Mannfred

The dog slips away over the rubble, and we follow. He keeps just out of range of Cranker’s slingshot, and every once in a while we don’t see him and I worry that we lost him. But right about then he turns up over the top of an overturned bus or a huge busted chunk of road and looks at me, then we head his way again until he disappears.

I don’t know where he’s taking us, but it’s clear we got to follow.

After about an hour, we’re within a slingshot of the dome. Up close, it’s like a giant pearl stuck in the busted City. We know the top is open, because we seen it open two nights ago, and we haven’t heard it close yet, but this close we can’t see it. It’s too far above us, straight up.

The dome shoots into the sky, a beautiful, magic pearl.

The dog is nowhere in sight, but he brought us to a place where the rubble is thinner, and there’s a kind of pathway where you can walk safer and down. Cranker and me head down into this pile, when he stops me.

He points.

The dog is lying at the feet of a figure. There’s a man in the rubble. Or really, a man MADE of rubble. Someone made a man out of garbage, a pretty good likeness too. He has a head, a torso, arms, and legs. He’s tall, over our heads, and he wears a crown of letters from the black boxes. As soon as the dog sees that we found the man made of Olden Begones garbage, he takes off at a run. He slinks over a distant pile of garbage, then another farther away, smaller and smaller, but don’t look back. I can’t help thinking he brought us where he wanted.

To this crowned figure of garbage.

“Dog’s weird,” Cranker says. Then he tries to read the crown.

“W … Will …” he starts.

“William1, it says.” I hurry him along. I’m better at letters than Cranker. He looks at me with wonder.

“What the heck’s William1?” In all the piles of garbage and rubble and destruction we seen in the City, it’s all been random. Broken signposts, busted half-words on buses or big boards with words and faded letters on them for stuff we don’t understand. Like giant ladies with long curls and something called “hair color.” Or stuff for teeth, called “toothpaste.” Or men and women with huge faces talking about something called “insurance.” These images are broke, half there and buried deep, faded so much that we only spy a face or word down in the garbage piles below us. We walk over them and under them, and at first we read them, but after a while they’re so common that we stop. It’s just more Olden Begones junk.

But this figure is a thing made here, the first sign of a living human hand in the waste. Someone made him and crowned him William1.

It’s strange.

Who made it? And why?

We look at each other, but Cranker is braver than me. Or sometimes I wonder if he’s just got less imagination. Anyway, he smiles, since there’s an adventure here, he can tell. Then he heads down into the well of garbage ahead of me. I hear him shout, and I run to catch up.

There’s the dome, right there. We walk up and we both touch it and grin at each other. It’s warm from the sunlight, and we lean against it and laugh. We bang against it, we peer into it, but we can’t see inside.

Cranker walks a little out of sight. “I’ll be jiggered!” he shouts.

I run up.

There’s a door built against the wall!

It’s marked out in black boxes!

On the ground in front of the door, it says in the same letters as the crowned garbage man, “William1 was here.” There’s deep, muddy footprints and handprints beside it, and Cranker and me put our feet into the prints. Mine are bigger, Cranker’s are about the same.

There’s muddy handprints all over the glass, and footprints, even a face outlined in mud. Cranker and me add a tiny bit of water to the dried mud and make our own muddy handprints, footprints, and faceprints alongside. I take out the charcoal, and I write on the dome: MANN WAS HERE.

There’s words in mud on the door, too: W1’s DOOR.

Cranker looks at me. “You know, this mud message couldn’t be too old. The last Black Rain would wash it off.” I nod. He’s right. He’s not great with letters and numbers, but Cranker is plenty smart. Wise, Grannie calls him.

“Not more than a week old,” he adds. “Or less.”

“So who’s William1 then? This W1?” I ask. Cranker thinks.

“Well, we know he’s about like us, with feet and hands the same size. His name must be William1.” Cranker points at the message on the ground. “And he made his own image, up there.” He points back the way of the garbage king. “And this here says it’s a door, W1’s Door, outlined in garbage.”

“It’s a doorway,” I say. I get a little shot of nerves up my back, through my neck, up to my hair. I can see Cranker feels the same way.

“Doors was meant to be opened, right, Mann?” He grins at me, and we both start booting and hammering on that door like no tomorrow. Truth is, except for the outline of black boxes, the word “door” and a little mud, there’s no door that we can see. It’s just more dome glass, pearly and hard as nails, reaching into the sky.

We throw chunks of busted-up road or whatever we can find at the sweet spot between the black box outline of a door, but there’s no dent. Not a mark. We keep at it. We scare up a load of FatRats, who scurry off, surprised.

Soon, though, we tire. Then Cranker gets an idea. He says to think of a blacksmith, the man who fixed Nellie’s horseshoe a few nights back. The blacksmith used two pieces of metal to make the horseshoe fit right, one he held and one he banged upon.

“But he heated it up,” I add. “We can’t.”

“No, not heat it up. But throw two rocks at the same place at the same time,” he says, and I see what he means. He gets me to draw a circle in charcoal in the middle of the doorway, and we spend the next hour trying to hit the circle at the same time with two chunks of rock.

Which does nothing.

Finally, Cranker gets mad, takes out his slingshot, and starts pinging huge rocks, as big as he can shoot, at the door. Then he picks up a piece of metal and shoots that. I find a good spot above the door on a flat pile of rock, and I rain down metal and chunks of road, right at the same spot.

Then it happens. Pure luck, or stupid timing, or just the right amount of both a shot piece of metal and my giant boulder ramming it home, but suddenly we hear a tiny creak, and we both stop and run forward.

Somehow, there’s the piece of metal that Cranker shot stuck in the glass in the center of the door. It’s not very big, but it’s stuck all right. He shot the hard, raggedy piece of shiny metal, and in perfect timing, my boulder rammed it home.

We look at it, proud for a minute. We slap hands and do a little dance around the door. We did it! The piece of metal is sliced right into the door, about the length of my finger. We’re impressed that we managed this. Can’t fault us for trying. We bang on the sliver of metal with rocks and sticks for a while, but that does nothing. After a while, the stuck metal piece seems like enough, as close to opening the door as we’ll get.

And as we stare into the glass, feeling proud and brave, a weird figure appears on the other side of the door.

I jump back. It’s slithery, and monster-looking, and scary as anything I ever seen.

“What’s that?” I shout, and Cranker comes to look.

“Save us, it’s a ghost!” Cranker shouts, and we both run off a little. The strange, ghost-thing looks monstrous on the other side of the glass. It floats and shimmers, stretches and shrinks, and two huge staring eyes leap out of it.

We grab our packs and run farther off, but when we look back, the ghostly figure is gone.

We eat quick, a little of Grannie’s dried meat and a few bites of bread. I’m thirsty as anything but only allow myself two small mouthfuls of water, enough to wet my tongue. The sun is raging down now, it’s midafternoon, and we should go back the way we come and find shelter for the night. Plus I don’t want to stay here another second with the ghost thing on the other side of the glass.

Before we go, Cranker goes back to the door, picks up another huge rock, and rams it into the stuck metal piece a few times. Then he calls me over.

“Look,” he says, pointing. I don’t want to get near the door again, but I swallow my fear and go look. There’s a crack in the glass, a small one, starting around our stuck piece of metal. It runs upward and out about a hand’s-breadth. I raise my eyebrows.

“We did that? Made that crack?”

Cranker nods. “We did. Come on, let’s go.”

We take one last look at the door, at our piece of shiny metal lodged there, then we turn away. There’s no more phantom face on the other side, peering back at us. I think about that face, the stuck piece of metal, and that crack all the way back to the porch we slept in the night before.

I don’t say it to Cranker, but I think that crack we made in the door is deep, deeper than it looked at first glance.