They chased the blue light as it flew down one passageway and turned down another and then another, staying far ahead of them. All at once it veered left, then disappeared through a doorway.
“It’s going into our school,” Nogg said.
A moment later, they stood at the school’s doorway. The blue light had disappeared again.
“This is my classroom,” Nogg told them, shining the flashlight around the room. There were no posters on the walls or reading lofts, just desks. Hugo thought it wasn’t nearly as nice as his school in Widdershins Cavern.
“See that?” Nogg aimed the flashlight at the back of the classroom. There were rocks all over the floor, some of them very large. “That’s where the wall caved in after we heard the knocking.” He pointed the flashlight at a desk that was smashed to bits. “That was my desk.”
“Holy cats,” Boone said quietly.
Out of the corner of his eye, Hugo spotted the blue light in the next room, darting about wildly.
“There it is!” he cried. They dashed into the other classroom, but by the time they got there, the blue light had disappeared once more.
“And poof, it’s gone,” said Boone.
“This is Yama’s classroom,” Nogg said, pointing the flashlight at the small desks. The cavern’s walls were lined with shelves full of paint and brushes and pots of glue. On a table in the corner was a display of miniature houses.
Hugo felt that prickly feeling in his Golden Eye again.
“What are these?” Hugo asked as he walked up to the little houses.
“Fairy houses,” Nogg told him. “The younger squidges made them.”
They were built out of bark and moss and clay. Some of them were lopsided and some of them were nothing more than twigs leaning up against one another. But there was one that was very well made and as big as a dollhouse. It had windows with curtains and a little door painted blue. The roof was made of pinecone scales and it had its own chimney that was covered in moss.
“That’s Yama’s fairy house,” Nogg said when he saw Hugo looking at it.
Carefully, Hugo wiggled the roof on Yama’s fairy house. It was glued down, but with a few more wiggles, he was able to lift it off the house and look inside.
“Whoa!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Nogg rushed over and aimed the flashlight directly into Yama’s fairy house.
Piled in the house were all sorts of things—candles, a river-stone bracelet, a small fox carved out of wood, a whittling knife, a toy lantern, a wooden spoon, a doll in a green cap lying down on a tiny bed with a handkerchief blanket, a piece of honey-drop candy, and dozens of other things.
Nogg reached into the house and pulled out a blue sash covered with colorful wooden badges pinned to it.
“My merit badges,” he said, shaking his head in bewilderment. He put the sash around his neck, then sifted through the pile of things in the fairy house. “There’s Mrs. Wikpik’s bracelet and that’s my dad’s knife, and there’s my cousin’s slingshot . . .” He stopped and sighed. “No notebook, though.”
“I guess it must have been Yama who was stealing things,” Nogg said sadly. “I just don’t understand. It’s not like her . . .”
It was then that Hugo reached into the fairy house, and with the tip of his finger, he knocked the green hat off the little doll’s head. In a flash, the doll leapt out of the bed, bit Hugo’s finger, and snatched his hat from off the fairy house floor.
