Young Fredle - Louise Yates [61]
“Upstairs is home. Besides, I already know how to get back outside, if I want to.”
“Are there flowers upstairs? I think I’d rather see flowers than stars. Which do you like better, Fredle?”
“Woo-Hah,” Fredle laughed. “Both.”
“Maybe I do, too,” Linu said. Then she said, looking around at the cellar with its shelves of food and unseen families of sleeping mice, “I’m sorry I don’t know a way for you to get home, Fredle. Do you want to look for one together? We could look tonight.”
“Why not now?”
“Now? It’s daytime. Mice sleep during the day.”
“We’re not asleep,” Fredle pointed out. “Anyway, since I’m awake I’m going to do it. Come on along if you want to.” He actually hoped she would want to join him in the search, because things were more enjoyable when you had company. But he would go looking, with or without her.
“All right,” Linu said. “I’ve been thinking about upstairs. It’s pretty easy to see that to get there you’d have to find a way through the ceiling. So,” she finished, in case Fredle couldn’t think it out for himself, “the first thing is, you have to find a way to the ceiling.”
They both looked up.
The ceiling was not made of impenetrable stones and mortar, like the cellar walls. It was made out of strips of wood, like the cupboard shelves. Wooden boards ran across it, and there were also the round white pipes, as well as the long black lines. Linu was right; Fredle knew that as soon as she had spoken. The ceiling was the only possible entrance to upstairs.
Was it possible to move across the ceiling? Upside down? He couldn’t imagine it. But that was a problem he couldn’t solve from down below. If it was possible, he wouldn’t see how until he actually got up there.
The first thing, then, was to find a way up the wall. Fredle and Linu climbed to the shelves where the baskets stood, which was a known and easy path, and from there, continuing slowly, they found footholds on stones that jutted out from the wall. When they had arrived at the top of the wall, they discovered a board just wide enough to walk along single file. That was easier going, and for mice, with their natural balance and light-footedness, not perilous.
However, they had no known route to follow. They were exploring.
Fredle looked all around, noticing everything he could, and he thought. He wondered aloud, “Where do the pipes go?” and he answered himself, “Upstairs. I’ve seen pipes in the kitchen. In the sink cupboard.”
“They look like they go through holes in the ceiling, don’t you think? See?” Linu asked. “Can you see a board that leads over to the pipes? I think this one—” And she was off.
“Don’t go too fast,” Fredle advised, and followed her.
They were in the middle of the ceiling when once again light exploded all around them. This time, Fredle knew enough to simply freeze where he was. He looked down at Missus from above, and she didn’t look so very big after all, bending to take things out of one machine and put them into the other, which immediately started making its own rumbling noises, like hundreds of raccoons, snoring. Then she went out of sight. When they could no longer hear her footsteps ascending, the light disappeared again. After a while, “Is it safe now?” Fredle asked.
“Did you see how high we are? I didn’t know you could get up onto these boards and be so high. You are an adventurer, Fredle.”
Fredle was surprised to hear that, but he didn’t mind. “Maybe I am, sometimes,” he said.
“I think we can get from here to the pipes that go from the top of the water heater,” she told him. “We can get to a lot of new places from here.”
Moving quickly but carefully, because you wouldn’t want to fall from so high up, they made their way across to the boards that crossed above the water heater. Standing there, looking up, they could see a pipe entering the ceiling through a hole large enough for a mouse to squeeze through.
“What did I say?” asked Linu.
“And you were right!”
For a while, they looked at it. Then they talked about how easy it would be for a mouse to get up there from where they stood, and Fredle