The Spindlers (14 page)

“She knows we're here now,” Mirabella said in an excited whisper, watching the enormous bird-things circling above them.

“Who's she?” Liza asked.

“The queen of the spindlers,” Mirabella said, and Liza felt a zip of anxiety run up her spine. “The moribats keep watch for her. Spies, secret-spillers, and tattle-tellers—that's what they are.”

“Shouldn't we hide?” Liza asked.

The rat tutted at her. “No way to hide from the moribats. Nothing happens Below that the moribats don't find out about eventually. It's too late anyway; she knows we're here, and she knows what we're coming for, too.”

Liza did not at all like the way Mirabella pronounced the word
she
, as though it was something very large and very frightening.

Above them, the circling moribats gave a shrill cry. The noise was terrible and made a dagger of ice-cold fear drive through Liza's center. The noise made her think of children abandoned in barren places without enough to eat; and open graves; and dark, bleak winter nights when through the thin air came the sounds of cars skidding and crashing on Route 47; and the squeak of a gurney's wheels on a hospital floor. It made her think of everything that was sad and lonely and depressing in the world.

Liza struggled to ignore the shrill wailing from above. She tried to remember the words to a song she and Patrick had made up years ago, for bath time, called “The Splish-Splosh Song,” whose very first lyrics were “Drip and drop, slip and slop, watch the soap bubbles go pop, pop, pop.” It was a stupid song, but it had always made Patrick giggle and so it usually made Liza feel better. She could not think of the tune, however. The moribats were too loud.

“I hate them,” she burst out, and as if in response they fell silent and drifted away into the blackness. Instantly Liza felt better.

“You think
they're
bad,” Mirabella said. “They're a nice piece of day-old sirloin on the very top of a trash heap compared to the scawgs! They're a fat wedge of only semi-moldy cheese! They're a one-worm apple!”

“Please,” said Liza, who was starting to feel queasy. “I see your point.”

Mirabella sniffed as though she doubted it.

“What are the scawgs?” Liza ventured, although she wasn't sure she wanted to know. Groups of moribats still massed up in the rocks around them, but at least these stayed silent, watching the travelers with their dull, milk-white eyes.

Mirabella shivered, and her tail twitched agitatedly. “Terrible creatures,” she rasped hoarsely. “Ugly, ugly, ugly, inside and out. Originally part of the reptile family, of course, which explains it if you ask me. Evil, filthy things. Some say they're working for the queen. But the scawgs don't work for anyone but themselves. Always looking to fill their bellies.”

“Yes, but what
are
they?” Liza demanded impatiently.

Mirabella's eyes darted back and forth, as though she feared they might be set upon by scawgs any second. “Hard to say, hard to say. They're crafty, nasty, crooked things—take different shapes at different times. But they can't hide their tails—oh no, never. Thick tails as long as snakes.”

Liza's stomach flipped. She'd had quite enough of snakes for, well, ever.

“And the smell—they stink to high heaven! You could bathe them in rose petals and they'd still smell worse than a barnyard in August. They eat the flesh of the dead; that's why the smell is so bad. It stays on their breath.” Mirabella shook her head. “Very uncivilized. No manners at all.”

Liza was horrified. “We won't—we won't run into any scawgs, will we?”

“Perhaps,” Mirabella said, which wasn't very comforting. “It's hard to say.” Then she sped up again, leaving Liza to imagine being picked to pieces by an oversize iguana with vicious dog-breath. She thought she would rather have been smashed into splinters by a tree snake.

By now even the bushes of hope had stopped growing. On either side of them were sheer chasms of rock, dark slated stone, and no plant life whatsoever. The few lumpen that still pulsed among the rocks did so weakly, faintly.

“Almost—there—” Mirabella panted out. “Just—a—little—farther—to—the—top—”

Then, from ahead, came sounds of singing.

The voice came from just beyond the final bend in the mountainous path, past two enormous, ancient rocks that leaned together to form a vaulted archway over the path. Whoever it was had the worst singing voice Liza had ever heard—worse even than that of her father, who couldn't even sing “Happy Birthday” in tune and had long ago given up trying.

They rounded a bend in the path, passed through the stone archway, and came suddenly to the end of the mountain. A small lip of rock jutted out over a sheer, vast, dizzying drop, an endless valley filled with floating mist.

A narrow wooden bridge stretched across the empty space, connecting the summit of their mountain to that of its twin, which Liza could make out very distantly, a looming dark shape beyond the mist. But the bridge did not seem particularly sturdy. Just looking at it made her feel nauseous.

“Are we—” She gulped. “Are we supposed to cross?”

“Not so fast!”

The voice came from a small pile of rubble. As Liza watched, the pile of rubble unfolded itself and stood, and Liza saw that it was
not
a pile of rubble after all, but an enormous mole, even larger and fatter than Mirabella, and dressed in gray robes so dingy and dusty and crinkly that Liza had mistaken the animal for stone. Its fur was the palest white, and its eyes—which were open, and twitching continuously back and forth—were clouded over, like a window completely covered in frost. The mole was blind, Liza realized.

“We come in peace,” Mirabella said, and despite the fact that the mole surely couldn't appreciate it, she performed a low curtsy, so that her newspaper skirt touched the ground.

The mole's nose, also a perfect white, trembled wetly. “A human girl and a rat. What's your business on the other side?” The mole's voice was a raspy, hoarse whisper. He must have been the one singing, or attempting to; only a voice so terrible could mutilate a song so badly.

“We go to the nests,” Mirabella said. “We have brought a gift for the queen of the spindlers.”

Liza knew Mirabella only said it to help get them across, but she did not like the way the mole turned his milky, unblinking eyes toward her just then, and smiled, showing small, sharp teeth inside a glistening pink mouth.

“Ah yes. A gift.” The way he said it was the way that a very hungry person might have said,
A sandwich
. “But nobody crosses the bridge without passing the test.”

“What kind of test?” Liza asked warily.

“You must answer a riddle,” the mole replied.

Liza's heart sank. Patrick had been given a book of riddles for his birthday last year, and she had never known the answer to a single one.

The mole cleared his throat loudly, and then began to rumble out, in a horrible approximation of song:

“What always runs but never walks
,

Often murmurs but never talks
,

Has a bed but never sleeps
,

Has a mouth but never eats?”

“Oh dear.” Mirabella took her tail in one paw and began to gnaw on it. “Oh dear, dear. How confounding. How confuddling! I've never been good with riddles, myself. Piddling things. Tricky, sticky, icky things.”

“What always runs but never walks …” Liza repeated to herself.

The mole let out a cackling laugh. “Do you give up?”

“Give me a second, give me a second.” Liza rubbed her forehead.

“Tick-tock, tick-tock!” the mole hummed, milky eyes roving endlessly. “Your time is running out.”

“You didn't tell us there was a time limit!” Liza cried.

“Oh yes.” The mole smiled, showing his slobbery pink tongue. “Hardly any time left to answer at all. No one but the wise will journey 'cross the Bridge of Sighs.”

“But that's not fair!” Liza burst out. This was exactly how things were Above: There were rules, but nobody told you about them, and you were somehow expected to know them anyway, and punished when you didn't.

“Fair?” The mole sniffed witheringly in her direction. “There is no such thing as fair. There is only the way things are.”

This made Liza even madder. Suddenly she found she couldn't control her anger. She was sure that wasn't true. There was also the way things should be, and she knew it, and the mole knew it, and everybody Above and Below knew it, forever and always. Certain things were right, and certain things were not right. And she thought of Patrick, and she thought of her parents, and how they wouldn't listen, and the anger rose and crested inside her, and her heart let out a pulse of protest, and she continued, “It's not right, and you know it. We won't be turned back. We came all this way, and nearly got thrown into the dungeon by the nids and eaten by tree snakes and had to follow the river to—”

Liza shut her mouth quickly.

“Had to follow the river …?” Mirabella prompted her encouragingly, but for a moment Liza stayed perfectly still and silent, as the gears in her brain went
click-click-click
into place, and the meaning of the riddle became clear.

She looked up at the mole, her eyes shining. “The river,” she said.

“We won't be turned back because of the river?” Mirabella repeated confusedly.

“No, no, no,” Liza interrupted the rat excitedly. “I mean, that's the answer to the riddle. A river runs and doesn't walk, murmurs but doesn't talk, has a bed and never sleeps, and has a mouth but doesn't eat. That's right, isn't it?”

For a moment the mole let his disappointment show on his snout. Then he grunted, “You're much smarter than you smell.”

Liza let out a whoop of satisfaction and chose not to worry too much about what stupidity smelled like.

“Well, that's that. Tip-top, and top shape, and topsy-turvy, and oopsy-daisy, off we go,” Mirabella chanted. She adjusted her wig—which was again gravitating to the left—and started forward.

“Just a minute.” The mole raised both paws and stepped in front of Mirabella, blocking her path. Despite his blindness, the animal was surprisingly quick on his feet. “I didn't say you could cross. You still have not paid the toll.”

Liza gaped. “But you said—”

“I said you must pass the test,” the mole said witheringly, showing his sharp teeth again. “But you must
also
pay the toll.”

“We haven't got any money.” Liza balled up her fists, feeling as though she would like to punch the mole directly in his ugly white snout. “We haven't got anything. My broom was snapped in two by a tree snake, and Mirabella lost her lunch box—”

“My purse,” Mirabella corrected her primly.

“Her purse, and I'm only wearing one shoe …”

“Then I'm afraid you're out of luck,” the mole said, folding his arms over his tunic and spreading his legs apart so that he was entirely blocking the entrance to the bridge.

Liza jammed her hands into her pockets. She still had Patrick's baseball, and the sock she had taken back from Mirabella, which was wrapped around her father's glasses. She offered all of it to the mole.

“This is everything we have,” she said desperately. “Please—take it.” Patrick would forgive her for losing his baseball again. He would have to. And her father would never know the difference.

The mole snorted disdainfully. “Trash!” he spat out. “I ask for a toll, and you insult me with this stinking mound of human trash! Get out of here, before I set the moribats on you both.”

“Come on, Liza,” Mirabella said quietly. “We won't find passage here.”

Liza felt tears pushing at the back of her throat, burning just behind her eyes. As she stuffed the sock, glasses, and baseball back in her pocket, her fingers brushed against the seeds of hope.

“Wait!” Liza cried out. She reached into the pocket of her pajamas, and withdrew several seeds of hope. She had no idea whether this counted as a toll, but she offered them up to the mole anyway. “Hold out your paw,” she said, and he did. His claws were dirt-encrusted and very sharp, and she was careful to avoid them as she counted three seeds into the very center of his paw.

Instantly the mole's whole snout loosened. A slow smile spread across his face as he stroked the seeds lovingly.

“Seeds of hope …,” he said quietly, milky eyes roaming aimlessly. “Ah, yes. I never thought …” Then he lapsed into silence, a look of utter contentment on his face, as he continued to fondle the seeds carefully, shifting them from paw to paw.

Suddenly he seemed to remember that Liza and her companion were still there. He stepped abruptly out of the way, coughing.

“All right, then,” he said. “Off you go.”

Mirabella and Liza went forward onto the Bridge of Sighs, leaving the blind mole humming happily to himself, hunched over his seeds.