The Goonies (12 page)

“Okay, okay, we got the point,” said Data, “he took Door Number Two.” He was hooked on the story now.

“No, that's the weird part, for some reason he took Door Number Three. So the game show guy screams, ‘Congratulations! You've
just won one hundred thousand…’ And the door swings open, and this huge glass jar is sittin' in the middle of the stage, filled
with… toothpicks. One hundred thousand toothpicks.”

They were all still starin' at me, waitin'. Troy suddenly shouted down from up top, like he had to remind us what a pain in
the ass he was. “Hey, Andy! You coming or not?” He pulled on the rope, and the bucket scraped the floor. I was glad he did,
though. It made our choices even more clear to me. Andy pulled back on the rope, kind of annoyed, and kept lookin' at me,
waitin' for me to finish. I liked that.

“So everybody in the place was laughin',” I went on. “Even Mom and Dad smiled. But I could see on their
faces, they knew. They were never gonna live on Easy Street. They blew their chance. And you know why? 'Cause they didn't
follow their instincts. They tried to outguess themselves. They thought that what they knew in their hearts and what they
knew to be true for them couldn't be the door that the riches were behind. So they chose the door they thought they
should
choose instead—and they blew it.” I looked steadily at each of them. “This is it, guys. On Monday our living rooms turn into
golf holes. This is our last chance, and I don't want to blow it 'cause we're too chickenshit to go for it.”

Nobody moved a muscle, but I could see they were all nodding inside. And I knew that for the first time that night we were
all together, really together.

Troy shouted down again. “Hey, Andy, you want to stay down there with the Goonies? Or are you coming up here where you belong?
I don't have all night!”

Everyone looked at Andy. Without a second of hesitation she picked up three large rocks and put them in the bucket. Then she
took off Troy's letter sweater and piled that on top. Then she tugged on the rope three times, and Troy slowly pulled the
bucket up.

She was one of us now.

Nothin' left but to make it official.

We heard Troy swear and roar off in his Mustang as I had Andy raise her right hand, and repeat after me:

I will never betray my Goon Dock friends,

We will stick together until the whole world ends,

Through heaven and hell and nuclear war,

Good pals like us will stick like tar,

In the city, or the country, or the forest, or the boonies,

I am proudly declared a fellow…

* * *

And it was right at that moment that I saw the first one. My skin pulled tight, and I screamed. “Leech!”

“Leech!” repeated Andy. She'd repeated the whole oath perfectly. Then she paused. “Leech? You mean ‘Goony,’ don't you?”

“I mean leech!” I shouted. “All over your arm! Leeches!”

Everyone gawked. There were countless small, black, slimy leeches covering her arms and hands.

Covering all of us.

In a panic we ran out of the water, out of the moonlight, screaming and yelping and pulling at the little bloodsuckers. But
they stuck. We couldn't shake, dance, or squirm the things off.

Data had an idea, though. He grabbed a twenty-volt battery out of his pack and connected two long wires to each pole. Then
he crouched in the pool and stuck the ends of the wires into the water. The leeches writhed all over him and fell off—electrocuted.

Data called us all over. One by one we stepped into the water, between Data's wires, and our leeches dropped off. Andy and
Stef were last in the water. Even after their leeches were gone, though, they kept standing there with this kind of limp smile
and small sigh.

When they finally came out, I heard Stef whisper to Andy, “I got all tingly—just my luck, I'm in love with a pond.”

It pissed Andy off, for some reason, I don't know, like someone had made her get horny and she didn't want to. “Who's responsible
for that?” she grouched.

Data held up his two battery wires proudly, and Andy,
wham
, slapped him without warning, like she was sayin' “Don't you ever try that again with me, Buster!”

Hitting him triggered one of his booby traps, though—
this little G. I. Joe doll popped out of his shirt and shot her with a tiny plastic BB. She just rolled her eyes.

That's when we heard the shots. Way back in the tunnel, like gunshots. We froze.

“What was that?” Brand whispered. “What was that sound?”

“My booby caps,” said Data. He held up a couple of his red ball-caps. “I put these on the ground back there so we could hear
if somebody was following us.”

We looked at each other in a sort of quiet panic as the news sank in.

“That means somebody's following us,” said Stef.

Nobody argued the point. We just started running.

Data lit the way with another flare. The tunnels turned and curved, but they seemed to stay on a gradual rise, which meant
we were getting near the surface, I guessed. For ten minutes we ran like that, kind of bouncing off the walls with one ear
behind us, when all of a sudden we turned a sharp corner and ran smack into a dead end. And then the flare fizzled and died.

Data lit another one, but I could see that Brand was starting to freak, anyway, from his claustrophobia.

“Great! A dead end! Now what, huh?” He was breathing too fast, lookin' all around.

“We just go back the same way we came in,” said Andy. She looked worried about Brand, and she was trying to cool him down.

I looked at the map. There had to be a way out. “It's gotta go on—right, Willy? You wouldn't end it here. You always got somethin'
up your sleeve.…”

Brand was really flippin' now. “I can't breathe, it's too small in here! You guys are usin' up all the air! It's too small!”
He was scratchin' at the walls, lookin' like he might melt.

I found the place on the map where I thought we were at, more or less, and told Mouth to translate the writing there.

Copper bones,

Triple stones,

Westward… foams.

I looked at Chester Copperpot's copper medallion, shaped like a skull with nose and eye holes. “Here's copper bones,” I said.
That seemed right to me. I couldn't quite figure out the rest of the riddle, but I kept running it over in my mind.

That's when Brand snapped. “I can't breathe! You guys are suckin' all the air out! You sucked it all! Lemme out! Let me out!”
Then he began to climb the walls—for real. He tore out big chunks of earth, he scraped away sheets of moss, he snapped off
roots and pulled down stones. Man, he wanted out of there.

We all grabbed him and wrestled him to the ground and piled on top of him. I mean, we didn't want him to hurt himself. He
finally relaxed a little, but he couldn't stop breathing like a locomotive with the accent on
loco
.

“Anybody got a paper bag?” said Stef. “We gotta get him to breathe back his own carbon dioxide.”

Data pulled off his backpack and rummaged through it, but he didn't have a bag. Nobody had one, so Stef pulled out her shirt
and stuffed Brand's head inside. I tell you, she knew how to handle herself. “Just breathe back in what you breathe out,”
she told him. “It's good for you.”

Data looked away, and Mouth snickered, but Andy just stared at Brand's head buried in Stef's chest and didn't look real happy.

Stef could've cared less, so she took Brand's head out and stuffed it under
Andy's
shirt before either of them
could say anything. “Andy's probably better equipped for this,” she said, shakin' her head like the rest of us were all kids
acting like kids.

Still, I couldn't help thinkin' maybe Brand wasn't so dumb to breathe too fast after all.

I noticed the wall Brand had clawed at and walked up to examine it closer. All the dirt was scraped off now, and it was just
hard, cold stone, with a lot of irregular metal pegs jutting straight out of it. They looked almost like natural formations,
but something about them caught my eye. Like there was a pattern there or something. Like, did you ever see these computer
printouts of pictures of people made up of just dots, but if you move farther back, it starts to look like something, and
then finally you can see it's a picture of something? Like that. Only I was sort of at that in-between point where I could
see it was something, but I couldn't figure out exactly what yet.

“‘Copper bones, triple, stones…’” I said. I held the medallion up and looked through the holes in it at the higher pegs on
the wall. I'm not sure why, it just looked like there was a connection somehow. Like when you're doing a jigsaw puzzle and
you see a piece that belongs in a certain section but you're not sure how.

“Hey, Data, give me a boost,” I said. He hoisted me up to the pegs I wanted.

I put the medallion up against the wall. Some of the pegs fit into some of the holes sometimes. I kept moving it all around.

The other guys were watching me.

“What's he doing?” said Data. I know it looked pretty weird.

“He flipped,” said Mouth. “Just like his brother. Just like the rest of us pretty soon. We're all gonna go batty. One by one.
Pretty soon we'll be eatin' each other's
fingers to stay alive. Finger-lickin' good, taste like it should, we're all goin' nuts, knock on wood.” He rapped his head
with his knuckles.

All of a sudden it fit. A perfect fit. Just like a piece sliding into place, the medallion just slipped over three pegs just
as snug as a key in a lock.

It made me gasp, it was so cool. I was really on to something—if I could only figure out the rest of the riddle. “Westward
foam… foams… foaming…”

“My grampa had a dog that foamed after it got bit by a skunk,” said Mouth.

“How about shaving foam?” said Data. They were all into it now. They could see I was on a roll, and they wanted to get on
it with me.

“There's a foam in the ocean when it breaks on a shore,” said Stef.

That sounded right. “And the ocean's to the west,” I said. I turned the medallion in the direction I thought was west. And
guess what—it turned!

It turned, and the pegs turned with it, like this perfect doorknob. We heard all these clinking sounds, like gears turning
and tumblers falling into place. Man, it was radical.

And then the cannonball shot out. Didn't actually shoot exactly, but it rolled out of this crack in the wall and down this
incline that was obviously cut for it, and it plopped down on this stone plate on the ground—reminded me exactly of the bowling
ball device I had rigged to open my front gate at home. It was amazing. I was expecting any second to see some gate in the
wall open up to let us pass through—and suddenly this square of floor opened up under Data, and he fell like a rock into the
hole, with a wild, kind of bottomless scream, while I held on, dangling, to the doorknob in the stone.

And then the scream stopped.

Cut short. Come to a fast, bad end.

I jumped over the pit, to the ground.

We ran to the hole and looked down. Nothing but blackness, in a long, vertical shaft.

“Data?” called Brand. “Data?” He held the flare down the pit, but it was too deep to see bottom.

Andy turned white in the red glare. “Data! Data!” she shouted. But there was no answer. “Hail Mary, full of grace…” she began
whispering.

Mouth was shakin' his head. “He just went down. I could've grabbed him—I was this close… this close…” He held his hands a
foot apart. “He's really—”

“Gone,” Brand said quietly.

That was it for me. I mean, it just happened so sudden, it was like one second Data was right there with the rest of us and
the next second he was history. And it was totally final, like no asking to do it over. I remember when Grandma died when
I was a little kid and I asked Dad when was she comin' back, and he said not ever, and it was too sad to stand that I wasn't
ever gonna see her again, so I ran away to cry. And now it was the same thing only I couldn't run away.

So I just cried.

Couldn't stop. Everyone was sort of sniffing, in fact. Brand even left Andy's side to come over and put his arms around me.
We hugged each other, and it helped a little, and I wasn't ashamed to do it, either. “I'm gonna miss the way he used to shout
out the names of all those goofy inventions of his,” I said. I imitated him: “Glasses of Death! Bully Blinders! Smoke Screen!”

And then a voice shouted up out of the hole: “Pinchers of Peril!”

We all shouted back down into the shaft.

“Data! Data!”

“Are you okay?”

“Speak to us!”

He shouted up to us. “I've been saved by my Pinchers of Peril!”

We cheered and hooted and razzed him, but man, it sure was good to hear his voice.

I pulled a rope out of his sack and tied it to the flare and lowered it into the pit. About twenty feet down we finally saw
Data. His Pinchers of Peril had clamped onto a jutting rock, and he dangled from it by its slinky coil, bobbing up and down
a couple feet above these giant wooden spikes sticking up from the floor.

He shouted again, “Hey, you guys, I found another hole… it's all lit up down here!” I saw him get a foothold on a nearby rock
and lower himself all the way down. And then he was out of sight.

I pulled up the flare. We tied one end of the rope to a grappling hook in his sack, which we secured to a rock. Then, one
by one we lowered ourselves on it, down the shaft.

When I got down to the level of the tips of the spikes, I saw there was a skeleton jammed down onto one. It looked like a
screaming mummy. Scared me so much, I slipped and almost fell on the next spike.

I finally made it down, though. We all did. We hugged Data, or patted him on the back, or shook his hand, or called him a
jerk, or whatever. He just smiled the way 007 would.

We looked around to see where we were. It was a medium-size cave, all damp and covered with this slimy algae stuff that glowed
a kind of greenish phosphorescent glow. Water was dripping from the ceiling, from these stalactite deals, and collecting near
the corners, all over
this dark, rough coral. I wasn't sure, but somewhere in the distance I thought I could hear the ocean—kind of a low
whsh, whsh, whsh
, like the sound of cars speeding by on the freeway at night just over the hill past my bedroom window.