"D-did you do something to that bell?" asked Wirt. He didn't know how exactly Jason Funderburker had managed to part with it, and he wasn't sure he wanted to. What mattered was that the curious little bell since that day had been their everyday reminder that the Unknown wasn't some sort of shared hallucination.
Wirt and especially Greg had tried everything from waving it at the top of the graveyard wall to facing each other and ominously chanting: "The ringing of the bell commands you… to return to the Unknown!", but it had been clear that all the magical properties of the golden statuette had remained in its native world.
"Oh, what I didn't do to that bell…" murmured Greg absentmindedly. "Hey, it's probably the wind or something, really…"
His little brother was being rational – that's how bad the situation had become. Wirt shook his head, picked up the bell and looked at it closely. The figurine still reminded him of Lorna, and the expression of its skull-like face underneath the fine bonnet was just as perplexed as before. He rang it gingerly, and the melodic tinkling sent shivers down his spine. He felt the smell of a forest in his nostrils, the taste of true spring on his tongue. He felt so different.
"Did you feel it?"
He turned to Greg and found him wistfully staring at the window, his mouth half-open and his large eyes shining. Wirt rang the bell again, and this time he could almost hear Ms. Langtree calling her students to lunch, or the frog ferry reaching the riverbank. It was the melody of magic and adventure, and he had never heard the bell sing this hypnotic tune in their world. The Unknown wasn't exactly there, in their old room in the middle of the town, but it felt like it was somewhere a lot closer than usual.
"I think this bell stayed here for too long, that's what I think", said Greg, finally looking at his brother. He was desperately trying to restrain his hopefulness, although it shined brightly through his gloomy façade. "I feel kinda sorry for it, you know, stuck in this boring world in this boring town in this boring room when there's probably so much fun stuff to do in the Unknown".
"Not too many evil spirits to fight here, eh?"
"Yeah, unless you count that time when Jason Funderburker wanted to play The Beast and the Woodsman, but he was a clueless Beast, and he couldn't hold the flashlight, and the horns made him nervous and… Yeah, not too many, definitely".
Greg ran to his brother and grabbed the bell. He made a move as if to ring it once again, but seemed to have thought better of it and instead put it in a pocket of his jacket.
"Let's go bury Grandpa!" he said to Wirt, his face the brightest it had ever been the last few months.
Wirt managed a nervous smile which was intended to be reassuring. He got used to constant disappointment, whereas Greg was still too prone to raising vain hopes – and receiving the bitter backlash of cruel reality some time later. The bell sounded like it was up to something, but Wirt wasn't ready to embrace it as a certain truth just yet.
They got themselves ready for the funeral (Greg insisted on hiding Jason Funderburker in the inner pocket of his jacket, claiming the frog had known Grandpa for a long time and would want to say his last goodbye) and went downstairs where their parents were already waiting for them.
Grandpa was their mother's father, so there weren't any awkward "whose family is it?" moments which the brothers had already faced in the past. He died peacefully in his sleep at a quite respectable age, which, as Greg straightforwardly commented, was "a fair deal, all things considered". Their parents took the nonchalant manner in which their youngest son reacted to the death of his favourite grandparent as yet another sign of his mental disorder. Wirt decided not to call them on their duplicity: to them, apparently, both hysteria and the lack of it were troubling, which wasn't entirely fair to Greg.
Their family wasn't especially religious, which was why Greg's confident statements about "a better world" were a surprise to them. Wirt wasn't sure he subscribed to his brother's point of view – he didn't consider the Unknown to be exactly synonymous to the proof of some kind of afterlife – but he could see why Greg was taking everything in stride.
The brothers couldn't wait for the coffin to be lowered into the ground, and the priest to deal with his boring soulless speech which, frankly, had nothing to do with the Grandpa they both knew and loved. The sun was hiding behind the clouds, high in the sky, and it looked like it might rain. Grieving relatives in uniform black were standing around the grave in white snow, foreign statues to Wirt and Greg.
They managed to part from their immediate family as the service ended, claiming they needed some more time and promising to return for the commemoration dinner. Wirt wasn't sure his mom and step-dad bought it, but they clearly decided not to seek quarrels with the children on such a dark day. The brothers waited until everyone but the grizzled graveyard keeper had left the Eternal Garden, and only then ran towards the snowy wall where their last journey to the Unknown had begun.
"Do you miss Grandpa?" asked Greg as Wirt helped him reach the top. "I don't, just yet. It's weird. I miss Jason Funderburker more, and he's right here in my pocket."
Wirt did miss his Grandfather but he could see what his brother meant. Nothing felt real anymore, life or death, with the ghost of another reality hanging over their shoulders all the time.
"He bought me my first tape recorder," Wirt recalled. "And remember how you almost fed his goldfish to Mr. Heathcliff? He was livid!"
"Grandpa or Mr. Heathcliff?"
"Well, Mr. Heathcliff was quite up for it, as far as I could tell. That crazy cat…"
"Yeah," Greg pulled his motley hat with a pompon further down his ears. "About the only thing that's unfair, I think, is that Grandpa died earlier than Mr. Heathcliff. I mean, Mom has Dad and us, and we have them and each other and Jason Funderburker, too, but Mr. Heathcliff had no-one but Grandpa, right?"
They sat in silence for some time, looking at the steep woody hill just beyond the railway, with patches of bare ground already visible in the thin sheet of remaining snow. The surface of the lake glimmered deep below, between the thick black trunks.
With a sigh of resignation, Greg fished the bell out of his pocket and held it in his mittened hands. Then he lifted it above his head as high as he could, which was about the same level as his brother's shaggy hair, and rang it furiously until the sweetness of the tinkling transformed into a manic high-pitch drone. A few birds hiding in the trees among the branches took off and flew away, indignant at the disruption. When Greg stopped, there was grim satisfaction on his big round face.
Apart from Wirt's ears being unable to process simple silence for a few moments, nothing had really happened. For several minutes Greg was impatiently turning his head left and right and eventually almost lost his balance as he tried to look over his shoulder – his brother had to catch him to keep from falling backwards. He gave Wirt a guilty look and pursed his lips in disappointment.
"Maybe we should try the whole "ringing of the bell commands you" stuff again?" asked Greg, never the one to abandon hope too easily, and Wirt started thinking about the way to let him down gently when he noted that his ears were playing tricks on him again.
It sounded like a rhythmical clank of a strange old engine, too small and quiet to be a train, and it came from the north, where the railway made a sharp turn around the wall. Alerted, Greg leaned closer to his brother to hear it better, and at that moment the mysterious sound drowned in a clear male voice singing:
Sweet is the silvery song of the railways a-leaving
Eating the miles to the music of clattering wheels,
Forgo the silence and darkness in which you've been living,
Leave it behind, come and jump in the river of steel…
The verse was complemented with a squeaky harmonica solo, something genuine and merry and maybe even invented on the spot. As the final notes died down in the crisp February air, the clank became discernible again, and much louder this time, and then Wirt saw an old-fashioned draisine with a hand pump appear on the railway from around the wall. It was a battered old engine, with its dark yellow paint covered by a spiderweb of cracks or peeled off in some spots, and its metal bits surrendered to rust long ago. The brothers had only seen the likes of that draisine in old cartoons and some westerns, but even the cinema hadn't been able to prepare them for meeting its crew.
The hand pump was operated by a pair of small lions – they stood upright, facing each other, and pressed the handle by turns. Each was dressed in a white linen shirt and loose black trousers with suspenders, and their fiery manes were somewhat inadequately covered by grey leather caps. One of them had a smouldering cigarette in the corner of the mouth.
Compared to the lions, the other living passenger of the draisine could have been utterly unremarkable: a tall, lean black man with short graying hair, he sat at the front edge of the platform with his feet swinging wildly, his large hand holding a harmonica next to his mouth. Only when Wirt looked closer did he notice that the man had two silver pennies for eyes. They twinkled dimly despite the sun's absence and obediently moved in his sockets like the real things. Soon, for example, they focused on the brothers who were still frozen to the spot on top of the wall, unable to mutter a word.
"That's a nice bell you have there, kids," said the stranger in calm, confident baritone, leaving no doubts as to who was singing earlier. "Brave as the sun, sad as the moon. They don't make 'em like that anymore."
Without any signal or command, the lions stopped the pump, and the draisine started slowing down, its inertia still propelling it forward.
"It was once Auntie Whispers', but Jason Funderburker swallowed it so she said we could keep it", explained Greg. "She was a nice old lady, even if a bit creepy."
"Ah, isn't she just a cloud and a half…" said the man cryptically. "So, young men, do you need a ride, or are these old eyes playing tricks on their old Charlie Acorn?"
"And… and where might you be going?" asked Wirt, suddenly finding his throat too dry to speak.
"All the way and then some, kid."
"Can you get us to the Unknown, then?" enquired Greg, his voice weak with worry and fledging hope.
The stranger flashed him a warm smile of straight yellow teeth.
"In fact, we go right through that place, believe it or not, and you should believe most of what Charlie Acorn says. Hop onboard, then, this old crazy thing won't wait forever! Birds of a feather flock together, don't they say that still?"
He pointed his harmonica to the last passenger of the draisine, lying still across the platform right behind him, and only then did the brothers see that it was the corpse of their late Grandpa.