Billy and the Birdfrogs (12 page)

“Look, Grandma, we’re saved!”

“Don’t stop and gloat now,” she said. “Let’s get up there, fast!”

When we got to the rope she suddenly threw out her arm to stop me. “Hold it!” she said. “Something’s been here! Billy, look, something’s smeared on the rope!”

When I looked up at the end of the rope dangling just above my head, I could see a small amount of yellowish-brown goo stuck to the fibers.

“Grandma, it must be the peanut butter. You had it all over your hands before, and—”

“Don’t be silly, I didn’t touch the rope. It wasn’t me. Something’s been messing with our rope. It might be a special poison. Some kind of cave spore that they mash up into a paste, and if you touch it you turn purple and melt on the inside. Or it might be. . . .” She stopped and sniffed at the rope. “Billy,” she said, “What do you think?”

I stood under it and sniffed. The end of the rope dangled about a foot above my head. “It’s. . . ,” I said, “it’s banana.”

“It’s more than banana,” she said. “Sniff again, Billy!”

I took another sniff. “It’s hard to tell Grandma. You’re taller than me, so your nose is closer to it. But it smells like . . . like banana and chocolate.”

“It does,” she said, looking at me grimly. “The birdfrogs have been here.”

“How can you be sure, Grandma?” I said.

“It’s obvious,” she said. “They’re gorillas. What does a gorilla eat? Banana. But they’re cultured gorillas, so they eat chocolate-covered bananas. They were in the middle of lunch, stuffing their nasty faces, when suddenly they got the call to nab some intruders. Wham, they come running out and climb all over our rope.”

We peered around everywhere and peered up at the black hole in the ceiling that the rope went into, but we didn’t see or hear anything that might be a birdfrog, or any other animal. We were alone.

“Maybe they left,” I said.

“Bosh!” my grandmother said. “They’re hiding and watching. They’ll wait till we’re half-way up the rope and then untie it at the top.”

“Maybe they won’t, Grandma,” I said. “If they eat chocolate-covered bananas, then they don’t eat people.”

“Billy,” she said, still staring around suspiciously. “Don’t lose your grip now, boy.
You
eat chocolate covered bananas, and you also eat meat.”

“But I don’t eat people,” I said.

“Never mind boy. You climb the rope, and I’ll wait below. If they cut the rope, I’ll catch you. If they don’t, I’ll come up after you.”

I swarmed up the rope. I didn’t see any movement above me; everything was still. The chocolate banana was stuck to the rope at regular intervals, as if it had gotten on some creature’s palm just before it had climbed up hand-over-hand. But the creature was no birdfrog. It must have been about my own size, or larger, judging by the length of its reach.

When I got to the top I scrambled up into the shaft. Rod A and B were still firmly wedged into the shaft just as I had left them, and the rope was still securely tied to them. Nothing was different except for a handprint of banana on the rocky wall. I could see the handprint very clearly because it blocked the greenish phosphorescence. It was a large print; human sized.

My grandmother started to climb the rope but she was very slow. I could see that her hurt leg was preventing her from climbing easily. You might think that you climb a rope only with your hands and arms, but you need to grasp the rope between your knees to steady yourself. Because her arms were so strong she was able to pull herself up slowly, bit by bit, but I wasn’t sure that she would be able to get to the top.

“Grandma,” I called down, “hold on tight and I’ll pull you up.”

“You can’t do it, Billy,” she called up. “I’m too heavy.”

“No, Grandma, I can do it.” I braced my feet on the crossed rods, grasped the rope firmly, and hauled. It was just like hauling a sack of canned goods up the stairwell, except that it was harder to put my back into it because the shaft that I was standing in was so narrow. I heaved and heaved until I thought that my arms would get pulled out of their sockets, and finally my grandmother rose up to the top. She reached out a hand and clutched onto one of the rods, and right away her weight lifted from the rope.

“That was just in time,” I said as she climbed up into the shaft after me. “You were really heavy.”

“That’s the weight training,” she said. “Builds muscle mass. And all that sewer mud adds a little too. But you did it, Billy. You really did it! You are a wonderful boy.”

I showed her the handprint on the rock, and she stared at it for a long time.

“Grandma,” I said, “do you think it’s a person?”

She measured it between her fingers. “Billy,” she said finally, in a grim voice, “Do you know what that is? It’s a regular sized gorilla. Those little ones, they m
ust keep a few giant ones around. I bet they keep ’em chained up in that big building we saw, and they unchain ’em whenever there’s dirty work to do. It’s a hit gorilla. They sent him up the rope and he’s waiting for us up there somewhere to rip off our heads, when we’re stuck in the tunne
l and have nowhere to run.”

“What do we do?” I said in a frightened voice.

“There isn’t much we can do, Love, except climb up and see what happens. Maybe we can fight it off when the time comes. I know a few tricks, and these iron bars will come in handy. We can’t stay down here, anyway.”

Chapter 21

We Encounter the Hit Gorilla

Even with my grandmother’s hurt leg, it was easier climbing with two people than with one. We tied one end of the rope around my waist and the other end around hers, so that if one of us fell, the other one would be able to brace against the tunnel wall and hold the weight. I took rod A and my grandmother took rod B. First, with my headlight on, I climbed up very far, about fifty feet, and wedged in rod A and sat on it. Then I shined my headlight down the shaft so that my grandmother could see. She climbed up slowly, taking as much time as she needed with her injured leg, until she passed me and climbed about fifty feet higher. Then she wedged in rod B and sat on it. Then I climbed up above her again, and so on. After about an hour, my grandmother said that the exercise had limbered up her leg and made it feel better.

“Grandma,” I said, after a while, “do you hear something clinking above us?”

“Yes, it’s that giant gorilla,” she said, scowling. “The filthy brute is climbing up ahead. I bet he’ll wait for us in the basement, and as soon as we stick our heads out of the top of the hole, he’ll reach out and nab us. Then,
crunch
.”

I didn’t like to think about that possibility. It made me shudder. But then I had a happier thought. “What do you think the gorilla will do,” I said, “if it climbs into the basement and finds Mr. Earpicker and the policemen?”

“Eat them, I hope,” she said fervently.

We didn’t say anything for a long time after that. We were too short of breath. It was very hard work going up, much harder than it had been coming down, and took a lot longer. We climbed miles and miles without a break. Hours later we reached T29, and crawled into the cave on top of the fossil to rest.

“That’s done me in,” my grandmother said, sitting on the floor of the cave and panting, her face glistening. All the mud had been washed away by sweat. “Only three hundred feet to go, Billy, but I need a breather. I don’t suppose you have any food left?”

I opened up the pack and rummaged around, but everything was eaten. Even the water bottle was empty. All we had was a wad of dirty paper napkins with some jelly smeared on them, but neither of us felt like eating them.

“Good fiber,” my grandmother said, “but you need water to get those things down.”

We settled back against opposite walls of the cave to rest and my grandmother looked around in the light from my helmet. “That’s her handwriting,” she said, pointing to the lettering on the rock. She looked sad.

“What was she like, Grandma?” I asked.

“I told you, she was wonderful. She was very intense about her work and could forget about everything else. You wouldn’t believe how focused she could get. Once, after a fossil had been hauled up from the shaft, she sat in the corner of the basement to work on it, picking the rock off of it, and reaching out now and then for a sandwich on a plate next to her. Well, every time she finished that sandwich I replaced it with a new one, and she didn’t notice. She thought it was the same one that she kept taking bites out of. And do you know how long she stayed like that, working on that fossil? Nine days. Nonstop. And when she was done, she came up the basement stairs a little stiff into the kitchen and she says, ‘Ma, I just put in a good hour or two of work. And I’m hungry. But somehow I don’t want a sandwich right now. You have anything good in the fridge?’ That’s how focused she could get. I can still see her perfectly clearly, working at her computer with a glass of catsup yogurt at her
elbow—”

“A glass of
what
?”

“She liked to pour catsup into her yogurt and sprinkle in little bits of boloney. Not bad. I could do with some right now.”

“But that’s disgusting!”

“What’s disgusting to one person, Billy,” she said, “is a delicacy to somebody else. The French eat live snails. And the Skruponians eat ladybugs. And those birdfrogs, remember, they eat people.” She scowled fiercely and added, “They probably ate my daughter.” She looked up at the ceiling of the cave and shook her fist in the direction of that hit gorilla.

After we were rested, we began the last three hundred feet. My grandmother insisted on going first this time so that she could protect me from the hit gorilla. When we were near the top she paused and whispered down to me, “Turn off the light now. Stay where you are and I’ll take a look around.” She had one of the rods ready in her hand as a weapon, her wrinkly fingers clamped tightly around it. I switched off my helmet light, and she eased herself up the last few feet and stuck her head out of the opening. I waited, my heart hammering. I could hardly breathe, I was so anxious. Then she pulled her head back down.

“I don’t see anything,” she whispered.

We both climbed out. Nobody was in the basement. No
gorilla. No policemen or Mr. Earpicker either. Sunlight came in the basement window. I didn’t know what time it was, or even what day.

My grandmother clutched my arm and peered around the room suspiciously. “I bet it’s lurking upstairs somewhere,” she said in a low voice. “Keep your weapon handy, and let’s go look.”

We went up the basement steps. The door at the top of the stairs was still welded closed but the hole I had made in the wall was much bigger now. The police must have broken it open. It was big enough for a large person to walk through.

“This is it,” my grandmother whispered to me, holding my arm tightly. We stepped through the hole into the kitchen, but the room was empty.

“I don’t think anybody’s here,” I said.

“Quiet,” she said in an urgent whisper. “Don’t you hear that?” She pointed up at the ceiling.

I held my breath and listened. Something was scraping or clicking just above us. We crept out to the hall and went up the staircase. On the second floor, we looked in the door of the schoolroom and saw someone sitting at my desk working on the computer. We stared at the woman, but she was so busy looking at the computer screen that she held up a hand to signal us to wait.

“Just . . . one . . . moment. . . ,” she said.

She had a mug on the table beside her, filled with some disgusting reddish pinkish squishy material. It looked like pureed goldfish. She was skinny and had long curly blonde hair that was almost down to her elbows. She had wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, a piercing blue gaze, and very, very dirty and tattered clothes. Except for the tattered clothes and the extra long hair, and the traces of chocolate and banana and pinkish squishy stuff at the corners of her mouth, she was straight from the photograph in my grandmother’s bedroom. But she was full of an amazing wiry energy and intensity that could never come across in any picture.

My grandmother seemed to go rigid and her eyes bugged out of her head. I could feel her swaying next to me and I thought she was about to fall over backward, so I clutched onto her to hold her up. Her metal rod fell to the ground with a clang, and the woman finally looked up.

“Mom,” she said, “this is great. Wow, what’s happened to the Internet? It’s so fast. It’s amazing. I need to order some laser guided survey equipment. By the way, this yogurt tastes a little old. It was in the back of the fridge.”

Chapter 22

Mabel Begins to Understand

My grandmother tottered into the room and I stayed at her side in case she fell over. “Mabel?” she whispered.

“Oh, right,” the woman said, glancing up again. “Thanks for the rope. Was that your rope? I was wondering when somebody would come after me. I climbed up as soon as I saw it. We’ve
got
to bolt a ladder down there so we can get up and down more easily. Maybe a cable with cross-pieces.”

“But Mabel,” my grandmother said, lurching forward a few more steps and reaching out her trembling hands.

The woman looked at my grandmother intently. “Mom,” she said, “what’s the matter? Did you fall in a puddle? You look awful. You smell really bad, too. You’re acting like I’ve been away for years.”

“Mabel,” my grandmother said in a choked voice, “do you know how long you’ve been down there?”

“Well I. . . . Are you saying. . . ? To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. I sort of lost track of time, it was so fascinating. You know how I get. I found an entire society of
Gorilla minimus
! I’ve been studying them. They’re really friendly and they even built a house for me, right at the edge of their city.” She took a drink from the mug of pink squishy material and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I suppose it was really two weeks instead of two days. You weren’t worried about me, were you?”

“Worried?”
my grandmother said. Her voice was getting stronger and a huge trembling smile was spreading into the wrinkles all over her face, right back to her ears. “
Worried?
Mabel! Do you know who that boy is?” She pointed a finger at me.

My mother turned her eyes to me. They were like two swords, they were so sharp. But they were friendly, too. “Nope,” she said. “Nice to meet you. Mom, did you remember to change Billy?”

“Change Billy?!” my grandmother roared, pouncing on my mother, grabbing her hard around the head, and hugging her.

My grandmother is very strong and a sincere hug from her can sometimes cause damage. My mother made a squawking noise like a bird getting its head pulled off. But she also started to laugh. “Mom! Help! Stop!”