At the same time we stood there gaping, Old Tom suddenly found himself with his own jaw hanging as he stared around the inside of a loud airplane. It was Old Tom’s first time on an airplane, and he decided there and then it would be his last. Initially he was only conscious of the great rattling roaring noise, the shaking of the plane, and a peculiar smell. But once he was slightly oriented and had a chance to look about his heart dropped, for there in the cockpit lay a man he could only guess was Fixing Bob, slumped over the plane’s instruments and on the floor, lying as neatly side by side as if they’d been placed there, were Winifred, Wilfred, and Zebediah. All unmoving. All dead.

At first Old Tom could only stare. He was confused and dizzy and the funny-smelling air seemed to be making him sick. He just gazed down at the bodies of the children and thought how they had followed their father one by one into uncertainty and death. What an extraordinary thing love and families were. How the children would rather follow their father into folly, doomed to prison or death, than let him or each other go it alone. How unhappiness in one person in a family is taken on by everyone else. That they would rather join the unhappy party in his unhappiness than isolate him by leaving him to it. And now there were four-fifths of this family, lying dead. Crying Alice would really never recover from this. No doubt she would do herself in rather than survive it. If you want to do something for your family, old Tom thought, be happy. Let them join you there. He knew he should be doing something, trying to figure out the plane controls. Or the radio to signal distress. Something. But all he could do was stare down at those three little bodies and cry.

The Ground

THE GROUND

Sina and I continued to stand there saying nothing, but our brains were each working furiously.

Finally Sina said, “I can’t think of anything to do but to go see the hermit again. He may not remember telling Zebediah the access code, but perhaps he will remember some way to bring the plane back.”

“I have an unused wish,” I said. “Why don’t I just wish them all back here safe and sound?”

“You can’t,” said Sina. “You remember the story of Maria May: you can’t unwish something. And we tried once with something I wished. I wasn’t sure … I hadn’t been sure my wish had worked.”

“What?” I asked. “What did you wish?”

“We haven’t got time to go into that now. Now we must find out what the hermit knows about this plane and see if he can think of a way to help them.”

“How?” I asked.