Wooden Bones, page 4
The ground was uneven, scattered with damp boulders and slick stones. One wrong step and he might stumble; if he stumbled, he would most certainly shatter. That’s what happens to ice.
His eyes were open and unblinking, but they might just as well have been closed, for all the good they did. He felt strange too—a strangeness he could not explain, like he was somewhere he didn’t belong.
The air smelled dank and foul, as if wet, rotting things had been left there long ago and the smell remained. If he’d had a choice, he most certainly wouldn’t have pressed onward, but the sudden baying of the wolves behind him—a frustrated, almost mournful sound—was like a poker pressed against his back. The wolves howled and whimpered and scratched at the stones at the mouth of the cave, but they did not follow. It was Pino and Geppetto’s first sign of good luck, if you could call hurrying into such a queer, dark place good in any sense.
Each time Geppetto stumbled, Pino helped him along, but the stumbles became more frequent. Pino’s strength was failing him. The way was so black that he had to grope forward like a blind man, trying to avoid smashing their heads on any unseen jutting stones. Geppetto’s raspy breathing echoed off the cave walls. The passageway narrowed.
When they rounded a corner, a sliver of daylight appeared in the distance—like a single golden hair afloat on a pool of oil. Pino blinked a few times, thinking it was a trick of the eye, but the light remained.
“Must . . . rest,” Geppetto said, his teeth chattering. “So tired.”
“Just a little farther,” Pino said.
“Tired. So very . . . tired.”
Pino thought it was going to take them quite a while to reach the golden light, since it appeared a long way off, but they reached it in seconds. The sliver of light wasn’t small because it was far away; it was small because it was a sliver.
A narrow shaft of daylight shone down from a needle-size crack far above, painting a tiny yellow oval the size of a coin on the slick gray stone below. It wasn’t much, but the very sight of the daylight warmed Pino’s soul. It was a sign of a better world, of a better place, one not strangled by all the darkness and all the cold.
Geppetto stumbled into the light, falling flat on his stomach, his breathing fast and shallow.
“Rest now,” he sighed.
“Papa!” Pino said. “Papa, you must get up.”
Even with Geppetto’s face fully under the shaft of light, he was still mostly shrouded in darkness. All the pink was drained from his cheeks, the skin like parched and bleached granite. He looked up at Pino through slit eyes.
“This . . . this is the end for me, boy,” he said.
“No!” Pino shot back.
“I’m sorry. I can’t . . . I can’t go on.”
“You can! You must!”
“I love you, son.”
“Papa!”
“Hug me now.” There was an odd quaver in Geppetto’s voice. “Hug me close. I want to feel your warmth on me. My boy . . . my only son . . .”
“Papa!”
Geppetto didn’t answer, the pauses between each raspy breath growing longer. Pino pressed himself against Geppetto, wrapping his bony arms around his papa’s chest and hugging him tight. His body seemed so big in comparison to Pino’s thin little arms, like the trunk of a sturdy tree; it didn’t seem possible that he could die. Big, sturdy trees didn’t die, did they? And he was warm, too. If he were dying, he wouldn’t be warm. He would be cold, as cold as the cave.
Pino leaned close to Geppetto’s lips. He felt warm breath on his ear—faint, but still there. He was definitely alive, at least for a little while longer.
“Pinocchio . . .”
The sound didn’t come from Geppetto. It was so weak that Pino at first thought he’d imagined it—or if he hadn’t imagined it, that it was just some hiss of the wind against wet stones.
“Pinocchio . . .”
The second time Pino recognized it for what it was—a voice. A lilting woman’s voice, whispering his name. His full name. The name his papa had given him in the early days, before the change. It was the name he’d used for a long time, before his papa decided that such a long name was too much of a mouthful for everyday use. That’s when he’d become Pino, and that’s what he’d gone by ever since.
“Pinocchio . . . come closer . . .”
The sound was definitely coming from up ahead, deep within the darkness. Pino did not want to leave Geppetto. It didn’t seem right, leaving him alone. But he felt the beckoning call of the voice. It was irresistible. He had to know.
“Come closer. . ..”
The voice wasn’t human. It sounded human, but Pino could tell right away that it wasn’t. It was something else. Something magical.
Magic.
If it was magic, maybe it could help his papa. Maybe it could make him better. That would be worth risking leaving his papa alone. Besides, what other choice did he have? He could go back to the entrance, but he was sure the wolves would still be waiting. And even if they weren’t waiting, it would take far too long to return to their village.
After giving Geppetto’s arm a squeeze in parting, he edged forward, leaving the narrow band of light behind. The way ahead was pitch black. He crawled over damp stones and dry stones, smooth stones and rough stones. He crawled through wide-open spaces and passageways so narrow he had to turn sideways. He crawled for minutes or hours or days, he could not tell. He crawled until his chapped hands, rubbed raw by the rock, came up against a wall.
It was as smooth as glass. He felt around it, but he found only a single, narrow hole, not even big enough for his hand. The hole was just as smooth as the rest of the wall. He was staring at this hole—or at least where he thought the hole was, for it was so dark he couldn’t see a single thing—when a jet of musty air shot out of the hole and blasted him in the face.
“Pinocchio . . .”
This time the voice was much louder, and it so startled Pino that he fell on his back. A smudge of blue appeared, illuminating the border of the hole. It started as a soft, warm light, but it grew brighter, more intense, spilling out of the hole like electric smoke. The light swirled around him, undulating eddies buffeting the air, accelerating, spinning faster and faster—brightening the tiny cavern in which he found himself, bathing the black rock with blue light.
Inside the shimmering light, shapes began to appear. At first they were no more than blots of color, ghostly wraiths blooming and disappearing as if he were inside a twisting kaleidoscope. Then the images sharpened. They appeared only for a moment before vanishing into a swirl of blue, but it was enough—Pino froze when he saw what they were.
Geppetto standing next to a smiling redheaded woman, one who wasn’t Antoinette . . .
Pino, as a lifeless puppet, sitting on Geppetto’s workbench, gathering dust . . .
Pino crying over the dead body of Geppetto in this very cave . . .
Geppetto and Pino on the deck of a great ship, nothing but ocean all around . . .
Geppetto standing on a scaffold while a noose was fitted around his neck . . .
The same images kept appearing and reappearing. Many of them Pino recognized from his own memories, but the others . . . what could they be? He’d never been on a ship in his life, and he’d certainly never seen Geppetto with a noose around his neck.
Suddenly the woman’s voice spoke again: “What you see is all that was and all that wasn’t, all that will be and all that might be. . ..”
The voice came from all around him, as if the woman was spinning with the images inside the light. Pino, propped up by his elbows, leaned forward and hugged his knees. “Who are you?” he asked.
There was a pause, and then: “I have no name.”
“What do you want?”
“To help you,” the woman said. “I can be heard only by those with special gifts, and here is my message to you, dear Pinocchio. As long as you are true to yourself, your heart will never harden, and the future is yours to shape.”
Pino had no idea what this meant, and at the moment he really didn’t care. He cared about only one thing. “I want to save Papa,” he said. “Can you help?”
The spinning blue light began to slow. The light itself began to fade.
“Please!” Pino begged.
“Find the girl with no arms and no legs,” the woman said.
“Where?”
The light was gone, leaving Pino once again alone in the darkness. He thought that was it, that no more help would be forthcoming, but then there was one final whisper: “Go north to Sapphire Lake. . .. Farewell. . ..”
With that, the voice was gone, and the cave seemed even colder than it was before. Pino was also quenched with a terrible loneliness; he had never felt so lonely, not even in the days before the change, when he was on his own. His breathing—which had become ragged without his realizing it—echoed off the rocks crowding around him.
All that will be . . . The woman’s warning filled him with panic. By showing him crying over his papa, was she saying it was already too late to save him? Why tell him to find this girl if it wouldn’t matter? It would be a cruel trick.
Returning to Geppetto, Pino twice banged his forehead on some low stalagtite, but he didn’t stop, his own heartbeat a roar in his ears. Finally he saw the sliver of yellow light—and there was his papa, lying prone just as Pino had left him. The light shone on his motionless face.
“Papa,” Pino said.
There was no reply. Pino leaned over him and put his ear against Geppetto’s lips. He waited. And waited. And waited some more—and still there was no breath.
It was true, then.
His papa was dead.
A strange, gurgled moan rose up from the darkness, a terrible noise from some terrible creature, and it scared Pino until he realized that the sound was coming from within him. His eyes blurred with hot tears. What a terrible way for his papa to die—alone, in the dark. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Mixed with Pino’s sorrow was a gathering rage—rage at having been so cruelly deceived. Why give someone hope if there was no chance at all?
“Oh . . . ,” Geppetto sighed.
Pino jumped. He wiped away the moisture in his eyes. “Papa?”
“Mmm . . .”
“Papa! Papa!”
“My boy . . .”
The eyelids cracked open. Pino hugged Geppetto fiercely. When he spoke to Geppetto again, there was no reply—but there was a rush of warm air escaping his lips. It had just been so faint he hadn’t felt it before.
There was hope after all. Pino hated to leave, but he had no choice; his papa was far too heavy to carry.
Pino could do one thing for him, though. He unbuttoned his own shirt—it was badly torn and bloodied from all their ordeals, but it was still something—and draped the thin fabric over his papa’s body. The cold air clenched Pino’s naked chest and made his teeth chatter worse than before, but he didn’t care. He was going to run so fast he wouldn’t even notice.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said, then scooted into the darkness.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The wolves were gone.
When Pino reached the mouth of the cave, all that was waiting for him in the clearing—a clearing that had darkened considerably—was a pile of scorched branches that had once been part of the tree they’d ridden to safety. Lying there on the jagged gray stones, the branches did not move or quiver; all the life had gone out of them. No red eyes glared at him from the narrow gaps between the oaks that encircled the area. No growls rose out of the wispy fog.
A few lonely crickets chirped. A solitary owl, somewhere quite distant, hooted a somber warning.
Pino, afraid the wolves were lying in wait in the shadows, would have waited much longer, but there was no time. Every moment was precious.
The problem was, he wasn’t sure which direction to go. The voice in the cave had told him to go north, to Sapphire Lake, but which way was north? The cliff formed an impregnable wall behind him. What little sky he could see above him was a deep, impenetrable gray. No sun could be seen. The trees cast no shadows—at least no distinct shadows, for there were shadows everywhere.
A cool wind stirred dust along the barren stones outside the cave, sweeping across Pino’s bare chest and blowing back his hair. He shivered. Gooseflesh formed on the backs of his arms.
The seconds were ticking away.
Inside the cave Geppetto was dying.
North, north—how could Pino tell which way was north? He hurried to the thick trunks that formed a wall around the clearing, stepping through the gap created when their tree had barreled through them.
He remembered his papa telling him that moss often grew thickest on the north side of the tree, but what little moss he could find seemed to grow evenly on all sides. He also remembered how the top branches of many trees grew more consistently in an easterly direction to catch the first morning light, something his papa had told him once, but inside the dense forest Pino couldn’t see the tops of the trees. It was as thick as a roof, made worse by the fading light and the heaviness of the air.
The tops of the trees.
This gave Pino an idea. He might not be able to tell the direction from down here, but maybe he could up higher.
Picking the tallest tree, one with plenty of branches from top to bottom, not an oak but some kind of pine, he started climbing. He hated to waste so much time, but it would be much worse if he chose a certain direction only to find later he’d chosen wrong.
The rough bark chaffed his hands, hands already raw from crawling through the cave. The higher he climbed, the thinner the branches became. He had to be careful. Many of the slender ones broke off at his touch; others scratched at his back and chest. Soon he was covered with dozens of cuts.
He climbed and he climbed and soon he was exhausted, his arms and legs painfully throbbing, but each time he thought of resting, he only had to think of his papa to get a new burst of energy. Bits of bark rained down on his face and pricked his eyes. Dry needles spiked his bare skin. He climbed until the trunk thinned. He climbed until he passed through a blanket of fog, through the very clouds.
When he came out the other side, the branches, though still sickly, were not as black. A bit more green sprouted here and there.
The air felt cooler. The trunk was now so thin that it began to sway. This startled Pino, but he still couldn’t see beyond the other treetops around him. He climbed. The trunk swayed violently. He climbed, sweat trickling into his eyes. He climbed, clenching each branch so hard his hands turned white, until finally he reached as high as he could go.
Blinking away the sweat from his eyes, trying to remain as still as possible so the tree wouldn’t sway, he swept his gaze across the treetops. At last he was high enough. This tree might not be the tallest in the forest, but it was higher than most. The trees that poked up through the clouds were few and far between; they looked like birthday candles on a white cake.
Pino could not see the lake, but he could see a hazy purple mountain range far off in the distance, stretching as far as the eye could see. He knew those mountains. His papa had spoken of them. They were the mountains that bordered the western shore of their country.
If that was west, then Pino knew which way was north. He peered over the frothy white broth and didn’t see anything that distinguished north, but regardless, that was the direction he needed to go.
He just had to keep it firmly in his mind as he crawled down the tree.
Going down seemed to take much longer. A few times he slipped and nearly plummeted, which made him even more cautious.
When he passed through the fog and had a good view of the ground, he picked out a stone just north of the tree as a marker. When he got down, he would walk toward that stone. And he would try to keep walking in that general direction.
Nearly to the bottom, it suddenly occurred to Pino that he was going about this wrong. Why walk at all? He’d brought one tree to life; why couldn’t he bring another? Since he had this special gift, he might as well use it to make life easier for himself.
Perched on one of the lower branches, he pressed his palms flat against the bark. Come alive, he told the tree.
Nothing happened.
“Come alive,” he said aloud.
Still nothing. He tried again and again, his voice getting louder and more frantic. He tried with his eyes open. He tried with his eyes closed. He concentrated, his forehead furrowing, the veins on his temples pulsing. He imagined it. He willed it. He wished for it as hard as he’d ever wished for anything in his life.
And yet, nothing.
Howling with rage, Pino climbed the rest of the way down. What good was a gift if it wasn’t available to you when you needed it? He jumped to the ground and started for the stone he’d picked out above, walking first, then running. When he reached the stone, he picked another not far away, hoping he was keeping a straight line. Running faster. Not letting himself rest. If he couldn’t ride a tree, he had to run as fast as his legs would carry him.
As he ran, another thought occurred to him, one that quickly dissolved his anger at not being able to use his gift and replaced it with fear.
If he couldn’t use his gift, what would happen to him if the wolves came again?
* * *
There is something that happens to the human body when it is pushed past the point of exhaustion. There is something that happens when every ounce of strength is spent; when every breath burns in the lungs and every muscle throbs in agony; when every swelling joint and every quivering tendon screams in protest. There is something that happens when the saliva in the mouth tastes like acid and the heart pounding in the ears drowns out all other sounds.
Eventually all feeling goes away, all sensation departs, and the mind disengages from the enormity of the pain the body is sending its way.
That is the place where Pino went as he dashed through the dark forest—a timeless place unmoored from his surroundings, disconnected from the here and now, where the rotting trees and the uneven ground were a passing blur. He was vaguely aware that he was running—north, heading north—but it was like someone telling him a story. Even his worry was gone. He was somewhere else.
