The True Meaning of Smekday (Smek 1)

The lion whined.

“This is the best I can do,” I said, tossing him my cheese crackers. “I saw a peacock near the sundial, if you like that sort of thing.”

He sniffed at the crackers and ate them, wrapper and all. I shinnied along a branch, then another, and dropped onto the roof of the house. With a little maneuvering I made my way to an open window, pushed aside the skeleton leaning out of it, and went in.

It was dark, of course, and the air was thick and close. There wasn’t a real room inside—just a catwalk. Looking downward through the elaborate stage set of the Haunted House was pointless. It could have been a bottomless pit, for all I could see. Here and there, a bit of moonlight slipped through a window or gap and bleached some of the darkness a dim blue.

I could only feel my way along the catwalk, searching for a way down. Strange shapes loomed out at me from every angle. In the dark every loop and coil of wire was a jungle vine or snake, and every theater light hung from above like a one-eyed bat. It might have been scary if I were the type who got scared. As it happened, I did feel sort of breathless and jumpy, but I think you have to expect that when you’ve just finished a lot of running and you haven’t been eating well.

Anyway.

I found the way down by nearly falling off the edge. There was a sort of open tube running along one wall, formed from hoops and slats of metal. Inside the tube was a ladder.

Here’s the thing: I thought the ladder would end when I got to the ground floor, so I wasn’t paying much attention until it hit me that I’d been descending for a long time. Too long. I looked out around me and saw nothing. Really nothing. Like, you don’t have any idea what nothing looks like, because there’s always some light somewhere, leaking under a door or through a window crack. This was black like death, This was honest-to-God-can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark. Pardon my language.

At one point I thought I’d come to the bottom. I reached out with my foot, but couldn’t find the next step. Aha, I thought, the floor must be right below. So I stretched my leg out some more, and suddenly the section of ladder I clung to slid downward like the bottom of a fire escape. My stomach lurched, then lurched again as the ladder butted against something. There was the loud clang of metal on metal. And now I could feel another rung below. My ladder had only met up with another ladder, and I began to wonder if it would ever end.

The sensible thing would have been to turn back, to climb back up until I at least saw a window again. But I picked this time to remember part of the secret message:

MEET UNDER THE CASTLE

and it made me think, Is this what they meant? Am I underground?

It didn’t seem so crazy if I thought about it hard enough. Maybe the Happy Mouse Kingdom people had underground tunnels so they could go from place to place without disturbing the guests. Maybe they even had a little subway under here, or something. Something that would lead to the Snow Queen’s Castle.

So I kept going. The length of ladder that had so unexpectedly dropped now sprung back up as I let go. I descended another twenty, maybe thirty, steps before I ran out of rungs again. This time my foot found a hard, concrete floor, and I stepped away.

I reached out with both arms, swung them in slow, wide arcs, like I was trying to swim. I began to touch things around me. Strange things. Something that I hoped was a coiled hose. Something that I hoped was a sponge. I felt a stack of shelves, and these were filled with plastic bottles and maybe buckets, and one object that felt like the worst thing in the world but which turned out later to be a sandwich.

Then I felt the cage. It was all around. I was in some kind of chain-link cage, maybe six feet by ten, and I couldn’t feel any opening. And I thought, Okay, that’s it. They caught me. And it was a few panicky seconds before I reasoned that if the Boov wanted to capture someone, there was probably an easier way to do it than to hope they’d see a message in Pig Latin that would lure them, like, a hundred miles to a theme park, where they’d be chased by a lion into a tree and onto a roof and then down a ladder into a cage that they could just climb back out of whenever they pleased. So I groped around a little more and eventually found the rack of flashlights.

The first couple I tried worked. I swished them around and saw I was in a supply cage, mostly full of cleaning products. The buckets were buckets. The horrible thing was, in fact, old peanut butter. And there was a gate on one end. I slipped one of the flashlights into my waistband and emptied all the batteries from the rest into my pockets. I grabbed a bottle of glass cleaner because it comforted me to hold something in my hand that had a trigger, such as it was.

I pushed out through the gate. Far above was some massive shape hanging from the ceiling. In the dim light I could make out shutters, windows, and shingles. Spare parts, I figured, for the house aboveground. Around me was only darkness, even with the flashlight. The walls of this room were too far away, or there weren’t any walls at all. I crept steadily forward, and soon my light found a squat little something in the corner. It looked like an engine, or part of a lawn mower, and I was pretty sure it was a generator. With any luck it had gas in it, so I searched around for the rip cord and gave it a tug. The thing sort of shuddered and coughed, so I pulled it again. And again. On the fourth try it growled to life, and all over and around me lights began to wink and flicker, and soon I could see it.

It was the Haunted House. Hanging upside down. From the ceiling. I was in a big room, an enormous room, a room like half a football field, and there was an entire Haunted House hanging upside down in the middle of it.

It was perfect in every detail: the broken shutters, the bent weather vane, even the fake black cat screeching silently over the front porch. On the ceiling itself was a little plot of land, fake grass and mud, with gravestones and wiry trees hanging down like stalactites. Or stalagmites. I can never remember which is which.

I sat heavily on the floor, dumbstruck. I wondered how I’d know if I was crazy. Is there a blood test, or can you just pee in a cup or something? Once I was in a bicycle accident, and I lay in the street for a long time afterward. People surrounded me and wouldn’t let me stand up until the paramedics arrived. When they did, they asked if I knew who the president was, and what state I lived in, and how much was three times seven. When I answered everything correctly they seemed pleased, so they asked my name and I said “Gratuity,” and then they wouldn’t let me up until I told them it was “Janet.”

Anyway, sitting there, I decided to test myself again. But this time the president wasn’t the president anymore, and I didn’t have a home, and my name was still my name. I could do the math, sure, but I decided all the same to just lie down for a while. I gazed at the roof of the house like I was flying.