“Is that so? Just … let him in? Like that?”
“It is true. But how is this possible? It is not possible. Mr. Wigman—Brad—I come to you like old friend. You and Betsy”—Betsy was Mrs. Wigman, a triathlete mother of five and member of the school board; she’d always rubbed Desdemona the wrong way—“have always been so kind. Ever since I come to United States. I ask you, please. Please to make Joffrey stop this madness with Impassable Wilderness. It is hurting business. It is hurting Quintet. It is hurting me.” She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye to see that her story was hitting its intended mark.
Wigman looked distracted; he was chewing on his lower lip. He seemed to startle when he realized she was finished with her plea. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yeah. Well, that’s clear.” He straightened his tie, tightening the knot at his throat. “You know, I told that guy: Get your head out of the Impassable Wilderness junk. Told him plenty of times. But it doesn’t sound like he’s listening much. Tell you what, Dessie. If I popped over to the shop and had a little chitchat with your man there, would that smooth things over? Try to get his head back in the game?”
Desdemona smiled broadly, revealing her one gold tooth. “Yes, it would very much so.”
“Good, good,” he said. “I’m gonna go get that on the books straight away. ’Tween you and me, Dessie, we’re going to get all this straightened out. Your man’ll be back to normal in the time it’d take you to say ‘environmental regulation loophole.’”
“Environmental regulation loophole,” said Desdemona playfully.
Wigman smiled. “There you go. That’s the spirit. C’mon, I’ll walk you out.”
Together they sauntered out of the conference room and through the tall brass double doors to the lobby. Wigman had his hand on Desdemona’s shoulder as they walked. When they’d arrived at the secretary’s desk, Wigman said, “Hey, doll—why don’t you put me down for a little onsite visit to the Machine Parts Titan’s place, as soon as you can swing it.” He winked at Desdemona.
“Sure, Mr. Wigman,” said the receptionist. She began stabbing a pink-nailed finger at the computer mouse, clicking her way through her boss’s calendar. In the meantime, Wigman gave Desdemona a little pat on the back.
“Now, Dessie,” he said. “I want you to head on back to that li’l orphanage of yours and take it easy; don’t let this nonsense get to your head. We’ll have it all sorted out in no time.”
“Brad,” said Desdemona, sneaking a look at the receptionist to see if she’d registered the first-name familiarity that the two of them had. “Bradley. This is so kind. So kind of you. You are old, true friend. If anything can get his mind back to important things, to machine parts, it is you.”
“And that’s just what we’re going to do.” He gave her another pat. “Now run along, Dessie. We’ll be seeing you soon enough.”
Desdemona smiled sheepishly, breathed another word of thanks, and headed toward the elevator doors at the other end of the room. Wigman watched her go. Once she’d disappeared beyond the closing doors, he put his hand to his chiseled chin and rubbed absently at the freshly shaved skin. He glanced at the ceiling-tall windows that made up the western wall of the lobby and stared at the wall of trees beyond the glass in a way that he hadn’t remembered doing before—it was something that hadn’t necessarily ever occurred to him. But now the wall of green seemed to take on a new—what had she said?—yuckies. It was distracting him; distracting him in a way that it hadn’t before.
“You can do Wednesday, Mr. Wigman,” said the receptionist, jarring him from his meditations.
“Wednesday,” he said. “Great. Put me down.” He spun about and walked back thro
ugh the resplendent brass doors.
What Wigman didn’t know: On the hem of the forest’s leafy fabric, all flocked with snow, there was a curious ribbon through which no one of Outside descent could travel. It was there that Elsie and Rachel Mehlberg had found themselves, quite trapped, among thirty-six children, several dozen stray dogs and cats, and an old blind man with wooden eyes. Two days had passed since they’d crossed over into the netherland, the Periphery, and while the rest of the children who called the place home seemed to enjoy their lives there, Elsie and Rachel were strangely discontented. For one thing, it would be a matter of days before their parents would return from their trip to Istanbul, hopefully with their brother in tow; they couldn’t imagine their grief on arriving stateside only to discover that in the process of finding one child, they’d managed to lose the other two. It was paramount that Elsie and Rachel be there for them—their parents would undoubtedly die of heartbreak if they weren’t.
However, it didn’t seem like they had much of a choice. The magic of the Periphery was clearly very strong—why else would all these children and dogs and cats be stuck here? Besides, Elsie was very much under the sudden impression that her brother was not, in fact, in Istanbul at all. It was a feeling she’d had before, when she’d seen her brother’s school friend at the pumpkin patch in the fall, though she now was suddenly able to correlate it with this place, the Wood and its enchanted boundary. And so the two sisters fell in line with the other children and chose tasks for themselves that they might better contribute to the community into which they’d been thrown.
Rachel, while initially resistant, found that the hewing and stacking of firewood appealed to a patch of her brain that longed for structure. The chopping part somehow ameliorated whatever frustrations she was having, and the loading and stacking felt like an elaborate game of Tetris. Elsie, too young for heavy physical work, had taken to mending clothes. She also endeavored to replace her Intrepid Tina doll with a facsimile that she’d made out of a few sticks and a handful of moss. Once she’d completed it, the doll became the envy of the other younger girls (and a few boys), and so she became busy satisfying the orders of a steady line of customers for the woody toy.
At night, the children would gather on the floor of the cottage’s living room, where a fire burned merrily in the hearth. Carol would take his place in the rickety rocking chair, and the children would splay around him, wherever they could manage to fit. Puffing at his ever-present pipe, Carol could be induced to tell stories of his time inside the Impassable Wilderness—“The Wood,” as he called it—and the children would thrill to the fascinating tales of talking animals, nature-attuned Mystics, and the comings and goings of kings and bird princes and Governors-Regent. In all his stories, however, he would always deflect the question of exactly how he came to be in the Periphery and what thing he’d done that had so angered the people of the Wood, enough to exile him to this strange purgatory.
Once the younger ones were tired, the children would shuffle off to their makeshift beds. The house managed to sleep all of them fairly comfortably, though they’d been forced to fill every available space with little fur cots. Once the few bedrooms had been filled, the attic then took the overflow; it wasn’t long before that large room had reached capacity, and ever since, they’d been sticking little beds wherever they could manage in order to meet the demands of a slowly growing pool of children. Growing in number only, however. It was one of the advantages of the time-stoppage that occurred in the Periphery—the fact that the littlest ones, whose beds could fit easily in the cavity of a kitchen cabinet, would never outgrow their sleeping arrangements.
And so the days folded one into another, and thus would they continue to pass; or so Elsie and Rachel figured. That was, until they discovered something very strange, something that they wouldn’t, in the immediate moment, be quite able to figure out or explain.
It happened one afternoon; the firewood had been stacked and the cleaning had been done. Most of the children were opting for an afternoon free of chores and were busy blocking out a hopscotch court in the snow of the yard. Elsie and Rachel were sitting on the porch of the cottage, watching the proceedings, when they saw Michael and Cynthia prepare themselves for an outing in the surrounding trees, setting snares for wild game. Rachel had asked what they were doing. Michael had responded with an invitation to come along.
“Sure,” said Rachel. She then looked at her sister. “Wanna?”
“Yeah, okay,” said Elsie, though she was a little leery. She kept flashing back to that rabbit she’d seen, their first day in the Periphery. It broke her heart, the idea of it snagged in a wire snare. “I’ll go along just to keep company.”
They followed the two older kids—Cynthia was a year Michael’s senior, at eighteen—into the trees beyond the vale. Cynthia carried a few loops of wire at her belt; Michael had built several traps out of salvaged metal and wood which he held at his side as he walked. They stuck to familiar paths, worn into the forest floor by their own steps; after they’d been walking for a time, they stopped and studied the surrounding woods.
“It ends right about there,” said Michael, pointing to a stand of trees in the distance, where the ground began to slope upward. “We’ve never been able to go beyond. We just keep ending up back here.”
“That’s weird,” said Rachel.
“It is—and it’s a little disorienting. I wouldn’t advise it.” This was Cynthia. She wore her auburn hair back in a knotted bandanna.
“Makes me a little, like, seasick every time,” said Michael, miming rubbing his stomach. “It’s gross. And then you’re back where you were before. Easy to get lost that way.”