Three shrinking tales, p.12
Three Shrinking Tales, page 12
“But we couldn’t see those from the cave,” Emily told him.
Dick looked to see what she was talking about.
There were big signs on each side of the bridge, like the sign they had found on the tree.
“You’re not allowed to wade in the stream,” Emily said. “It’s a good thing nobody saw us.”
The sky was very dark now. A streak of lightning zigzagged across the clouds. A second later the children heard a loud clap of thunder.
Emily felt a drop of rain on her nose.
Another splashed on her cheek. Domino jumped out of her arms and raced across the bridge.
Emily and Dick ran after him.
The cat left the road and leaped to the rocks along the stream.
Emily looked at the big signs. She knew she’d be in trouble if anyone saw her down by the stream. But she couldn’t let Domino get lost in the woods. Then he’d have to eat the birds and chipmunks.
“There’s a car coming,” Dick said. “Somebody will see us.”
Emily was already making her way down the steep bank. Dick followed her.
Domino was leaping from one rock to another along the stream. The two children chased after him.
There was another flash of lightning and a bang of thunder. The rain was coming down in white sheets.
Domino had jumped onto a rock in the stream. The water swirled all around him.
Emily waded into the water, shoes and all. She grabbed the cat.
“Hey, Em,” Dick yelled. “Look where we are.”
Emily turned to look at her brother. He was standing right by the crack in the rock that led to the cave. “Come on up here, Em.”
She held the cat in her arms and waded to the rock. Dick lay on his stomach and reached down for Domino. Emily handed up the cat and climbed after him.
Dick carried Domino through the crack. And Emily squeezed into the cave behind them.
It felt like coming home.
Rain dripped through the open places in the roof. Now and then a flash of lightning lit the dim cave for a second. Dick and Emily sat close to the walls, out of the way of the drips. Dick put the shopping bag on the ground near them.
The legs of Emily’s jeans were soaking wet. So were her shoes and socks. Domino was wet, too, but he ran over to the pool in the center of the cave.
“Take a look at that crazy cat,” Dick said. “He’s fishing again!”
For a while Domino just stared into the pool. Then he poked in a black and white paw. He pulled it out almost at once and started to shake it. “Meow!”
“There’s something stuck on his paw.” Dick ran over to see what if was. “A crayfish.”
Emily went to help. The crayfish was pinching Domino’s furry paw with one of its sharp claws.
“Watch out it doesn’t grab you, Em!” Dick went to the shopping bag. He took out the butter knife and brought it over to pry the crayfish’s claw open. “I’ll have you free in a moment, Domino.”
Dick wiggled the knife in the claw. The crayfish opened its claw, and Domino pulled his paw out. Dick put down the knife, picked up the cat, and began to stroke him.
Emily looked at the crayfish. “There’s something in its other claw.”
The crayfish was crawling back toward the pool of water.
Suddenly Domino twisted out of Dick’s arms and jumped toward the pool. He reached the water before the crayfish did and crouched on the edge. “Meow!”
“He’s trying to tell us something,” Emily said.
The cat was moving back and forth in front of the pool. He seemed to be trying to keep the crayfish from getting into the water.
Emily picked up the butter knife. She pried open the other claw of the crayfish. Something small and shiny dropped onto the floor of the cave. Dick picked it up.
Domino stood up and stretched.
Splash! The crayfish dived into the water and disappeared under a stone. “We don’t want to lose this.” Emily put the knife back into the shopping bag. “We’re in enough trouble already.”
Dick was looking at the little object the crayfish had dropped.
“What is it?” Emily asked.
“It’s so dark in here I can’t be sure,” he said. “And anyway it seems too good to be true.”
Emily felt her heart pound inside her. She was so excited she could hardly speak. “Give it to me.”
Dick handed her the little shiny thing. She held it up.
A flash of lightning lit the cave. Now the children could see that what they hoped was really true.
Emily was holding the little stepladder in her hand.
“The ladder must have fallen into the pool when I was looking at the catfish,” Dick said. “Anyway, now that we’ve got it back, let’s go home.”
Emily looked at the low roof of the cave. “The ladder’s too tall for us to open it here. And we might be struck by lightning if we took it outside.”
“The cave’s wide enough to open the ladder sideways on the floor,” Dick told her.
“But then we couldn’t go up to the red steps,” Emily pointed out.
Dick thought for a minute. “Maybe just touching the red steps works the magic.”
“It’s worth a try,” Emily said. She laid the little ladder on its side near the pool and opened it while it was still on the ground.
At once a full-size ladder stretched from one wall of the cave to the other. It went right over the pool of water in the center.
Dick picked up the cat. He walked over to the end of the ladder and got up to stand on the side of the red step there. Emily went to get the shopping bag. She stood on the side of the step next to her brother.
“We want to go home,” Dick said. Then he hopped off the ladder. “We’re still in the cave, Em. I guess the magic doesn’t work when the ladder’s on its side.” He put the cat on the ground.
Emily stepped down. “Help me fold it up, Dick.”
“Meow!” Domino ran to the other end of the ladder. He jumped onto the edge and tiptoed along it, crossing the pool as if he were on a bridge. When he reached the red steps, the cat sat down on the side of the ladder.
Emily looked at him. Domino was swaying, and his green eyes were crossed. “He’s dizzy, Dick! Hurry up! He’s showing us how to work the magic!”
Emily went to the opposite end of the ladder and crawled along. The ladder creaked and shook. Emily nearly fell into the pool of water when she had to cross it. The handles of the shopping bag were looped over her arm, and the bag flapped against the ladder.
At last Emily got to the first red step. She felt it with her fingers, and bells started to ring in her ears. She crawled over to the cat.
Emily took hold of the red step at the end of the ladder. Now the cave was turning like a merry-go-round.
Dick started along the ladder. He had even more trouble than Emily. The ladder was shaking as if it would fall apart at any moment.
It seemed an age before Dick reached the red step next to Emily. “Try it now, Em.”
Emily closed her eyes and whispered, “Home, please take us home!”
She opened her eyes. “Dick,” she said, “I think we have to go back all the way across the ladder.”
“Yipe!” Dick started crawling backward the way he had come.
Emily waited until her brother was almost to the end of the ladder before she started to move. Then she backed slowly over the pool of water.
Domino was still crouching on the side of the red step. Without any warning, he made a mad dash and bumped into Emily. The ladder tipped over and threw Emily and the cat on top of Dick.
They rolled over and over on the living room rug.
Emily let go of the shopping bag. She stood up and looked around the room. The canvas drop cloth was still spread on the rug under the hole Pete had made in the ceiling. “We’d better put the ladder back where it was. Give me a hand with it, Dick.”
Dick got to his feet. He helped Emily set the ladder upright.
“Pete’s probably waiting on the front stoop.” Dick ran to the door. “He’s not there.”
“Maybe he came back and went away again. We’ve been gone a long time.” Emily moved the ladder onto the drop cloth. She stumbled over something. It was the big hammer Pete had used to break the wall of the shower.
“Let me take that out of your way.” Dick tugged at the hammer. “It’s heavier than I thought.” He looked at the wooden handle. “There are some numbers written here.”
Emily set the ladder under the hole in the ceiling. She came over to see what Dick was talking about.
28″ was marked in pencil on the handle.
“That means twenty-eight inches,” Emily said.
Dick looked at the hammer. “I remember now. We learned that in school. This hammer looks about twenty-eight inches long. Hey, Em, you know what I think?”
Emily pulled the yellow pencil stub out of her pocket. There was an eraser on the end of it.
As soon as she touched the pencil marks with the eraser, they vanished. Then Emily wrote 10″ on the handle. At once the hammer was only ten inches long.
Dick picked up the little hammer. “Now we know where Pete got the big hammer,” he said.
“Yes. And I’d better make it big again before he gets back.” Emily erased the numbers she had written.
“Wait a minute!” Dick put the little hammer on the floor. “I don’t want to be holding this when you change it back.”
Emily bent over and wrote 28″ on the wooden handle. Once again the hammer was too big for them to lift.
“Where’s Domino?” Dick asked.
Emily picked up the shopping bag. “That reminds me. Go shut the back door.” She walked into the kitchen and took the peanut butter jar and the graham cracker box out of the shopping bag.
She used the eraser on Pete’s pencil to remove the writing on the box. Her mother would ask a lot of questions if she found cookies in it. Emily opened the box and sniffed. The smell of graham crackers met her nose. She put the pencil stub away in her pocket.
Dick had gone down the stairs to the door to the yard. Now he came back into the kitchen. “I shut the door, but I didn’t see Domino in the yard.”
“Maybe he’s still in the house,” Emily said. “We have to make sure he’s out.”
“It wouldn’t make Dad sick if we kept the cat in the yard,” Dick said. “We could build a kennel for him.”
Emily didn’t think Domino would want to live in a kennel, but she didn’t feel like arguing with Dick.
“I’ll look in the basement,” Dick said. “You check around here.”
Emily searched the kitchen and dining room. She looked under the living room sofa and in the hall closet. She didn’t find the cat.
Dick came up from the basement. “Do you think he could have gone up to the bedrooms?”
Emily ran up the stairs. Dick was right behind her.
The children looked in their bedrooms. Then they both tiptoed into their parents’ big room at the front of the house.
The sun streamed through the tall bay windows onto the wide bed. The wet black and white cat was curled up in a patch of sunlight on their mother’s pillow.
“Domino!” Emily yelled. “Get off there!”
The cat opened his eyes. Dick walked over to pick him up. But Domino made a flying leap to the floor and ran out of the room.
Emily and Dick chased after him.
Emily and Dick rushed out of their parents’ room into the hall. Domino was already out of sight. They looked into the pink bathroom. The cat was slipping through the open door of the stall shower.
The children ran into the bathroom. They were just in time to see the end of Domino’s black and white tail disappear into the jagged hole in the wall.
Dick got down on his hands and knees on the shower floor. He looked into the hole. “It’s like a little tunnel.” Dick stood up. “What did you do with Pete’s pencil, Em?”
Emily took it out of her pocket. “Why?”
“I want to try something.” Dick took the pencil out of her hand. Emily saw him write 3 ½″ on the back of his arm.
The pencil clattered to the floor. Emily couldn’t see Dick anywhere. But when she bent over to pick up the pencil, there was a tiny boy standing in the middle of the shower stall.
“Hey, Em, it worked!” the boy said. It was Dick’s voice, but not nearly as loud as usual. “Now I can find out where the tunnel goes.” He ran over to the hole in the wall and stepped into it.
“Dick, come back!” Emily called after him.
There was no answer.
Emily crouched down to look into the hole. It was very dark inside. “Dick, can you hear me?”
Dick didn’t answer. Emily wished she hadn’t let him have the pencil. It would be terrible if anything happened to her little brother. She had to get him to come back.
Emily went to her room to get the little red flashlight she kept under her pillow. She pushed it way down into the pocket of her jeans. Then she ran back to the bathroom and stepped into the shower stall.
She stared at the magic pencil and thought hard. Emily liked being taller than her brother. She wrote 4″ on her arm.
At once the pencil stub was almost as big as she was. Emily had to drop it. She pulled her flashlight out of her pocket and turned it on. Emily took a deep breath and stepped into the tunnel.
Her shoes and socks and the legs of her jeans were still damp. Maybe I should have written dry on them with Pete’s pencil, she thought.
But it was too late now. Anyway, Emily didn’t know just how the pencil would work. She wondered if Pete knew for sure.
At first the tunnel went through soft wet cement. Emily’s feet sank into it with each step. The flashlight gave just enough light to keep her from bumping into the mushy walls. She thought of Dick running through the tunnel in the dark. Emily tried to go faster.
In a little while the floor was dry, but it was very rough underfoot. The way was crooked now. Emily had to duck under slats of wood and squeeze between chunks of plaster.
The darkness was fading into a kind of twilight. Up ahead there was light.
Emily came to the end of the tunnel. She stepped out onto a hard floor. It was made of the biggest tiles Emily had ever seen.
In front of her there was a huge metal paw like the foot of a lion. It was holding up an enormous old-fashioned bathtub.
Emily had walked into the bathroom of the house next door.
A dim light came from a dirty skylight in the bathroom ceiling. Emily turned off her flashlight and put it back into her pocket.
She didn’t like being in Mr. Dooley’s house. It would be awful if he saw her there.
But where was Dick? Emily walked all around the huge room. She didn’t see him anywhere.
The bathroom door was open. Emily went out into a hall. It was a lot like the hall in her own house. But the floor here wasn’t shiny the way it was at home. Mr. Dooley didn’t wash it very often, Emily thought.
A cockroach ran along the baseboard. Emily hated roaches. This one was bigger than her feet. She caught sight of a giant spider dangling by a thread from the ceiling.
Emily walked toward the stairs at the end of the hall. They were very big now that she was so small.
Someone was lying face-down on the top step. Emily’s heart seemed to stop for an instant.
It was her brother!
She ran over and kneeled down beside him. “Dick, are you hurt?”
He turned his head to look at her. “Em!”
“Why are you lying down?” Emily asked.
“I’m trying to figure out the best way to get down these stairs,” Dick told her.
“Why do you want to go downstairs?” Emily wanted to know.
“Domino ran down there,” Dick said. “Mr. Dooley will do something terrible to him if he catches him. You know how he hates cats.”
Emily saw that each of the stair steps was taller than she was. She pointed to the baseboard that slanted down the wall beside the stairs. “Why don’t we slide down?”
“We’ll have to hang our legs over the steps and go down sideways,” Dick said.
Emily climbed onto the board. She grabbed Dick’s hand to pull him up beside her.
They started sliding, using their hands as brakes. Halfway down they slipped off the board onto a little landing. Dick jumped to his feet and ran to climb onto the baseboard that went the rest of the way down the stairs. Emily came after him.
They began to slide faster. At the bottom of the stairs, Dick shot off the board onto the floor. Emily fell on top of him.
The two children stood up. They were in a dark hall. Dick rubbed his elbow. “Ouch! I landed on my funny bone.”
“Sh-sh!” Emily pulled Dick back against the wall.
Someone was coming down the hall. But all Emily and Dick could see were two huge bedroom slippers walking toward them.
The slippers went right by and walked into the living room.
“That’s Mr. Dooley,” Dick said. “We’d better keep out of his sight.”
The children tiptoed the other way down the hall.
They went past a gloomy dining room. There were six heavy chairs. A bowl of dusty wax fruit was set in the middle of the big table. The room looked as if nobody ever ate there.
At the end of the hall they came to a swinging door. Dick and Emily pushed as hard as they could. The door swung just wide enough to let them squeeze into the kitchen at the back of the house.
The kitchen smelled of stale coffee grounds and bacon grease.
Dick looked up at the grimy window. “Mr. Dooley can see into our yard from there. I’ll bet he’s always spying on us.”
Emily had the creepy feeling that someone was watching them now. She grabbed Dick’s arm. “Look!”
Two enormous eyes were shining in the dark shadows under the kitchen table.
