The Glas s Town Game

With a gurgling groan, the golden floor sagged, and rippled, and crumbled in wherever Brunty’s slime touched it. A sudden, yawning hole opened up at their feet, its edges hissing and smoking and crackling with that bluish lightning, and nothing inside but darkness. Brunty whooped joyfully and lunged like a terrible lion. He seized Anne’s arm in one newspaper-hand and Branwell’s neck in the other, the crook of the arm still hanging on to that monstrous acid-fountain. Everyone began screaming at once. Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree bellowed in rage and made ready to jump the gap. Emily and Charlotte started inching round the seething edge, cursing and hollering and calling their brother and sister’s names.

Brunty’s burning glare bored into Branwell and Anne. His grip on their bones crushed down, as unstoppable as stone. He smelled like new books, and the perfect capital O’s of his eyes narrowed until they were shaped like bitter, bitter almonds.

“Are you mad?” he snarled. He stared like he could blow open their skulls if he only looked hard and hateful enough. “Are you? Can four together catch the same madness?”

“Are you?” snapped Bran defiantly. “Go set yourself on fire.”

“No,” whispered Anne, who could not convince her chest to breathe.

The hulking book nodded, the way a man nods when he is looking over a job nearly done. He squeezed Bran and Anne to his massive chest and bellowed: “You filth of Glass Town! You deserve this! You deserve every single thing that is about to happen! You have killed yourselves!”

“Now, that’s just uncalled for,” Mr. Tree sputtered, deeply hurt.

Emily was so close. She was almost there. She could almost touch Anne’s sleeve.

But Brunty just grinned. He grinned, and laughed, and howled, and with Branwell, Anne, and his dread machine firmly in hand, hopped straight down into the poisonous pit he’d made and vanished. Inside half a second, the acid had writhed and wriggled and seared itself back together, leaving nothing but a long, ugly, green scar down the middle of The Governess’s Tale.

Charlotte and Emily stood horribly still, stunned silent and quite alone, apart from two very furious-looking editors, in the lobby of Bud & Tree Publishing House.

PART III

I Am No Bird

TWELVE

Gone, Gone, Gone

Not us! Not our fault!” cried Mr. Bud, holding out his leather arms in the air. “Don’t you go blaming us—I can see you want to! Stop that right now, right this instant. Stop looking like that! It’s distressing Mr. Tree, can’t you see?”

Emily had gone white as paper. She pressed her hands over her mouth, digging her fingernails into her jaw, trying to shove a scream back inside. But it was no good. The scream wanted out. Tears tumbled down her cheeks, soaking her knuckles, dripping off her wrists. She could feel the weight of the lemon in her dress-pocket, suddenly as heavy as her heart. Their ticket home. They’re gone. Gone, gone, gone. Two more of us gone. And no grog can help ‘gone.’ How could they ever go home again without Branwell and Anne? What would they tell Papa?

“We’re only editors!” Mr. Tree shouted, far too loudly. The pair of them stood pressed together, trembling, like two flamingos who have sighted an alligator. “We don’t make things happen; we just clean up the mess when it’s done! You brought that book in here. We’re innocent! And if you’ll follow me, I’ve got some papers for you to sign saying just that. And a few other unimportant little clauses. Be a good girl and we’ll have no trouble here.”

Charlotte stared at the mangled, ropy, yellow scar on the floor where her brother and sister had been standing only a moment ago. It looked like a century’s worth of candle wax. She knew she ought to cry. She wanted to cry. If there was ever a time to cry, now was surely it. But when she reached into herself, into the place where her most terrible fears hung up their coats, she found only a bright, tidy room with dry white walls, furnished with her own sturdy Will. And quite a bit of righteous indignation. She turned her dark gaze on Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree. The pair of them tried valiantly, but they could not meet the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl.

“Open that floor up at once,” Charlotte demanded.

“You can’t mean to go after them, miss.” Mr. Bud tugged fretfully at the leather cords that made up his beard. “Be reasonable, now!”

“They’ll be long gone by now, my dear,” tutted Mr. Tree mournfully. “Best take it on the chin, eh?”

Charlotte rolled her eyes. She marched up to Mr. Bud so forcefully that the poor editor truly thought, for a moment, that this breather child meant to hit him, which would leave him with the severe moral dilemma of whether to hit her back. Instead, she snatched his page-cutter saber from its sheath, glared at him so hard that it felt every bit as painful as a slap, and began trying her hardest to wedge the blade into the twisted, waxy ruin of the floor.

“They’ll only be long gone if you two keep standing there doing nothing like a couple of bricks in a silly old wall! What’s the matter with you? They might be killed! Crashey might spend his grog on us, but Brunty never would spare a drop, and you know it.”

“Oh, no,” Mr. Tree assured them. “Don’t say that. They wouldn’t kill them. Not even Can’t-Take-Him-Anywhere Brunty.”

Mr. Bud nodded. “They’re very good about that sort of thing over in Gondal. Sensitive, don’t you know.”

Charlotte wanted to feel relieved, but she’d no real reason to believe the editors. So she ignored them. She softened her voice a little. “Come on, Em, help me.”

Emily’s tears dried up at once. Charlotte always knew what to do when the worst thing possible actually happened. It was like a magic spell only her sister could cast. If Charlotte started bossing her about, then all was still right with the world. She fell to her knees and began trying to wedge her nails into the golden wound Brunty had left behind.

“You don’t understand!” Mr. Bud wailed. “They are gone. Remaindered! Departed. Decamped! Skipped t

own! Flown the nest! Hit the road! They’ve taken their leave! They’ve exited, stage left! Not at all due to any action or inaction by myself or good Mr. Tree, I’ll remind you. But their print run has been well and truly pulped.”

“You’ll never catch them, even if you could get that bit of our floor open again,” sighed Mr. Tree pointedly. “It is our floor you’re vandalizing, you know. I don’t know who you think you are. If they couldn’t get Victoria back with the whole limey army, I daresay you won’t find more than half a bootlace.”