by B. B. Wurge
For a few blocks we drove along Central Park. I saw a few people go in and out of the lit entrances. Then I saw something small whisk into the park through the black iron bars of the fence. I blinked and looked again, but it was gone. We stopped at a traffic light and I turned in my seat against the seat belt to stare hard at the spot, but there was nothing to see. It might have been a birdfrog. It was much too small to be a dog or a cat. It was even too small to be a squirrel, unless it was a very young squirrel. Nobody on the street seemed to have noticed. They walked right past the spot without looking. It was horrible.
Then suddenly I recognized the street we had pulled onto. My breath seemed to come short and I could feel all the parts of my body tingling. It was my own street, the street our house was on! I could see the house right in front of us, skinny and tall and brown, looking the same as it always used to, as if nothing was wrong. But it wasn’t our house anymore; it belonged to Mr. Jubber.
Mrs. Whingle, who was watching me closely in the rear view mirror, said, “Yes, Bobby, we live on the same street. We live all the way down at the far end of the row. See? This is our house. You’re almost back home again. We decided we would take you in because, oh, poor boy, we met your grandmother a few times back before she became . . . well, you know, kind of odd. When the commissioner came to talk to us last week, we agreed right away, because we couldn’t see you get sent to strangers. It wouldn’t be right. Isn’t that so, Dan?”
Mr. Whingle was trying to park the car along the curb, but two other cars had been parked very close to each other and it was hard for him to get into the small space between. “What’s so,” he muttered, “is that these confounded loonies can’t park a car.”
When the car was finally parked, we all got out and went into the house. It was a shock to me because the inside of the house was built exactly like the inside of my grandmother’s house. All the houses in the row were identical. But the decorations and furniture were all different. The rug in the hallway had a bright yellow design with little hearts and candies pictured on it. My grandmother hated yellow. And she hated candies because she said they were bad for you.
We all sat down in the living room. There was a gigantic flat screen TV, and lots of DVDs lying in piles all around the floor. I almost stepped on a plastic army man that must have belonged to the little boy. Mr. Whingle sat down in a big squishy chair and started to read the newspaper right away. Mrs. Whingle sat down on the couch next to me, sitting very straight, with her hands folded in her lap, and smiled at me brightly. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I looked at the carpet and said nothing. The boy and the girl sat down side by side, crammed into one chair, and stared at me.
“Bobby,” Mrs. Whingle said, “would you like anything to eat or drink?”
“My name’s Billy,” I said.
The little boy and girl burst out sniggering. Mrs. Whingle turned on them with a shocked look and said, “No! Dennis! Candy! What are you laughing at?”
“But Mom,” the little boy said, with a snort of laughter, “he don’t even know his own name.”
“Dennis!” Mrs. Whingle said. “What did I tell you? You watch your grammar. You know how your teachers get mad at you. Now,” she said, turning back to me with her anxious smile in place again, “Bobby, you’re going to have a wonderful time here. I’m sure of it. I know that your grandmother . . . er . . . kept you inside a lot. But with us, you’re allowed to go outside any time during the day, as long as you stay out of the street. You might not be used to it at first, but I’m sure you’ll get to like it.”
The thought of playing outside, unprotected, made me cringe and I felt that I had to explain. I blurted out, “Grandma nailed the door shut so that the birdfrogs wouldn’t get in at us.”
Her smile seemed to get a little more frozen and she exchanged a glance with her husband, who had looked up over the top of his newspaper. Candy and Dennis started to giggle even harder.
“I don’t want the birdfrogs to get me,” I said, anxiously. “They’re already in Central Park.”
“The birdfrogs won’t get you,” Mrs. Whingle said in a reassuring voice. “What are the birdfrogs, Bobby?”
“You wouldn’t know about them. They came from the basement. That’s why Grandma welded the basement door shut.”
Mr. Whingle dropped the newspaper in his lap and stared at me. “She welded the basement door shut?” he said.
“Oh yes,” I said. “To keep out the birdfrogs. They were coming out of the hole in the basement.”
“What hole?” he said, blankly.
I was starting to get uneasy. I could see why none of these people had heard about the birdfrogs. Only three people knew about them. My grandmother, who was dead; me; and the health commissioner, who thought they were three-foot-long rats. But shouldn’t everyone who lived on this block know about the really deep hole in the basement?
“You know,” I said, faintly, looking around at them. “The hole with the wooly mammoth in it.”
Mr. and Mrs. Whingle stared back at me blankly. The boy and girl were laughing so hard that they fell out of their chair.
Mrs. Whingle reached out her hand and put it very gently on my arm. “Did your grandmother tell you there was a hole in the basement?” she said, in a very kind voice.
“Of course she did,” I said, beginning to get angry and pulling my arm away. “Everybody knows about the hole. It was discovered when the row of houses got built, about thirteen years ago. And it goes down miles into the ground, and has wooly mammoths down it. Don’t you know? That’s what my mother was studying when she got killed by the wooly mammoth.”
“Holy cripes,” Mr. Whingle said softly to himself.
“Bobby,” Mrs. Whingle said, still in a very kind voice, “this building is much older than thirteen years. The man who sold it to us said it was an antique building from 1923.”
I was completely stumped by what she had just said. I had no idea how to respond. I felt like I had walked into a wall and knocked my breath out.
“Is it true?!” Dennis shouted between hiccups and peals of laughter. “That your grandma?! Cooked you tennis-ball soup every day?!”
His sister could hardly breathe from laughing so much. She was shrieking and kicking on the floor.
Mrs. Whingle gently squeezed my arm and said, “Bobby, your grandma was a very fine lady, I’m sure. She just made a few mistakes. We all do. Sometimes we believe things that aren’t true. It isn’t anybody’s fault. I’m sure she thought that there really was a hole in the basement that birdtoads came out of. But you don’t have to worry, Bobby, because there’s no such thing as a birdtoad. You’re safe here. You poor boy.” She shook her head and looked at me with her blue eyes huge and round and swimming in tears.
If she had come right out and told me that my grandma was crazy, then I would have gotten mad at her. I would have yelled at her and told her that it wasn’t true. I would have thought of seventeen different reasons why my grandma was right after all. I would have jumped up and stomped all over their stupid DVD collection. But because Mrs. Whingle was so gentle I found that I couldn’t get angry at her, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure of myself. I started to panic. My fantastic grandmother who had saved me from the birdfrogs and knew everything and figured out how to catapult the garbage into the dumpster, what if she was really crazy? What if there was no hole in the basement, no fossils, and no birdfrogs?
It was the worst moment of my life.
I must have looked horrible. I couldn’t breathe right. Tears were leaking out of my eyes and I felt dizzy. Mrs. Whingle put her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, the poor boy’s in shock.”
Mr. Whingle barked out, “Put him to bed, before he faints. Look at the boy!”
Candy and Dennis stopped laughing and lifted their heads off the floor eagerly. “Oh!” Dennis shout
ed out. “Can I watch him faint? Can I, Mom?”
Mrs. Whingle led me to a bedroom. She said it was the guest bedroom but they were going to give it to me. A pair of bright yellow pajamas lay on the bed, and I put them on and got under the covers. It felt strange to lie down in a different bed. I couldn’t help feeling like I was too close to the ground. My old bed was on the fourth floor, but this one was only on the second floor.
Mrs. Whingle sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. “It’s very late now,” she said gently. “It’s half past ten. You must be exhausted. Tomorrow we’ll register you for school, and buy you some clothes and a nice new lunch box that says ‘BOBBY’ on it.”
Chapter 11
I Decide What to Do
I tried hard to go to sleep. I thought it would be a relief and better than all the horrible thoughts that were going around and around in my mind. I might have slept for a few hours, but pretty soon I was awake again and my mind wouldn’t rest.
Just that morning I had woken up in my own bed, in my grandmother’s house. Now I was lying in a strange bed with a new family. Everything was different, and everything had gone horribly wrong. My grandmother was gone.
But had she really been crazy? It was like insulting her after she was gone. Like spitting on a person’s gravestone. It was horrible and I didn’t want it to be true. If she was gone forever (I could still hardly believe it), then at least I wanted to be able to remember her as the most fantastic and wonderful grandmother in the world.
I started to think about all the reasons why she might have been crazy.
First off, birdfrogs. I knew that birdfrogs sounded pretty crazy. But that was just a word she had invented. She didn’t really know what kind of animal it was. Couldn’t a new kind of animal live in a cave in the ground? New kinds of animals are discovered all the time. Maybe birdfrogs weren’t even new. Maybe they had been discovered long before, and any expert would know about them. Maybe they had some real name like the Eastern Spotted Quoggly.
So maybe the birdfrogs were okay. They weren’t so crazy. But there wouldn’t be any birdfrogs without the hole in the basement. Was there actually a hole in the basement? I had never seen it. The Whingle’s had never heard about it. But would they necessarily know? My mother had promised to keep the hole a secret, and the construction workers who had found the hole had also promised to keep the secret, so maybe nobody knew outside of a very small circle of people. It was possible that even the other families who lived on the block didn’t know.
So the hole in the basement might be okay too.
Mrs. Whingle had said that our row of houses was built in 1923. According to my grandmother, it was built about thirteen years ago. That was a problem. That was a real stumper. At first I couldn’t see my way around it. But what had Mrs. Whingle said, exactly? The man who had sold them the house, he had told them it was an antique house from 1923. What if he had lied, just to make the house seem like a nicer place, or to get the Whingles to pay more money for it? They would have been less impressed by an antique house from thirteen years ago. Maybe that was it.
It seemed like I had to stretch a lot of points, and there were a lot of unknowns. But still, it was possible that my grandmother had told me the truth and that she hadn’t been crazy.
She had been right about one thing. Mr. Earpicker really was an awful man, and he had invented a scheme and gotten our house away from us. Maybe he had lured her out of the house with that letter, just so he could push her in front of the steam rollers? When I thought about that, I wanted to rush out, find Mr. Earpicker, and kick him. My legs were pretty strong from running up and down the stairs, and I thought I could kick him clear across his office. I imagined him bouncing off the wall on the other side and shouting, “Blast! I hate that!” Maybe I could kick him in front of a steam roller. But I couldn’t really kick him unless I had proof that he had done something wrong. It was still possible that he and Miss Pointy had rescued me from a genuinely insane person. So it all came back to the same question: was my grandmother telling the truth, or was she making up crazy stories?
As I lay in the dark, I realized that there was only one way to find out. I mean, to find out for sure. I had to get back into our house again, get into the basement, and see if there was a hole. And I had to climb down the hole with a flashlight and see if it really went down hundreds of feet and had extinct animal bones in the walls. There was no other way. I had to see for myself, even if the birdfrogs got me. I’d be willing to brave the birdfrogs, for the sake of my grandmother’s honor.
The whole plan came to me as I lay in the dark. It was very simple. The Whingles’ attic connected to my grandmother’s attic. All the attics in the row were connected. If I snuck up into the attic, I could get across to my grandmother’s house. My grandmother had nailed boards over the trap door, but maybe if I pushed hard enough, or hammered with old pieces of furniture, I could get through. The boards were meant to keep out birdfrogs, not humans.
Lots of things might go wrong. Mr. Jubber might already be in the house, and then he would hear me and catch me.
But he might have decided not to spend the night there yet. After all, the house was full of our furniture, not his. He probably would not move in for a day or two. I would have to try to get in as soon as possible, before he moved in, which meant that tonight was the best possible time.
It was amazing how much better I felt, and how much more awake, as soon as I had made up my mind. I didn’t feel happy, of course. I felt sad because of my grandmother. But I felt determined, and there was no trace of a fog on me now. I was ready.
Chapter 12
I Sneak into the Attic
Next to the bed, the glow-in-the-dark clock read 12:30. I couldn’t hear any sounds from inside the house; only the comforting bang of cars driving over the metal plates in the street.
I sat up and pulled off the blankets. There was no question about going in my pajamas. I couldn’t. If I was going to climb down a rocky shaft in the ground, I needed my jeans to help protect me, and my sneakers too. I looked around the guest room in the dark, and saw a blob that might have been a chair. I crept out of bed and snuck across the floor, my hands outstretched, and when I got to the chair I felt over its seat and found my clothes in a pile. I knelt and felt around on the carpet, and found my shoes side by side under the chair. I dressed very slowly. It was better to take extra time and be perfectly quiet, because if I was caught I probably would never get another chance. I might even be sent back to Miss Pointy, and then I would get remediated in some awful way.
When my sneakers were securely tied I crept to the door and turned the doorknob very, very slowly and opened it. Just like in my grandmother’s house, this house had a staircase running up through the middle of it, and I came out of the bedroom onto the small, second-floor landing. A dim light filtered down from above. I think it was a nightlight at the top of the staircase. Dennis’s room was on the second floor, right across from my room. He had taped a sign to the outside of the door; his name was written on the sign in what looked like dead worms glued to the piece of paper.
I was glad the Whingles had carpeted their staircase. I walked up very quietly and slowly. I had to step over three plastic army men lying on the floor. If I had stepped on them, they might have snapped and made a noise, so I made sure to watch the floor carefully. I knew that the third floor would have another bedroom, and when I got to the landing I could see that it was Candy’s room. Her door had a sign printed out on a color printer, full of rainbows and birds and cows dancing around her name. There were no dead worms on her sign.
I walked up the last flight to the fourth floor, and heard Mr. and Mrs. Whingle snoring through the closed door of their bedroom. They were snoring in different keys, and in slightly different rhythms. The trap door to the attic was right outside their bedroom door. It would be almost impossible for me
to open the trap without waking them up. But I had to try, because there was no other way.
I held the end of the chain that dangled from the trap door, and waited. When both of the Whingles gave a snore at the same time, I gave a tug. It was only a little tug, and the trap door opened about half an inch with a very soft thump. It didn’t make too much noise. It must have been pretty well oiled. One little tug at a time, I opened the door, and a metal ladder unfolded and stretched down toward the floor. After a while I didn’t need to pull anymore; I had to hold up the ladder and let it down slowly, bit by bit, so that it wouldn’t whack onto the floor.