Mabel and Teek's Excellent Adventure

(July 4, 2014)

Chapter 5

"Finally!" Mabel made the leap from the last circling wall to a grassy plot that surrounded the castle. Well, it surrounded the moat, and the moat surrounded the castle. Mabel walked down a broad path toward the enormous drawbridge—which was up—and noticed a steady gurgling sound coming from underfoot. And the moat surged with suspicious eddies and whirlpools and the water moved in an obvious current.

"Must be the source of the canal," Mabel murmured. "Dipper would be so proud of me for thinking of that! What time is it, anyhow?" She checked her phone—the clock app was working, anyway—and breathed a sigh of relief. "I have another two and a half hours left, or a little more. OK. Now let me cruise around the castle and see if there's a back way in."

Twenty minutes later she came back to the closed drawbridge. "OK, so there's not a back way in! Let's see what we can do, Mabel! Right you are, Mabel! Mystery Twin!" She gave herself a fist-bump, but it wasn't the same.

She had assumed that the two wooden posts close to the moat on either side of the path served as guides for the lowering drawbridge, but—well, maybe they did, but—even wooden posts can multitask, in their own quiet way. The right-side post also held an accordion-pleated tube that on one end led down into the earth and on the other ended in a sort of funnel.

Mabel picked it up and yelled into it: "Hey! Open up!"

She heard a kind of confused muttering coming through the speaking tube, then a tentative, rather frightened voice: "Who's there?"

"Guess!"

The rusty-sounding voice muttered to itself and then asked, "Um—fairy godmother?"

"One down, two to go! Guess again!"

"Let me see, let me see, I should know this. Um. Is it my old granny?"

"Nope! You're down to one guess, so make this one count. I'll give you a clue: I'm everyone's friend!"

She heard a gasp. "Not—not—my Preciousssss!"

"Boom! You got it. Open the gate, buddy!"

Now, one must understand that drawbridge mechanisms look very simple in the movies, but they're quite complex. Lowering a drawbridge isn't just a quick matter of turning a clanking steel wheel to the accompanying jingle of chains. Oh, no. This particular drawbridge had in fact come with fairly detailed instructions printed in an informative four-color twelve-page pamphlet, some of which read as follows:

In order to lower your drawbridge, you must (A) carefully remove the pawl (Part P-12) from the master gear (G-1) as shown in figure 1, being careful not to catch long hair or loose clothing in the teeth of the gear, as this might lead to a malfunction causing the drawbridge not to lower and the loweree not to go on living; (B) move Lever 23-J from position O to position I (O meaning "off," I meaning "In gear"); (C) engage the emergency brake on the winch (foot pedal on the left should be pressed all the way down until you hear a strong "clack" sound; not a "click" and certainly not a "creak"); (D) ready Lever 42-BB by removing the detente pin (this is the drawbridge engagement lever, which gives the top of the drawbridge a prod to encourage it to give in to gravity and fall); (E) now, whilst grasping the spokes of the winch tightly, simultaneously disengage the emergency brake (stamp hard on the pedal until it squeaks and groans) and then immediately jerk hard on Lever 42-BB. WARNING: once this lever is pulled, the winch will tend to spin madly, like a skunk in a tornado; you MUST carefully control the rate of descent. The manufacturer will NOT honour the warranty on your drawbridge if you carelessly let it fall and shatter into a million pieces, and then, even in the unlikely event your having somehow survived the mad gyrations of the runaway winch wheel and the savagely lashing chains, you will probably starve to death anyway because you can't get out to shop for meals, can you, Mr. Smarty Pants?

This information and much more was printed in "GUIDE FOR THE DRAWBRIDGE OWNER," the thorough, detailed, and educational pamphlet that the company (Upson Downs, Ltd) that manufactured the drawbridge had helpfully provided with the kit to offer foolproof instructions to ensure that the proud new owners of an UD-3000 Drawbridge could safely operate their purchase. Like all such manuals, it lay yellowing, forgotten, and unread by anyone in a sticky drawer in one of the remote pantries of the castle, along with odd rusty screws, some two-inch-long ends of candles with fossilized black wicks, a metal screw-cap that looked as though it should be on some important bottle somewhere, jury-duty summonses (the king never responded to these), letters promising that a Narnian prince was holding a fortune that he could not get out of the country and advising you that he only needed your banking information to make you an absurdly wealthy goblin, some string in such a snarled tangle that it would have made even Alexander the Great despair, and in the rear left corner, an alcoholic mouse who always went there to sleep off a binge.

And not reading this pamphlet is why the creature that had operated the machinery felt briefly astonished as the drawbridge smashed down hard to the far side of the moat with a heck of a crash, though it did not shatter, and why that creature suddenly and finally wound up as a sort of unpleasant jelly spread out across the interior of the drawbridge operations centre (or DOC, according to the unread manual), a small, windowless stone room.

The moral is Always read the directions.

Anyway, Mabel crossed over the still-quivering drawbridge and found herself not in the castle proper, but in a sort of anteroom. A tatted orange and brown rug lay underfoot, looking tatty, and on it a small round pedestal table, very intricately carved. Behind that stood a door—an ordinary door, with a round white-enameled knob and a keyhole beneath it. Which was locked, of course.

Mabel knocked, but got no answer. A bored voice said, "The key is on the ceiling."

"Heck of a place for it," Mabel said. The vaulted ceiling rose thirty feet over her head and was so shadowy that she couldn't see anything. "What, is it taped, or stapled—?"

The voice sighed in a sort of Get-this-over-with way and said, "Look at the table."

"Yeah, it's an antique."

The voice became reproachful: "It's Baroque."

"I didn't touch it!"

Turning peevish, the voice snapped, "No, look on the table!"

Mabel did. "OK, I see a little brownie sort of a cake that has a tag saying 'Eat Me.' That's just rude. And here's a bottle of something that has a tag, 'Drink Me.' What are these, free samples?"

Now out of patience, the voice replied, "The cake makes you grow immensely tall! The wine makes you shrink!"

"Huh, likely story. Who'm I talking to, anyway?"

And now it was huffy: "To me, of course!"

"You sound all snooty and English."

"Well, rather. I am a bit of a nob, you know."

Mabel zeroed in. The voice issued from the keyhole—the old-fashioned kind that looked like the symbol you sometimes see on the doors of ladies' rooms, circular top for the head and long narrow triangle leading down from it like an unfashionable dress. Mabel leaned over and said, "You're a talking door."

The keyhole moved as it articulated words: "No, just the hardware."

"So . . . what are you suggesting?"

In a waspish, poisonously polite way, the keyhole said, "My dear, don't you understand? You're an American, aren't you? Hopeless. If you eat the cake, you will grow so large that you can pluck the key off the ceiling. Then you drink the wine, and you will become so tiny you cannot reach the keyhole. The food and drink are deceptively unhelpful. Diabolical!"

"So—how do I get in, then?"

Now the voice had a hateful tone of superiority: "You don't!"

Mabel picked up the little cake. "We'll see about that. Have some!" She squooshed the cake against the keyhole, muffling the alarmed voice. She kept pushing—something was happening—the whole door groaned as the hardware enlarged wildly, splintering the wood. "There you go!" Mabel said, stepping through the enormous keyhole.

"I HATE YOU!"

"Live with it," Mabel said. "Now which way to that baby?"

"I WILL NOT HELP YOU!"

"OK. Bye!"

Beyond the door lay long branching corridors. Kind of an interior maze. No other doors, until she came to the very end of a hallway. There two identical doors stood side by side, with bas-relief carvings of gobliny faces.

"Halt!" one wooden face said. "You must choose a doorway!"

The other said, "One path leads to certain doom!"

And the first then added, "But the other will allow you to find the young man who fell through the trap door!"

"Teek?" Mabel asked.

The wooden figures looked confused. The right one said, "Um—we're mahogany, actually."

"It's a dense wood," the other added helpfully.

"I could've guessed that. Where is Teek?"

The right door said, "Uh—you haven't let us finish—"

"I," said Mabel in an ominously sweet and calm voice, "am in a hurry. I have a very good friend who carries an axe around with her constantly. If you don't want to help, I'll get her to come and persuade you. Are we clear?"

"He's in an oubliette!" the left-hand door blurted. "Oops, I shouldn't have said that! No, I should have! Wait, I'm all confused!"

Mabel's face turned purple. "You cooked him with eggs?"

"No, not an omelette!" the right door squeaked. "An oubliette!"

"It's a kind of dungeon," the left one added helpfully. "But not really! It's a nice place, not a dungeon at all! Um."

"No doors, no windows," the first door explained. "Just a hatch in the ceiling. Cozy, really."

"Yeh, this castle's oubliettes ain't bad as oubliettes go," the left one said. "Or they are! Places of torture and terror, is what I meant to say!"

"OK, so which door—"

"Let us finish!" the right door said. "Where were we? Right, one of us always lies and the other one always tells the truth, and you can ask only one question of one of us to find out which door leads to—"

"Whatever!" Mabel said. She pointed to the right guard. "OK, I'm asking you! If I asked the other door which door leads to doom, which door would he tell me?"

"The left one," the door said. "Um."

"Open up, righty!"

"Wait, wait," the left door protested. "How can you be sure?"

"If he's the liar, he'd lie about which door the truth-teller would tell me, and the truth-teller would say 'left,' so he would've said 'right.' But if he's the truth-teller, he would have told the truth and so the left door's the wrong door, and the right door is still the right door, right?"

"How do we know?" the right door asked piteously. "We've never seen what's on the other side!"

"Then how do you know how to tell the truth or to lie?" Mabel asked.

The left door sounded embarrassed: "Uh, well—actually, we've never had to before. I mean we do all the time! I'm not doing well, am I?"

As though coming to the rescue, the right door said hastily, "Yeh, my mate's right about us not having to, 'cause most people give up and take the other way."

"Which other way?"

The right door said, "The stairs leading from the hidden door in the vestibule. You can't miss them."

"Really?"

"Yeh."

The left door said, "No."

"Are you lying?"

The door that had said "No" said, "Uh—yeh. Wait, no! No, yeh!"

"Open up the right door," Mabel said. "I was right the first time."

The door swung open, and ahead Mabel saw another corridor, this one ending in a grand staircase. As she ran down it, the voices of the doors came from behind her. "If she asks me if I lie, and I do lie, and I say I don't lie—"

"Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

At the top of the stairs Mabel opened a random door and found a whole herd of mice—pack of mice? Just a second. Huh. Googled it: the venereal term for mice (relax, that just means the term for a whole bunch of them) is "trip." A big trip of mice was industriously sewing a dress.

Trip of mice. Who would've guessed?

"Hi," Mabel said. "Mabel Pines here, don't want to interrupt you, but could you tell me where the omelette with the young man is?"

The mice conferred, sounding like a peace conference of wrens wrangling on weapons-treaty clauses, and then one squeaked, "There's one in an oubliette, if that's what you mean. Up two floors, front of the castle just over the drawbridge between the two arched windows, and look for the hole in the floor. He's in there."

"Thanks!"

Another one squeaked, "He's not alone!"

"That's OK! I'm packing!"

When she had left, one of the mice scratched his head. "Who was that?"

"Dunno. Seemed like a nice girl, though. Must be going on vacation. She's packing."

"Must be nice to have a vacation."

"Yeh."

And the trip of mice resumed its needlework.

The castle had not been designed for the convenience of visitors. Mabel had to ask twice again to find the oubliette—once she got a pointer form a grandmotherly type who was lying on a mechanic's creeper beneath an enormous pumpkin on four jacks, who muttered, "Just a second, I can't get this damn muffler loose" before rolling out from under it and pointing with her wand the way to another stairway, this a spiral one.

The second time, in a big square room at the top of the spiral steps, she met a dark-haired boy with chocolate-smeared cheeks, clutching a glittering golden card, who said, "Yeah, I saw something like that back that way. Uh—have you seen a tour group? I got separated from them in the chocolate room."

"Sorry, no!" Mabel yelled back.

She saw light ahead and then sped through a doorway. Two immensely tall Gothic-arched windows with complicated panes pierced the wall ahead, letting yellow daylight flood in. And a circular hole in the floor, a bit like a manhole without a lid, invited her attention. Mabel ran to the edge, dropped to her knees, and called, "Teek? You in there?"

"Yes!"

"I'm on my way!"

With the help of the grappling hook, she let herself down.

The oubliette did look cozy—it was a small, neat, circular room, a pristine white shag carpet on the floor, the walls hung with scarlet and yellow satin, a round table gleaming with plates of food, and glasses, and bottles, and a candelabra with a dozen candles giving a good light, a comfortable-looking canopied bed, Teek in it lying propped up with three pillows, and sitting cross-legged on the bed beside him a girl, a gorgeous dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty who in the flickering illumination looked half-naked.

"Teek," Mabel said in a deadly-serious voice, "you've got some explaining to do!"