“Liza! Over this way!”
Only Mirabella’s head was visible, her snout protruding over the lip of a hole she had excavated in the dirt. Liza took off running as the snake lunged for her again. She turned around, flailing out blindly with her broom. She struck the snake in the eye, and it reared back, roaring with fury. Just four more feet and she would slip down into Mirabella’s hole and then maybe, maybe, the snake would not be able to get them; just three more feet.
Behind her, the snake let out a screech. Liza saw its shadow swallow hers, and she knew it was headed for her again. She felt its hot breath on her heels, on her neck, on the crown of her head....
“Jump, Liza!” Mirabella screamed.
Liza dove headfirst. She felt a sharp pain in her left heel, and then cold air, as the snake clamped down on one of her sneakers, yanking it off her foot. She was flying; she was falling; then she was colliding with Mirabella and tumbling into the narrow dirt tunnel, head over paw over hand over claw, landing in a pile of matted fur and dirty newspaper.
“Mirabella?” Liza whispered as the rat let out a moan. “Are you okay?”
“Get—off—me,” Mirabella wheezed. “Can’t breathe. On—my—stomach.”
“Sorry.” Liza disentangled herself from the rat. The tunnel was so narrow and low she had to crouch on her hands and knees, and she felt very much like a rat herself. Ahead of them was a solid wall of dirt; the rat had not had time to dig very far. “Now what?” Liza asked.
“Plan A! Plan A! We wait,” Mirabella said. In the dark, her eyes glittered. “We wait for the trees to tire themselves out and go back to sleep.”
“Do you think we’re safe here?” Liza shivered. From above, they could still hear the horrible sounds of crashing and cracking, hissing and roaring.
“Oh yes,” Mirabella said, but Liza did not think the rat sounded entirely sure. “Very safe. Safe as a bug in a rug. Safe as a clam in a turtle shell. Safe as a needle in a haystack!”
“I don’t think—” Liza started to say.
But she did not get to finish.
At that moment the black tree snake came crashing its way into the tunnel, lashing and snapping.
Mirabella screamed.
And as the mouth of the snake loomed over them, an enormous, black vaulted mouth hung with moss and coated with black and slimy things, Liza did the only thing she could think to do. She reached out with all her might and shoved the broom handle deep into the snake’s throat.
The snake stopped, mouth gaping open, its fangs only an inch from Liza’s neck.
It blinked at her.
She held her breath.
And then the snake began to cough. The broom handle had lodged itself sideways in the snake’s throat.
The tree was choking.
“Mirabella,” Liza said in a low voice, keeping her eyes on the snake the whole time. It was now twisting and turning its massive neck, trying to work the broom out of its throat. And the second it did, Liza knew, they would be snapped up like mice in a trap. “I’m not sure waiting here is the best idea.”
“No, no. No. We mustn’t wait any longer. Very unsafe here,” Mirabella squeaked nervously. “We must move on to plan B.”
“What’s that?” Liza shuddered in the blast of hot, foul, musty air that emanated from the tree snake’s mouth. A beetle dropped from one of its fangs onto her thigh, and she brushed it off quickly, pushing herself backward in the tiny, narrow tunnel.
“We dig,” the rat said.
Chapter 12
THE SEEDS OF HOPE
Mirabella burrowed through the soft earth, and Liza helped her, scooping mounds of dirt with her hands. They crawled forward foot by foot, placing more and more distance between themselves and the tree snake, which still choked and coughed and wrestled with the broom handle lodged in its throat.
Liza was glad she did not have a fear of small spaces: On all sides, she was being squeezed by packed dirt, and she was constantly bumping her head, and her knees were scraped up from banging over small stones buried in the earth.
The heat and the hard work began to fray Liza’s nerves, and Mirabella’s temper.
“You’re stepping on my tail again.”
“I’m not stepping on anything. I’m crawling.”
“Then you’re crawling on my tail.”
“It’s not my fault. It was nearly poking me in the eye before.”
“It wouldn’t poke you if you would give me space!”
“There is no space.”
When Mirabella judged it safe to angle the tunnel upward, they ascended toward the surface and emerged at the far edge of the Live Forest. As Liza crawled out of the tiny tunnel, shaking dirt from her pajama bottoms, she took long and grateful gulps of air.
Behind them, the trees of the Live Forest had once again gone to sleep, cocooned in mist. It was almost impossible to believe, even now, that in their roots slumbered the terrible snakes.
“Well, now,” Mirabella said, suddenly cheerful again, as she brushed the dirt from her newspaper skirt, which had become quite hopelessly tattered. Only a few panels remained, and tufted bits of fur from her large, thick hind legs protruded between them. It was strange how once you saw a rat wearing clothes, it became slightly disgusting to imagine the animal naked. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Liza stared, speechless.
“What I wouldn’t give for a mirror! And a little bit of rouge! I’m sure I must look awful right now—a mess. A frightful, frazzled, fizzled mess!” The rat adjusted her wig—which had begun to slip dangerously toward her chin—and blinked expectantly at Liza.
“Oh! Um—n-no. Not at all,” Liza stammered politely, even though the rat looked even more ridiculous than ever. Dirt was mixed with the powder and the mascara now, so her face appeared to be two wholly different colors, and a pebble and a small twig were caught in her wig.
As they went on, the ground beneath them turned hard and gray and was punctuated by areas of gravel and large, jagged rocks. They had lost sight of the river, although Liza thought at times she could detect echoes of its strange babblings. She noticed that they had begun to wind upward; then the mist before them cleared and she saw vast boulders rising up in front of them, and a narrow path cutting through the rock.
“It’s—it’s a mountain,” Liza stuttered out. And it was: so many rocks layered on top of one another, forming a series of peaks. Of all the amazing things she had seen—Mirabella, the nocturni, the nids, and the tree snakes—this struck her as the most incredible. A mountain, Below!
“Mountains,” Mirabella corrected her. She had already started scrabbling up the path. “There are two of them—the Twins, they’re called. From here we must be very careful,” the rat added, lowering her voice. “We’re close to the border of the Bottomland: spindler land. From here, everything belongs to the queen, and to the Valley of the Lost Souls, where the spindlers have made their nests. There are spies everywhere. We must go like shadows—like shades—like dust!”
Liza nodded to show she understood.
“Well, come on, then,” Mirabella said. “Up we go, to the tippy-top. No point in gaping and gaggling.”
The path they followed was no wider than two steps and must have been infrequently traveled. In some places it was no more than a faint impression of displaced stones, and in other places it disappeared altogether and they had to scramble over the large, flat rocks that jutted out of the foothills. Occasionally Mirabella stopped and—alarmingly and without warning—dropped flat to the ground. The first time this happened, Liza cried out, thinking that the rat had been injured; she ran to help, before discovering that Mirabella had only pressed her nose to the ground and was sniffing furiously.
“That way!” Mirabella pronounced, springing to her feet and straightening her wig, which had begun to skew dangerously to one side. She confided in a whisper, “When in doubt, follow the feet! Sniff for the toes! That’s what you do. Of course, once that brought me straight to a half wheel
of Camembert cheese … made a nice dessert for the brothers and sisters that night …”
Up, up, up they wound, up the barren, rocky path. Liza began to be very sorry that the tree snake had eaten one of her sneakers; her socks did not protect her from the sharp stones in the path, and soon the sole of her right foot was aching. At a certain height, she began to notice large, brittle brown shrubs that grew up among the boulders. They were hung all over with thousands of tiny dark seeds—each no larger than a pinhead, and quite ugly, Liza thought.
“What are those?” she asked Mirabella, pointing to one of the scraggly bushes.
Mirabella stopped walking. “Those are the bushes of hope,” she said. She removed the wig from her head and pressed it to her heart, like a person about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Underneath the wig, her fur was tufted in some places and matted in others. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
“I guess so,” Liza lied, wrinkling her nose.
“There you go again,” Mirabella said miserably. “Judging a book by its cover and an animal by its tail. Go on. Look a little closer. And be lively about it.” She clapped the wig back on her head and crossed her arms.
Liza bent down close to the branches and peered hard at the tiny, dangling seeds. They were teardrop-shaped and at first appeared to be a solid black, the color of onyx. In fact, other than their strange shape, they looked almost exactly like poppy seeds, which Liza did not at all like and which were, she thought, a perfectly good way to ruin a lemon muffin.
But on closer inspection, Liza noticed that at their very center there was a tiny bit of pure white light—this no bigger than the fine, tapered point of a needle—that nonetheless was so blindingly bright she jerked backward, blinking.
“Oh,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Oh.”
Mirabella tittered. “I should have warned you. The seeds are full of light. Each seed contains as much light as your sun!”
Liza stared at her. “Impossible.”
Mirabella swept her tail around her wrist and gave an imperious sniff. “That is a human word,” she said. “And a very ugly one at that. We have no use for it Below.”
“Bushes of hope …” Liza bit her lip. “Does that mean—I mean, well, does that mean what I think it means? Does that mean that these seeds …?”
“Are seeds of hope, yes. Of course.”
The only thing Liza could think of to say was, “They’re so small.”
Mirabella snorted. “Small—and powerful enough to knock your socks off. Oh yes. Strong stuff. Big as a boom!”
“I didn’t think hope was something that grew,” Liza said.
“Of course it grows,” Mirabella said. “What else would it do? Sing?” She leaned a little closer. “The nocturni are the bearers of the hope seeds.” As usual, when she spoke of the nocturni, the rat lowered her voice and looked anxiously from left to right, as though worried one of them might be eavesdropping. “That’s why it’s such bad luck to cross them.... They carry the seeds Above, and plant them in souls where they’re needed.”
Liza wished again that she had Patrick with her. Everything about Below was strange and different. “Can I—do you think I could take some? Just a few, I mean?”
Mirabella waved a paw. “Take what you like,” she said. “The bushes of hope grow everywhere Below. They can grow in the soiliest dirt and the rockiest roads!”
Liza reached out and skimmed her right hand along the branches. They even felt like poppy seeds, she thought, as the seeds quivered and came away in her hand—a dozen of them, black teardrops against her palm. She transferred them carefully into the right pocket of her pajamas, along with Patrick’s socks and her father’s glasses, which were amazingly intact. She could do with some hope right now. It was nearly the only thing keeping her going: hope that she would reach Patrick in time, and hope that she would not be too late to stop the spindlers.
“Patrick and I will bring some to Mrs. Costenblatt,” she said out loud, because it helped to believe, truly believe, that they would go Above again. True, Mrs. Costenblatt couldn’t see very well—she might, Liza thought, even try to eat them—but she would be happy with the gift even if she didn’t know what it was.
“Who is Mrs. Costenblatt?” Mirabella asked.
“A friend,” Liza replied. “She lives across the street.”
“A friend, a friend.” Mirabella repeated the word, a rapturous expression in her eyes. “What a beautiful word.”
Liza shrugged. “I guess so.”
“I have never had a friend,” Mirabella said sadly. She began plucking at the remaining panels of her newspaper skirt, which were so coated with dirt that the print had become illegible.
“Never?” Liza repeated, stunned. “Not even one?”
Mirabella shook her head.
Liza didn’t know what to say. Mirabella looked so pathetic, in her strange, sloppy wig, fiddling anxiously with her tail, Liza couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Everyone deserved at least one friend. At least Liza had Mrs. Costenblatt. And Patrick, of course. Anna would be her friend, she felt sure, if Anna would just come back from college. And Mirabella was taking her to the nests, where she would—she had to—rescue Patrick and the other souls that the spindlers had stolen from Above.
Liza made a sudden decision. “I’ll be your friend,” she announced. She had trouble speaking the words but was glad once she had spoken them. She did not really want to be friends with an enormous rat of questionable sanity, but it seemed the right thing to say.
Mirabella did not seem cheered, however. If anything, she began to worry her tail more frantically, until Liza was scared she would snap it in two.
Chapter 13
THE QUEEN’S SPIES, AND THE WAY ACROSS THE CHASM
The air grew cold and thin, and Liza wrapped her arms around her waist and panted cold white clouds into the air. Higher up, she and Mirabella came across groups of birds massed among the rocks.
Birds, or bats; Liza could not decide. They were as ugly as bats—large, about the size of vultures, with webbed wings, hooded eyes, and long, sharp beaks. They were white and featherless. Looking at them gave Liza an uncomfortable, itchy feeling and reminded her of standing in the front of Mr. Toddle’s classroom, reciting her multiplication tables; she’d had the same feeling then of being scrutinized and evaluated.
The birds—or bats—followed Liza and Mirabella’s progress carefully. As they passed among the rocks, a few of the creatures lifted off from their perches, gliding into the darkness on silent wings.
“She knows we’re here now,” Mirabella said in an excited whisper, watching the enormous bird-things circling above them.
“Who’s she?” Liza asked.
“The queen of the spindlers,” Mirabella said, and Liza felt a zip of anxiety run up her spine. “The moribats keep watch for her. Spies, secret-spillers, and tattle-tellers—that’s what they are.”
“Shouldn’t we hide?” Liza asked.
The rat tutted at her. “No way to hide from the moribats. Nothing happens Below that the moribats don’t find out about eventually. It’s too late anyway; she knows we’re here, and she knows what we’re coming for, too.”
Liza did not at all like the way Mirabella pronounced the word she, as though it was something very large and very frightening.
Above them, the circling moribats gave a shrill cry. The noise was terrible and made a dagger of ice-cold fear drive through Liza’s center. The noise made her think of children abandoned in barren places without enough to eat; and open graves; and dark, bleak winter nights when through the thin air came the sounds of cars skidding and crashing on Route 47; and the squeak of a gurney’s wheels on a hospital floor. It made her think of everything that was sad and lonely and depressing in the world.
Liza struggled to ignore the shrill wailing from above. She tried to remember the words to a song she and Patrick had made up years ago, for bath time, called “The Splish-Splosh Song,” whose very first lyrics were “Drip and drop,
slip and slop, watch the soap bubbles go pop, pop, pop.” It was a stupid song, but it had always made Patrick giggle and so it usually made Liza feel better. She could not think of the tune, however. The moribats were too loud.
“I hate them,” she burst out, and as if in response they fell silent and drifted away into the blackness. Instantly Liza felt better.
“You think they’re bad,” Mirabella said. “They’re a nice piece of day-old sirloin on the very top of a trash heap compared to the scawgs! They’re a fat wedge of only semi-moldy cheese! They’re a one-worm apple!”
“Please,” said Liza, who was starting to feel queasy. “I see your point.”
Mirabella sniffed as though she doubted it.
“What are the scawgs?” Liza ventured, although she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Groups of moribats still massed up in the rocks around them, but at least these stayed silent, watching the travelers with their dull, milk-white eyes.
Mirabella shivered, and her tail twitched agitatedly. “Terrible creatures,” she rasped hoarsely. “Ugly, ugly, ugly, inside and out. Originally part of the reptile family, of course, which explains it if you ask me. Evil, filthy things. Some say they’re working for the queen. But the scawgs don’t work for anyone but themselves. Always looking to fill their bellies.”
“Yes, but what are they?” Liza demanded impatiently.
Mirabella’s eyes darted back and forth, as though she feared they might be set upon by scawgs any second. “Hard to say, hard to say. They’re crafty, nasty, crooked things—take different shapes at different times. But they can’t hide their tails—oh no, never. Thick tails as long as snakes.”
Liza’s stomach flipped. She’d had quite enough of snakes for, well, ever.
“And the smell—they stink to high heaven! You could bathe them in rose petals and they’d still smell worse than a barnyard in August. They eat the flesh of the dead; that’s why the smell is so bad. It stays on their breath.” Mirabella shook her head. “Very uncivilized. No manners at all.”