The Remarkable Inventions of Walter Mortinson Read online

  “Normal” meant not special.

  Walter had thought this way often, which meant he had gotten into trouble often—but it also meant that Walter experienced things normal people never do.

  He had slipped along the curious road, unaware as the endless dirt flats on either side had given way to an equally endless drop off the face of a very tall cliff.

  In the darkness it had looked as if the landscape were high up in the clouds. Coils of mist had sunk below the rocky edge, sifting with treacherous serenity. Had Walter swerved an inch farther when he’d parked, he would have careened unknowingly over the edge, and, consequently, he and Cordelia would have had a morning involving considerably more dying. Cordelia didn’t much like dying, so it was fortunate they hadn’t.

  Walter had situated the car safely in front of the twelve-foot-tall mole statue (which, if you’re not good at measurements, is a bit larger than an average mole) and behind a very large pile of trash. Again, for any normal person, a very large pile of trash would probably have been concerning, but Walter hadn’t seen the mound when he’d laid the rumbling automobile to rest.

  If we’re being honest, it wouldn’t have much mattered. Walter loved a good pile of possibilities.

  • • •

  As the sun rose over the odd little place, it shot light skipping across the fading fog. Shrew’s Borough, seemingly made of near-black shadows the night before, was starkly different when met by morning. The many tones of rock—from the reds to the yellows to the browns—radiated sunny warmth.

  The hearse stood fast on the side of the cliff. No one was around to notice it, except for the miner sitting on the edge of the crag nearby. He sat wide legged, a fishing pole over the side of the ledge, a large helmet tipped over his forehead. Excited, he reeled the line up through the fog. On the end of his pole was a shoe.

  “Dagnabbit, another ’un.”

  Disappointed, he tossed it onto the slumbering hearse.

  He hadn’t seen the kids, so he didn’t know he was burying them in garbage. They were unconscious, so they didn’t know either. How horribly, horribly unlucky.

  Unless, per chance, you love trash.

  Walter stirred when the moss-encrusted tongue of a boot slapped against his windshield. Befuddled, he rubbed his crust-encrusted eyes. That can’t have been a boot flying by its tongue, he thought. He had invented those only a month ago. . . . Then a broken lightbulb came flying into view next, interrupting his thoughts.

  Somewhere between concerned and intrigued, Walter slipped outside, wading through the growing cover of garbage along the way, cautious not to wake Cordelia, who was snoring in the passenger seat. He didn’t think she’d like his plan.

  • • •

  Drat, thought Dreg. This ain’t it neither. He pulled the open Worm Crunchies bag off his fishing line and tossed it onto the growing rubbish heap behind him.

  The young miner, whose beard hadn’t yet reached his chest, was tired of near misses. This was Dreg’s first job, see. Well, actually, “job” is maybe too big a word. This was Dreg’s first big scheme (of many to come). He had been scheming for a while but had yet to get rich. This fact he found very, very confusing.

  “It ain’t called a get-rich-quick job, shoot,” he mumbled to himself.

  Dreg had devised his scheme in order to buy Opal—who had the most beautiful, densest sideburns in the colony—a new handle for her pickax, one that would match her favorite plaid overalls. To earn money and, consequently, prove his love, he was fishing for trash. Not just any trash, however. Dreg was fishing for expensive trash.

  All sorts of things got thrown into the Pit—that’s what Boroughers referred to the cliff basin as. Rarely, treasured mining ore got lost down there among the rubbish, whether it flew off into someone’s shoe while they were drilling or became caught in their mustache, then flicked down the drain—sometimes the ore seemed to even disappear on its own. Boroughers didn’t like losing their ore. Dreg was happy to sell it back to them for more than it was worth . . . if he could just find some already.

  He knew that if he didn’t work quickly, Frazil, who had a freakishly long goatee (that was most certainly fake, if you asked Dreg), would buy Opal a plaid handle first. And then Dreg could kiss those beautiful sideburns good-bye.

  Suffice it to say, Dreg took his scheme very seriously.

  One of his greatest fears was that others would catch on to his brilliant plan. He hadn’t even yet considered that someone might leech off his work. He’d spent so much time and effort pulling the trash up out of the Pit, and some fiend could have been picking through it when his back was turned. This realization occurred to Dreg as he heard a rustle behind him.

  “What the . . . Who’s that scrambling in there?”

  Dreg dropped his big hairy hand into the pile—scratching it uncaringly across buckets, drill bits, and beard combs along the way. Like all Boroughers, Dreg’s skin had thickened up and was elephantine, from years in the mine.

  Meanwhile, Walter clung to the inner trash as long as he could, desperately trying to reach for his prize. He’d seen a flash of whatever it was when he’d first hopped in, and he just had to find it. In his last few moments he succeeded, extracting his reward from the innards of a rusted tin can. Clutched in his fist was a small, curiously glowing sphere. It reminded Walter of a marble. Walter had big plans for this marble.

  Just then Dreg pulled the red-haired boy out with one hand and held him at nose height by the scruff of his collar.

  “Who goes there?”

  Dreg had read this phrase in a book once and hoped it had the same effect now as it had on the characters in the story. Unfortunately for Dreg, Walter was more confused than intimidated.

  “Goes where?”

  “Here—ya know, right here where we is.” Dreg scratched his head with his free hand as he surveyed the rubbish. “Who goes here?”

  “Where is here?”

  “Ya know, in this town—er—in this trash pile! Who goes in this trash pile? Naw, that’s not it. I mean . . .”

  Walter wriggled out of the fumbling miner’s grasp.

  “Do you want to know who I am?” Walter asked.

  Satisfied, Dreg nodded, smiling widely, before remembering that he should have a serious face. “Yeah. Who are ya?”

  “I’m Walter.”

  Dreg felt proud that he had extracted information out of his prey . . . but he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

  “Oh . . . yeah . . . Walter. Well, Walter, I am Dreg.”

  Dreg ended the declaration by pounding on his chest. Walter held out his hand. Confused, Dreg engulfed it in his meaty catcher’s mitt. Walter guided Dreg’s fist up and down, grunting with the effort of it.

  “Nice to meet you, Dreg.”

  “Nice-in-ta meet ya too.”

  Walter nodded, slipping himself out of Dreg’s fist. He proceeded to brush himself off as Dreg tried to rearrange his wits.

  Walter knew his way around a bully and figured he’d do what he usually did and ignore this one. He pretended Dreg wasn’t even there as he inspected his new treasure. The marble-thing just fit inside Walter’s pinched fingers. It was green, sort of. As Walter turned it in the light, the marble reflected blues and pinks, but when Walter tried to find them again, they were replaced with oranges and yellows. Marvelous, he thought.

  Little did he know that Dreg was peering to see what Walter was holding and didn’t seem to find it wonderful at all. His face puffed up twice its normal size as he bellowed: “THIEF!”

  Walter knew that when bullies turned red and screamy, it was time to go. He darted across the pile, trying not to stumble along the way. Years in the junkyard had taught him how to balance on garbage. Dreg was not so practiced, but his massive feet crunched through it with natural talent.

  “STOP, THIEF!”

  Walter whipped his key out as he made it to the hearse. He tried to turn the key gently so as not to wake Cordelia. He didn’t suspect she would like odd miner
business. And while he was right—she definitely didn’t like odd miner business—unfortunately, Walter didn’t even get a chance to enter the car. Cordelia had already awoken, and he hadn’t anticipated the fury she’d brewed up.

  The poor boy had no idea that one of her worst fears in the whole world was being buried alive.

  Just as Walter opened the door, he realized Cordelia was no longer inside. In her panic, she’d swum out, straight into the garbage.

  His head whipped around. Where could she be?

  He jumped as Cordelia’s trash-covered form erupted from the gut of the mountain of stink.

  “GRAH!”

  One of her hands was lost in a bottle with murky contents, the other in a toilet roll tube; her once-white nightdress was stuck with old newspaper; and her head had become lodged in a rusty radio, covering her face and blinding her completely.

  To be honest, it wasn’t her best look.

  Upon seeing her, Dreg and Walter blanched—but for very different reasons. As Walter tried to think of a way to make her less inclined to scream, Dreg was too busy being terrified.

  You see, Cordelia may have been petrified of being buried alive, but Dreg had an equally strong fear of something called the Titanous Termitonous.

  Perhaps you have heard of the boogeyman—an ugly, oogley fellow who lives below children’s beds and munches their toes when they fall asleep. Moormouth’s boogeyman was called Laxidaisyskull, a skeleton that followed you around, knees clacking, if you didn’t work hard enough. In Shrew’s Borough there was no boogeyman nor Laxidaisyskull. Instead they feared the queen herself: the Titanous Termitonous.

  As Dreg had been told when he was only a nugget, the Termitonous is a woman-size termite, dredged up from the depths of the Pit, who had an appetite for so much wood that she could devour a forest in one buggy bite. Once all the tops of the trees had been eaten, she would look for more food below, in the Boroughers’ dwellings, underground. She had a particular fondness, Dreg suspected, for children’s flesh.

  And while Dreg would swear up and down that he didn’t believe in such foolish things as the Termitonous (especially in front of Opal . . . Frazil definitely didn’t believe in such childish legends), deep, deep down in his belly, he had hoped never to meet the Termitonous.

  As Cordelia wailed, radio antenna jutting out of her head at odd angles, hands elongated into points, Dreg’s childhood fears came scuttling back.

  Cordelia stumbled in a zigzag toward him (admittedly, unknowingly). She even tripped and nearly landed straight on him. But Dreg was too fast; he shot away, unseeing . . . straight toward the hearse.

  Walter had to dive under the trash again to avoid getting squashed by Dreg’s barrel body as he came tumbling by, wailing.

  But hold that thought! Remember that Boroughers are approximately a smudge bigger than Moormouthians—a “smudge” being quite large. Dreg was the runt of his family, and the tippy-tops of Walter’s curls just brushed Dreg’s chest. In Moormouth little Dreg would have been stared at as he trudged through town, because no one in Moormouth had ever seen a man so big . . . let alone a bearded child.

  Now, imagine that a massive child like that came hurling at you at a speed so fast, it’s only ever reached by people being chased by bears or by children who are very afraid (who are also, sometimes, running from bears). Imagine his flapping boots, the size of toolboxes, stomping inches from your head as you huddle on the floor under a pile of Pit trash. Imagine that very big, very fast boy slamming into the side of your car—parked just on the edge of a very high cliff.

  “No!” Walter screamed as he heard the horrible thwack of Dreg’s hip meeting metal.

  The car creaked ominously, giving Dreg just enough time to fall back safely onto his globular behind. He hadn’t been paying attention to where he was running, only that it was away from the Termitonous. Now he could only gawp at the mess he’d made.

  The hearse rocked onto the lip of the mountain, before the edge of the cliff below inevitably gave way. The black car dove into the Pit, trash falling behind like fluttering leaves in its wake.

  Walter ran to watch as it clunked and thunked down the rocky face and then rumbled to a dusty stop at the bottom. His head now filled with fuzz, his eyes growing hot with fear, Walter whispered to himself, “Mother is going to be very, very displeased.”

  Walter then glanced at Dreg. Dreg, however, had his eyes trained on Cordelia—who was still blissfully unaware of this whole disaster.

  “Argh!” She released a guttural sound as she finally pried her arm free of the bottle it had been stuck in. In a shot, Dreg’s face morphed from fear to anger.

  When Walter then hurried over to pry her other hand out of the toilet roll tube, Dreg was steaming.

  “Y-y-ya tricked me!”

  Walter, befuddled and affronted, shouted back, “I did nothing of the sort! You wrecked my car!”

  But Dreg was not listening, already shaking his head. As he saw Walter struggle to free Cordelia, Dreg came stomping over. “Ya done shammed me! Pretendered to be the Termitonous just to steal my spoils!”

  Walter had stopped listening, trying to tug Cordelia’s head out of the radio. Dreg continued, lacing his fingers easily around Walter’s thin arm. “I ain’t lettin’ ya get away with it!”

  Dreg yanked Walter away from Cordelia, who stumbled, falling back onto the trash with a yelp. Walter struggled to get free as Cordelia did the same, her voice echoing inside the radio.

  “Walter? What’s going on?”

  But Walter could only get out a “Cor—” before Dreg carried him off, straight into the mouth of the giant mole.

  CHAPTER 17

  •  •  •

  MERRY MAD MINERS

  It was pitch black in the mine, the only light coming from the headlamp on Dreg’s bobbing helmet. Walter and Dreg had been stumbling down a carved rock slope for a while, and Walter was growing more and more afraid of what waited for them at the bottom.

  In fact, Walter was worried about a great many things.

  Who was this miner boy holding him, and why was he so big? More important, was Cordelia all right? Had she stumbled off the side of the cliff? And what about the car? Would he be able to fix it? Would they ever get to Flaster Isle? . . . Would Hadorah be very mad? This absurd thought stopped his worries in their tracks.

  Of course she would.

  But he had no time to fear what his mother would say, for he was constantly distracted by his captor, who seemed to only want to squabble.

  “Quit squirmin’!”

  “I can’t; that’s my arm!”

  “Yeah, well, that’s my ore!”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about! My friend is up there, and I need—”

  “Oh, sure, and I bet the Titanous Termitonous means nothing to ya neither!”

  “In fact, it doesn’t!”

  Dreg huffed, having had well enough of the thieving boy. He heaved him into the air effortlessly and tucked him up under one arm. The two continued, Dreg tromping downward.

  “If yer gonna act like a sack of worms, might as well carry ya like one!”

  Walter could feel the ooze of the other boy’s armpit soak into his only shirt. He was too troubled by this to listen to Dreg’s mutterings.

  “Stupid teeny thieves. Bet this is Frazil’s fault, stupid goatee. We’ll see what Ms. Galena says about it. Stupid car—shouldn’t of even been there, and they thought they could sham me. Well, I never . . .”

  Walter was distracted instead by his surroundings. As the beam of the headlamp cascaded over the walls, Walter saw something increasingly peculiar. While most of the stone cavern was a reddish sort of brown, there were odd streaks through it. These streaks were green and glowed faintly.

  As they descended, the streaks became larger and more frequent. The veins gradually wove through the walls, into patterns and braids. In these greater concentrations, the green stone glowed much more brightly, lighting the way softly. What was
more, now Walter could see that the streaks weren’t all green—when he looked at the stone one way, it appeared to be blue, from another way yellow, even pink.

  Just like his marble.

  Walter felt in his pocket, fingering the little sphere. He held on to it, pushing all of his worries into it. Cordelia would be fine, he thought, squeezing the marble tightly. The car would be fine, he thought, squeezing it more tightly. Hadorah might be only a little bit mad, he thought, squeezing it tightly-est. It would all be all right—it had to be.

  And somehow, having that little green marble in his fist made him feel a bit better. After all, this glowing rock should be impossible, but here it was, all around him. Maybe impossible things could happen.

  This was what Walter chose to focus on—hope—as they descended, farther and farther, into the depths of the unknown.

  • • •

  Cordelia, meanwhile, was not nearly so hopeful. No. Cordelia was, to put it lightly, miffed. To put it strongly? Murderous.

  She was finally able to rip the radio from her head, along with a small patch of hair. She squealed as it went, tossing the wretched thing right off the side of the mountain.

  Wait. Mountain?

  She did a double take as she looked back down the cliffside. Gasping, she stumbled away. As she backpedaled, she tripped, falling to the ground with an awful clatter. She collided with an old, massive drill bit, causing her to skin her knee. Wincing, she pressed against the scrape to hold in the blood.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” she said.

  Cordelia yanked at the bottom of her nightdress, pulling off a long strip. Without having to look, she tied it tightly around her wound.