CHAPTER 10
THE WORM TUNNEL
The Descent
By Dr. Alford Carr-Insurance
Three children and their teacher
descend beneath all hope
suspended on a platform
held by one desperate rope.
Too rickety for comfort,
the teacher turns the crank;
the shaft grows ever darker
and the afternoon turns to stank.
The candle flickers brighter
as the last of daylight wanes.
What streaks are these that mar the walls?
Are they claw marks?
Or bloodstains?
Dee-Dee smiles, Eugenia groans,
Gertrude quakes in fear,
the Pastramibird cleans its feathers,
while Millicent says,
“WE’RE HERE.”
“I AM NERVOUS,” Millicent said. “I have never been down here before. I have no way of knowing what contraptions Fifi Bubblegumme used to guard his lab. I don’t want to kill someone else’s children. I read a book once about a woman who dropped someone else’s baby onto a brick walkway by mistake and it ruined her life and everyone else’s. I hope this isn’t that. Anyway. Just had to get that off my chest.”
The rickety platform came to a halt. At the bottom of the old elevator shaft was a long hallway lit by sconces made out of human skulls, with little flames flicking through the nose and eye holes. A sign on the wall read:
These Skulls Were Here When I Bought This Tunnel and I Didn’t Have the Money to Change Them
—Dr. F. Bubblegumme
The group tiptoed through the darkened tunnel. “Fifi Bubblegumme was a Vermologist,” Millicent reminded them, “so probably any booby traps en route to the laboratory will be worm themed.”
The walls and ceiling of the tunnel were lined with thousands of little holes, which none of the children wanted to really think about, least of all Eugenia, who was trying to stifle a gag.
“Eugenia, dear, are you ill?” Millicent said.
“Eugh,” she gagged. “It’s my trypophobia.”
“Your what now?”
“I have a fear of lots of tiny holes all together, like a wasp’s nest or a lotus,” she replied. “Eughhhh, I can’t think about it, I am gagging!”
“That sounds fake to me,” said Millicent. “Is that a real fear?”
“YES!”
As they pressed on, Gertrude had the bizarre feeling of being at once terrified and certain that when she looked back on the whole of her life, this day would probably rank among the top five.
“Let us read the riddle one more time,” Millicent said, and she consulted the sign posted on the wall of the tunnel, which read: KEYPAD INSTRUCTIONS FOR MY LAB.
“Open the lock with the azure spoon
The laboratory will be your boon
But be quick, for after a minute
There may be some visitors in it.”
Gertrude shuddered to think of who the visitors might be.
“What happens after a minute?” Eugenia had asked, trying to appear casual.
“I do not know,” Millicent had said. “But let us do our best to not find out.”
Finally, the group reached the end of the tunnel, where they came upon a door that had been carved from a solid slab of beautiful, swirling blue rock.
“Veinite,” Eugenia said. “Interesting.”
Millicent smiled slyly, having caught Eugenia in a rare moment of sincere interest. “Where did you read about Veinite?”
Eugenia bristled, not about to be pegged for anything other than an aloof and annoyed person. “Not that I care, but it was in the textbook you gave me. The crystals rearrange themselves in the presence of azure. Again, not that I care.”
“Would you like to do the honors, then?” Millicent asked, handing Eugenia the Azure Spoon of Aziza.
Eugenia, having forgotten all about her trypophobia and the tiny holes, placed the spoon into an opening in the door. At once, the crystals of Veinite began to curl like ringlets of hair, and the door crumpled in on itself.
Millicent and the Porches had to admit that it was one of the more beautiful things that had ever graced their eyeballs. They stood there for ten seconds or so, observing the slow caving of crystal, marveling at how something so solid could be so summarily rearranged, almost like life itself.
“Wait! What are we doing?!” Eugenia cried, yanking the group from their reverie. “We only have sixty seconds, remember! Run!” She checked her pocket watch. “FIFTY SECONDS REMAINING!”
The group burst into Fifi Bubblegumme’s laboratory, a stone chamber strewn with old glass terrariums, hundreds of empty silkworm cocoons, and reams and reams of silk—silk that had been spun, ostensibly, by the now-defunct colony of silkworms. In one corner there was a pile of books as high as the ceiling—thousands of leather-bound books, all labeled DIARY.
“Which one is the right diary?” Gertrude cried.
“THIRTY-SEVEN SECONDS REMAINING!”
“I DON’T KNOW!” Millicent shouted. “Just take them all! Pile them into your pockets!”
They stuffed as many leather-bound diaries as they could into their Taffetteen pockets, which was not many. Meanwhile, the walls began to quake, and dust shook from the ceiling.
“FOURTEEN SECONDS REMAINING!”
Millicent looked around for a solution, then, in a panic, cried: “Dee-Dee, be a dear and make a machine that can ferry the rest of the diaries back to the elevator?”
Dee-Dee surveyed the room from beneath the brim of her cowboy hat. Cocoons, terrariums, reams of silk—not much for making a diary-carrying machine, but if anyone could do it, it was Dee-Dee.
“Got it.”
She wobbled under the weight of a bolt of blue silk as she pulled it from the pile. It was stitched together at the ends, forming a big band. She knew that she could use the silk to construct a conveyor belt and lay the diaries on it—but how would the belt be conveyed?
“ONE SECOND REMAINING!”
Then, zero. Silence.
“What happens now?” Gertrude whispered.
“Now we wait,” Millicent said gravely.
All was still.
Then, from the ceiling: little pitters and patters, like light rain.
“Where are the visitors?” Gertrude whispered in terror.
Eugenia, looking up at the horrible holes in the ceiling, began to gag. “I am going to barf,” she said. “I am barfing. Oh my Gourd, I am barfing.”
From the holes emerged hundreds and hundreds of tiny silkworms, gray and furry. They fell like grains of rice at a wedding and writhed on the ground. They fell like a spring storm, pelting the floor, landing in the pupils’ hair. Grayish-white wormy worms, wriggling everywhere. Every surface was alive and churning.
Millicent’s chest heaved as she tried to control her breathing. “This is fine,” she said brightly. “This is all in the course of a normal school! The school is going well!”
The group stood two feet deep in a pool of worms, while more slopped from the ceiling. Gertrude could feel them burrowing through her hair, up her sleeves, and down her socks. She wanted to wade through the horde to get to safety but didn’t want to crush any of the poor things underfoot, so she stayed where she was, figuring maybe it was her destiny to be buried alive in a grave of worms.
She considered screaming, but she didn’t want to appear terrified in front of her little sisters, so she turned her scream into a single high-pitched, operatic note.
A few of the worms that were worming around in her hair suddenly leaped to the ground, as if trying to escape the sound.
“Jeez, my voice isn’t that bad!” Then she remembered the worms in the lemons in Millicent’s kitchen and how they were repelled by the sound of high-pitched singing. Might these silkworms be the same?
Gertrude took a breath from deep in her core and sang as high and loud as she could: “Azure Spoon of Azizzaaaaaaaaaaa…!”
The worms slithered away from her as fast as their segmented tube bodies could carry them.
“Everyone, sing!” Gertrude shouted. “Sing high!”
Millicent, never one to turn down an opportunity to perform, cleared her throat and sang an Italian aria about unrequited love. The worms fled en masse.
Eugenia, who had never deigned to part her lips in song, offered a reedy rendition of “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
Dee-Dee was not one for singing. She was too busy studying Themath1 of the scene—the angles, the forces, the torques, the propulsions, the forward churning of the worms… Huzzah! What better way to power a silk conveyor belt than the insistent forward churning of millions of worms?
Dee-Dee fed the blue silk over the swarm, and the worms propelled it forward. She tipped her cowboy hat to the wriggling pistons of her impromptu motor. “Keep up the good work, boys.”
The Porches all pitched in to pile the leather diaries onto the conveyor belt, all except for Eugenia, who was too ill from the sight of worms and tiny holes to do much of anything, so they piled Eugenia onto the conveyor belt as well.
Loading the diaries into the trunk of the Gerbilcar was a tedious misadventure all its own, as is always the case when one has to load things into the trunk of a car. Suffice it to say that Millicent and her pupils sped away with their hard-won cargo just as Mme Flambé returned with the police, where the frazzled shop owner found nothing out of place, save for a few stray worms wriggling on the floor.
Meanwhile, in a café across the street, Ursula Wintermacher enjoyed a cup of tea while she watched the scene unfold through a pair of opera glasses.
“Fascinating,” she said. “Now I see where those three little Porch rejects ran off to that day. Looks like Millicent Quibb has gotten herself some pupils!”
At the same time, Lavinia-Steve watched the same scene unfold from a patisserie around the corner, desperately confused as to why the three children loading books into a strange car looked a lot like…
HER COUSINS!
Footnotes
1 Reminder: The universal order underlying all things.