The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [57]
“I don’t have a good feeling about this.” I jumped to my feet. Which sent Barbie flying backwards and complaining, but I didn’t listen. I was too busy pushing and trying to pull frantically on the plywood door. I even went to the back of the cave and ran at the door to give it a flying kick. But it wasn’t budging. It was bulging. And now my foot ached all the way up to my neck.
I turned to Barbie to tell her we were trapped, but the words wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t swallow either. I was terrified.
“Sebby, what is it? You’re scaring me.” Barbie ran to push and pull and kick on the door, too. And then she knew. “That noise was a mudslide. We’re buried in here.”
I was surprised she didn’t scream. Maybe she was just too shocked. She sank down on one edge of Grum’s raggedy quilt and stared at the plywood. Along the bottom and around the edges you could see a little bead of mud that had seeped in. In the gaps between rocks, thicker flops of mud had formed. They reminded me of the new mortar oozing between the stones behind the henhouse.
“Do you think the door will hold?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” With my finger, I wiped a bead of mud away from the bottom edge, then kept my eyes on the cleaned stripe of wood. “There’s no water coming in behind it. At least we don’t have to worry about drowning in here.”
Barbie crawled to my shelves and dumped the coffee cans, clawing around in the contents. “Don’t you have anything here to dig with?”
“There’s no use,” I said. “This cave is solid rock.”
“Well, we have to try, at least. Do you have any better ideas before we suffocate?” She went to the door and dragged a coffee can across the top like a shovel. The scraping was maddening. I could hardly stand how crazy I felt. This was no way to die.
I put on Odum’s cracked glasses, plugged my ears with my fingers, and lay back on the mattress of blankets to stare up at the swirling ceiling. All the times I had lain here, reading comics or just going away inside my head, and I never imagined what was really surrounding me. I looked for shapes in the colors, like looking for shapes in the clouds, and I saw a dragon lying on a bed of jewels.
And then I was the dragon. A powerful wizard had taken me prisoner, locked me and my treasure deep inside my own mountain with a magic spell. Because the jewels held secret powers only I knew how to use. They could bring any object to life—or kill any living thing. The wizard wanted this power to rule the world.
Suddenly the dragon felt the mattress of jewels tremble beneath him. Shaken by the princess, who had this very afternoon been cast into the dragon’s lair because she wouldn’t marry the wizard. She had been weeping for hours. Her body trembled with grief and fear and shook everything around her.
“Don’t cry, dear princess,” the dragon said. “I won’t eat you.”
“Princess?” she said. “Did you just call me princess?”
The dragon’s magical jewels suddenly disappeared. In their place were walls of nubby gray rock flickering with candlelight. The sight of the bulging plywood wall brought me back to the Hole in the Wall. And there sat Barbie, twisted around to look down at me, her face tear-stained, Odum’s cracked glasses dangling from her dirty fingers.
“Have you finished digging us out yet?” I asked.
“I’m a queen, thank you,” she said. “And all the magical spectacles in the kingdom belong to me.”
I grabbed them back. “Well, I’m the dragon, and what’s yours is mine. But I’ll let you borrow your spectacles if you rub my back.”
“The last time I rubbed your back, a natural disaster happened.”
“Oh, come on. Do you want me to die itching, or with a smile on my face.”
“I guess I can dig at your crusty old scales. Give me the spectacles, dragon.”
I handed them to her, rolled over onto my stomach, and closed my eyes to fly away inside my head. The dragon sang the secret words that gave the jewels