Ignatius MacFarland (24 page)

BLAM! The office door broke open behind us as we tore around the corner and saw an open elevator.

“Oh, man, I always swore I’d never get into one of those in this frequency,” Karen said as we sprinted toward the junky-looking elevator and jumped inside. The elevator bounced up and down as we landed, like it was being held up by a bungee cord instead of a steel cable. We looked and saw the octopus come flying around the corner, slipping on the floor and smashing into the wall. His tentacles scrambled on the carpeting and soon he was tearing straight toward us.

“Push the button!” Karen yelled as she reached past me and hit the “1” button over and over. The doors didn’t close, even when I started frantically pushing the “close door” button. Oh, man, this might not have been a very good idea, I thought as I stood in the tiny room-on-cables with a murderous octopus running toward us at a very high rate of speed. Just as the octopus guard leaped into the air and flew toward us with his tentacles reaching out and his suction cups smacking at us like four sets of kissing lips, the door went
ding!
and slid closed.

WHAM! We heard the octopus hit the door hard as the elevator started to move. I was about to say “That was close!” to Karen when we both realized that the elevator was not going down.

“What the . . . ?” Karen said as she looked at the buttons and started hitting the “1” again. Nope. This elevator was going up. Way up.

7, 8, 9, 10 . . . The numbers lit up on the counter as we watched helplessly. I hit the “stop” button but it didn’t respond. . . . 20, 21, 22, 23 . . .

“At least he thinks we’re going down,” I said, trying to put some kind of positive spin on all this.

“The numbers on his counter are probably showing that we’re going up,” said Karen, sounding worried for the first time since I’d known her. “God, is everything Arthur built a total piece of junk?”

. . . 50, 51, 52, 53 . . . We were almost at the top, since the buttons only went up to 60.
Only!
Sixty stories above the ground in a building that I knew was a swaying piece of bad engineering with a ton of army guys surrounding it.

Suddenly Frank Gutenkunitz didn’t sound so bad.

DING! The elevator ground loudly to a stop and bounced up and down so violently that Karen and I fell against each other. The door slid halfway open and then got stuck. Karen pressed the “1” button again, hoping that maybe the elevator would go back down. It made a loud buzzing noise that didn’t sound like it was telling us anything good was about to happen.

Karen and I looked at each other and both silently decided that it seemed like a good idea to get out of this dangerous little room. We stepped out cautiously and looked around, in case any of the army guys had somehow beaten us to the top. It was quiet, with only a few flickering lights showing us the crooked hallway. Not sure what to do, we started down the hall, trying to find a stairway.

“So why didn’t Arthur want you killed?” she asked as we walked. “What, are you, like, his best friend now or something?”

“Yeah, we’re best buddies,” I said sarcastically. “He just likes me because I didn’t say anything mean to him.”

“Why didn’t you? You saw what he did to Herfta’s city.”

“Yeah, like I’m going to give him a hard time when I’m trapped in his house. I didn’t want to get thrown into his dungeon.”

“So you just kissed his butt? ‘Ooo, Mr. Arthur, you’re so cool! It’s really great how you’re forcing a whole frequency of creatures to do everything you say or you’ll throw them in jail!’ That’s pretty pathetic, Iggy.”

My face got all hot as I suddenly felt really angry. “Look, I’m not some wannabe kung fu warrior like you, okay? I don’t know how to fight and I’m not good at being mean to people. What, did you want me to kick him in the nuts, too, and then take on his whole army?”

“That’s what I did.”

“Okay, so you’re cooler than I am! God! I’m just trying to stay alive right now.”

“Sometimes you gotta call people on it when they’re doing messed-up stuff, Iggy,” she said with a shrug. “You like Foo and you saw her entire city destroyed and yet you meet the guy who was responsible and you don’t say anything to him about it.”

“I don’t think he was responsible,” I said, suddenly remembering the conversation I overheard in the gold room.

“What are you talking about?”

“I overheard Mr. Arthur talking to that Herbert Golonski guy and he was yelling at Mr. Arthur for destroying the treetop city and Mr. Arthur said it wasn’t his fault. It sounded like the army did it on their own.”

“And you believed him?” she said with a snort.

“Yeah, because Mr. Arthur seemed really upset, and he and that Herbert guy were unloading tons of gold and Herbert was mad because having all the flying people in the air was going to make it hard for him to transport the gold back to our frequency.”

Karen stopped and looked at me.

“Wait a minute,” she said, looking confused. “
Our
frequency? What gold? And who’s that Herbert Golonski guy?”

“Didn’t you ever see him when you were hanging with Mr. Arthur?”

“I’ve never seen him before in my life,” she said, looking even more confused. “They’re
transporting
gold back to our frequency? How?”

“I don’t know. They had piles of gold bars in this big room and they were putting them into some kind of machine that I think can get us back home.”

Karen looked really surprised and was about to open her mouth to ask me more questions when suddenly the windows at the end of the hallway exploded inward and three octopus guards flew through and started running toward us.

We both screamed and took off down the hallway. We ran past the elevator, which was still buzzing loudly as the door kept banging, trying unsuccessfully to close itself.

SMASH! The window at the other end of the hallway disintegrated into a million pieces as three more octopus guys flew through. We skidded to a stop, trapped. I looked over and saw a door marked stairs.

“C’mon!” I said as I grabbed Karen’s arm and pulled her away.

I threw open the door and we started running down the winding metal stairs as fast as we could, our footsteps klinking loudly and echoing through the stairwell.

The sound of heavy gorilla feet running fast on the stairs came echoing up to us. Karen and I looked at each other, then she pulled open a door marked 58
TH FLOOR
and we ran into another hallway.

“They just got out of the stairwell!” we heard a gorilla voice yell as the door closed behind us.

“They’re going to find us,” Karen said as she looked around for an idea. “We’ve gotta get out of this building.”

“You think the elevator’s working yet?” I asked, knowing the answer was no but not having any other ideas.

Karen looked at me and I could see in her eyes that a plan had formed. “Great idea!” she said sincerely. “Let’s take the elevator.”

I knew from her tone that her new idea of taking the elevator wasn’t going to be the standard get-in / press-the-down-button / then-get-off-in-the-lobby version of elevator-taking. She ran around the corner and I heard her kick open an office door. I looked and saw her grabbing tape and mouse pads off a desk. Then she ran out carrying a couple of couch cushions and dropped everything in front of the elevator.

“C’mon!” she said. “Help me open these doors.”

I ran over to the elevator and she and I wedged our fingertips into the space where the doors closed and pulled in opposite directions. The doors slid open and a blast of air came out. We peered over the edge. The sixty-story shaft looked like a bottomless pit with a thick rope running down the middle of it.

Before I knew what was happening, Karen grabbed me and started taping one of the couch cushions around my waist, pulling a roll of packing tape around me several times.

“You’ll need this padding if you don’t want your stomach to get rope-burned,” she said as she tore the tape and then started taping the other cushion around her own waist.

“Wait, why would I get rope burns?”

“Because you’re going to be sliding down that elevator rope at a very high speed,” she said as the sound of the gorilla guards’ footsteps got louder inside the stairwell.

“We can’t slide down that rope!” I said, really freaking out.

“Maybe you want to take the chance that those guards won’t kill you but I don’t. So suit yourself,” she said as she peered down the shaft again and then looked at the rope to judge how far it was from the edge.

“Wait! You can’t just leave me here!” I said, freaking out even more, if such a thing was possible.

“Then follow me.”

“But . . . what about our hands?” I asked, desperate to find a way to talk her out of this particular escape plan of hers.

She smiled and held up the mouse pads she had taken from the office. “Arthur’s such an idiot. He invented mouse pads before he invented the mouse.”

She quickly taped one pad around each of her palms as we heard a gorilla in the stairwell say, “You guys check the fifty-eighth floor. We’ll go up to the fifty-ninth.”

“Oh, man,” I whined. “If I die, I’m gonna kill you.”

I held out my hands to Karen and she quickly taped a mouse pad around each of my palms.

The stairway door down the hall burst open. Karen gave me a look that said “Well, here’s goes nothin’” and then jumped into the elevator shaft, grabbing onto the rope and sliding down it quickly.

Just then, the gorillas ran around the corner and stopped when they saw me. They smiled and raised their swords threateningly as the octopus guys appeared behind them.

“End of the line, Anti-Art,” said the head gorilla guard.

“Wait, Mr. Arthur said not to kill me.”

The gorilla looked around at the others, then back at me.

“Don’t remember hearing that,” he said with a slow shake of his head.

They all started to stalk forward with evil smiles on their faces. I looked at the open shaft, then at the rope. Oh, well, I lied to myself, maybe it’ll be fun.

And with that, I jumped into the shaft and grabbed onto the rope. Ka-CHUNK! The rope jolted and I looked up to see that my weight had dislodged the elevator. It started to move downward as I quickly slid down the rope. I looked up to see the gorillas and octopus guys peering over the edge at me, then almost get their heads cut off by the descending elevator.

I was sliding down the rope quickly and could feel the heat from the friction through the mouse pads. It was getting hot fast. Wisps of smoke started to come out from under them.

“My hands are burning!” I yelled to Karen, who was sliding down the rope about ten stories below me.

“Then stop for a second,” she yelled back.

I tightened my grip on the rope and stopped suddenly, which made my hands burn even more. Fortunately the rope was attached to the bottom of the descending elevator so that even when I stopped I was still going down. Just not fast enough. I waved one hand at a time in the air to cool it off, then started to slide down again. What would happen when we got to the bottom? I suddenly wondered. The elevator was coming down fast and unless we got to the bottom with enough time to pull the doors open and get out, we were going to get crushed.

As much as the sliding made my hands burn, the thought of getting smashed flat as a pancake at the bottom of a dirty elevator shaft burned even worse. I loosened my grip on the rope and slid even faster. I heard Karen’s feet hit the bottom of the shaft and realized I was almost there.

“Iggy! C’mon! I can’t open the door without you!”

THUMP! I hit the ground at the bottom of the shaft really hard and my hands felt like they were on fire. I jumped up and started pulling on the doors with Karen. They were shut tight and we were having no luck at all. It probably didn’t help that our hands were sore and had the remnants of melted mouse pads on them.

I looked up and saw the elevator coming down really fast now. It was only about ten stories above our heads. I’ve never been good at math but by my calculations at that moment, I figured we had about zero time left to live.

Just then, we felt a spray of dirt hit us and saw a feel’s head sticking up through a trap door in the ground.

“Quick! In here!” he yelled at me as he looked up and saw the elevator almost on top of us.

Before we could even think, Karen and I dived in.

Slam! BOOM! The trapdoor dropped shut as the elevator landed on top of it like a ten-ton weight. Karen and I both looked up to see that the feel was standing next to one of the extendable one-eyed weasels, who was holding a lighted torch in his hand. They stared at us, then looked at each other and smiled at Karen like she was a movie star.

“Welcome to the Underground, Anti-Art,” said the feel.

I had no idea if they were good guys or bad guys, but considering we would have been dead without them, I sure was happy to see them.

32

NUTS FROM THE UNDERGROUND

As we sat around in the small dirt room that was shaped like the inside of someone’s stomach, I kept thinking about how we got there; the bizarre network of underground tunnels, all barely big enough for us to crawl through one at a time; the heavy wet air that smelled like the inside of my grandma’s closet; my desperate attempt to not completely freak out because of how claustrophobic it all was. It felt like we crawled through those tunnels for hours even though it was probably a lot less than that. I guess time just passes slower when you can’t see where you are and have no idea where the heck you’re going.