Under the Beetle's Cellar by Mary Willis Walker Page A

time the lights came back on, Jacksonville and Lopez had been given an important mission by the President of the United States, and everyone seemed calmer.
    But the calm hadn’t lasted long, because, when the lights came back on, Samuel Mordecai had arrived. He had dropped down into the underworld and started preaching. He had strutted up and down the aisle spouting Bible verses and doom.
    Forty-six days had passed and the man was still strutting and preaching.
    But at least the lights had stayed on after his first visit. That first terrifying darkness had not been repeated, though they all worried about it. Every time a bulb flickered or dimmed, they were afraid it was burning out. And there was always the possibility the Jezreelites would just flip the switch again and plunge them back into the darkness and panic of the first day.
    Once he had started telling the story, it spun itself out spontaneously, as if he’d been practicing it all his life. The characters rose up and spoke. Often it felt like the story was telling itself, just passing through him. It didn’t seem to be doing the kids any harm, and it filled some empty time, so he had kept it going with one installment a day, or sometimes two, if it was a particularly difficult day.
    He cleared his throat. “Remember last night after the Tongs caught Jacksonville, they put him in a bamboo cage? Remember how scared he was? He fought. He beat his wings against the bars. But the cage was strong. The bars were made of thick stalks of green bamboo. And it was small—so low that he couldn’t stand up straight. A turkey vulture perching is about two and a half feet tall and this cage was only two feet four inches high, so he had to keep his head bent over to one side. And whenhe saw what they were doing—building a fire and bringing out that huge cooking pot—you can imagine how scared he was.”
    Walter leaned forward as he felt the story welling up. “Now, the Tongs had never seen a vulture like Jacksonville. They have vultures in Tongaland, of course—there are vultures of one kind or another all over the world—but theirs are much smaller, only half the size, and they don’t have red heads or pale yellow feet, so Jacksonville was a curiosity, a freak. Like I told you last night, they put the cage right in the middle of the village where all the people passed by. Word got around, the way it will do in a village, and everybody came to look at him. They all came—old grannies and little children, men and women, even babies who could barely walk—all day long they came by. They stared and poked him with those long forks, and they laughed.
    “Jacksonville was used to people laughing at him. People often found him ugly. Now, it’s real hard to get used to that. None of you would know how painful it is because you’re all exceptionally handsome children, but Jacksonville knew because he’d run into it a lot. People, and other animals even, would see him and say yuck, how ugly. And they would call him bad names: buzzard or filthy buzzard, which is very insulting to a turkey vulture. And it wasn’t just because of the way he looked, he knew that. Lots of people didn’t like what he ate.”
    “Dead things,” Bucky said. “He ate dead things.”
    “Gross!” Heather exclaimed.
    “Yeah. But we eat dead things, too,” Sue Ellen McGregor said. As she listened, she wove thin strands on her string box, the only one that had survived the first day’s confiscation of backpacks and possibly dangerous items. She had made friendship bracelets for all the girls before Walter discovered how strong and flexible the finished products were. Now he had her making long ropelike lengths that they could use for their emergency defense plan. Everyone on the bus envied Sue Ellen’s possession of the string box, even Walter, because it was such a calming activity and actually produced something useful.
    “Let him tell it,” Josh said. “Mr. Demming’s telling