AS THEY RACED down the basement stairs, Gertie saw something ahead of her glowing.
“Stop! Stop!” she called back to the others. “There’s something on the step.” But then she recognized what it was.
“Slug Lamp!”
“What on earth is that doing down here?” Kolt said, catching up. “Moonberries don’t grow underground.”
Gertie picked it up and looked at its squashy, sluggy face.
“Hey! It’s the one you gave me on my first night here!”
At hearing her voice, the Slug Lamp glowed a bit brighter.
“Throw it upstairs through the trapdoor,” Kolt said quickly. “We have work to do.”
“I will not!” Gertie snapped. “I’ll bet it was trying to save the cave sprites, but only got as far as the third step.”
The Slug Lamp glowed and wriggled as if this were all true. Robot Rabbit Boy stepped down to where Gertie was and touched the creature with his paw.
“Mashed potato?”
“Slug Lamp,” Gertie said, then stuffed the creature into her jeans pocket where he’d be safe. “C’mon, let’s go!”
Once they were in the basement, the presence of intruders was immediately clear. Most of the lamps had been pulled from the rock and lay glowing in bits on the ground. Messages had also been spray painted on the cave walls, such as:
loserz win!
And:
wee no wear u live!
And perhaps the one they had intended to be most frightening but wasn’t:
keepers dye
A few of the bedroom doors had cracks and indentations where they had been thumped with something hard and heavy.
“Look, Kolt! They must have tried to get into some of the rooms.”
“But they couldn’t, could they?” Kolt said, examining the handles. “I wonder why their stolen Keepers’ key didn’t work?”
“I guess the same reason they couldn’t get into our bedrooms. . . . Maybe the B.D.B.U. has the power to block them!”
“Yes, or maybe they only work when yielded by a true Keeper.”
The Losers had also failed to capture, or douse, even a single cave sprite, and the whole week of them appeared to meet Gertie and Kolt as a chaotic jumble of orange lights, although old Sunday still lagged behind, confused as to what was happening.
Robot Rabbit Boy couldn’t stop looking at the sprites. “Eggcup . . .” he said dreamily, reaching up with his ragged paw toward the lowest one. “Lavender . . .”
“Thank goodness they’re unharmed!” Kolt said, wondering why the sprites had begun to hover over an ancient Inuit boat in the center of the room. “What are they doing?”
“Maybe they have something to show us?” Gertie asked.
“That’s it, you’re right!” Kolt said, rushing over to the boat. “Let’s get in the umiak! The sprites must want to take us deep under the cliff to one of the lowest rooms. Climb inside the boat, everyone!”
Gertie and Robot Rabbit Boy stepped sheepishly inside the vessel—which Kolt said had been joined from whalebone and animal skins by the native people of Greenland.
“Hold on, both of you,” he instructed.
“Mashed potato?”
“But there’s no water up here,” Gertie pointed out, looking around, “so hooooowwww—”
A trapdoor opened suddenly under the umiak, dropping the boat and its crew of three ten feet into a fast-flowing underground river.
“Hold on for dear life!” Kolt bellowed over the thunder of rushing water. “If anything jumps into the boat—throw it out!”
They were going so fast, Gertie didn’t even try to answer. She just gripped the sides, her hair blowing wildly as they dropped through a series of corkscrew turns. All Gertie could do was blink away the splashing water as best she could and hope that Robot Rabbit Boy hadn’t bounced out of the boat. When a sharp corner threw them all to the side of the bone-framed kayak, Gertie felt the Slug Lamp squirming in her pocket. Then a wave of freezing water took her breath away.
Finally, they dropped from the rushing tunnel into a deep lagoon.
Everyone was sopping wet, but had somehow managed to stay in the boat during the hellish descent. As they drifted with the current, still recovering their senses, Gertie saw they were deep under the cliff, most likely at sea level.
“We made it!” she said, taking the Slug Lamp out of her pocket to check if it was okay. The squashy creature nodded and blinked its eyes.
Kolt grabbed a bone oar and rowed them to the side of the cave. With the cave sprites drifting overhead, there was enough light for Gertie to make out a rocky staircase leading to a corridor lined with doors.
“That must be it!”
They clambered out of the boat and ran up the steps.
“It’s bedroom 888,” said Kolt, jostling his key into the lock. With extreme caution Kolt, Gertie, Robot Rabbit Boy, the Slug Lamp (in Gertie’s pocket), and cave sprites entered the darkened chamber.
To Gertie’s great relief, it didn’t appear to be a living room (like the bedroom of lost limbs), as all they could see at first were narrow slits of bamboo with vertical writing that had been tied together with string.
“Books,” Kolt said, unrolling one. “Old Chinese books.”
“Why are there books in here?”
“I don’t know,” Kolt said. “But not all books contain knowledge, Gertie—some are just pamphlets intended to spread fear.”
Gertie pointed to a plain-looking bowl with pink powder. “I thought each room contained only one type of thing?”
“This one is different,” Kolt said apprehensively. “I knew it existed, but hoped I’d never see it.”
“Why?”
“Because bedroom 888 contains an object from ancient Asia capable of destroying the B.D.B.U.”
“It can be destroyed?”
“Oh yes . . . just like any living thing.”
“But why these things?”
“Because they’re made from metals, or powders, or even sound frequencies that have been known to undo the fibers from which the B.D.B.U. is woven. The rooms in this lower chamber of the cliff contain some of the most dangerous items from the world.”
Gertie stared in awe at the various artifacts capable of such devastation. There was a bronze gong with a skull drawn on it, three green poles sharpened at the edges, a statue of an angry looking half-man/half-fish, a glass ball with fire inside, and a sword in a sheath woven with silver, which was the only item in the room glowing brightly.
Kolt saw it too.
“Be careful!” he said. “Stay back, and let the cave sprites do their job.”
“Why would the B.D.B.U. want us to get something that could destroy it?” Gertie asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
They watched as the cave sprites flitted about the room over the many objects, before finally settling on the glowing sword.
“Could it be wrong?” Gertie asked. “You said the B.D.B.U. sometimes gets things mixed up, so how can we be sure?”
When the cave sprites had gone over the ancient weapon several times, checking to make sure it wasn’t a trap left by the Losers, Kolt stepped forward and took hold of it. “At this point we have no choice, Gertie. It’s blind faith in the old book from here on out.”
Gertie and Robot Rabbit Boy followed Kolt out of bedroom 888, and watched as he removed his key from the lock, then hurriedly took out the time machine.
“We’re not going in the Time Cat?”
“No time!” Kolt said. “We’d have to paddle out of the cliff, then around to the beach. Even with Johnny the Guard Worm pushing us, it would take too long to get back to the garden.”
“Do you know where we’re going?”
“Ancient China, I think, but I don’t know exactly, sometime between 700 and 300 B.C.E. We’re going to have to trust that the B.D.B.U. knows what it’s doing.”
“Shouldn’t we change clothes at least, to fit in?” Gertie said.
“We can’t visit the Sock Drawer, we’ve got Losers to catch! Now everybody link hands.”
With the Slug Lamp still in her pocket, Gertie huddled next to Kolt as he threaded his key into the time machine.
“Wait!” she cried, looking around for Robot Rabbit Boy, who had slinked off to a far corner of the cave.
“What’s he doing?” Kolt called out. “Robot Rabbit Boy! Over here now! Eggcup! Eggcup!”
But he just stood there, looking down at the floor and shuffling his paws.
“He’s upset about something,” Gertie said. “Maybe he thinks we’re taking him back to the abandoned city?”
“I’ll take care of this,” Kolt said, giving Gertie the sword and rushing over to the little creature.
“Down on one knee!”
Robot Rabbit Boy did as he was told, his plump metal legs knocking with fear.
“I, Kolt, head Keeper of Skuldark, hereby officially recognize that the Series 7 creature known as Robot Rabbit Boy is to be sworn in by an emergency honorary decree in the Age of Disappearance as an official Keeper of Lost Things, thus enjoying all the privileges, benefits, protections, mysteries, coincidences, extraordinary cakes, and dangers accompanying the aforementioned position, from now until the end—or the beginning—of time. Upon these words I do so solemnly swear, this day, with Gertie Milk as my official witness . . . now link up!”