Odds Are Good (21 page)

Knowing he could not keep his grip on the saliva-slick rope, Edgar made a desperate leap and landed on the giant's collar. The giant swatted at him, as one would at an annoying insect, but Edgar quickly scrambled under the giant's collar, where he held as still as he could, scarcely breathing.

All through the long hot day he stayed there, peering sideways at the world below, longing for it, thinking of how he had missed it.

Finally night darkened the sky, bringing with it the stars that he had not seen in so many years. Their beauty made him weep.

The giant lay down, and after a time began to snore.

Edgar climbed out onto his chest. He stood, staring out at the rising moon, the river on whose water it was reflected, the dark ridge of the distant mountains, and the road that led back to his village, back to Melisande.

He wondered if she had waited for him, or if she had married Martin Plellman after all.

The giant's clothing was so coarsely woven that the threads were almost like the rungs of a ladder. Now that the giant was lying down, it was only a few hundred feet to the ground.

Edgar took a deep breath of the clean, clear air, and released it with a sigh.

Then he began to climb the giant's shirt—not down, but up—onto the giant's chin, where the stubble grew so thick it was like a grove of small pine trees. Across the loose and pendulous lip Edgar climbed.

Then he lowered himself back into the moist cavern of the giant's mouth, where his home and friends lay waiting.

I suppose I can't really blame my parents for not believing me when I told them about the weirdness under my bed. After all, adults never believe a kid when he or she talks about that kind of thing. Oh, they'll believe you're
afraid
, of course. But they never believe you've actually got a good reason to feel that way. They'll certainly never believe you if you tell them something horrible is lurking under the bed, waiting to take you away.

But you and I know they should. You and I know that there
are
terrible things that hide there, waiting to catch you, snatch you, steal you.

At least, I know. Because now I'm one of them.

 

I'm not sure when I first realized there was something wrong under my bed. I must have been fairly young, because I can remember that one night, when I was about five or six, I rolled a ball under the bed by accident. I heard a popping sound and started to cry because I knew I would never get my ball back from the weird gray nothingness down there.

So clearly I knew about the nothingness by then, and understood that things disappeared into it. But at the time I was upset simply because I had lost my ball. Like a kid who needs glasses but doesn't know it, and just assumes things look fuzzy to everyone else, too, I figured that was just the way the world was.

Besides, everyone loses things in their bedroom—socks, pencils, yo-yos, homework you're certain you did. It wasn't until I began staying overnight at friends' houses and saw the incredible messes under their beds—messes that
didn't disappear
—that I realized something was truly wrong at my house.

My second clue came when I tried to tell my parents about this and they thought I was playing a silly game. “For heaven's sake, David,” said my mother. “Don't be ridiculous!”

I remember these words well because I heard them so many times in the months that followed. The few times I actually did manage to drag Mom and Dad up to look under my bed, the weird gray nothingness wasn't there, and all they saw was solid floor. That happened sometimes. Finally I realized that the nothingness disappeared whenever grown-ups were around.

As you can imagine, this was very frustrating.

After a while Mom and Dad decided to get me some “special help”—which is to say they sent me to a shrink. Unfortunately the nothingness under my bed wasn't something that could be fixed by a shrink. All I learned from the experience was that I had better keep my mouth shut if I didn't want to get sent away for even more intense treatment.

Personally, I thought Mom should have figured out that a kid as sloppy as I was could never naturally have a bed that didn't even have dust bunnies under it! But Weztix has taught me that people will believe really stupid things in order to avoid having to believe something else that they think is just plain impossible. I guess Mom just assumed that my losing so much stuff simply indicated I was even lazier, sloppier, or more addle-brained than most kids.

Maybe I was. That didn't mean that the area under my bed wasn't weird and scary.

Even so, I managed to live with it—until the day it swallowed Fluffy.

Yeah, I know: Fluffy is a disgustingly cute name for a cat. But when we got Fluffy she was a disgustingly cute kitten. And according to my parents I was a disgustingly cute toddler. So when I wanted to call the kitten Fluffy, they were happy to oblige.

As you get older, you discover certain things you wish your parents had done differently, maybe even been a little stricter about. Letting me name our cat Fluffy was one of them. By fifth grade I had earned at least two black eyes from fights that started with people teasing me about my “sissy” cat.

Not that Fluffy cared what anyone called her, as long as we fed her on time. She was pretty aloof. But she was mine, and I loved her.

Fortunately Fluffy seemed to have figured out on her own that she should avoid the area under my bed. Maybe it was some instinctive awareness of danger. Whatever the reason, I never had to worry about losing her there. She just naturally avoided the area.

If it hadn't been for my rotten cousin Harold, I doubt she would ever have gone under there.

 

When I was little and got upset, my mother used to say, “Well, David, into every life a little rain must fall.”

If that's true, then Harold was my own personal thunderstorm. Two years older than me and about forty pounds of solid muscle heavier, Harold projected all the friendly charm of a porcupine having a bad hair day.

Even so, his mother adored him—a fact probably worth a scientific study all by itself.

Harold and his mother came to visit more often than I would have liked. Well, once in a hundred years was really more often than I would have liked, but Harold and Aunt Marguerite actually showed up almost once a month—including the day that I was stolen.

I had already had a rough week, and when I found out that they were coming that afternoon I threw myself to the floor and screamed, “Just kill me now and get it over with!”

“That's not funny, David,” said my mother.

“I'm not trying to be funny,” I replied.

They came anyway.

As usual, Aunt Marguerite had “private things” to discuss with my mother—meaning that she was having trouble with her latest boyfriend and wanted Mom's advice. In my opinion, Aunt Marguerite's endless string of boyfriends was one source of Harold's problems. But no one asked me. Anyway, the fact that she wanted to talk to Mom meant that I got to entertain Harold.

It was a wretched, rainy day, so the two of us had to play up in my room. After a while Harold grabbed Fluffy and said, “How about a game of Kitty Elephant?”

Kitty Elephant is something Harold invented, and it will tell you a lot about him. Basically it consists of putting a sock over a cat's face so that the cat looks like it has a long trunk, then laughing hysterically while you watch the cat try to get out of the sock.

I had learned to stay out of the way when Harold was doing something rotten, but when I saw Fluffy getting too close to the bed I tried to grab her. Harold grabbed me first. Twisting my arm behind my back, he hissed, “Don't interfere with the game, Beanbrain.”

“Harold, you don't understand!”

“I understand that you're a wuss,” he said. “I'm embarrassed to have you for a cousin.”

I thought about telling him that I was
disgusted
to have him as a cousin but decided against it, since he had already twisted my arm so far behind my back it felt like it was coming out of the socket.

Fluffy got closer to the edge of the bed.

“Let me
go!”
I screamed.

To my surprise, Harold did let go—mostly, I think, to keep our mothers from coming up to see what was going on. It was too late. In her efforts to get the sock off her head, Fluffy had rolled under the bed.

A bolt of lightning sizzled through the rainy sky.

For an instant I had dared to hope that this was one of the times when the floor was in its solid state. The lightning told me that it was not. And when I heard a
pop
like someone pulling his finger out of a bottle, I knew Fluffy was gone.

The popping sound drew Harold to the edge of the bed. “Come on out, Fluffy,” he said, reaching under to grab her.

When he couldn't find her, he bent and lifted the edge of the bedspread. Then he scrambled over the bed and looked down the other side.

“What happened?” he asked nervously. “Where did she go?”

“Why don't you crawl under there and find out?” I said bitterly, feeling so wretched I thought I might throw up.

 

Having Harold as a witness did not, of course, mean that our mothers were going to believe us. Nor did it help that when we finally did convince Mom and Aunt Marguerite to come upstairs we found Fluffy sitting on my bed, licking her paws. Glad as I was to see her, the sight gave me a shiver. Nothing had ever come back from underneath my bed before.

Nothing.

“Harold, you know that David has been playing this foolish game for years,” said Aunt Marguerite sharply. “I don't want you to encourage it. His poor mother has enough trouble with him as it is.”

“Just look under the bed,” insisted Harold. “Look at the floor!”

I could have told him what would happen. In fact now that I think of it, I
had
told him—several times—when we were younger. He just never believed me. So he was actually surprised that when he finally convinced Aunt Marguerite to get down on her knees and raise the edge of the bedspread all she saw was bare floor.

Harold and my aunt didn't stay much longer. After they left, Mom yelled at me for “dragging up that stupid fantasy again.”

And that was the end of things—until later that night, when Fluffy began talking to me.

She had come and curled up on my pillow when I climbed into bed, the way she often did. This had made me a little nervous. But she had seemed perfectly normal since her reappearance, so I had let her stay.

It was storming again when the big clock downstairs struck midnight. As the last chime faded, Fluffy opened her eyes.

They were red.

Now, sometimes a cat's eyes will catch the light just the right way to reflect off the back of them or something, and they look red. I've seen that. I know what it looks like.

This was different. Fluffy's eyes were fire red, blazing with their own light. Before I could move she nuzzled her face close to my ear and whispered, “Weztix wants you, David. He wants you to come to the other side.”

I screamed and yanked up the covers, sending Fluffy flying off the bed.

“What's going on up there?” shouted my father.

“It's Fluffy!” I cried. “She's . . . she's . . .”

My voice trailed off as I realized that Dad would never believe me.

“She's
what?”
he yelled.

“Nothing!” I shouted. “Never mind. Forget it.”

Why did I give up so easily? Because I had been through this a hundred times before. Because I had barely avoided being sent to a mental institution after I had insisted on clinging to the “delusion” that there was something strange under my bed. And most of all because I didn't know that being sent to an institution would have been infinitely preferable to what lay in store for me.

Fluffy clawed her way back onto the bed. Her eyes blazed in the darkness.

“Go away!” I hissed. “Get out of here!”

Instead of leaving, she slunk onto my chest. “Go under the bed, David,” she hissed. “Weztix wants you under the bed.”

I jumped to my feet, scooped up Fluffy, and threw her out the door. Then I took a flying leap back onto my bed, avoiding at least six feet of the floor. I lay there shaking with terror, wishing I could sleep downstairs for the night. But my parents had put a stop to that one angry night years before.

After I caught my breath, I hung my head over the bed and lifted the edge of the sheet, hoping not to find anything too strange. And what I saw wasn't that strange, really. Just that familiar shimmering grayness. But it scared me then in a way it never had before.

I rolled back onto the bed and stared up into the darkness, wondering if I would make it until morning.

Suddenly I felt something pounce onto the bed. I cut short my scream when I realized it was Fluffy again.

I glanced sideways. The door was still closed.

“How did you get in here?” I whispered.

I know people talk to their pets all the time, but I realized with a kind of terrible fascination that I expected her to answer me.

“The same way I got back from the other side,” she purred. “Once you've been there, doors don't mean that much. But you'd better go soon, David. They're waiting for you.”

“Who?” I asked desperately. “What do they want?”

Instead of answering, Fluffy jumped to the floor and scooted under the bed. I rolled over and stuck my head down again. Heart pounding, I lifted the bedspread. My cat was gone. But the shimmering gray nothingness that had replaced my floor now had a small blue circle in the middle of it.

From the circle came a new voice. “We're waiting for you, David. Come to us.
Come to us!”

I rolled back onto the bed, pulled the covers over my head, and tucked the sheets tightly around me, trying to convince myself I would be safe if I just stayed wrapped up that way. I have no idea why I thought that; desperation, probably. Who knows? Maybe it would even have worked if I hadn't fallen asleep.