Bubble in the Bathtub (15 page)

“Feet on the floor, don your duds, and ten hut,” the woman behind the pistol commanded.

“Wh-wh-why?” Nilly stuttered, pulling the covers up to his chin.

“Because you're going to help me find the man who ruined my life.”

“Wh-wh-who's that?”

Raspa's eyes glowed with hatred as she whispered, hoarsely, “Doctor Proctor, of course.”

LET'S REWIND FOR five seconds and then pick up again where we left off.

“You're going to help me find the man who ruined my life,” Raspa snarled with a pistol aimed at the bed in which our hero, Nilly, was lying with the covers pulled up to his chin.

“Wh-wh-who's that?” whispered Nilly, who maybe wasn't looking quite as heroic as we might have wished.

Raspa's eyes seethed with hatred as she whispered, hoarsely, “Doctor Proctor, of course.”

Nilly swallowed and asked, “C-c-couldn't I just tell him you said hello when I see him next?”

“GET UP!” Raspa bellowed, the pistol in her hand shaking.

“Okay, okay!” Nilly said, tossing off the covers and hopping out of bed onto the floor. “You don't need to yell like that. What do you want with that shabby old professor, anyway?”

“Not much,” Raspa said, sinking down into an armchair as she watched Nilly get dressed. “I just want what's mine.”

“And that is …?”

“Elementary, my dear young sailor. The drawings for the time-traveling bathtub.”

“Yours? Didn't Doctor Proctor discover—”

“But I was the one who invented the time soap!” Raspa growled, white drops of spit spraying from her mouth. “And then that idiot betrayed me! Messed everything up by falling in love with this Juliette woman. Just her name makes my mouth taste like rancid butter. He ruined everything!”

“So you were … you were …”

“Yes, I was his assistant. But I was at least as smart as he was!”

“And now you want to find him so that you can steal his part of the invention.”

“Hurry up!”

Nilly discovered that he'd put his shoes on before his pants and had to start all over again. “Why should I help you find the professor if you're just going to steal from him?”

Raspa waved the pistol.

“Oh yeah, right,” Nilly mumbled as he pulled on his
pants. “What's going to happen to us after you get your claws on the drawings?”

“If I were you,” Raspa said, scratching the side of her nose with the pistol, “I would try not to think about that. Concentrate instead on where the professor might be.”

“I have no idea,” Nilly said. “So sue me, but I really have no idea.”

“People can't be bothered to sue dead dwarves,” Raspa said, waving the pistol.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I do remember that it starts with ‘In,'” Nilly said hurriedly. “And that could really be so many places. India, for example. Or Indonesia. The Incan Empire. Inishshark Island in Ireland …”

“Stop!” Raspa snarled, raising the pistol. “You're obviously no help, you snotty-nosed brat. So, farewell …”

Nilly could see her long, crooked index finger curling around the trigger and starting to pull back on it.

“Wait!” he screamed. “I just thought of it!”

Raspa squinted at him in suspicion without lowering her pistol. “Oh, did you now?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Nilly said, nodding so energetically that his bangs painted red streaks through the air.

“Well? Where?”

“We need a time-traveling bathtub to get there,” Nilly said. He ran over to the bathroom and pulled open the door. “Can you set up this tub?”

“No, you idiot!” Raspa railed. “Not without Proctor's drawings. We have to go back to the bathtub in that blasted meadow. I landed right on my head when I arrived …,” Raspa complained, rubbing her forehead, and only now did Nilly notice a blue lump right at her hairline.

“You came here in the same bathtub as me?”

“Of course,” Raspa mumbled.

“How?”

“Enough talk. Time to ship out,” Raspa said, and
then opened the door and waved Nilly out into the hallway with her pistol.

Nilly gasped in disbelief. “
Before
breakfast? Are you aware that breakfast is
included
in the price at this hotel? That it's
complimentary
?”

“NOW!”

Nilly shrugged.

“All right,” he said innocently. Precisely as innocently as someone who's just had a not-altogether-so-innocent idea. Because Nilly had actually just figured out that they had to get out onto the street so he could sneak off and, thanks to his small stature, disappear in the crowd.

“Come on,” he said, strutting out. Raspa followed, sticking the pistol into her coat pocket as they went down the stairs. When they came out onto the street, Nilly looked around in confusion. The clouds had rolled in overnight and now it felt like it was about to start raining. But that's not what was confusing him.

“Hey, where did everybody go? There was a huge crowd out here yesterday.”

“They followed the cycling circus to its next stop,” Raspa said, peering down the empty street. “Oh, too bad. Did that ruin your plan to sneak away and, thanks to your small stature, disappear in the crowd?”

Nilly didn't respond.
What, could she read minds too?

Raspa laughed. “Come on, pipsqueak, hop up onto my back.”

“Your back?”

“Do you see a taxi or something instead?”

“No …,” Nilly said, sounding reluctant.

Raspa bent down. “Hop on. Let's get down off this damned mountain before it starts pouring.”

Nilly hesitated, but did as she asked. Once Raspa was sure that he was holding on tight enough, she kicked off. The ungreased wheels at the bottom of her wooden leg squealed. They rumbled over the asphalt as
they passed under the finish line that was still up. They started speeding up.

“Hold on tight,” Raspa said over her shoulder. “Full steam ahead.”

She hunched over. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the wind beat against Nilly's face as they whooshed down the same desolate, extremely steep mountain road that Eddy and Nilly had struggled their way up the day before. Raspa leaned into the turns, causing her rubber roller-skate wheels to shriek.

And Nilly, since he was Nilly, totally forgot what an awkward situation he was in and cheered happily, “Yippee! Faster! Faster!”

He got what he wanted. Ultimately they were moving so fast that the air pressure made their cheeks flap, flipped their eyelids back, and flattened their noses against their faces. Nilly suddenly stopped shouting when his tongue disappeared down his throat and he had to shut his mouth so he could cough it back up again.

* * *

TWO SHEEP WERE standing next to each other watching the—to put it mildly—peculiar woman with the boy on her back, who was the same boy who had sped past them the day before going the other way.

“Haven't we seen that redheaded chap before?” one of the cud-chewing sheep said to the other.

“No idea,” the second cud-chewer replied to the first. “We're sheep, you know. We don't remember stuff like that.”

RASPA AND NILLY were almost horizontal by the final curve before the road flattened out and Nilly spotted the flower-filled meadow. And the feet of the upside-down bathtub.

That very instant, the clouds opened up. And boy did it rain! It was as if the biggest raindrops in the whole world had gathered over this specific meadow to hold the world championships in The Last Raindrop to the Ground Is a Rotten Egg.

“Perfect,” Raspa shouted, hopping over the fence and starting to limp through the grass toward the bathtub.

“Pe-rf-ect?” Nilly asked, as he bumped up and down
on her back and felt the rain streaming down the back of his neck and in under his jersey.

Raspa was heading straight for the bathtub. She wiggled so Nilly fell off and tumbled down into the grass. Then she grabbed one of the tub's feet. “Help me right her so we can launch.”

Nilly stood up and did as she asked. They turned the bathtub over so it was right side up and watched the rain hammering against the enameled bottom. Raspa took out a jar, which she opened and poured from. A familiar strawberry-red powder sprinkled down into the tub, where the rain frothed up the soap, which starting forming bubbles right away.

“Now we just have to wait until the tub is full,” she said, climbing in and sitting down at one end. Nilly climbed in and sat down at the other end.

“So how did you find us, anyway?” Nilly asked.

“Easy,” Raspa said. “When I noticed that you came in with a stamp from 1888 that looked brand-new and
also had traces of white soap around the edges, I had a suspicion. When it tasted like strawberries, too, I knew that that could only mean one thing: that Proctor had gotten his time-traveling bathtub to work. And you're not exactly good at keeping a secret, sailor. When you said you guys were going to Paris, I realized that you would lead me right to him.”

“You followed us.”

“I did. I stood watch outside the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille, and when I saw the little girl come back with that awful woman—”

“Juliette Margarine, awful?”

“Don't say that name!” Raspa snarled. “They went up to the room, and I knew that you must be up there, all four of you. So I knocked—”

“Oh, we thought that was the hippos,” said Nilly, who could feel that the water level had risen a little, but even a downpour takes a while to fill a whole time-traveling bathtub.

“I was trying to knock down the door, but I had to give up. So I ran downstairs, to that little wimp at the reception desk, and politely asked for the room key.”

“And he just gave it to you?” Nilly asked in disbelief.

“I asked
very
politely,” Raspa said. “Plus I was pointing the pistol at him.”

“Oh,” Nilly said. “Good thinking.”

“But when I got into the room, it was empty,” Raspa sighed. “Proctor wasn't there and neither was anyone else. I turned the place upside down. Not a living soul. Just a stupid seven-legged spider. Seven legs! If it weren't for the fact that they don't exist, you might have thought it was a seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider.”

Nilly didn't respond.

“So I realized you'd escaped in the time-traveling bathtub, and I started reading the tracks left in the soap….”

“Can you really track people from the soap?”

“Of course,” Raspa sniffed in irritation. The rain was making her makeup run in black rivulets. “I'm the one who invented the soap, I know
everything
there is to know about it. The only problem was that there were multiple tracks. You'd all gone to different places, so I had to pick one of them. And that led me here. I walked over to that café over there and saw you on TV. Nice of you to say exactly where you were. And now you're going to be just as nice and lead me to wherever Proctor went. Let's go now, and no funny business. I'll just follow your tracks no matter where you go. Keep that in mind.”

“But I—” Nilly began, sticking his index finger in his ear and twisting it around.

“It's time to go!” Raspa said, raising her pistol. Water dripped from the end of the barrel. “Take your finger out of your ear!”

There was another thunderclap, close enough to make the ground shake this time.

“Oooooookay,” Nilly said with a shudder, and a little
plop!
was heard as his index finger quickly exited his ear.

But it hadn't been the pistol that had made Nilly shudder. Or the cold water. Or the crazy plan that had just formed in his head with a
plop!
Nilly had shuddered because he'd just discovered that the thunder that was making the ground shake wasn't coming from the sky. But from something heavy that was charging toward them from behind Raspa. An enormous, black, exceptionally enraged bull.

“It's time to go,” Nilly said, diving down into the bathtub.