Chapter 15

The Potato Peeler Gets Me Through

Mr. Jubber sat in the kitchen for a long time. I was afraid he might fall asleep at the table and I wouldn’t be able to break into the basement without waking him up. He drank the rest of the wine in his glass, and finished the rest of Mr. Earpicker’s glass too. Then he sat still for a while, breathing heavily and muttering to himself. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Finally he got up heavily and stumped out of the kitchen.

I knew all the sounds of this house. I knew exactly which room he was in and which floor he was on. I followed him with my ears as he stumped slowly up the staircase. When I was sure that he had reached the second floor, I crawled out of the cabinet and snuck to the foot of the stairs so I could listen to him better.

Then I remembered about the trap door to the attic. If he went up to the fourth floor, he would see that someone had broken into the house. He would see the missing board, and the open trap door, and he would see that the light in the attic was on. Then he would call the police, and I’d be caught. I clutched the staircase railing and listened intently as his footsteps went up, higher and higher.

“Please,” I thought, “please stop at the third floor.” But the footsteps continued up the staircase.

Suddenly the footsteps stopped. I knew he had reached the fourth-floor landing. He must have been staring at the break-in, because I didn’t hear any sound for a minute. Then I heard him mumble, “Earpicker’s right. She really was a loony.”

I heard him open my bedroom door and go in. Then I heard the sound of my bed squeaking. He had climbed into my bed! I crept up the staircase as quietly as I could, and as I neared the top floor I could hear him softly snoring. I braved looking in the door, and there he was, stretched out on my bed with his clothes and shoes still on, his great round face pointed up at the ceiling, and his eyes closed.

At first I felt mad. I didn’t like him in my bed. But then I decided he had done me the best possible favor by going to the top of the house, far away from where I would be working in the basement, and falling asleep.

I didn’t waste any more time on Mr. Jubber. I went right back downstairs to the kitchen and carefully checked the basement door. My grandmother had done a very thorough job welding it closed, and I couldn’t see how I was going to get it open. It looked hopeless. The door was metal, the edges were sealed, and the lock was completely blocked off by melted silver dollars. If I couldn’t get through the door, then I’d have to go through the wall next to the door. I’d have to carve a hole in the plaster.

I looked around the kitchen and gathered some tools together. If Mr. Jubber hadn’t been in my bedroom, I would have fetched my Swiss army knife. Instead, I hunted through the drawers of kitchen utensils. I wanted a small knife that was easy to hold and good for carving, and I found a potato peeler that seemed just right. I also gathered together a flashlight, a whole handful of extra batteries, a hard-boiled egg, some bread, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly, a jelly knife, a bottle of water, and a lot of napkins. I didn’t know how long I might be down that hole exploring. It might take me into the next day, and I hadn’t eaten very much in a long time. I put all these things into a cloth bag that was hanging on the doorknob of the closet. Then I got to work on the wall next to the basement door.

First I stabbed the plaster with the potato peeler. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be, but on the third try the blade went right in. Then I started to pry and chip, opening up a hole. It was hard work. When the hole was big enough for a fist to get through, I could see that the wall was hollow, and that I would have to carve through another layer of plasterboard a few inches away. After a while I had the idea of filling a glass with water and pouring it on the plasterboard. When the plaster got soggy, it was easier to break apart. It only took fifteen minutes to get through the first layer, and about ten minutes to get through the second layer.

In the end I had a jagged hole at floor level that was just big enough for me to fit through. It looked like a giant mouse had chewed it.

I couldn’t see anything but darkness through the hole. When I shined in the flashlight, I could see the basement stairs sloping down, covered in dust and bits of plaster. I was excited, because I was looking at a part of my own house that I had never been in. I had never been allowed. I pushed in the bag of supplies, and then crawled in after it. I had to twist around carefully to get onto the stairs, because the hole in the wall didn’t line up with the steps. Once I was inside, I held the bag in one hand, the flashlight in the other, and went down the steps to the damp cement floor of the basement.

I shined the flashlight around the room. It looked like any old basement room. It had a washer and dryer against the wall, and some old furniture, and a rusty bicycle. Nothing looked unusual. I checked the floor carefully, but I didn’t see any tiny white footprints. I saw a movement and a flash out of the corner of my eye and almost dropped the flashlight in fright, but then I realized that there was a small window high up on the wall, and the headlights of a car had sparkled in the glass for a moment. The room was completely ordinary. There was no hole in the floor.

I felt like my stomach was sinking down into my legs. I guess I should have known. The whole story of the birdfrogs was too silly. How could it be true? I walked over to the washing machine and looked inside, and there was an old dried-up load of laundry from years ago.

My adventure was over. Mr. Earpicker was right. Mr. and Mrs. Whingle were right. I sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and put my head in my hands. I felt awful again, and very tired. I also felt cold. My feet in particular felt cold, as if there was a draft of air on them. I put my hand down on the floor, and there was a draft of air. I thought that was odd. The air must be blowing from somewhere.

Right away, all my tiredness disappeared. I felt around on the floor, crawling and following the blowing air, and traced it to a wooden bookcase that was set against the wall. The air was blowing from the gap under the bookcase. It was a very tall bookcase that rose almost to the ceiling, and it was empty. It had been dragged to that spot and never used. I peered around the back of it, shining the flashlight into the crack, and saw a door. The bookcase was blocking a wooden door in the wall. Now all my excitement came back, and I felt a tingle all over. Of course, my grandmother must have placed the bookcase against the door as an extra precaution, just before sealing off the basement.

It took me half a minute to drag aside the bookcase and pull open the wooden door. I stepped into a cold, damp room and shined the flashlight around. This was it. This was the room. I knew right away. It was a big room, and had a huge, mechanical winch with a rusty cable wound onto it. Four or five wooden crates filled with tools lay scattered around on the floor, as if they had been left there anyhow. In the corner, a tattered old plastic tarp lay in a heap. And next to the tarp was the hole. It had a cement rim built up around it, so that it looked like an old-fashioned well. A horrible, musty, damp smell was coming from it.

When I shined the flashlight on the floor, I saw little white footprints of paint everywhere, just like my grandmother had said. They were three-footed prints. They really were. Everything was exactly the way she had said. I even found the small round hole in the basement wall where the pipes went through, and when I looked more closely I saw little footprints in the dust around the pipes. Whatever made those footprints had crawled through the pipe conduit and gotten into the neighbor’s house.

A thrill of horror went through me. “Oh Grandma,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry I didn’t entirely believe you. But it was pretty hard to believe.”

When I went over to the hole and looked down, it seemed to breathe into my face with a musty, damp breath. I listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything, no echoing sound, no pebbles shifting, no hammers tapping. I shined the flashlight into the hole and got a fright at first. I thought the entire shaft was crawling with birdfrogs, and I leaped back away from the edge with my heart hammering. But I didn’t hear any sound, and I didn’t think that so many birdfrogs could be so silent, so I came forward again and looked down. Then I saw that it was just shadows from my flashlight, and I felt better.

I tried to imagine what Mr. and Mrs. Whingle would say now, if they could see the hole. They’d believe me. They wouldn’t say that my grandmother was crazy. They’d have to apologize. And Dennis and Candy would probably want to climb down the hole.

But then I imagined Mr. Whingle peering down into the darkness and saying, “It’s a sewer access. And she painted bird feet all over the floor?”

I could imagine Mr. Earpicker shouting, “I told you, the old bat was crazy!”

No, I had to do my job thoroughly. I had to climb down and see the extinct animal bones. I had to see if the shaft really went down for hundreds of feet, or if it was just a sewer access. I didn’t want to, because, if the birdfrogs got me while I was in that narrow space, I’d have no chance against them. But it didn’t matter: I had to go down. I owed it to my grandmother to find out for sure.