Bubble in the Bathtub

by Jo Nesbo

  “But … but why did you follow me and Nilly to Paris if it wasn’t to get your claws on those drawings?”

  “Isn’t that what your friend Nilly would call elementary?”

  Lisa smiled. “You wanted to find Doctor Proctor, not the drawings for his tub.”

  Raspa sighed heavily. “I was dumb, I was hoping … that maybe there might still be a chance that he would …”

  “Fall in love with you?”

  Raspa laughed a bitter laugh. “Pretty stupid, huh? I mean, can you imagine? With me? An old witch of a woman with a wooden leg and bad breath?”

  “I don’t know,” Lisa said. “But what I don’t get is why you’re helping Doctor Proctor find Juliette if you don’t actually need his drawings after all.”

  “Sometimes,” Raspa said, climbing into the tub, “even witches aren’t sure why they do the things they do. Come on, Lisa. Time for us to head to the Dark Ages.”

  Witching Night

  AND, INDEED, THE Dark Ages did turn out to be extremely dark: coal-black and jet-black, pitch-black and ink-black. Totally nighttime-black, actually. Nilly determined this as he stood in his bathtub. Now he cried out, “Is anyone here?” His voice echoed.

  “I’m here,” a voice next to him said.

  “Well, duh, I know that,” Nilly said. “We came in the same tub, didn’t we? I was wondering if anyone else was here. Can you see anything?”

  “No,” Doctor Proctor said. “Juliette? Juliette?”

  No answer.

  “Juliette!” the professor repeated. “Juli … Ow!”

  “What was that?”

  “Something hit me on the head again.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know, but it felt like a bathtub.”

  “Is there anyone here?” That was Lisa’s voice.

  “I’m here,” said a hoarse, desert-dry voice.

  “Well, duh, I know that,” Lisa whispered. “We came in the same tub, didn’t we? I was wondering if—”

  “We’re all here,” Nilly said. “But where are we? It’s totally impossible to see anything.”

  “We’re exactly where we wanted to be,” Doctor Proctor said. “In Joan of Arc’s prison cell.”

  Nilly’s eyes started adjusting to the dark, and he could just make out a little window with bars on it very high up in the wall. And the outlines of three white bathtubs arranged scattered about at random.

  “Juliette’s been here,” Nilly said. “I can see her bathtub.”

  There was a creaking squeak.

  “The door’s closed.” That was Raspa’s voice. Nilly could just make out her outline over by something that looked like an alarmingly solid iron door.

  “Um, so we’re locked in and Juliette’s not here?” Lisa said. “What are we going to do? Shh! Did you guys hear that?”

  Nilly held his breath and listened. All he could hear was a soft crackling from outside, like the sound of fireworks in the distance. But wait! Now he heard it, too. A soft moaning. It was coming from … from underneath Juliette’s bathtub.

  “Help me tip over this bathtub!” Nilly shouted.

  Raspa and Doctor Proctor were at his side in a flash. They tipped the tub up onto its side and the bathwater poured out onto the black, hard-packed dirt floor. And there, lying on her stomach under the tub, was a woman! The moon must have emerged from the clouds right then, because a pale, flickering glow lit up the prison cell and the woman’s auburn hair and white dress.

  “Juliette, you …!” Lisa started, beaming with joy. But she stopped suddenly when the woman on the floor raised her head and looked at them with her frightened but incandescent blue eyes. Because although she certainly looked like Juliette, with the same color dress and the same auburn hair, this definitely wasn’t Juliette. This was a young woman. Well, actually, she looked like she might just be a teenager.

  “Who are you?” Doctor Proctor asked.

  “I’m Joan,” the girl said, her voice quavering.

  “Joan of Arc?” Lisa cried, astonished. The girl had long, beautiful hair, just like in the picture in her history book, but she looked so much younger.

  The girl nodded.

  Nilly stood frozen in place, still holding the top edge of the tub. He was tongue-tied. The girl under the bathtub was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, more beautiful than the women who had kissed him on the cheek after the bike race, more beautiful than Juliette in that picture from when she and Doctor Proctor were young, yes, even more beautiful than the cancan dancers at the Moulin Rouge.

  “Where’s Juliette?” Doctor Proctor asked.

  The girl blinked her eyes, not understanding his question.

  “The woman who arrived in the first bathtub!” the professor said.

  “I don’t know,” Joan said, curling up defensively as if she was afraid they were going to hit her.

  Finally Nilly let go of the tub, which toppled out of the way with a long, drawn-out boom, and squatted down next to the girl.

  “Joan, we know you’ve been through a lot,” he said solemnly in a sort of artificially deep voice as he put his hand on her shoulder. “But you mustn’t be afraid of us. We’re only here to rescue Juliette. She’s the professor’s girlfriend. Do you understand?”

  The girl nodded at Nilly, who gave her a big smile in return and then added, “As for myself, I’m not seeing anyone at the moment. How about you?”

  Lisa cleared her throat and pushed Nilly aside, saying, “Can you tell us what happened, Joan?”

  The girl looked from Lisa to Nilly.

  “I was sleeping and waiting for them to come get me,” she said. “They’re going to burn me at the stake for being a witch today, you know.”

  “I know,” Nilly said, enthusiastically. “Because you helped defeat the English at Orléans.”

  “Yes,” Joan said. “And because I hear God speaking to me. And because I refuse to allow them to give me a bowl cut.”

  “A bowl cut?”

  “Yeah, everyone’s supposed to wear a bowl cut. To show that we submit ourselves to God, right? You guys don’t have bowl cuts. That’s why they put you in here.”

  “No,” Lisa said. “What Nilly says is true. We time-traveled here from the future in a bathtub to save Juliette.”

  Joan stared at them for a long time. “You poor people. They want to burn me at the stake because I claim I’ve heard a few sentences from God. Guess what they’ll do to you when you tell them that ridiculous lie.”

  “Let’s not worry about that now, Joan,” Doctor Proctor said. “Just tell us what happened.”

  “I woke up because someone opened the iron door. That’s when I discovered that someone had put a bathtub on top of me. A second later I heard someone standing up in the tub. The guards were shouting and pulling a wet woman out of the tub and they took her with them. The door slammed shut again and I was alone. I … I …” Her eyes darted from Nilly and Lisa over to the professor. “… think maybe they thought she was me in the darkness.”

  “Oh no,” Lisa said. “Do you mean that—”

  “… they came to get my beloved Juliette…,” a horrified Doctor Proctor continued.

  “… to broil her over a bonfire, like a roast pig?” Nilly gasped.

  The girl nodded. “On the square just outside. I’m so sorry….”

  Something dawned on all of them just then. The flickering light coming in the window way up there on the wall wasn’t coming from the moon. And the crackling sound wasn’t fireworks. It was a bonfire.

  “No!” screamed Doctor Proctor, sinking to his knees. “No!”

  Long fingernails dug into Nilly’s upper arms and he was raised up. He felt Raspa’s deathlike breath on his face. “Up into the crow’s nest with you, Napoléon.”

  A second later he was standing on Raspa’s shoulders right in front of the window with the metal bars over it.

  “Oh,” Nilly said. “Uh-oh.”

  “What do you see?” Lisa cried impatiently. “Des
cribe what you’re seeing.”

  “Okay,” Nilly said. “We’re right by the market square here in Rouen. The audience is ready and the players are on the field. And, sure enough, everyone has these unbelievably stupid-looking bowl haircuts. The home team is dressed like priests and they’re holding crosses and crucifixes and reciting battle cries from a thick book, probably the Bible. The away team, which consists of only one person, Juliette Margarine, is tied to a stake surrounded by neatly arranged bundles of wood that are just being set on fire. A bunch of torches have been lit around her. Unfortunately the home team looks like the clear favorite. We’ve got no time to lose….”

  “Oh no!” Joan cried. “I was the one who was supposed to be burned. I’m the one who’s a witch, not that poor woman!”

  Nilly jumped down off Raspa’s shoulders, straightened his uniform, put his hand on the hilt of his saber, and proclaimed in a loud voice, “No one is going to be burned here, my dear Joan. Sergeant Nilly is here, and he will get us all out of here and rescue Juliette. First let’s check all the bricks in the wall here….”

  “Why?” the others asked in a chorus of exactly four voices.

  “Elementary,” said Nilly, who had started feeling his way along the walls with his fingers. “There’s always a key or a dagger hidden behind a loose brick in the walls of prisons like this. Haven’t you guys ever seen any prison movies? We just have to find the brick.”

  “Nonsense,” Lisa said, but even she couldn’t help but run her eye along the wall looking for a loose brick.

  “Here!” Nilly cried. “Someone wrote something in the mortar over here! This must be the one.”

  The others came closer. And in the faint moonlight from the little slit high in the wall they saw that, sure enough, there was a date written above the stone.

  “A prisoner must have scratched that in,” Nilly said, pushing on the bricks around the inscription, but none of them would budge.

  “I don’t think it was a prisoner,” Doctor Proctor said. “Look, here’s what it looks like if you scratch something into the mortar.” He pulled out a knife and scratched a face with two eyes, a mouth, and a Fu Manchu mustache.

  “See, the edges are sharp and the surface is rough. But on that date, the letters are smooth, rounded indentations in the cement. That must have been written when the cement was still soft, so, I guess by one of the people who helped build the prison back in 1111.”

  “Strange,” Lisa said.

  The others turned to look at her.

  “The only person I’ve ever met who draws little eyes and noses on all his numbers and letters is Nilly.”

  The others turned to look at him.

  “What’s your point?” Nilly asked. “I mean, duh, I wasn’t around in 1111.”

  “Eureka!” Doctor Proctor cried.

  The others turned to look at him.

  “You wrote that message,” the doctor said. “You were there in 1111! Well, here. You just haven’t been there yet!”

  And it’s funny how two, three, and (every once in a while) four brains can suddenly think the same thing at the same time.

  “Eureka!” they cried, because “eureka” means that you understand everything.

  Raspa poured soap powder into the tub and stirred it while Nilly jumped up onto the edge and got ready. He was rolling his head around while Doctor Proctor massaged his shoulders and Lisa leaned over to his ear and urged him in a voice that made her sound like she was chanting, “Concentrate on the Old Market Square in Rouen. January thirteenth, 1111. That’s when they built this prison. When you get there, get ahold of the key to this iron door, get a blacksmith to make a copy, go to the bricklayers in the prison, and get them to put it under a brick. Then you write the date in the mortar before it hardens. Okay?”

  “Okay, okay,” Nilly said.

  “Hurry,” Joan whispered. She was looking toward the slit where the flickering light was getting brighter and the crackling sound was getting louder.

  “The time soap is ready,” Doctor Proctor said. “Bon voyage! And remember to come back here …” He looked at the clock. “Ten seconds from now. At ten fifty-five at night. Hurry!”

  “Wait,” Raspa said. She stepped forward and handed Nilly a small, black leather coin purse. “This should make it easier to convince the blacksmith and the bricklayers to help you.”

  “Thanks,” Nilly said, stuffing the coin purse into the pocket of his uniform. Then he shouted, “Cannonball!” and jumped.

  The soapy water splashed all the way up to the little window with the bars over it.

  “What was in the purse, Raspa?” Doctor Proctor asked quietly as he watched the second hand on the clock.

  “Just a formula I happened to discover in my free time,” Raspa said. “How to make aurum out of sulfur dioxide, silicon, and scrambled eggs.”

  “Aurum?” Lisa asked.

  “Latin for gold,” Doctor Proctor said. “Four … three … two … and … ZERO!”

  They all stared at the bubbles in the tub. No one said anything. Nothing happened. Outside the cheering was starting to get louder.

  “Something must have gone wrong in 1111,” Raspa said.

  Doctor Proctor whispered, barely audibly, “It’s too late to go get him.”

  “Don’t give up!” Lisa said. “He’ll be back soon.”

  Raspa snorted. “What makes you think that?”

  “Because he’s my friend and I know him,” Lisa said. “He’s a little forgetful, and he’s always a little late. But he’ll be here. That’s just the way he is.”

  “Oh no,” Joan moaned. They turned around. They followed her eyes toward the little window slit and they could see it, too: a tall, clear flame silhouetted against the night sky outside.

  Just then they heard the sound of water smacking against water and a voice proclaiming:

  “Never go to 1111!”

  “Nilly!” Lisa shouted.

  “The food is disgusting, the mattresses are filled with straw and fleas, everyone’s teeth are rotten, and no one has TV!” The red-haired boy was standing on the edge of the bathtub, looking at them with a triumphant expression.

  “Hurry!” Doctor Proctor said. “What took you so long?”

  “Sorry,” Nilly said, hopping down onto the floor. “But the plague had killed all the blacksmiths in town, so I had to ride a horse to the next village. Then the horse died of the plague on the way back, and I had to walk the rest of the way. And by the time I got back, all the bricklayers had kicked the bucket, so I had to lay the bricks myself. It should be right over …”

  He pulled his saber out of the scabbard and was now driving it into the mortar between two of the bricks.

  “… here!”

  He bent the blade back, causing small, dry chunks of mortar to fly out. Then he stuck his fingers under the brick, pulled it loose and plucked out the key. He ran over to the iron door, stuck the key in the lock and twisted it. Or rather, he tried to twist it. But the key wouldn’t budge.

  “Owl poop!” Nilly cursed.

  The professor was standing behind him jumping up and down. “What’s wrong?!”

  “Hm,” said Raspa, who was studying the lock. “I’m afraid they’ve changed the locks since 1111. That was a lot of bricklaying effort for nothing.”

  “Oh no,” said Joan. For the third or fourth time, Lisa thought, a little irritated.

  “It’s hopeless,” the professor said, sinking down onto his knees. “Alas!”

  “Yup, alas,” Nilly said.

  But while everyone else was alassing, Lisa had an idea. She walked over to the door, pressed down on the handle and pushed it.

  The alassing stopped the instant the unoiled hinges of the door screeched and the door swung open.

  “How the …?” started Doctor Proctor.

  “Elementary,” Lisa said. “If they thought they’d removed the only prisoner who was in here, why would they bother locking the door? Come on!”

  “Wait!” Joan yell
ed. They turned to look at her and saw, to their surprise, that she’d taken out a comb and was now frantically combing her hair. She stopped when she saw the looks of disbelief on their faces.

  “Well, there are a lot of people out there, aren’t there?” she said, a little miffed, slipping the comb back into her dress.

  Then they all rushed out the door, ran down the dark corridors, up stairs that twisted like snakes around the towers, and finally reached a door that led into a courtyard, which in turn led to the town square.

  There they stopped. The reflection of the flames danced on their faces.

  “Oh no,” Joan said, covering her eyes with her hands.

  “We’re too late,” Doctor Proctor said.

  Back to the Present

  LISA STOOD AS if frozen. She’d seen this before, in a painting, in a book, a history book.

  The flames were licking up around a central stake to which a figure in a white dress was tied.

  A man in a priest’s robe was standing in front of the bonfire, holding up a cross at her. The people in the square were quiet, all you could hear was the roar of the flames and another priest shouting Latin words up into the night sky. And now Lisa understood everything: why she’d thought Joan of Arc had looked like Juliette Margarine in that painting in her history book. Lisa shuddered. Because she also realized that this could mean only one thing: that what was happening had already happened, that in a mix-up Juliette was going to be burned at the stake today, May 30, 1431, instead of Joan of Arc. That no matter what they did now, it didn’t matter. She’d already seen the picture of Juliette in her history book. It was carved in stone. It couldn’t be changed.

  “It’s too late …,” Lisa whispered. “It’s been too late this whole time.”

  She whispered it so softly that the professor, Nilly, and Joan didn’t hear it. But Raspa must have heard it, because she leaned over to Lisa and her desert voice blew right by Lisa’s ear:

  “Maybe so, Lisa. Maybe so. But there’s still one thing that can save her.”

  “Death,” Lisa whispered. “You said that a person who was willing to die could change history.”