The Remarkable Inventions of Walter Mortinson Page 9

  “I didn’t mean to, and this whole trip . . . I . . . I . . .”

  She waited, but the answer never came. She curiously peeked over, becoming concerned . . . just as the car began to swerve.

  Cordelia saw that he’d fallen asleep—and was directing the car headlong into one of the floats. She shot up and dragged the wheel back on course, narrowly avoiding disaster.

  Walter jerked awake. “Mom, what—!”

  His face suddenly became hot as he coughed to cover up the words he’s already let slip. When he spoke, he made his voice sound much deeper than it naturally was.

  “What’s going on?” He took over for Cordelia, nudging her hands away.

  “You fell asleep,” she said.

  “No I didn’t. When?”

  She shrugged. “The car’s veering woke me up.”

  “Sorry; thanks. I’ll pull over at the next stop. Don’t worry. You can sleep.”

  “But if I don’t talk to you, you might fall asleep too!”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  Cordelia mulled over her limited options, assessing the risk of sleeping and letting the boy certainly follow suit (and probably kill them both), versus the risk of staying up and having to talk to him.

  She didn’t particularly like either.

  “Well, I don’t think I can sleep anyway,” she said. “This blanket is awful. It’s itchy and it has big holes.”

  “My mom made it.”

  Cordelia scoffed, hiding a half laugh, then regretted it. “Really?”

  Walter refused to look at her, making the girl feel all the worse.

  “Sorry. I just didn’t see her as the knitting type, is all.”

  The smile was soon wiped off her face.

  “Why? Because of the whole dead-people thing?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Or because she’s not like your mom?”

  “She isn’t like my mom—”

  “Or is it because you think she killed my dad?”

  There it was. The silence she used to wish for, yet now it felt deafening.

  Walter inwardly cursed as he got ahold of himself again. Unfortunately, there was no invention that he could think of that would let him go back in time; he’d spent years trying.

  “Sorry. I’m just tired.” His voice betrayed a weariness that went beyond that night, and Cordelia wasn’t foolish enough to pretend she didn’t recognize it.

  Her voice was even quieter than his. “I don’t think she did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Killed your dad.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re the only person in Moormouth, then, I guess.”

  He finally cracked a smile that she returned, despite neither of them thinking it was particularly funny.

  “I think it’s . . . nice that she knits. My mom doesn’t knit.”

  “Neither does mine. Can’t you see? It has big holes.”

  Now they both smiled, big honest ones, as Cordelia observed the brightly colored woven mess.

  “It’s nice.”

  Walter smiled even wider. He found a bravery deep within himself that was reserved for when he was feeling particularly senseless or sleepy. “Would you mind grabbing something out of there? It’s a brown book.”

  Cordelia looked around, before realizing that he was pointing to his bag by her feet. With a previously unknown urgency she sought to please him.

  She rifled through the clothes, deciding not to question the choice of two pairs of long johns and a pair of swim trunks, and emerged with the little leather album. On the cover was an intricately etched flower. One side looked light, while the other was in shadow.

  “It’s . . . nice?”

  “Second page.”

  She fumbled with the plastic-covered sheets, cracking the book open. Then she faltered, staring at the first page, where an image had been pasted of young and beautiful versions of Hadorah and Maxwell, holding baby Walter outside their house . . . the same house that Cordelia had been told to avoid as a child. It struck her just how sad it was that they looked so happy. Realizing she was being watched, Cordelia flushed and flipped to the second page.

  It was a faded photograph of toddlers in a line. They wore uniforms nearly identical to the black-and-gray suit Walter had on now.

  Three-year-old Walter, with a mess of orange curls and a slate-colored hound’s-tooth tie, stood at one end. He looked utterly terrified as he stared at the camera. Next to him, however, was a smiling schoolgirl—cherubic with two blue headlights for eyes and curled ribbons in her hair. She was only just recognizable as a miniature version of the girl holding the book between her shaking hands. Cordelia looked closely to see if it was as she had remembered . . . and it was. The two toddlers’ fingers just touched.

  “Is that you?” she asked.

  Walter nodded. “Maybe we were friends?” He waited for the response, a second too long.

  “Maybe,” Cordelia finally replied.

  She snapped the book shut, controlling her breathing as best she could. Cordelia shoved the book back into the backpack, careful not to bend it. She waited a moment to let the air clear, but found she couldn’t stand the silence anymore.

  “So what makes them go?”

  His eyes followed her finger pointing to the unmanned peacock float ahead.

  “Could be lots of things.”

  “That’s all you’ve got? Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of genius?”

  He smiled to himself in a way that she found utterly infuriating, and said, “Not everything is so complicated.”

  “What, is it magic?”

  “Mechanics aren’t magic?” He side-eyed her, but she was yawning. He looked away quickly so as not to be caught staring. “We can stop soon . . . even though you aren’t tired.”

  Cordelia stifled a second yawn before nodding slightly. Her eyes had already begun to droop against her better judgment. “I’m not, but I might sleep a little bit . . . just until morning or so.”

  “Me too. We have places to be, right?”

  Cordelia nodded again, curling up in the seat once more. She jolted back awake when Walter hit the brakes.

  “I’m not asleep!” Cordelia declared.

  “No. Look . . .”

  The float ahead had stopped in the middle of the wasteland. Small beings, lemurlike, with long noodley limbs, trudged out of the bottoms of the floats. They were only two feet at the tallest. The massive floats deflated as the creatures marched out, hundreds of them, stretching after a long day’s work. They made no sound but gestured to one another as if speaking. It was almost as if they could read one another’s thoughts.

  How very strange.

  Suddenly, as the tiny beings departed and the colorful skins of the parade lay motionless, Cordelia and Walter came to the same bizarre conclusion.

  The little beings were what had made the parade go.

  Walter’s voice was practically a whisper, but Cordelia still heard him when he said, “And some things are more complicated than you might expect.”

  Cordelia stretched her neck out the window, staring as the parade creatures disappeared into the night. “Where are they going?”

  “Maybe the parade is over.”

  As Cordelia looked at the floats, she suddenly remembered the last time she’d seen them, as a little girl. With a pang of reproach she spat, “It doesn’t go through Moormouth anymore, but it used to. It’s the Summer Solstice Parade.”

  “But it isn’t summer.”

  “Exactly. The parade goes until the solstice. I don’t think it ever stops moving, really.”

  “But what about when the summer solstice is over?”

  “It becomes the Winter Solstice Parade.”

  Walter was too tired to think about the never-ending parade. The desert was wide and strange, and now felt unnerving without the sun to make the sand glitter or the floats to brighten their way. They had to get off the road and find somewhere safe to sleep, so he pressed his
foot on the gas and went faster now than ever before.

  • • •

  Hadorah knew where Walter had gone, but she had no way to follow. He had taken her only means of transportation.

  She stopped in her tracks, just short of the porch.

  Or had he?

  Hadorah circumvented the house, heading for a place she had let vanish from her mind for years.

  Going into the backyard wasn’t easy. She fought with the coils of overgrown weeds and hiked through the hip-high grass. (If Walter had been there, she mused, he probably would have been concerned about hippopotamuses, or whatever else he was always getting on about.) She banished the thoughts as she stared at an old mechanized carriage, gears covered in dirt, dust, and whatever else, the metal horses at the front wrapped in vines. Hadorah had blamed this vehicle for many things, and now it was going to have to be put back to work. She desperately hoped it wouldn’t disappoint her again.

  She pulled away one of the bougainvillea creepers to get a better look at the condition of the contraption. The once-shiny silver iron had been eaten away by rust and inattention. The idea of driving it once more was terrifying, but it had to be done.

  Hadorah nearly tripped. She was surprised to look down and see the vine she had detangled, now wrapped around her leg. What an unfortunate coincidence, she thought, stepping out of it. Walter would have imagined that the vine had a mind of its own.

  Hadorah just saw a plant, and as with anything that got in Hadorah’s way, she knew just how to fix it.

  “Now, where did I put that hatchet?”

  Hadorah tromped off, not bothering to look back—for if she had, she might have seen something that her son would not have missed: the slight quake that ran through the bush as it considered its imminent demise.

  CHAPTER 15 1/2

  •  •  •

  THE BEARDED BABY

  Hadorah sat beside Maxwell. She was already pregnant but not yet bursting at the seams. Her rotund belly pressed up against the carriage door as she considered the peculiar landscape. The dusty dirt road had morphed into something muddier and cobbled. The massive mechanical horses lead the way, hooves chattering as they plonked from stone to stone.

  The dirt beyond was pocked with hundreds of pits, as if a great colony of moles had had their fill of it. Maxwell, humming to himself, nearly drove right into one.

  “Whoops! Sorry, Haddy.”

  Hadorah ignored him, and squashing her nose against the window, she realized these were no mole holes at all—they were much, much too wide, and dreadfully deep. They were man-size. Hadorah suddenly thought this trip might not be a good idea.

  The cobbled lane branched into a smaller path, just wide enough for the carriage. Hadorah and Max followed it, deeper and deeper into this strange place. Still, she saw no signs of life save for the trees that were growing ever more frequent. These were the tall, fluffy variety of trees that looked like they might house a nice squirrel family or a wise owl that solved riddles (you know the type). In fact, Hadorah was to learn, they bore a very different kind of life.

  She gasped when the houses came into view. Instead of being built on the ground, the log cabins were plopped right on the trees themselves, perched all the way at the very tippiest-toppiest of the frothy green branches.

  Shrew’s Borough was a city in the sky.

  This odd little place was evidently trying to keep out of the way of other people, or else keep other people away from it.

  The buildings crowded together, the spaces between crisscrossed by rope ladders that led to the ground. Hadorah watched, bewildered, as the branches shook. When she refocused on the inner workings of the trees, she saw Boroughers climbing from door to door. They were miners, all of them, with headlamps and plaid shirts. They were bearded, too, even the women and the children. Their facial hair was groomed into braids and curls and coifs—the pride of everyone who grew them.

  Hadorah was particularly mesmerized by a baby miner, cheeks as big as her eyes, helmet nearly sliding off her head. She was strapped to her mother’s burly chest, and the older woman swung through the trees. The baby had a wide grin stretched under her wispy handlebar mustache.

  Having spotted some of the tree-dwellers, Hadorah now noticed the whole of them, hundreds scampering through their airborne colony with ease.

  Hadorah wouldn’t have liked living in a tree, she thought, nose scrunched. For one thing, there were too many people for such a small place, and not nearly enough land to live on. As a consequence, Hadorah realized, they had to build up . . . and certainly these trees were very, very far up, past even the clouds coursing around the town.

  Wait. Clouds?

  Hadorah peered out the window and then promptly shrieked. Shrew’s Borough was hundreds of feet in the air, perched on a perilous cliffside.

  Why, of all the places, had her infernal husband brought her to this one?

  “Because someone needs my help.”

  Of course, she thought. Someone always needs his help. He’s Maxwell. Her face grumped into a deep grimace. Sometimes she wished she were the only one who loved him. It hardly seemed fair that she had to share him, especially when no one except for Maxwell seemed to want to share her.

  As the horses plonked their last plonks, Max and Hadorah came upon a band of miners carving a cave into a molehill. One miner, a man with big floppy earlobes and a bigger, floppier beard, could just be seen in the back of the dark cave, manning a massive automated drill. The thing sparked and fizzled, chugging through the mountainside with furious growls. But as soon as the floppy man had started making headway, the drill sparked, lighting some green substance in the dirt. The green stuff abruptly burst into flames. Two miners nearby leapt onto the fire, suffocating it with blankets as the floppy miner yelped, his beard ablaze. The helper miners then leapt onto him, smothering his beard and smacking him to the ground in one brave swoop.

  The monstrous machine continued chugging, causing havoc as it spun. Hadorah just managed to make out a gold F emblem on the side of the drill as it barreled into a group of onlookers. A meaty fist grabbed the handle, just in time.

  Hadorah’s gaze traveled up the burly arms of the hero and rested on the woman’s stern face. She was missing a front tooth. Hadorah simply didn’t trust people who were missing their front teeth. She was prejudiced like that.

  But that didn’t much matter to the woman. Her long mustache was double braided into her longer beard, which swept in the wind behind her as she squinted at the carriage. Hadorah couldn’t meet her hard glare, piercing through the windshield. She sunk into her seat, hoping to disappear.

  Maxwell didn’t feel the same, jumping out, instantly shouting, “Good rummage, Galena?”

  “Better tomorrow, Mortinson.”

  Galena was at least one and a half Maxwells tall and three wide. They shook hands firmly, then grasped each other in a half embrace, Max quickly lost in the folds of her body.

  Galena pushed him away finally, shouting, “Awful nice of you to inventerize a replacement. Now, where is it?”

  Hadorah could feel the carriage shake underneath her as Max stepped up onto the side, to untie the invention on the roof.

  “Well, lookie here!” Miners surrounded the device.

  It was a massive spinning top, painted a brilliant sky blue, with green swirls twirling down the sides. Hadorah watched but couldn’t hear as Max brought the group of miners, led by a fascinated Galena, back over to the mine. They huddled around him as he wound a long rope through a hole in the top, then handed the rope over to the floppy-lobed gentleminer. Floppy grabbed the rope with one hand and held the handle on the top firmly with the other. He then closed his eyes as he yanked the rope out. The crowd gasped and parted as the top spun.

  Unfortunately, Floppy had never let go, so he spun too.

  The top zoomed toward the mountain and barreled easily into the hole, creating a deep cavern as it dizzied itself. Finally it quieted. Moments later Floppy reemerged, triumphan
t and wobbly. Miners cheered and converged on him.

  But then there was the matter of the old Flasterbornian drill, sputtering and sparking in the middle of the cave floor. Galena parted the crowd, trudging over to it. She grabbed a pickax and thrust the tip deep into the machine. The beast whined and then fell silent for good.

  The crowd chanted Max’s name as they tossed his tiny frame above them.

  Hadorah never got used to being with Max. Of course, she thought, he was wonderful, but it was hard sometimes when she realized that everyone else felt the exact same way. She secretly wished that someone else would one day think she was wonderful too.

  CHAPTER 16

  •  •  •

  DREG AND THE TERMITONOUS

  Walter didn’t know it, but he had parked in a town far different from the one his parents had passed through those many years before.

  The forest was now gone, leaving dirt flats in its wake. The only surviving trees were skeletons, their thin riblike branches having long ago given up. They could no longer hold up any homes and were now empty. In the dark of night this looked like a sad place.

  The main feature that had remained was the massive cave mouth roaring out of the ground. On its rock face had been sculpted a mighty mole, his mouth open wide, pig nose snuffling up, and granite teeth flashing in the moonlight. The cave’s giant mole hands, with their big banana fingers, seemingly pushed the earth around them to the sides, creating little hills.

  But none of this did Walter know. For one thing, his mother had never told him about her and his father’s travels. For a second thing, it had been very dark when he’d clunked onto the cobbled road, and he hadn’t seen much other than the skeletal trees lining one side, which had looked more like looming shadows in the night.

  He had been desperately tired, fighting the fingers of sleep that beckoned him. He’d had just enough mind to pull off onto the road made of rocks and mud.

  Walter hadn’t thought it odd at the time, a road made of mud. Perhaps most people, even most sleepy people, would have felt the rough desert sand give way to the slippery stones and would have thought: Huh, isn’t this peculiar? I, a normal person, dislike peculiar things, so I’ll find another road. Unlike for most people, Walter’s fear of the abnormal didn’t exist. If you asked him, in fact, he’d say that normal was quite a bit scarier than abnormal. “Normal” meant working in a big factory making toothbrush bristles. “Normal” meant the gray people who had whispered behind his and his mother’s backs after his father had died.