The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the Land of Nod.
A policewoman was setting out traffic cones to block off reserved spaces when they arrived at the town park. SPRINGFEST CENTER STAGE, a sign proclaimed, MOTHER GOOSE RETOLD. Wren could see the main performance area and the temporary shelter that served as the theater’s backstage. When she knocked on the makeshift door, a woman dressed in a pink flowery dress and blue cape opened it. She was holding an oversized wooden cane. “May I help you?”
“I’m Suzette Matthews’s daughter,” Wren said. “And these are my friends.” She nodded to Simon, Jill, and Jack, who stood a little behind her. Jack had used stardust to cloak his falcon, so even though it fluttered its wings and resettled onto Jack’s shoulder, the lady in front of them didn’t blink an eye.
“You must be Wren!” The woman’s stage makeup creased into a huge smile. “So you’re the one we have to thank for the Mother Goose theme!” She grinned. “Your mom’s not here yet, but you can wait for her if you want. Our last dress rehearsal starts soon.”
“That sounds good.” Wren peered behind her at the bustling theater. “I wouldn’t mind having a peek backstage anyway.”
As they followed the woman, they could see a man wearing a flannel shirt teetering on a ladder and fidgeting with lights that hung from the two-by-fours serving as scaffolding.
“That’s too bright,” an actor who was standing in the center of the stage and wearing some sort of poufy trousers and green tights said. “And it’s off center. Angle it more to the left.”
Behind him, two women were rehearsing their scenes. Something about three blind mice and how nameless corporations were going to cut off all their tails.
“So it’s an interpretation of the rhymes, I guess,” Simon said, and their guide nodded.
“Yep. Irony is the main selling point. The tame nursery rhymes set against corporate greed and how it’s destroying our environment. Your mom’s a genius, Wren.” She pointed to her dress. “My character, for instance. I’ve lost my sheep, because they don’t have clean grazing land anymore.” She waved her crook up at the ceiling. “Take that, Monsanto!”
“So does my mom have an office here or something?” Wren felt the urgency of their search twitch between her shoulder blades. Who knew how long it would take to go through her mom’s play notes?
“You could call it that,” Bo-Peep said as they skirted some actors wearing hazardous waste suits. They pushed past a rack of costumes to find the chaotic backstage area.
“Stop moving around,” said a woman kneeling to adjust the hem of an actor’s ball gown. “Your costume doesn’t need to be perfect. I’d settle for it not falling off, but if you keep squirming, you’re going to have neither.”
There were volunteers moving props into place and others using paint to touch up set pieces.
“One hour until go-time.” A stage manager dressed all in black swooped through with a clipboard, and the volume of the frenzied activity tripled.
“Over there.” Bo-Peep pointed to a curtained-off area in the very back. “Y’all can be here if you keep quiet, but you’ll have to leave before curtain call.” She turned to go.
“Thanks,” Wren said, pushing aside the fabric and spying the familiar sight of her mom’s coffee thermos on an old folding table in the corner. The surface was covered with three-ring binders and file folders wedged neatly between bookends.
“Thank goodness my mom is a neat freak,” Wren said, handing several binders to Simon and a file to Jill. Little Post-its stuck out to catalog things by theme. “The rhyme we’re looking for will be in a section on mysteries or historical basis for the rhymes. Something like that. Or she could have a section on conspiracy theories.” She shoved a folder at Jack. “You should be good at looking for those.”
Wren flipped through the pages. She found rhymes about porridge and others about hens. Blackbirds and sheep and cows. Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, but no keys. She wasn’t misremembering, was she? Her mom had distinctly said “forgotten key” when she was talking about the goose that laid golden eggs. That had to be it.
The stage manager was calling for quiet. They were getting closer to go-time.
“Hurry,” Wren told the others. “We’ll have to leave before they start performing.” Jill sat cross-legged with her back up against the wall, Simon next to her. Jack was pacing back and forth, his falcon twitching nervously on his shoulder. Wren wondered what all the theater people would say if they could see it. Her eye caught the back of an actor carrying a chicken under her arm. With all the craziness, they might not even notice.
Wren skimmed her mom’s loopy handwritten notes, wondering how many rhymes she had actually transcribed. Most were labeled, a few flagged for use in the play. At first, it seemed that her mom had organized them by subject, but then she found a folder where they were cataloged by rhyme. There were only a few notes here. The King and Queen of Hearts. The Old Woman from France. And Wren’s gaze stopped fast on the last one: The Land of Nod.
She ran her finger down the page.
From breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night, I go abroad
Afar into the Land of Nod.
All by myself I have to go
With none to tell me what to do—
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountainsides of dreams.
The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the Land of Nod.
Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day.
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.
Wren’s heartbeat quickened. This rhyme explained what she’d experienced with the weird visions. Seen in that light, what Robin had told her made more sense. Perhaps she wasn’t getting messages in her dreams. Perhaps she was actually seeing what was happening on Nod. What else had her mom found about Nod? Something about Boggen? She flipped through the pages. She had to be getting closer. She read a different poem about three old witches, mainly because they were sleeping in it, but it referenced nothing remotely close to keys—and then she found it.
“Guys, I think this is it,” Wren said in a shaky voice. Jill stopped reading and looked up at her, and Simon reached for his own notebook, pencil ready to write down whatever Wren was about to say. Jack was over at her shoulder in an instant.
“You found the rhyme?” he said, his eyes wide with excitement. “Lemme see.”
“Listen to this,” Wren said, running her fingers along the words as she read the rhyme aloud:
I had a little treasure tree,
Nothing would it bear,
But a silver lockbox,
And a golden key;
The King of Nod’s daughter
came to visit me,
And all for the sake of my little treasure tree.
So I danced over water
I hopped by the bay
Forty laps of moonlight
Will open up the way.
“I wonder what the forty laps of moonlight means,” Wren said, skimming the poem again. “It’s got to be tied in to the amount of stardust used somehow. What do you guys think?” she asked, but no one answered. In that moment, Wren realized that the room had gone eerily quiet, too quiet even for the minutes before a performance, and that she no longer heard the familiar scratching of Simon’s pencil. She glanced over to see him fast asleep on the floor, one arm curved protectively around his notebook. Jill slumped down next to him, snoring softly.
“Simon?” Wren said, taking one step forward before the room began to spin around her. She reached for the table to balance herself, but managed to catch only the edge of the folding chair, sending it crashing down as she stumbled to the floor, right before everything went black.
Wren woke to find herself standing in a silent hallway. The air hummed with the sound of a million wings. What had just happened? Was she having another vision of Nod?
She moved down the hall, and she could hear voices, the man’s and woman’s, the same ones she heard in her very first dream. This time, the woman sounded terrified. Her tone was shrill, and every word came out sharp. “We have to hurry!” she said. “What will we do if we run out of time?”
Wren quickened her pace. She needed to find them, ask them about Boggen and what was happening on Nod.
The man’s voice was a low rumble, but even he sounded frightened. “You worry too much, Elsbeth. We have to do what we have to do.”
“He has Robin,” the woman nearly shrieked. “There’s no more time for her. Or the rest of Nod.”
What had happened to Robin? How were these people connected to her? Wren sped her steps toward a door. The voices were coming from behind there. She had to find out what Boggen was planning to do. If someone at the Crooked House was working to help him come back to Earth, the worst possible thing would be to deliver the rhyme into the wrong hands. She had to know who was helping Boggen. The urgency of her need took hold, and she felt the same shifting sensation, the one that took her different places in the dream world, and the voices were gone.
She pushed open the door, but the owners of the voices weren’t behind it. The sound of their argument cut off into silence, and instead, she was faced with a long hall, glowing on either side with blue fire and marked with the rows of U-shaped lines bent in on each other, matched up to look like pairs of wings. Her heart thumped loud. She was getting closer at last. She began to run, hurrying around the twists and turns, each footstep taking her closer to where she felt she was supposed to go.
She trailed her hands along the walls, the rough edges of the pattern marking her skin. The humming sound grew louder, urging her on with a pulsing intensity. Up ahead, she could see a glow of brighter blue, and she was a few steps away when it snuffed out like a candle, and she was alone in a dark passageway.
She felt empty inside, as though all hope had drained away, and her body refused to move. She wondered if she would stay planted there forever. She reached out a hand to touch the wall next to her. Perhaps she could still feel the carvings. She instinctively knew they would take her where she needed to go.
But the walls were smooth, damp to the touch. Besides, the humming was gone. In its place, Wren heard a strange rough sound, like someone sawing on a piece of wood.
It was coming from behind her, and Wren retraced her steps. Nothing was the same: no tunnel, no glowing walls, no sound of the man and woman talking. She was in a stairwell. An old building, she’d wager, with a pipe-lined ceiling above and weathered stone beneath her feet.
The sawing sound was coming from a room up ahead. Wren could see the gilding around a green door, but there was a landing in front of it, a wide-open space that she would have to cross.
For the first time, Wren felt uncertain. Should she find the cause of the noise? Or stay in the shadows? A humming sound drifted toward her from somewhere up ahead, like the low thrum of an engine. The ever-present sawing noise barely drowned it out. A factory, perhaps.
Wren tiptoed toward the perimeter of light, peering into a scene that looked like it had come straight from a history book.
Gas-lit lamps lined the walls and these, along with a blazing hearth fire, lit up the crowded room. Women in drab corseted dresses and men in worn clothes leaned over worktables filled with strange apparatuses. Some reminded Wren of old-fashioned sewing machines, with foot pedals that workers pumped to set the gears spinning. Others looked like giant printing presses, with rollers and cogs maneuvered by small children who operated levers on the side.
Whatever they were doing, it seemed to charge the air with energy. Overhead, a tangled ball of stardust shot jagged sparks down to the machines, but the workers didn’t seem to notice. Scurrying servants dressed in ragged clothes bobbed between them, delivering glass bottles full of brightly colored liquids and removing empty trays as the workers continued on. Wren couldn’t tell if they were creating the stardust or using it for their frenetic activity, but she needn’t have worried that they would notice her. Their attention was completely fixed on their work, as though they couldn’t stop for a moment, and Wren thought she knew why. In the center of it all stood a giant statue, a figure holding a large hourglass, the bottom of which was filled with iridescent stones. The top half was nearly empty but for one final stone, tottering on the edge of the funnel. Whoever had made the timepiece had a strange sense of artistry, for as Wren peered closer she saw that the statue was actually a skeleton, its hollow skull leering at the dwindling time as though to give a morbid warning. She drew back with a shiver.
No one in the room seemed to notice how loud the sawing noise had gotten. Or if they did, they didn’t care. Wren edged her way out from her hiding spot. She was having difficulty thinking clearly with the awful sawing sound. Back and forth. Back and forth. I have to find the source. She was in the middle of the landing now, and no one was looking in her direction. She hurried across to the gilded door. It was cracked open, and now she knew for sure. The sawing noise was definitely coming from in there.
She reached for the handle and waited a heartbeat. She felt a strange reluctance to leave the landing, as though she belonged in the middle of all that work below. She forced herself to turn her back to it, instead nudging the door in front of her open a fraction of an inch. She instantly wished she had stayed away. Her stomach roiled, and she staggered, reaching to the wall for support.
An enormous table filled most of the space inside the room. A solitary individual bent over its surface, gnawing back and forth at the carcass of a giant bird. It wasn’t a sawing sound that Wren had been hearing. It was crunching. With every bite, the crunching grew louder.
A pile of bones lay underneath the table, and half the surface was crowded high with more birds. Dozens of them, Wren guessed. And all of them as black as night.
“Don’t linger in doorways, Jack,” Boggen said, not even looking up from his horrifying meal. “It’s very rude.”
“I’m not Jack,” Wren said, and her mouth grew dry as she realized what it meant.
Jack. She stumbled backward. Boggen was expecting Jack. She felt behind her for the door. If she could just get away, escape onto the balcony, return to the tunnel, she could sort this all out.
“Wake up, Wren,” she told herself. “Wake up before it’s too late.”
But it already was too late.
Boggen looked at her, causing the mark on her neck to flare, and Wren’s stomach twisted, forcing her to swallow hard not to be sick.
Boggen’s mouth was smeared red with blood. His forehead glistened with sweat. And his eyes. Ice-cold blue eyes looked at Wren with a piercing glare, her own surprise mirrored in his gaze.
“The Weather Changer.” He dropped the bird carcass. “I must thank you for your assistance, however unwittingly given. Without you, that idiot boy would never have found the key to the gateway. Or the rhyme.” He picked at his bloodstained teeth with a bone. “I am nearly ready to fly. I will thank you in person.”
Wren staggered to the doorway, shaking her head back and forth, willing all of this to go away. Jack couldn’t be helping Boggen. That would mean he’d been lying to all of them.
She rushed past the workroom, not bothering to hide herself, and she heard cries of alarm and surprise.
“A Dreamer!” someone shouted, and the whirring sound of the assembly line stopped.
“She was in with Boggen!” another cried.
“Quick!” A man’s voice this time. “Catch her!”
But they were too slow. Wren hurried into her passageway, hoping that every footstep took her closer to waking up. She heard the commotion behind her, and she was running, running as fast as she could, the wooden floor pounding against her feet.
She heard the voices behind her, screaming for the Dreamer, and the noise of the crowd, growing louder into a nightmarish chant. “Get her! A Dreamer! Get the Dreamer!”
Their voices became drumbeats for Wren’s strange flight. She had to get back. She had to warn the others. Figure out a way to stop Jack. The desperation grew inside, until she felt like she might explode. She must have outpaced them, or the dream was changing again, because soon all she could hear was the pounding of her own heart. She kept running anyway, wondering how long the dream could possibly last, when the tunnel abruptly ended, shooting her out into a valley.
Her breathing slowed, and her heart regained its normal rhythm. The valley was calm and nearly silent. Every rustle of wind against the grass felt loud to her ears. She half expected some woodland animal to arrive and start chiding her for being a Dreamer when she heard the humming again, the wings that called to her like no other. She retraced the way she’d come, but no glow lit her way, no familiar etching of wings.
She whirled in a great circle, waiting for a sign, any sign, to tell her which way to go.
“What now?” she screamed into the glorious blue sky. “What am I supposed to do now?”
But Wren’s voice only echoed with the harmony of the beating wings, and she was falling, falling down to the ground, down to the wet grass beneath her palms, falling into sleep, falling awake.
She shot up from where she’d been slouched on the cold floor of the theater. Her clothes clung damply with sweat, and her throat was so dry it hurt. She tried to force down a swallow, pinching herself to make sure she was really awake. No strange voices came from the room beyond. No odd symbols hummed at her. No vision. She was out of the dream.
Instead, she saw Simon right where she’d left him, his head thrown back and mouth open, snoring softly. Jill was dozing next to him, but Jack was nowhere to be seen.
From the stage area, Wren could hear that the play had started. The sound of projected voices built until the actors and actresses were chanting a rhythmic rendition of “Little Boy Blue.”
“Simon!” Wren crawled over to him, shaking him roughly on the shoulder. “Simon, wake up!”
“Wha—” He made little smacking sounds with his mouth, his eyelids fluttering open.
“It’s Jack, Simon.” Wren shook him harder. “It’s been Jack all along. He’s the one who’s been helping Boggen. We’ve got to stop him! He’s been lying to us. About everything.”
“What?” Simon was wide awake now.
“Boggen’s coming.” Wren’s thoughts were racing faster than she could get the words out as she told him what she had seen in the dream world. “He said he was getting ready to fly. We’ve got to stop Jack from opening the gateway before it’s too late.”
“You dreamed about Boggen?” Jill pushed up to a seated position. “I don’t understand.”
Wren told her what she’d seen, how her dreams somehow took her to Nod. “He was expecting Jack, because Jack’s been visiting him through his dreams.” Wren felt jittery inside. Like she would jump out of her skin if they sat there wasting more time talking. “I don’t know if Nod is in trouble because of what Jack’s doing or for some other reason, but everything’s about to get a whole lot worse. Jack’s got the rhyme now. And Boggen said that Jack had already found the key.” She left out the part where Boggen had credited her for helping him.
“And once he opens the gateway . . .” Jill sprang up.
Wren yanked Simon to his feet. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Come on! Jack can’t have gone far.”
From the stage, Wren could hear someone reciting a very different, very angry version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Suddenly, the rhythm of the actors’ lines was cut off by a too-authentic scream and the unmistakable sound of a falcon’s screech.
Wren tore through the curtain in time to see Jack in the final step of growing his falcon. Jack hadn’t bothered to hide his bird, and the backstage workers were all in a fright. One had passed out cold, another stood gaping openmouthed, and the rest cowered, trying to avoid the set pieces that crashed down as Jack’s bird hopped and jolted, trying to get room to maneuver. There was yelling and shoving and the stage manager was in the middle of it all, shouting into her headset. “We need to stop the rehearsal. I repeat. Stop the rehearsal.”
“Jack!” Wren screamed. “Don’t do this!”
“Too late, Wren. You picked your side, and I picked mine. I’m on the right one,” Jack said, pulling himself up onto his bird. “Nice knowing you, but I’m off to Nod.” He gave Wren a cold smile. “And don’t worry about your pesky falcon. I’ll take care of her.” His bird backed up, knocking a rack of clothes into Little Miss Muffet’s spider, and then Jack was aloft, soaring out of sight.
The actors on the other side of the curtain let out a collective gasp, and then a wild cheer as if Jack’s flight was somehow part of the show.
The few backstage workers still on their feet gaped at Wren, Simon, and Jill as though they were aliens from another planet.
“Sorry,” Wren mumbled. From the other side of the curtain, her mom’s voice bellowed, “What in the world was that? What is going on back there?”
“Run!” Wren said, tearing toward the exit. It was as she passed her mom’s office that she saw it, a slim blue book that she had seen once before.
“Jack’s notes! He left them!” Wren scooped up the tattered log, dodging and ducking her way through the backstage chaos until finally they were at the door, through it, and back outside. It wasn’t until they were at the edge of the park, hidden under the cover of a thicket of trees, that she told the others to stop.
“I saw Jack with this,” she panted. “That day we were cleaning the repository.” Simon made a starlamp so they could see, and Jill crowded close as Wren flipped through it. Long lists of equations, followed by notes that proved he had been hunting for the rhyme all along. Pages torn from a book with detailed information about the capabilities of Weather Changers. A drawing of Boggen’s lab they had found underneath the waterfall. Tables where Jack had calculated the amount of stardust required for interplanetary flight, where he’d scribbled rhymes about scraping cobwebs from the moon and riding the paths of the stars. The last part had drawings of instruments Wren had seen in the old Crooked House observatory and, below them, a rhyme:
Sing a song of Fiddlers,
A pocket full of pow’r;
Four-and-twenty blackbirds
Eaten in the tower.
The skies your voice will open
The stars begin to sing.
Light the darkest candle
Through the heavens you will wing.
Wren’s stomach flip-flopped. What had Jack meant when he said he would take care of her falcon? An image of Boggen feasting on the birds flashed through her mind. What exactly had he said? That he was almost ready to fly. “Come on!” Wren shouted as she sprinted toward Pippen Hill. “We’ve got to save the falcons.”