After a day, he was surprised to find Meagan knocking at the edge of the hole he had made.
“I missed you,” she growled. Then she showed him a bottle of wine she had recovered from a wagon the giant had swallowed two years earlier, which she had been saving for a special event.
Edgar invited her in and they had a small party, sitting in the darkness and discussing what he should do next to make his tooth more homey.
The following day they ran a rope from Meagan’s home through the gap between it and the next tooth, and then along the outer wall of the teeth to Edgar’s door, which made it easier for them to visit each other whenever they wanted.
While he continued work on his new dwelling, Meagan taught him how to snatch things from the tide of food and rubble that poured down the giant’s throat three times a day. When she “went fishing,” as she called it, she first secured a safety rope about her waist, anchoring the other end of the rope to one of the chairs inside her tooth. Normally she pulled things in with the help of a long pole that had a hook on one end. But if something particularly good came rushing past that was too far out on the tongue for her to snag simply by leaning for it, she would fling her whole body onto the surface of the tongue, then use the rope to haul herself back.
Once they saw an old man go past, but he was all the way in the center of the mouth and they were not able to reach him, despite their best efforts.
His cry of despair as he disappeared down the giant’s gullet echoed in Edgar’s dreams for many nights afterward.
Once Edgar was truly settled, he began to explore the giant’s mouth in search of a way out. Though he did not tell Meagan this was what he was doing, he suspected she was able to guess. Not that it made any difference. He could find no way of escape. His greatest hope had been to climb out of the giant’s mouth while he was sleeping. But the moist walls of his lips were too slick to climb easily. Twice Edgar tried using the pickax to help him make the climb, but both times this caused the giant to rub his mouth, with results that were nearly fatal. (The second time, he barely made it back to Meagan’s tooth, where she set his broken bones but gave him no sympathy for the pain that kept him awake for seven nights running.)
It was like being at the bottom of a well: easy enough to fell in, impossible to climb out.
Despite his misadventures at the front of the giant’s mouth, Edgar continued his explorations, until he had at last reached the most distant of the giant’s molars. He carried a torch with him, which he lit and waved to Meagan when he reached the far side.
When he returned from that trip, he was burning with a new idea. “If we string a rope directly across the center of his mouth, we might have better luck snagging things as they go by,” he said.
“The giant would rip it out,” replied Meagan.
“Well, what if we didn’t make it permanent? We could put in a couple of hooks or pegs or something, one on each side of his mouth, and run the rope between them when we wanted to use it.”
“Might work,” said Meagan dubiously. “We’d have to put the pegs in the upper teeth, though; if we try it with the lower ones he’s sure to snap it with his tongue right away.”
The next day Edgar again made his way to the far side of the giant’s mouth. As he traveled, he tucked a rope into the narrow trench that ran along the edge of the teeth.
He made the trip without incident, except for one frightening moment when he was at the front of the mouth and the giant happened to make a clucking sound. The violent forward movement of his whalelike tongue had almost flattened Edgar.
After some searching, Edgar found an upper tooth with a small hole, into which he pounded a peg. Then he waved his torch to Meagan to let her know he was going to take up the slack on the rope.
Once they had the rope tight, he swung himself onto it. Then, moving hand over hand, he inched his way toward the center of the giant’s mouth.
His ambition was rewarded when the giant tossed a cart full of melons into his mouth. Though it went directly down the center, Edgar was able to retrieve not only a pair of the melons but one of the wagon wheels, which he thought would look nice in his new home.
When he returned to the other side, Meagan grudgingly admitted that the rope had been a good idea. Just how good an idea became clear as the weeks rolled on and they were able to retrieve more and more items.
The most unexpected of these items was a young man named Charles, whom Edgar snatched from certain doom by hanging upside down from the rope and reaching out to him.
When he escorted Charles home with him, Meagan muttered about things getting too crowded in the giant’s mouth. But when Edgar said that Charles could live with him until they were able to excavate another tooth, she settled down.
Charles turned out to be clever with his hands, and it was not long before they were hard at work making a home for him in the tooth between the two they had already hollowed out.
Many hands making lighter work, the home took less time to complete than Edgar’s had, and soon they were turning their energies to new and better ways to salvage things.
During Edgar’s second year in the giant’s mouth, they rescued Farley. His arrival upset Meagan even more than Charles’s had, and she began muttering that she didn’t like having so many men around. On the other hand, she seemed to find Farley attractive, and once it became clear that he returned the compliment, she stopped fussing. They hollowed a home for him in the tooth above hers—the first in an upper tooth—and soon the two of them were visiting each other several times a day to consult on various ideas and projects.
Their masterpiece was a system of buckets for collecting fresh water whenever the giant took a drink. This freed them from reliance on the giant’s saliva, which was a great relief to everyone. Even better was when they could save some of the occasional flood of beer. Such a catch was always a signal for a party—which helped make up for the dangerous (not to mention putrid) belches that the giant inevitably unleashed an hour or so later.
Next to be pulled to safety, about six months later, were a pair of sisters, named Babette and Cleo, and their dim-witted brother, Herbert. The time had come to begin building homes in the teeth on the other side of the mouth. Babette and Cleo chose to live together. Herbert took the tooth above them.
Once their homes were complete, Edgar began thinking about doing some bridgework.
Before too many more years had passed, a thriving community had risen in the giant’s mouth. The people got on well enough, though there were occasional conflicts—as there always will be when you have people locked together in a crowded space.
To the surprise of no one save Edgar, he turned out to be the one who usually solved these conflicts, and eventually he was elected mayor of Giant’s Mouth Township. They gave him a jeweled scepter, which they had managed to retrieve one afternoon when the giant swallowed a king. (They had tried to save the king, too, of course, but his grip was weak and flabby, and he had not been able to hold on when Herbert reached out to him.) Many was the night Edgar sat in his tooth and looked out the window he had carved on the tongueward side, feeling warm and cozy at the sight of the lights twinkling on the other side of the giant’s mouth.
In this way, the years rolled on.
And then, one afternoon while he was setting a rope, Edgar was suddenly yanked from the giant’s mouth.
It happened because the giant, who was in a foul mood that day, became particularly irritated by the feeling of things moving in his mouth. Edgar was stringing a rope across the roof of the giant’s mouth in order to do some salvage work when the giant reached in and began to scratch at the roof of his mouth. Though the rope was less to him than a silk thread would be to a human, it caught on his fingernail. When he pulled his hand out, one end of the rope came free—and with it, still clinging to the end, came Edgar.
As he hurtled out of the giant’s mouth, two things caused Edgar to blink. The first was the unexpected brightness of the sun, which he had not seen exc
ept at a distance for so many years. The second was the horrifying distance that separated him from the ground.
Knowing he could not keep his grip on the saliva-slick rope, Edgar made a desperate leap and landed on the giant’s collar. The giant swatted at him, as one would at an annoying insect, but Edgar quickly scrambled under the giant’s collar, where he held as still as he could, scarcely breathing.
All through the long hot day he stayed there, peering sideways at the world below, longing for it, thinking of how he had missed it.
Finally night darkened the sky, bringing with it the stars that he had not seen in so many years. Their beauty made him weep.
The giant lay down, and after a time began to snore.
Edgar climbed out onto his chest. He stood, staring out at the rising moon, the river on whose water it was reflected, the dark ridge of the distant mountains, and the road that led back to his village, back to Melisande.
He wondered if she had waited for him, or if she had married Martin Plellman after all.
The giant’s clothing was so coarsely woven that the threads were almost like the rungs of a ladder. Now that the giant was lying down, it was only a few hundred feet to the ground.
Edgar took a deep breath of the clean, clear air, and released it with a sigh.
Then he began to climb the giant’s shirt—not down, but up—onto the giant’s chin, where the stubble grew so thick it was like a grove of small pine trees. Across the loose and pendulous lip Edgar climbed.
Then he lowered himself back into the moist cavern of the giant’s mouth, where his home and friends lay waiting.
There’s Nothing Under the Bed
I suppose I can’t really blame my parents for not believing me when I told them about the weirdness under my bed. After all, adults never believe a kid when he or she talks about that kind of thing. Oh, they’ll believe you’re afraid, of course. But they never believe you’ve actually got a good reason to feel that way. They’ll certainly never believe you if you tell them something horrible is lurking under the bed, waiting to take you away.
But you and I know they should. You and I know that there are terrible things that hide there, waiting to catch you, snatch you, steal you.
At least, I know. Because now I’m one of them.
I’m not sure when I first realized there was something wrong under my bed. I must have been fairly young, because I can remember that one night, when I was about five or six, I rolled a ball under the bed by accident. I heard a popping sound and started to cry because I knew I would never get my ball back from the weird gray nothingness down there.
So clearly I knew about the nothingness by then, and understood that things disappeared into it. But at the time I was upset simply because I had lost my ball. Like a kid who needs glasses but doesn’t know it, and just assumes things look fuzzy to everyone else, too, I figured that was just the way the world was.
Besides, everyone loses things in their bedroom—socks, pencils, yo-yos, homework you’re certain you did. It wasn’t until I began staying overnight at friends’ houses and saw the incredible messes under their beds—messes that didn’t disappear—that I realized something was truly wrong at my house.
My second clue came when I tried to tell my parents about this and they thought I was playing a silly game. “For heaven’s sake, David,” said my mother. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
I remember these words well because I heard them so many times in the months that followed. The few times I actually did manage to drag Mom and Dad up to look under my bed, the weird gray nothingness wasn’t there, and all they saw was solid floor. That happened sometimes. Finally I realized that the nothingness disappeared whenever grown-ups were around.
As you can imagine, this was very frustrating.
After a while Mom and Dad decided to get me some “special help”—which is to say they sent me to a shrink. Unfortunately the nothingness under my bed wasn’t something that could be fixed by a shrink. All I learned from the experience was that I had better keep my mouth shut if I didn’t want to get sent away for even more intense treatment.
Personally, I thought Mom should have figured out that a kid as sloppy as I was could never naturally have a bed that didn’t even have dust bunnies under it! But Weztix has taught me that people will believe really stupid things in order to avoid having to believe something else that they think is just plain impossible. I guess Mom just assumed that my losing so much stuff simply indicated I was even lazier, sloppier, or more addle-brained than most kids.
Maybe I was. That didn’t mean that the area under my bed wasn’t weird and scary.
Even so, I managed to live with it—until the day it swallowed Fluffy.
Yeah, I know: Fluffy is a disgustingly cute name for a cat. But when we got Fluffy she was a disgustingly cute kitten. And according to my parents I was a disgustingly cute toddler. So when I wanted to call the kitten Fluffy, they were happy to oblige.
As you get older, you discover certain things you wish your parents had done differently, maybe even been a little stricter about. Letting me name our cat Fluffy was one of them. By fifth grade I had earned at least two black eyes from fights that started with people teasing me about my “sissy” cat.
Not that Fluffy cared what anyone called her, as long as we fed her on time. She was pretty aloof. But she was mine, and I loved her.
Fortunately Fluffy seemed to have figured out on her own that she should avoid the area under my bed. Maybe it was some instinctive awareness of danger. Whatever the reason, I never had to worry about losing her there. She just naturally avoided the area.
If it hadn’t been for my rotten cousin Harold, I doubt she would ever have gone under there.
When I was little and got upset, my mother used to say, “Well, David, into every life a little rain must fall.”
If that’s true, then Harold was my own personal thunderstorm. Two years older than me and about forty pounds of solid muscle heavier, Harold projected all the friendly charm of a porcupine having a bad hair day.
Even so, his mother adored him—a fact probably worth a scientific study all by itself.
Harold and his mother came to visit more often than I would have liked. Well, once in a hundred years was really more often than I would have liked, but Harold and Aunt Marguerite actually showed up almost once a month—including the day that I was stolen.
I had already had a rough week, and when I found out that they were coming that afternoon I threw myself to the floor and screamed, “Just kill me now and get it over with!”
“That’s not funny, David,” said my mother.
“I’m not trying to be funny,” I replied.
They came anyway.
As usual, Aunt Marguerite had “private things” to discuss with my mother—meaning that she was having trouble with her latest boyfriend and wanted Mom’s advice. In my opinion, Aunt Marguerite’s endless string of boyfriends was one source of Harold’s problems. But no one asked me. Anyway, the fact that she wanted to talk to Mom meant that I got to entertain Harold.
It was a wretched, rainy day, so the two of us had to play up in my room. After a while Harold grabbed Fluffy and said, “How about a game of Kitty Elephant?”
Kitty Elephant is something Harold invented, and it will tell you a lot about him. Basically it consists of putting a sock over a cat’s face so that the cat looks like it has a long trunk, then laughing hysterically while you watch the cat try to get out of the sock.
I had learned to stay out of the way when Harold was doing something rotten, but when I saw Fluffy getting too close to the bed I tried to grab her. Harold grabbed me first. Twisting my arm behind my back, he hissed, “Don’t interfere with the game, Beanbrain.”
“Harold, you don’t understand!”
“I understand that you’re a wuss,” he said. “I’m embarrassed to have you for a cousin.”
I thought about telling him that I was disgusted to have him as a cousin but decided against it,
since he had already twisted my arm so far behind my back it felt like it was coming out of the socket.
Fluffy got closer to the edge of the bed.
“Let me go!” I screamed.
To my surprise, Harold did let go—mostly, I think, to keep our mothers from coming up to see what was going on. It was too late. In her efforts to get the sock off her head, Fluffy had rolled under the bed.
A bolt of lightning sizzled through the rainy sky.
For an instant I had dared to hope that this was one of the times when the floor was in its solid state. The lightning told me that it was not. And when I heard a pop like someone pulling his finger out of a bottle, I knew Fluffy was gone.
The popping sound drew Harold to the edge of the bed. “Come on out, Fluffy,” he said, reaching under to grab her.
When he couldn’t find her, he bent and lifted the edge of the bedspread. Then he scrambled over the bed and looked down the other side.
“What happened?” he asked nervously. “Where did she go?”
“Why don’t you crawl under there and find out?” I said bitterly, feeling so wretched I thought I might throw up.
Having Harold as a witness did not, of course, mean that our mothers were going to believe us. Nor did it help that when we finally did convince Mom and Aunt Marguerite to come upstairs we found Fluffy sitting on my bed, licking her paws. Glad as I was to see her, the sight gave me a shiver. Nothing had ever come back from underneath my bed before.
Nothing.
“Harold, you know that David has been playing this foolish game for years,” said Aunt Marguerite sharply. “I don’t want you to encourage it. His poor mother has enough trouble with him as it is.”
“Just look under the bed,” insisted Harold. “Look at the floor!”