Grandpa laughed. It was such a beautiful sound, so full of life and joy. His eyes were bright, and they glowed eerily green; none of us had seen that happiness in so long. I was overcome by a sudden and deep feeling of warmth. I felt secure, and that felt strangely good after being scared for such a long time. Then, for some reason, we all just cracked up. There we were, all being held prisoner by these gargantuan ants, and all sharing a good laugh that was surely more stress relief than humor. But, for whatever reason, eating bug poo struck us all as really funny at the time. Can you imagine us gnawing on a cricket leg, or lapping up aphid honey? At the time, we couldn’t. We were just happy to be alive; we were happy to be together; and we were happy to have found Grandpa. Now, we needed to find a way to get home.
“Funny stuff aside, kids,” Grandpa said, “it’s great that ya still have your weapons. Believe it or not, these are one part of your keys to getting home.” At that, Grandpa leaped straight up and literally dumped us all on to the ground. We all smacked the ground pretty hard, right on our butts. Grandpa chuckled while he grabbed one of the spears, then he began to dance around just as he had on the day he disappeared. He kept stabbing and poking, spinning and thrusting. The whole show was as dramatic as he could make it. Finally, when all of us were thoroughly shocked at his speed and agility, he spun completely around and smacked Thomas pretty hard on his right ear. A sharper edge might have taken his ear right off. Thomas let out a pained yelp, then reeled backwards about three steps before grabbing his ear and falling to his knees. It must have smarted. Thomas just looked up at Grandpa with red eyes and a wounded puppy look. Without any kind of apology, Grandpa said, “Remember that. “Don’t lose these.” Then, Grandpa twirled on his toes and made a huge, arching, back handed swing toward Brian. Poked him right in the middle of the chest so hard, I think, that he may have drawn blood! Brian’s face turned red at the sudden sting. While his hands instinctively grabbed the little prick hole in his chest, his wide-opened eyes turned straight to Grandpa. Grandpa stopped all motion as suddenly as he started; the sword’s point still poised at Brian’s chest. He looked Brian right in the eyes and said, “And you.” He glanced quickly at the other three of us, “All of you.” Then he stared into the depth of Brian’s mud-puddle eyes, “But especially you! Remember the goodness of your hearts.”
Brian added a thought that seemed out of place, like he was in shock and didn’t know what else to say. “Thomas lost his sword in our battle with the mouse. Actually, he saved my life, but the mouse got the spear in his lip, an it stuck there.”
Grandpa was not quite finished, not quite ready to change the subject. He jabbed the point home one more time to help Brian remember. “You! Remember the goodness of your heart,” he repeated, and then he pulled the sword from Brian’s chest. He continued Brian’s conversation as if nothing had happened. “That’s okay. If everything else works out, all ya need is one. Butcha need to have at least one. You’ll notice that mine is gone. I lost it at the beginning of this trip, somewhere between too many springtails and too many ants. This time, I wouldn’t have been able ta get home even if I could have tried. The ants made certain of that.”
I was hanging on every word that Grandpa spoke. His wisdom got us here. He had obviously been here before, and his wisdom would get us back, but not yet. I was about to ask what he meant when he told us that we needed our devil’s club swords to go back home, but I was distracted by a deep thud and a low rumble. The rumble grew in intensity, so much so that the ground began to shake.
It seemed as if the end of Grandpa’s sentence was the signal to start the destruction of the world. Everything around us began to quiver. It wasn’t a shake or a little bump up and down. This was like the earth’s surface had begun to shiver, and we were shivering with it. In fact, everything was. It didn’t slow, and it didn’t end, at least while we were still in that chamber. All of us had been shaken to the ground and were crawling on all fours trying to get our balance, get up, and get out before the roof caved in.
The glow-in-the-dark mold quivered like scoops of lighted Jell-O. Huge, slimy patches of it fell to the ground. Some of it splattered on our heads with a sickening sound that I had heard only once in my life, and that was when Grandpa butchered a rabbit for supper and dropped the intestines to the garage floor. I ran and hid that day, too. Anyway, when we tried to scrape the mold off, it only smeared deeper into our hair and clothes, and it stuck to our hands like glowing body paint. The quake worsened. The sides of our chamber began to disintegrate before our eyes. Huge chunks of dirt and rocks fell just like the mold did. Those chunks were really heavy, and it hurt when they hit us. The ceiling was next, so, once again, we found ourselves dodging things that fell from the sky. This time, we had to do it while trying to maintain our balance on a trembling earth. We were being pelted to death with falling debris, sticks, rocks, dirt, and slime.
If we wanted to stay alive, we had to leave the chamber. There were only two additional problems, and those still stood fast in front of the chamber door.
*****
21. Holy Jumping Spiders, Grandpa
Rather than face certain death, we scrambled for whatever safety we could find. Brian, Sarrah, and I grabbed our weapons. All of us scuttled toward the door as fast as we could scramble. We crawled, or jumped, or climbed over giant masses of earth and timbers that fell all around us. We finally clawed our way to the entrance, and there, we met the two ants that still guarded us. Getting sprayed with formic acid? Getting dismembered by giant ant jaws? Being crushed by a falling ceiling? All of these were, of course, perfectly unacceptable choices. Since recent experience told us the ants were actually trying to keep us alive, we continued stumbling toward the door; the ants seemed less of a threat than the stuff falling on us. We had to make it. We had to get through the door, past the ants, into the tunnel, and into whatever unknown still waited for us.
Brian was the first to reach the door. He skidded to a stop so suddenly that the rest of us slammed into him and practically shoved him out the door. That was a tiny commotion compared to everything else that was happening, but, for some reason, it caught the attention of both ant guards. They began to charge us. The closer ant signaled a bloodcurdling warning by slicing those red, massive jaws through the air like some alien marauder wielding a pair of living swords. The trembling earth knocked Brian to his knees just in the nick of time. Those giant jaws swooshed right over his head, missing by mere inches. Brian rolled out of the way of the ant’s jaws, thank God. I swear he would have been sliced in half by those slashing, red tusks. The animal made no sound of its own, not a scream or warning roar; there were only the slashing and grating sounds of those gnashing jaws, like concrete bricks being rubbed together. I was as terrified as I had ever been—ever—that is, until the second ant vanished. Vanished! From right in front of my eyes! It was standing right there, and in an unfocused blur, it was gone! I had no idea what happened to it. None of us did.
The ant that was slashing at us seemed just as shocked. It jerked its head away from us, probably to find the missing ant, or maybe so it could determine what the heck was going on. In the split second that followed, that ant, too, was attacked by a great hairy something. The attacker hit the ant broadside; the two rolled over and over through the tunnel. They finally stopped as their conjoined bodies piled on top of the missing, already dead ant. The realization struck me that the first ant disappeared for the same reason. It got hit by something too, only harder and faster. We didn’t even see it happen. Since the ants and whatever hit them were occupied, the five of us chose that moment to escape through the door.
“Jumping spiders!” Thomas screamed. “Look!” He pointed to the second ant, the one that we saw get hit. The animal that attacked the ant had black and white stripes and so much hair it looked like a forest on legs—eight of them. These creatures weren’t quite as large as the ants, but it became quickly apparent that these hairy brutes were much more ferocious than the ants could ever ho
pe to be. I couldn’t tell if they were actually stronger, but for sure, they were faster. The one we were watching murdered the ant that guarded us in a matter of seconds. Those huge spider fangs stabbed directly into the head of the ant. Between the poison and the punctured brain, the only thing that poor ant could do was spaz. Its body just laid there on the ground jerking and twitching for a few seconds while the rest of its nerve cells died. And now, both spiders stared in our direction.
“They’re jumping spiders,” Thomas explained, again. “They’re larger than we are, and they’re able to jump twenty times their own body length in an instant. Perhaps more. That’s why they seem to disappear. They don’t, really. They just jump great distances, like they flash from one place to another; they’re much too quick for our puny eyes to follow, especially in this darkness.”
Great, I thought. I just love being attacked by invisible, hairy spiders that can jump twenty times the length of my body.
Watching those two ants die was the perfect signal for us to panic. We all knew that we needed to run, to hide, to escape, but we were nearly paralyzed from fear. We stood there like stammering idiots unable to do anything that we should have done—like run. Thomas finally grabbed two of our arms and broke the trance. One of those arms belonged to me; I’m not even sure who the other person was that he grabbed, but I know both of his hands were full. He pulled us back toward our prison chamber. The three of us began scrambling in that direction, and the other two naturally followed. The earth continued to shake violently, so our movement toward the chamber was not easy, but it made perfect sense. We might be able to defend the tiny opening of our chamber, but for certain, we could never defend ourselves in the open tunnel. I looked back at the two spiders. I could see one that was following our every movement with the two largest of its eyes. Those eyes seemed to rotate inside of themselves. They looked like black beach balls that rotated inside of plastic domes. “The monster could surely follow our movements,” Thomas said, “with deadly precision.” I wondered at the time if they could see us more easily because of that glowing slime that stuck to us like fluorescent body paint. Both spiders stood perfectly still for awhile, sensing, staring, waiting. We stood our ground at the tunnel entrance. We huddled five abreast, fully prepared to defend ourselves. Thomas ripped the devil’s club sword out of my willing hands. He, Brian, and Sarrah moved to our front, weapons and hearts at the ready. I stood behind them with Grandpa behind me, and we waited. Then, in less than a single heartbeat, both monsters were gone. Vanished. Just as the first ant had done minutes earlier.
We decided to make a cautious run for it. We peeked outside the entrance of the chamber. The coast was clear, or anyway it seemed to be. At least, the spiders were gone. We ventured a few feet out of our chamber and into the tunnel. It probably took us five minutes to move those three feet. We were all holding onto each other, each taking a step only after the person in front did, too. It had to be a comical sight. If it’s possible to hold onto four other petrified people and crawl at the same time, then we were doing it. Suddenly, one spider reappeared in a vague blur as quickly as it had vanished. It landed facing away from us at first, but with one or two jerky, indistinct movements that made it look robotic or mechanized, it turned around to ready itself for the attack. Our total attention was on the spider in front of us. Then, we felt the soft thud that suddenly came from behind us. Something about the tunnel magnified the sound of those eight hairy legs that hit the ground between us and our chamber. The spiders had set a trap! We were fenced in with no path to escape on and no place to escape to. Our group automatically took a back-to-back defensive position. Thomas and I turned to watch the spider to our rear. It watched us as well, this time with eyes that were as steady as rocks. Other than its landing, this latest addition to our monster list made not a single sound. Its front two legs were raised high over its head, waving slowly, purposefully. Black and white stripes moved back and forth through the air, constantly to and fro as a flag might wave in a light breeze. The spider seemed to be thinking, getting its bearings, calculating exactly how far it had to jump to kill as many of us as possible on its first attempt. I wondered if it even cared about the puny weapon that Thomas held in his hands. We, Thomas and I, glanced toward the others. We could see over our shoulders that the other spider was making the same movements. The two spiders could easily have been mirror images in both looks and intentions. We were about to be eaten, or at the very least, killed either by spiders or the still-falling roof.
Brian had other ideas. He charged directly toward one of the freakish, hairy things while waving his sword all around and screaming like a Viking warrior. That seemed to cause the striped beast a moment of confusion. It skipped backwards, and then it vanished again. It reappeared almost as quickly to our other side. Brian’s attack initially caused the spider to take the defensive. But now, it was behaving in the same way it did before: sizing us up, judging its distance, getting ready for the kill. I didn’t know what to do. Run? Try to dodge something that could jump a hundred times farther than I can? Hide from something with eight eyes that could see our every move because of this glowing goo? With hair that could feel the movement of the air? Maybe even taste the smell of our sweat? How do you hide from a creature like that?
Brian sprinted back to our group. Thomas was pumping himself up, jumping up and down, yelling, getting psyched to attack the other spider as Brian had done. Brian was getting ready to attack again, too, when we were all suddenly overcome by the smell of vinegar. Six ants flooded the tunnel and leaped onto the closer spider, the one that was clearly our greatest threat. They sprayed their own poison on the spider as they landed on it, and then their giant sword-like jaws went to work. The spider did not die easily, but he was outnumbered, and he was going down.
Thomas and Brian attacked the second spider by themselves. They stabbed into the spider’s mouth without consequence, except to make the thing angry. Thomas almost got sprayed with a fang full of venom. The spider ejected it when Thomas’s spear jabbed its mouth. I guess you would call it more of a drip than a spray, but at any rate, both boys thought it better to get out of the way of the monster’s mouth, so they ran to its rear. Each jabbed two feet of sword into the spider’s abdomen. I kept expecting a roar of pain, but none came. The spider, silent as moving fog, spun on its legs trying to bite the boys. The boys crawled directly under the spider’s rear and used its own body as a shield. While they crawled they stabbed again, and again, and again. The spider weakened but refused to die. Two warrior ants left the dying spider and rushed to our rescue. Grandpa, Sarrah and I were in their way, but it made no difference. We dodged as those warriors ran right through us and attacked the now weakened spider. Luckily, the boys managed to escape through an unimaginable flurry of legs, antennae, and giant fangs while the wounded spider continued its struggle toward a certain death.
We decided to make another attempt at escaping through the tunnels. The spider threat had been removed, at least for the moment. That bought us some time, some freedom, and the chance to run. We hoped we could find our way back to the Magic Portal. We had no idea what direction to go, but we leaped into the tunnel and began to run. Other than the dim light we carried only because it was stuck to us, the tunnels were as black as a coal mine during a power outage. We ran straight through until we came to the first of many intersections in the tunnels. We were lost. We had no idea which direction to take, so we decided to take the tunnel that seemed to contain more light. Every time we got to another intersection, we chose that path; we ran toward the light. Light had to mean out. It was the only guess we had.
*****
22. Captured And Back In Prison
The light we followed was nothing more than a whole lot of that glowing slime; it guided us deeper into the mound rather than out. I noticed, too, that the ground shook much more violently as we ran deeper into the tunnels. The glow eventually led us to a chamber that must have been near the middle of the mound. This chamber
was a good many times larger than the one we were being held captive in. It was also a death chamber: an underground coliseum that housed a ferocious battle between ants and spiders. We all found hiding spots in the tunnel behind rocks or other lumps in the dirt so we could watch the melee, but at the same time, we desperately needed to avoid detection. Even during the unrelenting madness of the battle, I could see that uncountable numbers of ants were dead, but I saw not a single dead spider. I watched as thousands of ants clamored over each other almost aimlessly, seemingly without guidance or direction. Each ant was trying to attack a spider, but mostly, they managed only to crawl all over each other. The difference between the way these ants fought the spiders and the way they killed the giant mouse was alarming. When they killed the mouse, these same ants were completely organized, perfect killing machines. Now, facing an enemy of equal number and strength, they couldn’t organize themselves to kill a single spider. The ants seemed panicked and unable to defend themselves against so many attackers. These spiders were anything but vulnerable. They were, in fact, ruthless. Even I could see that they double-teamed the ants in a way that was perfectly deadly. With the spiders, one would attack; the second would defend the attacker. It was a perfect killing tactic. The spiders had poison, speed, and strength. Above all, they had the ability to act beyond instinct. They could organize, and they could carry out a plan against vast numbers. The hairy, eight-legged beasts were simply too much for the ants. The ants were losing this war. Unless they could organize themselves, their numbers would be of absolutely no help this time. The ground shook violently, uncontrollably to a rhythm that mirrored the falling of dead ant bodies.
I’ll never be able to explain it, but rather than make our escape, we stayed to fight. Thomas started it. He began to stab at one spider’s abdomen, its softest spot, as he had done in our prison chamber. The resulting pain only angered the spider. It didn’t jump, though. Instead, it turned around and bore down on Thomas. Thomas didn’t run or hide. Instead, he danced, turned circles under the spider’s body, and crouched close to the spider’s abdomen to avoid its bite. Brian joined Thomas. The two boys fought together, just as they had done in our prison, just as the spiders were doing. Now both were stabbing and dodging, double-teaming against the spider. The spider’s eyes spun inside of its lenses. The boys’ erratic movements confused the spider, as did the pain of each of their many stabs. It wasn’t able to focus on either boy; it couldn’t size either up for a kill.
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