Chapter 21

We Encounter the Hit Gorilla

Even with my grandmother’s hurt leg, it was easier climbing with two people than with one. We tied one end of the rope around my waist and the other end around hers, so that if one of us fell, the other one would be able to brace against the tunnel wall and hold the weight. I took rod A and my grandmother took rod B. First, with my headlight on, I climbed up very far, about fifty feet, and wedged in rod A and sat on it. Then I shined my headlight down the shaft so that my grandmother could see. She climbed up slowly, taking as much time as she needed with her injured leg, until she passed me and climbed about fifty feet higher. Then she wedged in rod B and sat on it. Then I climbed up above her again, and so on. After about an hour, my grandmother said that the exercise had limbered up her leg and made it feel better.

“Grandma,” I said, after a while, “do you hear something clinking above us?”

“Yes, it’s that giant gorilla,” she said, scowling. “The filthy brute is climbing up ahead. I bet he’ll wait for us in the basement, and as soon as we stick our heads out of the top of the hole, he’ll reach out and nab us. Then, crunch.”

I didn’t like to think about that possibility. It made me shudder. But then I had a happier thought. “What do you think the gorilla will do,” I said, “if it climbs into the basement and finds Mr. Earpicker and the policemen?”

“Eat them, I hope,” she said fervently.

We didn’t say anything for a long time after that. We were too short of breath. It was very hard work going up, much harder than it had been coming down, and took a lot longer. We climbed miles and miles without a break. Hours later we reached T29, and crawled into the cave on top of the fossil to rest.

“That’s done me in,” my grandmother said, sitting on the floor of the cave and panting, her face glistening. All the mud had been washed away by sweat. “Only three hundred feet to go, Billy, but I need a breather. I don’t suppose you have any food left?”

I opened up the pack and rummaged around, but everything was eaten. Even the water bottle was empty. All we had was a wad of dirty paper napkins with some jelly smeared on them, but neither of us felt like eating them.

“Good fiber,” my grandmother said, “but you need water to get those things down.”

We settled back against opposite walls of the cave to rest and my grandmother looked around in the light from my helmet. “That’s her handwriting,” she said, pointing to the lettering on the rock. She looked sad.

“What was she like, Grandma?” I asked.

“I told you, she was wonderful. She was very intense about her work and could forget about everything else. You wouldn’t believe how focused she could get. Once, after a fossil had been hauled up from the shaft, she sat in the corner of the basement to work on it, picking the rock off of it, and reaching out now and then for a sandwich on a plate next to her. Well, every time she finished that sandwich I replaced it with a new one, and she didn’t notice. She thought it was the same one that she kept taking bites out of. And do you know how long she stayed like that, working on that fossil? Nine days. Nonstop. And when she was done, she came up the basement stairs a little stiff into the kitchen and she says, ‘Ma, I just put in a good hour or two of work. And I’m hungry. But somehow I don’t want a sandwich right now. You have anything good in the fridge?’ That’s how focused she could get. I can still see her perfectly clearly, working at her computer with a glass of catsup yogurt at her elbow—”

“A glass of what?”

“She liked to pour catsup into her yogurt and sprinkle in little bits of boloney. Not bad. I could do with some right now.”

“But that’s disgusting!”

“What’s disgusting to one person, Billy,” she said, “is a delicacy to somebody else. The French eat live snails. And the Skruponians eat ladybugs. And those birdfrogs, remember, they eat people.” She scowled fiercely and added, “They probably ate my daughter.” She looked up at the ceiling of the cave and shook her fist in the direction of that hit gorilla.

After we were rested, we began the last three hundred feet. My grandmother insisted on going first this time so that she could protect me from the hit gorilla. When we were near the top she paused and whispered down to me, “Turn off the light now. Stay where you are and I’ll take a look around.” She had one of the rods ready in her hand as a weapon, her wrinkly fingers clamped tightly around it. I switched off my helmet light, and she eased herself up the last few feet and stuck her head out of the opening. I waited, my heart hammering. I could hardly breathe, I was so anxious. Then she pulled her head back down.

“I don’t see anything,” she whispered.

We both climbed out. Nobody was in the basement. No gorilla. No policemen or Mr. Earpicker either. Sunlight came in the basement window. I didn’t know what time it was, or even what day.

My grandmother clutched my arm and peered around the room suspiciously. “I bet it’s lurking upstairs somewhere,” she said in a low voice. “Keep your weapon handy, and let’s go look.”

We went up the basement steps. The door at the top of the stairs was still welded closed but the hole I had made in the wall was much bigger now. The police must have broken it open. It was big enough for a large person to walk through.

“This is it,” my grandmother whispered to me, holding my arm tightly. We stepped through the hole into the kitchen, but the room was empty.

“I don’t think anybody’s here,” I said.

“Quiet,” she said in an urgent whisper. “Don’t you hear that?” She pointed up at the ceiling.

I held my breath and listened. Something was scraping or clicking just above us. We crept out to the hall and went up the staircase. On the second floor, we looked in the door of the schoolroom and saw someone sitting at my desk working on the computer. We stared at the woman, but she was so busy looking at the computer screen that she held up a hand to signal us to wait.

“Just . . . one . . . moment. . . ,” she said.

She had a mug on the table beside her, filled with some disgusting reddish pinkish squishy material. It looked like pureed goldfish. She was skinny and had long curly blonde hair that was almost down to her elbows. She had wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, a piercing blue gaze, and very, very dirty and tattered clothes. Except for the tattered clothes and the extra long hair, and the traces of chocolate and banana and pinkish squishy stuff at the corners of her mouth, she was straight from the photograph in my grandmother’s bedroom. But she was full of an amazing wiry energy and intensity that could never come across in any picture.

My grandmother seemed to go rigid and her eyes bugged out of her head. I could feel her swaying next to me and I thought she was about to fall over backward, so I clutched onto her to hold her up. Her metal rod fell to the ground with a clang, and the woman finally looked up.

“Mom,” she said, “this is great. Wow, what’s happened to the Internet? It’s so fast. It’s amazing. I need to order some laser guided survey equipment. By the way, this yogurt tastes a little old. It was in the back of the fridge.”