The Goonies

by James Kahn

  “I mean, what's the story?”

  “It's cold, I think,” said Stef. “Cold and dark. Like this.”

  The fog swirled around in a brief wind, then settled again.

  “No, this is what limbo is,” said Andy, “and this is what I'm most scared of. Just floating, in the middle of nowhere, the middle of nothing, in a kind of thick darkness, waiting forever, and it never ends.…”

  “And you hear things,” said Stef, “but you can't see 'em.…”

  I heard something, but I couldn't see it. “Sshh,” I said.

  Everyone got quiet.

  I heard it again. A voice. Whispered, through the fog.

  And then the mists blew around again, and for a second there was an opening in the soup, and I saw, just thirty feet away, the Fratellis, floating on a smaller raft, in a slow current, wavin' a flashlight around.

  Then the fog closed up again, and they disappeared. Only the hazy glow of their flashlight remained, and then it got dimmer and faded away.

  I suddenly felt like totally exhausted. I mean, I had no idea how long we'd been in these caves, but all the tension was startin' to wear me down, and this brush with the Fratellis and then being saved by these weird currents… it was like sleep was just beggin' me to fold.

  I didn't wanna, but it was tough holdin' out. It's not like there was much I could do, anyway, right? I mean, we were becalmed. I thought of all the stories of becalmed ships I'd ever read or heard, to see if I could remember anything that might be useful.

  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I had to learn that in seventh-grade English. He was becalmed 'cause he killed an albatross, but we hadn't done anything like that, so I didn't think that would apply. Unless breaking Mom's statue of David counted, but I didn't think so.

  Moby Dick? They were becalmed 'cause Ahab was crazy and wanted revenge on the White Whale. But we didn't want revenge on anybody, so scratch that one.

  The Sargasso Sea, the Doldrums, nothing gave me any clues. Maybe if I just nodded off for a few minutes, something would come to me in a dream. I noticed that Data had already taken that plunge—he was asleep, in a fitful kind of sleep, leaning against Stef, hangin' tight on to her sweater.

  And Stef was kinda dozin', too.

  Brand looked wide-awake, peerin' into the fog. Mouth and Andy, too. So they could wake me if somethin' heavy started happenin'.

  So I curled on my side with my head on the logs, lookin' straight out at water level. That's when I noticed we were movin' again. Not fast, but there was a definite wash past the raft now, and even a little breeze on my face.

  I just stayed where I was. Maybe my sleepiness was causing this motion somehow. Maybe if I woke myself up, it would stop. I let myself doze, sort of in and out. The raft seemed to pick up speed.

  Maybe I should go all the way, really crash and dream. Maybe a dream could really speed us outta here. But then I'd miss all the fun, and I didn't wanna do that. So I forced myself to stay awake, sort of half-drowsing, watchin' the water splash gently by the log my head was resting on. The captain's log, I thought—and I'm the dream-captain of this raft. I think I was so tired, I was startin' to hallucinate.

  Or maybe not. The fog cleared after awhile, and it turned out the cavern had finally narrowed to where we could see the walls, so now we were on this like wide, steady-movin' river that twisted back and forth through these tall, fantastic tunnels.

  The walls glowed with phosphorescent algae or sparkled with rock formations, or the ceilings hung with stalactites, or light mists swirled like ghosts here and there over the face of the water, or plankton shimmered just below the river's surface, like they were electrical sparks, or like the river itself was alive and the dots of light were its nerve cells, or shafts of moonlight sometimes pierced cracks in the ceiling, like spotlights on special crystal configurations.…

  I didn't move during all of this. Just lay there, dozing, tryin' to stay awake while I slept, so I could see it all in all its wonder and still make it keep happening with the power of my sleep—keep the raft movin'.

  It sounds pretty flaky now, I know, but that's what I was thinkin' back then.

  And then, lazin' along the river like that, it made me think of Huckleberry Finn driftin' down the Mississippi, havin' adventures and gettin' into trouble and escapin' trouble and helpin' his friends and learnin' a thing or two now and then… and I suddenly realized, Huckleberry Finn was one of the first Goonies.

  And as I had that thought my eyes were unable to stay open a second longer, and I fell into a deep, undreaming sleep.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Cave of Rushing Waters… The Chase Quickens… The Organ Chamber… The Ship… The Squid… Pirate Booty… One-Eyed Willy.

  I was dreaming I was floating down a river through a magical tunnel of jewels when I was jolted awake by our raft crunching on some kind of shore.

  I jumped up, ready to run.

  We were at the end of the river. It just ended, the way it began, lappin' against the stone floor of a small cave.

  “Guess this is the end of the ride,” said Mouth. He stepped off the raft, into the cave.

  We followed, and he kept talkin'. “Please make sure you have your purse and other valuables with you before we continue.…”

  “Stow it, Mouth,” said Brand. He stretched and flexed. We all did, kinda creaky from all that nappin' and hunchin' down and cold fog. I don't know how long we'd drifted.

  Mouth bowed and smiled. “I can stow it, I can throw it, or I can show it.”

  Stef groaned. “Whatever you do, don't show it.”

  We looked around quickly, and again there was only one way out.

  “I hope this is getting us somewhere,” said Andy.

  “It is,” I said. I knew it was. It was the way Willy wanted to get us.

  “Sshhh,” said Data. We all froze and listened. Nothing. And then, just for a moment, far back along the river, voices.

  Fratelli voices, maybe, but it was hard to tell 'cause the wind shifted or somethin', and we couldn't hear 'em anymore.

  “Let's get outta here,” said Mouth, and this time no one objected.

  We entered the next tunnel and set off.

  It was good to walk again after so long cramped on that raft. Some of the passageways looked man-made here, with occasional timber beams supporting the earth. They jagged down for a while, not too steep, though. Reminded me of Journey to the Center of the Earth, this old Pat Boone flick I'd seen last month one Sunday afternoon. I hoped we weren't going that far.

  The tunnels did veer upward again, and eventually we came to a real tall grotto, with a major stream running right across our path, and a stairway cut into the rock on the other side, leading to a hole up near the high ceiling. Spanning the stream was an old, crooked piece of mast, just wide enough to walk across, but it looked awful slippery. And sticking out of the water was the rib cage of a whale or a sea serpent or something, must've got caught in there ages ago and never found a way out. But there was a way in, so there had to be a way out.

  Water dripped from the top of the cavern, and the ocean's roar wasn't too far away at all anymore. Hundreds of starfish stuck to the walls, moving too slow to see. Which is how we were moving now. Just standing there, really, just watching this huge sort of craggy chamber, with stalactites and rushing water and a starfish convention and sparkly sea creatures and a jangle of rose quartz crystals spillin' down one wall, and bones from somethin' big enough to be a monster, and a broken mast from an old man-of-war, and it was like this was it, we were doin' it, and it was pretty damn far-out.

  We all felt it. Andy, right behind me, called to Brand in front of me, “Brand, hold my hand, I have to be sure this is real.”

  She reached out her hand, still lookin' up at the dripping rock and crystal formations near the ceiling. I took her hand. I mean, this was my adventure, not Brand's. And it was me she kissed, not Brand. And besides, it was dark, and it just seemed easier to do that kind of stuff in the dark. And besi
des, in the dark, I don't think she knew it was me.

  Brand heard her and reached back without looking. I pulled a starfish off the wall and slipped it to him—he thought it was Andy's hand. What a dork he was sometimes. He saw what he had in a few seconds, though, and threw it into the water. I let go of Andy to try to stop my giggle.

  Brand got pissed off, so he grabbed me in a headlock. “You little wuss! You wanna play games? We'll play—”

  He was cut off by the noise of banging caps. Data's booby traps.

  “Shit! That sound again!” said Mouth.

  “And it isn't as far back this time,” said Stef.

  We started over the mast.

  It was slippery in some places, and rotting in others, I think maybe depending on where it was most tarred. We inched across, watching our feet at every step, but halfway to the other side a gusher shot out of the hole where the stream was comin' from, flooding the mast and nearly knocking us all off at once. I went over but caught the beam at the last second and pulled myself back up and crawled to the end as soon as the gusher passed by.

  The rest of the kids were still dangling or crawling when we heard Mama Fratelli's voice.

  “Ohhh, boys…” she called out.

  I looked back to the other side. There they were, at the foot of the mast, watchin' us, holdin' guns and flashlights, and looking like they were not kidding.

  “Ohhh, shit,” cried Andy.

  And Mouth whispered, “Jerk alert.”

  “Not one more step!” Mama shouted across the mast. Her voice echoed up and back like there was ten of her. She raised her gun.

  For a bunch of goony kids, we moved very fast. I scrambled up the rocks toward the hole in the ceiling, while the rest of us slipped and slided along the mast to the far side.

  Mama shot.

  The bullet hit a section of timber near Mouth, and he nearly jumped the remaining distance across.

  The other Fratellis sent a couple shots off, too. The slugs hit rock, though, and ricocheted around so much, Mama told her boys to stop shooting, so they wouldn't hurt themselves.

  So instead they just came after us.

  We all made it to the other side. Data was the last one over. Just before he hopped off the beam, he turned and screamed, “Slick shoes!” Then he pulled a cord on his jacket.

  Tubes running down his pant legs and around his heels squirted this black oil all over the mast. Then he started climbin' up the rocks to where we were.

  Another gusher hit the Fratellis just about the time they made contact with the oil slick. The combination dragged them into each other and half into the rapids before they could figure where to grab. It was a comforting sight.

  We didn't stick around to see how it ended, though. We ran into the next passageway, high up near the top.

  It was a smallish chamber, maybe thirty feet across, with a huge stone slab blocking the only way out, and this incredible weird pipe organ filling the center of the room. An organ made of bones.

  The middle of it was a human skeleton, its arms outstretched, its hair flowing thinly to its shoulders. Radiating out from its hips in a wide semicircle were about fifty finger bones—these were the keys. And sticking up every which way behind it and around it were the organ pipes, made of either hollow thigh bones or bamboo sticks. But that wasn't the creepiest part. The creepiest part was that it was playing itself.

  Not a song, exactly. It's just that the thing was set up over a hole in the floor that this wind kept blowing through, sometimes harder and sometimes softer, but it kept blowing up the hole and through the pipes, making these eerie, unnatural chords.

  Brand tried to open the stone door, but it wouldn't budge. Data noticed a bunch of candles on the walls, so he lit them while I looked at the map. I remembered seeing a line of musical notes along one edge of the paper and found them now, except some were smudged with age and some burned away from when Troy had lit it in the Stop-‘N’-Snack. What a jerk. Anyway, I can't read music.

  There was another riddle, near the notes, so I told Mouth to translate again.

  * * *

  To move on, play the tune,

  As each note is said,

  For too many mistakes,

  Ye will surely be dead.

  I held up the map. “Anybody know how to read music?”

  “You mean we gotta play this thing to get outta here?” said Brand. His claustrophobia was acting up.

  Stef looked at Andy. “Hey, you're the only one here who could afford piano lessons.…”

  “Six months of lessons when I was five and then I quit because I hated it,” Andy said. She wrinkled her nose when she talked about somethin' she hated.

  “Six months is better than nothin',” I told her, and gave her the map. It was neat the way each of us was helpin' out in some way. Like we couldn't've done it alone. Made me proud to be a Goony.

  She looked over the music while me and Data checked back down at the mast over the river. The Fratellis were still hangin' on, and the water level was down now, and they were slowly pulling themselves along toward our side.

  “Hey, guys, they're coming,” said Data.

  We all looked at Andy. She gave kind of a nervous shrug. “I'll give it a shot,” she said, and propped the map up against the skeleton's chest.

  I gave her the thumbs-up. She smiled and pushed the first key. A loud, hollow, scary tone filled the chamber. Scary but beautiful, like a secret harmony you dreamed once but don't quite remember.

  It was beautiful for another reason, too. As soon as it started, the huge stone door creaked and opened a crack, right at the top, where it was being lowered on chains.

  Andy played the next two notes. Two more chords echoed around the walls, and the door dropped down a couple more inches.

  We all smiled nervously and motioned Andy to hurry. The next note was kind of smeared, though, and when she hit the key, this sour tone jangled out, and the next second, a big chunk of floor dropped away, right near my feet.

  It happened so fast, I almost didn't have time to be scared. Instead I just inched up to this new hole that was now in the floor and looked down. Then I got scared. Below me was a hundred-foot drop, to a floor full of sharp stalagmites and rough coral.

  “Oh, my God,” I whispered.

  “What?” said Stef. “What is it?”

  Data joined me. He gasped, too. “My whole life just flashed before me.”

  “Life? What life?” said Stef. “You're eleven years old.”

  Andy played the note again. This time it was the right one—clear and melodic. And the door opened another inch.

  Me and Data checked on the Fratellis below. They were more than halfway across now.

  Data shouted at Andy. “Better play faster—they're getting close!”

  Andy played faster. It was really this haunting tune, reminded me of early Doors. And inch by inch the boulder opened, lowering on chains like a drawbridge.

  But then she hit another wrong note, and another huge section of floor dropped out, crashing to the cavern below. I nearly went with it this time, but Stef grabbed me by the belt and pulled me back.

  “Always pullin' on guys' belts,” said Mouth, but he was just bein' nervous. She flipped him the bird.

  “Hurry, they're coming!” screamed Data at the entrance. “You have to play faster!”

  Andy played faster. The door opened faster, and the floor dropped away faster, all at the same time. We were leapin' around like frogs, tryin' to avoid this pit that was gettin' wider all the time, until finally we were all huddled onto this one section near the center, and the rock door was half open and too far to jump to, and we could hear the Fratellis clattering up the stones below us.

  “Mouth,” I whispered, “say somethin' funny.”

  “We're all gonna die!” he screamed.

  Andy was on the last bar of music. Four notes left. She played three real fast, and I could see that her hands were sweating. The drawbridge came down almost far enough to reach.<
br />
  The last note was completely blurred. Andy paused.

  Brand touched her shoulder. “Andy, whatever you do… don't screw up another note.”

  That's when the Fratellis showed up at the entrance—still slippin' and wet and obviously totally pissed off.

  Andy was frozen at the keyboard. Didn't want to hit the wrong note, didn't want to look at the Fratellis, didn't want to think about the long way down, wished her mother had made her keep taking piano lessons.…

  But Data screamed at her, “Just play the mother!”

  And she played it.

  And it was the most beautiful note yet, and the door dropped open enough to climb across. Everyone hopped over to the next cave. Except I just stood there a few seconds at the organ, facing the Fratellis—they were on their feet now, just about to jump the distance to the remaining slab of floor I was on.

  “Go back,” I said. “This isn't for you.” And I pushed a handful of keys.

  I grabbed onto the stone door as the floor I stood on fell away, taking the whole organ with it. Brand reached over and took my arm and pulled me across to safety.

  This next cave had a steep slope, and it felt slippery with moss, so we all huddled at the edge, deciding what to do. The Fratelli gang was taken care of, for the time being, but I couldn't see any way out of this new place.

  “Data, light a flare,” I said. The lantern was lost now, and there was only a little candlelight from the room we'd just escaped. We were all holding on to each other for support and to make sure we were all still there.

  And we were. It was a good feeling. We'd come through it together. We'd outsmarted the Fratellis, and Willy as well. Although it didn't feel like I'd outsmarted Willy so much as understood him. Like he was communicating to me. Like just now when I played the last organ note to wipe out the floor so the Fratellis couldn't get across, just as I jumped to safety—how did I know how to do that? I mean, it wasn't the kind of thing I did every day. It was just sort of… intuitive. Or maybe Willy just told me how to do it.

  I wondered if Willy like inhabited my body. You know, like if I was possessed? If he did, it might explain why I was feeling so un-sick down here, too, like maybe his strong, healthy spirit was beefin' up my body for a change.