Ignatius MacFarland (25 page)

The feel, whose name was Peepup, and the weasel, who called himself Feep Feep, crawled ahead of us the whole time with their torches lighting the way. But since I was at the back of the pack, all I really saw ahead of me were the silhouettes of Karen, Peepup, and Feep Feep’s butts and absolutely nothing behind me. I kept wondering if the guards were going to come through the tunnel after us but figured that when the elevator hit the bottom as hard as it did, the guards must have decided that we were just two really flat, bloody pancakes underneath the elevator’s floor that would be too gross to look at. And even if they did decide to look and found we were gone and saw the door to the tunnel, they were all way too big to fit inside it.

Peepup (if you want to say his name in feel language, just stick your lips way out like you’re going to kiss someone and then start making popping sounds) told us that the mole creatures had built all the tunnels over the course of many centuries. When I asked him how the mole people could possibly fit inside these because their bodies were so much bigger than the tunnels, he told me that the mole people’s bodies were made up of these weird bones and muscles that allowed them to get really long and skinny when they were underground. He said that one of the reasons the members of the Underground traveled around in the mole tunnels was that none of the creatures in Mr. Arthur’s army could fit inside them, not even the mole guys.

It seemed that once mole guys joined the army, Mr. Arthur made them all exercise and work out and become bigger and stronger and in doing so, the mole guys’ muscles became so hard that they could no longer collapse them enough to get inside their own tunnels. So Peepup and Feep Feep and the others were pretty safe from Mr. Arthur’s army when they were in the tunnels, although it meant that the Underground could only really be made up of feels, weasels, and mole creatures who didn’t work out.

Okay, I got ahead of myself there. You don’t even know what the Underground is. Well . . .

“We are a group of freethinking, nonconformist rebels who have forsaken the tyranny of President Chester Arthur and his authoritarian ways,” said Peepup as he handed Karen and me each cups of some hot liquid that looked a lot like mud.

“That’s right,” said Feep Feep the weasel as he held out a plate covered with roundish cookies that sort of looked like a balls of clay. “We are the leaders of the Underground, who have dedicated our lives to the overthrow of the Arthurian government and the return of the unrestricted society of the pre-Chesterian days.”

“Right on!” said Karen excitedly, using a phrase I had only heard used by my uncle, who was a hippie in the 1960s. “How many people are in the Underground?”

Peepup and Feep Feep looked at each other for a second, then sort of lost all the bravado they had had just moments earlier.

“Um . . . just us,” said Feep Feep, looking a little embarrassed.

“Well,” said Peepup, giving Feep Feep a dirty look, “we’re the only ones left at the moment. But there used to be a lot of us.”

“What happened?” asked Karen as I tried to drink a mouthful of the hot mud and very secretly spit it back into the cup because it tasted like . . . well . . . a cup of hot mud.

“What do you
think
happened?” asked Peepup. “They were all arrested.”

“How did they find out about you?” Karen asked as she took a bite of the clay cookie and didn’t seem at all affected by its terrible, Play-Doh-like taste. “Did you guys stage a protest or something?”

“We didn’t do anything,” said Feep Feep. “We had a few meetings and tried to recruit others to the cause but one by one our members started disappearing. We lost all our diggers or, as you call them, mole guys, first. Mr. Arthur’s army saw a few of them leaving our meeting one day and arrested them. Then the rest of them started disappearing one by one, presumably because they were also members of the Underground. But the weird thing was a lot of other diggers who had nothing to do with us and who were actually quite happy living under Mr. Arthur’s regime started getting taken away by the army, too, usually for some reason that didn’t make any sense. They arrested hundreds of them. We heard that a lot of them were getting nabbed because the army said they simply looked like they were
thinking
bad things about Mr. Arthur.”

“Were they only arresting diggers?” Karen asked as she sat forward, looking surprised.

Peepup told us that at first it was just the diggers who were being taken away, but then suddenly the giant babies, whom they called the waddlers, also started getting arrested in large numbers and disappearing. Other creatures also got arrested, but it seemed like Mr. Arthur’s army was mostly concerned with the moles and the giant babies.

“You know anything about Herbert Golonski?” Karen asked.

“Who’s Herbert Golonski?” asked Peepup with a perplexed look.

“This weird guy who works with Mr. Arthur. He’s kind of short and wears a suit. You’ve never seen him?” I asked.

“Never,” said Feep Feep. “Who is he?”

“We don’t know,” Karen said with a shrug. “I never saw him before, either. But he’s not a good guy.”

“Where does the army put all the diggers and waddlers after they’re arrested?” I asked.

“We have no idea,” said Feep Feep. “A couple of times we sent one of our scouts to follow the army when they took some of the diggers away but then we’d never hear from the scouts again, either. We just assumed they got arrested and put in prison, too. Wherever prison is.”

“Did you see any of them when you were locked up in the White House?” I asked Karen.

“No,” she said, perplexed. “I was in a small cell in the basement but there weren’t enough cells to hold more than a few people.”

“Then maybe this has something to do with the gold mines,” I said, trying to figure it all out.

“What gold mines?” said Peepup and Feep Feep in unison as they gave me a perplexed look.

Man, did my knees hurt.

That was all I could think about as we crawled through an endless maze of tunnels for what I think actually
was
hours this time. When I told them about the gold in the secret room and the weird machine and what I had heard Herbert Golonski telling Mr. Arthur about transporting the gold from the mines to the White House, they all wanted to find out just where these mines were and what this gold business was all about. Karen was getting really riled up at the thought that on top of everything else Mr. Arthur had done to this frequency, he could now add stealing gold to the list. Peepup and Feep Feep didn’t really understand it all, since gold wasn’t really something that any of the creatures in this frequency knew or cared about. They had seen it from time to time because the mole people would occasionally come across chunks of gold when they were digging their tunnels, but except for occasionally using a piece as decoration somewhere, it was about as important to them as dandelions were to us back home.

But everybody decided we should try to find the mines, so that maybe we could figure out exactly what was going on in Lesterville, who exactly this Herbert Golonski guy was, and where all their friends were. And so I changed out of my pajamas back into my regular clothes and we were suddenly crawling through the endless maze of mole tunnels that led everywhere in the city. Which was why my knees were hurting so badly.

As we crawled along, Peepup and Feep Feep told us that in the centuries before Mr. Arthur arrived, the mole people, the giant babies, the praying mantises, the feels, the weasels, and all the other creatures I had originally seen at the Artbucks lived in the valley where Lesterville is now, and that they all got along pretty well. They each had their own languages and different ways of living but they tried to learn bits of the others’ languages so that they could have a basic understanding of one another. A few generations back they all pitched in and built a village in order to protect themselves against the gorilla guys and the octopus guys and the potato bug guys, all of whom lived in the next valley over and were pretty aggressive. They would occasionally come into this valley and steal food because the dirt in their valley wasn’t as good at growing plants as it was over here.

When the creatures in this valley weren’t all together in a village, they had a hard time fighting off the gorillas and octopuses and potato bugs. But once they were all bonded together, they were able to scare the bad guys away because they outnumbered them and, to put it frankly, the bad guys were sort of stupid. And so the bad guys pretty much stayed in their not-so-great valley and things over here were pretty nice.

Then Mr. Arthur showed up and at first everybody loved him. They were really into the idea of learning a language they could all use to communicate with each other, since they could never decide on one language between themselves and it was hard for them to learn all the different languages they each spoke. So they really took to Mr. Arthur teaching them English (even though he decided to call it Artlish) and some of them even got quite fluent in it, like Peepup and Feep Feep. And then when Mr. Arthur started showing the creatures all the other ideas he had (that he said were all things he was thinking up on the spot), they really felt like he was the super smart leader they never had. The creatures did everything he said and helped him start to construct new buildings and stores and acted in his plays and listened to his music. And so things were pretty good.

But then everything started to change.

Mr. Arthur started to get really weird if he heard anybody talking in any language other than Artlish because he never took the time to learn any of their languages and didn’t like not being able to understand what they were saying. And he started to get mad if they didn’t want to do something he told them to do. And he got really mad if anybody didn’t like one of his plays or songs or if they wouldn’t wear the clothes he was making. And while they didn’t like getting him mad, if there was something he wanted them to do that they didn’t want to do, then they simply wouldn’t do it.

And that was about the time the army showed up.

One day, a bunch of the gorilla guys and octopus guys and potato bug guys marched and rolled into town, wearing uniforms and telling everybody that they’d better do everything Mr. Arthur said or they’d be in trouble. Nobody could believe it. And they didn’t know what to do because now the bad guys all had swords and axes and spinning blades and other dangerous weapons that they were willing to use on anybody who didn’t do what they told them. A few of the creatures tried to stand up to them but they were quickly “made examples of.”

Suddenly the fun-filled town of Lesterville became a pretty scary place. Since no one was used to living under such unpleasant conditions, many of them simply decided that life would be easier if they just did what Mr. Arthur and the army told them to do. And so Mr. Arthur started making them build more and more buildings and watch more and more plays and wear more and more clothes and “enjoy” anything else he invented or told them to do.

This was the world into which Karen and I both arrived.

When I asked them about the flying people and if they hated them like Herbert Golonski had said they did, Peepup said that while none of the creatures in this valley really cared one way or the other about the flying people (they didn’t dislike them but they didn’t really like them, either, since the flying people would never interact with them or even wave hello when they flew over the city), the guys in the army from the other valley really hated them. Apparently the flying people would fly into the gorilla guys’ valley all the time and take the water from their lake without ever saying a word or asking if it was okay. There was more than enough water for the gorillas and octopuses and potato bugs, but they still got really mad that the flying people were taking it all the time without their permission.

So it started to make sense to me that, given the opportunity to start chopping down some of the flying people’s trees yesterday, there was a very good chance that the gorillas and octopuses and potato bugs would simply destroy the whole city, just because they had waited generations to get back at the flying people.

When I asked why there were some creatures from this valley in the army, like the mole commander, Feep Feep said that there were always some members of the village who weren’t the nicest creatures in the world. And since it’s impossible that any group of people would be all good and all nice, the minute those creatures saw the power that the army had and all their weapons and uniforms, they immediately joined up and turned out to be some of the meanest members of Mr. Arthur’s force.

It was right about this time we finally got to an opening over our heads in the tunnel that Peepup said came out behind the White House. He made a “be quiet” face to us and carefully pushed up on the boards that were covering the tunnel’s entrance. Peepup peeked out of the door and said that there were no guards around that he could see. Then we all nervously stood up and peered out.

It was still dark, even though the sun was just beginning to light up the sky as it slowly made its way toward the horizon. We looked across the field and saw a small path that went up and over a hill that stood between the White House and the mountains in the distance.