The Hole in the Wall

by Lisa Rowe Fraustino

  Suddenly the dragon felt the mattress of jewels tremble beneath him. Shaken by the princess, who had this very afternoon been cast into the dragon’s lair because she wouldn’t marry the wizard. She had been weeping for hours. Her body trembled with grief and fear and shook everything around her.

  “Don’t cry, dear princess,” the dragon said. “I won’t eat you.”

  “Princess?” she said. “Did you just call me princess?”

  The dragon’s magical jewels suddenly disappeared. In their place were walls of nubby gray rock flickering with candlelight. The sight of the bulging plywood wall brought me back to the Hole in the Wall. And there sat Barbie, twisted around to look down at me, her face tear-stained, Odum’s cracked glasses dangling from her dirty fingers.

  “Have you finished digging us out yet?” I asked.

  “I’m a queen, thank you,” she said. “And all the magical spectacles in the kingdom belong to me.”

  I grabbed them back. “Well, I’m the dragon, and what’s yours is mine. But I’ll let you borrow your spectacles if you rub my back.”

  “The last time I rubbed your back, a natural disaster happened.”

  “Oh, come on. Do you want me to die itching, or with a smile on my face.”

  “I guess I can dig at your crusty old scales. Give me the spectacles, dragon.”

  I handed them to her, rolled over onto my stomach, and closed my eyes to fly away inside my head. The dragon sang the secret words that gave the jewels their power, and the entire mountain came to life. With a rumbling noise, the rock walls pulled away, forming a tunnel like a giant throat. The queen packed the jewels away into the dragon’s pouches, then climbed onto his back. We flew out of the mountain’s mouth on our way to a new world. And then the treacherous queen had to go and ruin it. She started pulling the dragon’s armor off. Which was my T-shirt.

  “Hey, what are you doing, Queen Shish?”

  “Didn’t you notice that you’re not stiff anymore? The colors flew away. Or I thought they did.” She held a candle close to my skin. It felt warm. “Some kind of shadow is still there, like a faint bruise. But with the glasses on I don’t see the colors swirling anymore. I think they left.”

  I sat up and wriggled my shoulders around. Then I pulled my sweatshirt over my head. She was right. I could move normally. My back wasn’t stiff anymore. “I’m better! All better!” I almost grinned my head off, then slumped, remembering. “Just in time to die. I wish I could see Jed one more time. And Ma. And Grum. And . . .”

  “Pa,” Barbie said.

  “Yeah, him too.”

  My heart started beating hard, and I felt the hot pressure of tears welling. I hated crying in front of Barbie, but there was no place to go. What a blubbering mess I was. Making myself sick. My stomach churned and all of a sudden I gagged. Up came Sunday dinner. Except why did it smell sweet?

  “Oh, wow,” said Barbie, staring down at my mess through the glasses. “You’ve done it again, Seb.”

  I grabbed the glasses and saw skinny twirls of color spinning up out of little black dots in the roast and potatoes.

  “Are those raisins?” Barbie said, plugging her nose as the colors faded and the truth hit.

  “If they are, they’ve been in my stomach since Thursday,” I said with a sinking feeling. “Oh, man, my snacks! That stuff must have gotten into them, too. No wonder I’ve been feeling so crappy lately.”

  Barbie leaned over the bits of pretzel that the chickens had jumped away from and studied them. “Yep,” she said, handing me the glasses. “They’ve got it, all right.”

  The pretzels flickered with blinky colors like the rocks. “Strange—why don’t the colors just fly out of the pretzels?” I wondered. “How did the stuff even get into the pretzels, if this cave has the power to draw it out of me and the chickens? I just don’t get it.”

  “Me neither. And you know what? We never will!” Barbie howled and ran to jump kick the plywood. Then she collapsed in a heap and started to cry again.

  “C‘mon, Shish.” I pulled her over onto the mattress beside me. We curled up together like we must have inside our mother long ago and cried ourselves to sleep as the candles burned low.

  I doubted we’d ever wake up.

  17

  It was the darkest of dark nights and a weight pressed down on my stomach. Celery was still my chicken twin! The cookie dough was still in my guts! I was living a nightmare! Then the weight lifted with the sound of wings fluttering and a squawk, and I remembered we’d saved the chickens at the Hole in the Wall. I smiled to myself in the dark, until I remembered the rest of the afternoon and felt my heart go into double time.

  The candles had gone out. Had they run out of air to burn? Or just melted down? I groped around for them and couldn’t find anything but cold rings of wax. I did feel kind of dizzy, though, and the air was hard to breathe. Barbie slept next to me, taking shallow breaths, and I could hear the restless chickens moving around.

  Ma’s chickens. Ma. We’d probably never be found. After a couple of days searching, she’d think we had run away like Jed. She’d spend the rest of her life thinking we didn’t want to live with her anymore. She didn’t deserve that.

  I did run away once. When I was eight. I climbed onto the roof of the henhouse and stayed there all day, waiting for someone to notice I was gone and come looking for me. Finally I got too hungry to wait any longer and went inside. Everyone was gathered around the TV watching a sit-com. I stood in front of it jumping up and down to block their view.

  “What’s for supper? I’m starved. Didn’t anyone miss me? For Pete’s sake, I ran away this morning,” I hollered.

  “Did not. You were here for lunch,” Barbie said.

  “You make a better door than a window,” Jed said.

  “Did I hear someone say ‘for Pete’s sake’?” Grum shouted from the bathroom. “The Lord knows . . .”

  “Oh, there you are, Seb,” said Ma. “Did you have a good time on the roof? We ate all the goulash. Make yourself a peanut butter and jelly.”

  “You know better than that, Claire,” Pa said. “Young man, get your sorry blankety-blank to bed without supper. That’ll teach you to miss a meal when it’s on the table.”

  Nobody had even worried about me. I guess they’d already gotten used to me going off by myself. In fact, at this very moment, even though I’d been gone for hours and hours after she told me not to go anywhere, Ma probably wasn’t really worried about me. Mad, yes. Worried, no, not yet. She was probably sitting in front of the TV with her Word Search. Maybe sipping a glass of wine, since Pa wasn’t there. She never drank with him. Joking with Grum about how I’d be grounded for two life sentences when I got home. Make that three life sentences for dragging precious Barbie into my life of crime.

  I didn’t want to spend my last minutes thinking about bad stuff. Barbie was sleeping so I took the magic glasses off her and let my imagination go wild as Sebastian Alfred Daniels, Space Explorer, finding new galaxies and discovering new kinds of natural resources for our dying planet, and sweet things to munch on, until Barbie woke up.

  At first I thought she was having one of her nightmares, with all that screaming and kicking her way out of the covers. But she was wide awake. She grabbed me and hyperventilated, “Sebby, is the plywood caving in? Is this the end?”

  And then I heard a noise humming outside like insects in your ears. A sound I knew well from all the time I’d spent in the gore. “Barbie, someone’s out there! Someone’s coming with a bulldozer!”

  Breathing got really hard. I could hear Barbie wheezing. No, that was me wheezing. But someone was coming for us! We held each other and didn’t talk, just worked at breathing. I thought about all the new things I would do, and all the old things I wouldn’t do anymore, if only we could wake up alive in our own beds tomorrow. And then the engines stopped. What did that mean? Were they going away?

  Oh, no! Maybe it wasn’t a rescue. Maybe the bulldozer had just come to tear up the oasis,
finally mine every last ounce out of the gore’s rocks! I had no sense for how much time had passed. Maybe we’d slept through the night. Maybe it was Monday morning, a regular workday at ORC.

  I leaped up and pounded on the door and screamed, “Help! Help! We’re in here!” I pounded like the door was someone I’d wanted to punch for a long time, pounded and pounded and screamed and screamed until I don’t think it was even real words coming out of me. I didn’t have the magic glasses on. And it was pitch-black, but I was seeing all sorts of bright colors all the same. I was in a rage. Man, I wasn’t ready to die. Not anymore. Not with actual people nearby.

  And then I couldn’t scream anymore because my lungs had no air. I felt so dizzy, my legs melted out from under me as if they’d lost their bones. I was going to die five minutes before we were found. Typical me. It actually struck me as kind of funny. I started giggling between drags for breath. And crying. All at once.

  Barbie knelt next to me and held my face and said, “Sebby, hold on! You can do it.”

  And then another noise started, the most beautiful music in the whole world. It was the scrape scrape scrape of shovels in dirt.

  Now Barbie jumped up to pound on the door and scream for help. Only not the wild and crazy way I did. And the scraping noise got closer. And finally the top of the plywood inched away. A strip of midnight blue sky appeared. Moonlight and voices poured through the crack—a man, a woman, hollering our names.

  “Ma!” Barbie screamed.

  “You kids in there?” The outline of a familiar left hand appeared, pulling at the edge of the plywood. I never thought I’d be happy to see that hairy fist.

  “Pa!” Barb squealed. I just moved my lips because I didn’t have the energy to speak.

  Then a mannequin-smooth right hand joined the hairy left one to yank on the plywood, and the face that appeared sideways in the open space all nose and grin didn’t belong to Pa. It was Boots Odum, saying, “Thank God we found you in time. Back away, kids, so we can get some good swipes through this mess with the dozer.”

  Barbie helped me crawl back to the narrow end of the cave and we huddled together with the chickens, hugging and laughing and crying. The plywood groaned as the bulldozer pushed away the dirt behind it. Finally the darkness ripped away, and the world opened up in a sudden burst of headlights. Soon the familiar shape of Ma filled the doorway, outlined by the brightness like an angel. There should have been trumpets.

  “Barbie! Seb!”

  “Ma!” I pulled in a deep breath of the cool earthy air that she seemed to carry in her open arms.

  She fell to her knees and pulled me and Barbie together into a hug and laughed and cried until she shoved us away. “How dare you two scare me like that? You didn’t come home for supper, so I went looking for you, and found all sorts of strange things out in Jed’s castle and the henhouse. Scared me half to death! I followed your bike tracks into the gore, and—are those my chickens?”

  From outside the cave came an urgent voice: “Ma, rescue now, talk later!”

  Jed! I could hardly believe my ears. And then he appeared in the blinding glow of the headlights, using a shovel like a walking stick. Only it didn’t look like our old Jed. This Jed made a taller and thinner silhouette than the brother who had left home. And he lumbered along in a slow, jerky movement as if the legs he walked on weren’t his own. As he got closer, I saw that his legs were wrapped up in some sort of braces.

  “Jed!” Barbie cried, and ran out of the cave to throw her arms around him. Then she pulled back and looked him up and down. “What happened to you?”

  Stanley Odum stuck his head in. “Hurry on out of there, now—we still have a long night ahead before we can be sure you kids are safe.”

  Those words scared me and got me wheezing again.

  “Oh, I’m so glad we got here in time!” Ma pulled us back into another hug that practically broke my back. My normal, not itching and not stiff anymore back. Then she picked me up on my feet and started walking with me, but my legs were limp and I fell back down. Like the world’s strongest weight-lifter she curled me right up in her arms and carried me to Odum’s pickup truck. Barbie came along behind with Jed. We all loaded into the back and then Boots Odum jumped into the driver’s seat and took off. The bulldozer whined along behind with a goon in the cab. We soon outdistanced it.

  It felt so good to be alive, with Jed among us, looking up at the almost full moon and all the stars winking. I didn’t even wonder where we were going as Ma explained that she’d followed the tracks to the gore and called Stanley Odum for help. To her surprise, Jed was with him when he showed up at the house.

  And now Ma asked the questions we all wanted to know. “So, Jed, do tell us—where have you been all this time? Why wouldn’t you talk to us when you called? Why did you even leave us?”

  “I was at . . .” Jed hesitated.

  Now that my eyes had adjusted to the moonlight, I realized just how different he looked now, not just his body but his face. He looked a lot older than eighteen. His eyes were sunken and sad. He had a new scar on his right cheek, all the way from his eye back to his ear and down to the chin. He had a scraggly beard with thin spots that I thought might be covering scars, too.

  “I was at ORC.”

  And of course we were all bursting with questions about that until Jed gave us a warning look and gestured toward our driver.

  “Folks, I really can’t tell you a lot of it. Well, I could tell you—” He grinned his old grin and he didn’t look so aged and beaten down. “—but I’d have to kill you.”

  That was one of Jed’s favorite jokes, but at the moment it seemed more scary than funny. He cleared his throat and said, “Sorry. But honestly, a lot of it is top secret. Classified stuff. I wasn’t even supposed to be calling you at all, and I didn’t want my calls traced. I had to sneak around.”

  Ma had me cradled in her lap, and the pickup bounced along on the rib road like a baby buggy. Man, I hadn’t felt this spoiled since I carried a blankie. She reached over to stroke Jed’s arm sympathetically. “How much can you tell us, honey? What happened?” She ran her finger gently down the scar on his face. He turned his head away and stared off toward the mudslide.

  “I was snooping around in places I didn’t belong. Like some other people I know—” He paused to squint at me and Barbie. “And one day I had an accident. A terrible accident. A long fall. Broke my head open. Broke both legs while I was snowballing down. Landed in a crater of nasty water. Somehow dragged myself halfway onto land, even though I don’t remember doing it. I was almost dead when one of the ORC guards found me. I didn’t wake up for a week.”

  “You didn’t run away on purpose?” Barbie whispered.

  He drew a deep breath and pressed his lips together tightly, shaking his head. “And I’m sorry you had to think that, believe me, but it was better than the alternative.” Then he continued his story. “At first I thought I was in a hospital. My legs were all bandaged in casts held up in the air with pulleys. Traction, it’s called. My legs had been broken and twisted and—it’s hard to explain. They looked like pretzels before the surgery. Stan showed me the pictures.”

  I knew what he’d left out. My back had been there. “Your legs were petrified,” I said.

  He licked his lips nervously, craned his head to look through the cab window at Boots Odum, then shrugged and nodded. “Sort of. Petrification is the replacement of organic material with minerals, through capillary action, and it takes hundreds or thousands of years or even longer. What happened to me is called adrification. I was the first human it happened to . . . well, at least to this extent. They didn’t know what to do. They performed surgery to straighten my legs out, but I’m still not normal. The adrium is still in my tissues.”

  “So that’s what it’s called,” said Barbie. “Adrium.”

  We all knew he was talking about the substance that ORC was mining from the rocks.

  Jed nodded. “Based on the Hindi word for rock. A new ele
ment that Stan discovered. So far, it hasn’t been located anywhere else on earth. It has unusual properties of attraction, but it’s, well, I can’t go into it very far. Besides having to kill you if I tell you, it involves a lot of science that I don’t completely understand yet myself. But suffice it to say, from what we know so far, some isotopes are stable, some are unstable, some are right-handed and behave one way, some are left-handed and behave another way, and the more we experiment—”

  “Wait!” I blurted. “Adrium has hands?”

  Jed smiled crookedly in the moonlight. “Handedness isn’t just about hands—it’s about which side is dominant. And the harder we try to figure it out, the more trouble we get into.”

  “You say we a lot,” Ma said. “Are you working for ORC now?”