Lizard Music (12 page)

I must have watched the lions for an hour. I was sitting in the grass with my squirrel, just sort of relaxing. Sometimes the lions stopped their game and all fell asleep for a while—catnaps. Then they would start up again. Lions are really nice-looking animals. After a while, I thought I could hear Reynold calling me. I got up and started walking toward the sound of his voice. After a while, I could see the doorway glowing in the distance. Reynold called me about every five minutes. I got closer. The cobra was back in the doorway. I turned him into a corn muffin. Then I thought about a cobra with a bag over his head, and he turned into that. I walked right past him and out into the sunlight.

Reynold was waiting for me, sitting on the ground in front of the House of Memory swatting mosquitoes. “Did you have an interesting time?” he asked.

“Very,” I said. “How does that place work?”

“I have no idea,” Reynold said. “We discovered the spot a long time ago and built the hut around it to keep people from stumbling in by accident.”

“Is the snake always there?” I wanted to know.

“Search me,” Reynold said.

I guessed it must be afternoon. I checked my watch—I had forgotten to wind it. I asked Reynold for the time.

He looked at his pebble. “It’s 4:37.” I set my watch.

“By the way,” I asked, “how does that thing work?”

“What, the pebble?” Reynold asked. “It doesn’t work. We wear them to show off for visitors. Most lizards just guess about the time.” I put my watch in my pocket.

“We’d better start back to Thunderbolt City,” Reynold said. “You’re scheduled to attend a banquet with your friends and a lot of important lizards. Then we have to make preparations to send you back to Hogboro.”

Reynold and I started walking up the path toward the House of Plants. “Did the House of Plants get started like the House of Memory?” I asked.

“That’s right,” Reynold said, “we just found all the plants there and built the greenhouse to protect them. Probably Reynold planted them.” He meant Reynold, the old-time hero who started everything on the island.

When we reached the House of Plants, Reynold bought us Thunderburgers and cups of tea from a little stand outside the greenhouse. I saw him give the lizard two Agama Dollars, but I didn’t manage to catch him putting his hand into his pocket, or taking it out. We sat on a bench and ate our Thunderburgers. This time they tasted a little like flowers. Then we drank the tea, which was bitter, and started walking back to the city. We were halfway there when I realized that I had left my squirrel in the House of Memory.

There was a big commotion going on when we reached Thunderbolt City. Lizards were running everywhere. I couldn’t find out what was going on because they were all talking in lizard. I tried to ask Reynold what it was all about, but he had become so excited that he forgot to speak to me in English. He just kept repeating the same thing over and over in lizard talk. Reynold started running, and I ran with him.

There was a big crowd in the middle of Thunderbolt City. The lizard band that I had seen on TV was on the roof of a building playing. Lizards were cheering and dancing. Lots of the lizards were holding statues and pictures of chickens over their heads. There were thousands of lizards in a sort of open square outside the biggest building, the one with a golden egg on top. I guessed that was the House of the Egg. The lizards were really happy. I lost track of Reynold when a lizard grabbed me by the hands and started dancing with me. Then another lizard wanted to dance with me, and another one. I was in the middle of a thousand dancing lizards. They were all speaking in lizard. I had no idea what was going on. It didn’t seem likely that this was a going-away party for Charlie and Claudia and me. However, the lizards did go all-out to be nice to visitors.

I noticed that the wrist of the lizard I was dancing with had a flat pebble taped to it. I looked up. It was Reynold, my guide that afternoon.

“What’s going on?” I shouted.

“
Neeble, neeble neeble neeble
,” Reynold said.

“Speak English! I don’t understand you! Speak English!” I screamed. I shook him by the shoulders.

“Oh. Yes, of course. I do apologize,” Reynold said. “You don’t know what’s happened.
Neeble neeble neeble neeble
.” He was so excited that he had slipped back into lizard talk.

“English! English!” I shouted.

“Oh yes. Sorry,” Reynold said, “it’s just that I’m so excited. You see. The egg. It’s hatched!”

Reynold was really so excited that he couldn’t stand still. He was sort of hopping up and down the whole time he was talking to me. Another Reynold appeared. “Victor, I’ve been looking for you. You have to start for the coast soon. Come along and say good-by to your friends.” He took me by the hand and started leading me through the crowd of dancing lizards.

“Good-by? What do you mean?” I asked, but he didn’t hear me over the music and the shouting.

It wasn’t easy to get through the crowd. We would go a few steps in one direction, and then get swept back to where we started by the surging, swirling, dancing lizards. Everybody was patting me on the back and saying
neeble neeble neeble neeble
to me.

“
Neeble neeble neeble
,” I said back, and the lizards laughed and smiled and patted me on the back some more. I still don’t know what
neeble
means. I guess it means all sorts of things, depending on how you say it. It appears to be the only word in their language.

We finally got to a little wooden side door in the House of the Egg. Reynold pounded on the door. “Open up. It’s me, Reynold, and I’ve got Victor with me.”

The door opened, and we popped inside.

When the door closed, the noise of the crowd shut off as though someone had turned off a TV set. The House of the Egg had thick walls.

“Come this way,” Reynold said. We climbed a long flight of stone stairs. At the top of the stairs we passed through a door into a big room. It was the fanciest room I had seen in Diamond Hard. The walls were white with gold trim, and there were little plaster chickens carved on the corners of the ceiling. There were heavy red drapes tied back with gold ropes with gold tassels. In the middle of the room was a fountain made out of a greenish stone with gold running through it. In the middle of the fountain was a gold statue of Walter Cronkite. The water came out of his pipe. The floor was made of green and white stone in squares, like a checkerboard. There was a thin edge of gold around each square. There was this real fancy chandelier made out of diamonds or glass cut in the shape of eggs. It was some fancy room.

There were a lot of lizards standing around wearing black top hats. Some of them had red or white silk sashes running across their chests, and some of them had fancy medals around their necks. They were talking quietly and drinking lizard lemonade from little cups.

All the lizards in top hats shook hands with me and said, “The egg is hatched.” They seemed very happy about it. Someone was just handing me a cup of lemonade, when Charlie came through a big gold door.

“Victor! Come in here and see what we’ve got!” Charlie said. He was wearing a top hat too, and a red sash, and a gold medal with a diamond the shape and size of an egg in it. He waved me into the room he had just come out of. It was fancier than the room with the Walter Cronkite fountain, only cozier. It was sort of like a king’s bedroom. Running around on the floor was a tiny baby chick, all yellow and fuzzy, and running around after it, clucking, was Claudia.

“You can see what happened,” Charlie said. “No sooner did Claudia and I come into the room where they kept the egg—you were told all about the egg, weren’t you?”

I said I was. “It’s supposed to hatch out the king of the lizards or something,” I said.

“Something like that,” Charlie went on. “Anyway, the minute we laid eyes on it, it started to make noises, clicking and so forth. Reynold got really upset and ran for the lizards whose job it has been to look after the egg all these years. Claudia’s instincts took over, and she hopped on top of the thing. If she had done that when there were any lizards in the room, I don’t know what would have happened. You know they’re very respectful of that egg. They even put the empty shell in a vault for safekeeping. Anyway, being cold-blooded folks, they might not have really understood what Claudia was trying to do. It all worked out for the best, because by the time the egg-keeping lizards returned, the egg had just about hatched. They were going to say something about Claudia sitting on top of their sacred egg, but she gave them a look that could freeze water, and in the next second out popped a brand-new baby chick, the same one you see Claudia chasing around the room. She’s a pretty old chicken, but apparently she hasn’t forgotten a thing. You should have been there, Victor. The lizards didn’t know what the chick was, never having seen one, and Claudia and I had to explain that it was a baby chicken. Once they understood that, they nearly went crazy. Claudia knows how they feel about chickens around here. They like them better than anything. It seems they didn’t know what was supposed to hatch out, but a chicken suits them just fine.”

While Charlie was talking, the door opened a couple of times, and lizards came in to see if the new baby chick king needed anything. Both times Claudia chased them out of the room.

“See, Victor,” Charlie said, “what happened is this. The lizards don’t know anything about raising a baby chick and they’ve asked Claudia to stay around a while and sort of help out. Naturally, where Claudia goes, I go. So I’ll be staying on too. You, Victor, will have to go back to McDonaldsville.”

“Why?” I asked. “I like it here. I’m having a good time. I want to stay on the island!”

“What about your family?” Charlie asked. “You’re an exceptional kid, Victor, but still a kid, you must admit. Don’t you think it is suitable for you to continue growing up in your own home?”

“No!” I said. “My own home is boring. I want to stay here and be a lizard!” I was getting pretty upset.

“Victor, we will not argue about this,” Charlie said. “You know that you have to go home. Now think about it for a minute. You don’t want to upset your parents, do you?” He was right of course, but I really didn’t want to leave the island yet.

“Let me stay for another week. My parents are away—they won’t even miss me,” I said.

“The island may not come back this way for a year or more,” Charlie said. “Besides, you know the legend about the egg. The island is supposed to start getting less invisible now, easier to get to. I’ll see to it personally that you get back sometime. You have the Chicken Man’s word of honor.”

“When will I have to leave?” I asked.

“Right now,” Charlie said. “They’ll have a hard job getting you to the coast before the island starts moving. Transportation from the island to Hogboro is being arranged right now.”

“There are a lot of things I never found out,” I said. “I never found out where the lizards came from, or whether pod people really exist, or a whole lot of stuff.”

“There isn’t time to tell that story now,” Charlie said. “I’ll try to send you a letter in care of Shane Fergussen. By the way, I wouldn’t tell anyone but him what happened. Anybody else might think you were nuts.”

A lizard stuck his head inside the door. “The bearers are ready to take Victor to the water,” he said.

“You’d better get started,” Charlie said. He patted me on the back. Claudia clucked good-by, and the lizards hustled me down the stairs to the side door.

Four lizards were waiting for me. They were carrying a big flat board, like a surfboard, on their shoulders. I was lifted by many pairs of lizard hands, plopped on top of the surfboard, and we were off. The lizards ran, carrying the board. They were pretty fast. I would say they got up to about thirty miles per hour. We headed out of the city and into the big plain that was the crater floor. Every so often I would see a lizard sitting by the roadside. When he saw us coming, he would jump up and start running in the same direction, a little slower than the lizards carrying the board. As we caught up with him, the running lizard would fall in behind one of the lizards carrying, and that lizard would drop out. This went on the whole time I was traveling overland by surfboard. No lizard carried the board for more than about fifteen minutes. When we were climbing up the inside of the crater wall, the lizards changed places maybe every five minutes, and in the really rocky places there were hundreds of lizards who didn’t run, but just passed the surfboard from hand to hand. I made the whole trip at a steady speed, and at no time did the surfboard ever stop or slow down. The lizards were so skillful in handling the surfboard that it never rocked at all. I was able to sit on it as comfortably as if I were sitting on a solid floor. In fact, after I got to feeling confident, I even stood up and walked back and forth on the fast-moving board. It was quite a ride.

It was late afternoon when we reached the crater rim. I took a last look at Thunderbolt City. The red sunlight was making the gold rooftops shine. A minute later we were running down through the forest on the outside of the volcano. The lizards sort of sang or chanted as they ran with the surfboard. When a new lizard took his turn, he would join in the song.