The Spindlers (9 page)

“Miss Liza! Grab on to my paw!”

Mirabella had appeared at the window, looking pale and desperate. Liza tore an arm free of the nids' grip and tried to reach for Mirabella's extended paw. The nids wrenched them apart, so Liza came away with only a handful of brownish-gray fur.

“Mirabella!” Liza screamed, but already the nids had swelled forward and had grabbed the rat firmly by the shoulders. They hauled Mirabella into the room as they had done to Liza, then heaved her into the air above her heads, plucking the ruined hat from her head and picking at her wig.

“Let go of me!” Mirabella shrieked. “Get your filthy hands off my hair! Stop fiddling with my skirt. I—ow!
That was my tail!
”

The nids paid no attention to their protests. “A rat and a monster!” they chattered excitedly. “Strangers and intruders! Criminals in our midst! They must be punished!”

The orchestra continued playing, but now the notes were frenzied and discordant. Directly above her, the fireflies were flitting ever faster around the vaulted ceiling of roots. Now Liza found their movement frightening, as though the ceiling was covered with golden-skinned snakes.

They passed underneath the golden staircase, where the king of the nids was standing with a finger pointed toward the double doors, through which the nids had come. “Criminals must be punished!” the king thundered, and the nids cheered. “Intruders must be educated! Strangers must be abolished!
Bring them to the Court of Stones!
”

“The Court of Stones! The Court of Stones!” the nids chanted.

“Oh dear,” Mirabella squeaked as they were carried through the double doors and swallowed up by darkness.

T
he nids carried Liza and Mirabella down a broad set of stone stairs into a dank, dark part of the palace, where slicks of black mold clung to all the walls, and the only light came from a few dim clusters of sick-looking fireflies straggling through the air. As they passed through dark caverns, Liza could hear the lapping of water from up ahead, and fear snaked like a cold, damp finger down her back.

“Please!” Liza cried out, renewing her attempts to fight the nids off. Now that she had shaken off the fog of the music, terror came rushing in its place: Patrick's name drummed louder than ever in her mind. “Please let me go. You don't understand. I'm on a very important mission.”

“Save your breath, Miss Liza,” Mirabella said in a low voice. “You'll need it for the Court of Stones.”

The finger did another unpleasant zaggle down her back.

The nids set Liza and Mirabella down at the edge of a vast, fog-enshrouded lake. The surface of the black water was spotted with enormous, dark flowers, which looked like overgrown teacups. As soon as the nids reached its shore, the flowers began to move, skating toward them, leaving behind a gentle wake of dark ripples.

Then Liza saw that the blooms were being pushed upward from underneath; and suddenly dozens of large, slimy green frogs were waddling up through the shallows and plopping down on the banks on their fat, wet stomachs, blinking expectantly. Each frog had one of the oversize lily pads strapped to its back, and Liza found herself pushed, headfirst, into one of them.

She managed to grab hold of one of the flower petals and right herself. Immediately Liza's frog waddled back into the lake. Her stomach dipped as all at once it submerged. But the flower stayed above water, skating easily along the surface. Around her, the water was alive with floating flowers, sliding rapidly toward the opposite shore as though moving on invisible tracks. Wisps of mist floated past them.

Liza wished, fiercely, that Patrick were with her. She remembered when, the summer before, he had found a large frog in the creek at the bottom of their street, and how they had tried to hand-feed it lettuce before Sarah Wilkins had walked by and sneered at them both for being freaks. Liza should have stood up to Sarah.
The
world
is a freak
, she should have said.
Everything that happens in it is strange and beautiful
.

Liza felt a hot flash of fear and guilt. What if she didn't make it to Patrick on time? Who would play Pinecone Bowling with her then? Who would tromp through the woods with her on summer days, and build snow forts with her in winter, and try to water-bomb Mr. Tenley's snarling, drooling bulldog from the tree house?

They reached the opposite shore quickly. Liza saw what looked like a ruined castle rising up from beyond the mist. Scattered lumer-lumpen pulsed dimly along its black stone ramparts. Liza's throat squeezed up. She wished she could plunge her hand into the water, grab on to the frog, and instruct it to turn around. But all too soon it had waddled onto the shore.

I am not afraid
, Liza told herself.
I am not afraid
.

“Get down,” commanded the nid that had stolen her broom, and thrust the bristles threateningly in Liza's direction.

“Only if you stop sticking that thing in my face,” Liza said, surprised that she sounded very much in control of herself. The nid withdrew the bristles several inches from her nose, and Liza climbed, with some difficulty, out of the flower and maneuvered down to the ground with as much dignity as she could muster. Mirabella, looking somewhat green in the snout, slid down from her own flower and bumped onto the soggy ground next to her.

As though in response to the nids' arrival, the door to the castle groaned open, and Liza came face-to-face, or face-to-snout, with a large mole very much like the one that had been in charge of the orchestra. This one, however, was wearing a floppy, faded nightcap, which looked as though it had been fashioned from a used coffee filter. In fact, it most
certainly
was a used coffee filter; Liza caught a whiff of hazelnut as the nids prodded her forward. She bet he had gotten it at the troglod market.

“Come along, come along,” the mole said, turning on one furry heel and leading the way into the dark palace. “We heard you coming from a mile away—could have woken a slothbart with your screaming! The court is already assembled. Had to wake up the judge, and I'll have you know he was not pleased, not pleased in the slightest....”

“The judge is known to be very strict,” Mirabella whispered to Liza, and Liza's stomach turned.

The corridor opened up into a vast, semicircular amphitheater chiseled from dark stone. It looked like the baseball stadium at Fenway Park, but thousands and thousands of years old. Hundreds of tiers of blackened stone seats were arranged in a semi-circle, stretching endlessly upward, and Liza saw a smattering of sleepy-looking troglods and other creatures—including a skunk, still wearing a tattered bedsheet around its shoulders—which had apparently gathered to watch the trial.

Beyond the open amphitheater, Liza saw a river, which swirled with strange colors, opals and blues and deep purples, and emitted a vivid blue light. The river, Liza thought, must also be causing the strange shadows that flickered and floated and flew all around her.

“Sit!” the nid with her broom commanded, pointing Liza toward a rickety wooden bench. She regretted having brought the broom with her at all. It was getting very tedious to be poked and prodded by the bristles, and she began to sympathize with Mirabella's great fear of the things.

Liza took a seat on the bench. Mirabella sat down beside her. They were sitting directly in front of a wooden podium; Liza guessed this was where the judge would sit, when he—or she, or it—arrived.

Mirabella was very nervous. She was worrying her tail between her paws, muttering, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

“Stop that,” Liza whispered. “You'll make us seem guilty.”

The rat moaned.

“Shhh,” Liza hushed her. “Pull yourself together. Everything will be okay. I'm sure the judge will understand that this is all a big mistake.” Liza wished she felt as confident as she was pretending to be. She cursed herself for listening to the nids' music, for getting close to the palace at all. It must have been hours since she'd descended Below; and if what Mirabella had said was true, the spindlers' Feast would soon begin.

The nids filed into the stone seats that encircled the court, buzzing and chattering excitedly. Almost as soon as the nids were seated, the mole cried out, “All rise for the Honorable Judge Gobbington IV!” Instantly there was shuffling and rustling, and murmurs of excitement, as the nids climbed again to their feet.

Liza stood along with everybody else. Mirabella was practically white with fear, and Liza's throat was dry and chalky, as though she had inhaled sawdust.

She heard a scuffling sound, the noise of slapping footsteps along the dark, dank hall through which the mole had led them, then a dry, rattling cough. Finally the judge stepped into the amphitheater.

At least, Liza thought he must be the judge. He certainly looked wise. Although he was probably no taller than she, his head was four times the size of hers and incredibly wrinkled, like an enormous, shriveled pea. His face, in contrast, seemed ridiculously small: just a bare twig of a nose, and two squinty eyes, and a pinched mouth floating in the middle of that humongous head. Liza felt the wild urge to laugh, as she did sometimes when she got very nervous, and fought desperately to quell it.

Judge Gobbington IV had a large gavel tucked under one arm. He was wearing thick glasses and an elaborate black gown that reached almost all the way to the ground. His bare feet protruded from underneath its hem, however, and Liza saw that they were large and slightly webbed, like a duck's. When he walked, his feet made a wet, slapping sound against the stone.

Still, despite his faintly absurd appearance, the judge moved with solemn confidence, like someone supremely aware of his own importance. As he mounted the podium, Liza whispered to Mirabella, “What—what is it?”

Before the rat could respond, the judge shot Liza a withering look. “I see you are a stranger to the world Below,” he said in a reedy voice. “Otherwise you would surely be familiar with the Gobbingtons. We were the first family of hobgoblins to settle this region, back when the lumpen were still young and the nids were no more than nobs in the ground—when flowers had not yet learned to grow, and water and land did not know that they were separate.” Judge Gobbington IV frowned. “You would
also
be familiar with the fact that hobgoblins have excellent hearing. I trust you will not make that mistake again.”

“N-no, sir,” Liza sputtered. She sank back down onto the bench, and her heart sank with her. Obviously, she was not off to a very good start. The nids began tittering again, whispering to one another as they reseated themselves.

The hobgoblin judge banged loudly with his gavel on the podium to restore order. “Now, then,” he said. “What's all the fuss about?”

The nid with Liza's broom stepped forward. “Your Honor!” he cried. “The rat and the human child were snooping and spying! They were lurking and leering, and peering and prodding—”

“You've made your point quite clear,” the judge snapped, with another thunderous
bang
of his gavel. The nid shrank back, picking nervously at the broom's bristles.

Judge Gobbington turned his attention back toward the bench. He slid his glasses down on his small, pinched nose and stared at Liza over the top of them, as though she was an expired piece of deli meat in a refrigerator and he was trying to determine whether eating her would give him a stomachache. It was, she thought, very unpleasant to feel like a slice of spoiled turkey. “Let's hear what the defendants have to say for themselves.”