Jack was about ask, How do you consult a treasure?, but Jill hushed him.
“They consulted the Seeing Glass, and, as wise as it was valuable, it always told them the truth. It was, as I said, a golden age. But alas,” the goblin continued, “we live now in an age of error; we see, not with the Glass, but dimly. For there came a day, one horrible, dark day, when something evil erupted from the belly of the earth. It was massive and vicious—a beast unlike anything ever seen before. It sought to lay waste to our kingdom. We arrayed our vast armies against it and gave our lives to defend the kingdom—and our Glass.
“The tales that survive from those days of war, when the fate of the goblin people was in flux, are our greatest epics, and our greatest tragedies. For in the end, though our soldiers fought to the very death, they were no match for the beast from the center of the earth. For the Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschenfleischfressende.”
“The what?” said Jack.
“The Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschenfleischfressende,” the goblin repeated.
* * *
You want to say that word, don’t you? How could you not? I mean, come on. It’s like thirteen syllables.
Here’s how:
I-DECK-SUH VON FOY-ER, DARE MEN-SHEN FLYSH-FRESS-ENDUH.
See? That wasn’t so bad.
Now, I expect you to say it every time I write it, because it takes a minute and a half to type it out, and if I’m going to all that trouble, you’d better, too.
* * *
“What’s does it mean?” asked Jack.
“Well,” replied Begehren, “it’s the beast’s name. But, roughly translated, Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschenfleischfressende means something like, ‘Lizard-that-is-made-of-fire-and-eats-human-flesh.’”
“Oh,” said Jack. “Of course.”
“The Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschenfleischfressende was invincible. Made of bone and fire, he never once, in all the great battles the goblins waged against him, was so much as injured.” Begehren’s deep eyes seemed to cloud over with memories, as if he had himself seen that horrible war, a thousand years ago. Perhaps he had. “He kills reflexively, as if he were born to. Were he even to breathe in your direction, you would be burned to a cinder. He is as cruel and perfect a killing machine as has ever lived.
“Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschenfleischfressende took the Seeing Glass from us, and withdrew with it to his lair in the belly of the earth. Our kings were dead. Our heroes defeated. Now it is left to me, inadequate as I am, to care for the kingdom until the Glass is recovered, and our sage-kings and heroes return.”
Jack and Jill felt almost sorry for him.
Begehren was staring at them. With his goblin-green fingers, he played thoughtfully with a single long hair that grew from the end of his chin.
“But you,” he said, “you two are sworn to get the Seeing Glass.”
Jack and Jill hesitated.
“On your lives, you said.”
The frog began to quiver.
“Well,” Begehren announced, suddenly grinning, “what are you waiting for?”
* * *
They traveled in something like a carriage. It was golden and royal and very luxurious. But, like all very luxurious things, it had much in common with a cage. Jill stared through silver bars at the dark, winding alleyways of the Goblin Kingdom. Cobblestone streets twisted out of sight, and buildings of four stories hung out over the little alleys crazily.
Jack said, “I don’t get it. Is it a treasure or a mirror?”
Jill shrugged. “Maybe it’s both.”
“What does that mean? It’s a giant mirror of gold or something?”
Jill shrugged again.
“What does it matter?” the frog moaned. “We’re going to be murdered by this I-deck-suh-whatever as soon as we get down there anyway.”
“That’s true,” said Jill.
Jack was watching the Goblin Kingdom go by. “You know that deal we made with the old lady?” he said at last. “I don’t think it was a good one.”
* * *
In the center of the Goblin Kingdom was a great sinkhole. It was protected by a thick iron fence. Forged into the iron were intricate images of a terrible beast blowing fire and destroying a kingdom and devouring goblins. All around the iron fence, staring darkly at Jack and Jill, were dozens and dozens of soldiers.
Begehren stood before a heavily padlocked gate. He followed the children with his deep, old, black eyes. “Give them weapons!” he called. Two goblin guards stepped forward and handed Jack and Jill spears.
“Thanks,” said the frog. “Those’ll do a lot of good.”
Begehren moved to the iron gate and unlocked it with a twisted, ancient key. A soldier led Jack and Jill to the edge of the sinkhole. Heat radiated up from it. Next to the sinkhole there stood a giant bucket, attached to a long rope. Jack and Jill were told to get into the bucket. Once they had, four goblin guards lifted the bucket and held it, and the children, too, out over the darkness.
Begehren said to Jack and Jill, “Are you ready?”
Jill was about to shake her head.
Jack was about to ask, “How far down is it?”
The frog was about to scream at the top of his lungs.
But suddenly, their stomachs jolted into their throats and tried to squeeze out of their mouths. Jill’s hair was standing straight up on her head. The frog was upside down in the air, gripping Jack’s shirt with his froggy hands. They were falling.
They fell and fell and fell and kept falling.
And then, suddenly, the bucket stopped in midair, and the frog plunged back into Jack’s pocket and the two children slammed into the bottom of the bucket.
They shook themselves. They raised themselves to their feet in the great bucket. Jack said, “Frog, did you just throw up in my pocket?”
The frog poked his head up woozily. “Can I go in Jill’s pocket now?” he moaned. “This one smells.”
“Absolutely not,” said Jill.
They hung in near-blackness. The only light was the glow from the fires in the Goblin Kingdom way up above their heads, and an eerie phosphorescence on the rocks all around them. The long rope swung slightly back and forth, back and forth, creaking. Jack peered over the edge of the bucket. There was no sign of a bottom to the sinkhole.
Again, the bucket began to descend. But slowly.
And then, they heard a voice. “How will they get the treasure back up?”
Jill looked all around her. Jack gripped the edge of the bucket.
“Who said that?” the frog whispered.
“They’ll just hoist it up, piece by piece,” said another voice. It sounded like Begehren. But they could hear it as if he were right next to them.
“But if the treasure’s anything like what the legends say, that could take a lifetime!” Jack and Jill stared at the glowing walls, passing slowly by. The voices seemed to be ringing through the stone.
“If it takes a lifetime, it takes a lifetime. What’s another eighty years,” said Begehren, “after the thousand we have waited?”
Jack and Jill looked at each other, their eyes wide.
“But they won’t get it, right?” asked the voice. “They’ll be killed.”
“One way or another,” Begehren replied. “Almost certainly by the Eidechse von Feuer, die Meschenfleischfressende. And if not, once they hand over the Glass, we won’t need them anymore. So I’ll kill them myself.”
Jack went pale.
“I like him less and less,” whispered Jill.
The frog began to weep.
* * *
The bucket descended farther and farther into the impenetrable gloom, and beads of sweat began to stand out on Jack’s and Jill’s foreheads, faces, necks, arms. Farther, farther, farther. W
ith every few yards the children descended, the heat climbed another degree. The air was so thick they could barely breathe. It was as if they were being lowered into a forge, as if the children were metal, and they would melt and re-form themselves in the heat of the sinkhole. At least, those were the strange thoughts that passed through Jack’s head as he gasped for breath. Jill was so hot she could not think of anything at all. And the frog was still weeping.
At last, the bucket landed with a bump on a craggy outcropping of stone. The children crawled out. There was no relief from the heat. The spears, which had been jarred from their hands when the bucket stopped suddenly in midair, lay on the black rock. One was shattered to pieces.
“Great,” said Jack.
“Oh, because it would have helped,” said the frog.
Jill said, “Where do we go now?”
There was a small, dark tunnel that led away from the outcropping where they had landed. Jack pointed to it. Jill scanned the rest of the walls for any other passageways or doors. There were none. “Okay,” she said.
“Yeah,” said the frog. “Fantastic.”
So Jack scooped up the remaining spear, took Jill’s hand, and they walked into the dark, narrow, oppressively hot tunnel. Here, too, the rock glowed with that eerie phosphorescence. All it allowed the children to see, though, was that the tunnel was dark and rocky and descended gradually toward the center of the earth.
The children walked in silence, thinking about what Begehren had told them of the beast. He kills reflexively, as if he were born to. Were he even to breathe in your direction, you would be burned to a cinder. He is as cruel and perfect a killing machine as has ever lived. And they thought of all that they had heard of the Glass. It is a treasure horde so great a king could trade his kingdom for it and be counted a wise man . . . The greatest power, it is said, resides in that Glass . . . If you can’t find it, you die.
Deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper into the darkness. The children stopped and tried to catch their breath. Even walking in this heat was a trial. Deeper and deeper. Hotter and hotter.
“I may be turning into a casserole,” the frog muttered.
Deeper.
Hotter.
Deeper.
Sweat poured off the children’s faces. They could barely breathe for the heat.
The frog was now praying.
The dark tunnel continued down, down, down. The heat wrapped them in a bear hug and squeezed their lungs. But the heat was not the only thing that intensified. It began with Jill sniffing and wrinkling her nose. Then Jack said, “What is that?” Soon, the children—and the frog—were covering their noses and mouths, trying not to breathe because of the horrible, putrefying stench. It was as if flesh were rotting, had been rotting, for a thousand years. Jack bent over, put his hand on the pockmarked black wall, and tried not to be sick. He gagged and held his throat. At last, he straightened up, and the children staggered on.
They became dizzier and dizzier with the heat and the smell. How will we fight this thing? Jack thought. I can barely walk. I can barely see straight. He would have said as much to Jill, but he didn’t want to open his mouth, for fear of the pungent funk. And besides, he didn’t need to, because Jill was wondering the same thing.
The tunnel became narrower, and narrower, and narrower, until Jack and Jill were crouching, and then crawling. Their shirts, their hair, their socks were soaked with sweat.
The rock beneath them became hotter, until the sweat that ran off of their faces sizzled as it landed on the black stone. The palms of their hands were burning.
The tunnel turned precipitously. The frog, peering out of Jack’s pocket, said, “Holy . . .”
Jack looked up. “Have mercy . . .” he muttered.
Jill came up behind them. She opened her mouth. No sound came out at all.
CHAPTER TEN
Eidechse Von Feuer,
Der Menschenfleischfressende
Once upon a time, there was a huge cavern under the earth.
Jack and Jill and the frog stared.
But the cavern was not what they were staring at.
At the back of the cavern, a torrent of lava poured out of a rock wall, red and black and lurid and glowing.
But that was not what they were staring at, either.
The torrent tumbled into a magma river that wound its way around the back of the cavern, hugging the pockmarked black wall closely and then, in the distance, feeding into an endless underground lava sea.
But the three travelers were also not staring at that.
They were staring at a small mountain that sat beside the winding lava river. The mountain was made not of rock, nor of magma, but of pink, fleshy skin. The mountain had a ridge like a backbone, and little valleys formed by small arms and legs, and a slope of a wide, flat tail. There was no head. But its body rose and fell with breath. They could see thin black bones through the pink skin, and in the distended bag of a belly, black organs wound around one another, pulsing.
“I don’t want to do this . . .” Jill whispered.
Jack shook his head and muttered, “Maybe we can go back and beg Begehren to let us up.”
“Or we can just live down here . . .”
The two children backed into the tunnel they’d come from as swiftly as they could.
But the frog said, “Wait.”
“What?” hissed Jill.
“What?” said Jack, a little louder than he’d intended to.
Jill looked at Jack, eyes wide, finger before her lips. Jack slapped his hand over his mouth.
Silence.
Jack said a wordless prayer of thanks.
And then there was a roar. A roar that has never been described accurately, in all the times this tale has been told. A roar that shook the walls and the roof, that caused waves in the lava sea, that made Jack and Jill fear their eardrums would burst, that made their very bones vibrate and ache within their bodies, that was felt in a tremble not only up in the Goblin Kingdom, but indeed, even on the surface of the earth above that. Jack and Jill fell back into the tunnel, covering their ears and burying their heads between their knees and wishing, wishing, wishing the sound would stop.
And then there was heat. It scorched the children’s faces and arms, turning their skin red and blistery in an instant. Flame followed the heat, and it rolled up against their little tunnel like a beast that was too big to chase them any farther. The flame was red and yellow and blue and pale green, and Jack and Jill would have thought it was one of the most magnificent things they had ever seen in their lives—if their heads hadn’t been clamped firmly between their knees.
Finally, the flame subsided. The children peeked out from their protective positions. The frog had fallen from Jack’s pocket and was curled in a ball on the ground.
The children leaped to their feet. “GO!” Jack cried.
But the frog cried, “Wait!”
Jill hesitated, but Jack was already sprinting away, his spear discarded, his arms flailing wildly as he ran. “Wait!” said the frog again. “He only wants to know who we are!”
Halfway down the hall, Jack slowed to a jog.
“Excuse me?” said Jill.
“He was asking who we are,” said the frog.
Jill was staring at the frog in an attempt to determine if he had lost his mind. Jack had very much the same look on his face.
“He speaks Amphibian,” said the frog, and shrugged his little froggy shoulders.
“You’re joking . . .” said Jack.
“You’re certain?” said Jill.
“Sure,” said the frog. “It’s my language.”
The floor began to shake, the air heated to boiling, and Jack and Jill clamped their hands over their ears as another roar rocked the tunnel, the cavern, and the earth miles and m
iles above.
When it had subsided, Jill asked the frog, “Well? Was that Amphibian, too?”
“Yeah,” said the frog. “He wants to know where we went.”
Jack started laughing hysterically, and Jill was pretty sure that both of her companions had suddenly lost their minds.
“Let’s go talk to him,” said the frog. Jack continued to laugh insanely.
Jill looked back and forth between the two and, since Jack wasn’t giving her any better options, she followed the frog back to the very edge of the cavern.
The mountain had moved. It had turned and raised a humongous, grotesque, fleshy, pink head. This head was roughly the size of the rest of its body, excluding its long, thick tail. It had tiny black eyes that sat where you might have expected ears to be, just above the upward curves at the end of its wide mouth.
“Oh boy,” said the frog.
“What?” Jill whispered.
“It’s a salamander.”
Jill stared. “It is?”
The frog nodded.
“Is that bad?” Jill asked.
The frog shrugged. “Well, they’re not terribly clever.”
The mountainous salamander stared at them out of the tiny black eyes on either side of his head.
“I’m going to introduce us,” the frog said. Jill nodded as if this made sense. Jack walked up to them, giggling and mumbling about all the king’s horses and all the king’s men putting his head back together again. Then he tried to make his elbow touch his nose.
The frog croaked again. The beast opened his mouth, revealing a big pink tongue. Then out poured a roar that seemed to never end. Jill curled up in a ball and covered her ears. She thought they might be bleeding.
“He says his name is Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschen-fleischfressende,” said the frog.