The Hidden Boy (3 page)

“What's the matter?” came Ma's voice from the front of the busmarine.

Bea stood up slowly and turned to face her. She did not want to meet her mother's eye. She opened her mouth, but it was a struggle to get the words out.

“It's Theo,” she said. “He's gone.”

T
hrough the moonlit forest crept a blank-faced boy named Ike Ledbetter. He was twelve years old, or maybe fourteen, or nine. He had never been able to grasp numbers, which buzzed around his head and refused to settle long enough to make sense. At the first sign of the moon changing he had been sent to Cambio Falls to spy on the new arrivals. He slipped barefoot through the woods. The soles of his feet were leathery and hard. When he walked on stone floors it sounded as if he were wearing shoes, but among the trees he was the quietest of a stealthy clan.

Well before he reached the waterfall he knew that something was amiss. The birds were passing alarms to one another when they should have been settling down for the night, and he could hear tiny shouts carried on
the breeze. “Ee-oh,” he heard, repeated in several voices, some high and some low. As he got closer the word turned into
Theo
. He wondered who Theo could be, and why he was being summoned so urgently. How many things could there be that wouldn't wait until tomorrow? None of the voices he could hear was familiar to him, and his curiosity drew him closer to the sound.

When he reached the edge of the trees he stopped behind a trunk to size up the situation. Bontoc was back, as expected, and he had a new busload of strangers with him. There was always a certain amount of shouting and upset when strangers arrived, and Bontoc was well used to it, but Ike saw that it was different this time. The captain would usually be leading the way along the path to Bell Hoot by now, but instead he was sitting on a mossy rock by the falls, scratching his head in a puzzled fashion. A thin lady was shouting at him, her arms waving about like spider's legs and her face just inches from his. She had drawings on her skin.

“That's not good enough!” she was yelling. “You brought us here. You
must
know where he could be. He can't have just
vanished
!”

There was an enormous splash from the pool. Someone had jumped in, but Ike did not see who it was. It sounded like a water buffalo. A skinny girl followed
the first splash, leaping into the water as though there were no oilsnakes or slimfish to worry about. There were more people still on the Blue Moon Mobile, pulling up the seat cushions and tossing suitcases out onto the grassy bank, and still shouting for Theo. Evidently Theo was lost. But how could you lose someone on the Blue Moon Mobile?

An old lady appeared suddenly beside Ike, giving him the fright of his life. It's not easy to sneak up on someone who's an expert at sneaking up on people, and since Ike was just such an expert he was not used to being caught in this way. The old lady had big round eyes like a nightbird's, and she grabbed his wrist with a strong grip. Her expression was determined.

“Where do children go,” she said in an urgent whisper, “who are lost in the crossing?”

Ike Ledbetter shook his head. “I never heard of it happening before, ma'am,” he said. “It's just the cats and frogs and parakeets that disappear, usually.”

The old lady's grip loosened. She looked beaten for a moment; then she pulled herself together. “What's your name?” she asked, fixing him with a keen eye.

Ike was taken aback. He was supposed to be finding out about the new people, not the other way around. Still, he could not think of a tricky answer in time, and
the truth came out instead. Some of it, anyway. “Ike, ma'am,” he said. “Just Ike.”

“Well, Just Ike,” said the old lady, “if you see a small boy on your travels, bring him to Captain Bontoc. Don't let him out of your sight. You know Captain Bontoc, I presume?”

Ike nodded. He felt pretty sure he'd be in deep trouble if he did what the lady asked, but it didn't seem a good thing to mention that now. “Okay,” he said, and since the conversation seemed to be at an end, he turned and disappeared swiftly among the trees.

 

On board the Blue Moon Mobile, Bea Flint was standing on her tiptoes on the bench where Theo had last been seen. She could just see over the metal lip of the overhead luggage rack. There was no Theo there, either, just a thick layer of dust that made her sneeze so hard she almost fell backward off the seat. Outside the busmarine Ma was still shouting at the bewildered Captain Bontoc.

“Then bring us back through!” she yelled. “He must have gotten off the bus before…before we went into that
thing
!”

“We can't go back through,” said Bontoc. He gestured
at the pale blue moon as though that explained everything. “It's too late.”

“Now then,” came Granny Delphine's stern voice, “it seems that Theo is not on the bus and not in the water. Where else could he be?”

Bontoc would not meet Granny Delphine's eye. “Disappeared,” he said. He wiped his brow with his sleeve. “Must have had a pet hidden. Him or one of the other kids, but up till now it's always been the animal that goes pop. Never the child.” He looked up suddenly. “He wasn't
asleep
, was he?”

“Asleep?” said Ma. “What if he was? What do you mean, ‘disappeared'? Disappeared where?”

“We don't know,” he said. “Somewhere between here and the Other Side. All that's left usually is a meow or a cheep, trapped in the Squeak Jar. Nobody knows how it happens, but nine souls is the limit. Always has been.”

“We didn't have any pets with us,” said Ma. “We left the neighbors in charge of Theo's meerkat.”

Bea stepped down slowly from the bench. A cold tide of dread and guilt was rising in her chest. She reached out for Theo's backpack and quietly opened the zipper a couple of inches. A nose poked out immediately like
a twitching brown button. Bea glanced at Gabby, who was crawling mechanically toward the front of the bus, her head swiveling as she looked under each seat in turn. Bea pushed the meerkat's nose gently back inside and closed the zipper. She had known that Theo intended to smuggle Nails in his backpack. No, she admitted to herself, it was more than that. She had helped him at the last minute to line the backpack with a plastic bag and stock it with food for the trip. Now Theo was gone, and Nails remained. Could Bontoc be right about the reason for Theo's disappearance? Could she really be to blame?

She pushed the idea to the back of her mind with a great effort and looked out of the window. Clockwork Gabby was ratcheting across the grass now, holding the thick glass jar out toward the captain. Bea slung the backpack over her shoulder and followed her outside. Before Gabby could hand over the jar, Ma grabbed it from her with a wild look in her eyes, and began to unscrew the lid.

Bontoc leaped to his feet. “Don't open it!” he yelped. He rummaged in his pocket and produced a small wooden horn with a flat end, like the one a midwife uses to listen to a baby's heartbeat. It had
BLUE MOON
ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME ADVENTURE HOLIDAYS
stamped in gold lettering down one side, and it looked something like this:

He took the Squeak Jar from Ma's shaking hand, and placed the mouth of the horn on the lid and the flat end to his ear. Bea, Gabby, Ma and Granny Delphine watched him closely. In the pool behind them Bald Mountain surfaced for a moment, spat out a stream of water, spluttered, “THEO!” for good measure, and submerged again.

“Well?” whispered Ma.

Captain Bontoc shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

Ma's knees buckled suddenly and she sat down heavily in the grass.

“Let me try,” said Bea. She put the end of the horn to her ear and held her breath.

Now, the pool at the foot of Cambio Falls is not the quietest of places at the best of times, and on this particular night it was noisier than usual. Thirty tons of water per minute thundering into a pool make a hissing roar that you could hide a lot of smaller sounds in. Add to that the rustling of a million leaves, the creaking of branches, the chirping of blats, the who-hooting of howls, and a 250-pound man surfacing from the churning water and blowing like a whale every sixty seconds, and it would take an extraordinarily good listener to find in that din the voice of a lost boy with two missing teeth.

As luck would have it, Bea had always been an extraordinarily good listener. What was more, she knew from experience that if Theo needed to be heard he would find a way. She closed her eyes and put her finger in her free ear. One by one she drew aside the sounds she did not want, like a series of curtains, until right in the middle of the noise she heard a voice. It was thin and faint but unmistakably Theo's.

“What am I going to do
now
?” said the voice.

“Theo!” whispered Bea, as loudly as she dared. She felt her voice should match the volume of Theo's in order to reach him, although that didn't seem entirely
logical. There was no answer from Theo, but she could still hear him sniffling somewhere in the distance.

“Can you hear him?” asked Captain Bontoc.

Bea nodded, not wanting to take her ear from the horn.

“Quick,” said Bontoc in a loud whisper, “ask him to describe where he is.”

“Where are you, Theo?” asked Bea. Despite the seriousness of the situation she felt slightly foolish speaking to a jar.

She strained to hear Theo's voice again. In the background she could hear Bontoc whispering eagerly to Gabby, “If we can find the boy we might find my parrot, Trigger. Lost him on my first crossing thirty years ago.”

“Right here, of course,” said Theo's voice, even fainter than before. “Where are we?”

Bea took her ear from the horn. It was a good question. “Where exactly are we?” she asked Captain Bontoc.

Ma took the jar from Bea before Bontoc could answer. She put her ear slowly to the horn, as though expecting to hear nothing, and wanting to put off the moment of disappointment. She listened for a long
time, then looked up at Bea and shook her head. “It's the shock,” she said, and she got unsteadily to her feet. Her voice was trembling. “It's playing tricks with your imagination.”

“I
heard
him!” said Bea. “I'm sure of it.” She was not so sure of it, really. It did seem unlikely that her missing brother's voice would be speaking from a glass jar with a screw-top lid.

Captain Bontoc tugged the creases from his blazer and attempted an air of authority. “Best thing is to get ourselves to Bell Hoot at once and consult the chart. Wherever he is, he has to show up on the chart. Follow me, if you please. Look lively!” He scooped up a number of cases, balancing some on his head and shoulders. He was about to start up the path when he was arrested by a bellow from the edge of the pool.

“Where do you think you're going?” spluttered Bald Mountain. He was clinging to a rock, half in and half out of the water, trying to regain his breath. Pond water ran from his nostrils and soaked into his bushy beard.

“You won't find the boy in the water, sir,” replied Captain Bontoc. “The Blue Moon Mobile is completely sealed when she's under. Couldn't get an amoeba in or
out of her. Tight as a drum, she is.”

Ma stared around her quickly, as though a last look might reveal Theo standing right there by the bus; then she turned and marched rapidly after the captain, the Squeak Jar clutched tightly under her arm, despite its apparent emptiness. The others followed, stumbling up the path with whatever they could carry, Pa and Phoebe leaving trails of silvery water behind them in the moonlight. The path crested a rise, and they could see pointed roofs among the trees ahead of them.

Ma had drawn ahead of Captain Bontoc, who nonetheless kept up a surprising pace under the weight of an entire family's luggage.

Pa muttered testily at the rear. “Don't see why we couldn't bring the bus,” he said.

“Too noisy,” called Captain Bontoc over his shoulder. “It might attract…might wake people up, shipmate.”

They strode into the moonlit village, the captain and the tattooed lady setting the pace. Behind them came Bea Flint, her silver-haired granny, her enormous father, their clockwork lodger and the neighbors' girl, Phoebe Lu, who had yet to meet anything she feared.

“Beanos,” said Gabby as she clicked along. It was the first word she had spoken for many years, and her disused voice was no more than a whisper. Nobody heard but Bea, and she was so sure she must be mistaken that she didn't stop to wonder what it could mean.

Most of the wooden houses in the village were built about ten feet from the ground, supported by sturdy trees, as though their occupants feared that a river might change course and rush through the village at any moment. Chickens scratched around underneath the houses, and here and there pigs slumbered in the shadows. In the center of the village stood a large square building of pale gray stone, and it was to this building that Captain Bontoc was striding like an overladen ant. There were tall windows at intervals around the building. Above the door the words
BELL HOOT LIBRARY
were chiseled into the stone lintel.

The captain climbed the few steps to the door and deposited the luggage in an untidy pile. He fumbled in his pocket for a key, but Ma could not stand the wait. She planted her finger on the doorbell and held it there, while the shrill bell echoed inside the building. Bea glimpsed an expression on her face that she was more used to seeing on Granny Delphine's. Granny
Delphine was frowning and muttering to herself, and Pa kicked angrily at the top step as though it were the stone's fault that his little boy had vanished.