The Harley-Davidson growled on down the hill to the lanes where you waited for the next ferry. A moment later they heard another engine, and a car appeared, a big, old, finned monster, peppermint white with red roof and trim. It slowed as it passed by Ethan and Jennifer T., then stopped.
Mr. Chiron Brown rolled down his window. He looked surprised but not, Ethan would have said, happy to see the children. He shook his head.
“Well,” he said. His eyes were shining and for a moment Ethan thought he might be about to cry. “Let this be a lesson. Don’t never listen to a crazy old man when the old Coyote be workin’ one of his thangs.” A tear rolled down his cheek. “I let them poor creatures down.”
No, Ethan thought. I let them down. “I struck out,” he said.
“Nah,” Mr. Brown said. “Don’t blame yourself. It’s like you said. You too young. In the old days, not so long ago, we used to be able to afford to bring ’em along a little bit. Season ’em up. Hell, it took U. S. Grant most of his natural life to finally find his stroke.”
“Hey, where are you going?” Jennifer T. said. A pickup truck appeared at the top of Ferrydock Hill and came down towards them, slowing as it neared the white Cadillac. “Are you leaving?”
Ringfinger admitted that he was headed for home.
“Where is your home?” Ethan said.
“Oh, I doesn’t have no fixed abode, not here in the Middlin’. But lately I’ve been livin’ down in Tacoma.”
“What’s the Middling?” Jennifer T. said.
“The Middlin’? You standin’in it. It’s everythin’. All this here local world you livin’ in.”
The pickup had settled in behind Mr. Brown’s car. Its driver tried to be patient for a few seconds, then began irritably to honk. Mr. Brown ignored or seemed not to hear. Another car rolled in from the top of the hill, with a third right behind it.
“So is it… is it all over?” Ethan said.
“Well, I ain’t as up on my mundology as I ought to be, which is a word signifyin’ the study of the Worlds. I ain’t sure how many galls we started out with, back before Coyote’s mischief commenced. And I couldn’t say how many we got left now. But there wasn’t never very many, even in the glory times. And Coyote been hackin’ and choppin’ on ’em for a long, long time now.”
“And so now, what? Now the whole universe is going to come to an end?”
“It always was goin’ to,” Mr. Brown said. “Now it’s just happenin’ a little bit sooner.”
“Ethan? Jennifer T.?” The driver of the second car, behind the pickup truck, had rolled down her window now. “You kids all right?”
“Yeah,” said Ethan and Jennifer T. Ethan saw how they must look to Mrs. Baldwin, one of the secretaries in the office at school, hanging around the southend ferry dock, talking to some weird old guy in a Cadillac.
“Well,” Mr. Brown said, rolling his window up most of the way.” Look like I’m holdin’ things up.” He put the car in gear with a lurch. The big engine coughed and roared. “You kids enjoy the rest of your summer.”
“Wait!” Ethan said, as the drivers, angry now, swerved around Mr. Brown’s car and took off one after the other down the hill. “Isn’t there anything we can do—I can do—to stop it?”
“You doesn’t know magic. You doesn’t know baseball.” Mr. Brown looked at Jennifer T. “You knows a little about both of them, I reckon, but not much besides. “He shook his head. “Plus, you children. Tell me how you going to stop Ragged Rock?”
Ethan and Jennifer T. had no reply to this. Mr. Brown rolled his window all the way and drove off. Ethan and Jennifer T. started the long walk back to her house, which was closer to Southend than Ethan’s. For a long time they didn’t say anything. What can you say, after all, about the end of the world? Ethan was deeply disturbed by the memory of the ruined Birchwood, and by the thought of all those ferishers carted off to be made into horrible little grey bat things. And every time he closed his eyes, he saw the tip of a little red tail, disappearing into a world of shadows. But he could not help being cheered by the fact that when asked, Mr. Brown had not said, There is nothing to be done. Merely that he didn’t think there was anything Ethan and Jennifer T. could do.
Ethan tried to imagine how the conversation would go when he tried to explain to his father about the ferishers, and Ragged Rock. Few things made Mr. Feld truly angry, but one thing that did was when people insisted that there was more to the world than what you could see, hear, touch, or otherwise investigate with tools and your five good senses. That there was a world behind the world, or beyond it. An afterlife, say. Mr. Feld felt that people who believed in other worlds were simply not paying enough attention to this one. He had been insistent with Ethan that Dr. Feld was gone forever, that all of her, everything that had made her so uniquely and wonderfully her, was in the ground, where it would all return to the elements and minerals it was made of. This satisfied Mr. Feld, or so he said. He would not look kindly on tales of fairies and skrikers and shadows that could come to life and carry off werefoxes into the sky. And yet Ethan could think of no one else to go to for help. He decided he was going to have to tell his father some version of the truth. And then Mr. Feld would call Nan Finkel, the therapist that Ethan had been seeing on and off since their arrival on Clam Island, and Nan Finkel, with her two thick braids that were so long she could sit on them, would have him put in a hospital for disturbed children, and that would be that.
“Jennifer T.,” he said. They had been walking for half an hour in silence, and were nearly to the Rideout place. “Nobody is going to believe us.”
“I was thinking that.”
“You know it’s true, right?”
“Everything is true.” Jennifer T. spat on the ground. Her spitting was as professional in quality as the rest of her game. “That’s what Albert always says.”
“I know. I’ve heard him say it.”
They had reached the gap in the trees where a teetering old mailbox, perforated with bullet and BB holes, was painted with Jennifer T.’s last name. One of the dogs came tearing towards them, a big black mutt with his pink tongue flying like a flag. There was a little green parakeet riding on his shoulder.
“We can tell the old ladies,” Jennifer T. said. “They believe a lot of even crazier stuff than this.”
THE HOUSE WHERE Jennifer T. lived had two bedrooms. In one slept Jennifer T. and the little twins, Darrin and Dirk. In the other slept Gran Billy Ann and her sisters, Beatrice and Shambleau. The toilet was attached to the house and had a roof over it, but it was outside. You had to go out the back door to get to it. There were seven to nine dogs, and from time to time the cats became an island scandal. You came in through the living room, where there were three immense reclining chairs, so large that they left barely enough room for a small television set. One chair was red plaid, one was green plaid, and one was white leather. They vibrated when you pushed a certain button. The old ladies sat around vibrating and reading romance novels. They were big ladies, and they needed big chairs. They had a collection of over seven thousand five hundred romance novels. They had every novel Barbara Cartland ever wrote, all of the Harlequin romances, all the Silhouette and Zebra and HeartQuest books. The paperbacks were piled in stacks that reached almost
