In the brief time he'd been thinking, Boots had vanished.
***
CHAPTER 2
"Boots!" Gregor was beginning to panic. She'd been right here a minute ago. Hadn't she? Or had he been so busy thinking, he'd lost track of how much time had passed? "Boots!"
Where could she have gone? Into the trees? Out onto the street? What if someone had taken her? "Boots!"
There wasn't even anyone around to ask. The park had emptied out as dark had fallen. Struggling to stay calm, Gregor tried to follow the trail of footprints that she'd been making in the snow. But there were so many footprints! And he could barely see!
Suddenly he heard a dog barking nearby. Maybe it had found Boots, or at least its owner might have seen her. Gregor ran through the trees to a small clearing somewhat illuminated by a nearby light. A feisty little terrier was running in a circle around a stick, barking its head off. Intermittently it would grab the stick in its jaws, give it a good shake, and drop it on the ground. Then it would begin its frantic barking again.
A pretty woman, dressed in winter jogging clothes, appeared. "Petey! Petey! What are you doing?" She scooped up the dog and shook her head at Gregor as she walked off. "Sorry, he goes a little crazy sometimes."
But Gregor didn't respond. He was staring at the stick, or what he'd thought was a stick, that had been driving the dog wild. It was smooth and shiny and black. He picked it up and it bent in two. Not like a broken stick. But like a leg. An insect leg. From a giant roach...
His head whipped around the area. When they had returned from the Underland that summer, they had come up through a series of tunnels that led to Central Park. They had been near the street, just as he was now.
There, on the ground. That big slab of rock. It had been moved recently -- he could tell by the marks in the snow -- and then moved back into place. Something red was trapped under the edge of the rock. He pulled it out. It was Boots's mitten.
The giant roaches from the Underland had idolized Boots. They'd called her the princess and done some special ritual dance to honor her. And now they'd kidnapped her right out from under his nose.
"Boots...," he said softly. But he knew she couldn't hear him at this point.
He pulled out his cell phone. They couldn't afford a cell phone, but after three members of her family had mysteriously disappeared, his mother had insisted they get one, anyway. He dialed home. His dad answered.
"Dad? It's Gregor. Look, something happened. Something bad. I'm in Central Park, near that place where we came up this summer, and the roaches, you know, the giant ones? They were here and they took Boots. I wasn't watching her close enough, it's my fault and...I have to go back down!" Gregor knew he had to hurry.
"But...Gregor..." His dad's voice was full of confusion and fear. "You can't --"
"I have to, Dad. Or we might not ever see her again. You know how crazy the roaches are about her. Look, don't let Mom call the police this time. There's nothing they can do. If I'm not back right away, tell people we've got the flu or something, okay?"
"Listen, stay there. I'm coming with you. I'll be there as quick as I can," said his dad. Gregor could hear him panting as he tried to struggle to his feet.
"No, Dad! No, you'd never make it. You can't even walk down the block!" said Gregor.
"But I...but I can't let you..." He could hear his dad beginning to cry.
"Don't worry. I'll be okay. I mean, I've been down there before. But I got to go, Dad, or they'll get too far." Gregor puffed as he struggled to slide away the slab of rock.
"Gregor? You have any light?" asked his dad.
"No!" said Gregor. This was a real problem. "Wait, yes! Yes!" Mrs. Cormaci had given him a mini flashlight in case the lights ever went out when he was on the subway. He had clipped it to his key ring. "I've got a flashlight. Dad, I've got to go now."
"I know, son. Gregor...I love you." His dad's voice was shaking. "Be careful, okay?"
"I will be. Love you, too. I'll see you soon, okay?" said Gregor.
"See you soon," his dad whispered hoarsely.
And then Gregor lowered himself down into the hole. He stuck the phone in one pocket and pulled out his key ring from another. When he clicked on the little flashlight, he was surprised by the amount of light it produced. He slid the rock slab closed and started down a long, steep flight of steps.
As he got to the bottom he stopped and closed his eyes for a minute, trying to re-create in his head the path that had brought him here last summer. They had been flying then, on the back of a big black bat named Ares, who was his bond. In the Underland, a human and a bat could take a vow and swear always to protect each other no matter how desperate the situation. Then the two were called bonds.
Ares had flown Gregor, Boots, and his dad back from the Underland and left them at the foot of the stairs and headed off to the...right! Gregor was pretty sure it had been to the right, so he started running that way.
The tunnel was cold and dank and desolate. It had been made by people -- regular people, not the violet-eyed, pale Underlanders he had met deep in the earth -- but Gregor felt sure that it had been forgotten by New Yorkers long ago.
His flashlight beam caught a mouse, and it skittered away in terror. Light didn't come down here. People didn't come down here. What was be doing down here?
"I can't believe it," thought Gregor. "I can't believe I have to go back down - there! " Back into the strange dark land of giant roaches and spiders and, worst of all, rats! The thought of seeing one of those six-foot sneering, fanged creatures filled him with dread.
Boy, his mom was not going to like this.
Last summer, when they'd finally come home late one night, she'd freaked out. First her two missing kids show up with their missing dad, who can barely walk, and then they all sit down and tell her some bizarre story about a land miles under the earth.
Gregor could tell she didn't believe them at first. Well, who would? But it was Boots's chatter that she couldn't ignore.
"Beeg bugs, Mama! I like beeg bugs! We go ride!" Boots had said, happily bouncing on her mother's lap. "I ride bat. Ge-go ride bat."
"Did you see a rat, baby?" her mom said softly.
"Rat bad," Boots said with a frown. And Gregor remembered this was the exact phrase he had heard the roaches use to describe the rats. They were bad. Very bad. Well, most of them...
They'd told the story three times, under intense questioning from his mom. They'd showed her their strange Underland clothing woven by the huge spiders that lived there. Then there was his dad, white-haired, shaking, emaciated.
At dawn, she'd decided to believe them. At one minute after dawn, she was down in the laundry room nailing, screwing, gluing, doing everything she could to seal shut the grate they'd all fallen through. She and Gregor shoved a dryer closer to it. Not enough so it would draw a lot of attention. But enough so that no one could get back there and open it up.
Then she put the laundry room off-limits. No one was allowed down there, ever. So, once a week Gregor helped her haul the laundry three blocks to use a Laundromat.
But his mom hadn't thought about this entrance in Central Park. And neither had he. Until now.
The tunnel came to a fork. He hesitated a minute, and then headed off to the left, hoping it was the right direction. As he jogged along, the tunnel began to change. The bricks left off, and natural stone walls took over.
Gregor went down one last flight of steps. This one was carved out of natural stone. It looked really old. He guessed it must have been made by the Underlanders hundreds of years earlier, when they'd begun their descent to make a new world deep in the earth.
The tunnels began to twist and turn, and soon Gregor lost his bearings. What if he was just getting totally lost in some maze of tunnels while the roaches carried Boots off in a completely different direction? What if he'd taken a wrong turn back at the stairs...what if...no, there! His flashlight landed on a spot of red on the ground, and Gregor picked up Boots's
second mitten. She could never hold on to them. Luckily.
As Gregor sprinted off, he began to notice a crunching sound under his feet. Shining the flashlight onto the floor, he realized it was covered with a variety of small insects scurrying down the tunnel as fast as they could.
As he stopped to investigate the situation, something skittered over his boot. A mouse. There were dozens running past him. And there by the wall -- hadn't he just seen some kind of molelike animal go by? The whole floor was alive with creatures headed in Gregor's direction in a big, creepy stampede. They weren't trying to eat one another. They weren't fighting. They were just running, the way he had seen animals on the news one time running from a forest fire. They were afraid of something. But of what?
Gregor shot the beam of his flashlight behind him and there was his answer. About fifty yards away, galloping toward him, were two rats. The Underland kind.
***
CHAPTER 3
Gregor turned on his heel and ran. "Oh, geez!" he gasped. "What are they doing here?" Cockroaches had taken Boots. He'd seen one of their legs. But what were Underland rats doing so close to the surface of the earth?
Well, that was something to figure out later, because he had bigger issues at the moment. The rats were gaining on him, and gaining on him fast. He tried to think of a plan, but nothing came to mind. He couldn't outrun them; he couldn't outclimb them; and he sure couldn't outfight them with their six-inch teeth and razor-sharp claws and --
"Ugh!" He ran smack into the side of something hard. It caught him stomach high, knocking the wind out of him. He dropped the flashlight, but as it fell into empty space, Gregor recognized the circular stone opening that Ares had squeezed through to bring them home. Somewhere far, far below lay a massive Underland ocean. The Waterway.
Without thinking, Gregor swung his leg over the side of the circle and lowered himself down inside. His fingers clung to the edge as his legs swung free. "Maybe the rats won't see me inside here," he thought, and immediately the stupidity of what he'd done hit him. The rats didn't need to see anything. The rats navigated by their incredible sense of smell. So what might have been a really decent hiding place if you were being chased by people was utterly worthless if you were trying to lose rats.
Yep, and here they were. He could hear their claws screeching to a halt on the stone, then their panting, and then their confusion.
"What's he doing?" growled one.
"No idea," said the second.
For a few moments, Gregor could hear nothing but the pounding of his own heart. Then the second voice sputtered, "Oh, oh, you don't suppose he's hiding, do you?" And that's when they started laughing. It was a nasty, raspy laugh.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are!" said the first voice, and the rats cracked up again. Gregor couldn't see them, but he felt pretty sure they were rolling around on the ground.
He had two choices. Climb back out and face the rats in pitch blackness, or drop into the darkness below and hope against hope that some Underlander scout found him before he drowned or became something's dinner.
He was trying to weigh the odds of surviving. Either way they were very low. Either way the likelihood of finding Boots and bringing her home was --
"Drop, Overlander," purred a voice. For a second he thought it was the rats, but it couldn't be because they were still laughing and, anyway, it didn't sound like them. It sounded like --
"Drop, Overlander," said the voice again, and this time the rats heard it, too. He could sense them springing to their feet.
"Kill him!" snarled the first, and as its hot, ratty breath hit his fingers, Gregor stopped weighing his odds and let go. He could hear the scrape of claws on the stone ledge he had been clinging to moments before, along with a volley of strange rat curses.
Then the sickening sense of free-falling through space consumed him. He had fallen like this twice before, once when he'd gone down the grate in his laundry room after Boots, and once when he'd leaped into a huge void when he was trying to save his dad and sister and friends. "This," he thought, "is something I'm never going to get used to."
Where was Ares? That was Ares's voice he'd heard, wasn't it? For a second Gregor thought he'd imagined hearing the bat, but then he remembered the rats had reacted to the sound, too.
"Ares!" he called out. The darkness absorbed his voice like a towel. "Ares!"
"Ooph!" Gregor said, more in surprise than anything, because suddenly the bat was under him and he was riding, not falling, through the darkness.
"Man, am I glad you showed up!" said Gregor, his hands clinging to the thick fur on Ares's neck.
"I am glad you are here also, Overlander," said Ares. "I am sorry you had to fall this far. I know this causes you discomfort, but I was retrieving your light stick."
"My light stick?" said Gregor.
"Behind you," said Ares.
Gregor turned around and saw a faint glow behind him. He picked up his mini flashlight that had been shining into the fur on Ares's back. "Thanks!" The light calmed him down a little.
"Man, you'll never guess what happened! Those cockroaches came up in the park and took Boots! They just stole her right out from under my nose!" And suddenly Gregor was really mad at the roaches. "I mean, what were they thinking? Did they think I wouldn't notice?"
Ares veered off to the right and began to fly over a ridge along one side of the Waterway. "No, Overlander, they --"
"Well, did they think I wouldn't care? Like it would be okay just to grab her and run and I'd be, like, 'Oh, well, guess I won't be seeing Boots around.'"
"They did not think that," said Ares.
"Did they think I wouldn't come get her? And they'd just be able to keep her and do their little dances around her and sing 'Patty Cake' and --" said Gregor.
"The crawlers knew you would follow," Ares slipped in, before Gregor lost it.
"Of course, I followed! And man, when I get hold of those bugs, they'd better have some really good explanation for this whole thing. How far are we from their place?" said Gregor.
"Several hours. But I am taking you to Regalia," said Ares.
"Regalia? I don't want to go to Regalia!" said Gregor. "You take me to the roaches, and you take me there now!" ordered Gregor.
Thwack!
Gregor landed flat on his back. Ares had flipped him over onto the stone ridge. Before he could speak, the bat was on his chest, his claws digging deep into his down jacket.
Ares's face was just inches from Gregor's. The bat's gums were pulled back over his teeth in a snarl. "I do not take orders from you, Overlander. Let us be clear on this from the start. I do not take orders from you!"
"Whoa!" said Gregor, startled by Ares's intensity. "What's your problem?"
"My problem is that at this moment, you are reminding me a great deal of Henry," said Ares.
This was really the first time Gregor had ever gotten a good look at Ares's face. The light in the Underland was usually dim. And Ares was particularly hard to see because of his uniform blackness, black eyes, black nose, black mouth set in his black fur. But in the direct beam of the flashlight, he could see the bat was furious.
Ares had saved his life. Gregor had kept Ares from banishment, which would have meant certain death. They were bonded together and had sworn to fight to the death for each other. But they had never exchanged more than a handful of words. As Ares glared down at him, Gregor realized he knew next to nothing about the bat.
"Henry?" said Gregor, because he couldn't think of anything else to say.
"Yes, Henry. My old bond. You remember, I let him smash to his death on the rocks so that I could give you more time," Ares said almost sarcastically. "And right now I am wondering if I should not have let you both fall because, like Henry, you are under the impression that I am your servant."
"No, I'm not!" objected Gregor. "Look, we don't even have servants where I come from. I just wanted to go get my sister!"
"And I am trying to unite you with your sister
as quickly as I can. But, like Henry, you do not listen to me," said Ares.
Gregor had to admit this was true. He'd kept talking right over Ares every time the bat had tried to speak. But he didn't like being compared with Henry. He was nothing like that traitor. Still, maybe he bad been out of line.
"Okay, I'm sorry. I was mad and I should have listened to you. Now get off my chest," said Gregor.
"Get off my chest, what?" said Ares.
"Get off my chest now!" said Gregor, getting angry again.
"Try again," said Ares. "Because to me this sounds very much like an order."
Gregor gritted his teeth and suppressed an impulse to push the bat off. "Get -- off -- my -- chest please.""
Ares considered the request for a moment, decided it was satisfactory, and fluttered off to the side.
Gregor sat up and rubbed his chest. He was unharmed, but there were several deep holes in his jacket where Ares's claws had pierced the fabric.
"Hey! Can you watch those claws? Look what you did to my jacket!" said Gregor.
"It is of no matter. They will burn it, anyway," Ares said indifferently.
It was at that moment that Gregor decided he was bonded to a big jerk. And he felt pretty sure that Ares had come to the same conclusion.
"Okay," Gregor said coldly. "So, we have to go to Regalia. Why?"
"That is where the crawlers are taking your sister," said Ares, matching Gregor's tone.
"And why would the crawlers want to take my sister to Regalia?" asked Gregor.
"Because," said Ares, "the rats have sworn to kill her."
***
CHAPTER 4
"Kill her? But why?" asked Gregor, stunned.
"It is foretold by 'The Prophecy of Bane,'" said Ares.
"The Prophecy of Bane." Gregor remembered it now. When he had left the Underland the first time, he had told Luxa he would never come back, and she had said, "That is not what it says in 'The Prophecy of Bane.'" And then he'd tried to ask Vikus about it, but the old man had been evasive and hustled him onto his bat and given the command to leave. So, Gregor didn't know what it meant, but the first prophecy in which he'd been mentioned had resulted in the deaths of four members of a twelve-party quest and had triggered a war that had killed countless others. A feeling of dread swept over him. "What does it say, Ares?"