DAD WAS HOME WHEN I got back. I thought he’d be glad when he heard how I’d caught the hold-up man, but I was wrong as usual. You never can tell with him.
By the time I walked in the door, he’d gotten the call from Mr. Wong and was running around yelling at Cyndi for sending me out so late, and at Oggie for still being awake. Then Mom phoned in the middle of everything and had to be told what happened. For a while, everybody was screaming at everybody at the top of their lungs. The neighbors probably thought we were trying to murder each other.
Finally, things quieted down, but by then Oggie had the yeeks so bad he’d crawled under his bed. It’s serious when he does that because you know he won’t come out for hours. I handed him Bunny Two and we all, Dad and Cyndi and I, lay down on our stomachs so we could make eye contact and try to talk him out. But he was too upset. You can’t drag him out, either, or he just gets worse.
“You go to bed,” I told Dad and Cyndi. “I’ll stay up with him. I’m still pretty zapped from everything, anyway.”
“But honeybun, you’ve got school tomorrow! You need to get your rest!” Cyndi said, trying to sound like Mom. It burned me up when she pulled stuff like that.
“He’s all right, leave him alone,” Dad snapped at her. “Archie’s the only one that can do anything when Oggie gets like this.”
They went off to bed and I lay back down on my stomach and looked at Oggie again. He had Bunny over his face. I couldn’t see if he was still crying.
First, I thought I’d tell him what happened with the hold-up man at the store. Then I decided that might upset him more, because it was the thing that had started all the yelling to begin with.
Next I thought of telling him that I’d seen his wallet. I didn’t want him to know how I’d run into the Night Riders, though, or where I might be going the next day, in case he blabbed to Dad or Mom, so I put a block on that, too.
“Hey, Oggie, I was trying to remember. Where were we with The Mysterious Mole People?” I asked him.
Well, he knew as well as I did where we were. The last couple of nights, I’d been reading him some new parts I’d written in the closet. That closet was turning out to be great place to write. I’d been in there a few more times and the new stuff was pretty good, if I do say so.
Amory and Alphonse had launched themselves on a full-scale expedition into the Mole People’s kingdom. The open slurp hole they’d found, and the footholds, were the perfect way in.
They realized how risky it would be, though, and that one or the other might never come back, so before they went down, they swore a bond of eternal brotherhood. To make it real, they pricked their fingers with a safety pin Amory had and crossed their blood. Amory became part reptile, and Alphonse became part human, a big deal that neither would ever forget.
Then Amory picked up Alphonse and tucked him inside his shirt, where the old turtle always rode during dangerous adventures. Step by step, they climbed down the slurp-hole footholds into the dark.
For many days and nights, which were impossible to tell apart, Amory and Alphonse traveled around the Mole People’s underground tunnels, gathering information.
They saw (from a safe distance, of course) that the Mole People were really shy creatures when they weren’t making slurp-hole attacks on the world above. Anger and fear caused them to rise up and become warlike.
They saw that the Mole People still did have human feet, and spoke the remains of an English language. They had gone almost completely blind, though, like real moles. To make up for this, their sense of smell was razor sharp. Amory and Alphonse had to take dirt baths every day to erase the greasy human odors from their bodies.
For a while, Amory and Alphonse were undiscovered. But finally came a day when they stumbled into a group of Mole People by mistake.
“Hartungh! Who goes there?”
“Only we! I mean us.”
“Rumbfargh! Invaders! Sound the alarm!”
In seconds, Mole Security Forces closed in from all sides and arrested them. The Forces imprisoned Amory in a deep pit lit only by horrible, bloodsucking glowworms that lived in the mud walls. He had to stay awake at all times, and be constantly on guard that the worms didn’t fall on him, or he would have been sucked to a bloodless husk in one hour.
Meanwhile, the Mysterious Mole People, alarmed out of their minds by being invaded, called a huge meeting to decide Amory’s fate.
Oggie had heard all this. He was desperate to know what would happen next. He was just too stubborn to admit it.
“Amory Ellington is certainly in a tight place,” I told him. “Did you notice he’s lost Alphonse? The Mysterious Mole People carried Alphonse off. They’re probably getting ready to make him into turtle soup or something.”
Silence from Oggie. It was a listening silence, though. A listening silence is a lot quieter than the other kind. That’s because the person who’s listening is straining to hear something he thinks will be important, so he doesn’t move a muscle or even breathe very loud.
“I guess you think Amory and Alphonse are goners,” I said. “I guess you think they’ll be trapped in the Mysterious Mole People’s kingdom forever and ever, never to return, so it’s not worth hearing any more about them.”
Oggie’s eyes looked out over the top of Bunny’s ears. “No, I don’t,” he said in a quivery voice.
“I bet you think Amory’s mother will never see him again. You probably think Amory will give up life as a human and turn into a Mole Person himself.”
Oggie dropped Bunny and looked at me angrily. “No, I don’t!”
“Well, good,” I said. “Because he doesn’t. Amory Ellington knows how to get out of situations like this. He knows how to get Alphonse out, too. He’s one sharp dude.”
Oggie crawled out from underneath his bed. He lay down on top with Bunny flopped on his stomach.
“Did you really trip up that robber at the store?” he asked.
“Yeah. I didn’t mean to, though—don’t tell anybody.”
Oggie glanced at me. “You mean he just tripped?”
“Well, my foot was there, so I guess I did it somehow.”
Oggie twisted one of Bunny’s ears around his finger. I could see he was working something out.
“Maybe the Mysterious Mole People helped you,” he said at last. He gave me a humorous look.
“How’s that?”
“They didn’t have time to do a slurp on the robber, so they put your foot in the way and tripped him up.”
I had to laugh. “Maybe,” I said. We both grinned at each other.
Right then, in a flash, I saw that Oggie knew the Mysterious Mole People weren’t real. He was making a joke about them, that’s what told me.
“Wow!” I said. “You are one cool kid.”
I’d always thought Oggie believed the story was true, that he had to believe if it was going to work for him. Well, maybe he did believe it in the beginning, but he didn’t now.
He knew the Mysterious Mole People weren’t really there, living under the ground, slurping bad guys. BUT HE DIDN’T CARE! He still wanted to hear about them. They meant something to him that realness didn’t come into. That got the writer in me pretty excited. I could see I was on to some hot stuff.
A lot of people think that fiction stories aren’t the truth, that a story isn’t worth reading if it didn’t really happen. But they’re wrong. The realest stories are the ones that are made up, because if you do it right, they go down deep to where the real truth is, below all the fake stuff lying around on the surface.
I sat up on my knees by the bed and rested my arms next to Oggie.
“Are you ready?” I asked him. “This is serious, you know. This story is big. It might get published.”
“And make a lot of money,” Oggie said.
“So you can buy a car,” I told him.
“You’d give me your book money to buy a car?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not? You’re the one who’s going to be driving.”
Oggie opened his eyes up wide and stared at me for a second. Then he sucked in his breath and nodded.