Free Squiggle by B.B. Wurge

Sclera was an old villain. He pretended to walk away, but stopped in the shadow of a nearby phone booth and looked back.
    For a few minutes nothing happened. People passed by on the street, but none of them seemed interested in the briefcase. Then the case began to shake. Suddenly it popped open and out jumped—Mr. Sclera screamed when he saw it—a little black monkey. The monkey looked around at the wide-open space and then scampered away.
    Mr. Sclera stayed where he was for a long time, frozen in astonishment. Finally he decided that the monkey was delivering a secret message that had something to do with the pentagonal eyeball. The mystery intrigued him, and he was about to go look at the briefcase again to see if anything had been left behind in it. But he wondered if somebody might be hiding nearby, watching, to see if he had kept up his part of the deal. Maybe, to keep the deal entirely secret, they would take him away and kill him? He became horribly afraid and slunk off into the shadows. When he was a few blocks away he began to run, and soon caught a taxi to take him back to the airport.
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19
    E ven to a large person, the Eiffel Tower is gigantic. To Squiggle, who was only eleven inches tall, it was so large that she didn’t even recognize it at first. What she saw was a city square crowded with people. Some of these people were hurrying from one end to another, some were hurrying back the opposite direction, some were just milling about looking at everything and taking pictures and talking. A row of booths was set up along the opposite side of the square where people bought things to eat and drink. Squiggle saw a scruffy-looking man mingling in the crowd, trying to sell tiny plastic statues of the Eiffel Tower. He didn’t seem to be selling very many statues, however, and looked annoyed. She also saw a group of five people on roller blades, going around and around the outside of the square. She heard voices popping out everyw here and mingling together in a roar. They didn’t all sound like French voices. They sounded German, and Italian, and Spanish, and English, all jumbled together.
    The place was simply enormous and so full of noise and movement and confusion that Squiggle felt overwhelmed, partly because she had just spent eighteen hours in a dark box.
    She crept to the edge of the square and sat in the shadows, looking around for the Eiffel Tower. But she couldn’t see it anywhere, even though the area in front of her was lit up. Bright lights had been strung up everywhere. They were hanging all around her. Far above the busy city square was a patch of roof, blazing with lights.
    â€œI wonder,” she thought, “how they built a roof so high up, over such a large square?” The roof seemed to be made up of metal girders, and. . . . “It IS the Eiffel Tower,” she thought. “I’m directly underneath it. It must be enormous!”
    She was quite right about that.
    â€œHow,” she thought, “am I going to get to the top of it?” She thought there might be elevators that ran up the sides, but she didn’t want to take an elevator because she didn’t want to be seen by anybody. Who knows what would happen to a little monkey caught by a crowd of people in an elevator? No, she had to climb the tower. Being a monkey, she was not as afraid as you might have been. But still, she was not certain that she would succeed. “If I take lots of breaks along the way,” she thought, “I just might do it. I hope Mr. LeFuzz is at home.”
    At first she found it easy to climb. The iron girders and cables crossed everywhere and she had no trouble finding places to hold on with her hands, feet, and tail. And it was so much fun to climb higher and higher, above the city pavement. Pretty soon she could look down and see a beautiful river with lights reflecting in it. She could see hundreds of people; they were far below her now; none of them