Phillips shook his head. “I’m not leaving until I see the two of you standing safe and sound on the top of that damned Northern Ridge,” Phillips had vowed in a wheezing underbreath that was, nonetheless, easily heard by Newman’s keen ears.
“But I’m also worried about your losing the trail on your way back down from the Summit,” responded Ruth Wolf gently.
“So I lose the trail — what of it, Ruth? I’ll park myself on a rock and wait until morning when it’s light.”
The climbers pushed onward and upward and held to the path through the woods and toward the Summit, which they eventually gained later that night. The Summit of Exchange was untenanted. Phillips had privately feared that he might find one of Caldwell’s Enforcers waiting there, or any of the Tiadaghton men, for that matter, who would put a last-minute finish to Newman. But no one was there. Ruth Wolf had won her battle for Newman’s life. She had convinced the Project’s decision-makers that it wasn’t worth anyone’s time to kill Newman now. This was how it generally worked — the cat and mouse game with the Project.
Newman released a little satisfied sigh to find himself so close to home. He looked out over the twinkling valley. It was still too early for all but the youngest Dinglians to be abed there. What were his parents doing? he wondered. Was his father reading the newspaper or working an acrostic? Was his mother darning a stocking or playing patience with her cards? Were they thinking of him, wondering what he was doing in that same moment?
Newman also peered into the darkness close by, looked round him at this spot he had never visited before. There was the faint outline of the gazebo, and there were the warehouses, and over there, the large iron wicket through which the Beyonder tradesmen came fortnightly with their Beyonder foods and dry goods — meagre offerings when compared with all the things he had seen for himself in the Outland. Newman was eager to tell his mother and father of the discrepancy that existed between what was given to Dinglians upon the Summit and what they could easily obtain for themselves if they lived in the Outland: boxes that talked and played music, other boxes that allowed one to speak to a person over a great distance, onion rings and salty meat sandwiches and horseless carriages that moved like lightning, and all the orange juice one could drink. There was a great deal more that young Newman could scarcely wait to tell his parents and to tell anyone else who would hear him. For he had returned without any sign of the Terror Tremens having taken hold of him and surely would not be consigned within the imprisoning walls of Bedlam.
It only stood to reason.
“Be quick, Ruth,” Newman now heard Phillips say behind his back, and the boy assumed, most naturally, that the old jeweller was referring to the process of returning Newman to his family.
There followed in that next instant the sound of Ruth’s medical satchel being snapped open and then a rustle and a clink and a click. Newman turned to see a medical syringe clutched in the nurse’s hand.
“What is that?” asked the boy.
“An injection you must have before you enter the Dell.”
Phillips rolled up Newman’s sleeve. Nurse Wolf dabbed at Newman’s arm with a wet cotton ball and then inserted the needle. Within only a few seconds Newman began to feel sleepy. “Is it the shot that’s making me drowsy?”
“Yes, it is,” replied Miss Wolf.
“Must I be drowsy?”
“No, Newman. You must be fully asleep.”
A moment later the strong sedative took effect on Newman’s brain. Phillips caught the boy as his legs splayed out from under him and his head dropt back.
“There is a good boy,” said Ruth Wolf sadly. “There is a very good boy.”
Ruth and her fellow Rescuer beheld my unconscious nephew for a moment in mutual silence. Then they lifted him up and put him into a barrow. “Are you sure that I can’t help you get him down the ridge?” asked Phillips.
Ruth Wolf shook her head. “I’ll be fine.” She took out her little box telephone and pressed several of its tiny numbered buttons. “I just paged Towlinson. He’ll be waiting for me with the van when I get to the bottom.”
Ruth Wolf looked at the crumpled body folding in upon itself to fit into the tight barrow. “I feel like shit, Phillips.”
“Double that for me, Ruthie.”
“Call me by my real name. It’s been ages since I’ve heard anybody say it.”
“Megan,” said Phillips, taking his friend and fellow renegade into a warm and close embrace. “Little Megan Hester. I can remember all the way back to when you were just a baby.”
“I feel just as helpless right now.”
“I know, sweetie. I know.”
Another moment passed. “I should go,” said Ruth Wolf, finally pulling herself away and sucking in an emotional sniffle. “Watch your step on your way down, Phillips.”
The jeweller nodded. “Be safe, Wolf,” he said. “As terrible a thing as it is to place a boy into that Victorian madhouse, it’s still better than what might have happened to him on the outside.”
“Yes, I know. And I’ll make sure to keep an eye on him.”
“He goes right to the cock-loft?”
Ruth shook her head. “To the basement first. There’s a holding room there. That’s where we’ll keep him for the first couple of days — until we can figure out which of the bensodizepines are going to work best on him. Then we’ll put him with the other Limbo Returnees. Only a few staffers at the hospital even know about the room. And it’s really not such a bad place. There’s quite a collegiality among the inmates, since almost all of them are members of a pretty prestigious club.”
“Those who have been to the Outland and beheld its wonders,” said Phillips with a nod.
“Beheld them all to themselves. Goodbye, old man.”
“Goodbye, Meg.”
The two parted. Phillips stood and watched for a moment as Ruth Wolf turned her covered wheelbarrow southward and began down the Brokers’ Trail that led to the valley floor. Then he turned to begin his own caliginous descent down the forest path that pointed to the Outland and to all of its wondrous wonders.
Chapter the Seventeenth. Tuesday, June 24, 2003
y only marginally informative visit to Regents Park Stables had diverted me for a short time from indulging in worry and concern over what my brother Gus had said to me in his despairing hour. But now Gus and the frightful earnestness that characterised his need to launch himself from Dingley Dell in search of his son weighed heavily and importunately upon my thoughts. I rose next morning determined to engage my brother at his place of employment, where he kept watch over how many fishes came into the dried fish warehouse and how many fishes went out. I wished to make certain that Gus had taken this latest perilous scheme of his and tossed it decisively into the dustbin of impractical stratagems — a dustbin, I might add, overfilled with like deposits from a most injudicious mind.
Gus’s superintendent Mr. Mell reported to me upon my arrival that he had just received word by ticket porter that my brother had decided to accompany his wife Charlotte on her restorative visit to her friend Miss Snigsworth and would therefore be stopping in Hungerford for the next several days. Gus’s present whereabouts were confirmed by the letter I found addressed to me, secured beneath the iron knocker upon the front door to Gus and Charlotte’s cottage in Fingerpost. Appended in postscript was a request, attributed to Charlotte, that I be so kind as to water the roses and geraniums and scarlet beans, and a notation as to where in the outhouse I would find the watering-pot (for Alice could not be trusted to interrupt her Pupkerian holiday to do it, nor would they choose to enlist the widow Chillip who lived next door and once mortally drowned Charlotte’s American aloe in a full tub of water as if it were watercress). The prosy nature of the missive gave me hope that my brother and sister-in-law were attempting as best they could to return themselves to some semblance of normal life, clouded to be sure by the loss of their son, but needful of disallowing grief to reign despotically over the remainder of their years together.