Snotty Saves the Day
Page 4
But Snotty was, at bottom, a true entrepreneur. And your real entrepreneur knows that you’re never out until they’ve put you in a cell and thrown away the key. Snotty knew he had a ways to go till then—only not very far.
The Dog saved him. An ominous growl came from the Seventh Garden, and when the others looked up, startled, it leapt out, teeth bared, a whirling mass of black and gray. Mick screamed and staggered back, while a startled Terry let his grip loose just enough so Snotty could yank away and run. With Alan on one side, and Terry on the other, he had no choice, really. It was the Seventh Garden for him. That or jail.
“Just get to the other side, over the fence, onto Hamercy Street,” he thought, running. The Dog ran by his side. “Almost there, almost there, we’re out of here, yeah!” But his luck gave out. When Snotty (with the Dog following him) jumped onto the springy weeds at the center of the Seventh Garden, he felt them buckle and give. He skidded and froze, but it was too late for any of that. The weeds bounced and then gave way entirely. And with a faint ‘plop,’ Snotty and the Dog disappeared.
It was the Seventh Garden for him. That or jail.
The next thing Snotty knew, he was falling. He grabbed hold of a weedy vine that stretched taut, but it broke. Then he tumbled down a hole. He felt the Dog leap past him as he fell straight into the darkness underneath.
Snotty fell and he fell and he fell. He fell past other smells he didn’t know. Cedars on a hot day. Mushrooms frying in butter. Seaweed floating in a blue-green cove.22
He fell and he fell. Once he heard the dog howl, and then he thought that he could see stars above him. “Which makes no sense at all!” he thought. It had been many years since you could see stars in Megalopolis.23
Then he blacked out. Though he kept falling, he didn’t, for a time, see or hear or feel anything more.
“Where is he?” Terry said wildly. Mick lay groaning in the dirt, clutching a torn pant leg where the Dog had stuck its teeth.
“He went into that garden,” Alan said. “He’ll be long gone by now.”
“What garden?” Terry said.
And when Alan looked, there was no garden there.24
Chapter IV
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
“Drip...drip...drip...drip....”
“Snnnuuurrrgggghhh....”
“Drip...drip...drip....”
“Snoarrrgggghhh....”
Snotty lay on his back, eyes closed tight. His nose twitched. The air smelled damp and moldy. His head hurt.
“SSNNNARRRGGGGHHH?”
Something lay heavy on his stomach. It was making grunting noises, and its breath spread, warm and smelly, on Snotty’s face.
He opened one eye. This made his head hurt worse—a piercing throb through his temples. The light was dim, but he could just make out the source of the grunting: the Dog, its gray and black snout lying across his chest. When the Dog saw Snotty was awake, it lifted its head and placed its paw on Snotty’s arm.
Snotty groaned. Water dripped down the rock walls behind him and ran in rivulets down his collar. The Dog’s brown eyes looked at him, and its nose prodded his face.
“Hey!” Snotty said weakly. “Don’t!” He tried to lift his head up, had one dizzy impression of slate gray walls and damp moss, when another sharp pain went through his head, and he blacked out again.
When he woke up the second time, he was alone.
“Hello?” he said. He sat up again. His head still hurt, and the water running down his back had filled a puddle in his shirt that now ran down his jeans. He jumped up, shaking it out of his legs. He grimaced at the pain that shot through the back of his eyes, shook his head, and blinked, then looked around.
“It’s a cave, I guess. I’ve fallen into a cave.” This was reasonable enough, and comforted him as an explanation, though of course he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what cave or where or why. He’d never been in a cave, though he’d seen them on TV. For now, though, he was happy to be able to say where he was at all.
“A cave. Definitely a cave. Okay. Good.”
Now what?
He craned his neck and looked up from where he’d fallen. Up and up and up and up and up, he could see at the very top a tiny patch of cold gray sky. Daylight. He’d been lying here a long time.
“Drip...drip...drip....”
Foul smelling water dripped down the tangle of torn vines and branches that must have stopped his fall.
“Lucky, huh?” he said in a cheerful voice, and winced again at the pain in his head. Then he remembered the Dog. He looked around. “Dog,” he said. “You there?” He gave a hopeful whistle. “Here, boy. Here, boy.” And he blinked again as his eyes got accustomed to the dim light.
He could see the source of that light now, at the end of a long tunnel. He had to squat down to look into it, the passage was so short and narrow—just big enough for a small boy to crawl through.
Snotty shrugged, got down on his hands and knees, and crawled.
The tunnel was shorter than it looked. As Snotty crawled, the light got brighter and golder, and he felt a little of its warmth. There were some ferns growing across the tunnel’s outside face, blocking it. He pushed them out of the way, and the sun blazed inside. Snotty, startled, would have jumped backward, except he was hemmed in. To go forward, he had to scrabble and dig at the sides of the tunnel. After about ten minutes’ effort, he widened it just enough so that he could wiggle through. On the other side, he straightened up and dusted himself off.
The first thing he noticed was the Silence. The sounds of the great city Megalopolis had completely disappeared. In place of them were the singing of birds and the rustling of leaves in a breeze. Except for these, it all was pretty quiet. Certainly quieter than anything Snotty was used to.
This made him nervous.
Trying to get his bearings, he saw he stood on a green hillside. This was covered with soft grass and wildflowers of white and purple and yellow—a much different landscape than the one he was used to. His eyes narrowed suspiciously as he looked around. The mountain he’d crawled out of was at his back, and this was taller than the hills rolling away from him on three sides. At their foot was a long broad plain that spread out until it reached an even taller mountain range, far away.
“Great,” Snotty sighed. “Nature. Swell.”
Snotty knew Nature when he saw it, of course, having learned about mountains and rivers and oceans and those kinds of things in his school’s lone science class—at least, until he stopped going. Nature hadn’t interested him much. He couldn’t see the use of it.25
“Still, it’s something new, right?” he said to himself, cheering up. “Maybe it’ll be a laugh. An adventure, anyway.” At that thought, Snotty’s little red eyes gleamed. He liked adventures, no matter what kind. And this was one of the nicest things about him—although it’s true there wasn’t much in the way of competition.
So, set for adventure, Snotty checked out the landscape.
The rolling hills themselves he dismissed. “Boring,” he commented briefly, looking skeptically at their tufts of green and bursts of flower. Near their bottom, though, was a more rugged bit, gray and brown and rocky.
“That looks kind of interesting,” he admitted to himself.
He couldn’t quite make out what happened past that, even though he squinted and shaded his eyes against an unfamiliar sun. There seemed to be a band of dark green, maybe a strip of trees or something, then beyond that a mix of green and brown and black. There were a lot of bright red and black things moving around there—from up here they looked like beetles. But he didn’t worry about that now. Just past that, though, was something more interesting: a camp, or a fairground, covered with lots of tents and flags, all red and purple and gold and emerald green.
Snotty liked that. Tents meant people, and people meant business opportunities. Automatically, Snotty began to wonder which of his stories might play the best with an adult audience here. And he went on considering the view.
<
br /> Beyond the camp was a yellow desert that spread out around the multicolored tents until it stopped at another row of foothills, which in their turn rose up into the farthest-off range of green and brown and white mountains. Down the sides of these mountains ran a tangle of creeks, streams, and rivers—water of all kinds—that either ran into a larger river below or stopped at the edge of the vast glowing desert.
Snotty wasn’t much interested in any of that.
One thing did catch his eye: a triangular and pure white peak that stood up behind the mountains on the far horizon, the tallest and farthest and grandest of them all. As Snotty looked at this impressive sight, his mouth half open, a cloud rose up behind it and covered it in shadow. There was a far off rumble of thunder. “Hmm,” he said. “That’s the tallest thing there is around here.” Snotty was impressed, as he always was with anything the biggest, the tallest, or the most grand. All Megalopolitans were like that, actually.
“But what I really need is some action,” Snotty thought to himself. (All Megalopolitans liked action, too.) “And I’m not getting much of that just standing here, am I? So...”
Without worrying too much about what he would do when he got wherever it was, he started down the hill. It was, after all, the only way ahead.
As he walked, though, he started to feel lonely. Now, Snotty was not used to feeling lonely, though he had always been very much alone, and so he didn’t at first recognize this for what it was. “Head for those tents, that’s my best bet,” he thought, making his way down the boulder-strewn hill. “Bound to be money in a place like that.” As he went on, he considered what story he would tell the people he met about who he was and what he was doing there. These were obviously people who liked Nature, he thought with a grimace, so he tailored it to what he thought Nature-loving people would like. “My uncle, who’s a marine biologist...no, marine, that’s the ocean, right? My uncle, who’s a BOTANIST, brought me...what do they call it? Camping, right. He brought me camping. And I got lost...and my uncle will be so worried...and he’ll really want to reward anyone who takes care of me till he comes...” As he went on automatically spinning a new story to himself, he became aware of a vague pain in his chest. “Must’ve hurt myself when I fell,” he reasoned, trying to ignore it. But as he went on, the pain got sharper and harsher. Soon it hurt so much that he had to stop and catch his breath.
This was Loneliness. But Snotty didn’t recognize it. You might say that Snotty and Loneliness had never been formally introduced.
“What is it?” he thought, and he gasped as Loneliness stabbed him hard again. The very silence around him, broken only now and then by the calling of a lone bird, seemed to join with the pain and make it worse. “This really, really, really hurts,” Snotty thought. He couldn’t catch his breath. It seemed to Snotty that he couldn’t breathe at all. As there was no one to see, Snotty sat back on the ground. He hugged his knees to his chest and pressed his forehead to his knees.
That was when he heard the Dog. “Grrrooowwfff!” it barked from far away, echoing up the hill. “Ggrroowwff.”
At this, Snotty’s breath came back in a rush, and he leapt up, looking around eagerly. “Hello?” he called out. “Dog? Where are you?”
“ggrroowf,” the bark came back, fainter now, as the Dog moved away. “ggrof.”
“Wait!” Snotty called. His voice echoed back to him. “Wait for me!” He scanned the landscape. Then he saw the Dog, a small black and gray splotch running farther down the hillside.
Snotty ran after it. But the Dog ran faster now, letting out a sharp bark, then a second. Snotty, tripping and falling and tumbling among the boulders dotting the hill, soon lost sight of it. “DON’T LEAVE ME!” he wailed, picking himself up and running forward, only to trip and fall again. Then there was silence, except for the sound of the bird. The Dog was gone.
Snotty bit his lip.
“I don’t care,” he said. “I always hated dogs anyway.” That made him feel better, and he walked on.
He felt even better—well, more comfortable, anyway—when, as he walked (and this he did more and more slowly with every step), the beautiful landscape disappeared. Now he could see that gray and brown part of the landscape up close. It was mud. Just mud. Only mud. And lots of it, too.
The sight of all that mud cheered him up no end. It reminded him of home, which is always nice when you’re far away from it.
There was lots of mud now. Snotty trudged across it. And the mud got muddier and muddier the farther he walked. It sucked at the bottom of his shoes, and before long it was up around his ankles, making squooshing noises.
He slogged on. But eventually he couldn’t go any farther. The mud was halfway up his legs now, sucking at his knees.
From the far off distance came a dull noise. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. This startled him, and he tried to go back the way he’d come. But he just stuck more firmly in the mud. It was up past his knees now—blackish and bad smelling. Every time Snotty heaved himself out, it heaved with him, covering more of his legs.
He was stuck.
“Okay,” he muttered once he found he couldn’t move an inch in any direction whatsoever, “enough’s enough. A joke’s a joke. Let me out of here, now!” He yanked hard with both arms at his left leg. At this, he lost his balance and fell into the mud face down.
“Bbbbllluurrrggghh?” he said. Then, “brrrarrrggggh?”
And then, his arms windmilling in the mud, “bbbbbrrrrraaaa-AAAAAGGGGGGGHHHH!” The more he thrashed about trying to get free, though, the deeper he dug himself in.
If it weren’t for his big nose, which had pushed an air pocket in the mud, he would have smothered there for sure.
“Fine!” he thought to himself, thoroughly annoyed. “So this is Nature! Great! Swell! Yeah!” He bitterly remembered his science teacher boring the class on and on about Nature’s glories. “I’d like to rub his face in this stuff just for...”
SSSLLLUUURRRRPPPPHHHHH! A Herculean effort on Snotty’s part managed to set one ear free. “Not that there’s anything to hear. Nothing but that stupid bird.”
But even that stupid bird had flown away, apparently. And then there was no sound at all.
This was the worst of all. Snotty lay there tensely, waiting for he didn’t know what.
Then, with his one free ear, he heard a voice.
“Excuse me,” it said in a pleasant and unhurried way. “Can I help?”
Chapter V
SNOWFLAKE
There was a pause while Snotty considered this.
“Yyyyeeerrrrrgggghhh,” he said, at last.
The voice considered this. “I’ll take that as a yes,” it finally said. And a nose—or something like a nose, anyway—snuffled at Snotty’s back. Snotty screeched, which came out “bbbllluuuurrrgggghhh.” Meanwhile the snuffly thing pushed here and there until it got a hold on Snotty’s jeans. These it grabbed between its teeth and with a SSQQQUUUIRRRCCCCHH! yanked him up out of the mud hole, dragged him through the sludge and deposited him on a rocky path.
“There,” the voice said in a pleased sort of way. “That’s better.”
Snotty gagged and spat out some muck. He sat up and, wiping the mud out of his eyes with his muddy forearm, looked at his rescuer.
This was a small white and silver horse.
Snotty blinked with surprise. The horse blinked back. It seemed just as surprised as he.
“Well,” the horse said. “Not what I expected at all!”
But then Snotty, to his great relief, recognized the little horse.
“I KNOW you!” he said, jumping up and down on the rocky path in his excitement. “You’re a PONY! I RODE you. At a funfair. I snuck in without paying. You had a saddle and a saddlebag and everything. And your name on the saddlebag. It was...it was...it was...” Snotty snapped his fingers together, trying to remember.
“Snowflake?” suggested the horse.
“That’s right!” Snotty said. “Snowflake! Exactly! But what are you doing here?”
Snotty looked ashamed. It was true. He had kicked Snowflake. But somebody had been looking—that was the whole point. Stan and the boys, sneaking into the fair after him, had stood there jeering at him for enjoying himself. Snotty had to do something. Anyone could have seen that.
“I didn’t want to kick you, exactly.” He tried to explain himself but it came out all garbled. “Besides,” he said, trying again, “I knew you wouldn’t mind, being so much more mature than them, and all.” But this sounded too whiny and wheedly, even to him. Finally, he gave up.
“Well, never mind,” Snowflake said.
“Anyway,” Snotty said lamely, “I’m glad to see you again.” But Snowflake didn’t answer and Snotty followed him in silence down a particularly steep and rocky stretch of the path. Snotty skidded once, right at the bottom, but Snowflake offered his shoulder, and Snotty steadied himself. That was when he saw the wound between the little horse’s eyes.
It wasn’t so much of a wound as a scar that hadn’t healed right. It was scraped red and raw in the center, and glittered with silver around the edge.
“What happened to your head?” Snotty said, interested. Snowflake looked unhappy at the question and didn’t answer. His green eyes searched Snotty’s face.
“Don’t you remember?” Snowflake said.
“What?” Snotty asked, astonished. “What do you mean?” Did Snowflake mean it had happened at the fair?
But instead of answering, the little horse turned away.
Puzzled, Snotty kept walking. They were on level ground now, where the path curved through another grassy meadow. Up ahead was a huge black wrought iron gate.
From the distance came that sound again. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
“What’s that?”
“Have you forgotten that, too?” Snowflake said in his gentle way. Then he broke into a trot.