The Cracks in the Kingdom Page 36

  That’s exactly how it feels inside Maximillian’s chest.

  * * *

  This is the first time Sasha Wilczek has seen a doctor since she arrived in Taipei, Taiwan.

  She takes painkillers for her rheumatoid arthritis, and otherwise never gets sick. She can’t afford to.

  But today she is frightened. She can’t find a single reference to anything like this on the net. People have itchy inner elbows, and they get hives there. They have purple rashes on their inner elbows, and they ache there after doing chin-ups — but, as much as Sasha searches, nobody has a spray of multi-coloured specks.

  She’s in the waiting room, staring at the colours. The doctor might laugh and say it’s nothing. Or he might tell her she needs an X-ray, or a CT scan, which she won’t be able to afford. Or he might know immediately that this is a form of jaundice, and her liver’s shot to hell.

  Or — and this is the most likely — he’ll say that is something that her gang leader ex-husband injected into her bloodstream while she slept, just before she left, just after their fight, and it is, in fact, a tracking device. He’s using it as she sits in this empty waiting room, tracking her down wherever she is in the world.

  Those letters she’s been getting about the “kingdom-of-cello” — they must be gang-related. She hadn’t thought of that possibility because they’d always had English stamps and postmarks. And since they sounded more like a children’s book than gangster talk, to be honest.

  But now she sees that this is the gang’s way of telling her they’re on their way. They’re everywhere. They know where she is.

  She should maybe go to the police instead of the doctor, but she needs a diagnosis.

  It’s fading.

  That’s all right. She’s brought along some sliced wedges of lemon in a little plastic bag. She’ll squeeze some more while the doctor watches.

  * * *

  Monty Rickard and his buddies are all squeezing lemon juice onto their inner elbows. They’ve taken Interstate 84 west to Nampa so they can eat burgers at Starvin Marvin’s Blue Sky Café, and celebrate the fact that Monty has a rainbow of colours in both his inner elbows that only shows up under lemon juice.

  Nobody else has the same thing.

  They all swear they have nothing to do with the letters he’s been getting from the UK, nor with the latest, which came by courier, nor with the trick his elbows can do. Also, they’re all planning to come along to the meeting place on Sunday, so they can see what happens when he gets “transferred” to the Kingdom of Cello. They want to get transferred to Cello too, they say.

  He doesn’t believe them for a moment, but he’s having a blast.

  * * *

  In Berlin, Ariel Peters is doing tequila slammers, only instead of sucking the lemon, she’s squeezing it onto her inner elbow. Each time she does this, and sees the beautiful colours, she has a searing, magical sense that she is going home. That her entire confusing life is about to make sense.

  * * *

  At Avoca Beach, there’s a storm rattling the doors and the windows. At the same time, the upstairs shower has started leaking, and the clattering of water in the bathroom seems to be conversing with the rain splatters against the windows.

  Prince Tippett has already packed a plastic bag. He’s taken a few of his favourite DVDs from the living room, his driftwood collection, and the chart of local frog species that he took from an old science magazine. That’s it. Everything else belongs to the owners of his holiday house. The whole time he’s been here, the house had only been used by three different groups of vacationers, each for a weekend at a time.

  He slept on the beach at that time, until they packed up and drove away. As far as he could tell nobody seemed to notice he’d been living there and eating all the tinned and frozen food. He supplemented these by swiping leftover fish and chips from tables outside the takeaway.

  Cleaners arrived the day after each of the vacation groups left. The first time it happened he had to hide in the pantry while they mopped and vacuumed.

  He doesn’t need to do the lemon juice trick. He knows exactly who he is, and where he’s going at 3 P.M. tomorrow afternoon. He’d been thinking he was a runaway named Finn Mackenzie — and even finds himself slipping back into that idea sometimes. But he just needs to hold the piece of blanket, and Finn fades into what he is: a story he invented, a movie in his mind.

  He is Prince Tippett of the Kingdom of Cello, and he’s sitting at the kitchen table now, plastic bag on the floor beside him, watching the clock.

  The Royal Youth Alliance posed for photographs in the Reception Room of the White Palace. They drank glasses of GC teakwater and ate crackers with cheese or smoked oysters.

  Then the Princess stood on the raised platform, and confirmed the rumors that their missing member, Elliot Baranski, was either dead, or presumed dead.

  She could never remember which was which, she said, and added that he had perished, or presumably perished, again she could never — the reporters shook their heads as they scribbled notes — while being pursued by the WSU, because, it turned out — and this news, she explained, sent the Princess’s head into a spin faster than a roulette wheel, but a bigger sort of spin, so maybe a spin like a Big Wheel, except that those things spun fairly slowly, which would not be representative of how her head — anyhow, the Princess shivered, and confirmed that Elliot Baranski had, it seemed, been communicating with the World.

  Which, quite obviously, if she or anyone in the Palace or the royal family had known, well, there was no way he would have been on the Royal Youth Alliance! Are you kidding?! No, sir. So, it was maybe better that he was dead now, so he wouldn’t have to be thrown off the RYA in disgrace, but sad, and that.

  “However!” The Princess swung her lips upward, into a beam. “Let’s not let a sad and that situation turn a starspin to a slug! Because that’s what today is! A starspin! Because guess what, the whole gang — well, what’s left of the gang — is about to embark on a tour of the total Kingdom! Well, a lot of the Kingdom! Because that is what Alliances are all about! Travel, right? And getting to know the people and that. So, applause all around is what I’m thinking! After which, we’ll need to get cracking with our packing!”

  There was applause, a few more smoked oysters, then they fared the reporters well, and withdrew to their rooms to get cracking with the packing.

  “We have ten minutes to get to my little brother’s room and open the crack,” the Princess said as they strode along the corridors together.

  Sergio appeared around a corner, and joined them. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “It is not true,” he said. “Is it true? Is Elliot dead?”

  “From what I hear,” said the Princess, walking faster. “He fell off a cliff while the WSU were chasing him. They haven’t recovered his body yet — they’re bringing in special equipment. It’s a steep, narrow ravine he fell into, too rugged for the choppers to get down. They need abseilers. Mountain climbers. I don’t know. But he did fall. And he could not have survived. So yes. He’s dead.”

  Samuel staggered a little.

  “Hurry up,” said the Princess. She glanced back at Samuel. “What’s wrong with your skin? It’s flaking off in pieces. You look like crap.”

  “As to a —” began Samuel, his voice hoarse. “I cannot say that I am altogether in the greatest of health, your highness. But this news of Elliot, it —”

  “Well, get sick later.”

  “There was nothing you could do?” Sergio said, his voice breaking. “My warning came too late?”

  “Have you got the detector?” Princess Ko demanded, looking back at him, but then she slammed into Keira, who had stopped still in front of her.

  “You’re telling me,” Keira began, “you’re saying you knew the WSU were coming for Elliot, and you did nothing about it?”

  “Keep walking,” cried the Princess, stepping around Keira. “Of course I did nothing. The monarchy has no authority over the WSU. It’s a sepa
ration of power thing.” She had reached Prince Tippett’s room, and stopped by the closed door. “You think I wanted Elliot to die? He hadn’t even told me how to open up a crack yet!”

  Keira was a few steps behind.

  “He told me how,” she said, staring at the Princess. “You need a mirror and a light.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “You are unimaginable,” said Keira.

  The Princess threw open the door.

  “It’s something,” she repeated, “but it’s also nothing, unless Sergio has the detector.” She ushered the others into the room, and they were quiet for a moment. The room was exactly the same. Clothes and toys on the floor, racing car track on rumpled bed, frogs of all shapes and sizes.

  The Princess spun around and spoke to Sergio.

  “You haven’t answered me, Sergio,” she said. “You must have the detector. Your hands are empty, I see, but you must have it somewhere.”

  “As to a …” murmured Samuel. “Of course he hasn’t got the detector, Princess. Might I lie down somewhere? I feel as faint as a …”

  “My princess,” said Sergio sadly. “Ko, I am very sorry. I cannot tell you …”

  “There it is,” said Keira.

  Her hand was raised.

  “Just next to the chest of drawers there — just to the right of the TV screen. Can nobody else see that?”

  They all looked to where she was pointing.

  “See what?”

  “It’s so obvious I just can’t believe you can’t — but it must be the crack.” Keira stepped over the toys. “It’s like a thin line of brightness in the air, but it’s been tangled up somehow. I guess that’s how they seal it. But I can unknot it easily now I can see it. I just —” She reached up, and they watched her hands moving about oddly, her fingers twisting and turning, tracing patterns in the air. “I don’t understand why I couldn’t see it last time we were in this room. It’s perfectly clear.”

  “Are you serious?” whispered Samuel. “You are unknotting a crack — unsealing a crack — as we speak?”

  “It’s weird,” said Keira. Her voice was excited, her anger gone. “I can see it but I can’t feel a thing. But it’s coming — I can see the knots coming loose. I’ll be done in a minute.”

  “Then we need a mirror and a light,” breathed the Princess.

  Sergio picked up a night-light. It was shaped like a bullfrog.

  “It’s battery-powered,” he said.

  “Someone catch Samuel,” Ko said, unhooking a small mirror from the wall. It was framed in blue with white ceramic stars and moon. “He’s about to faint.”

  Samuel swayed back and forth. The others took no notice; they were gathering around Ko.

  “Done,” said Keira, dropping her hands from the air. “I’ll point to exactly where it is. Keep ahold of that mirror and night-light. You might need them to get yourself back through.”

  “Will it work?” Samuel breathed.

  “How will she see the crack to get back through in this direction?” Sergio asked.

  Samuel leaned up against the wall, and then slipped toward the floor.

  “Excuse me,” he murmured, crawling toward the door.

  The Princess adjusted the mirror and angled the light.

  There was a long pause, minutes passed, then there was a thud, the air itself seemed to tumble, and Princess Ko tumbled with it.

  She was gone.

  In her place was a kind of empty space of panic: a smearing of glassy streaks and smudges in the air, as if unseen fingers were frantically splashing dirty water at window panes.

  Seconds later, there was a showering displacement, and the Princess stepped toward them.

  She was grasping the hand of a small, dark-haired boy. He had a plastic bag pressed beneath his arm. He gazed around, solemn and frowning, with large, dark, critical eyes, then breathed a small sigh and smiled.

  1.

  It turned out that Elliot was at a BP petrol station just outside of Harrogate in Yorkshire, England. Cambridge, he was told, was a three-and-a-half hour drive south down the A1 and the A1(M).

  Elliot thanked the people who gave him this information and set off to walk to Cambridge. He had no car. He had a handful of Jimmy’s cash but doubted this was legal tender in the World.

  As he walked, he tried to figure out what had happened. There must have been a crack in the air above the ravine, he decided. He must have “stumbled” through it — he remembered Samuel mentioning that people sometimes “stumbled” through a crack without using any technique.

  Seemed impossible, but he accepted it like a fine, fine line of truth from here to home.

  Another thing that seemed impossible was the translation effect. He was supposed to lose his memory now? Translate himself and his past into Worldian?

  How could he be anybody other than Elliot Baranski?

  That’s who he’d been all his life.

  But Samuel had insisted it affected everyone, sometimes right away — and Samuel had been right about “stumbling” — so he had to take it seriously.

  If he did translate himself, he’d be lost here forever.

  I am Elliot Baranski of Bonfire, the Farms, he said, taking one step after another along the grassy bank that lined this part of the highway. And that’s the truth. Trouble was, another truth kept clawing at the inside of his skin.

  All this time he’s been dead —

  He set that aside with that logic he’d been using: If he’s dead, that’s no different to his being gone, so what’s the difference? Who cares? Don’t even THINK about it. And when something seemed to buckle inside him at that, he’d say to himself: Don’t think: Just get to Madeleine.

  Madeleine had held his hands in the darkness and she’d spoken in that voice of hers. It’s going to be okay, she’d said, your dad is coming back.

  She’d promised. All he had to do was get to her.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to realise that walking the A1 was not going to be possible. It was a huge, dual carriageway, without any sidewalk. He’d walk through the adjacent fields but kept hitting hedgerows and ditches and barbed-wire fences. He was going to need to find some kind of cross-country route. He’d ask at the next town.

  From this point on, his journey to Cambridge became complicated. Strangers in shops had conflicting advice, although everybody agreed that walking to Cambridge was preposterous. An old man with a collie sketched a map of England for him on the back of an old paper bag, but it turned out he was only doing it to point out exactly how preposterous it was, to try to walk that distance.

  A friendly middle-aged couple bought him a sandwich, while the man told him to take the “Roman roads” (“straight as an arrow’) or to follow the canals (“get yourself a bike and you’ll whistle along the towpaths”) and the woman said that he was such a handsome lad he ought to go on home to his mum at once, and here, why didn’t he borrow her mobile phone and give his mum a call?

  Eventually, an efficient woman in a business suit turned from her plate of lettuce and croutons, and instructed him to go to the local library.

  “Look up the 1 to 50,000 maps,” she said. “They’ve got pink covers. There’ll be a wall of them just inside the door. On the back of each, there’s a map of the UK with a grid that’ll show you which ones you’ll need. They’ll show you walking routes.”

  This turned out to be true, although it also turned out that he was going to need about thirty of the maps to cover the route.

  He stole a handful, and set off.

  England, he couldn’t figure out. Sometimes it seemed exactly like home — farmhouses, barns, cows low in the valleys and sheep on the hills, double-decker cattle trucks lowering their ramps — but next thing you knew he’d arrive at a village that was straight out of Olde Quainte. Pubs with thatched roofs and names like the Red Lion or the White Hart; wooden signs with coats of arms; red postboxes; duck ponds with reeds.

  Except that the villages all
seemed to have been invaded by Jagged-Edgian technology and Golden Coast billboards and set into rolling-hill landscapes that were borrowed from Nature Strip.

  It was wet, boggy, and blustery. Sometimes he’d find himself lost in low clouds, or slipping on scree. For a while the buildings were made of a light, sandy limestone, but then there was a grim patch of dark, gravelly material, in a region that reminded him of the northern industrial part of the Farms.

  He stole something called a Jaffa Cake from a little shop in one town, and a wrapped chocolate called a Mars bar from a giant supermarket called Sainsbury’s. Later, he stole a chicken leg wrapped in plastic, and an apple, from a place called Marks and Spencer. In the early mornings, he borrowed milk and bread from deliveries outside cafés; and in bigger towns, he found “food courts” where people abandoned trays of barely touched pastas, or pastries wrapped around meat.

  Farther south, there were orchards, and he stole fruit.

  He slept by the side of the road or in barns, only it was more half-wake dreaming than sleeping. Once, he dreamed that darkness was tendrilling towards him, getting knotted in his hair, tugging on him. He woke himself, then right away fell into the dream of a great, gusting wind. He knew he had to tether himself — his essence, his soul, the Elliot Baranski of him — to a post or the branch of a tree, but he felt too weary to do so.

  At other times, he dreamed a charcoal darkness, fingers pressing into the darkness then hovering over his body, ready to plunge down on him, press that darkness deep into his flesh, his bones, his organs, his heart.

  Once, he woke from this dream in such a panic he forgot how to breathe.

  Then a pair of memories came to him, side by side. One was the memory of Keira, telling him how she’d thrown her mother’s necklace into a snowbank; the other was Madeleine’s tale of going out into the street to search for her mother’s lost ring.

  Strange, he hadn’t connected the stories before, but now the contrast soothed him. Keira discarded; Madeleine saved.

  And here he was, on his way to Madeleine.