The Slippery Map Read online

  He should be counting his blessings. He thought of Sister Mary Many Pockets who, at that very moment, would be balanced on a pew, holding the snuffer on its long stick, placing its metal cap over the flames one by one. He was lucky, really, wasn’t he? He could have been left across the street and fed to the mean dog that guarded the Gold’s Fancy Pawn Shop and Cash Store.

  One of the van’s tires slammed into a deep pothole and then bounced back up again. Mrs. Fishback ignored it. “Well, Dr. Fromler can’t be very good if he’s hidden his office!”

  “Hidden it?” Oyster said.

  “Well, it isn’t where it’s supposed to be!” Mrs. Fishback screeched at him, her lips a terrifying red.

  “Are you lost?”

  “Don’t be an idiot, boy; of course I’m not lost! Get out the map!” She pointed at the glove compartment.

  Oyster popped it open. Inside he found a folded map, worn at its edges. Because the title of this book is The Slippery Map, you may be looking for an unusual map to appear, a slippery map, a highly unusual, maybe even magical map! (Even though right now you don’t know how magical a slippery map is.) But this map stuffed into Mrs. Fishback’s glove compartment was a very ordinary map. Oyster tried to spread out the map on his legs, but the map was flipping around in the breeze coming in through the windows. Finally it was swept out of his hands. It slapped onto Mrs. Fishback’s face, where it stuck for a moment. She swiped it away and it whipped out the window.

  Mrs. Fishback’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. She cinched her lips tightly. “Oyster! You numbskull!”

  Now, the map may have been a very ordinary map, but the glove compartment was not, at this moment, an ordinary glove compartment at all.

  Oyster realized that the wind had grown stronger and, worse, colder, shooting out of the glove compartment, which was still hanging open. It was the Awful MTDs, returned. He reached to shut the glove compartment, but the wind was full strength now, jet stream–like. There was no closing the little door.

  “Oyster!” Mrs. Fishback was screaming now. “Oyster, make it stop!” She was zigzagging all over the road. The wind pressed Leatherbelly against the seat. His cheeks opened and flapped like sails, revealing his pink-and-black gums.

  Oyster leaned over to the gusting glove compartment. He stared inside. “Hello?” he shouted. “Please stop!”

  He listened to the rushing air and then he thought he heard a rustling of voices.

  “What did he say?” one was asking.

  “Is it him?” he heard another voice ask.

  “It can’t be! Not possible. They can’t call on us, can they? Unless…it is him!”

  “Listen! Hush!”

  “How can I hear with you talking all the time, Ringet?”

  Oyster had never heard of the name Ringet. He leaned in again, the cold air rushing into his mouth, and shouted more loudly. “Hello? Who are you?”

  “Push it in the bucket! Send it back!” Oyster heard someone shouting.

  He thought they might be talking to him. “Push what?” he called back.

  “Do whatever they say!” Mrs. Fishback cried. “Give them whatever they want!”

  Oyster squinted into the hole. He saw something glint. The silver bucket, gliding toward him. And there was something in it. Something bristled and fierce looking. Oyster reared back from the glove compartment, the wind whipping around his head.

  “What is it?” Mrs. Fishback cried. “What is it?”

  Leatherbelly whined and pawed at Mrs. Fishback, who was trying to keep her hands on the wheel.

  “I don’t know!” Oyster told her.

  The bristly muzzle poked its way through the glove compartment and shot toward Oyster’s face. Did it have teeth? Oyster dodged and saw its stiff, snakelike body fly by. It landed behind Oyster, on the floor between the backseats. Mrs. Fishback finally wheeled crazily into a parking lot, swerved into a spot, and slammed on the emergency brake. Since she wasn’t wearing a seat belt, her pudgy nose smacked the steering wheel; and she screamed out, covering her face with her hands.

  The wind became a high-pitched whistle, like a kettle—as if a hole inside of the glove compartment were closing to the size of a straw—and then the gusty wind disappeared altogether. The air was still. The glove compartment was a glove compartment again. Oyster slammed it shut, but he was too afraid to turn around.

  “Oyster R. Motel!” Mrs. Fishback whispered hoarsely. “You fix this. Hear me? You’d better fix this.” Leatherbelly had landed in the footwell. He peered up nervously. Mrs. Fishback pulled her hands from her face. Her nose was bleeding. The blood was on her hands. “I could bleed to death!” she said, tipping back her head and pinching her nose. “And it would be your fault!” She grabbed Leatherbelly and got out of the car. “You go back there, Oyster, and find out what it is! Find out what is back there before it attacks me!”

  Oyster had no choice. He unbuckled his seat belt and climbed to the back of the van. He saw the spiky face, but the rest was hidden under the seats. “It’s okay,” he said to himself. “It’s going to be okay.” He slowly squatted.

  As it turns out, it didn’t have a muzzle or a stiff snake body. It was the green-handled broom, returned. Oyster stared at the broom. He nudged it with his foot.

  “What is it, Oyster R. Motel, you evil boy? What?” Mrs. Fishback yelled from outside the van.

  “A broom. It’s our broom, I think. One of our nunnery brooms.”

  “How terrible. A nunnery broom, one of our own, turning on us!”

  He knelt behind the seats, out of Mrs. Fishback’s view, and examined it. How strange, he thought, that they (whoever they were) had returned it. It seemed like they were looking for someone in particular. But who? Not him. Not even the nuns in the nunnery wanted him anymore.

  The tip of the broom handle had a caked-on splotch of something pink. Oyster picked off a chunk of the pink stuff. He sniffed and it smelled nice, like candy. Against everything the sisters had taught him, Oyster decided to nibble off just a tiny bit.

  It was the sweetest thing he’d ever tasted. Pink chocolate.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE MAPKEEPER

  Mrs. Fishback’s bloody nose was fat and bruised. She was pale. In a dramatic, woozy voice, she said, “Get help, Oyster! We’re lost and I’m going to die! Go, run! Get help! A doctor! Find a doctor!”

  Of course, Oyster knew that Mrs. Fishback was not going to die. She only had a bloody nose. Oyster had gotten one once when he’d whacked his nose on the back of a pew after slipping on some frankincense (or had it been myrrh?) that had leaked out of a canister in the chapel. It was really no big deal.

  Regardless, Oyster took one final look at the broom, and, with the sweet taste of pink chocolate still lingering in his mouth, he got out of the van and headed up the street. It wasn’t a very busy street. The shop windows rattled with air-conditioning units that leaked onto the sidewalk. The heat was steaming off of the pavement. Oyster wasn’t sure where to find a doctor on a street like this—Artie’s Arcade? It was closed due to the Awful MTDs. Bristol Bank? He cupped his hand to the window and looked at a maze of red velvet rope leading to a counter and a pale woman on the other side fiddling with her nameplate: MRS. FLORNT. She didn’t seem as if she’d be very good at consoling the hysterical Mrs. Fishback. No, she seemed to lack the necessary mustard—as Mrs. Fishback had once said of Oyster—and zip. She lacked zippy mustard, Oyster decided. He moved on.

  The next shop had no sign, only a plate-glass front with a small placard that read: MOVING. CLOSED. When Oyster looked in through the window, he saw boxes, and rows of shelves filled with rolled-up scrolls of some sort. A small figure shifted at the end of one of the rows. There was a dusty importance about the shop that he couldn’t explain, a mysteriousness. He walked to the door and tapped on the glass. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say. He’d nearly forgotten about Mrs. Fishback. He just wanted to go inside. It dawned on him that he’d been wanting to be out in the world, and here he
was, happening upon a mystery.

  The figure stopped, looked up. It was a woman with a trimmed head of gray hair and a sharp face, pinched eyes, and pinched lips—as if she’d bought them in a matching set. She put her hands on her hips and stared; and then, as if recognizing Oyster, she waved him in.

  Oyster pushed open the door. Bells jangled from the inside handle. The room held a small puff of coolness, just a small puff, from a hardworking air conditioner thrumming out of view. There was a back room with a door standing open, revealing a bit of an office desk and a chair on wheels. The dust motes churned slowly. There were scrolls of varying sizes stuck in cubbies. Some were fat and long, others short and thin. The labels on the cubbies were the names of people: GULOTH GLUTEN, DONALD OSTERMANN, LOLA HEFFERNAN, THE BAGGOTT TWINS, ALEXIS MAXWELL. And the labels on the cubbies matched small metal labels nailed into the wooden poles of the scrolls. There was one cubby in particular that caught Oyster’s eye. It had two names: EDDY WARBLER and FRANCINE MIGHT. But there was no scroll. Instead, there was only a little slip of folded paper that read: STOLEN, in red handwritten letters.

  “Yes, yes, what is it?” the woman said. She had the oldest, most wizened face that Oyster had ever seen—and Oyster, keep in mind, had been raised among old wizened faces in a nunnery. She wore a large metal name tag that read: CARTOGRAPHER AND KEEPER. It was so large, this name tag, and she was so frail, that it weighed her down, tipping her forward. The extra skin that sagged below her chin swayed forward. Her skin was leathery like the scrolls that protruded from their cubbies.

  “Um, well, I…” Oyster couldn’t remember why he was there. He wanted to know what the scrolls were, especially the one marked STOLEN. But there was a reason he was there besides that, wasn’t there? He stammered on a bit.

  “What is it? I don’t have all day! I’m busy here, moving again. Maps into boxes. So that I can get to the next spot and take maps out of boxes. Much to do!” She started rummaging through a box at her feet.

  “Maps?” Oyster asked. “Is that what these are?”

  “Yes,” the woman said, “of course!”

  He walked up to one of the shelves, reading the names: FRANCESCA HAROLD, ALLEN BLOOM, MICHITRA HUNAN. he walked closer to the one marked STOLEN: EDDY WARBLER and FRANCINE MIGHT. “What are they maps of?” Oyster asked.

  The woman paused, frozen mid-slouch. She stared at Oyster, eyeing him up and down, and then she asked, “How old are you?”

  “Ten,” Oyster said.

  “Name, please!”

  “Oyster R. Motel,” Oyster said.

  She disappeared for a moment and then reappeared with an oxygen mask strapped to her face and pulling an oxygen tank on wheels behind her. It rattled like a tea cart. She walked to her office, opening a massive book on her desk, bigger than the Baltimore phone book. She whipped through some pages and stopped. “Yes, yes,” she said, her voice muffled by the oxygen mask. She walked toward Oyster. “You haven’t given up on it. Not yet! But they usually all do in time.”

  “Give up on what?” Oyster asked.

  “Your IOW,” the woman said.

  “IOW?” Oyster asked.

  The woman sighed with irritation. “Imagined Other World. We all have them as children. I’m the Mapkeeper of all Imagined Other Worlds, a cartographer by trade. I map the Imagined Other Worlds of children, or at least I get them started. They usually become self-propelling.”

  Oyster looked at her, bewildered.

  “Once I get them going, they start to record the child’s imaginary updates on their own.”

  Oyster was still bewildered.

  She forged on. “And then I keep the maps. If I don’t, who will? People outgrow imaginations, you know, most often when they become adults. But I keep the IOWs, just in case.”

  In case of what? he wondered. He turned a small circle, gazing up and down the row of cubbies. “All of these are Imagined Other Worlds! Wow! There sure are a lot.” It was such a strange thing, he almost couldn’t believe it was true. He wanted to tell the Mapkeeper that he’d just been a part of something strange himself—the silver bucket trying to haul him off into a windy darkness, the disappearance and return of the nunnery broom. It seemed like the world was offering up an abundance of strangeness, and that this Mapkeeper was accustomed to such things. Maybe she could explain some of them to him. He thought of the name that he’d heard through the glove compartment: Ringet. He thought of Eddy Warbler and Francine Might’s stolen map.

  His eyes landed on the empty cubby again. “What happened to that one?”

  The Mapkeeper pushed her oxygen cart up to the empty cubby and stared at it. She pulled the oxygen mask up to the top of her head. She gave a smile—but it was a stern smile, the kind you give to a worthy opponent. She touched the label. “It was a joint possession. Two children had created an IOW together. A boy and a girl: Warbler and Might. Many years ago, they happened upon me and my collection. They stole their map and slipped inside it.”

  There was something about this last sentence that made Oyster’s heart pound loudly in his chest. It was as if he was hearing something that he was meant to hear, as if his whole life had been ticking toward this one sentence: “They stole their map and slipped inside it.”

  “They did what?” Oyster asked quietly.

  “The maps are slippery,” she explained, peering at him over her glasses. “One can slip inside of a slippery map, if it’s large and well imagined. One can slip into the World itself. All you need is the sharp edge of something and, well, it’s best to travel through the Gulf of Wind and Darkness in something.”

  “Really?” Oyster said. He didn’t know what the Mapkeeper was talking about. Not really. Yet he loved the idea of slipping into a map—into his own map. “Did those two kids ever come back?”

  “No,” the Mapkeeper said. “They’ve remained. They were needed, it seems, inside of their map. The Other Worlds exist, you know. Fully and completely. And those two, well, they were do-gooders; and now they’re grown-up. And, at the moment, quite stuck.”

  “Stuck?”

  The Mapkeeper flipped her hands in the air. “Well, it was their own fault!”

  Oyster understood the boy and girl wanting to stay. He understood wanting to be needed. If only the nuns needed him, well, then he’d have a place among them. He wouldn’t be just a nuisance anymore. He wanted to know whether he had a map. His name was in the book. Was his Imagined Other World here somewhere? Was it possible? He wanted to ask but didn’t want to sound forward, and so he spoke like he was just musing aloud. “I wonder if you have one for Mrs. Fishback? She was a child once. And for Sister Mary Many Pockets? For me? You don’t have one for me, I bet.”

  “Why do you say that? Have you imagined another World?”

  He had imagined another world: a green backyard with a swing set and his parents and the boy from the Chinese restaurant—but he couldn’t help but get interrupted by the thought of Mrs. Fishback with her bloody nose, probably cursing him this very moment for being a numbskull.

  “I’m a numbskull,” Oyster said. “I’m difficult. I’m too much trouble.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who says so?”

  “The nuns and Mrs. Fishback. They’d rather I weren’t around.”

  “The nuns and Mrs. Fishback? What about your parents?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Right, right, of course,” the Mapkeeper said, as if she’d just been stupid for asking the question. “Did this Mrs. Fishback and the nuns all say that you’re trouble?”

  “Not out loud,” Oyster said. “I mean, the nuns can’t talk. But they feel it. I know they do.”

  “Oh,” the Mapkeeper said. “And what do you think?”

  “I want to escape.” Oyster was shocked that he’d said this aloud. He’d thought it, of course, but he was surprised to hear the words bounce around the shop. “I want to go and be a hero, and prove to them that I’m worthy.”

&nbs
p; “Worthy of what?”

  “I don’t know,” Oyster said. Honestly, he didn’t.

  The Mapkeeper started to shuffle down the row, dragging her oxygen cart, her eyes scanning the labels. “Well, it so happens that if your name is in the book—and your name is in the book—then your map is here.” Oyster followed her closely, his ears pounding.

  “Oyster R. Motel. Oyster R. Motel.” She stopped. Oyster nearly bumped into the oxygen cart.

  “Here it is.” She pulled over a nearby step stool and climbed to a shelf so high that Oyster couldn’t see what was up there. His view was blocked by some mammoth scrolls sticking out here and there overhead. Some of them were so big that Oyster thought if they fell, they’d most likely smash his head. The Mapkeeper was reaching in, up to her elbow, and patting around. Was his cubby empty? Maybe so. Probably so. Who would keep track of his Imagined Other World? Not worth the time, most likely.

  But then the Mapkeeper said, “Aha!” And she pulled out something small and tight, the size of a pack of Life Savers.

  “Oh,” Oyster said. “Is that all?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid so. Haven’t done much imagining about your Other World, have you?”

  Oyster shook his head.

  “And how did you chip that tooth?”

  Oyster ran his tongue over the tooth. “I fell down on my face. And I got in trouble too.”

  There was a quiet moment. Oyster felt awful. He could feel the moment swelling with misery. His map was so puny, so sad, really.

  “Look here, Oyster R. Motel,” the Mapkeeper said. “You should learn to have a little more faith in yourself. You’ve got a great imagination. You just haven’t unleashed it.”

  Oyster nodded. He couldn’t look at the Mapkeeper, but he could feel her looking at him, regarding him very seriously.