Mabel and Teek's Excellent Adventure

(July 4, 2014)

Chapter 4

Mabel didn't know what to expect.

Well, I'm just being dumb here, writing that. Of course she didn't! She was in an alternate reality, for crying out loud! I mean, how could she know what to expect? Some days it's hardly worth getting out of bed and staggering to the computer. Anyway—

Mabel climbed onto the top of the surrounding wall—it was solidly constructed, about two feet wide at that point, and not quite high enough to trigger her acrophobia. "Huh," she said, staring over the impossible, confounding convolutions of the maze. She could see the castle clearly—but once she'd descended into the maze (the internal walls of which were about ten feet tall, as far as she could judge), she'd be cut off completely from the view and would be quickly lost.

To be certain of that, she took out her phone and checked the GPS. No signal, no satellite reception. "Yeah, I thought so. OK, make it hard," she grumbled.

A sprightly British-accented voice, a pre-pubescent boy's voice (though sounding strangely like the voice of a thirty-something actress), said from close beside her, "May I help you, Lady?"

She glanced around. A pointy-eared young man dressed all in green hovered in the air next to her with no visible means of support. "Can you fly me to that castle?" she asked sarcastically.

He doffed his pointed hat and bowed in mid-air. Then he pulled a suspicious-looking small leather bag from his belt. "Of course, Lady! It just takes faith and a pinch of—"

Mabel turned away and gazed back at the castle. "Sorry, I don't do drugs, thanks anyway."

He flitted around until he was directly in front of her. "Um. I could carry you. Will you be my mother?"

Craning to see past him, she flapped her hand as though shooing a pesky fly. "On second thought, just buzz off!"

She stepped to the side so she'd miss him, then leaped down from the wall—and landed five feet below on top of one of the maze divisions, making a good landing on her feet and one outthrust hand. That must've looked pretty cool! she thought. Too bad Teek wasn't around to see it. She stood and started trotting along the top of the intricate maze wall.

The hovering boy cruised along beside her. "You'll never make it on foot."

She snorted. "Watch me, sucka!"

He tapped her on the shoulder. "By the way, have you seen my shadow?"

Mabel stopped in her tracks, turned toward him, reached out, grabbed him by his tunic, and dragged him until they were nose to nose. "Get this, and get it good!" she told him. "I know who you are! You treated Wendy Darling like crap! Dated her for like a couple months, then dumped her back home and once in a while you took her back just so she could clean the house and do the laundry that you and the guys had been neglecting and letting pile up for a whole freakin' year!" She gave him a hard shake, rattling his teeth a little. "And then you stopped visiting and didn't come back until she was thirty or some junk and then you dated her flippin' daughter! Listen, Pete, life isn't The Graduate! Leave me alone, go home, and for crying out loud, grow up!" She shoved him away so hard that he turned two complete mid-air somersaults.

When he steadied himself, he shot her one terrified look and zoomed off upward at high speed, gaining altitude so fast that his pointed ears probably popped.

When he had dwindled to a far-off dot in the yellow-gray sky, Mabel nodded, and then surveyed her surroundings and smiled. By traveling atop the dividing walls, she could keep the castle in sight and make a beeline for it, assuming the bee was high on some potent nectar, or maybe Smile Dip. The route just required the occasional five-foot broad jump onto another wall, and a lot of zig-zagging, but she could be at the castle door in minutes.

She backed up a few steps, got a running start, jumped, trotted, jumped again, and with every stride drew closer to her goal.

"She's not playing fair!" complained the Goblin King, who was spying on her from his spy room in the spy tower through a spyglass.

"Well, y'knows there ain't no rules," his right-hand goblin pointed out reasonably, scratching himself in unmentionable places. "An' you'll pardon me sayin' that's your own fault, y'r honour. Remember? Back at th' beginning, right, you said yourself you weren't gonna have no rules—gurgk!"

With a snap of his fingers, the king had transformed him into a galosh. Not even a pair. Just one sad, lonely rubber boot. "Mr. Snott!" the Goblin King yelled. "Come here, I want you!"

Another goblin bustled into the spy room and tripped over the galosh. He pushed himself up from the carpet and saluted. "Here, sire!"

"You are now my sub-prime minister. That's Puke on the floor."

"Oh, you've been sick, guv'nor? My old aunty used to have a cure for that. Involved beatin' me on the head cruel 'ard wif a cricket bat—"

"Not vomit, Snott, Puke! Remember, you used to play cards with him? Mr. Puke? Round, warty, completely disgusting, smelled like a neglected watercloset in a boys' boarding school? My right-hand goblin he was?"

"Oh, yeh. My old mate, y'means, sire. Dumb son of a bint, easy to cheat."

The Goblin King gestured. "That's him on the floor."

"Wot? You mean the welly? Oh, you, uh, changed 'im, did yer?"

The Goblin King gave an annoyed grunt and turned back to the spyglass. The girl had almost made it to the second circling wall! It normally took them a week to get that far! He growled, "That boot is Puke. Toss him into the garbage chute."

"Good slant rhyme, sire, Em'ly Dickinson would be proud. Yeh, the chute, all right. As you say, sire." Snott grunted as he heroically attempted to lean over and pick up his former friend—for the run-of-the-mill, non-royal orbicular goblin, that was a significant effort, since they do not bend at the waist, having no waist to bend at. By extreme contrast, the Goblin King was tall, thin, cat-slinky, bushy-haired, and good-looking in an androgynous sort of way. This was probably the result of genes, or perhaps it was quantum.

Snott gasped at last: "Nicked 'im, sire. Garbage chute, did yer say, sire?"

Without taking his eye from the spyglass, the king snarled, "Yes! And then return to me immediately, because I have an urgent task for you. We have a girl approaching the cas—"

Sounding hopeful, Snott blurted, "A goblin girl, sire?"

"No, a human—"

Sounding yet more hopeful, Snott asked, "Is she pretty, sire?"

The king peered through the spyglass, adjusting the focus. "Um. I dunno. So-so, I suppose. She has an attractive sweater on, so it's hard to see her figure—"

"Ooh! She's got one of them, 'as she? Wait a bit! Ooh! Just thought of it, sire, sorry, sire, but don'tcha think I'd better set out a feast and get the tableware rehearsed for the dance? They haven't done their number in so long, I'm sure they're rusty—gurgk!"

In a specially annoyed voice, the Goblin King shouted, "Mr. Phlegm! Come here, I want you. And don't trip over the galoshes!"

Mabel had come to the end of one of the walls, and the next—one of the taller surrounding walls—was too far away and too high for her to make the jump, so with the help of her grappling hook, she swung down to the shadowy stone pavement at ground level—and discovered that she stood on the edge of a river, or more accurately, a canal. It spread about fifteen feet wide, too far to make the jump, and even looking both ways to where it crooked around the corners, Mabel saw no bridge.

"Well," she said, "there's gotta be one somewhere!" She knew that out of every hundred spunky girl adventurers, ninety would turn right to search, so she turned left. Worst came to worst, she could swim across—it might even be shallow enough to wade—but she preferred not to arrive wet.

"Hello," came a bubbly voice from somewhere around ankle level.

She looked down. "Hi, yourself. What are you?"

"I'm a Water Baby," said the greenish, chubby boy in the canal. "I used to be human—"

"And now you're waterlogged and naked. It's not a pretty sight."

"I have webbed fingers and toes, too!"

"So does the Creature from the Black Lagoon," Mabel said. "But I'm not about to date him, either!"

The boy squirmed, blushing blue from sheer embarrassment. "I'm not hitting on you!"

She reached down and grabbed him by his green, kelp-like hair and dragged him half out of the water. "What's wrong with me that you're not?"

"Gills!" he gasped in a thin, whistling voice. "Gills! Put me back! I'm anti-drowning!"

"I'm not crazy about it myself," she said, dropping him. "OK, WB, you want to help me?"

"I don't know," the boy confessed, rubbing the top of his head. "Will you hurt me if I do?"

"Hurt you if you don't, maybe," she said with an evil smile.

"Um—what do you want me to do?"

"Tell me where there's a bridge."

"Oh. Um. London has some very nice ones, I hear. See, never been there. I was a chimney sweep's lad, up in Yorkshire, right, and—"

"Too much information! Boring!" Mabel put her foot on top of his head and gave him a powerful downward shove. Prudently, he did not re-surface.

Following the canal, she walked on, turning five different corners, all acute, and then she stopped. Right ahead of her a small green rowboat had been tied to a bollard and bobbed gently in the canal's slow current. Two figures stood beside it, apparently deep in discussion. A couple of white Pekin ducks wandered around their feet, hopefully pecking at things that evidently only ducks could see here and there on the stones.

Mabel took a deep breath. She had never in her life seen a three-foot-tall rat or a two and three-quarters-foot-tall mole, and she had never seen a rat or a mole of either size (or even smaller ones) dressed in natty Edwardian-era tweed suits and wearing flat caps, but this wasn't Chinatown, it was, uh, well, wherever it was. "Wish Teek was here," she muttered again.

She approached the two, smiling. She liked animals. Usually. "Hi!" she said. "Nice boat you've got there. I wonder if you could give me a lift to the other side!"

They both started at the sound of her voice, turned toward her, and doffed their hats and bowed. "Hullo!" the rat said in a cultivated voice. British again, naturally. "I'm dashed sorry, Miss, but we're facing a dreadful problem and can't think how to solve it. Oh, I do beg your pardon, allow me! Miss, this is my friend Mole. I am Rat. Mole, this is, Miss, um—"

"Mabel Pines, and believe it or not, you're not the strangest things I've seen today. How about the lift?"

The rat scratched the back of his head. "Well—that is—I mean ordinarily we'd gladly oblige a young lady, Miss Pines, but we're so dreadfully perplexed—"

"You see," the Mole said in a wheezy, high-pitched voice, addressing the bollard (moles don't see too well), "we have these two ducks—and a bag of duck food—and we can only carry ourselves and one thing in the boat, and we need to get them all across—and if we leave a duck with the food, it's all up, isn't it?"

"Yeah, right," Mabel said. "No problemo! OK, uh, you, Rat, you row me across and I'll give you the secret of how to do what you want to do."

"Really? The Rat asked. "We'd be ever so grateful!"

"Quite!" the Mole said to one of the ducks.

"Quack," the duck commented, in a nasty, sarcastic tone, at least for a duck.

"Do climb right in!" the Rat said, holding the boat steady. As she did, he smiled at her warmly and said, "Do you know, I always say there's absolutely nothing in the world better than messing about in boats!"

"That's it, you stay, too," Mabel said, grabbing the oars and pulling away from shore. "Stay where you are, and I'll still help you, but you're not getting in the boat with me! Not with that attitude!"

"I say!" the Rat said, and indeed he did. Say it, I mean. Well, it's there on the page, isn't it? Or the screen. Whatever.

Mabel was not an expert rower, but she clumsied the boat across, climbed out of it, and tied the painter (not an artist, but the rope attached to a ring on the prow of the boat) to a lamp post. She pulled out her grappling hook. "Stand back!"

The claw whizzed across the water and landed clanking on the stones. "OK, let the Mole grab hold of the line and hang onto it tight!" Mabel yelled. The Rat helped his friend find the rope. "Don't let go!" she warned, and then she retracted the line.

The Mole couldn't have let go had he been so inclined—stark terror has that effect on small animals. He landed not so very hard (moleskin is quite soft and protective) and rolled a few feet. Then he got up, circling around and around and patting himself anxiously. "Oh, my! What happened?"

"You flew," Mabel said. "First mole to get off the ground!"

"I—flew?" The Mole sat down on the sidewalk, fanning himself with his flat cap.

"You flew. You're a mole hero. OK, I'll hold the boat, aim it back, and you row over and collect your friend the Rat and the bag of duck food. Here, take this." From inside her sweater she removed her emergency ball of yarn (always on hand for unexpected repair work) and tucked it into the Mole's side pocket. "The Rat will row back over. You will sit in the rear of the boat—"

"Stern," said the Mole.

"Didn't mean to be, I'm just in a hurry. Tie a piece of the yarn to the neck of each duck and hold onto the other ends."

The Mole looked confused. "But won't that pull the ducks into the water?"

"Yes, and they'll swim across behind the boat."

"Because—ducks—can—oh, I say! Ratty! By George!" the Mole called over to his friend, "I think she's got it!"

"Good show!" The Rat applauded, Mabel shoved the boat off, and then she grappling-hooked her way to the top of the second circling wall and smiled grimly. The castle was closer than ever.

Just a matter of time now.