Cold Cereal: Chapters 14–22

“You won't have to go to the doctor anymore,” Mr. Wilson answered with a sudden plunge in disposition.

Erno floundered in the terrible silence that followed, though Mr. Wilson went on busing the table as though he'd said nothing out of the ordinary.

Emily tried to look indignant, but it was obviously true.

Erno felt like mentioning that this wasn't really that scary a dream, but after considering it a moment, he conceded that yes, actually, it was kind of scary.

“You mean you think this dream was some kind of...fortune-telling? A premonition?”

She crouched down beside them, and her voice became suddenly soft, lilting, the sort of voice adults think will soothe children.

“Oh, don't call it Milk-7," said the woman who wasn't named Vivian. “That sounds so clinical, doesn't it? We call it Intellijuice™."

Both Goode and Harmliss bemoaned the lack of tasty, easy-to-prepare breakfast foods, and both had a secret longing for all- encompassing power over the peoples of the earth.

The cereal is three-fifths tallow already! Any more and I shall have to stick wicks in the boxes and sell them as candles.

Madness or no, the added tallow would make Toasted Sugar Beets the best-selling food of any kind in America, topping even such staples as milk and salt.

Biggs owned an old Citroën 2CV, a ridiculous little car made in France. It was like a curvy little clown shoe, all rust with a black top and fenders and a very earnest-looking grille.

The tree house had appeared so suddenly that Erno saw it only a moment before he could touch it. It was like a great egg or cocoon, as big as a sailboat, shaped from curved branches and clever shingles that looked like dead leaves.

It was the middle of the night—was a vagrant in there?

These experiments were purported to involve chemical additives that had not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. These rumors were supported by public statements made by then Goodco vice president Paul Flanders in the fall of 1990 that the breakfast cereals of the future would “make kids smarter, and better-looking. It's very exciting,” he continued.

Erno slept fitfully. In his dreams he worked the assembly line at Goodco, watching a shuddering steel bin fart puffed corn through a spray of artificial sweetener.

It seemed now like his sister had always been running a maze, wending her way toward the rumor of some warm and nourishing reward while Mr. Wilson took careful notes from above.

Did his finger waver at the doorbell as he contemplated his grim business?

It was at the top of the hill—a white van sliding like a fat specter around the corner.

“I didn't mean anything...untoward,” said John. “I'm glad to be here. I've been wanting to visit, but...it never seemed like the right time.”

“Your ma's about to go off on her jaunt down south, isn't she?”

Scott wouldn't have minded hearing Polly prattle on as she usually did on every conceivable subject, but she was apparently having one of her well-earned quiet moods.

The Freemen certainly don't suggest any connection to Camelot through their iconography, which is mostly concerned with vague mysticism and breakfast cereal. Their most visible symbol, the Sickle and Spoon, symbolizes the harvesting of cereal and its consumption.

From floor to ceiling will stretch two freestanding columns fashioned to resemble bundles of tall wheat and topped with capitals like ornate bowls.

At the 144th level he makes Second Squire, and at the 233rd he attains the rank of Knight Errant.

Each play is intended to reveal some new secret of existence that has heretofore been hidden and to explain some fresh facet of the Freemen's ultimate purpose.

The little prince discovered the magical lever that lowered the Crystal Portal of the Wind, and so Scott was gusted intermittently from the passenger window as Polly worked it down and up again.

"...Hey—what's another word for void?”
“Vacuum, emptiness, nothingness, vacuity, abyss—”

Mr. Wilson also believed in something called “breakfast dessert,” which Erno generally found redundant. He'd just eaten French toast, after all, which is basically just a pile of doughnuts.

The train station was a Greek-looking stone box in the center of Goodborough, and its columned facade faced the tallest building in town: the Freemen's Temple.

But he was struck with a sobering thought: Mr. Wilson had stuffed ten thousand dollars into a vacuum cleaner, but what he'd really hidden well were these notes.

There was a polite knock at the door, so Scott knew it was John, wanting to talk again. Polly would not have knocked so tentatively. Or at all.

“Polly wants to go. I venture to say she is desperate to go. She may do something cartoonish, like explode or whistle like a kettle if she can't.”

After another thirty minutes they decided arbitrarily that they had reached the geographical center of the park and began to trace a scribbly spiral outward, all the while watching the boughs of the passing trees.

So the finch mother looks down an' laments, ‘Just one lonesome egg, an' now a storm moves in.'

He came first upon Finn, a giant of some renown.

The elf showed Finn his prize and said, ‘The dragon's egg!' but Finn was dubious. ''Tis awful small,' said the giant in his rumblin' thunderous voice.

‘Great things come from small packages,' groused the elf, an’ he went on his way.

Next he happened upon Oberon himself, consort to Queen Titania an' commander o' the troopin' fairies.

Everywhere he went Finchbriton followed, to the fairies’ amusement an’ the old elf's consternation.

“Finchbriton led them home, whistling bright flame. The elf supposed he had a heart after all, an’ it felt like a naked new bird in his rib cage. An’ the finch an’ he were never parted,” said Mick, his voice low and not so boisterous as before.