The Giant-Slayer Read online

  ALSO BY IAIN LAWRENCE

  The Séance

  Gemini Summer

  B for Buster

  The Lightkeeper’s Daughter

  Lord of the Nutcracker Men

  Ghost Boy

  The Curse of the Jolly Stone Trilogy

  The Convicts

  The Cannibals

  The Castaways

  The High Seas Trilogy

  The Wreckers

  The Smugglers

  The Buccaneers

  For Mom—

  I miss you.

  CONTENTS

  ONE. THE GIRL WHO SAW THE FUTURE

  TWO. THE GIRL IN THE IRON LUNG

  THREE. A GIANT-SLAYER IS BORN

  FOUR. THE STORY OF CAROLYN JEWELS

  FIVE. THE SADDEST WISH OF ALL

  SIX. THE MAN WHO HUNTED UNICORNS

  SEVEN. THE TAX MAN RETURNS

  EIGHT. THE LAST WORDS OF SMOKY JACK

  NINE. THE MAGIC IN THE CHARM

  TEN. THE GNOME RUNNERS

  ELEVEN. THE RETURN OF THE HUNTER

  TWELVE. THE CASTLE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

  THIRTEEN. THE WITCH WHO RODE AN ALLIGATOR

  FOURTEEN. THE MAN WHO SHOWED THE WAY

  FIFTEEN. THE SHADOW OF THE STICK

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  THE GIRL WHO SAW THE FUTURE

  When Laurie Valentine was six years old she got out her crayons and drew the future.

  She started with an island in the shape of a potato, and in the middle she put a range of mountains in a zigzag line. She drew a crooked river crawling down toward the coast, green forests and a scarlet lake, a smear of yellow for a meadow. Here she put a white cross, there a lion with wings on its back.

  It was a Thursday morning in 1950. Laurie was kneeling on a kitchen chair, her elbows on the table, while her nanna—Mrs. Strawberry—did the dusting in the living room. The house smelled of furniture polish.

  “I need that table now,” said Mrs. Strawberry. She came into the kitchen with her rags and feather duster, and stopped behind the girl. “My, what a pretty picture.”

  “It’s not a picture, Nanna,” said Laurie, looking up. “It’s a map of my life. It shows all the things I’m going to find when I go exploring.”

  “So what’s the squiggle?” asked Mrs. Strawberry. “That red thing by the castle?”

  “I don’t know,” said Laurie. “But I think I’ll have to fight it when I get there.”

  Mrs. Strawberry laughed. “What an imagination you’ve got.” She rubbed Laurie’s hair and turned away. “Now clear the table, honey. It’s nearly time for lunch.”

  Laurie picked crumbs of blue crayon from the river. “Do you want to know anything else about my map?” she asked.

  “It’s probably best if you put it away,” said Mrs. Strawberry. “After all, we should keep it safe for your father. He’ll certainly want to see that when he comes home.”

  “Can I put it in the atlas?” said Laurie. “It’s a map, and—”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea.”

  “Because it should be with all the other maps.”

  “Yes, I understand,” said Mrs. Strawberry. “I know what an atlas is for.”

  Laurie had been smiling. But without another word she returned her crayons to the box, standing them as neatly as pickets in a fence. She climbed down from her chair, carried her map in both hands to the living room, and stuck it among the pages of the big blue atlas, between Antarctica and the index.

  “You’ve never seen a child so lonely,” said Mrs. Strawberry that night. She was sitting with her husband on the front porch of their small white house. He was on the glider, she on the wooden chair with her knitting on her lap.

  “It’s tragic, don’t you think,” she said, “for a girl to grow up without a mother?”

  “I suppose it is,” he said with a sigh. They had had the same conversation many times before.

  “So tragic, the mother dying in childbirth,” added Mrs. Strawberry.

  Her husband nodded. “Yes, indeed.”

  “I don’t know why he never remarried. I feel sorry for the both of them.” Mrs. Strawberry took up her needles and tugged on the wool. “That poor Mr. Valentine, he’s so darned busy. It’s good work, of course; why, it’s the work of saints he does, raising all that money for polio. But I wish he had more time for Laurie.” She began to work the needles, and they ticked as steadily as a clock. “It’s like he’s trying to save every child in the country, and forgetting his own.”

  “That does sound sad,” said Mr. Strawberry, as though following a script.

  “She’s so much like him. Smart as a whip,” said Mrs. Strawberry. “Shy and quiet too. You should see how she plays. She takes every book from the shelf and stacks them into walls, talking away to herself a mile a minute. She always arranges the books in the same way—in a square—but one day it’s a castle, and the next a sailing ship, or a fort or a covered wagon. It’s all imaginary, you see.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Strawberry.

  As always, Mrs. Strawberry finished with a clack of her knitting needles and some final words. “That child lives in a land of make-believe.”

  There were pictures everywhere of Mrs. Valentine—black-framed photos that stood like little cardboard tents on the mantelpiece and radio, on the sideboard in the hall, on every windowsill and table. But to Laurie these were images of strangers, of twenty different women all fading into brown and yellow.

  Sometimes, in the night, she could hear her father talking to the pictures.

  He was her hero: the second smartest man in the world. Only Santa Claus knew more than Laurie’s father. He raised money for the March of Dimes, but she thought of him as some sort of soldier. He was always talking about fighting.

  “We’re waging a war against polio,” he would say. Or, “We’ve won the battle, but the fight goes on.”

  His uniform was a brown suit, his helmet a gray fedora. Every morning, as soon as Mrs. Strawberry arrived, he put on that hat, gave Laurie a kiss, and hurried away to catch the bus. And Mrs. Strawberry, still holding her handbag, still wearing her gloves, would make sure that the knot on his tie was perfectly straight, that he hadn’t forgotten his briefcase.

  “People think your father’s scatterbrained,” she told Laurie. “But he’s so busy with big ideas that he doesn’t have time to think of little things.”

  Laurie thought of herself as one of those “little things.” Mr. Valentine never had time to play with her. He spent his evenings in the armchair, smoking his pipe, reading the papers he brought home from work. He didn’t like noise, and he didn’t like music, so the house was very quiet, the only sounds the rustle of his paper.

  But for a few minutes before her bedtime, Laurie was allowed to sit on his lap, and the smoke from his pipe coiled round the two of them like a gray rope. She liked to fiddle with his tie clasp, watching reflections twist on the gold.

  On the day she drew the map, Laurie brought the atlas to his chair. She put it on his knees and climbed up beside him. It was such a big book that it hit his pipe when she opened it. Then she nestled against him and started telling him all the things about the map of her life.

  “Isn’t that wonderful?” he said. But he wasn’t really listening.

  Laurie grew up to be quiet and shy.

  She grew up wearing glasses as big as windows. They kept sliding down her nose, and she spent all day poking them into place with her middle finger.

  She grew up afraid of daffodils.

  To her, the yellow flowers were the beginning of summer, the start of polio season.

  Because her father worked for the Foundation, he knew all about pol
io. But because he didn’t have time for little things like Laurie, it was Mrs. Strawberry who made the rules: “Don’t share food with others. For heaven’s sake stay away from the drinking fountain. And never, ever use a public toilet.” From spring until autumn, Laurie’s world shrank to the size of an atom. She was banned from the movies and the bowling alley, from the swimming pool and the playground. Anywhere that children gathered, Laurie Valentine was not allowed.

  “I know you think I’m a horrible old woman,” said Mrs. Strawberry every year. “But it’s for your own good because you can’t take chances with polio. I’ve probably told you a hundred times, it was polio that took my little sister.”

  Laurie had heard the same story every year, nearly word for word.

  “One day she used the public toilet, and that was it. The next week, she was gone. Infantile paralysis. It was a dreadful, awful way for her to die, and I’m not going to let it happen to you.”

  Laurie sometimes argued, but she always obeyed her nanna. She stayed away from the pool and the playground and everywhere else, and her summers were sad and lonely. But so were the winters, the springs, and the autumns. Laurie Valentine didn’t have a friend in the world until 1955.

  His name was Dickie Espinosa. On the first day of March he moved into the house at the end of the block, the smallest in the neighborhood.

  He appeared on the street that day with a buffalo gun, a coonskin cap, and a buckskin jacket with fringes down the sleeves. He looked just like every other boy in the city in that spring of 1955; the only unusual thing about Dickie Espinosa was that he didn’t go to school with the other Davy Crocketts. A tutor called at his home four days a week, a woman as skinny as a stick.

  Dickie Espinosa was eight years old, three years younger than Laurie. She met him on a Saturday, in the little Rotary park on the corner. A creek came tumbling out of a culvert there, dashed across the park, and slipped into another culvert, as though afraid of open spaces. Laurie was launching twigs two at a time into the stream, pretending they were rowing boats racing. She looked up and saw him in his Davy Crockett clothes, skulking along the creek. He had a wooden tomahawk stuck in his belt and the big popgun in his hands. He said, “Howdy, stranger.”

  From that moment, it seemed, they were friends. If Laurie wasn’t in school or asleep, she was playing with Dickie Espinosa. He spent time at her house, but she spent more at his. Down in his basement, Dickie had a little world of his own, four feet wide and eight feet long.

  The tracks of toy trains ran through towns and fields, into tunnels through the mountains, over spindly bridges across deep canyons. Tiny people seemed frozen at everyday tasks: a boy fishing at a pond, a woman hanging laundry on a line. There were cars on the roads, cows in the fields. There were ducks on the painted glass of the pond, and even decoy ducks among them, and a hunter—nearly invisible—lying with a gun in the grass nearby.

  “Keen!” said Laurie the first time she saw it.

  That day, Dickie scurried in between the sawhorses that held up the little world. He plugged electrical cords into sockets, scurried out again, and started flicking switches.

  Lights came on in the buildings. A windmill’s vanes went slowly round, and a watermill began to turn on a spillway at the pond. There was a hum that grew louder, and Laurie had a funny feeling that the people would suddenly start to move, to go about their business in the town. But of course they didn’t. Dickie worked the controls, and the trains went whirring through the mountains, through the forests, through the fields. Crossing gates flashed as they opened and closed in a ringing of bells.

  Dickie dashed back and forth, adjusting things. Then he waved Laurie over to stand beside him, and he gave her the controls of one of the trains. He showed her how to slow it down and speed it up, how to set the switches that would steer it where she wanted.

  It was a passenger train that he’d given her, and Laurie guided it from station to station. At first she didn’t stop anywhere near the platforms, and she and Dickie laughed at the idea of all the passengers getting angry. They acted out the people shouting at the train, shaking their fists at the stupid engineer. But soon she got the hang of it, and as her train went round and round she made up stories about the plastic people who never really moved to get on and off. She said one was a farmer on his way to town for the very first time in his life. And she followed him along, past simple things that were—to him—as strange as rocket ships and time machines.

  Laurie led Dickie all over the neighborhood, through every park and vacant lot. He called it “scouting,” and he did it in his coonskin cap and the jacket with the fringes. He said the hollow that the creek ran through—from culvert to culvert—was “like the valley of the Shenandoah.” When the weather was cold or rainy, they stayed inside, inventing long stories about the train-set people.

  “Why don’t you go to school?” she asked him once. “How come you got a tutor?”

  “My mom was worried,” he said, “’cause I missed so many days at my old school.”

  “From getting sick?”

  Dickie shook his head. “From getting beat up.”

  In March, just after St. Patrick’s Day, they played at the Shenandoah until it was nearly dark. Laurie saw the first daffodils showing yellow on the banks of the creek and stomped up and down the slope, trying to stamp them out. She squashed them into the ground.

  When she got home, Mrs. Strawberry’s white gloves were arranged on the sideboard as always, ready—like a fireman’s boots—to be slipped on in a jiffy. Nanna’s voice called out from the kitchen, “Is that you, Mr. Valentine?”

  “It’s me!” shouted Laurie. She kicked off her muddy shoes. But her socks made damp splotches up the hall and into the kitchen.

  “Where have you been?” asked Mrs. Strawberry. She was bending over the table, setting out the silverware. When she looked up, her mouth gaped open. “Why, look at you! You’re soaking wet,” she said.

  Laurie saw that the ends of her sleeves were dark with water. Her knees were wet as well. “We were playing in the creek,” she said.

  “You were what?” Mrs. Strawberry pointed through the doorway. “Go wash your hands.”

  “I just washed them in the creek,” said Laurie.

  “That’s not a creek; it’s a sewer. Now go,” said Mrs. Strawberry.

  Laurie didn’t move. She was older now, not so easily scared by a nanny. As though Mrs. Strawberry suddenly saw the change herself, she grew quiet and serious. “Look,” she said, “it’s nice you’ve got a friend; I’m pleased for you. But summer’s coming on, and you know what that means. I’ve probably told you this a hundred times, but—”

  “Oh, brother.” With a big sigh, Laurie looked up at the ceiling.

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady,” said Mrs. Strawberry.

  “I know all about your sister and her stupid toilet seat,” said Laurie. “I know all about polio too, ’cause we studied it in school. And guess what? You can’t get it from a toilet seat.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Laurie?” Mrs. Strawberry looked horribly sad, as though she’d been slapped in the face and was trying not to cry. “It’s my sister we’re talking about. I think I know better.”

  The front door opened, and into the house came Mr. Valentine. Laurie looked tauntingly at Mrs. Strawberry. “Ask Dad.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Strawberry. “Don’t bother your poor father the moment he comes through the door. Let him get settled at least.”

  But Laurie was already out of the room, marching down the hall. She reached her father as he was sliding his hat onto the shelf in the closet. She poked her glasses. “Dad, can you get polio from a toilet seat?”

  He looked puzzled, frowning at Laurie’s wet clothes. Then he glanced up as Mrs. Strawberry came into the hall, and he suddenly understood. He’d heard the story himself nearly as many times as Laurie. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows exactly how polio is passed, but—”
/>   “Dad, you know it’s impossible.”

  Of course he knew, but he didn’t want to say so with Mrs. Strawberry standing there. “The important thing,” he said, “is not how you get polio. It’s how you don’t get it.”

  “Well, you don’t get it in March,” she said. “Tell her, Dad. You can’t get polio playing in the creek in the last half of March.”

  “Now, you must know better than that.” Mr. Valentine sat down in the chair to take off his shoes. “It’s unlikely, but not impossible. It’s never too early for polio.”

  “Oh, Dad!”

  Mr. Valentine seemed old and small as he looked up from the chair. “Do you realize how well the war is going? How close we are to victory?” he asked. “There’s no doubt the vaccine will work. Nearly two million Polio Pioneers are proving that, and the results of the trials are better than expected. I know it’s hard sometimes to stay away from pools and creeks and things. But if you just hold out for a few more months we’ll have unconditional surrender.”

  Laurie suddenly saw her father as a little man trying to sound like General Patton. She felt embarrassed for him, even sad. But she laughed in a cruel way.

  Mr. Valentine turned red in the face. “The rules are for your own sake,” he said flatly. “You’re still a child, though you may not think so. As long as you live in this house, you’ll live by the rules.”

  Laurie glared back at him. “So you’re both against me now? You’re ganging up to wreck my life.”

  Mr. Valentine sighed. “Honey, nobody’s against you. And nobody’s ganging up.”

  But that was how she felt. So she turned and bolted from the room. She ran up the stairs, slammed her door as loudly as she could, and threw herself facedown on the bed.

  It was half an hour before Mr. Valentine went up and knocked on the door. He sat at the edge of the bed, as stiff and straight as a toy man.

  “We’ve been fighting polio for a hundred years,” he said. “In another month we’ll have the silver bullet. You’ll get a vaccination and never have to worry about polio again. And that will happen before summer.” He ran his fingers down his tie, smoothing it out. “You’ve waited so long already, can’t you hold on for a few more weeks?”