to come from the outside.
Nothing was worse than that limp, lonely feeling that he had no power over his own fate – and yet here he was again, strung up like a side of beef, just waiting for someone else to help him.
So many of the kids chimed beside him had grown to accept this. Lief, with his weird post-traumatic bliss, was a constant reminder to Nick that he, too, might someday just leave his will behind, and grow as passive as a plant, waiting for time to do whatever time does to Afterlights. The thought frightened him-it made him anxious, and that anxiety spurred him on to action.
“I’m finding a way out of here,” he announced to any of the other chimed kids who cared to listen.
“Ah, shut up,” said the high-strung kid. “Nobody wants to hear it.”
A few others echoed their halfhearted agreement.
“You new chimers just complain, complain, complain,” said some kid from deep in the middle of the chiming chamber-perhaps a kid who had been there for many years, and had lost anything resembling hope.
“I’m not complaining,” Nick announced, and he realized that, for once, he wasn’t. “I’m doing something about it.” Then he began to bend at the waist and swing his arms, making himself move like a pendulum.
Lief smiled at him. “Looks like fun,” he said, and he joined Nick, until they were both swinging together, bounding off of all the other kids around them-kids who were not at all pleased to be jostled out of their semi- vegetative state.
Grumbles of “Stop it!” and “Leave us alone,” began to echo around the chamber, but Nick would not be deterred.
He couldn’t quite swing to the door, and even if he could, it was locked from the outside, so that was out of the question, and there were so many kids, he couldn’t build up the momentum to swing free, like a true pendulum. In the end, he wound up accidentally locking elbows with Lief as he swung past him, and they spun around each other, like an upside-down square dance. Their ropes tangled, and they ended up pressed to one another like dance partners.
The high-strung kid laughed. “Serves you right!” he said. “Now you’ll be stuck like that!”
Their ropes were hopelessly tangled, and now they were even farther from the ground than when they started.
Farther from the ground… A stray thought sparked through Nick’s mind so sharply and suddenly, it burst out of his chocolate-covered mouth before he understood what he meant.
“Macrame,” he said.
“Huh?” said Lief.
One day long ago, when Nick was home from school, too sick to do much of anything else, his grandmother gave him some twine, and showed him how to weave it together into fancy patterns. It was called macrame. He had made a hanging-plant holder that was probably still holding a big old spider plant in his living room.
“Lief! ” he said. “Twist around me some more.” And without waiting for Lief to respond, Nick grabbed him and made Lief twist around him again and again until the torque of their tangled ropes made them spin backward, like a rubber band that was wound too tight. But before they could spin too far, Nick said, “Just follow me-do what I do.”
Nick reached out and grabbed another kid.
“Hey!” complained the kid.
Nick ignored him and twisted the kid’s position so that high above their upside-down feet, their ropes tangled. Lief did the same to a kid next to him.
By now there were mumbles of kids around them taking notice. This wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill swinging-this had purpose and design. This was something new.
“What are you doing down there?” demanded the high-strung kid.
“Everybody!” Nick shouted. “Grab the people around you and start crossing your ropes. Get as tangled as you can!”
“Why?” the high-strung kid said.
Nick tried to think of something the high-strung kid would understand. As he was wearing a Boy Scout uniform, Nick figured he knew just the thing. “Ever make a lanyard at Boy Scout camp?” Nick asked. “You know- those plastic strings you weave together to make whistle chains, and stuff?
“Yeah…”
“You start with tons and tons of string, right? But when it’s done it’s really short, once all the strings are woven together.”
“Yeah…” said the kid, beginning to get it.
“And if we keep tangling and tying up our ropes like a lanyard, we’ll get higher and higher off the ground-and maybe if we’re high enough, we could reach that grate up there and-”
“-get out!” said the kid, finishing Nick’s thought.
“I don’t wanna get tangled,” whined some kid far off.
“Shut up!” said the high-strung Boy Scout. “I think it might work. Everybody do what he says. Start tangling yourselves!”
All it took was an order from their leader for every single kid to start tangling. It was a strange dance of kids weaving in and out of one another, grabbing hands, pulling, swinging, stitching their ropes together, and with each stitch made, the collection of hanging kids rose farther off the ground.
It took more than an hour, and when it was done, and there was not an inch of give left in their ropes, they had risen at least twenty feet. The result was hardly a lanyard, or even a macrame plant holder. Their ropes were a tangled mess, and the kids themselves were all tied up inside it like flies caught in the web of a large, psychotic spider. From where Nick hung, he could see the opening above them, so much closer now, only about ten feet away. If he were free from that blasted rope, he could climb up the tangle, and get out. If only there were rats to chew through these ropes.
He looked around him. None of the kids who had been near him before were near him now-he was faced with an entire new set of neighbors. In fact everyone was chatting; those who remembered their names were introducing themselves. This was more life than any of these kids had shown for years. Even the screamer, who had pouted ever since Allie forbid him to scream, was happily talking away. Still, while the tangle brought some much needed variety to their dangling existence, it hadn’t freed anyone. Nick had to think-there had to be more he could do. And then, among all the chatty voices he heard one kid ask:
“What time is it?”
Through the interwoven ropes, he saw the kid in pajamas who everyone called Hammerhead. An idea came to him, and it amazed Nick that no one in the chiming chamber had thought of this before, being so deep and docile in their upside-down ruts. But then, Nick himself hadn’t really been thinking outside the box until today, had he? There “wasn’t much slack left in Nick’s rope, but he pulled his way through the clog of kids, and got them to shift positions, enabling him to inch forward until finally he was just a few feet away from Hammerhead, who smiled at him, showing his pointy teeth. “This is more fun than a feeding frenzy!”
“Uh… right. Hey, how’d you like to help me out?”
“Sure. What do you want me to do?” It took Hammerhead less than five minutes to gnaw through Nick’s rope.
“There’s a problem in the chiming chamber,” a nervous crewman told the McGill.
The McGill sat forward in his throne. “What kind of problem?”
“Well… sir… they all seem to have gotten…tangled.”
“So untangle them.”
“Well…it’s not as easy as it sounds.”
Frustrated, the McGill came out on deck, and went over to the grate above the chiming chamber. He pulled it open, and looked down into the depths to see the situation for himself. His captives weren’t just tangled, they were talking.
They sounded…happy. This was entirely unacceptable.
“Do we have something vile to pour on them?”
“I’ll go check,” said the crewman, and he ran off.
The McGill looked down at the tangled mob of kids again. “They look very uncomfortable,” he said. Certainly they were talking now, but in time, they’d grow tired of this new situation, and realize how much more unpleasant
