Bubble in the Bathtub Read online

  Anna suddenly looked sad again. “The professor’s poor girlfriend, though. Imagine having to marry that scoundrel, Claude Cliché.”

  Suddenly she punched the palm of her hand. “I can’t believe none of those cowardly judges in Paris have had the courage to throw the book at that hoodlum! It makes me so mad that everyone just does what he says.”

  “Unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about guys like Cliché,” Lisa said. “But now I have to go find Proctor. I have the time soap he needs.” Lisa patted her jacket pocket.

  Anna followed Lisa, who had gotten a running start. She had jumped over the ditch and was now running through the grass back toward the ledge where the time-traveling bathtub was. When they got there, Lisa was relieved to see that there were still bubbles.

  “Thank you for all your help, Anna,” Lisa said, jumping in. “You’ll see. What you’ve done will end up helping save the professor after all.”

  “I hope so,” Anna said. “But I hope you’re not right about the other thing.”

  “What other thing?”

  “That there’s nothing we can do to stop guys like Claude Cliché.”

  “You should try,” Lisa said. “Good luck, Anna Showli.”

  “Good luck to you too, Lisa Pedersen. Say hi to the professor from me when you see him.”

  “I will, I promise.” Lisa went to plug her nose with her fingers, but discovered that she was still wearing the blue nose clip.

  “Hey, the professor said one other thing,” Anna said. “That I should be careful if his old assistant showed up. His assistant is apparently able to track people by reading the time soap residue and can follow people no matter what time they travel to.”

  “Yeah, that was my understanding, too, that his assistant was kind of a shady guy,” Lisa said. “Okay, bye!”

  “But—” Anna started.

  But it was too late, because Lisa had already disappeared into the bubbles.

  “—his assistant wasn’t a guy,” Anna continued, mumbling. “The professor told me it was a woman. A very unusual woman …”

  Meanwhile, under the water, Lisa was concentrating on Gustave Eiffel’s office and a date in 1888. But which date? She chose the first one she thought of: May 17, Norwegian Independence Day. That’s as good as any other date, right?

  FROM HIS BED in the tower suite at the Hôtel Moe Bla, Nilly was staring into the muzzle of an old-fashioned pistol. And thinking that he would much rather be staring at a plate of bacon and eggs. Not just because he was awfully hungry, but because pistol muzzles are unpleasant things to stare at. A bullet could come shooting out at any time.

  “Feet on the floor, don your duds, and ten hut,” the woman behind the pistol commanded.

  “Wh-wh-why?” Nilly stuttered, pulling the covers up to his chin.

  “Because you’re going to help me find the man who ruined my life.”

  “Wh-wh-who’s that?”

  Raspa’s eyes glowed with hatred as she whispered, hoarsely, “Doctor Proctor, of course.”

  Raspa’s Story

  LET’S REWIND FOR five seconds and then pick up again where we left off.

  “You’re going to help me find the man who ruined my life,” Raspa snarled with a pistol aimed at the bed in which our hero, Nilly, was lying with the covers pulled up to his chin.

  “Wh-wh-who’s that?” whispered Nilly, who maybe wasn’t looking quite as heroic as we might have wished.

  Raspa’s eyes seethed with hatred as she whispered, hoarsely, “Doctor Proctor, of course.”

  Nilly swallowed and asked, “C-c-couldn’t I just tell him you said hello when I see him next?”

  “GET UP!” Raspa bellowed, the pistol in her hand shaking.

  “Okay, okay!” Nilly said, tossing off the covers and hopping out of bed onto the floor. “You don’t need to yell like that. What do you want with that shabby old professor, anyway?”

  “Not much,” Raspa said, sinking down into an armchair as she watched Nilly get dressed. “I just want what’s mine.”

  “And that is …?”

  “Elementary, my dear young sailor. The drawings for the time-traveling bathtub.”

  “Yours? Didn’t Doctor Proctor discover—”

  “But I was the one who invented the time soap!” Raspa growled, white drops of spit spraying from her mouth. “And then that idiot betrayed me! Messed everything up by falling in love with this Juliette woman. Just her name makes my mouth taste like rancid butter. He ruined everything!”

  “So you were … you were …”

  “Yes, I was his assistant. But I was at least as smart as he was!”

  “And now you want to find him so that you can steal his part of the invention.”

  “Hurry up!”

  Nilly discovered that he’d put his shoes on before his pants and had to start all over again. “Why should I help you find the professor if you’re just going to steal from him?”

  Raspa waved the pistol.

  “Oh yeah, right,” Nilly mumbled as he pulled on his pants. “What’s going to happen to us after you get your claws on the drawings?”

  “If I were you,” Raspa said, scratching the side of her nose with the pistol, “I would try not to think about that. Concentrate instead on where the professor might be.”

  “I have no idea,” Nilly said. “So sue me, but I really have no idea.”

  “People can’t be bothered to sue dead dwarves,” Raspa said, waving the pistol.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I do remember that it starts with ‘In,’” Nilly said hurriedly. “And that could really be so many places. India, for example. Or Indonesia. The Incan Empire. Inishshark Island in Ireland …”

  “Stop!” Raspa snarled, raising the pistol. “You’re obviously no help, you snotty-nosed brat. So, farewell …”

  Nilly could see her long, crooked index finger curling around the trigger and starting to pull back on it.

  “Wait!” he screamed. “I just thought of it!”

  Raspa squinted at him in suspicion without lowering her pistol. “Oh, did you now?”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Nilly said, nodding so energetically that his bangs painted red streaks through the air.

  “Well? Where?”

  “We need a time-traveling bathtub to get there,” Nilly said. He ran over to the bathroom and pulled open the door. “Can you set up this tub?”

  “No, you idiot!” Raspa railed. “Not without Proctor’s drawings. We have to go back to the bathtub in that blasted meadow. I landed right on my head when I arrived …,” Raspa complained, rubbing her forehead, and only now did Nilly notice a blue lump right at her hairline.

  “You came here in the same bathtub as me?”

  “Of course,” Raspa mumbled.

  “How?”

  “Enough talk. Time to ship out,” Raspa said, and then opened the door and waved Nilly out into the hallway with her pistol.

  Nilly gasped in disbelief. “Before breakfast? Are you aware that breakfast is included in the price at this hotel? That it’s complimentary?”

  “NOW!”

  Nilly shrugged.

  “All right,” he said innocently. Precisely as innocently as someone who’s just had a not-altogether-so-innocent idea. Because Nilly had actually just figured out that they had to get out onto the street so he could sneak off and, thanks to his small stature, disappear in the crowd.

  “Come on,” he said, strutting out. Raspa followed, sticking the pistol into her coat pocket as they went down the stairs. When they came out onto the street, Nilly looked around in confusion. The clouds had rolled in overnight and now it felt like it was about to start raining. But that’s not what was confusing him.

  “Hey, where did everybody go? There was a huge crowd out here yesterday.”

  “They followed the cycling circus to its next stop,” Raspa said, peering down the empty street. “Oh, too bad. Did that ruin your plan to sneak away and, thanks to your small stature, disappear in the crowd?”r />
  Nilly didn’t respond. What, could she read minds too?

  Raspa laughed. “Come on, pipsqueak, hop up onto my back.”

  “Your back?”

  “Do you see a taxi or something instead?”

  “No …,” Nilly said, sounding reluctant.

  Raspa bent down. “Hop on. Let’s get down off this damned mountain before it starts pouring.”

  Nilly hesitated, but did as she asked. Once Raspa was sure that he was holding on tight enough, she kicked off. The ungreased wheels at the bottom of her wooden leg squealed. They rumbled over the asphalt as they passed under the finish line that was still up. They started speeding up.

  “Hold on tight,” Raspa said over her shoulder. “Full steam ahead.”

  She hunched over. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the wind beat against Nilly’s face as they whooshed down the same desolate, extremely steep mountain road that Eddy and Nilly had struggled their way up the day before. Raspa leaned into the turns, causing her rubber roller-skate wheels to shriek.

  And Nilly, since he was Nilly, totally forgot what an awkward situation he was in and cheered happily, “Yippee! Faster! Faster!”

  He got what he wanted. Ultimately they were moving so fast that the air pressure made their cheeks flap, flipped their eyelids back, and flattened their noses against their faces. Nilly suddenly stopped shouting when his tongue disappeared down his throat and he had to shut his mouth so he could cough it back up again.

  * * *

  TWO SHEEP WERE standing next to each other watching the—to put it mildly—peculiar woman with the boy on her back, who was the same boy who had sped past them the day before going the other way.

  “Haven’t we seen that redheaded chap before?” one of the cud-chewing sheep said to the other.

  “No idea,” the second cud-chewer replied to the first. “We’re sheep, you know. We don’t remember stuff like that.”

  RASPA AND NILLY were almost horizontal by the final curve before the road flattened out and Nilly spotted the flower-filled meadow. And the feet of the upside-down bathtub.

  That very instant, the clouds opened up. And boy did it rain! It was as if the biggest raindrops in the whole world had gathered over this specific meadow to hold the world championships in The Last Raindrop to the Ground Is a Rotten Egg.

  “Perfect,” Raspa shouted, hopping over the fence and starting to limp through the grass toward the bathtub.

  “Pe-rf-ect?” Nilly asked, as he bumped up and down on her back and felt the rain streaming down the back of his neck and in under his jersey.

  Raspa was heading straight for the bathtub. She wiggled so Nilly fell off and tumbled down into the grass. Then she grabbed one of the tub’s feet. “Help me right her so we can launch.”

  Nilly stood up and did as she asked. They turned the bathtub over so it was right side up and watched the rain hammering against the enameled bottom. Raspa took out a jar, which she opened and poured from. A familiar strawberry-red powder sprinkled down into the tub, where the rain frothed up the soap, which starting forming bubbles right away.

  “Now we just have to wait until the tub is full,” she said, climbing in and sitting down at one end. Nilly climbed in and sat down at the other end.

  “So how did you find us, anyway?” Nilly asked.

  “Easy,” Raspa said. “When I noticed that you came in with a stamp from 1888 that looked brand-new and also had traces of white soap around the edges, I had a suspicion. When it tasted like strawberries, too, I knew that that could only mean one thing: that Proctor had gotten his time-traveling bathtub to work. And you’re not exactly good at keeping a secret, sailor. When you said you guys were going to Paris, I realized that you would lead me right to him.”

  “You followed us.”

  “I did. I stood watch outside the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille, and when I saw the little girl come back with that awful woman—”

  “Juliette Margarine, awful?”

  “Don’t say that name!” Raspa snarled. “They went up to the room, and I knew that you must be up there, all four of you. So I knocked—”

  “Oh, we thought that was the hippos,” said Nilly, who could feel that the water level had risen a little, but even a downpour takes a while to fill a whole time-traveling bathtub.

  “I was trying to knock down the door, but I had to give up. So I ran downstairs, to that little wimp at the reception desk, and politely asked for the room key.”

  “And he just gave it to you?” Nilly asked in disbelief.

  “I asked very politely,” Raspa said. “Plus I was pointing the pistol at him.”

  “Oh,” Nilly said. “Good thinking.”

  “But when I got into the room, it was empty,” Raspa sighed. “Proctor wasn’t there and neither was anyone else. I turned the place upside down. Not a living soul. Just a stupid seven-legged spider. Seven legs! If it weren’t for the fact that they don’t exist, you might have thought it was a seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider.”

  Nilly didn’t respond.

  “So I realized you’d escaped in the time-traveling bathtub, and I started reading the tracks left in the soap….”

  “Can you really track people from the soap?”

  “Of course,” Raspa sniffed in irritation. The rain was making her makeup run in black rivulets. “I’m the one who invented the soap, I know everything there is to know about it. The only problem was that there were multiple tracks. You’d all gone to different places, so I had to pick one of them. And that led me here. I walked over to that café over there and saw you on TV. Nice of you to say exactly where you were. And now you’re going to be just as nice and lead me to wherever Proctor went. Let’s go now, and no funny business. I’ll just follow your tracks no matter where you go. Keep that in mind.”

  “But I—” Nilly began, sticking his index finger in his ear and twisting it around.

  “It’s time to go!” Raspa said, raising her pistol. Water dripped from the end of the barrel. “Take your finger out of your ear!”

  There was another thunderclap, close enough to make the ground shake this time.

  “Oooooookay,” Nilly said with a shudder, and a little plop! was heard as his index finger quickly exited his ear.

  But it hadn’t been the pistol that had made Nilly shudder. Or the cold water. Or the crazy plan that had just formed in his head with a plop! Nilly had shuddered because he’d just discovered that the thunder that was making the ground shake wasn’t coming from the sky. But from something heavy that was charging toward them from behind Raspa. An enormous, black, exceptionally enraged bull.

  “It’s time to go,” Nilly said, diving down into the bathtub.

  He held his breath and concentrated. He concentrated on what Eddy had told him, because that was the crux of his new plan. He wasn’t sure if it was a particularly good plan, but nevertheless he concentrated on a place right next to a bike-repair shop in Belgium. The place was called Waterloo. The date was June 18, 1815. Napoléon Bonaparte’s bedroom, Nilly thought.

  When he surfaced again at first he thought he’d messed up somehow, because he could still hear thunder. But then he discovered that it was almost totally dark and that he was in a tent. And he realized that the thunder didn’t have anything to do with lightning or bulls. It was a deep, rumbling snore. It was nighttime and Nilly was at the Battle of Waterloo, the most famous military battle in history. And Nilly knew enough history to know that he’d ended up on the side that was going to lose, that was going to be trounced, smashed to smithereens and sent running for their lives.

  To summarize: Nilly no longer had any doubt. He was now quite certain that this had not been a good plan.

  Waterloo

  NILLY BLINKED IN the darkness. He was wet, he was scared, and he still hadn’t had any breakfast. Basically this day was not starting out the way he would have liked. And now, on top of all that, it was also going to be the worst day in French military history, the day they would be decimated by the wre
tched English and the at least equally wretched Germans.

  Nilly’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw that the thunderous snoring was coming from a bed located in the center of the tent. Next to the bed there was a chair with a uniform draped meticulously over its back. Nilly shivered. Of course the uniform would be way too big, but at least it would be dry. He quietly slipped out of the bathtub and snuck over to the chair, pulling off his wet clothes as he went. He put on the uniform, and—what the heck was this?—it actually fit! Nilly looked down at the bed, at the man lying on his back and snoring with his mouth wide open. Could this really be the great general and dictator, Napoléon Bonaparte? Why, this guy was just as tiny as Nilly! But, no time to think about that now. Nilly hurriedly buttoned all the shiny buttons on the uniform, buckled the belt with the shiny saber that only just barely dragged on the ground, and grabbed the strange, three-cornered hat that was sitting on the seat of the chair. How would you even begin to figure out which is the front and which is the back of a hat like this? No time to think about that either, because it wasn’t going to take Raspa long to read the time soap and be here. Nilly put the hat on his head and pulled the jar of fartonaut powder out of the pocket of his wet pants. And then spun around because he heard someone sneeze behind him. But it wasn’t Raspa, who was still in the tub. The sneeze had come from outside the tent.

  “Bless you,” he heard a voice outside the tent say.

  Nilly exhaled in relief, opened the bag of fartonaut powder, held it carefully over the snoring general’s gaping mouth, and poured. But right then the little man exhaled, making a long, wheezing sound and blowing the powder right back in Nilly’s face. Nilly’s eyes started watering and he got powder in his nose, and before he could stop himself, he sneezed. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the general’s whole face was covered with splotches of wet fartonaut powder. Nilly held his breath.