The Spindlers (10 page)

Liza swallowed, and opened her mouth. But before she could speak, Mirabella burst out, “Your Honor, this is all a terrible mistake!” The rat sprang to her feet, frantically trying to smooth down a few curls of her dirty skirt. She looked even more pathetic than usual. Thick gobs of mascara streaked her cheeks, and her whiskered chin was trembling. “We got lost, you see, on our way to the troglod market—”

“Don't listen to the rat!” came the shrill voice of another nid in the audience. “Everyone knows that rats are liars!”

“And fools!”

“And foolish liars!”

The courtroom exploded into sound, as the nids began babbling and firing accusations at Mirabella and Liza in turn. Mirabella sank to the bench with a little squeak of misery. Her ears burned bright pink.

“Order!” Judge Gobbington banged his gavel against the podium, trying to quiet the ruckus. “I said, order in the court!” But if anything, the nids only got louder.

“Please!” Liza burst out. She was struggling to be heard over the chaos of voices. “Please!” she tried again, with no effect. She took a deep breath, stood up, and tried a third time. “
Please!
Listen to me. I'm running out of time. I'm only here to rescue my brother. His soul has been stolen by the spindlers.”

As soon as she said the word
spindlers
, complete and total silence fell on the court, except for a few stifled gasps from the audience.

Judge Gobbington IV put down his gavel. He stared hard at Liza for several seconds, and she forced herself to remain standing, and balled her hands tightly so he wouldn't see they were shaking.

“What do you know about the spindlers?” the judge asked in a hoarse whisper.

“I—I don't know anything about them,” Liza said. The sudden silence was even more nerve-racking than the eruption of noise. “I know that they're bad. I know that they have my brother—and, and, that they're planning to take over everything Below. And I know I have to stop them.”

“And you came Below all by yourself?” the judge asked incredulously.

“I
was
by myself,” Liza corrected him. “Mirabella agreed to help me. She agreed to take me to the spindlers' nests.” There were more gasps. Liza turned and gave Mirabella a small smile, but Mirabella was once again working her tail between her paws, muttering, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

The judge removed his glasses. Without them, his eyes were no larger than two small raisins set in the vast floating balloon of his head. And yet, Liza felt she could see herself reflected endlessly inside them.

“And you will risk your life in the nests,” the hobgoblin said, “and pit yourself against the queen of the spindlers, to save your brother?”

Liza swallowed. The way Judge Gobbington IV said it made her plan sound both foolish and hopeless. “Yes,” she croaked out.

The judge leaned forward. “Why?”

Liza had not expected the question. She opened her mouth and then closed it again. It was, she realized, a difficult thing to explain. Images of Patrick swirled in her head: Patrick toddling behind her through drifts of snow on their way to skate across Gedney Pond; Patrick all sneezy and sleepy with allergies, dozing next to her in the car on long trips to the Adirondack Mountains; Patrick elbow-deep in mud, trying to gross her out by finding worms; Patrick scanning the yard for gnomes or standing lookout at the riverbed for Sarah Wilkins and her group of snotty, snooty friends.

“Because …” She couldn't put any of her feelings into words.
Because he's my brother
, she thought of saying. Or,
Because he would do it for me
. What came out was: “Because I have to.”

“A likely story!” a nid erupted from the audience.

“‘
Because I have to!'
What kind of a defense is that?” cried another nid.

“She's a spy, I tell you! Both of them are slippery, nippery, nasty little spies!”

Liza balled her fists again. She felt anger rising in her chest, pushing at her throat. Next to her, Mirabella had begun to rock back and forth. She was clutching her head so tightly, it made her cheeks bulge out from between her paws. If Liza hadn't been so upset, it would have been comical.

“I'm not a spy,” Liza said loudly over the din. “And I'm
not
a liar.”

“Order, order!” The judge was pounding his gavel once again. “In the name of the authority vested in me by the Court of Stones, I declare the defendants
guilty
by reason of insufficient proof! And proven inefficiency!”

On the word
guilty
, Liza's heart stuttered. For one second, time seemed to stop, and stretch, so that she could think of her mother and father, and Mrs. Costenblatt in her rocking chair on her porch, and feel sorry that she would never see them again.

And poor Patrick …

Liza was filled with regret. She had forgotten to tell the real Patrick, her baby brother, so many important things. For example, she had forgotten to tell him that when you reached third grade the cafeteria would try and give you celery and peanut butter with raisins on top and pass it off as dessert, and how important it was
not to be fooled
, and instead stuff your pockets with gummy bears before school. She had forgotten to tell him too that the last time they had played Chesteropoly she didn't let him win, as she said she had, but had in fact been beaten by him fair and square.

Then time jumped forward again, and everything was uproar and chaos.

“To the dungeons!” the nids squealed as they poured from their stone seats and flowed down to the courtroom floor. “Throw them in the dungeons and leave them to rot!”

Liza found herself surrounded by the jabbing, chattering creatures. She realized she must fight, or be left to rot in the world Below forever. The nid with the broom poked at her again, and she managed to snatch it from his grip.

“Stay away from me!” She turned in a circle, jabbing threateningly at the nids that came too close. “Or I'll bonk you over the head, and sweep you out the—oof!”

A nid jumped on her back and brought her tumbling to her knees. Mirabella was engaged in her own struggle, fighting and snapping and using her tail as a whiplash to try and keep the nids away. But there were too many of them.

“To the dungeons!” The nids' voices swelled to a roar. “Lock the spies in the dungeons!”

Then suddenly there was a rushing, fluttering sound, like the first pitter-patter of rain falling onto pavement, swelling quickly into a downpour. Instantly the nids fell silent. Liza managed to wrench her arm away from the nid that had been holding her. Even Judge Gobbington IV had gone ghostly white.

“Wonderful,” Mirabella squeaked in a tone of deep sarcasm. “
Now
see what you've done? You've gone and upset the nocturni.”

T
housands of shadows were swooping and flitting through the air above their heads, until the court was dark with them.

But they were
not
shadows, Liza realized as she looked at them more closely. That is, they were like shadows—they had the bare, thin, flickering, insubstantial quality of shadows—but unlike shadows, they were all the same shape. There were hundreds of thousands—no, millions—of them, and they were all about the size of Liza's palm. They looked like butterflies, except that they had the long, pointed beaks of hummingbirds, and they seemed to be made out of darkness and air.

There was a rustling, as thousands of quiet voices spoke in unison.

“Release the rat and the human child,” the nocturni said, and their voices sounded like dry leaves tumbling over one another.

“You heard them,” the judge croaked out. “Release the defendants at once.”

Liza found herself released. Instantly the nids began to withdraw. As they backed slowly and cautiously out of the court, they tittered anxiously, scanning the air above their heads and muttering various apologies at the floating, flitting shapes.

“A mistake! A mistake! Happens to the best of us.”

“No intention to offend …”

“A harmless little prank …”

“Very sorry, of course, won't happen again …”

Soon Liza and Mirabella were left alone with the swirling black nocturni.

“Well,” Mirabella sniffed. “Well.” She patted her wig, parts of which had become hopelessly tangled. “I hope you're happy. I told you to stay away from the nids. And now they've taken my purse.... If it hadn't been for the nocturni …”

“The what?” Liza turned a full circle, stunned, all the while keeping her eyes on the drifting shapes above their heads, like a dark snow.

Mirabella muttered something that sounded to Liza like
useless
and
humans
and
heads as empty as a beggar's purse
. At a normal volume, the rat said, “The nocturni.” She shot another reproachful glance over her shoulder at Liza. “Lucky they decided to speak up, or we'd no doubt be rotting to a pulp in the dungeons by now! Like forgotten bananas. Like turned cheese!”

“Are they—are they dangerous?” Liza swallowed hard, thinking of the fearful way the nids had fled from them.

Mirabella dropped her voice to a whisper. “
Very
bad luck to displease the dream-bringers,” she murmured. “
Very
bad luck. I once knew a badger … oh, but we won't speak of him. Terrible, terrible. Spends his days counting socks at the troglod market … convinced that the nocturni are sending messages to him through the color patterns …”

“Dream-bringers …” Liza repeated. She didn't know exactly what Mirabella meant, but she liked the sound of it. “There are so many of them.”

“One for every person in the world,” the rat replied.

“No.” This stopped Liza short. “It's not possible.”

The rat whirled around, clearly growing impatient. “Of course it's possible,” Mirabella said. “It's
necessary
. You didn't think the nocturni would share, did you? There is a nocturna for every single person in the world! And each night the nocturni sip dreams from the River of Knowledge, and fly out into the world, and deliver them to their humans.”

“So …” Liza struggled to understand what Mirabella had just said. “So I have a nocturna of my own?”

“You, the bus driver, the grocery store clerk … The nocturni mate for eternity. Even after you die”—the rat's voice dropped to a hush—“your nocturna will never take another human, not for all the length of time in the universe and beyond. Your nocturna is wedded to your soul. Some even say”—the rat paused again, chewing on her lower lip with her pointed front teeth, and coating them with lipstick in the process—“that it is the nocturni who carry souls into the Shadow World when we die, where they will watch over them and keep them safe forever. Some say that is nocturni's ultimate purpose.”

Liza shivered. The cavern was cold, and full of shifting light. The underworld, she thought, was strange and beautiful and frightening, like the nocturni themselves.

As she looked at them more closely, she realized it was not true that they were all shaped identically. They were all roughly the same size, true, and all possessed that same insubstantial dark quality, but she noticed that the wings of every nocturna were slightly differently, with ragged tips that formed special individual patterns, almost like snowflakes. And for the first time, what the rat had said—a nocturna for every single person in the world—struck her, and made her feel temporarily breathless. It was unimaginable.