The Glas s Town Game

“Or we send them to Australia.” Emily chewed the inside of her cheek thoughtfully. She readjusted her grip on Brunty. He was so intolerably heavy.

Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree reeled backward in horror.

“How dare you call us awful when you kill your baddies?” Mr. Bud huffed.

Mr. Tree fanned himself to keep from fainting. “I’d wager this ‘Australia’ is just your fancy name for burying a criminal up to his neck in sand and waiting for him to die of his own accord, and/or vicious biting fire ants!”

“It isn’t!” Charlotte insisted. “It’s a place on the other side of everything! It has kangaroos and a kind of an otter-thing with a duck’s face.” Between the kangaroos and the wigs, Charlotte began to feel that she was not helping their world to sound particularly upstanding or superior or even sensical.

“Correcting is worse than killing,” whispered Branwell, half-terrified and half-impressed. “A fellow still lived, even if he died badly. An edited man never was.” If he’d stopped there, it would have sounded a very regal and moral statement. But he couldn’t stop himself. Words poured out. “I’m sure Papa and Aunt Elizabeth have wanted to edit me plenty of times since I was born. I’m sure everybody would rather I be much better than I am. Older and stronger and nicer and cheerfuller and handsomer and cleverer and abler, oh, ever so much abler!”

“Branwell, no . . .” Charlotte said softly. She put a hand on his arm but he shoved her off.

“Branwell, yes! You know it’s true. You’d all rather a new and improved edition of a brother! You were probably hoping for it when I woke up on that table in Bestminster, but I’m still me. I can never get away from being me and neither can you! Don’t try to be sweet. Papa would roll up his sleeves and get right into me if he could. He’d cross out all the painterly bits and paste in parsony bits instead. He’d make me obedient and ambitious and fix it so I never cried or screamed or kicked walls ever again.” He was blubbering now and he knew it, but he couldn’t stop. It’s very hard to squash your feelings down deep inside when you only came back to life at lunchtime. Resurrection brings the truth out in a person. “But he can’t fix me, he can’t, and Charlotte can’t make me brilliant and Emily can’t make me friendly and Anne can’t make me patient because I’m just Branwell, only Branwell, and if you subtract Branwell from Branwell you’re left with nothing.”

“Hold fast, there, lad, no one is suggesting you get your pages clipped,” said Mr. Tree. Displays of emotion gave him rashes. He scratched his palm.

“How many people have you corrected?” Branwell seethed.

“More than a few,” Mr. Bud shrugged.

“Less than a lot,” Mr. Tree demurred. “Really, if the idea gets you so worked up, I daresay you’ve never seen a hanging.”

Mr. Bud grabbed the book of Brunty out of Emily’s arms. She struggled a bit, but the editor was frightfully strong. “You’ve no right to look down your inkin’ noses at our ways,” he sneered. “Nobody asked for your opinion. Do you argue with judges and suchlike where you come from?”

“No,” all four of them mumbled. A tear dripped onto Branwell’s shoe.

“Then what makes you think you can tell us off? How bloody like a breather, barging in and blathering on! I suppose you’d rather just let the unedited, unabridged, unexpurgated Brunty run wild? Or maybe you’d like to just kill him. That seems nicer, doesn’t it?”

“Well, what has he done, specifically?” Branwell protested, his face red with shame. “Maybe just Australia . . .”

Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree grimaced at them, shaking their heads. Ignoring the children’s protests, they hoisted Brunty up onto the frame of the printing press. They slotted him right into the spot where fresh new pages were meant to lie and wait to be inked. They bent down to unlatch one cover from the other. Of course, Brunty didn’t want to be opened just now. They pulled and pried, but the brass latches wouldn’t come free. Finally, Mr. Bud pulled his page-cutter from his waist. He stepped back, took a mighty swing meant to slice through the locks with one fierce stroke.

“Wait!” pleaded Emily. It was too gruesome, to watch somebody get hacked open, even if that someone was mostly a book. That only made it worse, somehow. Emily would rather have hacked off her own arm than maim any of their books back home.

“What for?” said Mr. Bud, his page-cutter still held high.

Emily thought quickly. She was better at quick thinking than perfect thinking, if she was honest, but perfect thinking only got you good marks in School and good marks in School got you nothing but cold paper in the end. She took a deep breath and said, quite gra

ndly:

“The Scurrilous Yet Stupendous (but Primarily Scurrilous) Chronicle of Brunty the Worst, Who in Gondal Is Called Brunty the Best. CHAPTER ONE!”

Brunty’s ornate cover sprang open. As quickly as they’d seen him fold up into a book on the Keighley train platform, he unfolded his pages into arms and legs and a great round belly and a neck and a huge head. He was the Magazine Man again, with his newspaper collar and newsprint waistcoat and glossy illustrated great coat and his red ribbon nose. He twisted and bucked in Mr. Bud’s and Mr. Tree’s grip, hollering and groaning. But though they could hold on to his arms, the editors could not wrestle all of Primarily Scurrilous Brunty at once. He heaved up his long, fat paper legs and kicked them both soundly in the head. Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree let go instantly, streaming ink from their brows, cursing and shouting.

Brunty breathed heavily, staring at the children. His black eyes glittered with malice behind his spectacles.

“What did I do, you little brats? I won the war for Gondal. They just don’t know it yet!”

“We don’t care about your silly war,” Anne said, turning up her chin.

Brunty turned the great book of his head to one side. “Now, that is what society folks call a lie, Miss Gumflapper. I think you care quite a lot.” He turned his glare to Emily. His voice turned high and mocking. “Ask them who invented grog, Mr. Bud. Ask them who invented the Iron Duke. Ask them about their toys. And then once you’ve returned from the asylum with the keys to their cell safely in hand, you can see to me. Go on, I’ll wait.”

Brunty’s inky eyes gleamed. He wiggled his ribbon nose. Then he drew something out of his newsprint waistcoat. It was just the most curious object Emily had ever seen. It looked as though someone had poked out all the glass in a fancy copper hourglass, dumped out the sand, filled it up again with a great stack of milk saucers wrapped in linen, and hung two clock pendulums off it on copper ribbons. The whole business oozed with greenish acid and crackled with tiny, bluish white arcs of lightning. Wet, sickly gunk bubbled out between the saucers, oozed down the ribbons, and crusted up the metal rods holding it all together like salt brine on a ship’s hull. It smelled vile, like rotting pennies. Brunty the Liar, Brunty the Godforsaken Gondalier, Primarily Scurrilous Brunty gave his contraption a good shake. The thing sprayed glittering, boiling, green-gray acid in a neat circle on the floor before him, that lovely floor so carefully painted with the words of The Canterbury Tales. Charlotte and Emily jumped and scrambled backward into the nearest printing press, barely missing having their toes sizzled off by the spreading muck.

Branwell and Anne were left on their own, on the other side of the puddle of poison, with a furious book-man brandishing his alien weapon.

“Change my tune, will you? Take my youth in the slums of Spleenpool, on the shores of Lake Elderna? Will you take my sisters, too? Stanza and Strophie huddling under the eaves in gloves with no fingers and only their brother to protect them?” Bran’s heart lurched toward the savage spy. “Is that too dark and cruel a first chapter to make a good man in the end? You want to look inside me and erase my pain, cross out our father casting us away in favor of our stepmother’s handsomer, merrier, uglier, and stupider children? And then I suppose you’ll cut my education with the Spyglaziers’ Guild? What about my doomed love affair with Indica, my beautiful Thesaurus, back in snowy Almadore where I dueled my usurping brother to the death with an icicle? You want to take her memory, her ghost? Will you redact everything, everything Brunty and replace it with your neat and tidy Glass Town daisy-man idea of goodness? You won’t! I AM FOREVER BRUNTY AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME.”