The Everlasting Story of Nory

3. A Story About Beetles

The owners of the Threll Cathedral, who were the Anglican Bishops and Deans, had just spent millions of dollars, or pounds, to clean all the glass in the Jasperium and make sure it wasn’t going to fall down. But while they were doing that, they had discovered that Death Watch Beetles had chewed through the lead that covered the ends of the beams of wood that attached the Jasperium to the tops of the stone columns. So they had to replace some of the wood, but not all. Death Watch Beetles were called that because in former times, when a person was very sick, if his family heard any of these beetles banging their small heads against the wood of a house—chk, chk, chk—it meant the sick person would die soon. Nory, because she wanted to be a dentist, had a specific thought about this, which was: ‘Their teeth must be extraordinarily strong to have chewed through lead. They must be hidden away normally and then fold out when they open their mouths.’ Crocodiles grow twenty-four sets of teeth in their lives and they can perform for two years without food. But Nory severely doubted that the Death Watch Beetle had more than one set of teeth. ‘It must be a difficult way of life up there,’ Nory thought, ‘generation after generation of Beetle, trying to find enough to eat in the old, horrible, chewed-over wood. They must be down to the bare gristle.’ Near the Cathedral was a very good tea shop that had an extremely good chocolate fudge cake. The cake was served with a little cup of whipped cream, by the way.

Nory didn’t like a certain picture in one of the brochures that her parents bought about Threll Cathedral that showed a man wearing a mask putting a metal tube into one of the old pieces of wood under the Jasperium in order to squirt powerful bug-killing foam inside. She had to make up a story about a family of Death Watch Beetles who learned of the approach of a squirt of the poison and packed up their household and made little parachutes out of some candy wrappers one of the bug-killing men had left in the scaffolding and parachuted down, down, down, smuggling through the cool empty air of the inside of the cathedral, swaying, their feelers curled up tight in fear, until they landed in a huge stone land of green light on the cold floor near a little girl with bright eyes and black hair named Mariana.

Mariana was sitting with her eyes closed, waiting to see if she could think the thoughts God wanted her to think. She opened her eyes to see how close the light was to her feet, because she thought that as soon as the light touched her feet she would start to feel the sacred holiness, and she was just creeping her feet a little closer to the light, so that the holiness would get there more quickly, when she thought she noticed something. Yes, she did notice something: four tiny creatures, carefully folding up a chewing-gum wrapper. ‘Oh, who are you?’ she said, bending toward them and letting them hop onto her palm.

‘We’re Death Watch Beetles,’ said one of them. ‘A bad man is squirting our country full of terrible poison.’

‘Oh,’ said Mariana, ‘he isn’t a bad man, I’m sure, he just wants to be sure that the Jasperium doesn’t fall down. You see, when you eat the wood, the wood becomes weaker and weaker, and finally the whole thing would turn to crumbs and fall. You wouldn’t want that to happen to the Cathedral, would you?’

‘Well,’ grudged the Death Watch Beetle, ‘if they’d just explained what the problem was, and given us another piece of wood to live in, we would have left on our own. As it is, look at little Gary, he has gotten sick from chewing on the lead.’ And indeed Mariana saw that little Gary was lying on his back and he did not look at all well. He looked as pale as a bug can look, and near death. Mariana gently put all four beetles in her pencil case and walked out to the forest. She knew where a special fallen tree lay. There was a pool of rainwater in a groove of this tree, and she picked a certain kind of flower as she went, singing a mild song, and crushed the petals in the water. It was a special kind of flower that could cure any kind of lead poisoning, and it was called the Montezuma flower, because it could grow in really hot or very cold places, so that it was a great survivor. Then she opened the pencil case. The three healthy Death Watch Beetles carried Gary, the sick one, out. ‘Wash him in the water,’ said Mariana gently. She was a tall girl with dark brown hair. ‘The potion will help him.’

At first the beetles weren’t sure, and they sniffed the water and tested it with their feelers and that sort of usual behavior. Then gradually they lost their fears and dipped Gary freely in, not head-first but gently, tail-first, and they all went in, one by one, and splashed in the water contentedly. They had spent so many centuries cooped up inside the old Norman beams of the Jasperium that they had forgotten that rainwater could be so clean and pure, and they were overjoyed. Gary sat up in the water and said he felt much better. Then all four of them found a place in a spot of sun to dry their bodies and when they were toasty and warm again, they waved goodbye, and began chewing their mazes in the huge tree trunk. ‘Lovely layers of wood!’ they said. ‘Rings and rings and rings! It’ll be a long time before we chew up this enormous country! Don’t tell anyone you brought us here.’

‘I won’t,’ laughed Mariana. ‘Good luck!’

‘Thank you, Mariana,’ they called, giving a last happy wave. ‘Bye! Bye! Bye!’

That was a story she had made about them. In real life Nory had never even seen a Death Watch Beetle. But there were definitely some unusual creatures in Threll. The worst one was a huge spider that her mother spotted in the shower curtain while Nory and Littleguy were in the bathtub setting up a store to sell pretend cappuccinos, with bubble foam. Her mother suddenly jumped up with her magazine and hurried them out and called Nory’s father.

‘What is it?’ said Nory, who hadn’t gotten a look because she was shoveled out of the bathroom so quick.

‘Don’t look,’ said Nory’s father. ‘It’s a loathsome Anglo-Saxon bug. It’s huge.’

‘I won’t be disgusted,’ said Nory. ‘I promise, I won’t be.’ She peered in, then instantly wailed out in a misery of disgust and hugged her mother. ‘Oh, awful!’ It was an enormous thing, like a black crab, with the dastardliest hairy legs Nory had ever seen on a spider, and not like a daddy longlegs’s legs, which are quite graceful, but hairy in an ugly thick fearful way. Normally Nory liked all insects, even earwigs, and especially ladybugs, and she did not appreciate any killing, because of the important rule of Do Unto Others, and how would you like it if a huge scrumple of toilet paper came down on you and stole your life away? But this spider in particular was just too hideously hairy-legged to get any empathy from her.

Nory’s father came out.

‘Is it dead?’ they all asked.

Nory’s father said that yes, it was dead.

‘Good,’ said Nory, although immediately she felt a little sad, not to mention embarrassed about shrieking to pieces when she saw it. ‘What did you do with it?’

‘Flushed it into the depths,’ Nory’s father said. ‘The worst part is I always feel I have to open up the toilet paper to look.’

‘Not to dwell,’ her mother said.

That was their first adventure in Threll. Nory had some trouble sleeping for two nights, but then she got quickly over it. The only problem was that now she didn’t like going to the bathroom in the middle of the night because she sometimes worried that a second-cousin-once-removed of that big black spider was lurching under the seat. But gradually she got over that worry, too. It was a wooden toilet seat — the landlady said that she had bought it for five pounds at an auction from a Stately Home, and that the Duke of Tunaparts, or someone quite obscure like that, had sat on it every day of his life, which was not really a point to its favor.