The Land of Yesterday Page 6

  “Is that your language?”

  One nodded. The other snickered. The balloon entered a thick layer of clouds. Perhaps this was what passed for Wordfartopotamus Syndrome in the outer atmosphere.

  Evil Tuesday knew no bounds.

  “I see. So, you can understand me, but I can’t understand you?” The friendly gnome nodded again, eyes fixed to the floor; the bad-mannered one grinned even wider. Cecelia groaned. “Is there a way you can tell me your names, if you have a plan, or what you know of my situation?” One nodded and the other shook his head. Cecelia threw her hands in the air. “Can you tell me anything at all?”

  The sweet one pressed his palms together as if in prayer and mouthed what looked like please to the grumpy one. A battle of waving hands and hats thrown to floor ensued. After the kind one stole the other’s hat and threatened to drop it over the basket’s edge, the grumpy one conceded and stepped forward. Head hung, he dug into his pocket and reluctantly handed her a sheet of glittery colored paper.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere, thank you.” Cecelia unfolded the note.

  Wild breezes ruffled the page. Fancily curled script ran up and down the letter, which read To Whom It May Concern: Please read this note aloud.

  Cecelia cleared her throat and did as the note advised.

  “Right. It says to please raise your hand if you are named Phantasmagoria?” Cecelia peered at the gnomes over the page. The happy gnome threw his hand high with excitement. “Very good. Pleased to meet you, Phantasmagoria.” Cecelia returned to the letter. “Next it says to bow if your name is Trystyng?” Mr. Cranky Pants, aka Trystyng, slid his hat off his head and bowed like a gentleman. Cecelia nodded and greeted him accordingly. “Hello, Trystyng. My name is Cecelia Andromeda Dahl, from Hungrig, a girl of eleven, who once resided happily at 2734 Saint-Exupéry Way and now exists in the depths of despair, permanently.”

  Trystyng farted.

  Phantasmagoria hid his face in his hands.

  Trystyng shrugged and then grinned.

  Cecelia opened her mouth to say How incredibly rude when the strangest thing happened instead. The corners of her lips did this weird thing where they turned up especially high; her chin quivered, not with sadness either but with the kind of laughter that started slow and then exploded. Phantasmagoria’s and Trystyng’s green eyes popped big as lollipops as they erupted into a fit of giggle tears with her.

  Laughing while her family was in danger made Cecelia feel guilty afterward, but for one shining moment, her worries, anger, and doubts had all melted away. She’d felt warm, as if the light from her lantern ran through her veins, and she wanted to hang on to that feeling. Cecelia hoped, sometime soon, to feel that warmth again.

  The gnomes readjusted their hats and dried their laugh tears. Cecelia set her eyes back on the letter. “Well, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s see what other gnome facts we can find.

  “The author goes on to state that this balloon is called the Dröm Ballong, which, loosely translated, means Dream Balloon. It also says that you’re from the Stratosphere of Now, and that you each hold the title of Aeronaut, as well as the privileged job of navigating the Intergalactic Taxi to Yesterday.”

  Hope filled Cecelia. That map did lead to the Land of Yesterday. With their services, she would get her mother and father back for sure.

  The gnomes pointed at the note.

  Keep reading.

  “Right. It says the operators of Dröm Ballong number nineteen, Phantasmagoria and Trystyng, have come to help the one reading this note find the answers they seek while navigating the perilous path to Yesterday in the safest way possible. Also, to help solve dilemmas that may or may not include the sudden appearance of cages in bodies, self-igniting and extinguishing lanterns, houses that switch from kind to evil, strange-language translation, evil-weekday possessions and how to stop them, crushing guilt, debilitating fear, and much, much more.”

  The last part consisted of such fine print she had to squint to read it, which caused her to speak extra fast. “Trystyng and Phantasmagoria may or may not be able to retrieve lost mothers, ghost brothers, housenapped fathers, or reform kindly houses that have gone over to the dark side.” She glanced at them with worry.

  They shrugged with an air of apology and tapped the note for her to continue.

  The print on the next line was so small she needed to bring the paper to the tip of her nose to read it. “If passengers of Intergalactic Taxi number nineteen should find themselves stranded in space without a hope in the galaxy of being rescued”—she cut them a weary glance; they rolled their hands for her to go on—“said passengers would do well to remember this riddle and employ its answer forthwith: What is an instrument of metal, man, and wind, and music to an Aeronaut’s ears?”

  A strand of Cecelia’s hair scratched her head as she continued. “Lastly and most important, the aforementioned gnomes may or may not turn into animals at any given time while entering forbidden lands, and under no circumstances are they to interfere with the process of those so filled with sadness, guilt, and regret that they turn themselves into—”

  Smoke billowed up from the page. Cecelia dropped it with a scream as it burst into flames. Phantasmagoria quickly scooped it up and tossed it over the edge while Trystyng giggled inappropriately.

  “Why did that happen?” She watched the flaming page drop into the clouds below. “I never got to finish the last sentence.”

  Trystyng hurried to the Dröm Ballong’s edge and cheerily waved the letter goodbye. Phantasmagoria, with his back to his partner, opened his mouth to answer her question. Remembering the last time Phantasmagoria tried to speak and almost blew her overboard, Cecelia cried, “No! Never mind. Forget I asked.” Phantasmagoria shut his mouth with a pout and Cecelia exhaled with relief. “No more talking, I think. That letter provided answers enough for now.”

  The Dröm Ballong sailed on a river of golden clouds. They were the exact shape and color of the lumpy pancakes her mother used to make every Saturday morning. Her father would flip them while telling bad jokes and Celadon poured too much syrup. Recalling these happy mornings caused Cecelia’s heart to throb with a bottomless ache.

  But this was no time for sadness or contemplation of lumpy pancake clouds. Cecelia had her family to save. “Pretending to be courageous is the first step on the road to actual bravery,” her father once told her after a run-in with a ten-legged Burmese biting spider. Once, she had been fearless. Maybe one day she could be again.

  Standing at the Dröm Ballong’s edge, far above the atmosphere, sunbeams arced outward in ten thousand shards of light. Cecelia tried to ignore the anxious look Trystyng and Phantasmagoria exchanged when they thought she wasn’t watching. The sort of look one friend gave another when they knew something horrible was about to happen.

  A look that said evil Tuesday wasn’t done with her yet.

  Chapter 10

  The Boy and His Sheep

  Every night after her brother fell and broke, Cecelia jerked awake at one minute past midnight: the exact time of Celadon’s fall. She’d bolt upright in bed to the same hideous thud. She’d tremble and gnaw her hair, and stare out the moony window as tears rolled down her cheeks. Then, after Cecelia had finally cried herself back to sleep, the nightmare that had been waiting would find her.

  Within this dark dream, Cecelia woke inside a cemetery with a wrought-iron fence. A giant silver-blue moon hung low. She’d walk alone between the tombstones, each one bearing her name. Her long hair, the same shade as the midnight sky, blew wraithlike around her—as if each strand searched for someone Cecelia could not see.

  “Hello?” she always called.

  Ill winds whistled through trees in reply. Black clouds zippered the blue moon into darkness. White mists rose from the earth between graves and assumed a child’s shape. Hundreds of ghosts wearing Celadon’s face reached out to her with icy hands, clawing her dress, trying to drag her into the ground with them.

  As Cece
lia broke into a run, a blue ghost, identical to her, crawled from the meandering mists and knelt before a separate grave, one that bore her brother’s name. “Help me,” the phantom girl cried, holding out her unnatural hand.

  But when she reached out to the ghost, it erupted into a colony of bats. Only then did Cecelia scream. Except the sound that exited her mouth was never a proper scream. It always came out as the hideous, deadly THUD.

  This time, when she bolted upright out of her nightmare, she’d been running toward a brightly lit lantern twined with daisies, desperate to capture its light.

  Cecelia found herself wedged between two snoring gnomes, one hand gripping her pen. She had left it in her pocket and was thankful she hadn’t lost it along the way.

  “Phantasmagoria, Trystyng, wake up.” Their hats pulled over their faces, Trystyng farted like a slow trombone and Phantasmagoria snorted so loud, the balloon trembled. Cecelia’s hair plugged her nose while she shook the sleeping gnomes. When she did, her middle crinkled ominously, across more of her than before.

  Cecelia inspected her midsection before they woke. The perimeters of her paperness had increased dramatically. The parchment of her skin ran from the tops of her hips all the way over the base of her ribs. Oh souls. If her body papered completely, she would no longer be a living thing, and would be unable to deliver her letter, bring her mother home, or rescue her father. Who would save them then?

  “Time is wasting, you two. Wake up.” They responded with trumpeting snores. Cecelia rolled her eyes. “Wake up, please.”

  The please did it. The gnomes jerked awake.

  Hats askew, they blinked at Cecelia, scanned the Dröm Ballong, and then sprang into action: checking maps, compasses, gas gauges, and jet-pack readings, and stowing the scraps of their last meal.

  All the while, Cecelia stared out at the everywhere sky. She couldn’t stop worrying—about her parents, Celadon, and Widdendream. Not even as the Dröm Ballong soared past nebulas close enough to touch. Not as Phantasmagoria and Trystyng shared a conversation in winds that nearly tossed her from the basket. Not even when they passed a blue planet inhabited solely by rabbits that winked and shouted “Hello there!” as Cecelia passed by. Not even as she wondered why people were so hard to understand when the language of animals seemed universal.

  And then, out of the east, Cecelia spotted a red planet, which harbored a patch of healthy spring daisies.

  Follow the daisies.

  Even though the blooms she’d followed into the Sea of Tears hadn’t led directly to her father as she had expected, a small something inside Cecelia felt the recurring daisies were important to finding her parents. That she could trust them, and they’d help her find her way home.

  Just as Cecelia was about to ask the gnomes about the intriguing red planet, Phantasmagoria poked Trystyng hard in the chest. Trystyng whipped around and poked him back. Eyes bulging, nostrils flared in astonishment, Phantasmagoria jutted a finger at the propane tanks and threw his hands in the air. Trystyng mouthed, Oh-oh. Then smacked his palm to his forehead and threw Cecelia a rope.

  “What?” Cecelia’s hope plummeted. “What does that mean?”

  Trystyng grimaced and pointed down. Phantasmagoria shook his head and gave Cecelia a look that said, He’s a mess, but he’s our mess. And without a second of warning, the fires that kept the balloon afloat sputtered and coughed and nearly died.

  “Oh, I see,” Cecelia said, holding tight to the rope. “We’re going down.”

  The Dröm Ballong skittered and whirled and crashed to a landing alongside a dilapidated refueling station. Different-sized cylindrical propane tanks, in many states of rust and shine, lay scattered haphazardly among the endless red desert. Cecelia climbed from the basket and stepped onto the rippling sands. She checked beneath her sweater and assessed any damage. Her dress and self were dented and dinged but otherwise intact. Apart from skewed hats and rumpled clothes, Phantasmagoria and Trystyng seemed fine. They stayed behind to refuel the tanks, while Cecelia went to explore, as starlit space glittered overhead.

  Hair bustling in every direction, thanks to the dry desert winds, Cecelia approached the daisies she’d spied from above. She stepped past pieces of scattered machinery poking from the rusty sands: metal bits and bolts, keys, corroded engines, plugs and cords in mad disarray. The wreck resembled the skeleton of a motorbike, but with wings. A royal purple blanket spread over the sand dunes alongside the smashed flying machine. Next to the blanket was a curious blond boy. A corral holding a midnight-blue sheep stood beside him. The boy was staring at her.

  And the boy looked awfully familiar. . . .

  Before Cecelia had learned to read, she used to sneak into Widdendream’s dim library. It was one of those dark and mysterious rooms with too many upward shelves to count, rolling ladders, and comfy chairs. The sort of place you went to get lost, to climb inside someone else’s dream and hide from annoying little brothers. One day, after a particularly horrific experience involving a spray hose and Celadon’s dirty diaper, Cecelia discovered a story about an intergalactic explorer who liked to draw elephants inside snakes that looked like lumpy hats. The main character was a boy adventurer who wore a cape, befriended a fox, and loved the most beautiful red rose. Without understanding the words, Cecelia had felt like she understood the story from the pictures alone.

  Something about this boy reminded her of that boy.

  Cecelia approached the boy with yellow curls now crouched on his heels beside the sheep’s pen. His inquisitive eyes followed every step she took. Eyes that said, I have a secret and maybe you know it and maybe you don’t, but either way, I’ll never tell.

  At the last second, she decided to approach the sheep first. “Hello,” Cecelia said. So far, she’d had good luck communicating with animals. Nevertheless, this one didn’t even bother to look up. It just kept chomping daisies, ignoring her.

  The boy giggled in hysterics beside her.

  Cecelia moved closer to the sheep and tried again. “Hello, good sheep. Can you understand me?”

  One bored sideways glance was all she got for her efforts until exactly one second later, when a question mark popped out of thin air over its head.

  Cecelia narrowed her eyes at the troubling punctuation.

  The yellow-haired boy laughed so hard he rolled onto his back and held his ribs until he cried. When he recovered from his fit of hilarity, the boy dusted himself off and approached Cecelia. “He’s lived here his entire life,” he said, drying his cheeks with one green shirtsleeve. “He only understands three things: eating flowers, this desert, and me.”

  Cecelia froze. “You understood me.” She gaped at the boy, her eyes big as space. “I’ve been having some trouble communicating with others, and worried I wouldn’t understand you either. But I do, and . . .” She peered harder into his sunny blue eyes. “Sorry, but you look so familiar. Do I know you from somewhere?”

  The boy bubbled over into another round of laughing fits before forcing himself to be serious. “You could say I’ve been around, if that’s what you mean. But him”—the boy aimed a thumb at the sheep—“he’s never left this planet. It’s his home. Together we run the refueling station. When we work together, we make a pretty good team.”

  “Hmm,” Cecelia replied, patting the beast’s wiry hair, the same shade as her own. “Does that mean you can understand him, then?”

  “I couldn’t at first.” The boy scratched behind the sheep’s twitching ears. “When we first got here, I had the prettiest rose in creation and I loved her deeply. The first chance my sheep got, he ate it.” Cecelia cringed. The sheep chewed on without remorse. The boy continued. “I was hurt and sad and angry. For a while, I couldn’t understand anyone or anything.” Wordfartopotamus strikes again. “Still, I needed to understand why my sheep would do such a terrible thing. So I bravely studied his actions and reactions to the world around him. His habits and schedules, hopes and fears, until I understood everything about my sheep, including why he at
e my rose.”

  “Then why did he do it?”

  The boy glanced lovingly at his sheep. “He didn’t know any better. It happened before our planet had daisies. I forgot to latch the gate to his pen, and in his hunger, he ate it.” The boy sighed. “I do miss my rose. But she’s not really gone. After I lost her, I started seeing her beauty in everything.” He smiled knowingly at Cecelia. “I understand my sheep better because of my rose. I understand people better, too. In fact, I even understand why you’re here.”

  Goose bumps arranged on her skin—paper and all. “You do?”

  “Sure. You’re on a quest for the mad house with the man trapped inside, and the woman who landed here that looked just like you.”

  Cecelia grabbed the front of his mint-green shirt and shook. “Yes! They’re my parents and that’s my house. Mother left for the Land of Yesterday to go after my ghost brother and now my house has turned evil and done terrible things—like almost certainly kidnapping my father and definitely trying to kill me—so any information you have about them would be greatly appreciated!”

  Breath caught, Cecelia apologized for getting carried away.

  “Completely understandable,” the boy replied, straightening his shirt. “If I were you, I might have done the same thing. As for when the woman—”

  “My mother.”

  “—your mother left, I can’t say for sure. Time is funny here—it sort of stretches. Minutes roll on like hours, and hours like years, especially when heading toward the Land of Yesterday. I can tell you that her taxi stopped at our station to refuel a while back. I saw her and then she left. . . . Your house arrived not long ago to fill its gas burners.” The boy leaned in close. Eyes twinkling with starlight, he whispered into her ear, “Your mother also asked if I could do something special for her.”

  Cecelia’s pulse raced. “What?”

  “She asked that if a girl with long midnight-blue hair stopped here, could I pass this on to her.” He pulled something from his pocket and placed it in her hand.