“Beast?” Nilly said, squatting down in front of the animal. “This is a Rattus norvegicus, Professor. A friendly, little Rattus norvegicus who’s smiling. Sure, it’s mentioned in a footnote in Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist by W. M. Poschi, but that’s just because it spreads the Black Death and other harmless diseases.”
The rat blinked at Nilly with brown rat eyes.
“I can’t help it,” Doctor Proctor said. “Rats give me the shi-shi-shivers. Where did it come from? How did it get in here?”
“Good question,” Nilly said, scratching his head and looking around. “Tell me, Professor, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Doctor Proctor stared at Nilly. “I—I—I think so.”
“And what are we thinking?”
“We’re thinking,” said the professor, totally forgetting to be afraid, and hopping down onto the floor and pulling on his professor coat, “that if it’s possible to get into a place, it must be possible to get back out of the same place.”
“Exactly,” Nilly said, holding out a finger that the little rat sniffed out of curiosity. “So I recommend that we pay close attention to our rat friend when he heads home.”
The Great Escape
NILLY’S SISTER ANSWERED the door when Lisa rang the doorbell of the yellow house the next morning. Eva gazed at Lisa with her narrow, kind-of-evil eyes, which glowed just as angrily as the two new zits she had on her face, and said in a taunting, squeaky voice, “Nilly’s not here, Flatu-Lisa.”
“I know,” Lisa said. “He’s in jail.”
Eva’s eyes got big. “In jail?”
“Yup. In the Dungeon of the Dead.”
“Mom!” Eva yelled over her shoulder. “Nilly’s in jail!”
They heard someone rummage around, drop several things, fall, and maybe curse a little.
“Haven’t you guys wondered why you haven’t seen him for twenty-four hours?” Lisa asked.
Eva shrugged. “It’s not easy to spot something so tiny, so I don’t think it’s that strange if I don’t see him for a few days, you know? It’s kind of a nice break.”
“Well anyway,” Lisa said, “prisoners in the Dungeon of the Dead are only allowed to receive visits from people in their immediate family, so I was wondering if you could give him this letter.” She held out an envelope.
“We’ll have to see,” Eva said, snatching the letter. “If we have time.”
* * *
NILLY AND DOCTOR Proctor were both lying on the floor of the cell, snoring and sleeping, when they were shaken awake by a member of the Royal Guard serving as a prison attendant in a black uniform and hat with a big, silly tassel on it.
“Huh? We must have fallen asleep watching the rat,” Nilly said, rubbing his eyes.
“Visitor for prisoner number 000002,” the guard said gruffly.
“Is that me?” Nilly asked, still half-asleep. “Or is that him?”
“It’s you,” the guard said. “He’s prisoner number 000001.”
Nilly looked around and said, “Where? Where?”
“That guy, right there,” the guard said, irritated, pointing at the professor, who was still snoring softly.
“No, not him!” Nilly shouted. “The rat! Did a rat run out the doorway when you came in?”
“Not that I saw,” the guard said. “Look, do you want your visitor or not?”
Nilly followed the guard through all the thick, but now open doors, down the corridor where the laser beams had been turned off, over the bridge, up the stairs, through the open door with the metal bars, and into the visiting room. And there was Eva, sitting in a chair chewing gum.
“Hi,” Nilly said, surprised, and smiled at his sister. “How nice that you wanted to come visit me.”
“As if,” Eva said. “I didn’t want to. Mom sent me. She didn’t feel like she was quite up to a prison visit herself. I brought you a letter. From that weird neighbor girl.”
“Lisa?” Nilly said, lighting up and taking the envelope. He could tell right away that it had been opened. “Well, what did she say?” he asked bitterly.
“How the heck should I know?” Eva asked innocently.
Nilly read the letter silently and put it in his pocket.
“What’s NASA?” Eva asked.
“Anything else new?” Nilly asked.
Eva snorted and stood up. “I’ve gotta go to school. Have a nice day in jail.”
Once Nilly was safely back under lock and lock and lock and key with the professor, he passed him the letter. Doctor Proctor read aloud:
Bad news. The Trane family is going to break into the professor’s cellar tonight, steal the fartonaut powder, patent it, and sell the invention to NASA. We have to do something. Lisa
“This is hopeless,” the professor blurted out. “They’re going to rob me! Steal my invention.”
“Lisa’s right,” Nilly said. “We have to do something. We have to get out of here.”
“But how?” the professor asked. “The rat is gone. We don’t know how it got out. ”
“Well,” Nilly said, “give me the letter. We’ll flush it down the toilet so no one finds out that Lisa’s working with us. Otherwise they’ll put her in jail, too.”
Nilly crumpled up the letter, tossed it into the toilet, and flushed. The toilet made a long, loud gurgling sound, the paper disappeared, and then the toilet bowl filled back up with water. Nilly stood there thoughtfully watching the ripples in the bowl where the paper had just been, and scratching his scalp through his red hair. And what he was thinking about was how the letter was being carried down through the pipes by the water. Down and down. Until it splashed down into a bigger sewer pipe somewhere way down below them. A sewer pipe that must surely stink and be teeming with …
“You know what?” Nilly said. “I think I just figured out where our rat friend went.”
“Really?” the professor said.
Nilly pointed down into the toilet.
“It swam up here through the pipes from the sewer. And went back out the same way.”
“Pyew!” the professor said, holding his nose.
“Maybe,” Nilly said. “But from the sewer pipe, the water keeps going. And going. All the way until it gets to the ocean. Or maybe to a treatment plant. And along the way there are ladders up to the street above, to manhole covers that lead right out onto the streets of Oslo. Do you get where I’m going with this, Professor?”
The professor, who clearly got where Nilly was going, stared at him in disbelief. “You must be crazy!” he exclaimed.
“Not crazy,” Nilly laughed. “Just very smart. And very, very small. We can only hope that I’m small enough.”
“You can’t!” Doctor Proctor said. “You mustn’t!”
“I can, I must, and I will,” Nilly said.
“The guards look in here all the time—they’ll notice that you’re gone.”
“We’ll wait until early evening,” Nilly said. “Then we act like we’re going to bed early and turn off the light. And then in the dead of night …”
THE SUN DRIFTED across the sky, and its rays fell on an Oslo that had started preparing for Independence Day, which was only two days away. People were cleaning up their houses and planting flowers in window boxes, ironing flags and the aprons that went with their national costumes, reviewing traditional eggnog recipes, and humming the national anthem. And as the sun began to descend toward Ullern Ridge at the western edge of the city, the men at the wharf carried the last of the crates off the ship from Shanghai.
The rays that penetrated between the planks of the wharf reflected off some seashells. And not just the kinds of shells that are attached to wharf pilings and the rocks that are only visible at low tide. But shells that were moving. Shells that were black and attached to the back of something slithering out of the dark opening of a sewer pipe. Shells on the back of something that hadn’t eaten anything since the leathery meat on that thirty-five-year-old Mongolian water vole a few days ago.
The
creature slides through the water. It hears the wharf planks creaking. Sees the soles of a pair of boots. Food. It’s a man carrying a wooden crate. The creature quickly twists its way up around one of the wharf pilings, up into the blinding sunlight, rises, swaying above the poor guy, and it hears the footsteps on the wharf stop. The creature opens its jaw, the sun shines on its gruesome fangs, and it hears a scream. Yes, yes, this is how food sounds… .
The creature gets ready for a bulky mouthful. But the afternoon sun is so low and still so glaring, and the creature hasn’t seen any light in days. It strikes blindly. Grabs hold of something, seizes it, and swiftly vanishes into the water. And then into the sewer pipe. Food! The creature can already feel its digestive juices starting to flow from glands throughout its body as it swims its way back into the Oslo sewer system. And then, deep in the sewers, in a strip of light that falls from a little hole for runoff water on a manhole cover in a street way up above, it stops to really enjoy its meal. But … what is this? Wood taste? The creature spits the food out. And it isn’t food at all. It’s a wooden crate. The creature fumes with rage. Blast it! Doggonit! How aggravating!
But then the creature hears something. An echo from a squeak within the sewer system. A rat squeak? Rattus norvegicus. Food! And whoosh, the starving creature is swallowed up by the darkness of the sewer, on the hunt again. Leaving the wooden crate floating there, bobbing up and down in the sewer water. And in the strip of light from the manhole cover, one can read the following printed on the lid in red letters: CAUTION! HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE SPECIAL GUNPOWDER FROM SHANGHAI FOR THE BIG AND ALMOST WORLD-FAMOUS ROYAL SALUTE AT AKERSHUS FORTRESS.
THE SUN SANK even farther toward Ullern Ridge and started to slip behind it. The last rays cast long, white fingers over the landscape, as if the sun were desperately trying to hang on. And the rays reached all the way to Cannon Avenue. But it lost its hold and then the sun was gone.
It was evening. Truls and Trym stood in one of their three garages on Cannon Avenue, watching Mr. Trane, who had pulled a black crowbar out of the toolbox in his black Hummer. He had already given each of them a ski mask, which would cover their whole heads and faces apart from their eyes and mouth, so they could see and breathe and talk a little. Nice when it’s really cold out. Or when you’re going to commit a robbery. Because even if someone sees you during the robbery, they’re guaranteed not to recognize you afterward. Unless you’re still wearing the ski mask, of course.
“Like so,” Mr. Trane demonstrated, sliding the crowbar in along the edge of a door. “And so and then so.”
“Like this,” Truls and Trym repeated through their ski masks. “And this and then this.”
They repeated and repeated and practiced and practiced the break-in. But it took some time, because Truls and Trym weren’t the smartest boys in the world. And not just not the smartest boys in the world, actually. They were not the smartest boys in Norway, not the smartest boys in Oslo, and not even the smartest boys on Cannon Avenue. Because at that very moment the smartest boy on Cannon Avenue was sitting on a cot in the Dungeon of the Dead, feeling nervous. More nervous than he’d ever been before. Yes, so nervous that he bordered on being scared. And scared was something that Nilly, prisoner number 000002, very rarely was.
“What are you doing?” he asked Doctor Proctor, who’d taken off his professor’s coat, turned the pockets inside out, and was now carefully brushing the pocket lining over one of his scraps of paper.
“I was thinking,” the professor said. “It’s going to be awfully dark when you get down there. And you don’t have a flashlight. Then I remembered that there is always residue in my pockets from some of the various powders I’ve invented. And voilà …”
Nilly came over and looked down at the sheet of paper, where there was a fine layer of light green powder.
“I’ve seen that before,” Nilly said. “That’s Doctor Proctor’s Light Green Powder. You had it in a mason jar in your cellar. You said it was a phosphorescent powder that makes you glow. And that it was a rather unsuccessful invention.”
“Maybe it isn’t so unsuccessful after all,” the professor said, carefully folding the piece of paper in half so that all the powder slid into the fold. “Open wide!”
With Nilly’s mouth open as wide as it would go, the professor poured the powder into the small opening.
“It’ll take a little while before it starts working,” the professor said. “And meanwhile …” He intensely brushed out the other coat pocket over the sheet of paper.
“Is that what I think it is?” Nilly asked when he spotted the small, light blue grains sitting on the professor’s mathematical calculations.
“Yup,” the professor said. “It’s fartonaut powder. Too bad I don’t have more here.”
“But what do I do with it?”
“The exits to the sewer system are blocked by manhole covers,” the professor said. “And they’re heavy and hard to move. If you need to get out, you should—”
“Fart one of them up into the sky!” cried the smartest boy on Cannon Avenue.
The professor nodded and poured the fartonaut powder into the envelope that Lisa’s letter had come in. “But there’s only enough here for one good fart, so don’t waste it.”
“I won’t,” Nilly said, folding up the envelope and stuffing it into his pants pocket.
The professor studied him for a moment. “Your face is green. Are you feeling sick?”
“No,” Nilly said, surprised. “Just a little … uh, nervous.”
“Good, then it’s the glowing powder starting to work. Quick, we’d better act now before it stops working.”
The professor went over to the door and put his finger on the light switch. He hesitated.
“Come on,” Nilly said.
The professor sighed and turned off the light, and it got pretty dark. But not completely dark. Because in front of him Nilly could see a glimmering green light, he just couldn’t see where it was coming from. Until he looked down at himself.
“Hey!” he yelled. “You can see right through me! I can see my own skeleton!”
“And you’re glowing,” the professor said. “You’re your own flashlight. Now hurry up!”
Nilly crawled up onto the rim of the toilet and hopped down into the water, making a splash.
“Brr,” he said.
“Ready?” the professor asked, looking down at the tiny little, and now phosphorescent, boy who was treading water in the toilet.
“Ready,” Nilly said.
“Take a deep breath and hold it,” the professor said.
“Roger!” Nilly said, taking a breath and pinching his nose.
And with that, the professor flushed. The toilet gurgled and spluttered and sloshed. And then it turned into a steady rushing noise, and the professor peered into the toilet and Nilly wasn’t there anymore.
Life in the Sewers
NILLY WAS IN a free fall. He had once tried the waterslide at some water park or other, but this was totally different. His body whooshed like a torpedo toward the center of the earth until a bend in the pipe flung him to the left. And then to the right. And then straight down again. He felt like a cowboy riding a wild horse of water, and he couldn’t help himself—he had to yell, “Yee ha!”
The pipes were exactly big enough with exactly enough water to soften all the falls and turns. He was carried farther and farther down, and although it was getting both darker and colder, he was having so much fun and things were glowing so green around him that he wasn’t thinking about being wet or freezing cold. And he realized why that rat in their cell had swum and scrambled all the way up into their toilet: This was the roller-coaster ride of a lifetime!
It felt like such an adrenaline rush in his stomach every time the pipes turned and Nilly plunged into a new free fall that he hoped the ride would never end. But it did have to, of course. And it did. Rather suddenly, too. The walls of the narrow pipe disappeared and he was stretched out in the air as flat as a pancake and saw
something black approaching with alarming speed. Then the black thing hit him. Or to be more precise, Nilly hit the black thing. No one has ever witnessed an uglier belly flop in the Oslo sewer system. Brown, slimy goo sloshed up against the walls. And, boy, did it sting! Nilly felt like he was lying facedown in a frying pan.
He stood up and discovered that the water only came up to his waist. He looked around. Besides the glimmering green light coming from him, it was pitch-black. And once the sloshing had subsided, it was completely quiet, too. But, yuck, did it stink! It smelled so bad that the author advises you to do the same thing Nilly realized he had to do: Stop thinking about it.
What was I thinking about? Nilly wondered, since he wasn’t thinking about the smell anymore. Right, that I need to find a manhole cover. And with that Nilly started wading through the sewer system looking for a way out.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as you might think to find a manhole cover in a sewer system after the sun has set. The reason being that the sun is no longer shining through the manhole covers’ small holes that are designed to let water in from the street. And although Nilly was glowing, the light didn’t reach far enough to illuminate the shafts above him. But he didn’t give up.
AFTER NILLY HAD waded for a long time and quite some distance, he heard a hissing sound. And he thought the hissing sound must be coming from a manhole cover. Because obviously hissing sounds don’t come from the sewer. Who the heck would be hissing down here? he thought.
But he wasn’t totally sure and noticed that as he approached the location where he thought the sound had come from, his heart beat faster. A lot faster …
And as he rounded a corner, he froze and stood still. Completely still. Actually stiller than he’d ever stood before.
Because he thought he’d seen something.
Something that had gleamed at the very edge of the circle of green light. A row of much too white, much too sharp, and, most of all, much too big teeth. Because teeth that big and that sharp should not be down in the Oslo sewer system. They should only be found in the Amazon River and thereabouts. And in a dreadful picture on page 121 of Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist. More specifically, in the mouth of the world’s largest and most feared constrictor. The anaconda.