Billy and the Birdfrogs (10 page)

I’m pretty sure that I slept for many hours, probably until late the next morning. Toward the end, I dreamt that a wooly mammoth was charging at me and trumpeting. The sound was loud and echoey and awful. I woke up, and the sound was still all around me. I didn’t know where I was and leaped up in the dark, hitting my head hard on the ceiling. I was very confused, and my arms and legs ached horribly.

The sound went, “Billlaaaaaaaggg!”

In the middle of my panic, I remembered that I had a light on my helmet, so I fumbled with it and turned it on. When I saw the cave, I remembered where I was and thought that the birdfrogs must be attacking me. I expected them to come pouring over the sill of the cave. I snatched up rod A (or it might have been rod B) but there were no birdfrogs, and the sound had a distant, distorted quality. I crept to the opening of the cave and listened. Somebody was calling for me. Somebody was at the top of the hole, shouting down into it. I could hear more clearly now and distinguish the words.

“Bobby!” the voice shouted. “Bobby! This is the police!” (“eece . . . eece . . . eece. . . .”went the echo.) “You’re under arrest for breaking and entering, and defacing private property! Climb out with your hands up!” (“Hup . . . hup . . . hup!”)

Then another voice, a high and raspy voice, screamed, “You filthy little featherweight! Are you alive down there or did you break your boney neck? You ruined a wall in my house and you’ll pay for it!” (“Hit . . . hit . . . hit!”)

Chapter 17

I Go Even Deeper

While they were shouting down the hole at me, their voices were so magnified and distorted that it was hard to make out the words. It was easier to hear them when they were talking to each other in normal voices. It was almost like they were whispering in my ear, because the sound got channeled somehow down the hole. I could hear everything they said.

“When did you discover the break-in?” the police officer was saying.

“When I woke up this morning,” Mr. Jubber’s voice said. “I came downstairs, and—”

“And that nasty rat chewed a hole in my wall!” Mr. Earpicker shouted. “And ruined a perfectly good potato peeler that belongs to me! It all belongs to me!”

“I understand your concern, Sir,” the police officer said. “Once we extract the suspect—”

“He’s not a suspect!” Mr. Earpicker shouted. “He did it! There’s no suspecting anything! Why do we have to extract him? Why can’t we put a hose down the well and drown him?”

“That’s a negatory,” the police officer said. “Not protocol. We’ll need to extract him in order to prosecute. Are we certain the suspect is still on location, and hasn’t fled?”

“How can I know?” Mr. Earpicker shouted. “Why don’t you go down and check, you big doofus? Here’s a rope. Is that protocol enough for you?”

I didn’t wait to hear any more. If I was caught, I’d be done for. Mr. Earpicker would probably figure out a way to put me in jail for life. Maybe if I hid as far down the hole as possible, the police wouldn’t find me, and they’d think I had already climbed out during the night. Then, in a few days, I could climb back up when no one was watching and sneak out, run away, and go into hiding.

As quietly as possible, I got my rod A and rod B and started to climb further down the hole. I took some risks now, because I wanted to move quickly. Sometimes I paused and listened, and I could still hear them shouting and talking. When I heard a lot of rattling and banging, I was pretty sure that the policeman had started to climb down, so I began to go faster. I was terrified. If I went too quickly, I’d make a mistake and fall. If I didn’t go quickly enough, I’d
get caught.

Some pebbles came bouncing down around me, sprinkling on my head. Someone was definitely coming down, knocking gravel loose as he climbed. Either that, or Mr. Earpicker was throwing handfuls of junk down the hole to hit me. I wasn’t sure, but I was so afraid of being caught that I gave up on rod A and rod B. I started to climb free hand, because it was faster. I stuck the rods in my backpack and hooked the rope to my belt, because I would need them later on to get back up again.

The shaft was very rough and pointy in this deep segment. I was below T29, and my grandmother had said that that was the deepest anybody had gone. So I was in new territory, and nobody had smoothed out the shaft here except maybe the birdfrogs. I didn’t mind, because it gave me a lot of handholds and footholds. I could climb pretty easily, and if I slipped and fell (which happened more than once) I could grab onto a crack or a shelf in the wall and stop myself pretty easily.

It seemed to me that the shaft was getting narrower and narrower. What if I got stuck and wasn’t able to go any further? I had awful visions of getting my legs stuck and then I would struggle and struggle and never be able to get back out again.

Every time a few pebbles rattled down on me from above, I felt panicky and climbed deeper. I thought the pebbles meant that the policeman was catching up to me. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was too scared. Of course, the pebbles had nowhere else to go except down, so it didn’t mean anything that they were falling on me. The policeman could just as well be on his way back up. Or he could be calling on his radio for extra policemen and a long cable.

I’m sure I went down twice as far as T29, then three times as far, then four times as far. I climbed and climbed. Because I was going freehand, I went much quicker and felt like I was flying. It was like running downstairs, except I was running on my hands and feet. I must have gone about two or three miles into the ground, maybe more. Maybe ten miles. But maybe less than that; it was hard for me to judge. I never thought about how hard it would be to get back up again.

After a while I couldn’t hear any voices anymore. Either they had left the basement, or I was too far away to hear them even with the sound-magnifying property of the shaft. I began to notice something else, though. I could see a little bit around me, in the corners of my eyes, outside of the beam of my headlight. At first I didn’t notice, but then I realized that it was easier to find handholds. I could see them more quickly. The points of rock were like ghostly shadows in my side vision. I turned off my headlight for a moment, and I could see the walls of the tunnel dimly. The light was coming from below me. It was so dim, however, that I had to turn the headlight back on again.

I wondered if I was approaching the earth’s core. The earth has a core of melted iron, according to the books I had read as part of my home schooling, and maybe I was getting close to it and beginning to see the glow coming up from below me. I didn’t feel hot, though. The air was warm and muggy, but the temperature hadn’t changed since I had first climbed into the hole. So if it was the core, it wasn’t anywhere near as hot as I thought it would be.

Then I wondered if I had gotten all the way through to China after all, and was beginning to see daylight. But if that was so, then the Earth wasn’t as wide as I had thought.

I was confused, but I decided that if I kept going down I’d find out.

Every few feet now, the light got brighter. Pretty soon my headlight seemed dim and wavering by comparison, so I turned it off. I climbed more slowly, because I didn’t know what I’d meet. Then suddenly my feet couldn’t find anywhere to rest, and I almost fell. My legs were dangling in space, kicking. I had to grab tight to a ledge with my fingers and pull myself up again.

I peered down past my feet, but I couldn’t see clearly. All I could see was a bright blob of light. I crouched and stuck my head as far down as possible, and this is what I saw.

The narrow shaft ended. It opened up on the ceiling of an enormous cavern with smooth walls that reminded me of a huge stomach (I had just crawled down the esophagus). The walls of the tunnel were glowing. Some mineral in the stone must have been phosphorescent. Even the stone right around me, at the end of the tunnel, glowed. I touched it, but it felt like regular stone. The light was sparkly and greenish. Each bit of stone wasn’t very bright, but the whole cavern put together made a lot of light.

The floor of the cavern was about fifty feet down. If I had not caught myself, I would have fallen onto the hard stone floor and smashed into pieces.

I decided to try and climb down into the cavern. I had to stop and rest somewhere, and it would be more comfortable to rest on the floor of the cavern than to perch in the middle of the thin, rocky shaft, especially if I was going to wait for a couple of days before climbing back up again. So I took out my rod A and rod B, and wedged them very firmly across the tunnel in an x pattern. I made sure that they were very tightly wedged, because if they slipped out, I would never be able to get back up into the tunnel again. Then I hooked my rope to the middle of the x. I didn’t quite trust the iron hook by itself, because it might slip off. So I tied a very secure knot. Then I dangled the rope down into the cavern. It didn’t reach the floor, but it came close. I climbed down the rope and then jumped the last few feet. The end of the rope was just above my head, and when I reached up I could grab it easily and pull myself up again. I checked, because I didn’t want to be trapped in that cavern with only one jar of peanut butter and one jar of jelly.

I looked around at the cavern. It was enormous, like the biggest cathedral you can imagine, and hard to look at because of the bright light that made me squint. Every time I turned to look a new direction, my feet scuffed on the rocky floor and the sound echoed all around me. About a dozen cave entrances opened off of the walls in all directions, and I wondered if they led to a system of tunnels and caverns. Maybe it was like a whole maze buried under the ground.

I heard a sound behind me and turned. Something awful was coming out of one of the caves. It couldn’t be a birdfrog. It was too big. It was brown all over and shuffling like a bear and had wild, horrible hair sticking out all over its head. I could smell it. It smelled disgusting, like a sewer. It stood still for a moment looking at me, balanced on its hind legs, its eyes glittering in the greenish light, and I stared back horrified. I wondered if it could climb ropes. It looked too clumsy for that. I wanted to swarm back up my rope, but I was so scared that I couldn’t move. My heart was beating hard.

Then it started to make a sound. “Billy,” it said.

Chapter 18

Grandma Tells Her Story

“Grandma?” I said, in a frightened, trembling voice.

The brown hairy monster sounded like my grandmother, and was about the right height and shape, but what if it was a ghost, or a zombie?

“Grandma,” I said, carefully, because I didn’t want to insult a zombie and get it angry at me, “didn’t you get run over by a steam roller?”

The brown muddy figure came lurching toward me, shaking its fist in anger. “Those lousy people! They tried to flatten me, Billy! They almost did, too.”

As she came closer, the smell got worse and worse. She was wearing the same clothes, and even the same black wool jacket, all plastered in mud. Even her face was muddy, and her hair stuck out all directions because it was full of half-dried mud. I could see that she was not a zombie or a ghost. She really was my grandmother, and she was entirely three dimensional and not flat. I thought my heart would explode out of me with joy, and I ran toward her and threw my arms around her.

“Hold on there,” she said, laughing and hugging me. “Careful, Billy, not so violent! I got a swollen ankle, and a bruised leg, and I don’t know what else, falling out of that hole in the ceiling. That’s a darn long drop. But it
is
good to see you! You are a marvel, Billy! How did you know I was down here? I was hoping you would figure it out, but I couldn’t see how.”

At first I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears were streaming out of my eyes. I hugged her very tightly, and then I let go and jumped up in the air a bunch of times, and laughed some more, and then hugged her again.

“Grandma! You’re not all squished! That Pointy woman said you were squished out like jelly. But you smell awful! Grandma, I didn’t know you were down here. I only climbed down here to escape the police.”

“The
police!”
she cried out. “Billy, what did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I made a hole in Mr. Earpicker’s wall with a potato peeler.”

“You made a hole in Mr. Earpicker?” she said, with a sudden, hopeful smile on her face. The mud started to crack and flake away around her mouth and eyes as she smiled. “With a potato peeler?”

“No, not in
him
. In his
wall
. I mean, in our kitchen wall. Oh, Grandma, how come you smell so bad?”

“Let’s sit down, Billy,” she said, leaning heavily on me and lowering herself to the cave floor. Wincing, she carefully stretched out her injured leg and wiggled her toes. “That’s a little better. Now I think we can tell each other our stories. You go first.”

“No, you go first,” I said. “Please? Grandma, how did you escape three steam rollers? Mr. Earpicker said you were splattered out like a can of tomato paste.”

“Very perceptive,” she said, dryly. “It
was
a can of tomato paste. I had to dive pretty fast, I can tell you, and I lost my grocery bag. They had told me to stand on a kind of ramp around the side of the building, and there was no room to go anywhere. I had to dive down a manhole. Do you know how heavy those manhole covers are? Great big iron Frisbees, they are. Good thing we kept up with our weight training, you and me. I yanked it up just in time and dove in. Splat, into the sewer.”

“It must have been awful, Grandma.”

“It was!” she said. “It was terrible! Not the sewer part. I didn’t mind that so much. I’ve seen worse. But while I was standing down there, neck deep in slime, looking way up at the manhole cover that had closed up again after me, I could hear them. I could hear them up there, talking.”

“What did they say?”

“They were congratulating each other! I couldn’t believe it! I was so mad. I wanted to get right back up there and give them a good beating. But the manhole was too far above me, way over my head. I couldn’t get out, that way. I had to swim through the slime for miles. I tried to navigate and take tunnels that would lead back toward our house, but I think I got lost.

“Then I found a kind of crack in the wall, a place where the brick lining of the sewer had collapsed and a sort of natural cave opened up, and it was close enough to the surface of the slime that I could grab onto the edge and crawl into it. I didn’t know where that cave went, but I thought I’d follow it for a little way and see if I could find a passage back up to the street. I got more and more lost in that tangle of different passageways crossing everywhere in the pitch blackness, and pretty soon I couldn’t even find my way back to where I started.”

“Poor Grandma!”

“Oh, well, I’ve seen worse. My hands and knees did get skinned, though, from crawling around so much. Then my tunnel joined up with a sort of vertical shaft. I wondered, maybe this is the same shaft that comes up in our basement? It had the right smell. Maybe I could just climb up and get out? I was sure of it. But Billy, it’s darn hard to climb in the dark. You can’t see where you’re putting your hands or feet. So I had to go very slowly. Then a bit of rock that I was holding onto—it stuck out a few inches into the shaft—that piece of rock suddenly broke off and I fell. I couldn’t stop myself. The broken piece of rock hit me in the head, and that made me dizzy, or I might have been better at catching myself. I went slithering down, and all around me I saw this greenish light growing. Then I shot out of the shaft and found myself in a cavern. Way at the top. Falling. That’s a darn long fall, even for someone trained to sky dive. I braced and rolled when I landed, but I bunged up my leg anyway.”