by Jo Nesbo
It had been a long time since Nilly had read the anaconda chapter in the thick, old book from his grandfather, but now he could clearly picture every single dusty word. And Nilly realized that he was in trouble. First of all, because he was standing up to his waist in what, according to his grandfather’s book, was the anaconda’s favorite element: water. Not very clean water, but water all the same. Secondly because Nilly was probably the most visible thing in the Oslo sewer world right about now: a transparent, glowing green boy. And thirdly because even if he hadn’t been a glowing larva, there still wouldn’t have been anywhere to hide.
So he kept standing there. And there was that hissing noise again. And there were those teeth gleaming in the light again. And they were attached to the biggest mouth he’d ever seen. On each side of the mouth, an evil anaconda eye was staring at him, and in the middle of the mouth, a split red anaconda tongue was vibrating. And Nilly had to admit that even the dreadful picture on page 121 didn’t do the creature justice. Because this was much, much worse and way creepier. The mouth came toward him relentlessly.
AND NOW AS Nilly is about to be eaten, maybe you hope that something will happen at the last minute, something completely unlikely, the kind of thing that never happens anywhere besides in stories just as the hero is about to meet his demise. But nothing like that happened. All that happened was that Nilly slid right down the gullet of the giant snake, glowing all the way. And only two days before Independence Day.
A FULL MOON hid behind a cloud over Cannon Avenue as if it didn’t dare watch. Truls and Trym stood by the fence to Doctor Proctor’s yard.
“Breaking in is fun,” Truls whispered.
“Breaking in is fun,” Trym whispered.
But even though they were whispering, they still made too much noise. The moon emerged from the clouds and cast shadows that ran across the overgrown yard like big men in hats and capes.
“Maybe I should stand watch out here while you go in and get the fart powder?” Truls suggested.
“Shut up,” Trym said, staring at the crooked wooden house in front of them, which didn’t have any lights on. The house that was so small in the daylight seemed enormous in the dark.
“Are you a tiny bit scared?” Truls asked.
“Nope,” Trym said. “You?”
“No way. Just wondering if you were.”
“Come on,” Trym said, and climbed over the fence. When they were on the inside, they stood still and listened. But all they could hear were a couple of grasshoppers that had lost track of the time and the wind rustling in the pear tree and making the walls of the house creak and groan like an old man telling dusty old ghost stories.
They waded through the grass toward the house. Truls could hear his own heartbeat. And maybe Trym’s, too. When they got to the cellar door, Trym held the crowbar up.
“Wait!” Truls whispered. “Check if it’s locked first.”
“You idiot,” Trym hissed. “You don’t think he’d be so stupid that he would keep a fortune’s worth of fart powder in an unlocked cellar, do you?”
“Who knows?”
“You want to bet on it?”
“I’ll bet you a bag of fart powder.”
“Okay.”
Truls pulled down on the door handle and tugged. And do you know what? It turned out that the door was actually … was actually … locked! What did you think? That someone would be so stupid that he would keep a fortune’s worth of fart powder in an unlocked cellar?
“Darn it,” Truls said.
“Hurray,” said Trym, pressing the tip of the crowbar in between the door and the frame and pushing on the other end.
It creaked a little. It creaked a little more.
“Wait!” Truls said.
“Not again,” Trym groaned.
“Look at the window.”
Truls looked at the window. And then eased up on the crowbar.
“Broken,” he said. “Must have been some pranksters throwing rocks.”
“Or some rotten sneaky thieves who beat us to it.”
They climbed in through the window and turned on their flashlights.
The cones of light from their flashlights slid over all kinds of strange equipment, test tubes, barrels, drums, tubes, glass containers, and an old motorcycle with a sidecar. And stopped on two enormous mason jars.
“The powder!” Truls whispered.
They moved closer and shone the light on the labels. The writing on them was the kind of swoopy lettering Mrs. Strobe had tried to teach them, but that neither Truls nor Trym had really gotten the hang of.
“Doctor Proctor’s Totally Normal Fart Powder,” Truls read one with difficulty.
“Fartonaut Powder,” Trym read the other one. “Keep out of reach of children.”
“Heh, heh,” Truls laughed.
“Ho, ho,” Trym laughed. “This’ll make Dad happy.”
“And then we’ll get a swimming pool. Come on, bro.”
With that, they each grabbed a mason jar and snuck back out the same way they’d come in. And only the moon saw them as it timidly peeked out from between the hurrying clouds.
And maybe one person in the red house across the street. At any rate, the curtains in one of the windows on the second floor moved a little.
The Even Greater Escape
THE SUN CAME up over Oslo and Akershus Fortress. And there was a great commotion there.
“What do you mean,” growled the Commandant, “the gunpowder from Shanghai is missing?”
“It disappeared while we were unloading it onto the wharf yesterday afternoon, sir,” said the steadfast but obviously nervous guardsman in front of him.
“Disappeared? How is that possible?”
“The longshoreman swears it was eaten by a big snake, sir.”
The Commandant’s growl made the window-panes in his office rattle. “Are you trying to convince me that some snake ate the whole crate of gunpowder?”
“No, sir. The longshoreman is trying to convince me of what I’m trying to convince you, sir.”
The Commandant’s face was now so red and his stomach so inflated that the guardsman was afraid he might explode at any moment. “Excuses! That butterfingers dropped the crate in the water! Do you know what this means, my dear cannoneer?”
And the cannoneer knew what it meant. It meant that for the first time in over a hundred years, there wouldn’t be any Royal Salute. People from Strømstad, just across the border in Sweden, to Poland, and yes, even all the way to Madagascar, would scoff at their little country way up north, make fun of them, and call them things that rhyme with Norway. Gorway and borway and sporway and things that might not sound so bad in English, but that could mean really preposterous things in Madagascarian.
“What do we do now?” asked the cannoneer.
And like a big red balloon that suddenly popped, the Commandant sank down into his chair, thumping his forehead against his desk, and then stopped moving. He tried to say something, but his lips were squashed against the top of the desk so it was impossible to understand him.
“Um, what?” asked the cannoneer.
The Commandant raised his head off the desk. “I said, I don’t know.”
BUT THE SUN kept shining and smiling as if nothing had happened. And it really shouldn’t have on a day like this. Because let’s review the situation, dear reader. The Commandant’s gunpowder is missing. Nilly has been eaten. Doctor Proctor is in jail. And his powder has been stolen by the evil Trane family.
So why does Lisa seem both happy and unconcerned as she plays her clarinet and marches down the streets of the city in the Dølgen School Marching Band at the crack of dawn on the day before Independence Day? Could she have forgotten all of their problems? Is she maybe not who we thought she was? Does she actually not care about her friends at all? Or does she know something we don’t?
Perhaps, but we also know something she doesn’t know. We know that Nilly was eaten by an anaconda. And the only other one, aside from us a
nd the snake, who knows that is Nilly himself.
I’VE BEEN EATEN by an anaconda, Nilly thought as he sat there in the darkness inside a snake’s body that was moving and slithering as the ceiling and walls dripped. He was still sore from having been kneaded through the snake’s jaws and throat, but there was more room in here and he was still more or less in one piece. But, of course, that was just a matter of time. Because he knew from page 129 in Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist that the stuff dripping on him was a highly corrosive blend of digestive juices. And that in time it would dissolve Nilly’s body into its individual components. As it had done to the poor thing that had owned the metal collar Nilly had found when he’d wound up in here the night before.
Nilly’d just had time to read the name engraved on the collar before his phosphorescent powder had stopped working. Attila. That was all that was left of the poor thing. The digestive juices had already started eating away at the soles of Nilly’s shoes, and the scent of burning rubber stung his nostrils. There was little doubt that he was facing a slow and rather gruesome death. There was little doubt that his hopes that the constrictor would sneeze or hiccup him back out were dwindling rapidly. There was no doubt that he had to think of something, and he had to do it in a flash.
So Nilly thought of something.
He pulled the envelope of fartonaut powder out of his pocket.
THE CONSTRICTOR ANNA Conda woke up suddenly. It had been dreaming the same dream it always dreamed. That it was swimming with its mother in the delightfully warm waters of the Amazon River among the piranhas, crocodiles, poisonous snakes, and other good friends, and was as happy as a hippo. And that one night it was captured, snatched out of the water, and shipped to a freezing-cold country, where it had wound up in a pet store. And that one day a fat little boy had come in with his father, who had yelled at the shop owner and shown her the bite marks on his fat little boy’s hand. Then the little boy had discovered the snake. His face had lit up and he had shoved his dad, pointed, and yelled: “Anna Conda!” And then that was its name. Even though Anna Conda was a girl’s name and he was a boy! Or that’s what he thought, anyway.
Anna Conda had wound up in a cage in Hovseter and had been fed some pasty white, round, slippery balls that tasted like fish while the little boy poked it in the side with sticks. This had all happened more than thirty years ago, but Anna Conda would still wake up from this awful nightmare and would have been drenched in sweat if constrictors could sweat. And then it exhaled in relief because it wasn’t in the apartment in Hovseter, but in the delightfully warm sewer pipes beneath downtown Oslo.
What had happened was that one night the little boy had forgotten to lock the cage, and Anna Conda had managed to escape through the open bedroom window, down along the downspout to the street, where after a great deal of searching and a couple of hysterical women’s screams, it had found a loose manhole cover. That first night in the Oslo Municipal Sewer and Drainage System, it had lain curled up in a corner scared to death. But that had quickly passed. And by the next day, it had started doing what anacondas do: squeezing the heck out of things and then eating them. Because there were lots of Rattus norvegicus, bats, and regular old mice down there. It wasn’t quite the Amazon, perhaps, but it wasn’t that bad either. Just the other day it had even come across a genuine Mongolian water vole.
Now that Anna Conda had gotten so big, it had started easing up on constricting the food first—it just swallowed it, which was so much easier. It was pretty sure it remembered its mother saying that it wasn’t good table manners to swallow food without properly squeezing the heck out of it first, but there wasn’t anyone down here to notice. So Anna Conda had just swallowed the tiny, glowing piece of meat with the red hair. And now it had the feeling that that might not have been such a good idea. Because the reason it had woken up was that it suspected something had exploded somewhere inside it and that a massive burp was on its way and wanted out. And Anna Conda suspected that the food was planning to go the same way. So Anna Conda clenched its jaws shut as it felt its long body inflate. And inflate. But it didn’t give up; it clenched its jaws harder. Its body was starting to resemble an enormous sausage-shaped balloon and it was still swelling. But Anna Conda didn’t give up; what’s eaten is eaten. It was so inflated now that its snaky black scales were smashed against the sides of the sewer pipe. Its jaws ached. Soon it wouldn’t be able to take anymore. And the pressure from within was only getting worse.
Soon it wouldn’t …
It wouldn’t …
Wouldn’t!
Anna Conda’s mouth popped open and out came a burp. And we’re not just talking about a regular burp, but a thunderclap of a burp that caused all of southwestern Oslo to shake in its foundations. And just like when you stop pinching together the end of a sausage-shaped balloon, Anna Conda took off like a rocket through the Oslo sewer system. Vroom! It was like a cannonball being shot out of a cannon. The speed just increased and when it was shot out of the sewer pipe under the wharf a few nanoseconds later, it kept going quite a ways out over the fjord before it turned and headed straight up into the air. And exactly like a runaway balloon, it made sudden, unpredictable turns all over the place, accompanied by a flapping, farting sound. Until it was completely deflated and it landed like a moth-eaten lion pelt in a spruce tree somewhere out on the Nesodden Peninsula.
Nilly was lying on his back, floating in the sewer water like a piece of poop, as he stared up at the ceiling and laughed. His laughter echoed through the network of sewer pipes. He was free! He’d been shot out of the anaconda’s jaws like a projectile about one minute after he’d swallowed the fartonaut powder. Who would have thought it would feel so liberating to be in a sewer!
But after a while Nilly stopped laughing. Because actually, all of his problems were far from solved. The snake would soon find its way back into the sewer, and he really didn’t want to be there when that happened. And how was he going to not be there?
He had to get out. He looked around. There was not a single exit sign to be seen. Just a wooden crate bobbing up and down in the water in the semidarkness. He clambered up onto it and paddled inward. Or outward. He wasn’t sure which way. And after he’d paddled around various turns and corners for twenty minutes, he still didn’t know where he was or how he was going to find an exit. He stopped paddling. And as he sat there listening to the silence, he thought he heard a faint sound. No, he wasn’t imagining it, it was a sound. And it was getting louder. A terrible sound. The sound of an explosion, a plane crash, and an avalanche, a sound that sends shivers down your spine, and sends the devil packing. And Nilly knew that that sound could only be one thing: the Dølgen School Marching Band.
Nilly paddled as fast as he could toward the sound, went around two corners, and sure enough: He saw a beam of sunlight coming down from something that could only be a shaft leading up to the surface. Nilly paddled over to a metal ladder that was bolted to the side of the shaft and looked up. The ladder led up to where the light was coming from, somewhere way up above him. And, sure enough, up at the top he saw the bottom of a manhole cover. Nilly hopped off the wooden crate and climbed up as fast as he could. When he was halfway up he glanced down, causing his heart to skip a beat and making him immediately promise himself that he wouldn’t do that again. Sometimes it’s just better not to know how high up you are.
When Nilly had made it all the way to the top and could hear the sound of the Dølgen School Marching Band moving away, he put his shoulder against the manhole cover and pushed as hard as he could. Then he tried one more time. And again. But unfortunately what Doctor Proctor had said was true: The manhole covers in this city would not budge. And there wasn’t a single grain of fartonaut powder left for him to blast the iron cover off with.
Nilly shouted as loud as he could: “Help! Help!”
The sound of the most hideous marching band music in the Northern Hemisphere was almost gone now, and Nilly’s shouts were drowned out by the cars that had started dri
ving on the street above him.
“Help! Help!” Nilly shouted. “There’s an anaconda living down here, and it’s on its way home for lunch!”
Nilly knew probably no one would believe that, but what did it matter since no one could hear him anyway?
Nilly held on until his arms ached, and he shouted until he was so hoarse that only a low rasping came from his throat. Resigned, he climbed back down and lay on the crate, exhausted. Then he sat up and started listening for the sound of a snake hissing. And while he was sitting like that, he happened to see a ray of light from the manhole cover shine on some deep holes punched through the lid of the crate he was sitting on. Holes left by large and rather sharp fangs. And some red letters that were printed on the lid:
CAUTION! HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE SPECIAL GUNPOWDER FROM SHANGHAI FOR THE BIG AND ALMOST WORLD-FAMOUS ROYAL SALUTE AT AKERSHUS FORTRESS
Yikes, Nilly thought.
Yeah, yeah, so what? Nilly thought.
Wait a minute, Nilly thought.
Maybe…, Nilly thought.
He felt around in his back pocket. And there it was. He took it out. It was the half-chewed matchstick he’d gotten from Truls as payment for the bag of fartonaut powder. Of course it was wet and practically chewed in half, but it still had the red tip made of sulfur.
He held the matchstick in the beam of sunlight, feeling how the sun warmed the skin on his hand. And two questions occurred to him now. Number one: How long would you have to hold a match in the sun on a morning in mid-May before it was dry enough to light? And number two: How long does it take an anaconda to swim across the fjord from somewhere over by the Nesodden Peninsula?