He did so as best he could.
“Good, good,” she said. “That’s the only way to get rid of the knots.”
Max slowed his jumping, hoping that he could be finished as soon as possible. “Done?” he asked.
“Sure. Thanks, King,” she said, and quickly rolled onto her back, forcing Max to step quickly, log-rolling-style, until he was standing on her stomach.
“Please go slower,” he asked.
Katherine looked up at him, as if assessing whether she should ask him what she wanted to ask him.
“Hey Max, you ever feel like you’re, like, stuck under other people?” she said, squinting up at him, seeming immensely relieved to have said it. “Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped under people … like in a bad way. You know what I mean?”
Max began to formulate an answer but she didn’t seem to need one.
“I don’t know,” she continued, “I feel like I’m constantly burdened by everyone’s issues. You know?”
Max thought he knew. Or did he? He wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. He just liked being with her, alone with her. She seemed interested in him, in being only with him and talking only to him, and he was having trouble breathing.
She smiled at him. “I was about to go crazy before you showed up. You’re different, you know? You’re …” She seemed on the verge of saying something very serious but then retreated. “You know, you’ve got less hair, you’re cleaner … You smell better. You don’t smell great, but better.”
Max laughed.
“King?” It was a distant voice, maybe Carol’s, from far below. “Max?”
Max jumped off Katherine’s stomach and tried to peer through the treetops to find the parade. He knew he needed to get back.
Katherine sighed. “Yeah, I know. You’re the king and all. I’m sorry for taking you away from your kingly subjects. Hold on. I know a shortcut.”
Max again held onto the scruff of her neck and immediately Katherine leapt from her platform — thirty feet up, a hundred feet forward, and then descended into what seemed like a mess of trees twenty feet down. But as they fell closer, another platform became visible, and Max realized they would be landing on it. He braced himself for painful impact but at the moment they touched the platform, they were high in the air again. Katherine had managed to touch the platform’s surface the tiniest fragment of a second before bounding off again, onto the next tree and the next platform. She leapt and bounded this way, more agile than any kangaroo or frog, for six more trees, each journey more thrilling than any roller coaster or bungee jump Max had ever known or seen and the only problem was the barf on his wolf suit. He threw up twice, yes, but it was a good kind of throwing up.
Finally Max felt them descending farther, down, down. He could see the lagoon ahead, a green body of water in the shape of a sleeping dog, and just before the lagoon he could see the group of beasts making their way there.
CHAPTER XXVIII
They came to earth slowly, as if tied to a hundred parachutes. They had beaten the group to the lagoon and Katherine made sure everyone had taken note of their entrance. No one was impressed, and Carol did not seem pleased at all. His face was twisted into a scowl.
Max ran over to him.
“Hey! You ready to swim?” he asked.
Carol shrugged.
“What’s the matter?” Max asked.
“Where were you guys?” Carol asked.
“Who? Me and Katherine? We just took a different route.”
“But you were supposed to lead the parade.”
“I did.”
“And then you didn’t.”
There was a new sharpness to Carol’s tone that Max couldn’t figure out. Was he really mad about something?
“Well, that’s when I had to see something with Katherine. Now let’s swim. Do you like the water?”
“No,” Carol said flatly. “And I don’t like sailing, either. Remember?”
Max didn’t remember.
“I heard you were talking about building a ship with everyone else. Why would you do that?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why would you need a ship, Max? You’re thinking of leaving already?”
“No, no,” Max said. “This would just be for fun. Or emergencies.” Carol’s face had darkened and his eyes had gone small. His expression scattered Max’s brain so much he started babbling: “It’ll have a trampoline. And a big aquarium. An aquarium under the water, inside the ship, where we keep the fish and squids and stuff we like …”
The explanation was doing no good.
“But I thought we said we were bored by sailing,” Carol said. “Isn’t that what you said just this morning? We talked about killing anything boring but now you want to sail? The most boring thing of all?”
“Well,” Max mumbled, but he hadn’t a clue how to reconcile the two states of mind. “We don’t have to build it. It was just an idea.”
“And why would you build it without me? I’m the one here who knows how to build things.”
“I wasn’t going to build it without you,” Max said. “I was just telling everyone about it. We were all going to build it together. Everyone was.”
“But it doesn’t seem like you want to be together. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone your different route with Katherine. What’s so great about her route anyway?”
Max had to think. This was getting too complicated too quickly. He felt his brain splitting and hiding. If only he could get Carol into the water and playing Marco Polo, he wouldn’t be upset about these little things.
“Let’s just swim,” Max said. “Please?”
“You guys go ahead,” Carol said, and then went off to a dark corner of the lagoon to stew. Max watched him sit down, throw his chin into his hands, and glower. He was tempted to go and talk to him, but he knew that time would heal this wound, which he assumed was small, superficial even. He hoped that Carol’s fiery mood would be cooled by the sight of merriment all around him.
“C’mon everyone, let’s swim!” Max said.
He ran from the grass, up a small embankment, and did a cannonball into the water.
No one followed.
“Okay everyone, do what I did,” he yelled. “Who can do the best cannonball? Katherine?”
She shook her head. “I don’t really do stuff like that,” she said. “I’m fine here.”
“Douglas?” Max said.
Douglas seemed flattered to have been singled out, and so got ready to follow Max into the water.
“Hold on!” Carol said.
Douglas stopped. Max turned. Carol was on his knees at the edge of the lagoon, his ear to the mossy ground. “What is it?” Max said.
Carol held his hand up in a wait-a-second gesture. He closed his eyes, listening intently to the earth for what seemed like a full minute, and then got up. “It’s probably nothing,” he said, knowing he had everyone’s rapt attention.
“What was it?” Max asked.
Carol didn’t answer.
“You don’t think it’s anything?” Ira asked.
The other beasts were frozen, their eyes huge with concern. Carol stood for a moment, a look of great thoughtfulness on his face.
“It’s nothing, don’t worry about it,” Carol said, in a way clearly meant to cause more concern. “Have fun. I’ll tell you if we need to worry.”
Max wasn’t ready to give up on the lagoon, on Marco Polo and the prospect of finishing the parade the way it needed to be finished.
“Okay, get in now!” Max yelled. He began splashing Douglas and Ira, but now no one wanted to go in the water. They were still watching Carol, who periodically got on his knees to listen to the ground.
“I order you to swim!” Max said.
No one moved.
Finally Max had to get out and do the job himself. He grabbed each potential swimmer by the hand, dragged them to the water, and pushed them in. He was pleasantly surprised by how well they all floated — they were like buoys, resting atop the surfa
ce with incredible ease.
Soon he had them all in the water, and was trying to get them to listen to the rules of Marco Polo. “Okay, so you have to close your eyes. Wait, I close my eyes. Then I swim around after you say Marco. No, I say Marco, and then you say Polo. And when you say Polo I try to catch whoever said it. Or I can hear you when you say that, so I go toward the sound—”
The mention of sound only got the creatures thinking again about whatever Carol was hearing in the ground, so they focused their attention on him. And he seemed to take the task very seriously. His mouth was moving silently, as if he were repeating whatever horrible things the ground was telling him.
Max, though, was determined to make the lagoon a success. If he could only get everyone in the water, he knew that they would love Marco Polo, and would forget the chatter and whatever else was on their minds.
“Hey Carol,” Max said, “you think it’d be good if someone went down the waterfall?”
Carol shrugged.
“Ira, go down the waterfall,” Max ordered.
Ira sat for a moment, then, resigned, stood and slowly climbed up the cliff wall. At the top, where the water looked downward and fell, he sat down, and with absolutely no joy or inspiration at all, he allowed himself to be taken over. But he wasn’t positioned correctly. He descended in a morose kind of belly-flop form, and Max knew that he would land with a huge and painful slap.
And so he did. The sound, like a wet shirt thrown against cement, was almost as painful to the ears as it no doubt felt to Ira.
It seemed like minutes before he emerged from the water, shuddering. He floated on his back for some time, moaning, weeping, sniffling and then moaning some more. The beasts all gave Max terrible looks.
The lagoon was not a success, and Max was quickly running out of ideas to create any kind of diversion or happiness in the lives of his subjects.
“Psst.” Max looked up to find Katherine up above him. She was hanging from a low bough of a tree. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
Max was so happy to see her, and was so ready to leave with her, to be free, even momentarily, of the obligations of pleasing everyone. He lifted his arms to allow her to raise him to the trees when—
“Wait!” Carol said, dropping to his knees. “Listen!” He rested his ear against the earth.
Everyone went quiet and rigid.
The look on Carol’s face grew grave.
“What? What is it?” Judith asked.
“It doesn’t sound good,” Carol answered.
The others scampered around Carol, with Douglas and Judith almost trampling Max to get there.
“What is it? Vibrations?” Douglas asked.
“Whispering?” Judith added. “Chatter?”
Carol lowered his head and nodded. “Vibrations, chatter, and whispering, I’m afraid,” he said.
“Oh no,” Ira moaned. “Not again.”
“Does it sound close?” Alexander whined.
Carol gave them an expression that seemed to say, “I don’t know for sure, but it very well might be right underneath us, ready to devour all of us at once.”
“Then what are we still doing here?” Judith wailed.
“Run!” Douglas yelled.
And so they ran.
CHAPTER XXIX
The beasts took off in seven different directions. Then, one by one, they turned to see where Carol was running, and they changed directions to follow him. Even Katherine dropped from the branches above to run and to follow Carol. Max did too.
“Carol!” he yelled. Max was running faster than he’d ever run and could barely speak, but he needed to know what was happening. “Why are we running?” he managed to say, heaving and holding his side.
Carol didn’t answer him. He didn’t even look his way.
“Carol!” he yelled. Carol was going thirty miles an hour, Max figured. Max couldn’t hope to keep up. Just as Carol disappeared down a ravine, Max spotted Ira following him.
“Ira!” Max yelled. Ira was slower, but still far faster than he looked. Heaving and crying, he almost ran over Max, seeming not to have seen him at all. He didn’t say a word as he sped by.
Not one of the beasts seemed concerned about leaving their king behind. They were barreling into anything, knocking any and all in-the-way foliage flat. They were huffing and moaning, their eyes tearing and their arms grabbing at the air in front of them. They were crazed. All Max could do was follow the wide swath their stampede cut through the trees and underbrush.
Max ran until he was ready to throw up. Leaning against a tree and catching his breath, he finally spotted them beyond the woods, all six beasts, in a many-colored meadow. The grass there was long, soft, and arrayed in a patchwork of clashing colors — ochre and black and violet and fuchsia. The beasts were all gathered in the middle, in a loose circle, heaving. A few had collapsed on the ground. As Max approached, they seemed to take little or no notice of him.
Max found Carol. “What was it?”
“What was what?” Carol asked.
“The sound. Whatever we were running from.”
“You don’t know?” Carol asked.
Max shook his head.
Carol looked surprised, or feigned surprise.
“You really don’t know?” he asked again.
Suddenly Carol was spun around. It was Judith, her claw on Carol’s shoulder.
“Where’s Douglas?” she asked, a panicked look on her face.
Carol shrugged. He turned to Max. “You see Douglas out there?”
Max hadn’t. Carol gave him an exasperated look, as if to say, What do you know, King?
“Maybe he wasn’t with us in the first place,” Carol said.
“Of course he was,” Katherine said.
But everyone else seemed suddenly unsure.
Katherine turned to Max. “Did you see Douglas with us?”
Max had, and was about to say so, but Carol interrupted him, placing his gigantic paw over Max’s mouth. “Don’t do that, Katherine. Don’t bring him into it. Douglas did not come.”
“Of course he did,” she said, astonished. “He was with us a few minutes ago.”
“Sorry. You’re wrong,” Carol said dismissively.
“I can’t believe you,” Katherine said. “Do you really not notice who’s around you? Are you really that self-centered that you can’t remember which four or five of us are near at any given time? Do you look at or hear any of us?”
This made Carol boil. But before he could formulate an answer, Katherine turned to the rest of the group.
“Okay, whoever thinks he was with us, stand up. And whoever thinks he wasn’t, sit down.”
Everyone began to sit down and stand accordingly, though they all were apprehensive to be picking sides.
Carol was exasperated. “No, no! Whoever thinks he wasn’t with us, stand up. And whoever thinks he was, lie down.”
“No,” Katherine said, her face reddening, “I was already standing! Why do you have to do that, even change the way I set it up? You make everything ten times harder than it needs to be.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do.”
“Do not.”
Katherine turned back to the group, who were all watching the debate intently, like children at a puppet show. “Okay, everyone who thinks Carol makes things ten times harder than they need to be, raise your left hand. If you think he doesn’t make things harder, raise your right hand.”
Everyone began, tentatively, to raise one arm or the other.
“Wait,” Judith said. “Should we be sitting down, too? Or is that part over? I don’t like sitting down when people tell me to sit down. It takes the pleasure out of it—”
“Forget it,” Katherine said. “It’s not worth it.” And she walked away, disappearing into the forest shadows before leaping upward.
A moment later, a rustling came from the woods, and Douglas emerged from between two trees and entered the clearing. He looked dazed, exhauste
d.
“Did you find out what it was?” Judith asked him.
Douglas shook his head. “No.”
“Did you hear anything?” Ira asked.
“No. Or maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. I did hear a loud, rhythmic sound, like a huffing. It was really loud, and lasted the whole time I was running. Now it’s gone though.”
Ira and Alexander looked worried. Carol nodded solemnly, as if this, unfortunately, confirmed his suspicions. Only Judith thought to second-guess it. She rolled her eyes and sighed elaborately.
“That was your own breathing, Douglas. Of course it stopped. You stopped running.” But though Judith was skeptical of Douglas’s account of the sounds underground, she didn’t doubt the existence of the chatter. “Carol,” she said, “when you heard it, did it ever sound like huffing?”
Carol was diplomatic. “I think it might have, somewhere down there. And it sounds different to different ears, of course. You might hear something more jagged and angry, Judith. It might be chatter specifically about you, and all the things you’ve done wrong. Ira might hear something open and hollow, like an empty, void-ish sound, the sound of a well with no bottom. They really know how to get to us.”
Judith was staring hard at Max. “So what should we do, King?”
“About what?” he asked.
“What do you mean, about what? About the sounds that run under the ground and are mean to us. What else?” she said. “We need to kill it dead, right, Carol?”
Carol nodded.
Max had no plan at all. “So what does it sound like again?” he asked.
Judith was apoplectic. “Wait. You don’t know about the chatter? I don’t know what’s worse — the chatter, or the fact that our king doesn’t know anything about it. How can you rule this place if you don’t know about the sounds in the ground?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t know,” he said. “I just was asking you guys what you thought it was. Where I come from the chatter just sounds different.”
Max got on his knees and listened to the earth. “Yeah, I hear it for sure. But it’s just quieter than where I come from. Our chatter is super-loud and it sounds like teeth.”
This had everyone’s attention.