Dark Cities Underground

DARK CITIES UNDERGROUND



PART ONE

THE DOOR IN THE TREE

THUS GREW THE TALE OF WONDERLAND THUS SLOWLY, ONE BY ONE. ITS QUAINT EVENTS WERE HAMMERED OUT ... .

 


--LEWIS CARROLL, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland



ONE

RUTH BERRY PULLED HER CAR UP TO THE HOUSE IN OAKLAND and turned off the ignition. The car bucked several times after she stopped it and then slowly fell silent, like a dog coming to the end of a barking fit.

She went up the front walk and knocked on the door. There was no answer. "Hello!" she called out. "Is anyone home?"

A path of round white garden stones led around the house to the backyard, and a white gate stood open at the end. She followed the path and knocked.

The man she had come to see had his back to her, shoveling compost from one bin to another. It was late October; everything in the garden had been cut back and pruned except for a few red and orange roses.

The man turned slowly. He was in his fifties, tall and lean, with a narrow face and thinning hair brushed back from his forehead. The hair was black mixed with gray, the eyes brown, the nose long and slightly hooked. Yes, she thought as he turned to face her. There's still a resemblance, after all these years ... .

"Mr. Jones?" she asked.

Jeremy Jones wiped his dirt-caked hands on his jeans. "Yes."

"Hi, I'm Ruth Berry," Ruth said. "Your mother is E. A. Jones, is that right?"

His face became guarded. "I'm sorry--I don't talk about my mother."

"Yes, I've heard that about you. I was hoping you mightmake an exception. See, I'm writing a book about her and the Jeremy series--"

"I'm afraid not. Sorry."

"But why not? What did she do to you that was so awful? You said in an interview once--" She took out her pocket notebook and began to leaf through it. "You said that she stole your childhood. What did you mean by that?"

"Actually I never said that at all. I told you--I don't do interviews. This dreadful woman came to the door, and when I turned her away she made up that quote, made up an entire article out of whole cloth."

"What was it like?" Ruth Berry asked softly. "Being the kid in all those stories?"

Jeremy hesitated. There was a moment, Ruth thought, when he might have asked her in, when the innate politeness she sensed in him might have won out over his defensiveness. Then, "I don't know," he said. "That was someone else. Sorry, I'm busy now."

"Here's my card. Give me a call if you change your mind."

To her surprise he took it. "Ruth Berry," he read.

One more try, she thought. What the hell. "Not as strange as Jeremy Jerome Gerontius Jones."

"You have no idea," he said, returning to his compost.

She went back to the car, defeated, and turned the ignition. "Good car," she said when it started. There was absolutely no money to repair it if it broke down, and she didn't see how she could get around the Bay Area without it. She had to try Jeremy again, and then interview Jeremy's mother--Esmeralda Ann, her full name was--and then, when the advance from her publisher came through, take a trip to New York to see E. A. Jones's editor. New York was expensive, they said.

The car bucked. Ruth held her breath. It smoothed out and she sighed with relief.

She'd known that it wasn't going to be easy to interview Jeremy Jones: that was why she hadn't called before coming to see him. She would have to try again, though; she couldn't finish her book without him.

She lived in Santa Cruz and had a long trip ahead of her, two hours if the traffic was good. As she navigated the freeway shethought about her book, and about the stroke of luck, her first in a long time, that had gotten her the contract.

Two months earlier a magazine editor she sometimes worked for had asked her to do an article about the new Museum of Neverwas. She had been allowed into the museum a week before it opened, and she and her daughter Gillian walked together through the quiet rooms, exclaiming over lunch boxes and plastic toys, pencils and mugs and t-shirts, computer games and limited edition porcelain figures. The museum had collected practically everything connected with E. A. Jones's books: her notebooks, first editions from all over the world, illustrators' renderings of Jeremy and the Guardian Dog and Iris and the pirates, animation cels from the Disney cartoon. One cabinet held some of Jeremy's childhood drawings; she was surprised to see what a good artist he had been, much better than Gilly or any of her friends at the daycare center.

"Mommy, Mommy--look!" Gilly called. "It's the Dragon!"

Ruth made her way to a glass cabinet. Inside stood the famous green dragon, the stuffed animal that Jeremy had taken along with him to Neverwas. But it's brand new, Ruth thought, surprised. They must have bought a new one--this can't be the original. It isn't even scuffed.

She leaned over to read the index card in the case. "Jeremy Jones's beloved stuffed dragon, given to him by his mother, E. A. Jones, in 1954." On a wall nearby hung the original of C. C. Andressen's famous picture, Jeremy clutching the dragon by the ear.

This doesn't look like a beloved toy to me, Ruth thought. Gilly's animals are much more beat up. There isn't even any fur missing from the ear, from either ear. And wait a minute--

She went back to look at E. A. Jones's notebooks. Yes, she thought. Look at this. Jones had started writing the stories in 1951, when Jeremy was five, three years before she bought the dragon. But everything Ruth had read had said that Jeremy and the dragon had been the inspiration for the stories.

She took a pamphlet from a stack by the door. It was the usual puff piece, but she noticed that Jeremy's name was not listed among those who would attend the gala opening, even though his biography stated that he lived in Oakland and had donatedthe green dragon. His mother's name was missing from the list as well, though that could be due to ill health or old age. Still, it seemed that he and his mother were estranged.

She studied the biographical information on E. A. Jones in the pamphlet. Esmeralda Ann Schneider, known as Ann, had married Blair Jones, a mechanical engineer, in 1945. Jeremy was born a year later. The couple had gotten divorced when Jeremy was two, and Ann had turned to writing to support herself and her son.

Ruth felt a strong kinship with Ann Jones. Gilly's father Ned had left her shortly after she had told him she was pregnant, and she had never seen or heard from him again.

She tried calling Jeremy and E. A. Jones the next day, but both were out and neither returned her calls. The deadline for the article loomed; she turned it in without interviewing either of them. But in the article she managed to create an air of mystery surrounding the mother and son, to imply that something hung unspoken between them. Two days after the article appeared she got a call from an editor in New York. The editor's curiosity had been piqued by the unanswered questions, and he wondered if she would be interested in writing a book.

 


THE DAY AFTER Ruth's visit Jerry Jones got a letter in the mail. "Dear Mr. Jones," the letter said. "I am an agent representing a number of fine artists in the Bay Area. Recently I saw some of your work at the Museum of Neverwas and was quite favorably impressed. I hope to discuss an arrangement with you that should prove to be profitable to both of us. Please call or write me to set up an appointment. Sincerely, Barnaby Sattermole."

Jerry read the letter again. There was no acknowledgement of the fact that the "work" Sattermole had seen had been done over forty years ago, by a child of five or six. But that child, as Jerry had told Ms. Berry, was...