Billy and the Birdfrogs (9 page)

I felt like my stomach was sinking down into my legs. I guess I should have known. The whole story of the birdfrogs was too silly. How could it be true? I walked over to the washing machine and looked inside, and there was an old dried-up load of laundry from years ago.

My adventure was over. Mr. Earpicker was right. Mr. and Mrs. Whingle were right. I sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and put my head in my hands. I felt awful again, and very tired. I also felt cold. My feet in particular felt cold, as if there was a draft of air on them. I put my hand down on the floor, and there
was
a draft of air. I thought that was odd. The air must be blowing from somewhere.

Right away, all my tiredness disappeared. I felt around on the floor, crawling and following the blowing air, and traced it to a wooden bookcase that was set against the wall. The air was blowing from the gap under the bookcase. It was a very tall bookcase that rose almost to the ceiling, and it was empty. It had been dragged to that spot and never used. I peered around the back of it, shining the flashlight into the crack, and saw a door. The bookcase was blocking a wooden door in the wall. Now all my excitement came back, and I felt a tingle all over. Of course, my grandmother must have placed the bookcase against the door as an extra precaution, just before sealing off the basement.

It took me half a minute to drag aside the bookcase and pull open the wooden door. I stepped into a cold, damp room and shined the flashlight around. This was it. This was the room. I knew right away. It was a big room, and had a huge, mechanical winch with a rusty cable wound onto it. Four or five wooden crates filled with tools lay scattered around on the floor, as if they had been left there anyhow. In the corner, a tattered old plastic tarp lay in a heap. And next to the tarp was the hole. It had a cement rim built up around it, so that it looked like an old-fashioned well. A horrible, musty, damp smell was coming from it.

When I shined the flashlight on the floor, I saw little white footprints of paint everywhere, just like my grandmother had said. They were three-footed prints. They really were. Everything was exactly the way she had said. I even found the small round hole in the basement wall where the pipes went through, and when I looked more closely I saw little footprints in the dust around the pipes. Whatever made those footprints had crawled through the pipe conduit and gotten into the neighbor’s house.

A thrill of horror went through me. “Oh Grandma,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry I didn’t
entirely
believe you. But it was pretty hard to believe.”

When I went over to the hole and looked down, it seemed to breathe into my face with a musty, damp breath. I listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything, no echoing sound, no pebbles shifting, no hammers tapping. I shined the flashlight into the hole and got a fright at first. I thought the entire shaft was crawling with birdfrogs, and I leaped back away from the edge with my heart hammering. But I didn’t hear any sound, and I didn’t think that so many birdfrogs could be so silent, so I came forward again and looked down. Then I saw that it was just shadows from my flashlight, and I felt better.

I tried to imagine what Mr. and Mrs. Whingle would say now, if they could see the hole. They’d believe me. They wouldn’t say that my grandmother was crazy. They’d have to apologize. And Dennis and Candy would probably want to climb down the hole.

But then I imagined Mr. Whingle peering down into the darkness and saying, “It’s a sewer access. And she painted bird feet all over the floor?”

I could imagine Mr. Earpicker shouting, “I told you, the old bat was crazy!”

No, I had to do my job thoroughly. I had to climb down and see the extinct animal bones. I had to see if the shaft really went down for hundreds of feet, or if it was just a sewer access. I didn’t want to, because, if the birdfrogs got me while I was in that narrow space, I’d have no chance against them. But it didn’t matter: I had to go down. I owed it to my grandmother to find out for sure.

Chapter 16

I Finally Meet T
29

I rooted through the crates of tools for anything that might come in handy and found a long piece of thick rope with an iron hook at the end. The rope was about fifty feet long. That wasn’t long enough to get me very far down the shaft, but it might be useful, so I coiled it up and put it in my bag.

I looked carefully at the long steel cable wrapped around the winch, but it was rusted so badly that it was fused into a solid mass. It wasn’t usable anymore.

I found two metal rods, each about two feet long. I didn’t know what they were for, but I thought they might be useful for wedging crossways into the shaft to anchor myself, if I had to. Also, if I was attacked by birdfrogs, I could use them as weapons.

I also found a sturdy nylon backpack. It looked old and used, and had a long tear that someone had stitched up carefully. It was much stronger than the cloth bag I had taken from the kitchen, so I transferred all my stuff to the backpack and slung it on my back.

I found a miner’s hat with a light on it. The batteries were dead, but I replaced them with the new batteries I had gotten from the kitchen, and it worked very well. It was fun to wear it and to be able to see in whatever direction my head was pointed.

I didn’t find anything else I wanted. There were a lot of strange-looking tools with points and hooks and spikes, and a giant corkscrew that might have been for drilling holes in rock, and a whole case of toothbrushes all mangled and dirty, probably from brushing the dust away from bones, but I didn’t see how they would be of any use to me.

Climbing into the top of the hole was terrifying. I almost couldn’t get myself to do it. I had spent the past three years hiding from the birdfrogs, and now I was going right into the most dangerous spot, feet first. The only way I could get myself to stop trembling was to think very carefully about each detail. I had to concentrate and figure out how to lower myself safely down the hole. Here is how I did it. I thought it was a clever method, especially since I didn’t know anything about rock climbing and had to invent it for myself. First, I tied the end of my long rope to my waist. I tied it securely, so the knot wouldn’t come loose. Then, I lay one of the short metal rods across the cement rim on top. I will call it rod A, so that I can explain what I did better. Then I took the other end of my long rope and hooked the iron hook over rod A. Then I lowered myself down the rope, hand over hand, for about twenty feet. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. It seemed to go on and on. The shaft was pretty smooth as I went down. I figured that this section of it, near the opening, had been worked over a lot, and most of the sharp points had been smoothed out. I didn’t see any animal bones, but they may have all been taken out.

When I was about twenty feet down, I held onto the rope with one hand and braced my feet against the side of the shaft to keep myself steady. Then with my other hand I wedged rod B across the shaft, pushing it firmly into some cracks in the rocky wall. I stood on the rod to make sure that it could hold my weight. It would have to catch me if I fell.

I climbed back up to the top of the shaft, unhooked my rope from rod A and hooked it to my backpack. I also slipped rod A into my backpack. It stuck out on top, but it didn’t get in the way. Then, with no rope to hang onto, I climbed back down. In some places I had to press my back against the wall and press my feet against the opposite wall. In other places I could find hand holds in the rock, and could climb pretty easily. But I wasn’t too worried, because if I slipped and fell, I wouldn’t fall very far. I would come up against rod B, and that would stop me.

When I had climbed back down to rod B, I hooked the end of the rope to it, and then repeated the whole sequence. I went hand-over-hand down the rope for about twenty feet and then wedged rod A across the tunnel.

And so on.

This way, link by link, I was able to climb down and carry my ladder with me. As long as the rods were securely wedged across the shaft, I would be okay. But it took a long time to go anywhere, because for every twenty feet of progress, I had to climb down, then back up, and then down again.

Pretty soon I was drenched in sweat. My shirt was sticking to me, and I had to rub sweaty dirt out of my eyes. I took a rest by wedging both rods across the shaft in an x pattern and sitting in the middle of the x with my legs dangling down. I took a drink of water from my bottle, but I didn’t drink very much because I wanted to save it in case I needed it later.

I didn’t hear anything that might have been a birdfrog. Sometimes I knocked loose a pebble and it would fall and bounce against the walls of the shaft, echoing, until the sound faded below me.

After a while, the opening above me shrank down to a pale blob that I could hardly see. I didn’t like to look up at it, because little bits of dust kept filtering down and getting in my eyes. The light from my hat lit up the area of tunnel just around me, and after a while I started to see pits and holes in the tunnel wall as if something had been gouged out. I wondered if these holes were the spaces where the skeletons had been.

I must have been about seventy feet down when I saw writing on the wall of the tunnel. I almost didn’t believe it. Who would be writing on the wall of the tunnel? Was it a secret message? I couldn’t read it very well at first, because I was swinging a little bit on the rope and the light was swinging with me. But I put a foot against the wall to steady myself, and saw clear, thick, black magic marker on a smooth part of the stone. It said:

“H12B. Head (and spine?) Remove Frontal Bone First.”

I looked around and saw a big hollow in the wall, about two feet across and three feet deep, next to the writing.

I couldn’t help breaking into a huge smile. I felt really happy, because everything was true, all of it, and I might even be looking at my mother’s handwriting. I wondered what sort of creature H12B was. It was too small to be a camel, and too big to be a mouse or a three-inch-tall gorilla. Maybe it was a fossilized baboon.

About forty feet later, I found two long, curving teeth sticking up out of the side of the tunnel. They were the teeth of a saber-toothed tiger, exactly as my grandmother had described it. I could see a little bit of his bony jaw and part of an eye socket, but most of the skeleton was trapped in solid rock. I couldn’t imagine how long it would take to chip that skeleton out of the solid rock.

As I went down, I saw more and more skeletons, some with labels and some without. They were amazing. Most of the time I couldn’t tell what kind of creature it was, because the bones were jumbled up. But sometimes a whole animal would be laid out in order, and I’d see that it was a turtle, or a two-headed frog, or a big bird with pointy teeth. I could see why my mother had been so excited by this find. It was fantastic.

My grandmother must have guessed right about the rubble that had blocked up the shaft. Either it had broken apart and filtered down by itself, or the birdfrogs had cleared it away. The shaft didn’t seem to have any bottom now. I was already past two hundred feet, and still, when I loosened a pebble, I’d hear it echoing down into nothing. It never seemed to hit bottom.

Down around three hundred feet I saw the biggest cave yet in the side of the tunnel. It was at least five feet tall and twice as wide. It went back very far. When I shined my helmet light into it, I could see the back wall sparkling from some kind of mineral. I didn’t know if it was a natural cave, or if my mother’s crew had dug it out for some reason. But then I realized that the floor of the cave had a skeleton embedded in it. It was a gigantic skeleton, a wooly mammoth skeleton. And on the wall of the cave, someone had written:

“T29. Remove Tail First.”

There it was, the whole wooly mammoth! I could see the curved top of the skull sticking up from the floor of the cave, and the long lumpy spine running down the middle of the cave. My mother’s crew must have dug out the cave to get at the main part of the skeleton. I wasn’t surprised anymore that it had taken six months to get out three tailbones. I could also see that the wooly mammoth hadn’t killed my mother. He was still intact. None of him had collapsed into the tunnel. It must have been some other part of the tunnel that had crumbled in. Maybe some of the hollows I had seen up above were the places where rocks had fallen loose and tumbled down.

I was so tired that I decided to take a break and sit inside the wooly mammoth cave. I pulled in my rope and rod A and rod B, and crawled into the back of the cave. Even though the floor was hard and full of points of rock, I was so exhausted that I felt wonderfully comfortable sitting down and resting, with my legs stretched out and my back against the cave wall. I felt safer, too, because if the birdfrogs came, they could only get at me from one direction, from the mouth of the cave.

I opened my backpack, rummaged around, and took out the bread, jelly, peanut butter, and knife. At the sight of the food, I was suddenly incredibly hungry. My stomach felt like it was hollow. I couldn’t wait. I had to scoop out a fingerful of peanut butter and put it in my mouth. It was delicious, and tasted stronger and saltier than usual because I was so hungry. While I was sucking on that first mouthful, I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When I was done eating the sandwich, I ate the hardboiled egg, and then I drank about half of my water. I felt wonderful. I decided to stay where I was and rest before climbing back up the shaft. I was free to climb back up now, because I had found out everything I needed to know. I had even found T29. I didn’t know if anyone else would believe me, but at least I would know the truth inside my own self. It would be a lot easier now to live with the Whingles.

I didn’t want to waste my batteries, so I turned off the light in my helmet and leaned back against the cave wall in the dark to rest for a few minutes. Of course, I fell asleep. I didn’t mean to, but I was very tired. It must have been about three or four in the morning, and I wasn’t used to being awake at that time.