El Spithor Vulthus (In the Belly of the Beast)

Chapter One

"Sherriiiiiii!" my sister called.

"Nora, I'm busy!" I shouted at her through my door.

"But Mother needs you to clean the toilets. Especially mine."

"I'm not your servant!"

"I will turn your door into chocolate and eat it, then sit on you if you don't go clean my toilet."

I laughed, though feeling rage surge through me at the same time. Nora couldn't turn my door into chocolate, though she always threatened to. But she was sixteen, and I only twelve. If she sat on me, it would be unpleasant.

"Fine!" I shouted. "I'll clean your stupid toilet."

I opened the door, and Nora was smiling mischievously at me. It was no wonder our last name was Malice. But I, at least, was a nice girl, or so I considered myself to be.

I went to get the toilet cleaning supplies out of a hall closet, wondering why Mom didn't just buy those Swift mop things I saw in commercials on TV.

"Sherri!" Mom's voice reverbated down the hallway. "The phone rang. It's for you."

I happily threw the cleaning supplies on the floor, spilling a spray for removing dirt from porcelain. Then I opened the door and ran to the living room, where the phone was situated.

"Hello?" I said.

"Is your refrigerator running?" said a voice I did not recognize.

"I think so…"

"Well, you better go and catch it!" The person on the other end hung up.

I stared at the phone for a minute, allowing the irritating dial tone to keep going. "That makes no sense," I said, putting it back on its cradle.

The phone rang again immediately. I hoped that it was not that same person. Why would somebody waste time to call people and tell them things as dumb as that?

I picked it up. "I will call the cops if you say that again," I said, before the person who called could speak.

"Sherri, what are you talking about? It's me, Jared."

"Oh, Jared. Sorry. Somebody called and asked about my refrigerator running…"

"Ugh, prank calls. I hate them."

"What's a prank call?" I asked.

"You're kidding. You never heard of them? Sometimes I think you come from another planet." I twiddled my thumbs as he said this. In fact, I did come from another planet. Another universe, actually. I didn't even know what a telephone was a year ago, when Mom, Nora, and I took Anglicized names two months after ending up on Earth. "A prank call is when someone calls you and say something stupid, like 'I think you have Prince Charles in a can.' People who prank call either don't know who they're calling, picking a random number in the phone book, or call someone from school they wish to irritate. They also might call the police and tell them there's a burglary on 49th Street, but when the cops get there, nothing has happened."

"Oh, I see. But what's the point of that?"

Jared shrugged. I could hear him shrugging over the phone. According to Mom's research, humans could not do any such thing. Because it was so natural for me, I wondered how the minds of human beings could be so dim that they could not detect these vibrations. "Some people get kicks out of it," he said. "But listen, I wanted to call you about Mr. Aryoung's homework. Who was the leader of the British forces in the Battle of 1812?"

"Can't you use the Internet?"

"I tried Wikipedia, but it just says that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was it, but Roosevelt was President in the 1940's…I don't see how he could've been around in 1812."

"Well, I don't know, Jared."

"Okay, what does manifest destiny mean?"

"Look in the textbook."

"Sometimes I think you don't know anything."

My face turned dark-red, and for once I was glad that humans were unable to detect this. I knew plenty of stuff…that the logarithm principles of duck mathematics are a square root of pi argunum, which every ten-year-old on the planet Pacifico can tell you. I knew that the temperature of the Gorbal Jutii, which gives us light during the day, was 36,000 degrees Portinat. I knew that a nimforc (a type of animal with three tails and a giant mouth that resembles a toothbrush) could run at speeds of 95 yicc per quarthrel, which I have not yet been able to translate into Earthian acceleration, nor did I believe I'd ever be able to. "Miles per hour" confused me. I was still getting used to the concept of an "hour," which I now knew was sixty minutes, a minute made up of sixty seconds. I also knew that in the Cartesian War in the 4560's (three-hundred years before the modern day), 800,000 soldiers were killed in one battle on Hithway Day. Jared knew none of this, but there was no way I could tell him.

"I'll call Marcia Spelling," he said, "and ask her if she knows the answers."

I doubted it, because Marcia Spelling was the dumbest girl in class. But I just said, "See you tomorrow," and hung up.

Nora was behind me. "Now about the toilet…" she said.

"I'm going, I'm going."

I cleaned her toilet miserably. If only there was a way I could show Jared that I wasn't stupid, that I did know things.

Just when I was coming up with some kind of plan, my hand touched something hairy behind Nora's toilet. I screamed.