by Jo Nesbo
Gregory poked his head out next to Nilly’s.
“Where the – hiccup! – heck is this?”
At this point Nilly could, of course, have replied, “What do I look like? An Oslo tour guide?” But he didn’t. In part because he actually knew exactly where they were.
“You see those guards over there with the lame tassels on their hats?” Nilly whispered.
Gregory nodded.
“They’re Royal Palace guards. This is the Royal Palace.”
“You mean . . . ?”
“The moon chameleons have moved into Norway’s Royal Palace. And we’re on the inside. Don’t you see? We’re close to president Hallvard Tenorsen!”
“Hiccup!”
“Quick, we have to get inside!” Nilly exclaimed.
“Double hiccup!”
But Nilly was already up out of the manhole, running, staying in the shadow along the palace wall. Then he stopped and looked around. The only door was just inside the gate, but it was light in there and the guards would catch them right away. He studied the windows. They looked very closed, all of them. But what was that sound? Music? A door on one of the balconies was ajar, and a metallic voice could be heard from within: “Senorita, don’t you want to know . . .”
“The balcony!” Nilly whispered to Gregory, who had grudgingly run over to meet him. “We have to get up there!”
“We do?” Gregory puffed.
“What? Are you tired?” Nilly asked, surprised. “I thought you were a superfrog?”
Gregory slowly blushed and hissed as quietly as he could: “Listen here, you ungrateful little half-pint! I’ve swum around half of Oslo with you on my back and you’re asking me if I’m tired? Just how much energy do you think your average superfrog has?”
“I’d expect him to be able to jump up there,” Nilly said, pointing to the balcony with the royal standard of Norway hanging off it – a red flag with a yellow ax-wielding heraldic-looking lion in the middle.
“Now you listen to me . . .”
“Just do it! Come on, Gregory, you know you can. You jumped one hundred and fifty feet on the ski slope without even a ramp! I saw you.”
“I just suddenly feel so weak. I don’t actually understand why . . .”
Nilly started chanting, softly and rhythmically under his breath: “Gregory! Gregory! Gregory! . . .”
Gregory sighed deeply. Then he squatted down, bending his knees as far as he could, and kicked off. And sailed up into the air. Sixteen feet up. Without a running start. A new world’s record. But exactly a foot and a half shy of the balcony.
He landed and tried again.
Fifteen feet.
He landed and took off again with a desperate grunt.
Fourteen feet.
Then he collapsed in the shadows, exhausted and gasping for breath. He tried to get up, but remained on his back.
Nilly leaned over him. “Is something wrong, Gregory?”
“It’s that music!” he spluttered. “It’s her!”
“What are you talking about?” Nilly asked.
“That’s a BABA song. That’s Agnes singing. That’s why I can’t do anything.”
Nilly listened. The voice from the balcony door sounded cold and indifferent, and Nilly recognised the woman’s Austrian accent: “Hum an old tune, Senorita . . .”
“You have to be able to do something,” Nilly said.
“Can’t do a thing,” Gregory Galvanius whispered weakly, curling up into a ball, trembling like a draining washing machine.
“Hm,” Nilly said, mulling things over in his mind, searching and searching for some solution. And then finding one.
“You liked Perry, didn’t you?” Nilly asked.
“Yeah . . .”
“Okay. You see that yellow lion on the flag hanging from that balcony up there?” Nilly asked. “Well, that’s not a lion. It’s a spider. A big, fat, yellow, juicy . . .”
“Butter spider,” Gregory said.
“Yes! Yes, it’s a butter spider, Gregory! Doesn’t it look delicious? Doesn’t it make your mouth water?”
“Yes, yes. I see it now. Or am I just hallucinating? I’m so weak, Nilly.”
“You’re not hallucinating, Gregory. Gregory! Keep your eyes open. Stay with me, Gregory!” Nilly slapped him and Gregory’s eyes sprang open again.
“I want you to eat that delicious spider, Gregory! You should catch it and – wait, wait!”
Gregory’s mouth was already open, and his red carpet of a tongue was starting to unfurl. Nilly flung both of his arms and legs around Gregory’s tongue.
“Now, Gregory! Now!”
And with that, the tongue shot out with Nilly clinging to it. An instant later, the tongue hit the flag and Nilly’s head hit the balcony railing behind the flag. Nilly pulled himself up and just managed to get his hands around the railing before he felt the sticky tongue being yanked away from under his feet, which were suddenly dangling in midair. His ears were ringing and he was seeing stars, but he didn’t let go. He fought, straining with all his might, and got a foot up. And then another one. Then he swung himself over the railing and hopped down. After he caught his breath, he snuck over to the balcony door and stood up just enough so that he could peek in the window.
The room was empty.
Unless there were a dozen moon chameleons sitting and standing around in there, camouflaged to look like the desk, chair, bookshelves, globe, rococo sofa, lamp, wallpaper or large portrait of a poodle hanging above the desk.
The music was clearly coming from the adjacent room, whose door was ajar. Nilly heard voices and quiet laughter. Since none of the furniture moved or attacked him, Nilly assumed it probably was furniture, and he tiptoed into the room. Just then he heard a voice from the next room loudly and clearly say: “It’s cold, Göran.”
And a high, squeaky voice: “Yes indeed, master.”
A scratching sound, like claws scraping on wood, was coming closer. Nilly hurried over to the desk and crawled underneath.
Just as the door opened.
From where Nilly was sitting, he could only see the legs of whoever had entered. They were covered with light grey hair and ended in a couple of feet that explained the scratching sound. Because two sets of toes with the longest, most unappealing and unkempt toenails Nilly had ever seen were poking through a pair of ratty white tennis socks. The toenails curled around the ends of the toes and scraped against the wood floor as the bowlegged legs maneuvered towards the balcony door with a swaying, side-to-side gait. The door closed with a bang. The toenail-infested creature bent down to slide the bolt at the bottom of the door shut, and when it did that, Nilly saw something that was even uglier than the toenails. Beneath a long, arching tail, he saw a naked, hairy rear end with something in the middle that made the toenails seem beautiful and appetising by comparison. It was a cluster of bulging pink protuberances that could only be one thing: hemorrhoids. External, monster hemorrhoids that could hardly be pleasant to sit on, and that must itch something awful.
The creature named Göran plucked something up from the balcony door threshold and made a series of loud sniffing sounds. Then squeaky, irritated muttering: “Poop! Filthy britches! That cleaning lady ought to be tortured for this!”
Poop? Poop?! Nilly looked down at his own shoes in alarm and discovered a brown, smushed blob caked onto the sole of his shoe. He must have stepped on a turd in the sewer!
There were some more sniffing sounds. Then the sound of the scraping toenails started coming closer. Nilly held his breath, but the sound moved away. That Göran creature had gone back to the room next door. Nilly exhaled for a long time, shakily. Because he had no doubt. He had just seen something that very few other people had ever seen: a dreaded moon chameleon.
Nilly stood up to leave again. His mission was completed; they had discovered where the moon chameleons were staying! Now it was just a matter of getting out of here safely. But just then he happened to notice something on the desk. Next to a framed pic
ture of a group of funny baboons, there was a thick document. Nilly stopped in his tracks. The front of the document was stamped with large, red letters that read:
TOP SECRET
The stamp went right over the title of the document, which was:
PLANS FOR INVADING DENMARK
(that lousy little country)
AND THE REST OF THE WORLD
A plan written by Göran Clason,
Luftwaffle Colonel. Translated from the Swedish
by Lieutenant Tandoora Hansen.
Nilly knew he ought to make his escape, but this was exactly the type of document that got the juices of a superspy like him flowing, the kind they dreamed of finding, that they could devote a whole lifetime of spy work to without ever finding! Nilly looked at the balcony door. Gregory was waiting for him. Nilly looked down at the document: TOP SECRET. He turned the page. And read:
SUMMARY OF THE PLAN
The plan is basically that we will invade Denmark (that lousy little country!). But the first step (see Chapter 1) is to strike at their very heart and core, where it will hurt them the most. A bomb in the middle of Legoland (that lousy little town!), which will obliterate that whole pointless collection of Lego blocks! After that we’ll give the Danes an opportunity to surrender before it gets any worse (see Chapter 2).
Alternative 1: They surrender, agree to become part of Greater Norway, and together we declare war on Iceland (that lousy, even smaller country!) (see Chapter 3).
Alternative 2: It gets worse. We crush those stupid Danes by letting the even stupider Norwegians shoot them to smithereens. We get them to do this by having our beloved father and benefactor, Yodolf Staler, camouflaged as an idiot named Hallvard Tenorsen, deepen their hypnosis through their daily choral singing ritual that takes place right around bedtime, sorry, prime time (see Chapter 4). Soon the Norwegian people (the whole lousy, measly – well, not particularly big, at any rate – population!) will be willing to shoot their own grandmothers if Yodolf orders it! The ones who don’t shoot their own grandmothers – or at least a Dane – will end up in the waffle iron (see Chapter 5).
Waffle iron? Nilly thought, quickly flipping ahead to chapter five. It was titled CHAPTER 5: NEW SECRET WEAPON FOR USE ON THE CIVILIAN POPULATION. WAFFLE IRON (V1). The waffle iron looked like a regular one. Only it was super-large. It looked big enough to waffle humans.
Nilly kept flipping through and reading. And reading. And he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Sure, it had said in his grandfather’s book that something super-awful would happen when the moon chameleons started making their presence known, but this . . . this wasn’t just super-awful. This was tera-giga-mega-awful. This was awful beyond the natural limits of awfulness. So awful that he had to rub his eyes and read it again. And it was just as shocking then as it had been the first time.
Suddenly he heard the voices from the room next door getting louder and scratchy footsteps coming closer. Nilly flung himself back under the desk just as the door swung open.
“Catch him,” he heard a strangely familiar voice growl. This was the moon chameleon Göran called “master.”
“Don’t let that wretched human get away,” a woman’s voice said.
And then the high-pitched male voice: “Torture! Yes! Inflict pain, I will! I will!”
Then that familiar voice again: “Shut up, Göran.”
Nilly curled up. There simply was nowhere to run. And if what he’d just read was true, the fate that awaited him was worse than getting extra homework, or a tongue-lashing. He closed his eyes.
And then opened them again when he felt a stream of cold air and heard the three voices getting a little quieter. Nilly peeked out from under the desk. And there, on the other side of the now open balcony doors, leaning over the railing, he saw three pink rear ends with the most repulsive clusters of hemorrhoids he had seen since . . . well, three minutes ago.
“There he is!” shouted the woman’s voice. “Guard, catch that human before he makes it to the manhole cover!”
Nilly heard several voices from the paved courtyard below and a rattling that made him think of chains, sabers and teeth gnashing. And then a clear: “Hiccup!” Oh no – they’d found Gregory.
“Take that, you!” the high voice squeaked. “Tighten the knot! More pain! Torture you, I will! I will!”
“Shut up, Göran. Into the waffle iron with him, no funny business. Can you handle that, Tandoora?”
“Aye-aye, General Staler.”
The three figures out on the balcony stood up, turned around and walked back into the room. Nilly quickly ducked back into hiding.
“Where were we, Göran?”
“You wanted to skip step one in my plan – bombing Legoland.”
“Yeah, no funny business. We’ll just invade Denmark matter-of-factly. Next Wednesday. Got it?”
“Aye-aye, General Staler.”
After the three had returned to the room next door and shut the door behind them, Nilly could still hear his own breath whooshing in his ears as if he’d just completed a ten-thousand-metre speed skating race on dull skates.
He had just barely managed to catch a glimpse of the face of the moon chameleon with the deep voice. And Nilly knew three things:
1. He had seen the very face of evil.
2. Gregory was in trouble. In tera-giga-mega-trouble.
3. The end of the world was near.
“DO YOU THINK something might have happened?” Lisa asked, her teeth chattering as she glanced at her watch.
“I really hope not,” mumbled Doctor Proctor, who was kneeling next to the manhole cover listening for sounds from the sewer down below.
“What do you think, Perry?” Lisa asked, turning her head to look at her shoulder, where she’d last seen him. But now the seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider was missing too. Then she spotted him. He was on the ground, near the broken glass from the flask that had held Doctor Proctor’s strength drink.
Lisa picked him up. “No more disappearing acts tonight, I’ll thank you very much,” she said, and tucked him safely under her hat.
“You go home and get yourself and Perry tucked in under a warm blanket,” Doctor Proctor said. “I’ll wait here alone. Okay?”
“I won’t hear another word about that,” Lisa said. “I’m staying right here until Nilly gets back.”
Doctor Proctor sighed. “But what if he—”
“Don’t say it!” Lisa interrupted. “I know that Nilly is coming back. Nilly promised me that he always comes back. And even if Nilly doesn’t keep absolutely every promise he makes, he always keeps the important ones.”
The professor looked at her without saying anything. And Lisa felt something coming to the corner of her eye. Something that occasionally came if she was very tired and a little down.
“There, there,” Doctor Proctor said.
“Do you think . . .” Lisa started, feeling tears starting to tug on her vocal cords. “Do you think we’ll . . . ever” – she gulped and gulped, but the clump of tears was forcing its way up and out – “see him again?”
Lisa knew she would start bawling if she said his name, but she took a deep breath anyway. And just then a familiar voice called up from the hole in the street:
“You mean agent Double O One Million, the Chameleon Spy?”
“Nilly!” Lisa and Doctor Proctor shouted in unison.
IT WAS MIDMORNING, and the sun was shining. People were sitting on the park benches along Oslo’s main drag in their winter coats, with their pale, smiling faces tilted towards the sun, their eyes shut, possibly dreaming of spring and summer. And about the new Greater Norway. But Lisa, Doctor Proctor and Mrs Strobe were sitting in the darkness at the very back of Syvertsen’s Pastries, their ears wide open and horrified looks on their faces as they listened:
“Razor-sharp teeth,” Nilly whispered, baring his own small and rather normal teeth. “Protruding snout.” He stuck out his lower jaw. “And deep-set, black, expressionless eyes below bush
y eyebrows. Like this.” He pulled his forehead down as far as he could and scowled, almost making Lisa giggle. After all, she’d already heard Nilly’s description of the moon chameleon the night before.
“In other words,” Nilly whispered with his lower jaw still stuck out. “They look exactly like baboons. But they speak Swedish.”
“And that fits with the rumours that the moon chameleons went to Sweden to start a war from there,” Doctor Proctor said. “Apparently they tried for years, but the Swedes just wouldn’t fight with anyone, something about neutrality. Because Swedes hate arguments and are deathly afraid of having a falling out with anyone, no matter how much you hypnotise them. These moon chameleons must have spent their formative years in Sweden.”
“There were three of them. At least. And I recognised one of their voices,” Nilly said. “It was Hallvard Tenorsen’s voice. He’s the one in charge.”
Everyone at the table was quiet for a while as they studied Nilly, who was still wearing his baboon expression so that the others could have sufficient opportunity to study it.
“The point,” Doctor Proctor said, “is not where the moon chameleons are from or what they look like, although of course that’s terrifying enough on its own. What’s really terrifying is that they came here to see if their same super-terrifying plan works any better in Norway.”
A sound came from under Nilly’s hat, like a little hiccup.
“Poor, poor, poor . . .” Mrs Strobe began, and Lisa counted another four “poors” before their teacher (who otherwise was generally known for her strictness and toughness) finally finished with a “Gregory,” practically stifled by sobs.
