Look under the rug, look under the rug…

Katherine repeated her father’s words over and over again, as if they were a kind of incantation, a spell that might reverse the night and bring the stagecoach back up the drive and drop him at the front doorstep.

She pushed away the table and the chairs, moving them to the walls. Her cold, stiffened fingers fumbled at the rug’s frayed edges. She dragged the rug over, folding it onto itself and then over again. She blinked. Beneath it was a door. A door in the floor. How had she never known it was there? There was an envelope stuck to the door. She opened it. Inside was a hand drawn map, in some detail, and a note:

K – If you’re reading this, then I’ve been taken. Now here is what you must do: Wait until dark. Take the Low Road into the Endless Bog and follow the Path of Pain and Suffering to Hopeless Cove. Climb up to the Footbridge of Forgotten Souls and cross over the River of Tears. Take the Hangman’s Noose into the Viper’s Nest and pass under the Arch of Falling Knives. At the end of the Alley of the Darkest Shadows, you’ll find the Umbrellicorn. Ask for the Keeper. You’ll be safe there. Love, Father

Katherine pulled the ring to the door in the floor. It wouldn’t budge. She re-read the note. And then she felt a shiver roll up her spine. She had heard of some of these places. Hopeless Cove was where the riverfellas went to spear the best picklefish. But in the old days, that’s where they sent the islanders who caught the worst of the sickness that swept over Farflung a hundred years before. The riverfellas were paid to row poor sick souls out to the ghost ships anchored in the cove and leave them there until they recovered. Or died. The riverfellas say that if you stand in the mudflats and listen closely on quiet nights, you can still hear the echoes crying out for help to the empty shore. But then, according to the Lives of the Leaders, Volume 14, the great Leon Mollycoddle, the Fifteenth Leader of Farflung, and father of the G.O.A.T. (who was known as the Leon the Incredible of Newfangle, or the L.I.O.N.), after working non-stop, alone, in his personal laboratory for a year and a day, single-handedly developed the antidote for the Farflung Fever and saved the island from certain its death throes.

Katherine fell back onto the bunched-up rug and laid there, staring up at the ceiling. A fly crept along the roofbeam. She closed her eyes. She tried to slow her heartbeat. She replayed the scene in her mind, trying to make sense of it all... The Hobnails, her father’s strange words before they arrived. The book he had thrown into the fire. A door in the floor she had never known was there.

Mr. Krupp, had said that her father was the last one on the list for the day. How many people had they taken today? Surely there weren’t enough people for them to take that many? They had taken both Ms. Prufrock and her father, who else was now gone?

The fog outside eventually gave way to steady rain, and she sat up. She gathered the few frying pans they owned and scattered them across the floor, where they could catch the water that was leaking through the roof. She watched the water slowly fill the bottom of the pans, wondering what to do. She paced around the kitchen in tight circles. She read the yellow paper in her hand again and again as she paced.

For questions or concerns? Other than questions, all she had were concerns. Why had they taken her father? Why had he said the things that he said? What was she supposed to find? Where would they live in seven days? She shuddered as she thought of her father locked in a cold, damp cell at the bottom of Heable Deeps.

Katherine slammed her fists down on the door in the floor.

“Mumblecrust!” she yelled. “What is happening?”

Normally, she kept her emotions in check. Mostly. But whenever her anger did get the most of her, she swore in this way - mumblecrust and lubberworts and codswallop and arfanfaarf. Words that might get her sent to her room with the taste of saltwater soap in her mouth. She could hear her father lecturing her. “Katherine…don’t say those words out loud…unless you’ve tried everything else and there’s nothing left you can possibly say. Those are the words of last resort. Do you understand?”

She never really understood what he meant by this, but she always nodded and said that she did.

“Mumblecrust…” she muttered again under her breath, sitting heavily on the chair at the kitchen table. She leaned forward, her folded arms on the dining table, her forehead resting on them. She could feel the pressure of exhaustion behind her eyes.

The fire had fully died and the house grew colder and quieter, the only sound the occasional metallic tink tink tink of rainwater dripping into a pan on the floor. A shiver ran through her, and she rubbed her arms to warm them up. She decided she may as well set the fire back up; she wasn’t going to go to sleep.

Katherine got up and picked the poker up off of the floor and went to start working the fireplace when she noticed it. The book her father had thrown into the flames had rolled to the side and settled into the back corner of the fireplace.

She looked at it. She used the poker and prodded lightly at the book, shifting it so she could see it better.

Between the letters on the cover and the letters on the spine, she could piece together the title and the author. A Secret History of the Collywobble Islands by O. Oliver Oxenfree. The pages her father had torn from the book were scattered beneath it, some curled into brittle black leaves, and others relatively unburnt.

She fished the entire smoky mess out of the fireplace. Gray bits crumbled off the edges of the book, and some pages crumbled to dust. It was still warm to the touch. She waited a long moment, letting the book cool while she built up the fire again, adding more peat from the bucket next to the fireplace grate. Finally, as the fire roared to life, warming her, she pulled back the cover and read what she could of the first smoldering page.

Dear Reader, take great care. There is danger in these words. If you are found with this book, your path to Heable Deeps will be swift, but your suffering will not. It’s a delicate war we wage within - we can choose to tell ourselves we don’t see the things we see, we don’t know the things we know… So you can choose to put down this text and go on about your uncomplicated life. Or you can choose to see and know the truth. Choose carefully… Now, if you're still reading, know this: everything you’ve been taught is a lie. The so-called “Wonderful Leader” of Farflung, whom you may know as The O.W.L., has spun a lie as great as can be spun. And who is left to unspin it? Only those who read this book. Here we will restore the history that has been erased. This text is to be read quickly, silently and in groups of three. Make a copy if you can. Share it only with those who can be trusted with your life. Speak of it to no one else. Until we can all speak freely of it together…

–O. Oliver Oxenfree

Katherine stared at the book.

Everything you’ve been taught is a lie.

She gingerly set it down, biting the inside of her lip. She flipped past that page, as carefully as she could, her fingers blackened by the burnt edges. Most of the remaining pages were destroyed. She examined the book thoroughly, and when she was satisfied that there was nothing else important about it, she put it back into the fire.

If her father had wanted it destroyed, he’d wanted it that way for a reason. She used the poker, nudging the book to the center of the fireplace. She then set about restarting the fire, adding peat to the charcoal and ash. She closed her eyes as the warmth of the fire rolled over her, and for a moment she pretended like nothing had happened that night. When she opened her eyes, she watched in silence as the book slowly caught fire and turned into something near indistinguishable from the rest of the burnt ash and kindling.

She turned back to the pile of page pieces that she’d been able to save. Maybe she could piece them back together. Maybe there would be something in there that could help her save her father…

Katherine was caught between waking and sleep, sitting on the floor surrounded by little puzzle pieces of torn paper. Slowly, patiently, she arranged them and rearranged them. And when the puzzle pieces came together to form a page, she fixed the pieces in place with strips of adhesive from the rolls of sticky bandages that Dr. Peckinpaw had given for her quill-pricks. She spent the rest of the night like this, reassembling the little shards into page after page, until the candles in the lanterns had all burned dry.

Dawn broke over the foothills and ran down into the valley. By then, she had managed to piece together most of the pages from one through twenty-three. A pile of torn pieces remained beside the hearth, waiting to be sorted. Now, as the first of the day’s light came through the window, she stuffed the twenty-three burnt and bandaged pages into her pocket and set off for #1 Avenue of the Mollycoddles, the knot in her chest growing tighter and the pins in her stomach growing pricklier, her tired mind filled only with questions and concerns.

Katherine stepped out into the purple glow of the pre-dawn. The rain let up. She walked up the mud-puddled lane, between the winding hedgerows, and when she came to the fork, she took the High Road. For seven miles she splashed along, past abandoned farmhouses and closed-down roadside inns, through the stink of the runoff from the butcheries and past the stockyards and the mud-caked streets lined with merchant carts and squabbling chickens and bleating goats and muckrakers raking up their filth and mud.

She kept on downhill, darting between oxcarts and under laundry hanging on lines, until the stench in the air disappeared and she could smell the saltwater and feel a little breeze and the alleys opened up to the wider streets of the waterfront where the grandest houses sat on stilts along canals that were lined with sweet-smelling frangipani and bougainvillea trees. This wasn’t the shortest route, but she passed this way by habit. Whenever she had reason to be in Newfangle Town, she liked to walk along the canals and smell the frangipani and the bougainvillea. She would imagine living here with her father, in the grandest house on the best canal, with a west-facing view of the ocean and a long dock to sit at the end of and fish. Today, she barely looked up as she passed through the old quarter. Instead of lingering, she quickened her pace through the market and the commons and the back alleys until at last she came to the Great Square and the long, broad Boulevard of the Mollycoddles.

A thunder cloud rolled in and the sky grew darker. As she came to the red brick building that was home to the Department of Administration, a heavy rain began to fall again. A line of islanders, a hundred deep, rained-on and silent, stood in the downpour waiting for the doors to open. Nearly all of them clutched yellow pieces of paper. Katherine took her place at the back of the line. She looked up and down the wide boulevard, which stretched for a mile and a quarter, from the Great Square to the gates of Blackhollow Manor. The boulevard was lined by government buildings on one side, and by twelve-foot statutes on the other, seventeen of them in all, one for each in the bloodline of the Leaders.

Soft thunder rolled over the island. The doors eventually opened, and the line of islanders inched forward. A banner above the door read: WELCOME TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ADMINISTRATION FOR RIGMAROLE & MALARKEY. Katherine didn’t feel welcome. The line shuffled forward slowly. Katherine stood in the rain for an hour and a half before the line moved enough that she moved into the building. The lobby smelled like musty bread and unwashed socks, but at least it was dry. Inside, the line only seemed to grow longer, twisting and splintering into more lines. People stood about, men and women, old and young, in silence, holding slips of yellow paper and staring down at their muddy sandals. It was hard to tell where one line of them ended and another one began.

It was another hour before Katherine came at last to the front of the line and approached the Information desk. Behind it sat a gray-eyed woman in a gray suit with her gray hair in a high bun.

“Take a number,” the woman said, nodding her head toward the ticket dispenser on the desk.

On the wall behind the woman hung three framed portraits, which looked down over her hair bun and each of her shoulders. Over her right shoulder was the black and white image of Equivia Null, Quartermaster of Malarkey, squinting through thick round glasses, with a distracted, almost sideways glance. Her chin was held high and angled slightly to the left, as if stealing a peek at the portrait in the middle. Over the gray woman’s other shoulder hung a washed-out portrait of Vassily St. Varicate, the Quartermaster of Rigmarole, who, like Null, seemed to cast at least one eye to his right. Between them, looking directly down over the gray woman’s hair bun and smiling with his mouth but not his eyes, was a portrait in radiant color of Hubris Mollycoddle, the seventeenth of the Mollycoddles, the Objectively Wonderful Leader, aka the O.W.L..

Katherine drew a ticket from the dispenser as she looked into the O.W.L.’s empty stare and smiling lips. Not a hair was out of place. He had soft features and wrinkled lips. Ears on the largish side. His nose was slightly crooked. Frown lines betrayed the half smile he wore. Katherine had always found the expression odd to see in public. It wasn’t normal to smile. Happiness invited suspicion. Laughter attracted attention. The last thing anyone wanted was attention. What was normal was to go about your business and follow the Leader. And not to ask questions.

There was nothing more suspicious and certain to attract attention than a person asking questions.

She looked down at the ticket. It was number one hundred eighty-seven.

“My father was taken to Heable Deeps last night,” she said, holding up the yellow eviction notice. “I have questions and concerns.”

“Over there,” the gray lady said and nodded her head toward an even longer line that wrapped along the side of the lobby, out through a pair of double doors and into another section of the building.

Katherine blew air out of the corner of her mouth.

For two more hours she waited in line, inching forward every few minutes. She watched as, one by one, the rain-soaked figures standing ahead of her stepped up to a window at a counter and spoke in hushed tones to the person behind it. Her stomach growled. When at last she arrived at the front of the line, the man behind the window didn’t look up.

“My father was taken to Heable Deeps last night,” she said, holding up the yellow eviction notice. “I have questions and concerns.”

“Fill this out,” he said. “And this. And this. And also this.” He piled paper upon paper on the countertop between them.

“What’s this?” Katherine asked. None of these were forms she had practiced before.

“Form 199-a, Eviction Notice Response Form. Form 211-c, Debtor’s Questionnaire. Form 3-99-z, General Information Form. Black ink only. Fill in your questions here,” he said, sliding her another form, “and your concerns here,” he said, pushing yet another towards her.

Katherine looked down at the pile of papers. “I don’t have a pen,” she said.

“Then you’ll need this,” the man said. “Form 129-b, Pen Requisition Form.”

“How can I fill out the Pen Requisition Form if I don’t have a pen?” Katherine asked.

The man looked up and stared at Katherine. “Are you being sassy?” he said.

“No,” Katherine said, shaking her head.

“Because if you’re being sassy, young lady, I can make this process very complicated for you.”

“It seems very complicated already,” Katherine said.

“Don’t test me, young lady,” the man said.

“Humph,” Katherine muttered under her breath.

“Sass!” said the man. “Back of the line!”

“But-”

The supervisor leaned in. “Is there a problem?” he said.

“This orphan doesn’t have a pen.”

“I’m not an orphan,” Katherine said, “I have a father, it’s just that he’s been sent to Heable Deeps.”

“You’re an orphan, then,” the man said, without looking up from the manual. He said it automatically, reflexively, with neither a hint of sympathy nor a dose of ill-will. He stated it as a fact, a plain fact, as plain as the reddening nose on his weather-beaten face, and not subject to further discussion. He said it like he might’ve said, “Happiness is selfishness.” Or, “Long live the Leader.” Or, “Forever, Farflung.”

“Back of the line,” the supervisor said.

The man in line behind her stepped forward and nudged her out of the way. Katherine frowned and blew air out of the corner of her mouth again and retreated to the back of the line. She stared at the portraits on the wall. She asked the others in the line if she might borrow a pen, but they just frowned and shook their heads.

Katherine looked down at the forms. She looked around at the islanders standing in lines. She wondered how many of their fathers or mothers or sisters or brothers had been sent off to Heable Deeps for no reason at all. She scraped in her pockets and collected a tiny handful of charcoal dust. Nearly enough, she figured. She tried to find any pointy thing she could. She thought about stepping out of line to find something, anything, but didn’t want to risk losing her place. Finally, she unfolded the staple that held the first set of forms together and removed it from the papers, pulled it as straight as she could make it, licked the end and pinched it between her thumb and forefinger, dipping it into the tiny pile of charcoal dust. One by one, she scratched her answers onto the pen acquisition form. When she ran out of charcoal dust, she reached for the pocket on the other side of her coat and felt the burnt and bandaged papers she carried there.

She glanced around. She was sure to do so without moving her head, just like she did in school, so that people didn’t notice her being curious. No one was paying her any attention. She pulled the burnt and bandaged papers she’d salvaged from the fire out of her pocket. She unfolded them as gently as she could, their edges flaking and floating to the floor.

Anyone looking at her would just think she was just reading over her paperwork.