Watching my feet follow Pepsi's I wondered if the same kind of shock had set in in me. I was wary of our precarious future, but not so afraid now. Was that because I had grown up some; got stronger along the way to the fifth Bone of the Moon? Or was this new unruffled me a result of knowing Jack Chili had both Pepsi and I by the nose, and there was little we could do now beside watch ourselves be destroyed? Shock, or a transcendent bravery I had never experienced in myself before?
The Dead Handwriting stopped suddenly although the rock face, bare of anything but nature's streaks and scratches, continued. The path was very narrow and kept us walking in tight single file, Carmesia leading the way. The stones under our feet were smooth and flat and made for a lot of slipping and sliding if you didn't watch where you were going. After a while it dawned on me what the «stones» were – bottle glass, all of them the same color as the piece I had found on the beach in Greece.
While walking, I somehow started thinking about the trams in Milan; how I had always loved the names of their destinations: Greece, Brazil, Tirana. If there was nothing to do on a sunny day, I used to climb aboard one, sit dowrn and – closing my eyes – tell myself I was off to Brazil. Just like that! Later, if I was meeting Danny at our favorite cafй across from the Castello Sforzesco, he would inevitably see a certain look in my eye and ask, «Where did you go today, Captain?» And I would be able to say, «Hungary.»
From our apartment near the Castello, we could hear the busy clank/clack of them passing all day and deep into the night. I loved them. Somehow their loud welcome sound always said to me, «This is Europe. We live only in Europe.»
The bottle-glass path turned a sharp corner and directly ahead were six glowing orange shoes, two stories high at the very least. They were men's Oxford shoes and were connected to tweed-covered legs as thick and high as California redwood trees that climbed up and through the clouds. None of these legs moved. I should have been afraid of them, but I wasn't. The zebra and the lion?
The heat from the glowing shoes increased as we got closer. When Carmesia stopped, Pepsi reached into his knapsack and brought out the third and fourth Bones. He handed me the third.
«Hold it very tight against your chest when we pass them, Mom. It'll protect you.»
Carmesia stood between us. «I have to go back now, Pepsi.»
Pepsi reached down and picked up the negnug. For the first time I realized the boy understood their language as well. When we'd first met the little animals by the Sea of Brynn, he hadn't been able to do so.
«Carmesia, be sure to tell Mr. Tracy that the shoes aren't moving. That'll make him feel better. But also tell him we got this far and everything's okay from what I've seen. Good-bye. Thank you!» He kissed the thing on the top of its head and put it gently down on the ground. It gave a stiff military salute and then skittered away back up the trail. It moved so fast that it was gone in no time at all.
Touching the fourth Bone to his chest, Pepsi gestured with his head for me to follow. The crack of rocks moving around underfoot followed us as we moved toward the Shoes – the Shoes that radiated like some kind of big, cockamamie spaceship from Planet Foot.
Holding the Bone hard against my chest, I still felt the heat of the Shoes, but only distantly, as if they were somehow much further off. As we got closer to them, the glass stones beneath our feet glowed all kinds of different fiery colors.
When we were almost all the way past the Hot Shoes, Pepsi dropped his Bone down the front of his shirt and to my horror, walked straight over to the last of these orange Goliaths. Climbing slowly up over its perforated toe, he made his way to the top by grabbing sections of the laces and putting his feet in the brass lace-holes at the sides. If watching that wasn't enough to bring on a heart attack, once he reached the top of the Shoe he climbed on to the sock and made his way vertically up its fuzzy, sheer face. I kept squinting my eyes so that I wouldn't have to see everything so clearly. Once when he lost his handhold and almost fell, I turned away . . . but not for long.
The worst moment came when, after climbing out and over the cuff of one pants leg, he actually disappeared down inside it. At that point, all six of the Shoes sent off a flare of molten orange light which blinded me momentarily. Oh, God! Eyes gone, I started screaming for Pepsi. By the time my eyesight had fully returned, I saw him scampering down the Shoe again with a smile a yard wide on his face.
«What were you _doing_?»
He came up and hugged me tightly; his head came to the bottom of my waist. «I can't tell you yet, Mom. Wait till later.»
And then we were off again on what turned out to be the last part of our journey. Eliot would have called it our quest.
We sat on a bottle-glass boulder and watched fog float gloomily across the valley below. Gloomy was the word for everyone at the moment, because on the other side of that partially hidden valley was the Cafй Deutschland, Jack Chili, etcetera. We were waiting for the fog to lift because a few miles back, the path had turned steep and quirky in its twists and illogical turns. Neither of us needed a sprained ankle or twisted knee right then.
There was a part of me that wanted to ask Pepsi what _he_ thought would happen when we met up with our adversary over there. But this quiet moment together promised to be one of our last for a long time. Why spoil it by bringing up ugly, ominous questions that led only to threatening answers. Like: «How do you think he'll eat us, Pepsi? With a knife and fork? Or maybe just dip us headfirst into the mustard like Vienna sausages?»
«No, I don't think it'll be like that, Mom. He's already shown us he can be mean. I think he'll do something else.»
«So, now _you_ can read my mind too?»
He looked embarrassed before he nodded.
«How often do you _do_ it, young man?»
«Only when you looked worried or real scared, Mom. I promise that's the only time.»
«Hmm. Your mother does _not_ appreciate having her mind read, thank you very much.»
I gave him the last of the Sidney Bean sandwiches which had been given to us before we left the meadow. Nice as that sounds, it wasn't an entirely selfless gesture on my part because I hadn't been hungry in ages. I must have eaten at times, but I certainly didn't remember where or when.
«Let's go, Mom. It looks like the fog's going away.» Like any kid, he ate his sandwich all the way down the hill and straight into the roiling fog.
We walked for some time before coming to the first of the children. The fog had done a good job of keeping them hidden from us.
Delicate sand-colored wicker chairs were placed by the side of the path about every two feet or so. The children sat in them. Some had smeared, ruined features – the result of either nature's worst pranks or mad, sadistic surgeons. Black, dead-blood bruises and livid yellow and brown railway-tracklike scars covered this wrecked human landscape. Some of the children looked like impossible survivors of accidents where they should have been allowed to die quickly if there was any mercy in the world. Every bit of them seemed to be either bandages, brutally exposed, or bleeding freely. A number of these shattered, blasted «children» had apparently been propped-up, because many of them fell slowly over as we walked past.
There was no sound. No cries or screams or groans came from any of them. What made it worse was a soft, smoky-white fog which hung everywhere around us and blotted out any background that might have lessened the immediacy of the scene.
Pepsi held my hand and led me through this hell of pink-and-powder-blue pajamas, stained gauze bandages small bodies which should have been on swings, in sandboxes, on little bicycles that still had training wheels on the back.