Carol was diplomatic. “I think it might have, somewhere down there. And it sounds different to different ears, of course. You might hear something more jagged and angry, Judith. It might be chatter specifically about you, and all the things you’ve done wrong. Ira might hear something open and hollow, like an empty, void-ish sound, the sound of a well with no bottom. They really know how to get to us.”
Judith was staring hard at Max. “So what should we do, King?”
“About what?” he asked.
“What do you mean, about what? About the sounds that run under the ground and are mean to us. What else?” she said. “We need to kill it dead, right, Carol?”
Carol nodded.
Max had no plan at all. “So what does it sound like again?” he asked.
Judith was apoplectic. “Wait. You don’t know about the chatter? I don’t know what’s worse — the chatter, or the fact that our king doesn’t know anything about it. How can you rule this place if you don’t know about the sounds in the ground?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t know,” he said. “I just was asking you guys what you thought it was. Where I come from the chatter just sounds different.”
Max got on his knees and listened to the earth. “Yeah, I hear it for sure. But it’s just quieter than where I come from. Our chatter is super-loud and it sounds like teeth.”
This had everyone’s attention.
“So what did you do about it?” Douglas asked.
“Oh, a lot of things,” Max said, having no idea at all.
“Like what?” Ira asked.
“Well, one thing is that we yelled a lot. We yelled out in the air a lot because then we didn’t hear the chatter.”
This didn’t seem to impress anyone.
“And the other thing was that we stomped on the ground really hard. We stomped like we did at the parade. We did that all the time, to let the sounds know how big we were. Sometimes with heavy boots.”
This was somewhat more convincing to the beasts.
“Okay,” Judith said. “So you scared it with the boots. What else? I’m assuming you got rid of it?”
“Oh yeah, pretty quickly. It was easy,” Max said.
“How?” Carol asked, his eyes pleading.
Now Max was up a creek. He couldn’t see or hear the thing they feared, but he had to think of a way to kill it. He was sure he could find a way to kill anything in the world if he could see it — especially with seven giants on his side — but if he knew nothing about it? He was stuck. He had to stall for time.
“I can’t tell you today …” he said, “but tomorrow I can. Tomorrow I will.” It was lame, Max knew it was lame, but it was working. They were nodding, as if acknowledging that such a problem needed a day of kingly consideration. He added the finishing touches to the lie. “I just need to stay here awhile, testing the ground and, uh, seeing which one of my killing methods will work best.”
They all nodded vigorously, picturing the many killing methods they knew themselves.
“You heard the king,” Carol said, shooing everyone away. “He needs time to think. Let’s give him some room.” He hustled them out of the meadow. Before he left Max by himself, Carol turned back to him.
“I really hope you kill it, Max,” he said. “It would really help us a lot. I feel like I haven’t slept in years.”
And with that, he left.
CHAPTER XXX
Max took off his heavy crown and sat in the many-colored meadow, alone, trying to piece together exactly how he came to be sitting in the many-colored meadow, alone.
There had been the parade, and that was good. Then the different route with Katherine, which was also very good. But when he arrived at the lagoon, Carol had not been happy about him leaving the parade. Carol seemed upset about Max’s time alone with Katherine. Max had to be careful about that in the future. He also needed to be careful about Ira and water — Ira definitely didn’t seem to like bellyflopping down a waterfall. And Judith didn’t like sitting down on command; she liked to sit when and how she wanted to sit. That seemed easy to remember.
All Max had to do, then, was to make sure that he didn’t upset Carol by spending time alone with Katherine, or upset Katherine by being alone with Carol, and he had to make sure Judith was being entertained and that Ira was being kept from the void. He wasn’t sure what the Bull wanted, but he knew for his own safety he needed to steer clear of Alexander, who’d had a very personal problem with Max from the start. Was that everything he needed to think about?
Oh, food. There was food to think about. Could it be that he hadn’t eaten since he’d left home? He really hadn’t. Nothing the beasts had eaten so far was edible for Max, and on his own he had no idea where to get food, or how to recognize it. And he couldn’t go into the woods looking for it, because it was getting dark quickly, and he’d seen snakes in the trees, and spiders the size of his fist, and knew there were countless other dangers unseen.
He felt reasonably safe in the middle of the meadow, though, and he realized that to remain safe all he needed to do was stay awake until the dawn. Easy. And while waiting for the sun, he only needed to solve the problem of the sounds in the ground that Carol heard whenever he was worried about something else.
Not expecting to hear anything, Max put his ear to the grass. Indeed, he heard nothing. There was no sound at all. But Carol knew this island far better than he did, and Carol’s ears might be better than his — and anyway, whether Max heard the sound or not, he needed to find it and kill it, or at least get the beasts to stop thinking about it.
He had faced similar challenges at home, with his mom, a dozen times. She would come home drained, collapsing on the couch or sometimes even the floor, and Max would find a way to entertain her or soothe her or somehow bring her to a different, happier, place. Sometimes he brought her a piece or two of his Halloween candy. Sometimes he would put the candy in the music box on the mantel. He’d get it down and turn the crank and present it to her, so when she opened the top the music started and the candy was there, always something she liked, like Bit o’ Honey. Sometimes he drew her something — a dragon getting its head cut off by a knight or a whale with arms and a mustache. There were a bunch of ways, he was sure, to lead someone out of a dark corridor of the mind.
Just then a sound came from the encircling woods. It was a high-pitched sound, something like a hyena’s laugh crossed with a woodpecker’s knocking. It was terrifying and arrhythmic, and growing louder. At any moment Max expected some animal to burst from the woods and bee-line toward him.
He knew he wouldn’t sleep this night. He would wait until first light and then go looking for Carol or Katherine, or anyone, really. And then he would have to set down some rules about leaving him, the king, alone in the middle of a meadow all night. He had to do so without implying that he was afraid of the dark, which he wasn’t, but that instead it was for their own good. They needed to be together, all of them, for together they were safer and happier. Or he hoped they would be.
He sat up in the meadow, scanning the forest for movement. Just then another sound came from the opposite woods. This one was a rough, zig-zagging call, trilling upward before ending with a loud sigh, like a truck at rest. It was just as threatening and eerie as the other sound, and soon the first sound and the second were trading calls, as if in a heated conversation full of threats and recriminations. Max had to spin back and forth, following the sounds, looking for anything moving. The fighting, if that’s what it was, seemed to be happening far away and didn’t involve him, but then again, how could he be sure? He might be the cause of it and very well might be its victim. And so he had to stay alert.