4

Stardust Cavern

BEFORE ANASTASIA COULD ask “Why is there a secret stairwell in the Merry Mouse cheese cave?” or “Why would Grandma Wiggy be down there, wherever there is?” or even “When are we going to take a bathroom break?” Penny stooped to scramble into the hole. “Come along, dear!”

Anastasia waffled just one heartbeat, and then she shifted her satchel between her shoulder blades and climbed into the stairwell. Baldwin squeezed in after her, reaching back to pull the cheese case snugly behind them.

“This staircase has exactly ninety-nine steps,” Penny said. “And they’re narrow and steep, so please be careful.”

“My friend Basil once fell down the whole shebang,” Baldwin said. “Ah, what a night that was! We had some wonderful fun at the Dinkledorf pub before he broke his arm.”

There wasn’t a railing, so Anastasia steadied herself by sliding one palm along the stairwell’s clammy, curving inner wall. Down, down, down they went. Zither, whoosh, swizzle, hummed their snow pants. The air was cold and damp and left a strange, gritty taste on Anastasia’s tongue.

“Where are we going, exactly?” she asked.

“Nowhere Special,” Penny said.

“It must be a little special if we have to take a secret staircase to get there,” Anastasia reasoned.

“No, dear. Nowhere Special. It’s the name of the city we’re going to,” Penny said. “We’ll be safe from CRUD there.”

“An underground city?” Anastasia squeaked.

“A secret underground city,” Baldwin corrected her. “It’s a shame we don’t have s’mores and a campfire, because the history of Nowhere Special is long and fascinating and just dripping with delectable secrets.”

“It’s dripping, all right,” Anastasia observed as a chilly droplet fell from the rocky ceiling and splashed on her nose.

“We’re coming to the bottom,” Penny said. “Ninety-eight…ninety-nine…”

The stairwell yawned into a low, craggy cavern. In this cavern was a man, sitting on a little chair and examining his fingernails by the glow of a lantern perched on his knee. When he saw them, he jumped up and clicked his heels. “Salutations!”

“Hello, Belfry!” Baldwin called. “How have you been this past decade?”

“Very well, Your Most Excellent,” Belfry said. He was wearing a tri-corner hat, a stiff black suit with trousers that ended just below his knees, and white hose, and his long hair was arranged in sausagey white curls tied back in a black bow. He looked, Anastasia thought, rather like paintings she had seen of George Washington.

“Presenting our Most Excellent Niece, Anastasia!” Baldwin said, clapping her shoulder. Belfry bowed at the waist. Then he turned and pressed his lantern into the darkness, illuminating a boat bobbing in a canal behind his chair. The boat was long and black. It was just wide enough for two people to squeeze in side by side, provided neither one had a very large bottom.

“Last one in is a rotten egg!” Baldwin crowed, taking a long-legged leap into the craft and nearly capsizing it in the process. “Here, Anastasia; alley-oop!”

“Keep your hands and feet inside the gondola,” Belfry intoned as she squished in next to Baldwin. “The eels have been particularly active tonight.”

“Eels?” Anastasia yawped.

“Electric eels,” Belfry added somberly.

Penny hopped to the seat in front of them, and Belfry followed, hanging his lantern on a hook curling from the boat’s prow. “Virgil!”

A dark shape detached itself from the shadows and fluttered to land on the tip of Belfry’s hat, swinging to dangle upside down.

“Is that a bat?” Anastasia gasped.

“There are lots of bats down here,” Penny said. “I’m glad you like animals so much!”

Belfry untethered the boat and grabbed the handle of a long oar, and they glided into the gloom.

“Your Most Excellent?” Anastasia whispered to Baldwin. “Is that how people say sir down here?”

Baldwin shrugged and smiled.

“Mind your heads,” Belfry cautioned as the gondola slid into a tunnel.

“There are tunnels all over the Cavelands,” Penny said. “Some of them link to the aqueduct system, and some of them are dry.”

Faint greenish light gleamed ahead, and it grew brighter and brighter until the channel blurted them into another cavern, and Belfry bellowed, much like a trolley conductor announcing stops, “Bacon Grotto.”

Big rock formations bristled from Bacon Grotto’s vault. “Those are stalactites,” Baldwin said. “They take thousands of years to form. They’re even older than your aunt here, Anastasia!”

“Oh, Baldwin!” Penny rolled her eyes. “But it’s true that they’re old.”

“They start with just a bitty drop of water on the ceiling,” Baldwin said.

“There’s a little bit of mineral mixed in,” Penny explained. “Each drip leaves behind a smidgen of limestone, and over time the limestone builds up to form those spikes.”

“What about those?” Anastasia asked as they passed some crags steepling from a stone ledge.

“Stalagmites,” Penny said. “When the stalactite dribbles onto the cave floor, it splashes and leaves some limestone behind. Eventually the drops grow upward into a stalagmite.”

“Sometimes the stalactite grows so long and the stalagmite grows so tall that they meet in the middle and kiss!” Baldwin said, winking.

“What’s that glowing green stuff?” Anastasia asked. “It looks like nuclear mold.”

“It’s phosphorescent moss,” Baldwin said. “And those blinky little lights up there? Twinkle beetles. They blink like that to attract their girlfriends, randy fellows!”

“Prrrrp! Squee!” Belfry piped up. Anastasia boggled as Virgil screaked in return, then rustled his wings and zoomed out of view.

“Virgil is a courier, you see,” Penny said.

“Sort of like a singing telegram,” Baldwin added. “We don’t have telephones down here.”

“Or electricity,” Penny said. “Everything is lit by lamps and candles, and we have to do things the old-fashioned way. And we use bats to send messages. Virgil just flew ahead to tell Wiggy we’re almost home.”

“Belfry talked to that bat? And told him all that?” Anastasia said. “And Virgil is going to—to squeak the message to Grandma?”

“Precisely,” Baldwin said. “They were speaking Echolalia, the ancient bat tongue.”

Belfry churned his oar, propelling the gondola from Bacon Grotto and down another dark conduit. The lantern swung to and fro, its reflection warping on the rippling water.

“Look!” Baldwin tugged one of Anastasia’s braids, tilting her gaze up to the stalactites. A platoon of enormous bats, their wings spread to reveal steel-tinseled torsos, hung from the scraggy dripstone.

“What are they wearing?” Anastasia squinted at the creatures’ strange vests.

“Chain-mail armor,” Baldwin said. “They’re Royal Guard Bats.”

“They’re called flying foxes, but of course they aren’t foxes at all,” Penny said. “They’re fruit bats.”

“Just try to make a Royal Guard Bat laugh,” Baldwin said. “You can’t! You can’t even make them smile when they’re on duty. These bats are very professional. Highly trained! Just watch!”

“Oh, bother. Anastasia, brace yourself for some very bad jokes,” Penny warned.

“Here’s a bit of fruit-themed humor for you boys,” Baldwin called. “What do you call a shoe made from a banana?”

“A flip-flop?” Anastasia guessed.

“Good try, but no cigar,” Baldwin said. “The correct response is: a slipper!”

“Baldwin, that was pathetic,” Penny chided. “Did you make that up yourself?”

The bats didn’t react at all. They were still as stone, their eyes glittering in the lamplight.

“See?” Baldwin said. “Not a smile! Not a snicker! These bats are stoic as heck.”

“We’re not smiling, either,” Penny said, even though she was.

Belfry cleared his throat. “Next stop: Stardust Cavern.”

Reader, have you ever—perhaps in a great cathedral, or observatory, or state capitol building—beheld a super-colossal vault? Stardust Cavern outsized any such man-made rotunda, and still its splendor surpassed its scope: every inch of it was splendiferous. Anastasia fancied they’d sailed into the belly of a star. Aglitter with snowy-white minerals, a-twinkle with thousands of candles, the luminous wonderland doubled in the silver lagoon carpeting its depths like a wall-to-wall mirror. From the center of this lagoon rose a castle, and a most phantasmagorical castle it was. Its domes puffed like the crowns of soft-serve ice cream cones, and its towers swirled like jet streams tootled by daring stunt planes.

“What is that place?” Anastasia breathed.

“Cavepearl Palace,” Penny said.

“Home,” Baldwin added. “Not too shabby, eh?”

“Home?” Anastasia exclaimed. “Our home?”

“Yes, dear.” Penny’s lips twitched in a silent librarian giggle. “You see, your grandmother Wiggy is queen of the Cavelands. And that makes Baldy a prince, and me a princess.”

“And you’re a princess, too, Anastasia,” Baldwin said.

“Biscuit crumbs! A princess? Me?”

Her head reeled. Freckled, tragically flatulent Anastasia McCrumpet (or Merrymoon), royalty? Absurd! Codswallop! Dottier, even, than the notion that she might one day turn into a mouse or bat or guinea pig!

“We didn’t tell you earlier,” Penny apologized, “because we didn’t want to overwhelm you with everything all at once.”

“And my dad is—”

“A prince,” Penny said.

“Gosh, it’s nice to be home,” Baldwin said. “We’ve been abovecaves for ten years, Penny. Think of that.”

A low sob rippled through the cavern.

Anastasia patted Baldwin’s arm. “It’s okay to cry. I know what it’s like to be homesick, too.”

“I’m not crying,” Baldwin insisted. “Look at my eyes. See? Dry as a desert.”

Boohoo. Boooohoooohoooo.

Anastasia turned. “Was that you, Aunt Penny?”

“No, dear.”

“You’re merely hearing the lagoon, Princess,” Belfry said.

“Ah! I’d almost forgotten,” Baldwin exclaimed. “This is the Gloomy Lagoon, Anastasia. It’s always moping and weeping. Sometimes it actually bawls, which is very unpleasant.” A wail rose from the silvery water. “Oh, stop your blubbering.”

“But how can water be sad?” Anastasia quizzed.

“Mystery of nature.” Baldwin shrugged.

A fleet of black gondolas bobbed beside a dock stretching, like a snowy lane, from the palace entrance. Belfry eased his craft alongside this dark flotilla. “Your Excellencies.”

“Thanks ever so much for the ride, Belfry,” Penny said.

The royals trod the pier to an arch flanked by two Royal Guard Bats and passed through this into a shadowy corridor. Candles guttered in nooks in the rippling rock walls, and crystal spikes bristled from the ceiling. Penny drew her face close to Anastasia’s ear. “You mustn’t be nervous,” she murmured. “Wiggy is very serious, but she’s also kind.”

“And don’t let her eyes frighten you,” Baldwin cautioned.

“Why would her eyes frighten me?” Anastasia asked, but Penny put her index finger to her pursed lips.

“Look,” she whispered. “There she is.”