Deleted Scene - An Alternate Beginning to The Tiltersmith by Amy Herrick

The Tiltersmith Prologue There were four of them—Edward, Feenix, Danton and Brigit. They weren’t young and they weren’t old. They were in that inbetween place which, in our world, is the place where anything can happen. They were bound tightly together because of an adventure they had stumbled into, an adventure that they could no longer exactly remember. Have you ever had the feeling that you had once visited a place you no longer knew how to return to? If so, you will understand the way it went with them. Every now and then, the backside of a memory from this time would hurry past and vanish around a corner. But how do you speak out loud about something like that? So, they avoided it. If you would like to hear the story of what they had forgotten, stop here and go back and read about it in the first book. If you would prefer, however, to know what happens next, turn the page. Chapter One Danton Goes in First Danton, as it chanced, was the one to go back into the park first. When he woke up that morning in late March, Danton could have sworn his feet were farther away from his head than they had been the day before. Rising from his bed, it was kind of terrifying, like being at the top of the roller coaster in

Coney Island. He must have grown some more in the night. This seemed to be happening a lot lately. It was tricky getting the hang of himself again each morning. But Danton wasn’t someone to be easily discouraged. Once he figured out how to get all the parts of himself to work more or less together, he couldn’t wait to get out the door. He was eager to get to the front steps of the school. “Whoaaa!” his father called out. Danton skidded to a halt. “Dad! You’re back!” His father, who was a drummer, had been traveling with his band for the last few weeks. They hugged each other. Danton stood back and his father looked at him and laughed. “You’ve grown again.” “Yeah. I think so. You’ll be here later? I gotta run. I’m supposed to meet some people in front of school. “Some people?” “Friends. You know, Eddie and Feenix and them.” “Them?” his father asked with one eyebrow up. But he did not ask any other questions. He simply said, “Good judgement, right?” “Right. Of course. These people are okay. Where’s Mom?’ “She went off to the nursery already.” His mother owned a gardening store not far away in Brooklyn. Her busy season was coming up if spring ever arrived. “I’m supposed to get your brother to school. So, we’ll catch up later, you and me. But you’ve got to eat something or your mother will hang me by my thumbs.” “I’m gonna be late and I’m not really hungry.” “You? Not hungry? Here, look, peanut butter and honey toast. I’ll make it into a sandwich.” His father slapped another piece of bread onto the toast and handed it to him. “Make sure you eat it.”

Danton opened the door. He stepped out. He took a deep breath of the damp, cold air. It was the tail end of winter—a grey tail end that only seemed to grow longer and longer. But let it be said: Danton was an incurably optimistic kind of person. Spring would surely have to arrive sooner or later. He would not allow his spirits to be squashed by a little more cold and damp. He shut the door behind him, bounced down the steps and took a bite of the toast. It tasted like heaven. He realized he was actually starving. Peanut butter and honey. His feet seemed to hardly meet the ground before he was off and flying through the air again. He thought eagerly of what lay ahead in the day. You never knew. And he felt friends with the whole world—the lampposts, the cat watching him from behind a front window, the mailbox at the corner. His usual route was to avoid the park and go down Union Street, but this morning just as he reached Grand Army Plaza, he realized he was thirsty. Really thirsty. And it came to him that he could get a drink from the fountain up by the Third Street entrance to the park. He could almost taste the water rushing into his open mouth. He generally thought of it as summer water. You drank as you were leaving the ballfields, all sweat-soaked and salty. It was gift-from-the-gods water, minerally tasting, down- from-the mountains water. You drank it and it poured the life force back into your body. He needed some now. He felt that if he didn’t have it, he might dry up and blow away like an empty paper bag. But, of course, this meant walking along the outside boundary of the park. This was something—it occurred to him---he hadn’t done for months. As if he had been avoiding it.

Well, not today. So, he strode along boldly, thinking all the time of the water fountain. He didn’t notice how people noticed him, but they did. He was already well over six feet, with long skinny legs and knobby knees and huge feet. He poked up into the sky, conspicuously giraffelike. His skin was a warm acorn brown and had its own quiet light. The look in his eye was so open and welcoming, it was hard not to smile as he went by. When he reached Third Street he stopped and gazed up at the two bronze panthers which stood on their pillars, their backs to the park. They gazed out at Brooklyn, cold and kinglike. Danton thought what it would be like to meet them alive and in person and something sputtered in his memory like a match coming alive. It was a memory of the two cats creeping towards him through the snow. A dream? But just as he nearly got the vision in focus, |the match blew out. He gave a shudder and turned toward the water fountain. Funny. He remembered a more ordinary looking water fountain. This one had a wide dark metal bowl and looked very antiquey. Around its rim metal birds and dragonflies peeped out of dark bronze leaves. The spout for the water was the open mouth of a metal frog. Had they put in new fountains during the winter? He reached to push the button on the side, but just before he touched it, a realization smote him between the eyes—blam! Almost certainly this water fountain hadn’t even been turned on yet. The fountains were never turned on till all danger of frost was over and this was still March. It had snowed just a couple of days ago and spring kept not arriving. He could almost hear Feenix and Eddie laughing at him.

Not Brigit, of course. Brigit did not laugh at people. And she had once confessed to him shyly that she liked to believe in one impossible thing every morning before breakfast. So, he pushed the button anyway. Nothing happened, of course. He stood there thirsty and embarrassed. He felt the rumbling acceleration of a truck coming down the street. He turned to see where it was, but to his puzzlement there was nothing there to see. The noise grew louder and louder. The rumbling felt nearly under his feet. He looked back at the fountain again and, with a loud gurgle and hissing shssssh, a jet of water shot out of the mouth of the frog and into the air. Well. He leaned over and drank deeply. It was just the way he remembered it, but colder and even fresher. When he stood back up, his thirst was quenched. And not just that. It seemed to him that his vision had grown suddenly clearer and his hearing extra sharp. He noticed several things he hadn’t noticed before. He could see details in the peeling bark of bare trees, mossy cracks in the stone wall that he never noticed before. Far away things seemed to come very close. He noticed, too, that one of the bronze leaves from the edge of the fountain had snapped off and fallen onto the sidewalk. He bent and examined it, feeling how sharp the broken edge was. He dropped it into his pocket and stood up. He was just about to turn and head down the hill towards school when a faint noise caught his ear. It came from inside the park. Not too far away. A whimpering cry, followed by a rustling, scratching sound. He was going to be late to school, but the whimpering came again. Someone or something was in trouble up there. His father said that to live a good life, the second most important thing was bravery. The first was kindness.

Danton stepped between the two great panther statues up on their high pillars. He entered into the park and listened for the sound. There it was again, somewhere up the hill on his left. He followed the winding path that climbed through the trees. He had gotten near the top when he heard the noise again. It was louder this time. It was coming from off the path over in the direction of a deep and thick tangle of bushes. They were the worst kind of bushes, thorny and all woven together. He heard the sound again. A snuffling, followed by a sharp ‘yip’ of pain. Danton left the path and walked quickly through the trees until he came to the bushes. He waited and listened again and there it was. The crying of some animal. He followed the direction of the sound until he saw something move inside the brambles. It was the color of old straw. There was a snuffling and a whimper. Danton went closer and peered into the thicket. It was hard to see anything at first, then there it was, yes, a dog, struggling to get free. He was caught in the thorns. A middle-sized dog, yellow, but very dirty as if it had been digging. The dog turned its face to him. It had summery gold eyes and a wide square head, and a dangerous looking jaw. A trickle of blood dripped down from the side of its muzzle. “Wait,” Danton called. “Don’t move. I’ll get you out.” Quickly, he tugged his sweatshirt sleeves down over his hands, and then pulled the hood up around his head. He turned sideways and shouldered his way through the tangled bushes, yanking and tearing as best he could with his clumsily mittened hands. They scratched at his face, and caught and tore hungrily at his clothes. Every time he got one branch out of the way, two more whipped right into the same place. They twisted and wove themselves cruelly together, but Danton was not one who gave up easily.

Eventually, he worked his way far enough in that he could reach through to the dog. The dog barked softly, as if in greeting. “How in the name of Eight Rattlesnakes on Roller Skates (one of his mother’s favorite expressions) did you get in there in the first place?” Danton asked. The dog ‘whuffed’ and tried unsuccessfully to move forward, but as the dog shifted, Danton saw how he must have gotten into this mess. He had dug himself a hole under an old wire fence which appeared to run through the woods and into one end of these brambles and out the other. The dog had come right up into the middle of them and was somehow caught in the twisted branches. “It’s all right, puppy. Hold still and I’ll get you out.” Danton began pulling carefully at the long thorny limbs. But, try as he might, he couldn’t get them loose. “What’s with these blasted things?” Danton muttered. He sat back on his heels and wiped the sweat from his face. As it often did, the voice of their science teacher, Mr. Ross, came into his head. Look more closely. Danton bent forward and looked more closely. Now he noticed what he had not noticed before. There was a mess of tangled fishing wire snaking through the branches and wound around the dog. Some meathead must have tossed it in there. Danton hated this stuff. Edward (who liked this kind of fact) said it could take fishing line 600 years to decompose. But besides that, it was menace everywhere in the park. The water fowl were always getting their webbed feet caught in it. The nesting birds sometimes foolishly used it in their nests. The dog, trying to work his way out, must have gotten tangled in it as he tried to get through the bushes. It was wound so tightly around his abdomen and neck that it was nearly hidden in his fur.

Danton reached out and grabbed hold of a piece and tugged. The dog gave a cry. Danton could tell it was super strong stuff. But Danton was not a person to be easily discouraged. It occurred to him he had just what was needed in his pocket. That broken metal leaf from the fountain. It had a sharp edge. He pulled it out and slid his finger between the fishing line and the dog’s body so he could saw at the line without hurting the dog. In a few seconds the silvery line snapped and the two ends flew apart. The dog gave a small whuff of relief and Danton proceeded to cut the rest of the line free and to push the branches back. Then he reached out and patted the dog’s head. The dog pressed its cold nose against Danton’s palm. “Good puppy,” Danton said and he turned to look behind himself. For a moment his spirits were dashed. In the time he had taken to free the dog, any sign of the passage he had made was gone. All the thorn branches he had pulled apart had snapped back in place. Like they knew what he was trying to do and they weren’t having any of it. “Don’t worry, fella. I got in here. I can get us back out.” Wrapping his hands in his hoodie sleeves he went at it again, pulling and tearing at the branches until he had opened a new space. The dog followed, pushing forward without hesitation, though the thorns tore without mercy at his rough yellow coat. In another few minutes they were out, standing in the woods on top of the little hill. Now that the dog was free, Danton could examine him more closely. He was muddied and bloodied, with a rough yellow coat that stuck out in tufts here and there, particularly between the ears. His tail was short and stubby and looked singed in some places, as if he had walked through a fire. He had golden friendly eyes and that fierce dangerous looking jaw. As Danton stood there trying to figure out what to do, the dog turned and lifted his nose as if he had caught a scent. Then,

without a look-back or the smallest ‘thank you’ he took off, running swiftly in the direction of the ballfields.