Far Far Away Read online

  Also by Tom McNeal, writing with his wife,

  Laura Rhoton McNeal

  Crooked

  Zipped

  Crushed

  The Decoding of Lana Morris

  By Laura Rhoton McNeal

  Dark Water

  By Tom McNeal (for adults)

  Goodnight, Nebraska

  To Be Sung Underwater

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Tom McNeal

  Jacket art imaging copyright © 2013 by Ericka O’Rourke

  Death and the Child, print made by Hans Sebald Beham, woodcut 1520–1550

  © The Trustees of the British Museum

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McNeal, Tom.

  Far far away / by Tom McNeal.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When Jeremy Johnson Johnson’s strange ability to speak to the ghost of Jacob Grimm draws the interest of his classmate Ginger Boultinghouse, the two find themselves at the center of a series of disappearances in their hometown.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89698-9

  1. Grimm, Jacob, 1785–1863—Juvenile fiction. [1. Grimm, Jacob, 1785–1863—Fiction.

  2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Ghosts—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction.

  5. Missing persons—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M4787937Far 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2012020603

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment

  and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Sam and Hank

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Page

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  What follows is the strange and fateful tale of a boy, a girl, and a ghost. The boy possessed uncommon qualities, the girl was winsome and daring, and the ancient ghost … well, let it only be said that his intentions were good.

  If more heavily seasoned with romance, this might have made a tender tale, but there was yet another player in the cast, the Finder of Occasions, someone who moved freely about the village, someone who watched and waited, someone with tendencies so tortured and malignant that I could scarcely bring myself to see them, and even now can scarcely bring myself to reveal them to you.

  I will, though. It is a promise. I will.

  Let us begin on a May afternoon when the light was pure, the air scented with blossoms, and the sky a pale blue. Lovely, in other words, and brimming with promise. The village trees were in full leaf, and there, in the town square, under the shade of one such tree, a boy named Jeremy Johnson Johnson stood surrounded by three girls.

  Jeremy was a shy boy, so as the girls inched nearer, their eyes bright, he lowered his gaze. One of these girls was Ginger Boultinghouse, whose coppery hair grew long and wild and whose amber eyes possessed the hue, sparkle, and—or so it seemed—effect of a strong lager. The soft sun was behind her. As she leaned closer to Jeremy, she tilted her head so that her unruly hair fell in a dazzling display.

  “About that insane word problem that our insane reading teacher assigned today,” she said in a low voice. “Was that what you were slaving over at lunch?”

  It was indeed.

  I had witnessed it all. At the end of the class, the teacher distributed a little poem called “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” and then asked the students to solve a riddle: “Find hidden in the poem the person who inspired it.” The class bell had rung. “It is deceptively simple!” the teacher called after the students as they filed from the room.

  Well, what the teacher said was true. It took me just a moment and a half to find the answer (though it must be admitted that I spent all my mortal life as a linguist). For Jeremy, it was more difficult. He sat alone during the lunch hour and contemplated the problem, trying this and that while others joked and ate their food and wandered out of doors to enjoy the warm sunshine. Would you like a hint? I whispered, but he shook his head no. When finally the hour was nearly over and he sat alone with his lunch untouched, he whispered, “Okay. But not the answer—just a hint.”

  And so I gave him a small hint. Acrostic, I whispered.

  He needed no more than that. A few moments later, the problem was solved.

  “Yeah, I was working on it,” he said now to Ginger Boultinghouse, and such was the effect of the girl’s eyes that he again had to look away.

  The girl teased free several strands of her coppery hair, held them in front of her face, and studied them for a moment. “And you figured it out, right?”

  Jeremy nodded his head.

  In the old tales, kindness is the purest form of heroism. Find the character who meets the world with a big heart and an open hand and you have found your hero or heroine. Jeremy was like this—whatever was his was yours. He would give up his answer the moment Ginger asked for it. But here was a surprise: the girl did not ask for it.

  She pressed the gathered strands of hair between her lips and stared at Jeremy. Her gaze was strange, and somewhat alarming. She seemed not just to look at Jeremy but through him, as if he were a window to something far away. A moment passed, and then another.

  When finally she spoke, it was not of the riddle within the poem but of something completely different. “Did you see the green smoke last night?” she asked, and I noted that the girlfriends’ faces retreated into mild disappointment.

  “Yeah,” Jeremy replied, but at once he became flustered. He touched the leather cord that looped about his neck, the cord from which his house key always hung. “Well, no, I didn’t see the green smoke. But I heard people talking about it.”

  “But you know what it means, right? ‘Green smoke at midnight; Prince Cakes at first light.’ ”

  Jeremy murmured yes. Everyone in town knew what the green smoke meant. But I knew that Prince Cakes meant something even more to Jeremy.

  “We’re headed for the bakery,” Ginger said, looking off, but then she let her amber eyes settle fully on Jeremy for a long moment. “You want to come, too?”

  Well! I can tell you that this was unexpected. Usually these girls took Jeremy’s answers and departed, but now …

  Jeremy’s eyes slid away. “There won’t be any left.”

  “There will be for us,” Ginger said.

  But Jeremy still shook his head no. “I’m not that hungry,” he said. “And, besides, Prince Cakes are kind of expensive.”

  Ginger smiled and said she wouldn’t worry about that.

  “Why not?”

  The girl’s dark eyes shone. “I just wouldn’t.” She drew closer. “You should come with us,” she said. “You like Prince Cakes, right?”

  Again Jeremy dropped his eyes. “I’ve never had one.”

  As Ging
er released an astonished laugh, a pleasant scent of cinnamon blossomed into the air. “You’ve never had a Prince Cake?”

  “No,” he said, but he did not give the reason.

  “Not even a bite?” Her smile turned frisky. “Not even … a nibble?”

  With each shake of Jeremy’s head, Ginger’s eyes grew brighter. As if it were a wand, she touched a single finger to his forehead and said, “Then today is the day.”

  He wanted to go—I could read this in the flush of his cheeks—but he was uncertain, and as he turned away for a moment, he placed a finger lightly to the side of his head between the eye and the ear. He wanted my opinion.

  I was there to protect this boy—that was my sole reason for coming to this village—but, truly, he lived so much in isolation. I myself had investigated the bakery and found it harmless. It was time that he saw this as well, and, besides, what harm could come from a visit to the bakery in the company of three pretty girls?

  None.

  That was what I told myself.

  But in this matter, as in others, I would be proved wrong.

  So I whispered no warning to Jeremy, and in the next moment Ginger and her girlfriends were leading him toward the bakery in search of his first bite of Prince Cake.

  While our group strolls down Main Street, allow me to provide a word or two about Jeremy Johnson Johnson. When he was six or seven years of age, he told one of his schoolmates that he sometimes heard voices, “a strange whispering,” he did not know whose, but if he pressed a finger right here—he pointed to his temple—he could hear the voices more clearly. “Jeremy hears voices!” the other boy sang out, and from there the news worked its way up and down the streets of the village.

  Some in the town believed there was something askew in Jeremy’s mind, some believed he was too suggestible, and some believed his silver tooth fillings received transmissions from distant radio stations.

  But I can tell you with certainty that Jeremy Johnson Johnson did hear unworldly voices.

  How do I know this?

  Because he heard mine.

  So! Perhaps you had already guessed. I am the ancient ghost mentioned at the outset of this tale. The one whose intentions were good.

  As a mortal man, I was known as Jacob Grimm. Yes, the very one! With my younger brother, Wilhelm, I lived once in Germany, in the village of Steinau in the Kingdom of Hesse. (The house is still there—I took the guided tour some years ago. Ha!) Both of us were linguists, but our collection of household stories—fairy tales, they are now commonly called—is what you doubtless know.

  I have been dead since the Saturday afternoon in September 1863 when I saw the elm tree in the garden dissolve into nothing, and also the window before which I sat, and the wicker chair, and my niece Auguste, who had just inquired what I, lieber Onkel, would like for tea. I lay with a dead tongue and a dead right hand. The next day, I stopped breathing.

  As a dead man, I had two surprises.

  In death, I expected to be greeted by Wilhelm, who had died before me. All of our lives, my brother and I played and studied and worked as one. He was less sturdy than I, and often unwell. I forgave him that, of course. But his was a dreamer’s nature, and he was given to wistful song, longings to travel, matters of the heart. The studies, I would say. The studies, the studies, the studies. If he came reluctantly to the work, still he came. We were strapped to the same yoke. Our desks stood side to side. When Wilhelm married, I joined his household. So of course in death we would travel together—was I so foolish to believe that?—but here I was, and Wilhelm was not to be found.

  That was my first surprise.

  I set out to look for him. I asked the dead if they had seen my brother, but the dead who remain here are less numerous than you might imagine, two here, one there—that sort of thing. I speak English, French, High German, Low German, Serbian, Italian, Latin, Greek, Swedish, and Old Icelandic. In various languages I asked about my brother, the famous, the esteemed, the revered Wilhelm Grimm.

  No, nej, nein, non.

  Several of them did not answer at all but merely stared at me with their dead eyes. To the dead, who was famous means nothing.

  I hastened to the national library in Paris, where I had first learned the ecstasy of comparing words to words, where Wilhelm might wait for me, but he was not there. Around the tables hovered three dead scholars, whose only interest, to my surprise, was in keeping a watchful and suspicious eye on one another. To these men I announced that in July 1805, after a day at this very table, I had written a letter to my brother to say that we must never be apart, that we must do our life’s work together as one.

  The ghostly scholars did not speak. They kept their suspicious watch on one another.

  I asked the scholar next to me if he knew my Bruder, Wilhelm Grimm.

  Upon hearing this name, the three scholars turned their suspicious eyes on me.

  Oh, the first scholar said, the famous Brothers Grimm, who followed the footsteps of von Arnim and Brentano, then claimed the trail as their own.

  Who collected the stories of peasants, said the second scholar, then diluted them for pedagogical nursery use.

  Who, the third scholar said, changed first the words and then the meanings and held still to the pretense of scholarship.

  I slipped away. When I looked back, the scholars had again turned their distrustful eyes upon one another.

  I went to the kingdom of Hesse, where we were born, and then to Kassel, where we went to school. I walked to the Amtshaus in Steinau, because Wilhelm and I had been happy there. I went to wait, like a child playing hide-and-go-find, in the room with the green-and-white wallpaper. But Wilhelm did not come.

  In the street, I met a woman, a specter who now inhabited the kitchen space of a grand home, where she had served as a maid. She had hollow eyes and a strange smile. I inquired of her, and she asked if my brother had been satisfied with his life.

  Yes, I said. Of course. My brother was a romantic man, and his work, his wife, and his children had met all of his romantic expectations. For all of his days, he had been at ease with his life.

  Then maybe he has passed on, said the maid. Her hollow eyes stared fully at me. Very few do not pass on.

  It was she who explained to me that only the troubled remain here in the Zwischenraum, those who are agitated and uneasy, still looking for what this maid and others since have called the thing undone. “Vengeance, for example,” she told me and then, eyeing me slyly, “or some other unknown yet unmet desire. It is unique to every ghost, tailored to his own failures, disenchantments, or regrets.” The dead maid set her hollow eyes on me. “It all depends on you.”

  These phrases—the thing undone; unknown yet unmet desire—have caused me lingering unrest, but allow me now to speak only of the second surprise: the Zwischenraum itself.

  Examine, if you will, the vibrating space around you, what is between and around your hands and your hearths and your homes. This is where I, or another like me, might be: in the Zwischenraum—the space between.

  Specters are not, as often imagined, agents of physical change. We cannot move table lamps or cause knockings in walls. There is about us a slight drafting of warm air—perhaps you have occasionally had one of us pass near you and, feeling a subtle current of warmth, wondered what it was. With effort, we can use this drafting to move a paper or, with greater concentration, perhaps even cause a door to swing closed. But more than that is beyond us.

  Here is what we can and cannot do in the Zwischenraum:

  We see but cannot touch.

  We smell but cannot taste.

  We suffer but cannot weep.

  We hasten but cannot fly.

  We rest but cannot sleep.

  We speak but are not heard.

  So! And what of Jeremy Johnson Johnson, who heard me?

  He was one of the Exceptionals. They come rarely, and in odd variations. I once came upon a woman in Romania who could see my Heiligenschein—my aura—well enough to disting
uish my age and gender, and I have crossed paths with a number of mortals—younger people, primarily, but sometimes older mortals grieving the loss of a spouse or a child—who can sense our presence. And there have been several who have heard me speak, though none in my experience so clearly as Jeremy Johnson Johnson.

  But wait!—I will offer you an example, for as Jeremy and the girls amble toward the Green Oven Bakery, an opportunity to illustrate his strange abilities will soon present itself.

  They had just crossed to the shady side of Main Street when a passing pickup truck slowed and drew alongside them.

  The truck was bright red, and its driver was Conk Crinklaw, a hearty boy whose father was the village mayor. In the back of the pickup, several boys sat on bales of hay. “Hey, Ginger,” one of these boys called out, “going to make the Moonbeam your summer go-to guy?”

  Ginger Boultinghouse smiled pleasantly at the boys. “No, but if you mean Jeremy, he beats most of the local competition.”

  This drew hoots from the boys, and one of them said, “But, then, Gingerkins, you might have to vie for Jeremy with Frank Gaily,” which generated more raucous laughter, and another boy sang out, “Catfight!”—which they then begin to chant in a husky singsong. “Cat-fight, cat-fight, cat-fight!”

  Well, there was no Frank Gaily. He was properly called Frank Bailey, and because he was a large yet delicate boy, he, like Jeremy, was the object of the bully’s sport.

  Jeremy’s skin glazed with sweat. He touched his hand to his temple to receive anything I might say to him, but it was a poor time for this. One of the boys noticed.

  “What’s up, Jeremy?” he called out. “Got a long-distance call coming in?” And another said, “Picking up a news flash from Jupiter?” And yet another called, “Or maybe something from Uranus?”

  Well, that is how people can be. I should have restrained myself, but I could not. I gave Jeremy something to say. Mögen Sie eine endlose Wüste auf dem Rücken eines furzenden Kamels durchqueren.

  “Mögen Sie eine endlose Wüste auf dem Rücken eines furzenden Kamels durchqueren,” Jeremy repeated. He had an excellent aural memory. His pronunciation was perfect.