely.”

  Unthank strode to the middle of the factory floor and raised the box high so that everyone could see it. Its black power cord dangled from it like a tail. Desdemona, standing at his side, held a wooden clipboard.

  Elsie looked over at Martha, who’d removed her goggles and was looking fixedly at Rachel, who was, in turn, staring down at the ground.

  “Does this look familiar to anyone?” asked Unthank. He had to raise his voice to beat the racket of the machines and it echoed in the cavernous space.

  No one spoke. Unthank shook the metal thing in his hand. It made a kind of rattle.

  “I’m willing to make an offer to whoever took this,” he said. “If you come forward and fess up, I’ll be happy to not punish everyone on this factory floor with three extra work hours a day. And even though this infraction is so great as to merit instant Unadoptable status, I will be merciful and give only two demerits for your honesty. Now: Who took this?” He surveyed the attentive children, who had emitted a collective groan at the suggestion of an even longer workday.

  Elsie looked at Rachel and Martha; Martha was staring at her sister with wide, accusing eyes.

  But no one spoke. Aside from the groan, the room remained silent.

  In this vacuum of sound, Martha Song stepped forward.

  “It was me,” she said. “I snuck into your office. I took that thing off the shelf. I’m really sorry, Mr. Unthank, sir.”

  Elsie’s jaw dropped. She noticed that Rachel was shooting Martha a shocked look.

  Unthank gave a smile. The beard and mustache portions of his goatee parted at his lips like a pair of stretching meerkats. “Very noble of you, Song,” he said. “And I’ll be pleased to hand you down two demerits for volunteering this information. Your first two, if memory serves.”

  Martha nodded, putting on a despondent face.

  Unthank had paused in his speaking as he scanned the room. He then said more loudly, “However, I happen to know that you are not, in fact, the culprit.” This observation elicited a few gasps from the crowd; Rachel was still looking at her shoes. Elsie felt her heart leap. “I have to say it disappoints me greatly to know that the real criminal, the trespasser, will not reveal themselves,” he continued. “Or herself, I should say. This piece of expensive equipment”—here he shook the metal box again—“was found in the footlocker of bed twenty-three. And bed twenty-three belongs to…”

  “Rachel Mehlverg,” finished Desdemona icily.

  Elsie let out a quick, high moan. She looked over at Rachel, whose shoulders could be seen shaking slightly. Her face was downcast.

  “Miss Mehlberg, for reasons unknown to me, decided to deceive the staff of the Home for Wayward Youth—and, by extension, the entire workforce—by sneaking into my office and stealing this piece of valuable equipment. I ask you, children, what family would want to adopt a girl who would do such a thing?”

  “I’m not up for adoption,” countered Rachel suddenly. She’d raised her head.

  “Well, you certainly aren’t now,” said Unthank. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you’re quite … Unadoptable.” He laughed a little at his own joke; Desdemona cracked a thin smile.

  Rachel’s hair fell back over her face; her shoulders sagged.

  “NO!” shouted Elsie, the tears springing to her eyes.

  Joffrey ignored the outburst, instead rounding on Martha, who was still standing stock-still. “As for you, Miss Song, your dishonesty is most distressing. I will have to award you an extra demerit for lying. That makes three demerits in as many minutes.” He then proclaimed flatly, “Unadoptable,” while Miss Mudrak made some scribbles on her notepad.

  Elsie stared at Martha, whose face had grown sheet-pale, creating a stark contrast to the black smudges of grease on her cheek. A boy standing next to Martha whispered angrily, “He tricked you!” Desdemona shot the boy a glare.

  Unthank gestured to Rachel and Martha to come to the center of the floor. They marched sullenly over to his and Desdemona’s side. He put his arms on the shoulders of the two girls and looked out at the rest of the children.

  “At Unthank Machine Parts,” he said loudly, “we believe in worker solidarity, solidarity in making the best machine parts we can possibly make. When that fundamental value is undermined by wrongdoers, liars, and thieves, it is imperative that justice is served for the good of the company.”

  The two girls at his either side carried themselves in two distinctly different ways: Martha’s head was held high, and a terrified look graced her brow; Rachel’s hair hung like curtains, shielding her eyes.

  “I have absolute faith,” continued Unthank, “that this unhappy event will only make our productivity greater. The more demerits handed out, the more Unadoptables we create, the greater our discipline will grow. Good day.”

  And with that, he began leading Martha and Rachel from the factory floor.

  Elsie turned to her machine and pulled the lever on its side; a metal nut was spit out in its mouth. Immediately, she pulled the lever again and the machine’s teeth came down, crunching the newly created nut with a loud CLANK!

  Unthank stopped at the stairs and turned. “What was that?” he asked, searching the room. His eyes landed on Elsie. “What did you do?”

  “Oops,” said Elsie. She pulled the lever again. A new nut was spit out. Again she destroyed it by bringing the machine’s teeth down on it.

  Unthank’s face turned beet red. He stepped away from Martha and Rachel and walked toward Elsie. “That’s two demerits, little girl,” he said.

  Elsie’s hand went back to the lever. Rachel looked up through her strands of hair. “Elsie!” she said. “Don’t do this!”

  “Sorry, sis,” Elsie said. “I can’t let you go alone.” She pulled the lever, twice. A High-Alloy Rhomboid Oscillated Bolt Nut was created and destroyed in the passing of a few seconds.

  “THREE DEMERITS!” shouted Unthank, spittle flying from his mouth. “UNADOPTABLE!” He strode briskly to where Elsie stood and grabbed her, hard, by the shoulder. He then walked her to the stairwell and shoved her in line with Martha and Rachel. He looked back out over the machine shop. “Anyone else? Anyone want to try me?”

  The room was silent.

  Unthank smoothed the front of his argyle sweater, which had become very rumpled from the activity. He pushed a few strands of hair back from his brow. “Right,” he said, his earlier composure lost. “Back to work.”

  T
he goateed man had been pushed to the end of his patience; he did not instruct Martha, Rachel, and Elsie to go to the dormitory, clean up, and collect their personal effects. Instead, he shoved them rudely up the stairs, away from the shop floor, and marched them directly down the checkerboard hallway to the door of his office.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Foundering Antelope; A Long Journey

  If anything, the woman elicited sympathy from the passing travelers along the Road. She passed easily as a wayward vagabond, her flower-printed dashiki flecked with mud and torn at the shoulder. A gypsy caravan driver even stopped and gave her a knitted shawl, which she accepted with mumbled thanks. Certainly, the few passersby who saw her decided she must have suffered some sort of great misfortune that she should be out traveling the Long Road in this cold, wintry weather in such wretched clothing. One pilgrim sought to give her a few coins as he passed but recoiled when he saw her lacerated, bloodied face. He dropped the silver to the ground and continued on his way. She did not stop to pick them up.

  The snow blew wildly at the top of the pass, and the woman held the shawl she’d been given tight at her throat. The terrain was steep and inhospitable here, and the snow collected on the ground in heaping drifts. The visibility grew dim, and the woman gritted her teeth in determination. Finally, she arrived at the faded wooden sign that marked the border between North Wood and Wildwood, at which point she took a small trail that led off the road and into the trees. Before long, she came to a cave in the mountainside. A warm fire crackled within and she entered, greeting the inhabitants curtly.

  “It’s done, Darla?” asked one of the fireside-sitters. He was a dark-haired man, dressed in a black three-piece suit.

  She nodded as she sat by the fire. She reached her hands out to warm them. Her fingers were blotched with dark red stains.

  “Good,” said a woman on the other side of the fire pit. She had her hair cropped close to her skull and wore a sort of terrycloth tracksuit.