Summerland (51 page)

"It ain't going to work," she kept murmuring to Nubakaduba. "No way is it going to work."

An hour later they could make out clouds of white lying thick on the green land; Cinquefoil said they were apple blossoms.

"This breeze picks up a little," he said. "We ought to make Applelawn by nightfall."

At the moment he said it—as if at last his ability to work grammers, so long depleted, had returned to him—the sail began to rumble, and the athletic sock which Buendía had tied to his pole, which he then planted in the planking for a flag, danced in the breeze. Then abruptly it spun around to the hither shore and strained at the knot, snapping and fluttering until at last it wriggled loose, and sailed off toward Old Cat Landing.

"Storm coming in," Pettipaw said, sniffing the air.

"Storm?" Cinquefoil said, looking up, his gaze traveling toward the west. "But the sky was as clear—"

They all looked up at the sky that only a minute before had been cloudless and blue. The next moment a flock of what Ethan took at first to be butterflies, frantic white butterflies, blew in from the west. The fluttering mass engulfed the raft, blowing into their hair and eyes, clinging to their clothes, blotting out Skid's windshield and clotting her radiator. Ethan, his skin creeping at the insect touch of them, scraped away a silken handful and found they were not butterflies at all but blossoms, thousands and thousand of apple blossoms blown from the trees of the land in the west. Now when they looked that way they saw the green ribbon overtopped with a thick dark band that billowed and heaved and flickered, now and then, with lightning.

"Storm buffalo," Cinquefoil said, in a low, grim voice. "Coyote's done come ta the Land o' Apples."

The storm spilled out from Applelawn toward them, sending great black tendrils to coil and flower over their heads. The river was scaled with waves, like the skin of a great bronze fish, and the raft began to pitch and reel. Buendía seized his pole and plunged it down, hand over hand over hand, until the river seemed to catch hold of it, and snatched it from his grasp. The next moment there was a terrific hissing as the water began to churn and fizz around them, and then Ethan heard a deep, disturbing
thump
as of something knocking up against the underside of the raft.

The next moment he felt himself being lifted up into the air. He had just enough time to reach out behind him and grab hold of Splinter before the entire raft stood on one edge and slid them all into the water, like onions on a cutting board being scraped into a bubbling pot.

Cold metal filled his mouth, and his nostrils. Cold fingers of water were poked into his ears, and pressed at the sockets of his eyes. He struggled and kicked and tumbled in the water, and then all at once something, some calm voice inside him, told him to lie still. As soon as he stopped moving, Splinter seemed to take hold of him and to rise, with him in tow, toward the surface of the water. At last in a shivering burst of light his head broke through to the air, and he spat and coughed and gasped for breath, clinging to Splinter. He thought he heard voices—Buendía's, Taffy's, Jennifer T.'s—and he looked around to see. The water was filled with Shadowtails, strewn everywhere along with the shattered bits of the raft, and in the middle of them all he saw Skidbladnir, the Wonder Ship, wheels to the sky, bobbing on the surface of the water. Then he heard, for the first time, a sound like rain, like water running ringing down a culvert after a rainstorm, and he turned, and what he saw nearly caused him to let go of Splinter.

There, filling all the sky between him and the place on the horizon where Applelawn had been, rose a vast shining column of water. It was strangely tinted a rosy orange, and it streamed down toward the surface of the river from a dizzying height. A waterspout, Ethan thought, until, tilting his head so far back that his ears filled with cold water, he saw that at the top of the column there sat, thick-lipped, goggle-eyed, ugly and wise, an enormous whiskered head. The whiskers were as long and twisting as anacondas, the lips fleshy and black, the eyes sly-lidded and unimpressed with the struggling flotsam that lay far below. What Ethan had taken for a column of moving water was only the runoff, the skin of water shed by the coils of an immense body, snaky and pink, as it rose from the river high into the air. A pair of green fins like sails, veined with bone like the wings of a bat, projected from its sides a quarter mile or so up, and another long fin began just above the waterline and ran down to whatever unimaginable depth represented the creature's terminus.

The Bottom-Cat, Ethan thought to himself.

"The Bottom-Cat!" Jennifer T. said. She swam up behind Ethan, kicking her legs, and he scooted down to the handle end of the bat and let her grab the barrel.

"Thanks."

"No problem."

The Bottom-Cat narrowed its bulging eyes, pursing its lips into a great blue-black plum.

"
What you got there, midge
?"

Ethan felt something bump up against his legs, something big that caught him, and lifted him and Jennifer T. out of the water. He reached down, and felt, beneath him, a surface—the skin of the thing—that was at once slick and rough, like half-cured cement, and gave to the touch of his finger. The Old Cat had caught them up, like ladybugs on a kid's forearm, on a bend in its long snaky tail. Now it began to hoist this humped loop of itself into the air, raising Ethan and Jennifer T. toward its head.

There was a grunt beside them, and Ethan saw Taffy scrambling up onto this living hill with them, as it climbed into the sky. In her arms she carried the hodag's egg, saved from the wreck of the raft.

"Taffy!" Jennifer T. said. "What is it doing? Is it going to eat us?"

But Taffy didn't answer. She just stood, legs apart, on the coil in the body of the Bottom-Cat, riding this strange elevator into the sky.

The stench from its gills was like mud and mold and rot, and it wafted toward them in thick rolling waves. The lips shone like wet rubber; the eyes, set wide in the face in a way that was disturbingly human, gazed at them with bright interest. Its voice was surprisingly small and soft, almost tentative, as if it were unused to speaking.

"
So. You bring the slugger a piece of his great stick. His weary, weary burden. That it, midge? Well, you too late! The slugger thanks you kindly, but it looks to him like it's nigh on time to lay his weary burden down. A storm in Applelawn where no storm ever was. Strange rumblings up and down the Tree all day long. Something inside Slug telling him it time to wake up
."

"E, look." Jennifer T. was not really listening to the Bottom-Cat—she had never had a whole lot of patience for speeches.

"
Been asleep a long time, little midges
," the Old Cat said. "
Pretty hungry
"

Jennifer T. was pointing down to the river, where they could see their friends, tossed and scattered by the coils of the Cat and by the storm-choppy waters of the river. In another minute they were all going to be eaten or drowned.

Ethan lowered his voice, and put his mouth to Jennifer T.'s ear. "You know that thing the Man with the Rattlesnake Tie said to me about noodling a cat? I thought he meant a
cat
cat, but do you think he was trying to tell me about—"

"Noodling," Jennifer T. whispered. "We saw that on TV, one time, on this fishing show, remember? Those guys down in Alabama or wherever. Shoving their hands down inside catfishes to catch them." She made a face. "But we could never…"

"We can," Taffy said. "We have to."

The Sasquatch ran toward the edge of the coil to which they clung, the hodag's egg tucked under her arm like a football.

"Eat me first!" she cried. "These two are nothing but strings and bones."

"
Powerful hungry
," the Cat agreed. It stretched its lips back in a grin and, slowly, opened its great mouth, a few slow inches at a time, as if its jaw were almost too large for its muscles to bear. Taffy danced right up onto its lip, and the mouth strove to open wide enough to fit her.

"Splinter, Ethan! Splinter, now!"

"She means jam it in there!" Jennifer T. said. "We have to grab hold of the inside of its mouth!"

Ethan slipped and scrambled up the coil toward the thing's mouth, and then shoved Splinter as far into its jaw as he could reach. The roof of its mouth, he saw, was lined with hundreds and hundreds of teeth, long and sandy gray. At the same time he heard Jennifer T. run up behind him. Without stopping, without even hesitating, she dived right into the mouth of the Cat and stood up. She looked wildly around, as the voice of the thing came rumbling up from its distant throat in a roar of outrage.

"I don't know where to grab it," she yelled. She dithered for a moment more, than reached up and took hold of one of the gray teeth embedded in the raspy roof of its mouth. Ethan held on to Splinter, feeling it throb with the force of the Cat's desperate struggle to close its jaws. Then, all at once, the struggle ceased, and the Cat's voice rose again from its innards, pleading this time. Jennifer T. rode the rippling and flappings of its mighty tongue as if she were surfing on its words.

"
Please let go of my tooth
," it said, quite piteous and tame as a kitten. Though it came out more like
Hease let go a I too
.

"When we get to Applelawn," Jennifer T. said. "And all our friends, too. Pick them up. Now."

Ethan looked down over the lower lip toward the water below. Slowly great slick coils of the enormous fish began to writhe and twist, reaching here and there to lift the Shadowtails. It hunched and shifted and stretched until it had tumbled them all together onto the top of one coil. Then it lifted them, en masse, into the air.

"Well done, reubens," Cinquefoil said as he and the others rose, waving, past the Cat's mouth, toward the crown of its head. "Ya got her by the mouthparts. Only what's become a Bigfoot?"

Ethan looked around. Taffy had been there a moment ago, perched on the lip of the Bottom-Cat. Now she was gone.

"Taffy!" He looked down at the river. There was no sign of her. There was also no sign, he saw now, with a sharp pang, of Skidbladnir. "Taffy!"

"Here."

Ethan was surprised to see Taffy emerge from the back of the Cat's mouth, from behind Jennifer T., who stood desperately clutching the big tooth, her gaze fixed on her hands. She was carrying the egg more carefully now, and Ethan saw a thin rime of black ooze spilling down one side of it from the stopper. Taffy knelt, and wiped the ooze away against the rough, grayish stuff of the Bottom-Cat's tongue. The great beast shuddered, down its whole length, and at that moment the whole of the Summerlands gave a great heave, and in the Middling a chain of earthquakes rippled outward from the Pacific Rim and rocked the temblor-prone countries of the world in a manner that was very surprising to seismologists.

"Let's go!" Jennifer T. "The sooner you get us there, the sooner I let go of your tooth."

And so they escaped the wreck of their vessel, and were borne the rest of the way across the Big River in and on top of the bewhiskered, outraged head of the Bottom-Cat. It was a journey of less than five minutes for the enormous beast whose coils reach down, down, down to the very roots of the Tree. Delicately, like a child cupping a chick, the great head lowered itself to the green grass of Applelawn. The grass was starred with blown blossoms, and the skies overhead were corrugated with vast steel bands of storm. One by one the Shadowtails climbed or slid down from the top of the Cat's head, and then Taffy leapt from the mouth.

"
Too, hlease
," said the Bottom-Cat. "
Let go
."

Ethan looked at Jennifer T.

"If I pull Splinter out, it might eat you," he said.

"But if I let go, we don't control it anymore," she said. "It could just take off and knock you out against a mountain or something."

"Huh," Ethan said.

"
Ket hromise
," the Cat said, reminding them that it had kept its promise. "
Let go
."

"On the count of three. One—two—three!"

She let go of the Cat's long tooth, and at the same time Ethan jerked Splinter free. They tumbled out of the mouth and went sprawling in the soft grass of Applelawn.

The Cat glowered down at them, hissing, and seemed briefly to be considering inhaling them all, like the nozzle of an immense Hoover. At the last it changed its mind.

"
I should have stood in bed
," it said, with a great sad shake of its head. Then it turned and, with a long, cascading ripple of its ninety-nine uppermost coils, slipped back down into its gloomy haunt at the bottom of the world.