Billy and the Birdfrogs (11 page)

“Is it broken, Grandma?” I said, looking anxiously at her leg.

“No, it’d be a lot more swollen if it was. It’s just bruised, or sprained maybe, and it’ll be all right. It’s already getting better. I’ve been down here a day, Billy. I thought I was stuck forever. I couldn’t climb up to that hole in the ceiling, of course. I did a little exploring, and couldn’t find another way up. I tell you, I thought it was all over for me! I’d starve down here! But it’s okay now. You rescued me. You wonderful boy, Billy, you brought a rope. Is that rope properly fixed at the top?”

“It is, Grandma. It’s very secure. I tied it to two metal rods that I wedged into the shaft.”

“Smart boy! I hope they’re wedged in tightly. Now, you tell me your story. But before you start, is that peanut butter I smell? You don’t have any food in that pack, do you? Because I haven’t eaten in a day and I’m starving.”

I brought out the peanut butter and jelly, and at the sight of it my grandmother clapped her hands together and grabbed my face and kissed me. She opened up the peanut butter jar and started scooping it into her mouth with her fingers. “Go on,” she said, in a thick, muffled voice through a mouthful. “It’s not as good without the brandy. But go on, tell me your story.”

I told her everything. When I told her about Mr. Earpicker and Mr. Jubber and Miss Pointy coming to the house and taking me away, and Mr. Jubber taking over the house, she shouted, “Blghrhdfih!”

“What’s that, Grandma?” I said.

I had to wait for her to swallow a big sticky mouthful of peanut butter. Then she said, “I knew it! I knew it was a scheme! I don’t know this Mr. Grubber, but I’ve met Pointy before and she is a nasty piece of work. So she took you away? Who’d she give you over to?”

I told her about the Whingles, and how Mrs. Whingle was pretty nice to me, and the two kids were probably okay if they would only stop giggling. Except that Dennis Whingle wasn’t very nice to worms, because he had killed some and pasted them to a sign on his bedroom door.

“Remember, Billy,” my grandmother said, putting down the empty peanut butter jar and reaching for the jelly jar. “You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat worms. There’s worm muckers in life, and worm savers. Every time I see a worm on the sidewalk, I put it in the grass.”

“Do you really, Grandma?” I said.

“Well, okay, not really. It would take me an hour to walk two feet out the door. Especially on a rainy day. But I don’t step on ’em deliberately, I can tell you that!”

I continued my story, and told her all about sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night and using Donald Duck to break into our house. When I told her about Mr. Earpicker and Mr. Jubber drinking wine in our kitchen, she got furious and shook her fist up at the hole in the ceiling. “You get your lips off of my juice glasses, you suckerfish!” she shouted.

When I told her about how I found the back room in the basement, and was so amazed to see the hole exactly as she had described it, she said, with a twinkle in her eye, “So you didn’t believe me? You thought I was crazy? You thought I was one egg short of a dozen? One piece of bread short of a sandwich?”

“Grandma, don’t say that! I didn’t want you to be crazy. I really didn’t. All those people were confusing me, and I just wanted to see it for myself.”

“That’s okay,” she said, grinning and patting my knee with her sticky fingers. “I bet you’ll believe me from now on.”

“I really will, Grandma. Everything you said was true. All of it.”

Then I told her about climbing down the hole, and going to sleep on top of T29, and then waking up and getting chased by the police. By the time I finished my story, she had finished the jelly and used the napkins to get the remains off of her face. A lot of the dirt came off too, so that she looked more and more like my dear old Grandma. “You should save these,” she said, handing me the grimy and sticky napkins. “They have a lot of jelly on them, and we might have to eat them. You never know.”

“But aren’t we going to climb back up now, Grandma? We’ll be home in a few hours.”

“That’s one possibility,” she said, looking at me with her eyes twinkling.

“But Grandma,” I said, “what else do you want to do?”

“I want to show you something,” she said. “Something
very
interesting. But I’ll have to lean on you a little, because I can’t walk too well on this leg.”

Chapter 19

We Find the Birdfrogs

“Where are we going, Grandma?” I said.

“You’ll see,” she said. “But we better be quiet. Don’t talk, and try to walk silently.”

We packed up the bag again and got up from the cave floor. Then my grandmother leaned on me and I helped her to walk to the edge of the cavern, into one of the tunnel entrances in the wall. The tunnel looked narrow in comparison to the gigantic cavern, but it was still wide enough for us to walk in side by side, and tall enough that we didn’t hit our heads on the ceiling. The passage sloped up, and we had to go slowly because my grandmother’s leg couldn’t climb up the slope very well. Also, as we followed the twisty bends of the tunnel and got quickly out of sight of the glow of the large central cavern, the light started to fade. The walls of our tunnel glowed, but not as much, and there were big patches of wall that were in darkness, so we had to watch carefully not to stub our toes. We didn’t say anything to each other. Every few minutes, my grandmother would turn to me and put her finger to her lips, and then wink and nod.

After about twenty minutes we got to the end of the tunnel. It just ended. It went nowhere. I couldn’t imagine what she wanted to show me, but she gestured to me to get down on all fours and to crawl to the very back of the cave. On the back wall, near the floor, I saw some uneven holes where the stone had crumbled away. It looked like they might open onto another part of the cave.

My grandmother lay on her stomach and put her eye to one of these holes, gesturing for me to do the same. I lay down very quietly and put my eye up to the hole, and almost screamed. My grandmother’s hand shot out and covered my mouth with a wrinkly palm.

“Not so loud, Love,” she whispered in my ear.

“But Grandma, what are they?” I whispered back.

“Look carefully,” she said.

I put my eye to the hole again, and stared for a long time. I think we lay there for about half an hour.

I could see into a cavern, a much, much larger cavern than the one we had just come from. It was football fields across. It was so big that it was hard to see the opposite side. The holes we were looking through were very high up in the wall of this cavern, about thirty feet up, so we were looking down onto a wide, flat, glowing floor that stretched out in front of us. The floor was crossed and patterned with lines running everywhere. It looked like a computer chip with strange lines running mysteriously, sometimes in parallel, sometimes making right angle bends. Th
e lines were made of stone. They were little walls, maybe twelve inches high and about six inches wide, perfectly constructed, and running everywhere. Some of the walls made streets, and some made little square building plans, with little rooms connected by gaps that were like doorways. There was not a roof anywhere, of course, because the whole cavern already had a roof, and so anyone building a city down here would just build walls and never think to put on a ceiling.

Little plants, a few feet high, lined some of the streets and stood in front of the open houses.

The entire city was teeming with creatures. Millions of them. They were everywhere. Even in the distance, I could see a seething, crawling movement in the houses and on the streets. One of the creatures was especially close, only about thirty feet away, almost below us, and I could see it clearly. It was sitting on top of one of the walls, scratching its head. It must have been about three inches tall, but it was unmistakably a gorilla. It was a three-inch-tall gorilla.

“Grandma,” I whispered suddenly, “it’s just like specimen R46A, that my mother found!”

“Yes!” she whispered back. “But keep watching! Watch them closely, Billy!”

I watched. The one sitting on the wall scratched his head, then his armpit, and then his foot. He yawned, opening his little red mouth very wide. He was a perfect replica of a gorilla, except for being so small. He was exactly the shape, very wide at the bottom, with a big round belly, long arms, round shoulders, and a pointed top to his head. His eyebrows and snout stuck out far from his face. He had leathery, black, hairless pads on his chest. After a while he picked up something from the wall beside him. It looked like a tiny newspaper. He leafed through it for a minute, scratched his head again, and then put it back down on the wall beside him. He looked around and I was afraid at first that he might see us. But there was no way that anyone in the gorilla city could have seen our tiny spy holes in the cavern wall, especially since the cave we were in was a dark one without a lot of phosphorescence.

He got up, picked up the newspaper in one hand, and walked away.

“Look at him,” my grandmother whispered. “Do you see that?”

“I see it, Grandma,” I said. “He’s walking
on
the wall. The sidewalk is really the top of the wall for
them.”

“That’s very nice, boy,” my grandmother hissed impatiently, “but that’s not what I mean.
Look at the way he’s walking.”

Then I understood. If you have ever been to the zoo then you have seen a gorilla knuckle-walking. They walk on their hind feet and also on the knuckles of their hands. This tiny gorilla was walking in exactly that way. He was knuckle-walking. But because he was holding something in his right hand, he was walking on the knuckles of his left hand. He was using three limbs, and if he could have made footprints, they would have been three-footed prints.

I turned and stared at my grandmother. “It’s the birdfrogs!” I said.

“Shhh!” she said. “Not so loud! Yes, it’s the birdf
rogs. But they aren’t birds, Billy, and they aren’t frogs.”

We stayed for a while, lying on our stomachs and watching the birdfrogs.

“Grandma,” I said, “do you still think they eat people?”

“I bet they do,” she said. “Remember, they took my kitchen knives.”

“But gorillas don’t eat meat,” I said.

“Right you are,” she said. “But gorillas don’t read newspapers. I tell you, these ones are different. I wouldn’t put it past them. Do you see that big building to the left? That one against the cavern wall?”

“I see it, Grandma. It’s huge. It’s person-sized.”

“It’s just the size for a half-dozen cows,” she said. “Why does a three-inch gorilla need a building that big? And it’s got a roof. It’s the only building with a roof. Why do you think that is?”

“It could be their city hall,” I said.

“I thought of that,” she said. “But then it would be in the middle of the city. Not at the edge. And why does it have a roof? Whatever’s in it, they don’t want it to get out. That’s why there’s a roof. And whatever’s in it probably makes lots of noise banging around, so they keep it at the edge of the city. Look how they don’t have any of their own houses near it. No, I tell you, it’s a holding house. I bet they keep cattle in there. And I don’t mean just four-footed cattle.”

“Grandma! Do you mean they keep people in there?”

“I tell you, I wouldn’t be surprised. I bet if we went in there, we’d find my good kitchen knives.”

“Ugh! Grandma!”

“Why else are they sneaking up to Central Park? People are always disappearing out of Central Park. I bet that’s where those old ladies ended up, hanging by their hocks.”

“Don’t say that, Grandma! That’s awful! And they look so peaceful.”

“You can’t tell by that,” she said darkly. “I bet if we were discovered here, they’d swarm us and tie us up. They’d drag us around by some back route to that building and fatten us up on big slimy hunks of cave fungus.”

“Then we better go right away, Grandma. We better climb out of here, before they discover us.”

“That’s the sensible thing to do, Love. But I wanted you to see them first. Now that we know what we’re up against, we can resist them better.”

We got up very quietly and turned around, and sitting on the cave floor just a few yards away was a birdfrog. He must have snuck up behind us to see what we were doing. We stared at him and he stared at us, and then he let out a yell. He leaped about two feet in the air, grabbed the sides of his head with his hands, and shrieked. When he landed, he turned and galloped down the tunnel. It was amazing how fast he went given how small his legs were. In a second he was gone and his yells had faded away.

My grandmother and I stared at each other. I could see that her face was pale even through the dirt and the greenish phosphorescent glow.

“Billy,” she gasped, still trying to keep her voice down. “We better get back to the rope before that one spreads the alarm!”

Chapter 20

The Chololate Banana Handprint Is Food for Thought

My grandmother leaned on me and we hobbled as best we could given her limp. It took a long time to get back down the twisty turns of the tunnel.

“They’ll have short cuts,” she said as we hurried. “They’ll be able to get through cracks that we wouldn’t even notice. I bet the whole first and second regiments are on the way already.”

I didn’t say anything, but I thought she might be right.

It took us about fifteen minutes to get back to the big stomach-shaped cavern and I was certain that our rope would be gone. I expected the whole cavern to be full of birdfrogs, thousands of them holding little pitchforks and chains to tie us up in. But the cavern was deserted. It was totally empty and silent and our rope was hanging from the center of the ceiling.