The Book of Sight Page 10

  “Well, this book isn’t exactly English, is it?” said Eve. “As the Dund would say, ‘You never know until you try.’”

  The house where Dominic lived with his grandparents was in the foothills outside of town. It was made from adobe and was obviously very old, but an inviting wooden porch looked over a beautiful garden surrounded by a homemade wooden fence.

  Dominic’s grandmother was in the garden, using a hoe to dig weeds out from around a row of perfect rose bushes. She was a little woman with long white hair in a braid down her back and a slight curve to her spine, but she wielded the hoe with as much energy as Alex could have done. On the porch, an old man with the most wrinkled brown skin Alex had ever seen was asleep in a rocking chair.

  The old woman in the garden looked up as they approached and leaned on her hoe, smiling widely. “Dominico, mijo. Trajiste unos amigos.”

  Dominic leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. “Si, abuela. Son unos chicos que conocí ayer. Le presento a Adam y a Alex y a Eve y a Logan.” They all smiled at the mention of their names. “Guys, this is my abuela. Abue, tenemos unas preguntas para usted.”

  “Preguntas para mi? Que tiene una vieja como yo que interesa a los jovenes?”

  “Tiene que ver con el cuento que siempre me contabas cuando era niño, lo del rey y el círculo de arboles. Ellos tienen un libro con ese cuento.”

  “En serio? Un libro? Entonces no hace falta que yo cuente la historia. No sé que mas tengo para ayudarlos. Pero contesto todas las preguntas que tienen…si puedo. Vamos adentro. Si no tengo respuestas, por lo menos tengo galletas y limonada.”

  She turned and began to hobble quickly into the house.

  “She says to come inside,” said Dominic. “She has cookies and lemonade, but she doesn’t think she knows anything that will help you.”

  Us, thought Alex. You mean that she doesn’t know anything that will help us. You’re a part of this, too, you know, whether you like it or not.

  Inside the big kitchen, they all took seats around the wooden table while Dominic’s grandmother quickly poured tall glasses of lemonade and set out a plate of sugar cookies. They each smiled and thanked her as she handed the glasses around. Finally, when Dominic convinced her that they were all comfortable and had everything they needed, she sat down. Her own glass held plain water.

  “Ahora, que quieren saber de esta viejita?”

  “She’s ready for your questions,” translated Dominic.

  After a moment’s awkward pause, Adam spoke up. “We mostly want to know if she’s ever seen a book like this before.” He slid it across the table.

  The old woman picked up the book in her gnarled hands and felt the soft leather cover. “Es lindo. Un libro hermoso.” She looked inside. “Nunca vi un libro asi. No lo puedo leer. Esta en ingles?”

  “No se, abue. Me parece que es otra idioma. Pero se puede leer un poquito igual.”

  She looked at it some more and then shook her head. “No entiendo nada. Lo siento, no conozco este libro.”

  “She’s never seen anything like it before. And she can’t read it, either.”

  Alex could see how disappointed Adam was. She wasn’t surprised, though. After all, Dominic had said his grandmother only heard the story from her father.

  “The story you used to tell Dominic,” she said. “You heard it from your father?”

  Dominic translated and listened to her reply. “She says yes, that he told her the story when she was a little girl. She thinks he heard it from his father. It is a very old story.”

  “What about the painting?” asked Logan. “You said she has a painting with the words gendel sea on it.”

  Dominic asked his grandmother something in Spanish. She replied, and he got up and went up the stairs.

  Left alone with the old abuela, the kids felt a little awkward. She began to offer around the plate of cookies again, urging them in her beautiful Spanish to eat more. Alex wasn’t hungry, but the cookies were really good, so it wasn’t much of a sacrifice to take another one.

  In a moment, Dominic came back with the painting held in both hands. It was bigger than Alex expected and had what looked like a hand-carved wooden frame. When he turned it toward her, Alex sucked her breath in quickly. It was beautiful. The dark cave that gaped in front of the young man was terrifying, but his face showed no fear. The colors were exquisite and the light from the torch in the man’s hand seemed to actually glow, but Alex couldn’t take her eyes off the man’s face. Why did it seem so familiar?

  “Can you ask her where she got this painting?” breathed Adam.

  After a short exchange in Spanish, Dominic looked surprised. He said nothing until Adam prompted him, “What did she say?”

  “She said this one isn’t the one she brought from Mexico with her. She said my mother brought this one home not long before I was born.”

  There was a silence. Alex turned from the painting to look at Dominic, but she couldn’t read anything in his face. None of them knew what had happened to Dominic’s parents. He’d mentioned that first night that he lived with his grandparents but had never said anything about his mom or dad.

  Alex could tell that no one knew what to say or do. But she hated how people always seemed afraid of offending her by mentioning her mother, so she decided to just be direct.

  “Did your mother die?” she asked.

  Adam looked down uncomfortably, but Alex kept her eyes fixed steadily on Dominic’s face.

  “No,” he said. “She’s still alive, but she’s very sick. A couple of years ago, she started getting worse, so they sent her to live on my great-grandfather’s farm in Mexico. I stayed here to be in school and help my grandparents.”

  “Do you get to talk to her often?” asked Alex.

  “There’s no phone in the village where she’s at. Once a year she goes to the city to call me for my birthday. She writes me letters pretty often, though.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alex. “You must miss her.”

  “Yeah.”

  After another pause, Dominic leaned the painting against the wall. “So, you’re no closer to understanding anything that you were when you came. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” said Eve. “You told us that would happen. And we did get some awesome cookies and lemonade. Gracias, Mrs. Valterra.”

  “Hernandez,” said Dominic. “Valterra was my dad’s name.”

  “Oh, right. Gracias, Mrs. Hernandez.”

  The little lady smiled as they all thanked her, and before anyone could protest, she’d taken another dozen cookies from the cupboard and wrapped them in paper. She handed these to Eve and shook her head firmly to indicate that she would not be refused. Alex left the cozy kitchen feeling like she’d just met the definition of the word “grandmother”.

  On the front porch, Adam looked around at everyone. “So where to now? Should we take Dominic to see the Gylf?”

  “Actually,” said Logan. “I think he has something to show us.”

  Dominic whirled around. “How did you know that?”

  Logan shrugged. “You looked like you were trying to decide something. And you kept looking at that one spot off in the woods over there.”

  “Logan’s a little bit psychic,” said Adam.

  Dominic smiled, but Alex thought he looked uncomfortable with the idea.

  “So what do you have to show us?” asked Eve.

  “Well, you asked if I’d ever seen anything that no one else could see.” He was leading the way through the garden gate and toward the trees across the dirt road. “I found this when I was a little kid and I used to love to play here. But one time I showed it to a kid from school, and he said it was just a bunch of tree roots. It’s…well, you’ll see.”

  Beyond the tree line, the ground dropped away sharply. Alex soon found herself half sliding down a leaf-covered embankment.

  They all finally came crackling and crunching to a stop at the bottom, and Dominic led the way off to the left. About fifty feet from where they starte
d, a huge tree blocked the way. Dominic skirted this and stopped on the other side. Alex was the last in line, so she heard the others’ exclamations of wonder before she saw anything. Then she, too, rounded the tree and felt her heart constrict.

  There in front of her was a tiny village. On this side, the giant tree’s roots looped up out of the ground in weird natural formations. But these had been shaped and carved into small houses, and beyond the roots, the embankment was also full of tiny doorways and windows. There were smoothed places that must have been roads and broken down fences around what might have once been gardens. Whoever had lived here had been very small. The doorways were only about two feet tall. The occupants were obviously long gone though. Weeds had grown up over most of the fences and the houses in the embankment were beginning to crumble.

  “It looks like something from a movie,” said Eve. “Like hobbits are going to come out of those doors or something.”

  “Looks a little small for hobbits,” said Adam absently.

  Eve laughed. “Sorry I’m not up on my hobbit dimensions.”

  “So you found this years ago?” asked Logan.

  Dominic nodded.

  “And that kid you brought here couldn’t see a village? That’s crazy. You’d have to be blind to miss it,” said Adam.

  “That’s pretty much what I thought,” said Dominic. “But I never brought anyone else here anyway. Then last night you guys were talking about meeting little people in the woods and I thought maybe they were the same sort of people who made this place.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Alex. “These places would be a little too big for them, I think. Besides, their home didn’t look anything like recognizable houses. They seem to like to…blend in more.”

  “Just because we recognize these as houses doesn’t mean they’re obvious to everyone,” said Eve.

  “True,” Adam said. “But I agree with Alex. These don’t feel like Gylf houses.”

  “So who did make them?” asked Logan.

  Adam shrugged.

  “I guess we can add that to our list of mysteries,” said Dominic, and Alex noticed that he was including himself with them now. “I’m just glad you guys saw what I saw.”

  “This must have been an amazing place to play as a kid,” Alex said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you guys think there are places like this all over?” asked Eve. “I mean, not necessarily just like this…but, you know, places that no one notices…places that are like something from another world. Who knows what you’ll find around the next corner and all that?”

  “I’m starting to think there are,” said Alex.

  “Just look at all we’ve found since we first read the book, and it’s only been a couple of weeks,” Adam said.

  “So even though it feels like we don’t know anything at all, we’re not totally in the dark. At least now we know how ignorant we were before,” said Eve.

  Alex hadn’t thought of it that way, but she knew immediately that Eve was right. Whoever sent them those books wasn’t trying to keep secrets from them. They were trying to reveal secrets. Just maybe not all at once.

  “Hey guys, look at this,” said Logan. He was kneeling in front of one of the doorways in the embankment, peering inside. Alex knelt next to him. It was very dark inside, but a small patch of light from a window fell on what must have been the wooden front door, now lying on the floor inside. And carved into the middle of the door was a symbol that Alex recognized immediately: a circle within a circle within a circle.

  “I think the next place we need to show Dominic is the Redoubt,” said Logan.

  13

  Selling Rotten Fruit

  When Logan woke the next morning, he had an instant feeling that something was wrong. In the first place, he wasn’t in his own bed. But that wasn’t anything unusual. Sam, his little brother, frequently had nightmares, and lying down next to him on his bed was the easiest way to calm him down.

  So why did he have that nagging feeling of having left something important undone?

  There was Sam next to him, fast asleep, and Darcy was snoring a little bit in the room she shared with their mom. Everything seemed exactly the way it always was.

  He got up and shuffled down the cramped hall to the kitchen. The little clock on the microwave said 7:09. His mom would be coming home from work soon, tired out after another long graveyard shift. He’d better put on some water. She usually liked a cup of tea before falling into her bed.

  Turning from the stove, his eyes fell on the door, and he realized that it was unlocked. Well, that explained the feeling of having forgotten something. How stupid could he be? He always locked that door, but he must have forgotten after his mom left last night. He had been a little off, getting home from the Redoubt just barely in time for her to leave. She’d been worried, and he had felt bad. Still, he thought he’d locked it, out of habit if nothing else.

  Then an idea slammed into him like a freight train. He turned and stumbled back down to his bedroom. The pillow, he’d left it under the pillow. But it wasn’t there. Dropping the pillow on the floor, he rifled through the sheets and blankets. Nothing. In desperation, he pulled the bed out from the wall and looked behind and under it. No book.

  He took one calming breath and tried to think. Yes, he had definitely put the book under his pillow when he went to bed last night. They’d all agreed that was the thing to do, to make sure it was right there with them at all times. But then he’d been awakened by Sam’s crying at 2:00 a.m. The book had been the furthest thing from his mind.

  Still, in order to steal it, someone would have had to come right here into this room where both boys were sleeping and take it without either of them waking up. The thought of it made Logan turn cold. Someone, a stranger, opening the door, walking down the hall past a sleeping Darcy, entering the room, passing right next to him and Sam, maybe standing over them in the dark, feeling around in his bed and finding the book. And none of them had noticed anything. What if the thief had decided to do more than just steal the book? They’d all been sleeping and vulnerable.

  Logan stopped himself. There was no point in imagining things after the fact. They were all fine. Only the book was missing. (Only the book, but already Logan was feeling its loss like an ache in his chest.)

  He needed to be very sure. Slower this time, and methodically, Logan searched through his sheets and blankets and in and around the bed. He knew he wouldn’t find it, but he forced himself to be thorough.

  A shrill whistling sound finally put an end to his search. He headed back to the kitchen to make tea and prepare himself to break the bad news to the others.

  • • • • •

  They took it just as hard as he knew they would. Sitting in a loose circle in the Redoubt again, the faces all looked back at him bleakly. He was a little surprised (and lot relieved) that none of them showed any blame.

  “But it was in the same room with you?” repeated Eve for the third time.

  “Yeah.”

  “That is seriously disturbing.”

  Logan nodded and continued picking at the grass in front of him.

  “We have to do something!” burst out Adam. “Whoever is doing this knows who we are and where we live. And if Alex is right, they were listening to us right here the other day. Maybe they’re listening right now, and we wouldn’t know because we can’t see them.”

  “What about your idea of trying to lure the thief and then trap him?” said Eve.

  Alex looked uncomfortable. “I really don’t think we should be discussing this here. We are still being watched. I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, it may not be very secure here,” said Adam. “But where are we going to go? I think we’ve already established that our houses aren’t safe either.”

  “I know,” insisted Alex, “but that doesn’t mean we have to discuss secret strategies in a place where we know we’re being spied on.”

  “Do we know it?” asked Dominic.

&nbs
p; “Yes, we do,” snapped Adam and Alex at the same time. Everyone saw Alex give Adam a look of gratitude, but Logan thought he might have been the only one who noticed the satisfaction on Adam’s face when he received it.

  “I’m just saying that feelings may or may not be accurate,” said Dominic.

  “Alex’s are,” Adam said with finality.

  Dominic didn’t respond, but his face said he wasn’t convinced.

  “Let’s take another look around,” suggested Logan. “We didn’t see anything the last time, but I've heard that sometimes you can suddenly see things you didn’t notice before.”

  The laughter at this broke the tension, and they all scattered around the circle, some studying the branches, some the ground.

  After a minute, Eve gave a shrill whistle of excitement. “Hey, guys, look at this!” She was brushing away a tall stand of grass in the middle of the circle of trees, uncovering a small ring of flat stones embedded in the ground. But no one was looking at what she had found. Their attention had been attracted by something much more colorful.

  As soon as Eve had whistled, something small and brilliantly pink had appeared in the branches over her head and then tumbled to the ground about two feet behind her. Adam and Logan remained frozen for a second, staring at the pink thing (Was it an animal?) on the ground. Alex stepped forward and opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Dominic had darted across the circle and snatched it up in both hands. They all closed in to see what he had caught.

  It was a lizard, very much like a little gecko, but with an abnormally large head. It must have had similar qualities to a chameleon because the hot pink color was already fading, and it was taking on the even brown tones of Dominic’s hands. It wasn’t struggling at all, but its eyes were darting in every direction. Logan had no doubt that the moment it saw a chance to escape, it would take it.

  “I think we’ve found our spy,” said Dominic.

  “Unless it’s just a chameleon,” Adam suggested, raising his eyebrows.

  “What do you think?” Dominic held the creature up to Alex.