Mariana was sitting with her eyes closed, waiting to see if she could think the thoughts God wanted her to think. She opened her eyes to see how close the light was to her feet, because she thought that as soon as the light touched her feet she would start to feel the sacred holiness, and she was just creeping her feet a little closer to the light, so that the holiness would get there more quickly, when she thought she noticed something. Yes, she did notice something: four tiny creatures, carefully folding up a chewing-gum wrapper. ‘Oh, who are you?’ she said, bending toward them and letting them hop onto her palm.
‘We’re Death Watch Beetles,’ said one of them. ‘A bad man is squirting our country full of terrible poison.’
‘Oh,’ said Mariana, ‘he isn’t a bad man, I’m sure, he just wants to be sure that the Jasperium doesn’t fall down. You see, when you eat the wood, the wood becomes weaker and weaker, and finally the whole thing would turn to crumbs and fall. You wouldn’t want that to happen to the Cathedral, would you?’
‘Well,’ grudged the Death Watch Beetle, ‘if they’d just explained what the problem was, and given us another piece of wood to live in, we would have left on our own. As it is, look at little Gary, he has gotten sick from chewing on the lead.’ And indeed Mariana saw that little Gary was lying on his back and he did not look at all well. He looked as pale as a bug can look, and near death. Mariana gently put all four beetles in her pencil case and walked out to the forest. She knew where a special fallen tree lay. There was a pool of rainwater in a groove of this tree, and she picked a certain kind of flower as she went, singing a mild song, and crushed the petals in the water. It was a special kind of flower that could cure any kind of lead poisoning, and it was called the Montezuma flower, because it could grow in really hot or very cold places, so that it was a great survivor. Then she opened the pencil case. The three healthy Death Watch Beetles carried Gary, the sick one, out. ‘Wash him in the water,’ said Mariana gently. She was a tall girl with dark brown hair. ‘The potion will help him.’
At first the beetles weren’t sure, and they sniffed the water and tested it with their feelers and that sort of usual behavior. Then gradually they lost their fears and dipped Gary freely in, not head-first but gently, tail-first, and they all went in, one by one, and splashed in the water contentedly. They had spent so many centuries cooped up inside the old Norman beams of the Jasperium that they had forgotten that rainwater could be so clean and pure, and they were overjoyed. Gary sat up in the water and said he felt much better. Then all four of them found a place in a spot of sun to dry their bodies and when they were toasty and warm again, they waved goodbye, and began chewing their mazes in the huge tree trunk. ‘Lovely layers of wood!’ they said. ‘Rings and rings and rings! It’ll be a long time before we chew up this enormous country! Don’t tell anyone you brought us here.’
‘I won’t,’ laughed Mariana. ‘Good luck!’
‘Thank you, Mariana,’ they called, giving a last happy wave. ‘Bye! Bye! Bye!’
That was a story she had made about them. In real life Nory had never even seen a Death Watch Beetle. But there were definitely some unusual creatures in Threll. The worst one was a huge spider that her mother spotted in the shower curtain while Nory and Littleguy were in the bathtub setting up a store to sell pretend cappuccinos, with bubble foam. Her mother suddenly jumped up with her magazine and hurried them out and called Nory’s father.
‘What is it?’ said Nory, who hadn’t gotten a look because she was shoveled out of the bathroom so quick.
‘Don’t look,’ said Nory’s father. ‘It’s a loathsome Anglo-Saxon bug. It’s huge.’
‘I won’t be disgusted,’ said Nory. ‘I promise, I won’t be.’ She peered in, then instantly wailed out in a misery of disgust and hugged her mother. ‘Oh, awful!’ It was an enormous thing, like a black crab, with the dastardliest hairy legs Nory had ever seen on a spider, and not like a daddy longlegs’s legs, which are quite graceful, but hairy in an ugly thick fearful way. Normally Nory liked all insects, even earwigs, and especially ladybugs, and she did not appreciate any killing, because of the important rule of Do Unto Others, and how would you like it if a huge scrumple of toilet paper came down on you and stole your life away? But this spider in particular was just too hideously hairy-legged to get any empathy from her.
Nory’s father came out.
‘Is it dead?’ they all asked.
Nory’s father said that yes, it was dead.
‘Good,’ said Nory, although immediately she felt a little sad, not to mention embarrassed about shrieking to pieces when she saw it. ‘What did you do with it?’
‘Flushed it into the depths,’ Nory’s father said. ‘The worst part is I always feel I have to open up the toilet paper to look.’
‘Not to dwell,’ her mother said.
That was their first adventure in Threll. Nory had some trouble sleeping for two nights, but then she got quickly over it. The only problem was that now she didn’t like going to the bathroom in the middle of the night because she sometimes worried that a second-cousin-once-removed of that big black spider was lurching under the seat. But gradually she got over that worry, too. It was a wooden toilet seat — the landlady said that she had bought it for five pounds at an auction from a Stately Home, and that the Duke of Tunaparts, or someone quite obscure like that, had sat on it every day of his life, which was not really a point to its favor.
4. Littleguy Had a Sensible Fear of Owls
Nory was a day student at Threll Junior School, where she used a medium-nib fountain pen with a kind of blue ink that you could make disappear completely from the page with a two-ended instrument called an ink-eradicator. Even when the ink had had a chance to dry for three weeks, the ink-eradicator still had the power to make it disappear. Threll School was started by a kind-looking person with a fur collar whose picture hung on the stairs going up to the dining hall. Pamela Shavers, who was a girl in Nory’s class, said he was called Prior Rowland because he lived prior to Henry the Eighth. The dining hall used to be the barn for the monk’s cows, another older kid said, but Nory couldn’t understand why the monks would have wanted to drag cows up and down stairs twice a day. Then her mother explained that they had built in a second floor when they shipped out the cows. There was still sometimes a slight barny smell about the place, though. The wood had twisting beams, like driftwood, but no Death Watch Beetles that Nory could see; of course she couldn’t possibly have heard them banging their heads since kids at lunch make tons and tons of noise.
Prior Rowland began the school to honor the memory of Saint Rufina, something like two thousand years ago, or ‘early this morning,’ as Nory’s brother used to say. Littleguy he was called, although his name was really Frank Wood Winslow. To Littleguy ‘long ago’ and ‘early this morning’ meant pretty much the same thing, because his head was still basically a construction site, filled with diggers and dumpers driving around in mushy dirt, and it was hard for him to tell what were the real outlines of his ideas. He knew how to say ‘construction site,’ and ‘traction engine,’ and ‘coupling,’ and ‘level crossing,’ and ‘hundred-ton dump truck,’ and ‘articulated dump truck’ and ‘auger driller,’ because he loved those sorts of things. But he sometimes held up a very simple object, like a fork or a candle, and said, ‘I forgot the word for this.’ And he still called a pillow a pibble. But that was a normal thing to expect, Nory thought, because you have to spend your whole life learning more and more about how to draw a difference between one idea and another idea and how to keep them separated out rather than totally dredged together in a sludgy mass. For example, if you say that you’re doing something to the honor of someone’s memory, say to the honor of Saint Rufina’s memory, you don’t mean that you’re honoring the wonderful memory they might have, as in they can dash off the names of every kid in the class by heart, because they don’t have any memories at all, since they’re dead. And you don’t mean that they have wonderful happy memories of picnics and chicken sandwiches and feeding the ducks that you’re honoring, because they don’t have those, either. You can’t mummify a nice memory in someone’s head — no magic herbs will do it. And you don’t mean you’re honoring any particular other person’s memories of the person that is being honored, because the people who are honoring him may not even have known him or met him. Or her, in the case of Saint Rufina. You’re just simply honoring the basic idea that this person once lived her life and you’re trying to convince the world not to forget her. But any person who remembers her is going to die also, obviously, so you have to keep convincing people from scratch—‘Remember this person, remember this person, remember this person.’ It isn’t easy, but it may be satisfying work.