by James Kahn
Luckily they didn't stay long, or we might have died of being grossed out. They flew in a swarm down the tunnel, back in the direction we'd just come from, like a loud cloud. It took maybe five minutes for all of 'em to pass.
So then we moved on.
Through the hole in the wall, which led, it turned out, to this huge old cavern with only one other tunnel out, which we took. Andy didn't want to go at first, until Data pointed out that if there were bats living here, there must be a way out for them, which meant there must be a way out for us too.
We had to muck through about a foot of bat guano on the way to the exit tunnel, which was no treat, but then we were across and into the next passage.
Brand was leading the way, holding the lantern, but the passageway was gradually getting narrower and heading lower again, sometimes so steep that we had to sort of slide down—and I could see Brand was getting nervous.
After a while the tunnel got so tight, we had to start crawling. That's when the flashlight began to flicker and die. Brand began to panic.
“Hey, what's goin' on? This thing's losin' juice! What're we gonna do about light?”
Data reached into his backpack and pulled out one of the flares he'd lifted from Chester Copperpot. He struck it, and it burst into that special cool red flame they make, so bright you can hardly stand to look at it, and he passed it to Brand.
Brand took it, but he kept griping. “All we keep doin' is goin' lower! Where we goin'? Where's this leadin'? All I know is, this place is gettin' too damn small.…”
I was near the rear with Andy. “Uh-oh,” I whispered, “he's gettin' that elevator look in his eyes.”
“What do you mean, ‘elevator’?”
I moved up close to her. Even after all this she smelled awful good. Some kind of perfume none of the other girls wore. Made me wanna talk softer than usual.
“Me and Brand got stuck in this elevator once,” I explained. “For five hours. It was okay at first, but then he started gettin' closet… trophy… photo…”
“Claustrophobia,” she said. She was even smarter than Brand.
“Yeah. And he freaked out. Lost total control. Started spinnin' in circles, his arms whippin' around. Like a break dancer on fast forward. I had to climb on the elevator roof so I wouldn't get hurt.…”
The tunnel started widening again a little, so we were able to stand up mostly now, but even so, Brand suddenly began shouting, “I can't breathe! I'm chokin'! Mikey, gimme your mist inhaler! C'mon, man! Now!”
The Goonies fight to save their homes on the Goon Docks in the Warner Bros. movie, THE GOONIES.
Mama Fratelli and her boys, who recently escaped from prison
The boys discover the map and…
its secrets really open their eyes.
The Goonies meet Mama, who doesn't make the most gracious waitress.
Sloth, before the Goonies set him free.
Chunk is interrogated by the Fratelli's while the rest of the Goonies make their way to the underground treasure (Below).
The path to the treasure is not an easy one.
Stef meets the octopus.
The Goonies finally discover the treasure aboard a mysterious pirate ship as they are caught by the Fratelli family (Below).
“The Goonies”
I passed my inhaler up, and I could see him take a long suck on it.
I whispered to Andy, “Last time he used that was in the elevator. Andy, this might get rough. You better let me take your hand.”
I don't know why I said it, it just came out. She looked so petrified and smelled so good, I just sort of had this urge to protect her. I don't know.
I really wanted her to like me, I guess. Not that she would, not someone with braces and asthma, but still, that's what I wanted. I think that's why I ratted on Brand about the elevator thing—so she'd think less of him, so maybe she'd think more of me. But then the trouble was, as soon as I said all that stuff, I felt real bad about breaking my promise to Brand, so I felt even worse about myself, which made me think Andy must feel worse about me too. So the whole thing kind of backfired, which made me remember that's why it wasn't such a good idea to break promises, even if I thought I had a good reason.
I must have looked awful pitiful to her, because she took my hand, and then I felt less nervous. Go figure that one out.
We kept walking, and the tunnel got real wide, so we could stand straight. After about twenty feet it turned a sharp corner, putting us in a pool of water up to our ankles. I walked to the front where Brand was. Near the head of the group I stopped, though, 'cause something caught my eye, on the ground, in the water. A lot of somethings, in fact.
In fact, sparkling and glinting there in the red phosphorous of the flare light, under the ripples of the shallow pool, were thousands of ancient, glimmering coins.
We'd found the pirate gold.
“We've found it! We're rich!” I screamed.
And then the flare went out.
CHAPTER 5
The Wishing Well… The Wrong Door… The Goony Oath… Leeches… Brand Flips Out… We Lose Data… The Pirate Skeleton… Rendezvous in Tunnel #3… Into the Skull's Nose.
I fell to my knees, scooping up handfuls of coins out of the inch-deep pool. All I could see at first was this red, glowing spot where the flare used to be, but as my eyes got used to the dark, I saw there was a shaft of cool, white moonlight coming straight down on us from above. And it smelled like fresh air too. Brand was taking in these big, deep breaths, like he was out of the elevator again.
As the guys were stuffin' their pockets with coins, I looked close at my handful. Pennies. Lincoln-head pennies.
Data was looking closer too. “What year was that map made?”
Then Mouth started checking. “Few hundred years before Lincoln… Washington… Eisenhower… Roosevelt… Martin Sheen—”
“That's President Kennedy, crater face. We must be at the bottom of the old Wishing Well,” said Stef.
She was right. It was mostly pennies down here, with dimes and quarters scattered around. Hardly a fortune.
Still, it was major pocket-change, so we started stuffin' our pockets.
Andy just stood there, though. “I always used to believe that when you threw a coin, it turned into your wish.”
In a few seconds Stef passed and looked at her and nodded. “Wait a minute, you guys. These are somebody else's wishes, not ours.”
She emptied her pockets. Then I did. She was right, it's not cool to mess with somebody else's wishes.
Everyone put the money back, except Mouth kept one quarter. “Yeah, well, this wish was mine, and it didn't come true.”
I stared back and forth between the map and the medallion I'd ripped off from Chester's neck. I was sure they were connected, I just didn't know how. “What's this got to do with the map?” I muttered to Willy's spirit, which I was becoming more and more certain was floating around here someplace. “I know the answer is here somewhere, Willy. I know how smart you are.…”
Suddenly there was a loud splash right in front of Data. He fished into the water and came up with a silver dollar. “Now who's got the K to be makin' dollar wishes?”
Brand grabbed the coin. “Well, let's get their attention before they split.” He sailed the dollar straight up the well, as hard as he could.
We heard a thunk, and then a voice shouted down to us. “Hey! Who's down there?”
It was a familiar voice.
The Goonies went nuts cheering.
“Hey, throw us a line!”
“Help!”
“We're down here!”
There was a pause, and then the voice at the top said, “Andy! Is that you I hear?”
And then I recognized the voice up there. Troy Perkins.
Of all the jerks in all the places in all the world, it had to be that jerk on that spot at that moment.
Andy shouted up to him. “Yeah, Troy, it's me! I'm stuck down here!”
“Who's that with yo
u?”
“Stef and Mikey and Mouth and… Brand…”
“Those Goonies?”
“Troy, just send down the rope and bucket and save us, for God's sake.”
“What have you been doing down there?”
“Troy, this is no time for show-and-tell. Now, please!”
“And how'd you get down there?”
She was gettin' real fed up, I could see, and nobody else wanted to say anything, 'cause how can you talk to a jerk?
“We got here through the lighthouse and into the tunnels,” she started out, real patient, “and then we banged on the underground water pipes, but nobody heard us.…”
“Pipes? The pipes under the Country Club? Was that you banging? Do you have any idea how much trouble you caused?”
“Trouble I caused?”
“Damn right! We had sewage going through the shower lines, we had water fountains getting sucked into the ground, we had toilets exploding…”
“Well, we had falling boulders and bats and… why are we discussing this while I'm trapped at the bottom of a well?” she screamed.
She got her point across, I guess. In a few seconds we heard the bucket being lowered down to us.
All the guys were pretty excited, but I stood off alone, still staring at the medallion. “I know I can beat you, Willy. This is just one of your games.”
The bucket reached us, at the end of its rope, and everyone gathered around as Andy started to put her foot into it. I got real sad all of a sudden, like somehow all of this was going to disappear—almost like it had never happened at all—as soon as Andy rode the bucket up.
So I grabbed her arm. “Andy, wait! We've got this other clue now… and Chester Copperpot never got this far, so we have a chance to—”
“A chance at what, Mikey?” she said. She was lookin' right at me. She was real serious. “Getting killed? Look, if we keep going like this, somebody's gonna get dead. Boulders, bats… I don't even want to imagine what other things are down here. Besides, we've got to get to the police.”
“Chunk probably already got to the police,” I said.
“Unless he's already dead.”
“Don't say that! Don't ever say that,” I snapped at her. “Goonies never say die.”
“I'm not a Goony,” she said quietly.
“Right, I forgot for a second.” I turned to the others, who were just standing there watching us, like we were gladiators or something. “But you guys understand what I'm sayin', don't you? The next time you see the sky, it'll be over another town. Next time you take a test, it'll be at some other school. Our moms and dads want the best of stuff for us, but they gotta do what's good for them because it's their game, it's their time, but down here, it's our time. Our time and our adventure and our rules and plans. But the minute we ride up Troy's bucket, that's all over.”
They were all lookin' at me with their whole bodies, like maybe they were hearin' for the first time the melody I'd been hearin' all along. I tried to make 'em hear it another way.
“Look, a couple years ago my mom and dad got on that big game show. Remember, Brand? Mom spent a month makin' those funny costumes. She was a giant egg. Dad was a frying pan. Dad kept sayin' we were gonna live on Easy Street. So we drove all the way to Hollywood. When we got there, they put us in this big audience with all these other people in funny costumes. Then some dude with lipstick and sprayed hair came down the stairs. He walks up to us, right? First he makes Mom guess how much toilet bowl cleaner costs, and she gets it right. Then he makes my dad guess what a jar of Ragu spaghetti sauce weighs, and he gets that right. Then he asks my dad, ‘Is the Big Prize behind Door Number One, Door Number Two, or Door Number Three?’ Now, my dad's lucky number was always two. He got married on August second. He got his job on June second. He's got two kids—”
“Okay, okay, we got the point,” said Data, “he took Door Number Two.” He was hooked on the story now.
“No, that's the weird part, for some reason he took Door Number Three. So the game show guy screams, ‘Congratulations! You've just won one hundred thousand…’ And the door swings open, and this huge glass jar is sittin' in the middle of the stage, filled with… toothpicks. One hundred thousand toothpicks.”
They were all still starin' at me, waitin'. Troy suddenly shouted down from up top, like he had to remind us what a pain in the ass he was. “Hey, Andy! You coming or not?” He pulled on the rope, and the bucket scraped the floor. I was glad he did, though. It made our choices even more clear to me. Andy pulled back on the rope, kind of annoyed, and kept lookin' at me, waitin' for me to finish. I liked that.
“So everybody in the place was laughin',” I went on. “Even Mom and Dad smiled. But I could see on their faces, they knew. They were never gonna live on Easy Street. They blew their chance. And you know why? 'Cause they didn't follow their instincts. They tried to outguess themselves. They thought that what they knew in their hearts and what they knew to be true for them couldn't be the door that the riches were behind. So they chose the door they thought they should choose instead—and they blew it.” I looked steadily at each of them. “This is it, guys. On Monday our living rooms turn into golf holes. This is our last chance, and I don't want to blow it 'cause we're too chickenshit to go for it.”
Nobody moved a muscle, but I could see they were all nodding inside. And I knew that for the first time that night we were all together, really together.
Troy shouted down again. “Hey, Andy, you want to stay down there with the Goonies? Or are you coming up here where you belong? I don't have all night!”
Everyone looked at Andy. Without a second of hesitation she picked up three large rocks and put them in the bucket. Then she took off Troy's letter sweater and piled that on top. Then she tugged on the rope three times, and Troy slowly pulled the bucket up.
She was one of us now.
Nothin' left but to make it official.
We heard Troy swear and roar off in his Mustang as I had Andy raise her right hand, and repeat after me:
I will never betray my Goon Dock friends,
We will stick together until the whole world ends,
Through heaven and hell and nuclear war,
Good pals like us will stick like tar,
In the city, or the country, or the forest, or the boonies,
I am proudly declared a fellow…
* * *
And it was right at that moment that I saw the first one. My skin pulled tight, and I screamed. “Leech!”
“Leech!” repeated Andy. She'd repeated the whole oath perfectly. Then she paused. “Leech? You mean ‘Goony,’ don't you?”
“I mean leech!” I shouted. “All over your arm! Leeches!”
Everyone gawked. There were countless small, black, slimy leeches covering her arms and hands.
Covering all of us.
In a panic we ran out of the water, out of the moonlight, screaming and yelping and pulling at the little bloodsuckers. But they stuck. We couldn't shake, dance, or squirm the things off.
Data had an idea, though. He grabbed a twenty-volt battery out of his pack and connected two long wires to each pole. Then he crouched in the pool and stuck the ends of the wires into the water. The leeches writhed all over him and fell off—electrocuted.
Data called us all over. One by one we stepped into the water, between Data's wires, and our leeches dropped off. Andy and Stef were last in the water. Even after their leeches were gone, though, they kept standing there with this kind of limp smile and small sigh.
When they finally came out, I heard Stef whisper to Andy, “I got all tingly—just my luck, I'm in love with a pond.”
It pissed Andy off, for some reason, I don't know, like someone had made her get horny and she didn't want to. “Who's responsible for that?” she grouched.
Data held up his two battery wires proudly, and Andy, wham, slapped him without warning, like she was sayin' “Don't you ever try that again with me, Buster!”
Hitting him t
riggered one of his booby traps, though— this little G. I. Joe doll popped out of his shirt and shot her with a tiny plastic BB. She just rolled her eyes.
That's when we heard the shots. Way back in the tunnel, like gunshots. We froze.
“What was that?” Brand whispered. “What was that sound?”
“My booby caps,” said Data. He held up a couple of his red ball-caps. “I put these on the ground back there so we could hear if somebody was following us.”
We looked at each other in a sort of quiet panic as the news sank in.
“That means somebody's following us,” said Stef.
Nobody argued the point. We just started running.
Data lit the way with another flare. The tunnels turned and curved, but they seemed to stay on a gradual rise, which meant we were getting near the surface, I guessed. For ten minutes we ran like that, kind of bouncing off the walls with one ear behind us, when all of a sudden we turned a sharp corner and ran smack into a dead end. And then the flare fizzled and died.
Data lit another one, but I could see that Brand was starting to freak, anyway, from his claustrophobia.
“Great! A dead end! Now what, huh?” He was breathing too fast, lookin' all around.
“We just go back the same way we came in,” said Andy. She looked worried about Brand, and she was trying to cool him down.
I looked at the map. There had to be a way out. “It's gotta go on—right, Willy? You wouldn't end it here. You always got somethin' up your sleeve.…”
Brand was really flippin' now. “I can't breathe, it's too small in here! You guys are usin' up all the air! It's too small!” He was scratchin' at the walls, lookin' like he might melt.
I found the place on the map where I thought we were at, more or less, and told Mouth to translate the writing there.