The Hotel and the Great Escape Attempt
IT WAS NIGHTTIME in Oslo, and the moon hung in a cloudless but star-packed sky like a yellowish-white paper lantern. It shone on the twenty-story-high Radisson Hotel next to Palace Park, on the not-quite-so-high dungeon tower at the Royal Palace, and also on the large, shiny device that sat just inside the gate, a device that bore an uncanny and frightening similarity to a waffle iron, only a hundred times bigger. And the moon shone on the gateway leading into the Royal Palace’s rear courtyard, which was guarded by two mustache-wearing men in black Royal Guard uniforms with lame hats with big, floppy tassels.
“Truly beautiful sky vee have here in Norway,” said the one with the handlebar mustache. “Don’t you agree, Gunnar?”
“I would have to say that I agree, Rolf,” the one with the Fu Manchu mustache said. “No one has stars as beautiful as ours in Norway.”
“Yes, just knowing that God shose to bless our specific country with sush a beautiful sky truly moves me, you know?”
“Not surprising, really, that the Danes want to take a sky like that from us.”
“From us, the Birthplace of Shampions, it’s an insult! I must say I’m looking forward to oblisterating them.”
“I think that’s supposed to be ‘obliterating,’ Rolf.”
“Yes, you’re quite right, Gunnar. And then, of course, I’m looking forward to the execution first thing tomorrow morning.”
“I wonder what that froggy fellow is thinking right about now,” said Gunnar with the Fu Manchu.
They both cast a quick glance up at the dungeon tower, which was silhouetted against the starry sky.
“Strange,” Fu Manchu said, stamping his feet. “For a second I thought I saw a little boy hanging in the sky up there.”
“Ho ho ho,” Handlebar said.
NILLY STOOD STOCK-STILL and kept his balance. He had stopped suddenly when those two guards down below had looked up. Had they seen him? Hopefully not.
He felt a slight vibration in the taut, almost invisible cobweb beneath the balancing shoes. He carefully turned the other way, to face the Radisson Hotel. More specifically room 1146, where the strand of cobweb disappeared into the window and was anchored around the minibar in the corner. And in the darkness, he could just make out the silhouettes of Lisa, Doctor Proctor, and Mrs. Strobe in the window. Then he turned back around to face forward again, toward the dungeon tower. There was always a lot more wind up at these heights than you would guess if you were standing on solid ground. But tonight the wind had helped him.
It had been twenty minutes since all five of them had rushed into the hotel and asked for a room high up with a view of the Royal Palace. And luckily room 1146 had been available. So the front desk clerk gave them a key card, and they took the elevator up to the eleventh floor. From there they implemented Lisa’s plan. Lisa had read somewhere that when spiders wanted to cover long distances, they would just spin themselves a cobweb sail and use that to fly on the wind. And Mrs. Strobe had nodded and said that that was actually true. And that was precisely what Perry had done. While Doctor Proctor checked that the wind was blowing in more or less the right direction, the enterprising, clever spider had spun his own little hang glider, anchored it to the minibar, and jumped out the window. And instead of plummeting down into a puddle of spider jam on the pavement eleven stories below them, Perry had sailed off toward the Palace Park and disappeared into the nighttime darkness with a little hiccup.
They had waited for almost ten minutes before they finally got the signal: three tugs on the thread, meaning that Perry had made it to the dungeon tower at the Royal Palace and secured the thread.
Then it was Nilly’s turn. Because of course it would be Nilly’s job to go over, who else? This time the others gave up as soon as he pointed out that he was the only one of them they knew was light enough for Perry’s cobweb to hold and that maybe he would even be small enough to squeeze through the bars into Gregory’s cell.
So Nilly strapped on the balancing shoes and cautiously stepped out onto the delicate strand of cobweb.
“Here,” Doctor Proctor had said, passing him the pink Double Deaf Earmuffs and a small bottle labeled “Doctor Proctor’s Strength Tonic with Mexican Thunder Chili. Maximum Strength.”
And then Nilly started walking. And kept walking until he saw the two guards at the gate suddenly look up. And then he stopped. And thus we’re back where we were, with Nilly standing stock-still on the thread and the guard with the handlebar mustache laughing at the guard with the Fu Manchu mustache because for a second Fu Manchu had thought he’d seen a little boy up there in midair.
Nilly exhaled with relief when he realized that he hadn’t been detected after all, and then he continued his balancing act, making his way over to the dungeon tower.
He heard music. And a familiar woman’s voice singing:
“Pizzeria, have a slice to go
Extra cheese, how can I refuse it . . .”
And there—in the darkness, through a narrow slit—he saw Perry’s eight black eyes twinkling.
Nilly crept the last bit of the way, hopped up onto the balcony that ran around the top of the tower, and waited for Perry to crawl up on top of his hair before squeezing his head through the bars into the window opening.
It was a dark cell with bare stone walls. But there—in the gleaming moonlight and the flickering light of a candle—he saw Gregory Galvanius. He was tied up on the wall with iron shackles around his wrists and ankles. Aside from a pair of long johns that was white—or at least pretty white—he was naked. His skinny upper body was the same bluish-white color as milk, and his already sad face looked even sadder with the blondish-brown stubble and the blue-black bags under his eyes.
“Mr. Galvanius,” Nilly whispered.
No response.
“Gregory! We’re here to rescue you.”
Poor Gregory lifted his face extremely slowly and stared at Nilly blankly at first. Then—as if it slowly dawned on him that this really was Nilly and not just a dream—his face lit up.
Nilly squeezed through the bars and—shloop—he was in.
“Lookie here,” he said, holding up the pink earmuffs. “We’ll put these on you and then you won’t hear the music. And then you take a swig of this . . .” He screwed the top off the bottle of strength tonic. “Maximum strength. Enough that you’ll be able to break open both the iron shackles and the door out of here. But we have to hurry; the others are waiting.”
He was about to put the earmuffs on Gregory when he noticed a sudden change in Gregory’s expression. Or more like a transformation. Because there, before Nilly’s very eyes, Gregory Galvanius’s face suddenly got smaller. And rounder. And then the stubble and the bags under his eyes disappeared, and the face was suddenly freckled, with a turned-up nose. And finally: hair so red it could only belong to one single boy Nilly knew of.
Himself.
Nilly stood there staring at his own mirror image. And then his mirror image started laughing. It opened its mouth, sharp teeth came into view, and a pink tongue flapped around in there as laughter forced its way out, drowning out Agnes’s singing. And when Nilly looked down, he spotted two pairs of holey socks with curved black toenails poking through them. And a long, gray-haired tail swishing back and forth just above the stone floor.
“Aaaaah!” Nilly screamed.
“Hiccup!” Perry said.
“Double aaaaah!” Nilly screamed.
“Hiccup hiccup!” they heard from somewhere else.
The chortling, betailed mirror image of Nilly stepped aside and there he hung, the real Gregory. His eyes were half closed, as if he had half fainted.
“I’ve been waiting and longing for this visit,” Nilly’s mirror image said, and Nilly recognized the voice from the Royal Palace. It was the boss himself: Yodolf Staler. And then the face and body of the creature changed. And turned into Hallvard Tenorsen, who then assumed an apologetic expression: “But I’m also a little sad, because our acquaintance is going to be so short-lived. Unfortunately, you’re both going to be made into waffles tomorrow.”
Just then the door opened, and in bounded four moon baboons. It happened so fast that Nilly wouldn’t even have had a chance to say “cake,” if he’d felt like doing that. Well, that’s an exaggeration; he would have been able to say “cake.” But maybe not “layer cake.” Or certainly not “frosted layer cake.” Because before he would have had a chance to say “frosted layer cake”—if he had wanted to say that—the baboons had picked Nilly up and shackled him to the wall next to Gregory. So now they were dangling there like wallflowers, the two of them.
Yodolf walked over to Nilly, cocked his head, and peered at him as if he were wondering what kind of strange creature this could be. Then he plucked Perry out of Nilly’s hair, held the spider between his thumb and index finger and looked like he was considering crushing the seven-legged thingamajig. But he changed his mind and instead dumped the strength tonic out of Doctor Proctor’s bottle, put the spider into the bottle, screwed the lid back on, and set the bottle on the window ledge.
“Now you can watch as your friend slowly suffocates in there,” Yodolf said.
Then he stretched his hand out through the bars, grabbed hold of the cobweb thread, and pulled it toward him. “Hm,” he said thoughtfully. “Tandoora, can you run out and see where this cobweb originates? If my guess is right, I bet the rest of the accomplices will be at the other end.”
“I’ll run and check right away, Yodolf,” the smallest moon baboon said, and then disappeared, shuffling quickly away.
Yodolf bit through the strand of cobweb with an obvious “snap!” and let it fall out the window. Then he put on the pink earmuffs and listened to the silence, but apparently decided that silence is boring, because he took them off again and tossed them over to one of the other baboons, who tried them on. Yodolf stretched in satisfaction, his arms thrust into the air, and yawned, revealing jaws so large that they could have easily accommodated a watermelon.
“Time for bed. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow,” Yodolf said. “No wait, ha ha! I forgot. You’re actually going to have a very short day.”
“Good one!” yelled one of the baboons in a squeaky voice Nilly recognized. Then all three baboons howled with laugher.
“You stand guard, Göran,” Yodolf said.
“Me? But I’m the . . .”
“Commander of the Luftwaffle, I know. But I’m still the one who makes the decisions, right? Hop to it, now! We’re going to go see what Tandoora found.”
And with that Yodolf chased the other moon baboons out the door ahead of him, locked the door, and passed the key ring to Göran.
“Would it be all right if I just . . . ,” Göran began.
“No,” Yodolf growled. “You may not torture them. They taste better untortured.”
Göran muttered a scarcely audible “filthy britches” and snatched the key ring, and then the other baboons were gone. Nilly heard the scraping of chair legs as Göran sat down somewhere out in the hallway and turned up the music.
“Yeah, yeah,” Nilly said. “Sometimes that’s just how it goes.”
“I think that’s how it goes every time, if you ask me,” Gregory sniffed. “Oh, if only they’d turn off that music!”
“I’m sure the others will be along soon to rescue us,” Nilly tried, but Gregory interrupted him in irritation: “Have you seen the guards around the Palace, huh? They have fifty moon chameleons and a hundred hypnotized Norwegians with rifles running around in traditional waterproof Norwegian boots. Forget about it! We’re toast!”
Nilly sighed heavily and bit his tongue since it was obvious that Gregory was not in a chatty mood. After a while he heard the guard out there in the hallway start snoring.
“Hey!” Nilly whispered. “I have an idea!”
“Oh no,” Gregory groaned. “I can’t take any more.”
“It’s simple,” Nilly said. “All you have to do is just unfurl your tongue.”