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  “Is your name Starkly?”

  Starkly said nothing at first but merely pondered all the ways in which he could answer the question…none of which, as it happened, had the slightest relation to the truth. Paul, meantime, wisely decided not to wait for the answer to be forthcoming. “The Irish pirate told me to come here. He told me to tell you not to kill me.”

  “Oh. Did he?” Starkly lowered his arm and actually looked a bit relieved. “Probably all for the best. I’m out of practice killing young boys.”

  “So is the Irish pirate.”

  “Yes, but he was never particularly skilled at it, even in his best pirate days. Poor sod never knew what he was on about.” Starkly leaned in toward Paul and squinted at him. “Do I know you, young sir?”

  “You might. I’m not sure.” Paul tilted his head, trying to look cocky. “I think I may be The Boy. Do you think I am? Do I look anything like him?”

  “No,” said Starkly dismissively, but then he took a second look. “Well…maybe a little. Around the nose, I think. Yes, the nose is a bit evocative of The Boy. So what do you want?”

  “I want to go to the Anyplace.”

  “Oh, do you.” Starkly made a face of nearly unveiled disgust. “And why do you want to do that? To fly like The Boy? To harass and kill perfectly noble pirates? To cavort like a heathen and never grow up and have no care in the world?”

  “No. To find a lost girl, if there be any, and bring her home so my mother can have a little daughter and not be so angry all the time since my previous little sister vanished from her crib, never to return.”

  Starkly took all this in, and something in his look and demeanor changed. It was far too subtle for Paul to note, but since we are standing just outside and slightly to the left of the situation, we can perceive what Paul cannot.

  “Well, I certainly don’t know what to tell you. Why in the world did the Irishman send you here?” When Paul merely shrugged in response, Starkly shook his head with the air of one greatly put upon. “Well, feel free to look about. If you find anything you think can be of help to you, we’ll discuss price.”

  “I don’t have any money,” said Paul.

  “Best not to tell me that,” Starkly said, “because now I have to throw you out. On second thought, I won’t do it myself. I’ll have to find someone else to do it. Hang on.” Starkly promptly walked into the curtained-off back area, leaving Paul alone in the shop.

  Nervous, his heart pounding, Paul began sifting through the many shelves, looking for he didn’t know what. A book, perhaps, or a map or a magic wand or secret words scribbled down upon a piece of paper, written in an ancient tongue that would grant Paul special powers when read aloud. Something, anything, that would be of use to him. All he could find, however, was miscellaneous bric-a-brac, none of which appeared to serve any useful function and all of which seemed to be there solely for the purpose of making him have to look at it all.

  His eye almost went right past something as he scanned the bottom shelf in the farthest corner of the room. But then his gaze was drawn back to it, as if something had tossed out a fishing line, snared his eyelid, and drawn him irresistibly back to the place he had initially overlooked. On his hands and knees, he leaned forward, craning his neck around so that he could make out whatever it was more clearly. Limited in his ability to do so, he reached back and pulled the dust-enshrouded object from its hiding place.

  It was a detailed wood carving, a statue about the size of the palm of his hand. At least he thought it was a wood statue. The material felt odd and looked even stranger. More “mummified” than carved, really. Yes, that had to be it. It was a representation of an Egyptian mummy, produced through some marvelously clever means. It was a female, definitely, because her curves were in the right places. She was upright, her hands crisscrossed upon her breast in the near universal depiction of one at her final rest. Her eyes were closed in solemn slumber. Intriguingly, she had a pair of wings upon her back. It was difficult to tell what they would have been like in life, for they were as solid and unmoving as the rest of her. She was clad in a skeleton leaf, or at least the remains of one, and she was a bit rounder in the hips than most women preferred—which was not something that Paul noticed, being a boy and not understanding women.

  But take heart! If he is fortunate enough to survive all that is going to happen to him before we take our leave of him—and we must tell you that his survival is not remotely guaranteed—then his reward, such as it is, will be to become an adult man and still not understand women.

  “What have you there?” said Starkly, having reappeared so abruptly that Paul jumped, startled. Instantly he thrust the mummified female into his pocket and stood up with his hands wide open and presented for inspection. Starkly did not seem impressed. “Did you take something with the intention of stealing it?”

  “No. Nooo, no, no, no. No.”

  “I think I don’t believe you,” Starkly said. “Aren’t you aware that thieves will be killed, just as it says on the sign?”

  “What sign?” said Paul innocently. He looked where Starkly was pointing, but saw nothing.

  Now Starkly looked where he was pointing and made an irritated noise with his lips. “Someone must have stolen it,” he said. “Well, it seems you’ll be getting off lucky this day. Best be off with you, then, before the sign turns up and something unfortunate happens to you.”

  Paul started to reach into his pocket to remove the mummified woman and replace her, but Starkly did not give him the opportunity. Instead, waving the belaying pin in a very authoritative manner, he said, “Off with you! Immediately! Don’t even think of putting your hands into your pockets in order to take something out of them, or I assure you it will go badly for you.”

  “But—”

  “No butting. Butting is for goats. Are you a goat?”

  “No.”

  “Off with you, then,” he said firmly.

  Paul went to the door, opened it, and immediately was struck by the total absence of the sound of the bell. “Did you hear that?” he said.

  “Hear what?” said Starkly with a tilt of his head.

  “Did you not hear that?” Paul said. He looked up at the bell that was hanging on the edge of the door. “The bell kept ringing, and now it’s not.”

  “That bell has not rung since the day I took over this store,” Starkly said. He reached up and tapped it with his finger. It produced no noise, not even the slightest tinkling. “See? Nothing.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Boys don’t think,” Starkly said. “Boys do. Boys believe. Go do something you believe.” And with that, he closed the door firmly, leaving Paul out in the street and the bell thumping soundlessly against the door.

  Chapter 4

  The Crooked Old Lady with the Hooked Nose

  If any of you are sitting snug in your homes and wondering where The Boy might be at this point in the narrative—whether he’s actually Paul, now living a normal life as a youngster struggling to find his way back; or perhaps residing in some world existing only in the shadow realm of mirrors, not unlike that blond-haired girl in another tale; or perhaps he was just strutting around the Anyplace and far too taken with whatever had lately caught his fancy to concern himself about anything else—take heart that several of his most devoted followers were wondering much the exact same thing. And since their particular situation was far more dire than yours, you can be cheered that a small bit of impatient frustration is a pale thing compared to worrying that you are going to die with The Boy not there to aid you.

  The foremost of his followers was a young lady who served a peculiar function in The Boy’s life. She was a petite British girl named Gwenny, an occasional visitor to the Anyplace rather than a permanent resident. There are some very curious aspects to Gwenny, beyond some of the more head-scratching aspects—such as that sometimes The Boy saw her as his mother and other times as his wife, arbitrarily addressing her sometimes as “Mother” and other times as “tut-t
ut, my dear” (which is what he thought husbands called wives). But this part is about Gwenny, not The Boy’s peculiarities.

  So: the curious aspects of Gwenny. Once upon a time, Gwenny and her brothers would sleep peacefully in their nursery and dream of the Anyplace, playing upon its colorful shores and hobnobbing with its varied and sundry residents. They would see lions and wolves, savages and gnomes and a strange old lady with a hooked nose, and princes with six brothers, and just about everything that they could imagine and you could imagine. The Anyplace was about all these marvels and more besides. And every night their mother would sort through their minds, as mothers always do, so as to make them all nice and orderly for the morning’s activities, and she would find bits and pieces of the Anyplace strewn about. It was in this manner that she first learned about The Boy, setting into motion an entire sequence of events that no one could have foreseen.

  Gwenny and her brothers made their initial flight to the Anyplace when they were of a certain youthful age. There they had many great adventures, including notable and epic confrontations with Captain Hack, who eventually went to his end in the jaws of a beastly serpent. They then returned home, Vagabonds in tow (“Vagabonds” being the group name for The Boy’s followers—parentless young boys gathered by The Boy to return to the Anyplace and accompany him in an endless reverie of unending childhood). The Vagabonds were adopted by Gwenny’s parents and put on the path to the inevitable destruction that is called maturity.

  A year later, The Boy returned and brought Gwenny and her brothers back to the Anyplace for spring cleaning, just as he had promised…although it should be emphasized that time moves very differently in the Anyplace than it does in our own world, and The Boy easily crammed a lifetime’s worth of adventures into the same period that Gwenny was cramming fractions, history, and astronomy.

  The positive aspect of this was that The Boy’s existence was one of constant challenge. The negative aspect was that, since Gwenny and her brothers were far less ambitious in their experiences, they were able to retain the knowledge of the things they learned; whereas events unfolded so quickly upon The Boy, and in such number, that they pushed one another out of his head. Gwenny was dumbfounded to learn, for instance—upon her eventual return to the Anyplace—that The Boy had no recollection of Captain Hack. The Boy didn’t consider this remotely unusual, explaining that he tended to forget people after he killed them.

  Even more shocking was that he had no recollection of Fiddlefix, the glowing pixie sprite who had been his constant companion. When Gwenny did all she could to stir his memory on the subject, he opined that she was probably dead, since pixies tended not to live for all that long.

  It was odd that this should have left Gwenny unhappy. Fiddle (as she was called) had done nothing to hide her disdain and dislike for Gwenny, and had even tried to engineer her demise on more than one occasion. To Gwenny, though, pixies were amazing creatures, and Fiddlefix was no less amazing than others of her sort. It had been almost touching how much she had wanted Fiddle to like her; and the fact that she would never be able to accomplish that aim weighed sadly upon her.

  That first spring cleaning visit was gloriously active otherwise; and, although The Boy’s forgetting about Hack and Fiddlefix distressed Gwenny, the Anyplace is such that sad memories tend not to linger. So Gwenny and her brothers were able to enjoy their share of experiences without too much concern about those missing from said experiences, both friend and foe.

  After that occasion and their return home, The Boy did not come back for her for several years, and when he did, he was unaware that he had missed all that intervening time. Gwenny’s brothers were absent, off on a school holiday, when The Boy came for Gwenny; but that did not daunt him, since he didn’t recall her brothers either. Indeed, it was miraculous and a measure of the depth of feeling he had for Gwenny that he remembered her. So he can be forgiven for overlooking that Gwenny was wearing a new frock, one that hid—as best as possible—the fact that she was on the cusp of becoming a young woman.

  The danger signs were there for anyone who chose to see them. Since The Boy chose not to, however, naturally he was oblivious to them. He did not know that the ravages of time were not about to let up upon Gwenny and her brothers any more than they passed over any other children…except, of course, for him.

  But that was a tragedy for another time. Currently we are dwelling upon the tragedy unfolding before us now.

  When Gwenny had first voyaged to the Anyplace, the Vagabonds and The Boy had resided underground. She had not been enamored of that living situation, asserting that young boys needed to be surrounded by fresh air and sunshine rather than dirt. So The Boy and the Vagabonds had obediently constructed a house secured high in a tree. They had all moved in there and, even after Gwenny and the original Vagabonds had departed (the former to return to her parents, the latter to be adopted and destroyed), The Boy had continued to reside there as he went about his business gathering new Vagabonds. Upon her return, Gwenny found herself once again the mother of children who needed one more desperately than any other children in existence.

  The circumstances were markedly different, though, due to the total absence of The Boy and more than half the Vagabonds.

  Gwenny, having arrived in the Anyplace after a dizzying and dazzling flight that fairly took her breath away, met a half dozen new Vagabonds that The Boy had acquired from various points around the world. They were a scruffy lot, and there was something in the eyes of many of them that Gwenny found a bit disturbing. This was due partly to the fact that Gwenny was no longer the young, wide-eyed girl that she had been when she had first come to the Anyplace at The Boy’s behest. The adult eye that resided deep within her head was opening wider and wider, and causing her to look down upon the youngsters that she had formerly looked at directly. Where once they had been lacking merely a mother—a role that Gwenny was more than happy to fill—now she saw they were lacking other things. Compassion. Joy. The sheer thrill of childhood. This new crop of Vagabonds was…

  …sinister.

  Not all of them. Two of them evoked memories of the gentle, credulous enthusiasm that she had seen in all the Vagabonds of days past. One was a young, skinny, slightly twitchy fellow who took great pride in knowing his name, since it had been on a tag on the shirt he’d been found in: “Irregular.”

  The other was very different from Irregular in that he was broad shouldered, even stocky, with an open and eager expression that made him appear so eager to be liked, it was impossible not to like him. He was French, and he was called Porthos. He tended to dress like an oversized dog, with a headdress of floppy fur ears; and he was remarkably strong but was one of those who was easy to bully because he didn’t know his own strength.

  Within a day of Gwenny’s arriving, The Boy was gone, and he had taken most of their “sons” with him, leaving behind only Porthos and Irregular.

  This action, in and of itself, did not alarm Gwenny. The Anyplace was a place of vast and endless adventure. Many had been the times when The Boy had hustled off on some exploit or another, sometimes gone a day, even two. He would invariably return and strut about, pumping his arms and crowing over his varied and courageous deeds. Gwenny and the family would ooh and aah; and if they did not do so with sufficient enthusiasm, Gwenny would say firmly, “Now, show proper respect to your father, children.” Whereupon they would sustain their oohs and aahs for far longer, allowing The Boy more time to puff and strut.

  That was when The Boy was being the father and Gwenny the mother. There were other times when The Boy wanted to be treated as a child as well, although Gwenny confusingly remained in her role as mother in those instances. In his inability to decide whether he wanted the most significant female in his life to be his mother or his life mate—and perpetually alternating between the two—The Boy was closer to the attitude of adult men than in any other aspect of his nature.

  When The Boy departed with the balance of the Vagabonds that first day which woul
d mark a major tragedy in their lives, Gwenny went about the usual routine of spring cleaning. Naturally she had no true idea how much time or how many springs might have passed in her absence, but she dealt with the considerable mess with her usual aplomb. The day slid easily into night, and Gwenny told her two young charges stories and settled them in bed, while assuring them that their father would be back by the morning.

  The morning came and went and brought no sign of The Boy. The evening followed as had the previous, and by the time of the third morning, Gwenny’s assurances that all was well rang hollow in her own ears.

  Time passed, and passed some more. In The Boy’s prolonged absence, the Vagabonds were responsible for food gathering, and they did an adequate if not spectacular job. They would come home with armloads of plants mostly, but tell great stories of how the vegetation had put up a mighty fight. Gwenny would ooh and aah, but her efforts to do so were halfhearted as her concern grew.

  Gwenny lost track of how long The Boy was gone. That wasn’t all that difficult to do, for the Anyplace was adept at draining one’s awareness of times past or present, encouraging its residents to live only in the now. But every so often her mind, or the thoughts of the Vagabonds, would return to their missing father and siblings, and the concern would grow once more. Eventually it took such deep root that no amount of the Anyplace’s influence could distract them from their anxiety over their father’s prolonged absence.

  “What if he’s dead?” Irregular whispered to Gwenny, thinking that he was the only one who was doing so when in fact so was Porthos.

  “He’s not dead,” Gwenny said firmly. “He is far too wonderful to die, and he would be the first to tell you, if given the opportunity.”

  “Then I hope he has that opportunity soon.”

  Then one day, Gwenny woke up with the distinct feeling that this day was going to be significantly different from those that had gone before. She didn’t know why she thought it, but it was an ill-at-ease that she could not escape. She continued to try to put up a brave front for the others, but they picked up on her worry, and it permeated the entirety of their day.