Squiggle Read online

  “It was awful,” Mrs. Squagg said, trying to look depressed, while she leafed through a Paris travel brochure. “In the middle of the night, our poor daughter burped and her head exploded. I heard it, Officer, so it must be true.”

  Officer Poe wrote this down carefully. When he was done he said, “Ma’am, please be calm. I know this is difficult for you. What do you think made her burp?”

  “That’s clear enough,” Mr. Squagg said. He was tying string around a big suitcase that wouldn’t close right because it was stuffed too full. The Squaggs were in a hurry. They had already booked their flight to Paris and were planning to go that very afternoon and stay for a month. They hadn’t had a vacation in nine years. “Something frightened her so much that she burped. She was frightened to death. Literally frightened to death, Officer.”

  The officer wrote this down too. Then he said, “Very interesting. Yes, I’ve seen this situation before. And what, exactly, frightened your daughter?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Squagg tried to describe the horrible animal they had found in Lobelia’s bedroom. As they talked, Officer Poe remembered a famous case he had read about once. That other case was called The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and involved a lot of people getting killed by a gigantic ape. He thought and thought, and suddenly asked, “Was it ugly and covered in black hair?”

  It was.

  “Ah-ha!” he said, and wrote at the bottom of his pad, “A gorilla did it. Find the gorilla.” (Mr. and Mrs. Squagg had forgotten to mention that the animal was only eleven inches tall.)

  “Sir, Ma’am, thank you for your help,” the officer said. “I think I know what to look for now.” He tucked the pad into his shirt pocket and hurried out to the zoo, to see if any gorillas had escaped.

  8

  The baby carriage bumped and rolled across the park and along the sidewalk. All Lobelia could think about, hidden beneath the baby’s blanket, was how hungry she felt. The bumping made her stomach hurt even more. The baby, who was a very genial little creature, said “Uug,” and “Mumff,” and offered its bottle to the little monkey, but one sip almost choked her. Monkeys definitely did not drink baby formula.

  After a while they got to the zoo. Lobelia had never been there before. She knew what a zoo was, of course, because she had seen them on TV lots of times. But now that she was actually at one, she found it so exciting that she almost forgot about being hungry. She managed to tent up a bit of the blanket, so that she could see out of the carriage while still being hidden from the baby’s mother.

  “Look Baby,” the mother said. “Look at the Effelants!” She meant to say Elephants, but had gotten into the habit of baby talk and couldn’t get out of it anymore. Two huge gray elephants stared back. From their perspective in front of the baby carriage, they could see that there was a monkey in it in addition to a human baby, and this seemed to surprise the elephants very much. They couldn’t make any sense out of it. Lobelia waved at them cheerfully, and they stared back.

  “Why Baby,” the mother said, “you’re wiggling your toes! You must like the Effelants.”

  Next they saw a cage full of lions. Lobelia thought they looked extremely sleepy and cuddly and fuzzy, like great house cats asleep on a sunny windowsill. If she had not been keeping a lookout for monkeys, she might have been tempted to join them in their nap. (You probably know all about lions. But just to avoid any confusion, let me say that even though they look cute and fuzzy, they almost always get annoyed if you go into the cage to cuddle with them. They don’t like it, and often eat you.) Next they passed the giraffes, who were so tall that Squiggle could see only their bulgy knees. She didn’t want to risk looking up any higher and having the blanket fall off her head.

  The most amazing animals of all were the people. The next time you go to the zoo, see if you don’t think so too. The crowd was so thick that everyone had to walk slowly and stop a lot. Every kind of person was in that crowd. Little babies were being wheeled and carried everywhere. Little old people, at least one-hundred-and-fifty years old, crutched along on aluminum walkers. A little boy said, “Daddy, Daddy, eye wunt cot’n candy!” A little girl said, “Mommy, Mommy, lookit! Monkeys!”

  The baby stroller had just reached the monkey cages. Squiggle kept a sharp watch as they went past cage after cage. She had seen herself in a mirror, and so she had a good idea of what kind of monkey to look for. But none of them seemed right. Some kinds were too big. Some kinds were too small. Most of them were brown, or white, or golden. One rare tropical kind was bright blue and had seven legs. The very last cage in the row had a sign over it that said, “Colobus Monkeys from Zaire.” Without even waiting to get a closer look at them, Squiggle leaped out of the baby carriage and jumped through the iron bars into the cage. Being a stuffed animal, she was able to squeeze between the bars quite easily.

  Nobody noticed her except for Baby, who waved goodbye to her; and the twenty-seven Zairean Colobus in the cage, who went berserk. They leaped to the very top back corner of the cage where they hung in a tangle of limbs and tails, and made a horrendous sound something like, “Gaaak! Awwwk! Blaaaah!”

  This is how Zairean Colobus react when something unexpected jumps into their cage. They are easily frightened. Monkeys are generally scatterbrained and nervous animals. But Squiggle didn’t know this, and the reaction of the monkeys startled her.

  The noise attracted the attention of everyone who was standing nearby. “Daddy, Daddy,” a little boy said, “look at the funny monkey scaring all the other ones!”

  In three seconds a crowd formed in front of the cage. Everyone was shouting in excitement and having a wonderful time. Even a police officer appeared, and took out his note pad in case he had to write anything down.

  A flock of zookeepers arrived. The head zookeeper shouted, “What’s going on here?” He had a huge hat shaped like a Tyrannosaurus rex standing on its hind legs with its mouth open (although there were no tyrannosaurs at this particular zoo). When he pressed a button the tyrannosaur hat roared hugely and the eyes flashed red, like a police siren with a sore throat. “Let me through!” he shouted, pressing his hat button to help clear a path through the crowd. “What’s going on?” The other zookeepers, who were less important, had smaller hats shaped like other animals.

  “The monkeys are escaping!” someone shouted.

  “The monkeys are eating each other!” someone else shouted.

  “A gorilla got into the monkey cage!” a third person shouted. “And it’s jumping up and down and squashing all the other monkeys!”

  “A gorilla?” the police officer said. “Did you say a gorilla?” It was Officer Poe, of course. “Catch it! That gorilla is wanted by the law, for murdering a little girl!” He pulled out a pair of handcuffs.

  The crowd surged against the bars of the cage. The people who were right up against the bars stuck their hands through and tried to grab Squiggle, but she was just out of reach. Everyone was shouting, “Catch it! He said it was a murderer! It murdered a little gorilla! No, it is a little gorilla! Grab it! Don’t let it get out!”

  Squiggle cowered on the cement floor in terror. She saw a tiny square opening at the back of the cage. She didn’t know where it led, but in a panic she ran for it and whisked inside.

  She scampered down a cement tunnel that smelled awful. (Actually, it smelled like monkey.) Then she turned a bend, and found herself in a different part of the cage that was inside of a building. This inside part of the cage was where the monkeys went if they wanted privacy, or wanted to sleep, or if it got too rainy and cold outside; but nobody was there now. She squeezed through the metal bars, jumped out of the cage, and ran down a corridor. The building seemed very dim after the bright sunlight outside, and very quiet, and very solemn. The only person in the building was a janitor with a broom, and Squiggle waited until he was facing the other way and then darted down a different corridor. He didn’t see her, and he didn’t hear her becaus
e her feet were padded and didn’t make any noise on the marble floor.

  At the end of the corridor she came to a huge set of double doors and was just wondering how she was going to get them open, when they suddenly flew open from the opposite side. Sunlight streamed in. The steps outside were packed with zookeepers and people and a police officer, and for one moment they all stood still and looked at the little monkey on the floor in front of them.

  “There it is!” somebody shouted, and the crowd came boiling in the door. Squiggle turned and ran with the throng at her back.

  They chased her down one corridor and along another one, up a flight of stairs, and down a long carpeted hallway that was lined on either side with wooden doors. It was a straight hallway, without any side branches. Squiggle realized that when she got to the end, she would be trapped. One of the doors along the hallway stood partly open and she jumped inside. Maybe she could find a place to hide before the crowd followed her in.

  9

  Squiggle stopped just inside the door and looked around. The room had a frayed carpet with exotic African designs on it. Along one wall a bookshelf was lined with the most heart-stopping, horrible things floating in jars—bits of people, and bits of sea creatures, eyeballs and fingers and worse things, pickled and labeled, so that the room looked like the larder of a cannibal. In the center of the room was a desk piled high with books and maps and pads and sheets of paper. And sitting at the desk (Squiggle suddenly realized) was a person.

  The person had been reading a map. Squiggle could see it was a map because part of it flopped over the edge of the desk. He still had his finger on the center of it, where he had left off tracing a route. But now he was looking directly at Squiggle. He didn’t look at all surprised or frightened. That much was good, but that was the only thing about him that was encouraging.

  He was a lumpy bulgy man, too short and too wide, with red hair like coat-hanger wire standing out all over his scalp and his chin in twisty directions. Framed in all that hair his face would have been a pasty, disgusting white, except that it was mostly covered with tattoos. The tattoos didn’t seem to mean anything. They were mostly triangles and circles. But here and there you saw a frowny-face with fangs or a clawed foot worked into the design. Each of his eyes had a bright red circle and a green square around it that made him look angry—although, when you looked closer he didn’t seem to be angry at all. He was hideous. But Squiggle had no time to run back out and try another room. When she heard a trampling of footsteps outside the door, she dove into the wastebasket and pulled a paper bag over her head. (The bag smelled like bologna.)

  She couldn’t see what was going on but she heard everything. The door banged open and a lot of people scuffled and muttered and coughed.

  “Can I help you?” said a voice. It was the strangest voice, and she knew right away that it belonged to the tattooed person sitting at the desk. It was polite in a way that sounded like it would get dangerous at any moment. It was rough and pitted like an old rusty fence, the kind with spikes on top. It sounded like it wasn’t used to speaking softly.

  The voice must have had an effect on the people in the room because they all went quiet.

  “Sir, I think you can help us,” said another voice. It was the police officer. Squiggle heard a clink and thought it must be handcuffs. “I’m looking for an escaped suspect. I believe he came this way.”

  “A suspect?” the tattoo voice said.

  “To be specific,” the officer said, “a gorilla. Considered extremely dangerous.”

  A lot of people murmured in the background that it was true, a huge dangerous gorilla had just run into that exact room. Eight feet tall. A thousand pounds. A tail that could choke you from seventeen feet away.

  “Are you telling me,” the tattoo voice said, with a harsh gravelly anger just under the surface, “that an eight-foot gorilla with a tail just ran into my office, and I didn’t notice?”

  Everyone said that, although it was strange, it seemed to be true.

  “Consider this,” the tattoo voice said. “Gorillas are among the most peaceful animals on the planet, unless they are cornered by a pack of fools. In that case, the fools will get their arms and legs ripped off.”

  The crowd went suddenly quiet again.

  “And consider this,” the tattoo voice continued. “Gorillas are apes. Apes don’t have tails. And finally, consider this. Since a little monkey did actually just run into my office, jump to the window and leap outside, I strongly urge the rest of you to jump out of the same window. Or better yet, find a window ten stories higher up, and jump out of that one. But whatever you do, GET OUT OF MY OFFICE!”

  There was a scuffling noise and a few angry voices. Most of the people wanted to run around to the side of the building and continue the chase. “Don’t worry about old crabby here,” someone said. “He’s told us all we need to know!”

  Pretty soon, the office was quiet again.

  Then the gravelly voice said, “What strange little creature has jumped into my garbage can?” Something grabbed the top of the paper bag and pulled it off.

  10

  Squiggle stared up into the wild, tattooed, hideous face of the red-haired man. She was about to spring out between his knees, but paused for an instant and looked at him more closely. He wasn’t snarling at her, anyway. He looked honestly curious. (Who wouldn’t be?)

  “Er, please, don’t pickle me!” Squiggle said. Her voice wasn’t very loud, but it got amplified a little in the metal trash can.

  The man cocked his head at her, his hair quivering like watch springs. “Come on out of the garbage,” he said, “and sit on my desk. It’s more comfortable, and I can see you better. And,” he added, “don’t bother running away. The door is closed. And the window has a metal screen. Not that any of those fools noticed the screen.” He chuckled at that, and suddenly his face looked kind. Rather fierce, and scary, and exciting, and kind, all in one. He reached in with a hairy hand, picked Squiggle out of the trash, and set her on the desk in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (on the map) and right under the lamp.

  “What did you say about tickling?” he said. He leaned forward to hear better.

  “Please, um, Sir,” Squiggle said, “don’t pickle me!”

  “Don’t WHAT?”

  Squiggle threw a terrified glance at the glass bottles on the shelves.

  The red-haired man looked up at the glass bottles, and looked back at Squiggle, and then burst into a laugh. His laugh was so loud and sudden, and sounded so much like a buzzard being choked to death, that Squiggle jumped back to the far corner of Siberia (on the map, of course). But the laugh didn’t sound evil. It wasn’t very polite, maybe, but it seemed honest enough. When he was done laughing he wiped his eyes with a fistful of his beard, which looked so wiry that Squiggle thought he might poke out his eye (but he didn’t).

  “You like my collection?” he said. “That’s nothing. I’ve got three rooms in the Museum of Natural History. Three rooms, lined with jars! These are only a few damaged specimens, bits and pieces, and also my son’s eyeball collection. My son is, well, he likes eyeballs. He doesn’t keep them at home because the octopus opens the jars and eats the eyeballs. But don’t worry! I never pickle anything that isn’t already dead when it got to me. And you’re alive, I think. Although I never saw anything like you before. What kind of monkey are you?”

  She came forward timidly and held out the tag pinned to her ear.

  “A colobus!” the red-haired man said, reading the tag. “That would be an African monkey. Obviously a clerical error. If you’re a colobus, then I’m an aardvark. Whoever put you together didn’t know what he was doing. You look more like a cebus monkey to me. South American. You have a prehensile tail, anyway. I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Squiggle. Don’t look so surprised! Of course I can tell you’re a Miss. Girl monkeys have bushy whiskers—and yours are exceptionally beaut
iful.” He winked at her, and she saw that a picture of a frog was tattooed on his eyelid. “Now! Tell me who you are, and where you come from, and how you got here, and why that pack of fools was following you. I love a story. Put your mouth right up against my ear; your voice isn’t too loud.”

  Squiggle didn’t know whether to trust the man, but felt that she didn’t have any choice. He seemed a great deal nicer than he had looked at first.

  She put her mouth up to his hairy ear and began to tell her story. She started from when the Lesser Spotted Pickfloo had appeared on her bed, and went right through to the moment she got chased into the man’s office.

  All through the story, the red-haired man kept grunting and making little noises of amazement. You might think that he didn’t believe the story? That he thought Squiggle was either crazy or lying? Not at all. For one thing, he had the evidence right in front of him: a talking monkey. He had a look of wonder on his tattooed face, and he didn’t interrupt at all.

  When the story was over, he sat back in his chair and said, “That’s one of the stranger stories I’ve ever heard. And I’ve heard some very strange ones. The first thing, little monkey, is to get you something to drink!”

  He opened a desk drawer and took out a tin canteen. It looked battered and scratched, as if it had been on safaris all over the world. “I’m sure you can drink water,” he said. “Most animals do.”

  He unscrewed the cap for her and Squiggle took a long drink. It felt like the coolest, cleanest, most wonderful breeze passing through her entire body. That is what happens when you are very thirsty and then get something nice to drink.

  “But I’m so hungry,” she said. Then she said, “Please?” which shows that she had made a great deal of progress, and that being a monkey had done her some good after all.