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Linden Park Publishers, Ltd
Category:
Holidays
Publisher: Linden Park Publishers, Ltd
ISBN-10: 097866552X
Type: Fiction
Pages: 432
Copyright: Dec 12, 2012
ISBN-13: 9780978665524
Price: $5.95 (eBook)
If Mary Jane was motivated by faith, a spirit of independence and the quest for truth in the first novel of the trilogy, Madeleine and Esmeralda are driven by purposes quite different in the second. For both girls, it is the embracing of hope - of salvation for Madeleine, and illumination for Esmeralda - that propels them along their separate paths.
Madeleine, a daughter of the Magian line, is bequeathed calinda al emeris magis - the rare "gift of the fourth king" - which enables her to perceive what others cannot. But, as with many gifts, there are prices to pay for such things. The bloom of a rose, or the fruit of a tree, does not come without the promise of a thorn, or the threat of blight.
For Esmeralda, the fortuneteller who once read Tarot cards for Mary Jane on First Night, the journey forward is impeded by that affliction which haunts everyone who calls Christmasville home: memory - the multiple perforations of memory, which prevent her from summoning images of her long lost father, her mother, her brother Oscar...and of what became of them all.
As readers follow Esmeralda and Madeleine in their quests, they discover the origin and dynamics of the colossal clock tower, the functions of the giant transformers that generate much more than heat and light for the idyllic town of Christmasville, the "secret of lightning" and the remarkable phenomenon of "thin places." But for the astute reader - the reader who discovered in Christmasville a confirmation of that sometimes elusive, though always enduring virtue of faith - Finding Christmasville will be a journey of illumination, an epiphany, a celebration in that most wondrous and fragile of human aspirations: hope.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Pink Depression Glass (Mary Jane)
Chapter 1: Infrared, Ultraviolet...Variations on the Spectrum of Illumination (Esmeralda)
Chapter 2: The Sounds of Water (Madeleine)
Chapter 3: Blue Lightning (Esmeralda)
Chapter 4: Thin Places and Places Thick (Madeleine)
Chapter 5: The Cross in the Trees (Esmeralda)
Chapter 6: Shadows and Whispers of Things (Madeleine)
Chapter 7: The Bounds of Expectation (Esmeralda)
Chapter 8: A Letter to Santa (Madeleine)
Chapter 9: Adventures with the Nutcracker (Esmeralda)
Chapter 10: The Spark in the Dark (Madeleine)
Chapter 11: Agnesium (Esmeralda)
Chapter 12: The Bridge to December (Madeleine)
Epilogue: An Empty Box of Everything (Mary Jane)
Excerpt
From Chapter II: "The Sounds of Water" (Madeleine)
Eyes closed, I sit at the desk in my father's study and imagine the many sounds of water.
Rainfall...
Rainfall is a vast medley of pings and patters, its volume and pitch orchestrated by the whimsical inclinations of the wind.
Waterfall...
It bends over a rocky precipice and stretches toward the water below like the strings of a harp, but strikes with the roar of cymbals.
A car speeding through a puddle in the street is not unlike the splash of sound that a pianist makes when he flips a page of his sheet music.
The flow of a mountain brook is often quick and serpentine, a gurgling glissando streaming from the liquid glass of water as it rushes, curls, undulates around the polished surfaces of stone. I wonder: if I listened carefully, could I hear the sonata of the brook? Throughout the year could I distinguish the transitions of its four movements from one season to the next?
In late winter I imagine the brook as a whirling tarantella - a gushing, allegro movement, its rapid tempo echoed in notes that are crisp, brisk, brittle - as if the splash and wash and music of the water itself were a frenzied celebration over the silence, and stillness, of ice. Spring showers, having dampened winter fears, would prompt a carefree melody, a charging cha-cha-cha cascading down the mountainside and into the lake below. From summer rains the grace of a swirling waltz - a whirlpool movement round as daisies, playful as pollen wafting on a warm breeze while autumn...the rhythm of the brook in autumn mirrors a dance of leaves, a fluttering adagio falling from trees. Maybe it's because the water of the brook harbors the same memory as trees...the same memory of what is to come.
Ocean...
The sound of the ocean...
Can you hear the turn of the tide? The bass of its ebb? The soprano of its flood?
A wave curls round as a drum when it rolls toward the shoreline, making a soothing, percussive sound when its arc collapses.
Leaning back into the desk chair, I remember the illustrations - the water colors - in a picture book that mom had once read to me:
"Who is the strongest?" said the wind to the rock and the sea.
"I am the strongest!" replied the rock in a deep voice, his massive frame braced against on onslaught of waves. "My muscles are carved in granite; my veins forged of iron. Surely - I am the strongest."
Said the sea to the wind and the rock: "Although my muscles are weak as water, and my veins carry only salt and seaweed and the slightest specks of sand, I am the the strongest. For I have the tenacity of time; the capacity to turn granite to granules, iron to rust."
Opening my eyes, I see Mason in the leather chair on the other side of the desk.
"Maddy?" he signs. "Do you want me to get mommy?"
He is so tiny in the chair - Mason, the youngest of the triplets, his fragile frame once eclipsed in his mother's womb by the shadow of his siblings.
"No," I sign back to him. "Do not get mommy."
He knots his brow, sets his jaw in defiance.
"But you're in pain again," he signs. "Mommy should know."
"It's only a headache," I reply. "It's passing."
With fixed intent he sits in the chair and inspects every feature of my face, looking for a telltale sign that betrays what I have told him.
"Maddy? Maddy, did you count them all?" dad shouts from the dining room.
"Dad's calling me," I sign to Mason. "I have to go help him now. And you, Mason - you should be out sledding with your brothers."
"But they aren't sledding," he signs. "They're building a snow fort."
I look at him as if to say: "Then get your snow shovel, Mason!"
Getting up from the chair, I move round the desk, tousling Mason's hair as I pass. For a moment I wonder if Mason - or if mom, for that matter - can imagine the many sounds of water in the silence of their deafness. I wonder too: Am I like the rock?...Or am I like the sea?
From Chapter IV: "Blue Lightning" (Esmeralda)
"You were going to tell me about my father, Auntie," says Esmeralda, sliding a square of lasagna onto her fork and raising it up.
"Oh...yes," Lucinda says. "You know, Clyde's gravy really is much better than mine, sweetie."
She spears a piece of meat loaf, dabs it in the brown hollow of the mashed potatoes and inserts it into her mouth. She picks up her napkin, wipes a smear of gravy from her upper lip.
"Your father, Lars, was unlike anyone whom I ever met," she says, chewing her meat, swallowing.
Instinctively Esmeralda moves her hand to the book in the plastic bag beside her. She glances at her aunt across the table, starts to speak, but, thinking better of it, remains silent.
"'Brilliant,' I suppose, is the first word that comes to mind. Lars could have done anything that he set his mind to had the circumstances been different."
She stabs her fork into the mashed potatoes, glides a mound of them into her mouth. She looks at the wall panel beyond Esmeralda, her eyes garnering that faraway mistiness that prefaces the animation, and elaboration, of images summoned from the recesses of memory.
"Your father was a scientist by profession - quinine physics? No," she says, contradicting herself. "Quinine was a drug that your brother, Oscar, was given...Quandary?...Quantum physics. Yes, that's it: your father was a scientist in quantum physics. And scientists from places I never heard of before would come to see him in his laboratory, to discuss things...well, it was all science and physics jargon so - even if I could remember what it was that they talked about, I wouldn't have the slightest clue of what it meant. There was one man in particular - he was a scientist like your father - and he would come to stay with us at the house, sometimes for weeks on end. He and your father would sit about the breakfast table before going to the laboratory...Oh, I remember now - they talked about worms! Of all things that they might have talked about at the breakfast table, they talked about worms! Something about worms, about holes...about worms punching holes into some sort of fabric or other. Honestly, sometimes the way they carried on so, you would think that they were a pair of loony birds!"
"Loony birds - in search of worms," remarks Esmeralda.
"What's that? Oh, yes," her aunt says with a chuckle. "Birds and worms - very clever, Esmeralda.
"But anyway," Lucinda continues, after scooping up a forkful of mixed vegetables and slipping it into her mouth. "I remember that little man - that scientist - who would come to stay with us. He had a wild shock of unkempt hair, a mustache that covered the whole of his mouth - and so thick that you would think that it was a patch of horsehair, pasted in place as one might glue in their dentures as part of their morning routine. He had a pipe - sometimes lit, sometimes not. I remember the distinct smell of cherry tobacco, burning, wafting from your father's laboratory when they..."
A gentle smile emerges upon Lucinda's face - as if she's remembering a fond episode.
"His name was Albert," Lucinda discloses. "And he could be very humorous at times. I remember...I remember that Evelyn - your mother's sister - she would come over to the house for morning coffee a couple of times a week, and to help your mother out with the soups and the breads. Evelyn was married to Tom Higgins by then, but...sometimes...well, some of the things that she said to Albert were just so...so crazy and...and such nonsense that you couldn't imagine where she came up with some of the things that she said. Well, Albert of course was thoroughly amused by all this. And it reached a point where Evelyn had said something to Albert that was so ludicrous and so far-fetched that he turned to her and said: 'You know what I think, Evelyn? I think you're just crackers!'
"Of course, Albert didn't say it in a mean or spiteful way. And frankly, I think Evelyn enjoyed the attention from Albert, particularly when he changed the way he addressed her from that point forward: 'Morning, Crackers," he would say to Evelyn. 'Morning, Albert,' she would reply, rather fond of the peculiar pet name he had bestowed upon her.
"On the morning before he left - I remember Evelyn was in rare form, carrying on about the failure of science to develop a smudge-proof lipstick or some such nonsense and...well, I was cleaning up the breakfast table afterwards and found a napkin that Albert had written upon. He was always scribbling notes and formulas across napkins or scraps of paper during his morning discussions with Lars. I thought it might be important because the napkin had an equation written upon it so I brought it to Albert in the laboratory. But when he looked at it, he pulled his pipe from his mouth and laughed.
"'Thank you, Lucinda,' he replied. 'But no - it's not important. What E=MC2 means is...Evelyn equals MANY crackers, squared.'"
From Chapter IX: "Adventures with the Nutcracker" (Esmeralda)
If it was his helmet that had prompted their initial curiosity, it is in the finery of his uniform that they find it now.
'Are you a bandleader?" Esmeralda would ask, had she not detected the jewel-studded scabbard which dangles from his belt, and the gold-and-silver lacework which embellishes the elaborate hilt of his sheathed sword.
Swinging his drab, makeshift cape about him and clasping it at his neckline, he steps toward them. He towers well above the pair - his helmet certainly augmenting his generous height, seated, as it were, high upon his head, hovering in the air the better part of seven feet upwards.
"Who are..." starts Esmeralda, stopping in mid-sentence to turn her head - as do the others - toward the grating, sandpaper sound that is launched from the far side of the hollow.
"Off with us!" the man says, spinning about and whizzing into the trees.
Together Esmeralda and John dash into the woods behind him.
The forest here is much more navigable for their purposes, allowing them to run across a flat landscape that is populated by towering pines, the density of their canopies preventing all but a sparse sprinkling of scrag, of scant underbrush to take hold. The snow, too, is more conducive to their sprint - in spite of the ice pellets - having a thinner, wetter crust to it, as if it had borrowed some of its moisture from the fog that glides, or resides, atop its coarse surface and which enables them relatively secure footings as they push themselves onward. Even the accumulation of pine needles, fallen in layer upon layer beneath the snowy surface, assists them in their endeavor, springing them forward with each thrust of their legs.
'But where are we going?' thinks Esmeralda, realizing now that they are moving further and further away from the train tracks, from the rail-and-tie trail, which leads them, as she believes, to the object of her destination: the clock tower!
Ahead, the man in the cape jolts to a stop. He leans over to catch his breath, stands upright - arms akimbo - to scan the countryside before them.
'Who is this man? What is his name?' she resolves to ask. 'What is it that chases them? That drives them recklessly across this foreign landscape?'
Gasping for air, John and she arrive at the spot where the man has stopped - and with good reason, since he stands at the edge of a steep declivity, the bottom of which is shrouded in fog.
"Who...are...you?" asks Esmeralda between breaths. "And what...what are we...running...from?"
Behind them they hear the swerving, scraping sandpaper sound. It's as if their dash through the forest had carried them no farther away from the sound of it than the rock shelf where they had taken refuge in the ice storm.
"Here!" the man says, reaching up to unclasp his canvas cape. "Here is where the line is drawn!"
He lays his broad cape across the snow near the edge of the precipice, beckoning them to sit, to rest.
John collapses on top of it, though he is careful not to spill beyond the perimeter of the canvas. Esmeralda plops down beside him.
"When you arrive at the far side of the lake," says the man, lowering to his haunches, "you must go due south for a kilometer or so. With any luck, you'll see the cross on the ground that's formed by two felled oaks - the one crisscrossed on top of the other."
"Why are you telling us this?" asks John. "What lake?"
"When you see the cross that's formed by the oaks," the man continues, "there you must turn directly southwest until you see the light of a cabin. There...there you will find sanctuary."
He turns his head aside, acknowledging the close proximity of the grating, rasping sound behind him.
"What is it?" Esmeralda insists. "What is it that's coming?"
Turning his head back, he looks into her eyes with an expression that suggests what might be described as a deep, fraternal fondness.
"The mice!" he replies. "The infernal mice!"
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