Brian’s yell was much louder than mine. “Holy crap!” He jerked his once-missing arm out of that doorway-to-somewhere and started running and jumping all over the place. Almost certainly, Brian’s energetic antics were the result of a huge surge of adrenaline, but also, they were the result of the dozen or so tiny insects that bounced all over his arm. Finally, he brushed the springtails off, stopped dancing, and collapsed onto the nearer colonnade.
“A dozen or so won’t be difficult to overcome, I don’t think,” Thomas said. His analytical mind was always at work.
Brian’s response was, understandably, energy charged. “How the heck do we know what’s too bad an what’s not? What makes a dozen of those things good, anyway?”
Sarrah answered. “It makes no difference, Brian. Good or bad, I’d rather face a dozen springtails than the thousand or s-s-so that you gathered the last time you did that trick. It’s good that we waited. Now, it’s time.”
We were all in shock. I’m sure the three of us stood with our mouths hanging open. Young Sarrah could show moments of brilliance and determination for one her age.
Thomas closed the discussion. “Brian has accomplished this feat twice, and both times led to the same result; his arm disappeared, and then it reappeared when he jerked it back. Both times, he brought living creatures from the other side, so it seems that it should be possible to get back after we go through. I agree with Sarrah. It’s time.”
“It’s time,” Brian agreed. He lowered himself to his hands and knees and prepared to crawl through the portal. You could have heard the trees breathe; it was so quiet in the woods right then. The rest of us joined the silence and held our breath as we gathered in single file behind Brian: Thomas, Sarrah, and last in line, me.
Brian raised his tiny, devil’s club sword, and with one last word, led the four-kid assault through the portal and to worlds unknown. “Chaaaarge!”
The four of us scampered through the portal one after the other, all following Brian’s lead. I don’t know if only I heard this, but as each before me passed through the gate, the air sizzled with an electrical warning of the perils to follow.
*****
16. The Springtail Armies
The forest vanished in that sizzling instant. We flailed through a liquid tunnel that was filled with tiny balls of light and electricity, and we pinged off those like out-of-control pebbles held captive in a tsunami. We were immediately and unmercifully pelted by a storm of electrical hail stones, and any sense of muscular control we had was replaced by a constant, head-to-toe electrical tingle. We were being towed downstream toward some unimaginable end by the overwhelming power of that flowing tunnel, and the farther we were dragged, the greater our pain was. Those electrical hailstones quickly grew to a size many times our own, and as they grew, the tingle was replaced by an ever-increasing, crippling pain. The forest reappeared in another sizzling instant. The landing was not pleasant, but at least the beatings stopped, probably, I felt, just before we were to die. Each of us tumbled across the ground as if we had been tossed from the roof of a three-story building. I skipped along like a balled up pill bug and tumbled head over heels through the moldy dirt of the forest floor. I crawled out from under a giant, dead leaf, spit out a mouthful of dirt, and started fighting for my life. Fighting isn’t exactly the right word; running and dodging would be a lot more accurate. For all these years, I’ve wondered how we were even able to move after that grueling punishment, let alone defend ourselves. I still don’t know the answer, but I’m sure glad we were able to fight after we stopped.
None of us had time to complain about our aches and pains or even figure out if we were injured. The second we were dumped out of that pinball tunnel and rolled into the dirt, the giant bugs were on us. At the time, only Thomas realized that they were giant springtails that stood about half as tall as me. They were creepy things, white and squishy, like a crusty chunk of Brie cheese with legs. The things fell all around us like leaves falling from trees during an autumn wind storm. These were obviously much more dangerous, and surely they would have killed us if we had not kept dodging. I felt like I was inside of yet another hail storm, defending, trying not to get hurt, trying not to die. As these creatures landed, I could see what appeared to be a seventh leg coming out of their butts, except that it was sharp, and it wasn’t a leg. Thomas knew it all along, but I realized only later that it was the spring that gave these bugs their names. Springtail. Get it?
These creatures sproinged back into the air almost immediately after they hit the ground. The things weren’t falling; they were jumping! Dozens of bugs were jumping and bouncing in all directions. The four of us continued to dodge these giant insects that pelted us from the sky. It became apparent that they couldn’t aim themselves but relied more on large numbers and mindless bombardment. The biggest problem was the springy spear coming out of their butts. If they landed on us and speared us with that, we surely would have died. Brian was the first to remember that he had a weapon. He raised his devil’s club spear that seemed to have grown to at least two feet long. Brian started stabbing every bug he could reach. The rest of us caught on in short order. We stopped running and dodging, and the battle began. All four of us jabbed and poked just as Grandpa had done that last day we saw him. We killed springtails as they fell near us, as they began to leap, and as they sat and waited for their butt springs to release. Dozens of them fell under our swords. Our timing had been good. Sarrah’s assessment of the springtail situation proved to be right on.
“If we had chosen to go through the portal during the rainy season,” Thomas said later, “there would have been thousands of these beasts attacking us.” We could not have survived. Grandpa was right.
We killed these insects at will, buy the cheesy nuisances just kept coming. There may not have been thousands, but there were enough. We had to find cover. Before long, we heard Thomas yelling our names, and we saw him jumping and waving his arms to gather our attention. He had located a tunnel. Brian, Sarrah, and I fought our way that direction and killed a great many springtails on the way. Actually, Sarrah and I mostly ran. Brian killed as many of the insects as he could get to. At first, the four of us stood at the tunnel entrance and made no attempt to enter. There was an unspoken, yet serious, question. Did we really want to chance entering yet another tunnel? A renewed onslaught of springtails convinced us. We plunged head-first into the tunnel and rolled boulders or logs or anything else we could find to block the entrance. The springtail army kept leaping into the air and landing. They bounced all over, but they couldn’t reach us behind the cave’s entrance.
We used this little bit of time to catch our breath and try to figure out what the heck had just happened. We also thought that, at least for the moment, we were safe.
I took only a fraction of a second to peek outside beyond the boulders we had rolled into position. I think I was just beginning to realize what was happening. I saw the giant insects still dancing around. I saw giant, mold covered sheets that were many times larger than me, and those looked exactly like old, dead leaves. The ground we walked on was no longer fine dirt, but huge rocks and boulders. In fact, we could no longer simply run. We constantly had to navigate around or over rocks, boulders, and giant limbs. Everything had grown to huge proportions. Grass grew to many times my height, so tall I could climb it if I had the time or the inclination. We had no time to discuss this or even think about this strange new world we were in.
We couldn’t see into the depths of our new tunnel very well, but its darkness told us that it was long and deep. Our only light was the sunlight that filtered through the blocked entrance. In front of us were giant, bouncing, cheesy insects. To our rear, there was practically infinite darkness. If we walked into that darkness, there was only more darkness. What little we could see in the cave was definitely not appealing. The smell of moldy poop assaulted our noses. The feel of the tunnel walls was coarse; boulders and logs and all kinds of itchy things poked at us from all direc
tions. In the very weak light, we could see that the cave was really a tunnel bored through loose rocks. There were no reinforcements, no beams, no structure except things that looked, in the gloom, like the roots of giant grasses and weeds. We feared that the tunnel might cave in at any time. From where we stood, the tunnel sloped downhill. None of us wanted to go in that direction. None of us wanted to return the way we came, either.
The more I think about it the more I’m amazed that none of this had soaked in: not the giant bugs, not our spears that were suddenly two feet long, not the tunnel that appeared out of nowhere. And, there were the giant mats that I had seen, the fact that we ran and walked over large rocks instead of soft dirt, the giant grass so tall and strong that we could climb it. Things had been really busy since we entered this world. Busy! Ha! That’s an understatement! But, the fact is we had been too darned wrapped up in surviving to notice the strangeness. We needed a minute to evaluate, but we weren’t going to get it. The foulest smell, much more disgusting than the smell of moldy poop, suddenly attacked us. The musky, skunk-like smell was so heavy it crushed our chests and stopped our breathing. A high-pitched growl, like that of a tiger with a sinus infection, rumbled through the darkness and scared us all half to death. The earth started to shake. The loose rocks that we stood on began to shuffle and shift under our own weight. All four of us began to slide down the shaft, right toward a gray, snot-covered nose that was about as huge as a basketball.
“MOUSE!” Thomas yelled. The beast crawled closer to us, and we slid closer to it, but not by choice. The dirt moved under our feet like a conveyer belt that ended at a cavernous, tooth-filled mouth. We could barely see in the almost nonexistent light, and that was worsened by the amazing amounts of super-fine dust that we were kicking up in our frantic attempts to scramble backwards toward the tunnel’s entrance. The animal had crawled close enough for us to see the whole hairy thing, and that was just way too close. The mouse dug itself along the tunnel. The closer it moved to us, the faster it dug. The thing drew the tunnel’s loose earth under its belly with its front feet and pushed it behind with its back feet. The tunnel floor avalanched downhill and we were stuck in that cascading dirt, sliding uncontrollably toward the hungry monster’s mouth. We panicked. We screamed. We ran, or tried to run, toward the entrance and our now beloved springtails. All of us were doing everything we could do to scramble back toward the entrance and away from the monster mouse, but instead, we were on a steady downhill slide in a pitch-black tunnel toward the meanest looking animal I could barely see, and it surely intended to have us for lunch.
That thought scared the holy heebies out of me. I grabbed Sarrah and tried to pull her back to the entrance, back to the springtails. “No! S-S-Stop!” Sarrah pulled me backwards, toward Thomas and Brian, who were not ready to escape. Both had scrambled straight past us girls and placed themselves between us and that wild animal. That meant they were first in line to reach the giant’s mouth. The thing made a clumsy lunge and caught Brian by the ankle with one sharp-clawed paw. “AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!” Either Brian or Thomas let loose with a guttural rasp that was surely a mixture of fear, or anger, or both. Even though Brian was on the ground and under the animal, he was the first to take a stab at the animal with his spear. He aimed for the obvious target—the beast’s nose. The animal’s howl pierced the tunnel and caused yet another landslide that trapped both Sarrah and I, and like marbles in a chute, we rolled further downhill and uncomfortably close to disaster. I thought, at first, that Brian had really hurt the monster, but actually, I think he just made it furious. Undaunted, and seemingly fearless, Thomas joined in the fight. First he stabbed the mouse’s paw. The beast released Brian with his injured foot but quickly grabbed him with the other. With one good foot and one bad, the thing tried to shove Brian into its mouth, either to eat him or to hold him for safe keeping. Brian stabbed at its tongue. The whole thing was horrific. Thomas screamed and stabbed. I screamed. Sarrah screamed. So did the mouse. Both of us girls were still trying to claw a path back to the entrance. The thing hadn’t managed to eat anyone, yet, and Brian was now stabbing anything his sword could reach: the mouse’s nose, lips, tongue. Thomas jabbed its paws, then went for its eyes. The battle went from bad to worse. A bright shaft of light suddenly pierced the tunnel. None of us knew why, but suddenly, the light was bright enough for Sarrah and me to see that the giant beast had pounced on both boys. We could clearly see both Brian and Thomas pinned to the ground, held by the clawed paws and the massive weight of a mouse that appeared as large as an elephant. The giant mouse stabbed at Brian with its two, tusk-like teeth. Brian twisted and turned. The mouse jabbed again and again, each time missing, but each time also getting closer to having Brian for lunch. If he had been stabbed by those teeth, he would have been split nearly in half for sure. Thomas reached across to set the butt of his devil’s club spear into the ground with the point directly in the path between Brian and the gray giant’s mouth. The mouse lunged at Brian but ended up jamming the spear into its own lip. That accomplished two things. It took the monster’s mind off of Brian, and it made the thing raging mad.
Its roar almost drowned out the new clicking and scraping sounds that Sarrah and I were just beginning to hear. Something began kicking up even more dust and dirt. Brian and Thomas sputtered some indescribable sounds, something between speaking and gagging. Both raised their hands and arms to shield their faces from more flying rocks. An even brighter light drew all of our attention up the tunnel toward its entrance, and to the ants. For a few seconds, I could hear nothing. Not the giant mouse. Not the boys. Not Sarrah. Not the falling rocks. I stared in terror at any number of somethings: the mouse, the ants, the darkness, the shafts of light breaking through dust-choked air. For those seconds, none of us had any idea of what to do next. As terrified as we had been, the magical world that we entered had only just begun to show us the meaning of fear.
*****
17. The Ants
Sarrah and I were shocked back into our strange reality by the scraping sounds of the living bulldozer behind us. The giant mouse had suddenly begun a frantic retreat. The tunnel was far too small for the mouse to turn around in, so the smelly beast began a clumsy, rearward skid and, in the process, nearly pulverized Brian and Thomas between its huge paws. It stepped on its own tail, and its backward-brushed fur bunched up like Velcro brakes against the walls of the tunnel. The clicking sounds created by the onslaught of ants had become mind racking. There were millions of individual clicks that ran together to create one monotonous hum. It was like being locked inside of a running machine. What I heard were millions of clicks and scrapes that, when put together, became the harmony of a living, meat-eating machine. What I saw were ants. Ants as big as we were. Bigger. Thousands of them. Millions, maybe. I suddenly understood the mouse’s retreat. That elephant-sized monster was trying to escape. As huge as it was, the thing feared for its life, and the ants were the cause of that fear.
I know it sounds like Sarrah and I did a lot of screaming, but I’m sorry to say, that’s what happened again. Our screams sure didn’t slow the ants. Those things advanced like a mechanized horde of six-legged robots. We watched in horror as they easily tossed aside the boulders and logs that we struggled to roll across the entrance. The light poured in from behind, so mostly I saw silhouettes. Every now and then, the light would hit their eyes just right so that I could see directly through their bulging eyeballs, like looking through thousands of neatly fashioned pieces of glass. With the lenses of their eyes backlit as they were by bright sunlight surrounded by the tunnel’s darkness, each reddish glow seemed to be outlined by a black halo. I have to admit, as I look back on it, the scene was strangely beautiful. At the time, however, I watched in horror as wave after wave of ants surged into the tunnel. Their antennae fumbled with each other in the ruckus. It seemed like each ant had to stroke the antennae of every other ant. Their legs clawed relentlessly at the ground, at each other, crowding hundreds at a time into the tunn
el’s opening. Dust filled the air, and that seemed to have no impact on the ants. They heaved logs and sticks out of the way. They crawled over each other like prisoners on their way to freedom. Nothing would stop them. Nothing could stop them. With the speed and strength of a moving train, one of the giant ants grabbed Sarrah in its huge jaws. Sarrah was a champion. She didn’t panic; she fought, twisted and turned. I could hear Thomas yelling directions from underneath the stuck mouse’s paw. “Stab it. Stab it.” Sarrah must have heard him, because that’s what she did. Sarrah stuck that ant a dozen times. She jabbed that ant in the jaw. She stabbed it in the head. She stabbed it in the eye, but nothing worked. The ant’s shell was just too hard. It appeared that nothing would hurt them. The ant held on to Sarrah, not tight enough to harm her, but for sure, tight enough that she couldn’t break free. And then, it was my turn.
One of the armored beasts grabbed me from behind, just as Sarrah had been grabbed. It held me between two huge jaws, each as big around as a baseball bat and sharp as a sword. As much as I struggled and fought, there was nothing I could do. I stabbed and poked with my spear, as well. Nothing worked. I couldn’t twist out of its grip. I couldn’t hurt the beast with my devil’s club spear, or for that matter, even get its attention. All the while, over the roar of the zillion clicks and the grating sounds of twice that many antennae rubbing together, I could hear Brian and Thomas still shouting instructions from underneath the mouse, “Sarrah! Hannah! Stab them! Stab them in the eyes! Jump! Run!” The two ants simply lifted us off the ground and stood to one side of the tunnel to allow the army of others to file through.
I kept yelling back to the boys, but I was pretty certain they never heard, “We can’t run! Nothing hurts these things!”