The Spindlers (4 page)

But in the night it was very different.

Liza had waited until both of her parents had gone to bed; then she had slipped on a long-sleeved shirt and her favorite puffy vest over her pajamas, and made her way as quietly as possible to the door next to the kitchen, and then down the rough wooden stairs that led into the basement. Everything looked strange and sharp and unfamiliar. The piles and boxes were people wearing cloaks of darkness; any of them might jump out and grab her at any second. Liza was desperately tempted to turn on the light. But then, of course, the spindlers would know she was coming. Liza thought she heard something rustle behind her, and she spun around, clutching the broom with both hands like a baseball bat.

But no. There was nothing. Liza lowered the broom.

There it was again. Liza paused, listening. Faintly, she could detect the sounds of scratching and scrabbling, coming from her right. She took one shuffling step in that direction, and then another. Despite the hours and hours she had spent playing in the basement, she felt very turned around: She had the sense that the room was growing bigger all around her, extending outward in strange and twisty ways, like a tightly closed flower suddenly opening its petals.

She bumped her knee against a hard corner and said, “Crill,” quietly into the dark.
Crill
was her word for when things were going badly.

She reached out and moved her hand along the object blocking her path; she recognized the carvings along its surface as belonging to a large wooden trunk in which her mother kept woolen sweaters. This helped orient her, and Liza took several more steps forward, more confidently this time. She kept the broom in front of her and swept from side to side so she could be sure that the path was clear and she would not trip and fall over anything.

She thought if she were to break her neck and die, and then Patrick—the fake one—were to crumble to dust when the spindlers overtook him, their parents would be extremely sorry and regret that they had accused Liza of making up stories. The idea was somewhat pleasing, and helped her focus on something other than the fear, and the scratching sounds of so many tiny nails, which were growing louder by the second.

At last she stood in front of the narrow bookcase that concealed the hole in the wall that was a crawl space: the best place for hiding during games of hide-and-seek. Behind the bookcase, the sounds of scratching and clicking were louder than ever.

Liza thought of her warm bed upstairs, and the orderliness of her room, with her pink-and-white-striped chair and the dollhouse she never played with anymore but still enjoyed looking at, pretty and peak-roofed and painted white. Inside the dollhouse were figures of a father and a mother and a brother and a sister with smiles painted on their faces, sitting happily around a miniature dining room table topped with a bowl of miniature fake fruit.

There was no basement in the dollhouse. There were no spindlers there, either.

But the dollhouse was not real life, and Liza knew that. As we have already established, she was a very practical girl.

She turned and gave a final glance behind her. The basement appeared vast and black, as though it had been consumed by a fog: She could make out nothing but the very barest outlines of dark shapes in the mist.

She turned back toward the bookcase. She placed the broom carefully on the ground by her feet. Then, using both hands, she shoved and wiggled and inched the bookcase along the wooden floor, until slowly the hole in the wall was revealed.

This, too, appeared to have grown larger. Normally Liza had to double forward and squeeze herself into the crawl space when she wanted to hide, and even then she had to be careful not to move around too much or she would bang her elbows on the walls or her head on the ceiling.

But now she stood at the edge of an enormous, gaping circle, twice as tall as she was. She could see nothing but a few feet of rough dirt pathway; beyond that, everything was blackness. She heard a howling wind that seemed to be blowing from somewhere miles and miles away. It carried with it strange smells that reminded Liza of very old paper, and the mud that clogged the storm drains in the spring.

She bent down, retrieved her broom, and walked forward into the hole. The ground beneath her feet was crisscrossed with faint silvery threads, all pulsing faintly in the dark, as if illuminated by a strange, evil energy. There could be no doubt that the spindlers had been here. This must be how they came in and out, up and down.

Liza took only a few steps before the darkness swallowed her completely. The air was cold and damp and weighed on her like a terrible, sweaty hand. The smell of mud and decay grew stronger and fouler as the ground sloped steeply downward.

She went slowly, gropingly forward, terrified that at any second she would trip and fall and be sent into a wild hurtle into black space. She had the sense of walls pressing down on her, but when she swept from side to side with her broom, she encountered no resistance: nothing but air.

Then, from her left, she heard the unmistakable sounds of scratching: louder, much louder than she had thought possible.

Bigger.

Liza froze. Fear drove through her, an iciness in her veins. She gripped the broom so tightly in her hands, her knuckles began to ache.

No. Now the scratching was on her right.

Closer. Closer.

Behind her.

Just like that, the terror that was ice in her veins became a gushing tidal wave, and Liza began to run. She ran blindly through the dark, her heart scrabbling into her throat, suppressing a cry of terror, stumbling over uneven ground. From all around her—above and behind, on her left and her right—came the sound of scratching feet and claws.

Then her foot snagged on something hard, and Liza tripped, and just as she had feared, went hurtling downward into the dark.

F
irst there was rushing wind; and then a warm, dark fog; and then a tremendous snapping and crackling sound as Liza passed through what seemed like a floating pile of dried autumn leaves.

“Oof.” After several seconds, she landed on her back on a large fur rug. Dizzy and disoriented, she sat up, relieved to find that the broom had fallen just a few feet away from her and appeared undamaged.

Above her, dark branches covered with glossy purple leaves and strung with hundreds and hundreds of lanterns formed a kind of vaulted ceiling. In one place, the leaves and branches had been broken apart where she had passed through them, and a Liza-size shape was now imprinted in the ceiling. Pretty, lace-edged leaves, disrupted by her fall, swirled through the air around her.

“Excuse me,” came a muffled voice from directly underneath her. “But this position is really quite uncomfortable. Quite squashily uncomfortable.”

Liza yelped, and scrambled to her feet.

The fur rug shook itself, unfolded, and stood.

Liza gaped. She saw that it was not a fur rug at all.

It was a rat.

It was the largest—and also the strangest—rat Liza had ever seen. Rather than scuttling around on all fours, first of all, it was standing on its hind legs, and it was so tall it reached almost nose to nose with Liza. It was, second of all—Liza blinked, and rubbed her eyes, and couldn't believe it—wearing
makeup
. A thick band of red lipstick circled her narrow lips—Liza assumed the rat was a female, given her appearance—and clots of mascara darkened the tufts of fur above her sparkling black eyes.

Perched on her head was what Liza could only imagine must be a wig of the rat's own creation: It was made of bits and pieces of different materials, wire and thread and yarn and even some pale yellow hair Liza thought she recognized from the head of her old doll, Amelia. The wig was perched at a slightly rakish angle on the rat's head, like a hat; two braids framed the rat's narrow face.

The rat was also wearing
clothes
. She wore a shawl of lace wrapped around her shoulders and belted at her waist with a bit of knotted rope. And she wore a skirt that appeared to have been glued together with bits and pieces of newspaper. The rat was not, however, wearing any shoes, and Liza saw her strange black feet and long black claws. Rather than letting her tail drag on the ground, the rat carried it slung over one arm, almost like a purse.

Liza did not especially like rats. (Does anybody like rats?) But she thought this must be the most awful-looking rat she had ever seen in her whole life.

The rat had bent down to scoop up a small paper hat, like the kind Liza used to wear as a little kid at birthday parties, which had been flattened.

“You ruined it,” the rat said reproachfully as she tried, and failed, to return the hat to its proper shape. “Who taught you to go around falling on rats and squishing on hats? Terrible, terrible. Must always be mindful of your manners.”

“I didn't mean to,” Liza said. “I tripped.”

The rat sniffed. “Likely story.” She placed the now-deformed hat on top of her hideous wig, making the animal look even more bizarre than before. Liza unconsciously took a step backward.

“Now, now, no reason to be scuttling away from me,” the rat said. “I'm not going to eat you.”

This was not very comforting to Liza, as she had not been considering the possibility of being eaten until the rat tried to reassure her. But then she did consider it, and felt extremely queasy.

Still, she said, “I'm not afraid,” and tried to keep her voice steady.

“You're not?” The rat looked pleased. “Oh, how wonderful. How very, very wonderful. I really do hate it—everyone always shrieking and running—and reaching for brooms—brooms!” She stopped and peered at Liza. “You're not planning to poke me with your broom, are you?”

Liza was unprepared for the question. “N-no,” she stuttered out.

“Or bop me over the head?”

“Of course not,” Liza said.

“Or stick its handle in my eye? Or try to tickle my nose with its bristles?”

“No, no, no.” She began to feel offended. “I would never.”

The rat appeared satisfied. “Then you may have it back, I suppose.” With a surprisingly graceful movement, she bent forward at the waist, snatched the broom from the ground, and handed it back to Liza with the arm—or paw, or whatever it was—around which her tail was looped.

“Now let's have a good look at you.” Once again, the rat doubled forward and snatched up a plastic lunch box, which she must have been carrying before Liza went tumbling into her. The rat fished around inside it for a moment before extracting a pair of glasses, which she then placed ceremoniously on her nose. The lenses made the rat's eyes appear golf ball–size.

Liza let out an excited shout. “Where did you get those?” she asked. She knew those wire-frame glasses, with the masking tape that kept the bridge intact.

The rat immediately whipped them from her nose. “I've always had them,” she said.

“You haven't,” Liza said. She reached out and wrenched them from the rat's paw. “Those are my father's reading glasses.”

“I tell you, they're mine!” the rat said shrilly.

But Liza had just caught a glimpse of another familiar item inside the rat's lunch box, and she grabbed it and squatted down to rifle through it.