Chapter
IX
"Tour"
It looked like we were going to crash
through the foundation of the Treehouse as the cage rose from the
pit, but at the last minute, the floor actually opened up and the
cage elevator, with us in it rose through it. Once the whole elevator
had made it through the hole, it closed on its own, along with the
opening of the door. Oogie was already there and it was a bit of a
tight fit for him.
"Welcome," the monster said, "To your
home." It was lit only by candles and all the furniture looked
somewhat strange; a small couch was actually a red and green couch
chopped in half, and then put together. It was hard for me to think
that this whole Treehouse was made out of trash. "Go ahead and look
around."
Shock and I looked at some of the weird furniture
while Barrel went exploring by himself. He said he found a room with
a door shaped like a coffin and that it would be his room.
"No,
your sleeping on the couch, you dingbat."
"Who are you
calling 'dingbat', ugly?"
Shock growled at him and gave him
a dirty look. She screamed then.
"What?" I said franticly,
running to her.
"Look at that thing!"
I wished I hadn't.
No more then three feet away from us was the largest bug I've ever
seen. It was as big as my foot and looked like and extremely large
ant. Its eyes were cartoon's; like googly eyes you would put on
something you made in school.
Barrel teased her smugly. "What's
wrong, Emily," Barrel knew she hated being called that, "I
thought you like bugs."
"I—I do, but I've never seen one
that big." Shock informed him.
"LET'S SQUISH IT!" Barrel
screeched with joy.
The bug seemed to know what he was
saying, got scared and crawled into a crack in the floor, whimpering.
Oogie strolled over to us, struggling a little bit due to his
enormous size and the small ceiling he was under.
"Common
species of bugs here," Oogie explained. "You can find them
anywhere around these parts. There has to be, at least, a thousand
inside the bark of this tree, alone. Now you know what you'll be
feeding me."
"Wonderful…" Shock muttered sarcastically,
trying to hide that she wasn't freaked out by the oversized
creepy-crawly.
The burlap creature walked to a whole in the wall
decorated like a shrine. He gestured us to come over and when we
looked down it, it seemed like a metal tube. In fact, before we
entered the makeshift elevator, I saw a long, crooked steel tube
going down the side of the Treehouse and entering the rock it was
"perched" on.
"This," Oogie said, "is where you will
drop the bugs down to me." He pointed to a small cage on the floor,
small enough to fit one of those large insects in. "Just drop it
down the hole along with the bug inside and I'll take care of the
rest. We start tomorrow."
With that, Oogie walked down the drawbridge and it shut behind him.
