The True Meaning of Smekday (10 page)

“Where are you going?” Mom asked as I broke away from her and ran to the ticket booth. “We already have our pass, we don’t have to pay again.”

“Just want to see something,” I called back. She probably didn’t hear me, but it didn’t matter. It would only take a second, then I’d have the rest of the day to gloat.

I pushed through lines of people and ignored their irritated looks and clucking tongues and knelt down at the base of the booth.

“No way,” I whispered.

I had the wrong booth, that was the only explanation. I dashed one row down and tried again. There was nothing there.

And then I knew I’d been right the first time. It was the booth directly in line with the Duke Elliphant sign; I’d made certain of it the day before. I went back to look again.

“What’s going on?” Mom said behind me. “Did you lose something?”

I stared in disbelief at the flawless ticket booth paint. You couldn’t even tell they’d touched it up.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

I mention all of this now to explain why, in the middle of the night in the Happy Mouse Kingdom parking lot, I walked to the empty ticket booth in line with Duke Elliphant and crouched down. It was just one of those things. It’d make a funny story to tell Mom when I found her.

Down at the base of the booth the word FART was scratched into the paint.

I leaned in closer. I squinted. I remembered the goats in tiny cars I thought I’d seen earlier, so I traced the word with my fingertip. I felt the shallow trench my key had cut two years before, and tiny flakes of paint stuck to my skin.

“I
am
crazy,” I told myself, and nodded. “Probably have been for a while.” I poked the booth again and picked away the paint so you couldn’t read the word anymore.

“There wasn’t even any alien invasion, I bet. I’m just nuts. Most likely I’m strapped to a hospital bed right now, drooling and making animal noises.”

It was a nice thought, but I didn’t really believe it. I stood up and walked through a turnstile into the park. At some point I would find the rest of the human race, and eventually I’d track down someone who worked at Happy Mouse Kingdom, and they’d explain about the really interesting ticket booths that sometimes said FART and sometimes didn’t. There wasn’t anything else to do.

The inside of the park was not so clean. There was garbage all over the walkways, in the buildings and shops, plastic bags hanging like bagfruit from the skeletal trees. I caught sight of stray cats and at least one peacock. Broadway was the name of the main thoroughfare, lined with little stores that once offered Gifts from Other Lands. Now they were pretty much just full of rats.

At the end of Broadway I should have been able to see the Snow Queen’s Castle, but I couldn’t. Then I saw why. Most of it had been vanished by the Boov’s guns. It was horrifying, somehow. It was like a person with no head. There was a little bit of tower here, half a drawbridge there, but the rest was sliced clean away. I thought of an old photo of my mom, taken when she was younger than me, waving from the drawbridge of this castle and wearing one of those rubber mouse noses that everyone buys. I hoped she’d never have to see it like this.

And I wondered if this had any bearing on the message I’d seen:

HUMANS

GO TO THE KINGDOM

MEET UNDER THE CASTLE

—BOOB

That had been it, hadn’t it? I’d taken a picture of the message but left it in the car. I supposed that even if the castle was gone I could still look
under
it. Was there a downstairs? I’d never noticed one before. I was staring ahead of me and thinking this when I saw what looked like a collie dog in front of a fire hydrant.

“Hey,” I said. “Here, boy.”

Now, the thing about Happy Mouse Kingdom, if you don’t already know, is that some things are smaller than normal, and some things are bigger. You can see what looks like a huge Bavarian ski lodge or something, then get closer and realize it’s only ten feet tall. They really screw with your sense of perspective. So that’s why you can get pretty near a dog in front of a hydrant before you notice the hydrant is as big as a refrigerator and the dog is as big as a lion, and is shaped liked a lion, and is, actually, a lion.

“Oh,” I said, stepping back. My mind raced. Part of it thought, Well, naturally, some of the animals must have escaped from the Wild World Animal Park, and part of it tried to remember if anyone in school ever told us what to do when faced with a lion; but no, of course they didn’t, they were too busy teaching really useful things like the state capitals.

“The capital of Florida is Tallahassee,” I told the lion as I backed slowly away. “The official beverage is orange juice.”

The lion grunted and crouched low on his haunches. He stalked. The word for what he did was definitely “stalked.” I’m certain that this word was coined just for lions; everyone else made a poor business of it.

“I probably don’t taste good,” I offered as I edged toward a shop corner. “You won’t believe what I’ve been eating.”

The lion’s rear quivered impatiently. Then he suddenly stretched back like he was coiling his springs, and I took off running.

I ran like I never had. I drew air so hard it felt like pins in my chest. I weaved back and forth, around lampposts and in and out of alleys, hoping it might make a difference, hoping that lions weren’t so good at hunting if their prey suddenly ducked behind a gift shop. I could hear his round paws pounding behind me, and the huff of his breath. And I realized that if I was looking for evidence that I’d lost my mind, I could do a lot worse than thinking I was being chased by a lion through the empty streets of Happy Mouse Kingdom.

I thought about what I had. I had some cheese crackers in the pocket of my cargo pants. I had a camera and a pack of chocolate Ding-A-Lings in my camera bag. I had a turkey baster that made noisy bubbles when you squeezed it. I had my car keys, but unless I was going to scratch FART into the side of the lion, I didn’t think they would help.

I leaped for the lowest branch of a tree and pulled myself up. Suddenly I felt a jerk, and the cat’s claws were hooked through the strap of my bag, pulling me down.

I screamed and batted at the paw with my fist. Finally I saved the camera, and the bag’s strap broke, and I left it to the lion as I hoisted myself higher, branch by branch.

The lion hunched over the camera bag, sniffing. He ate my Ding-A-Lings.

“Lions don’t climb trees, right? That’s leopards,” I said between rapid breaths. I was full of butterflies. “Or panthers. Leopards or panthers.”

The lion finished his snack and turned his attention to me again. He circled the tree, then stretched his tawny body up the trunk, sinking his claws deep into the bark.

“Lions don’t climb trees!”
I yelled.

I got a good look at his body now, his thick ribs nearly pushing through that bristly hide. I’m no lion expert, but his eyes looked sunken, and his legs were lanky and thin. He was old and he was starving.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry you can’t eat me.”

The lion lay back down on the ground, never taking his eyes off me. I didn’t want to use the turkey baster. It would alert J.Lo to where I was, but it would alert every other Boov in town as well. I looked around. I was pretty sure I could crawl along one of the tree limbs and climb onto the roof of the Haunted House.

The lion whined.

“This is the best I can do,” I said, tossing him my cheese crackers. “I saw a peacock near the sundial, if you like that sort of thing.”

He sniffed at the crackers and ate them, wrapper and all. I shinnied along a branch, then another, and dropped onto the roof of the house. With a little maneuvering I made my way to an open window, pushed aside the skeleton leaning out of it, and went in.

It was dark, of course, and the air was thick and close. There wasn’t a real room inside—just a catwalk. Looking downward through the elaborate stage set of the Haunted House was pointless. It could have been a bottomless pit, for all I could see. Here and there, a bit of moonlight slipped through a window or gap and bleached some of the darkness a dim blue.

I could only feel my way along the catwalk, searching for a way down. Strange shapes loomed out at me from every angle. In the dark every loop and coil of wire was a jungle vine or snake, and every theater light hung from above like a one-eyed bat. It might have been scary if I were the type who got scared. As it happened, I did feel sort of breathless and jumpy, but I think you have to expect that when you’ve just finished a lot of running and you haven’t been eating well.

Anyway.

I found the way down by nearly falling off the edge. There was a sort of open tube running along one wall, formed from hoops and slats of metal. Inside the tube was a ladder.

Here’s the thing: I thought the ladder would end when I got to the ground floor, so I wasn’t paying much attention until it hit me that I’d been descending for a long time. Too long. I looked out around me and saw nothing. Really nothing. Like, you don’t have any idea what nothing looks like, because there’s always some light somewhere, leaking under a door or through a window crack. This was black like death, This was honest-to-God-can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark. Pardon my language.

At one point I thought I’d come to the bottom. I reached out with my foot, but couldn’t find the next step. Aha, I thought, the floor must be right below. So I stretched my leg out some more, and suddenly the section of ladder I clung to slid downward like the bottom of a fire escape. My stomach lurched, then lurched again as the ladder butted against something. There was the loud clang of metal on metal. And now I could feel another rung below. My ladder had only met up with another ladder, and I began to wonder if it would ever end.

The sensible thing would have been to turn back, to climb back up until I at least saw a window again. But I picked this time to remember part of the secret message:

MEET UNDER THE CASTLE

and it made me think, Is this what they meant? Am I underground?

It didn’t seem so crazy if I thought about it hard enough. Maybe the Happy Mouse Kingdom people had underground tunnels so they could go from place to place without disturbing the guests. Maybe they even had a little subway under here, or something. Something that would lead to the Snow Queen’s Castle.

So I kept going. The length of ladder that had so unexpectedly dropped now sprung back up as I let go. I descended another twenty, maybe thirty, steps before I ran out of rungs again. This time my foot found a hard, concrete floor, and I stepped away.

I reached out with both arms, swung them in slow, wide arcs, like I was trying to swim. I began to touch things around me. Strange things. Something that I hoped was a coiled hose. Something that I hoped was a sponge. I felt a stack of shelves, and these were filled with plastic bottles and maybe buckets, and one object that felt like the worst thing in the world but which turned out later to be a sandwich.

Then I felt the cage. It was all around. I was in some kind of chain-link cage, maybe six feet by ten, and I couldn’t feel any opening. And I thought, Okay, that’s it. They caught me. And it was a few panicky seconds before I reasoned that if the Boov wanted to capture someone, there was probably an easier way to do it than to hope they’d see a message in Pig Latin that would lure them, like, a hundred miles to a theme park, where they’d be chased by a lion into a tree and onto a roof and then down a ladder into a cage that they could just climb back out of whenever they pleased. So I groped around a little more and eventually found the rack of flashlights.

The first couple I tried worked. I swished them around and saw I was in a supply cage, mostly full of cleaning products. The buckets were buckets. The horrible thing was, in fact, old peanut butter. And there was a gate on one end. I slipped one of the flashlights into my waistband and emptied all the batteries from the rest into my pockets. I grabbed a bottle of glass cleaner because it comforted me to hold something in my hand that had a trigger, such as it was.

I pushed out through the gate. Far above was some massive shape hanging from the ceiling. In the dim light I could make out shutters, windows, and shingles. Spare parts, I figured, for the house aboveground. Around me was only darkness, even with the flashlight. The walls of this room were too far away, or there weren’t any walls at all. I crept steadily forward, and soon my light found a squat little something in the corner. It looked like an engine, or part of a lawn mower, and I was pretty sure it was a generator. With any luck it had gas in it, so I searched around for the rip cord and gave it a tug. The thing sort of shuddered and coughed, so I pulled it again. And again. On the fourth try it growled to life, and all over and around me lights began to wink and flicker, and soon I could see it.