Chris Van Allsburg - The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell the Tales

For Peter Wenders, again

Text copyright 2011 by Lemony Snicket, Tabitha King, Jon Scieszka, Sherman Alexie,
Gregory Maguire, Cory Doctorow, Jules Feiffer, Linda Sue Park, Walter Dean Myers, Lois
Lowry, Kate DiCamillo, M. T. Anderson, Louis Sachar, Chris Van Allsburg

Illustrations copyright 1984 by Chris Van Allsburg

The House on Maple Street 1993 by Stephen King. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner,
a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King. All rights
reserved.

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this
book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park
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Houghton Mifflin Books for Children is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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The text of this book is set in Centaur MT.
Book design by Sheila Smallwood

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

ISBN 978-0-547-54810-4

Manufactured in Singapore
TWP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
4500298309

Modesty prevents me from answering this rhetorical question, but the fact remains that Harris Burdick has cast a long and strange shadow across the reading world, not unlike a man, lit by the moon, hiding in the branches of a tree, staring through a window and holding a rare and sinister object, who cast a long and strange shadow across your bedroom wall just last night.

The story of Harris Burdick is a story everybody knows, though there is hardly anything to be known about him. More than twenty-five years ago, a man named Peter Wenders was visited by a stranger who introduced himself as Harris Burdick and who left behind fourteen fascinating drawings with equally if not more fascinating captions, promising to return the next day with more illustrations and the stories to match. Mr. Wenders never saw him again, and for years readers have pored breathlessly over Mr. Burdick's oeuvre, a phrase that here means "looked at the drawings, read the captions, and tried to think what the stories might be like." The result has been an enormous collection of stories, produced by readers all over the globe, imagining worlds of which Mr. Burdick gave us only a glimpse.

I always had a theory regarding Mr. Burdick's disappearance, however, that I have lacked the courage to share until today. It seemed to me that the mysterious author was hidingbut not in the places people usually hide, such as underneath the bed or behind the coats in the closet or in the middle of a field covered in a blanket that looks like grass. Mr. Burdick likely hid among his cohorts, a word that here means "other people in his line of work." Rather than give any more of his work to Mr. Wenders, Mr. Burdick might have distributed his stories, over a period of many years, among his comrades in literature. Perhaps he gave them as gifts in acknowledgment of their allowing him to hide in their homes. Perhaps he hid them in their guest rooms in the hopes that they would never be found. In any case, it was always my hope that the rest of Mr. Burdick's work would surface, even if the mysteries of Mr. Burdickwho by now is either very old, quite dead, or bothremained unsolved.

This book, then, is suspicious. The stories you find here may have been written, as so many Burdick stories have been written, as the guesswork of authors drawn to Mr. Burdick's striking images and captions. But I believe these are the actual stories written by Harris Burdick, given by Burdick to the various authors who are now pretending to have written them. I have no proof of this theory, but when I questioned the authors involved, their answers did nothing to change my mind. Sherman Alexie told me it was none of my business. Jules Feiffer told me it was none of my concern. Lois Lowry told me she'd never heard anything so ridiculous in all her life. Louis Sachar told me he'd heard something equally ridiculous but that it was a very long time ago. Kate DiCamillo told me to talk to her lawyer. M. T. Anderson told me to talk to his doctor. Tabitha King told me to talk to her husband. Stephen King told me to talk to his wife. Cory Doctorow told me I should ask Walter Dean Myers, who told me to go bother Linda Sue Park, who directed me to Gregory Maguire, who told me that he had a special message from Chris Van Allsburg, which was to go away and leave him alone and stop talking about Harris Burdick. Finally, Jon Scieszka told me that he would be happy to answer my questions, and to please come in and have some ice cream, and then after a long pause he fled through the window and left me alone and it turned out to be sherbet.

Perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps these stories were written by Harris Burdick and perhaps they were not. Either way, the mysteries of Harris Burdick continue, and if you open this book, you will likely be mystified yourself. As you reread the stories, stare at the images, and ponder the mysteries of Harris Burdick, you will find yourself in a mystery that joins so many authors and readers together in breathless wonder.

A tiny voice asked, "Is he the one?"

ARCHIE SMITH, BOY WONDER

T ABITHA K ING

Archie squinted into the glare of the sun as he choked the neck of the bat. He pulled his helmet down to get what little shade the visor gave. With his bad luck, the ball would be coming straight out of the sun, which seemed to sit on the runty little pitcher's shoulder. His palms were wet and gritty against the smooth ash of the slugger. His scalp, itchy and sweaty under the helmet.

The pitcher was shorter than he was. All the pitchers were. His bad luck again, he was the biggest kid in the league. It was a weird kind of leverage for them; if they sank the ball enough, it would come in at the low edge of his strike zone.

He thought about Luke in Star Wars, wielding his Jedi lightsaber against a tiny sphere of light. He took a deep breath and waited.

Behind him, the catcher tensed.

Not yet, thought Archie, his grip tightening, and then he thought, Now and his arm drew back just as a tiny sphere of light broke out of the sun. The ball met his bat with a glorious CRACK! and spun away back into the glare.

He stared after it even as the bat fell from his hand and he pushed off, the toes of his Converse All Stars digging into the dirt. There was no following it; that baby was gone. He reached first base, looking to make sure his foot touched it, but then he couldn't help looking up toward where the ball had disappeared as he ran all the way around the bases. He was running hard enough to make his chest tight, and he could hear people yelling to slow downhe could stroll if he wantedbut you don't do it that way, you always play all out, so he kept on running, tagging each base carefully and finally throwing himself down across home, so no one could ever dispute that he owned it.

Coach, who was kind of a goof, grabbed him and hugged him and pounded his back, screaming, "You put that one over the moon!" He screamed it three or four times as if nobody had heard him the first time.

Archie didn't need Coach to tell him what he had done. He was Archie Smith, Boy Wonder. Just like his mom said. There she was, jumping up and down and celebrating for him. He knew he was grinning too much and looked stupid, so he tried not to, but he couldn't help it. So what if people laughed at him because they thought he looked funny. So what, his mom always said. So what! When Archie wondered why she said it so often, in so many different ways, turning it into a joke, she said she got it from Metallica, this metal band his dad used to like.