Free Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner Page B

was this: up to that moment my legs had been river reeds which threatened to collapse under me. But the sight of this git put the bull between my teeth good and proper.
    “It’s becoming routine,” said the leather-coat man. “Every day I’m faced with Standish Treadwell. Where is your grandfather?”
    “Asleep,” I said. “Why do you want him?”
    He slapped me across the face with his leather glove.
    “I ask the questions.”
    He was speaking to me again as if I was stupid and to oblige I said, really slowly, “Yes, sir.”
    I could see the Greenflies waiting behind him for the order to come charging in.
    “Mr. Treadwell,” said the leather-coat man.
    I turned to see Gramps stiffening that gammy leg of his. He pottered down the stairs real slow in his old pajamas and his patchwork dressing gown, yawning.
    “Why are you here?” he asked. “You broke everything yesterday.”
    It was not hard to see that the leather-coat man was a kettle of liquid fury about to reach boiling point. He sat on one of the broken chairs. It rocked back and forth. I hoped the bloody thing would break under him. He took to slapping the table, slapping it with his leather gloves.
    Gramps just let out a sigh soiled with weariness. “I’m an old man. I try to survive with my grandson, nothing more. Why do you keep hounding us? We have done nothing wrong.”
    The leather-coat man didn’t answer. He waved in the Greenflies. Gramps was right about one thing, they were very young. Just a bit older than me. Upstairs, downstairs, they went, into the cellar. An infestation of them.
    I thought,
well, this is it, it’s all over apart from the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Louder than the rats in the woodwork were those soldiers. The walls seemed papier-mâché thin. The floorboards shook.
    The leather-coat man sat there, smack-smack-smacking his gloves on the table. He stopped only to take out a cigarette and light it.
    Finally, he said, “I want you to tell me where he is.”
    “Who?” asked Gramps.
    The leather-coat man was stuck on the flypaper of an unanswerable question.
    The gloves hit the table again. The long silence was broken. The leather-coat man said, “We took a television away from this house.”
    “Yes,” said Gramps. “It was from the time we were allowed to have them.”
    Much to my amazement the leather-coat man didn’t answer.
    I realized that Gramps must have pulled that TV apart so that no one would suspect that we had seen the land of Croca-Colas, where all the color lived, where people were having a ball.
    The leather-coat man stubbed out his cigarette on the table, leaving a round, burnt hole. Maybe it was that burnt hole on the table that gave me the idea. You see, I saw in its pattern a stone. That’s when the idea floated into my brain.
    The Greenflies came up from the cellar. They looked as if they’d done their job to the letter, their uniforms more gray than green. I knew they hadn’t found the moon man because if they had we would have heard their triumphant shouts. Instead they brought up the rat traps.
    The man in charge of the Greenflies came down the stairs. He didn’t look too happy to whisper what he had to whisper to the leather-coat man.
    “Nothing? Nothing? Are you sure?” shouted the leather-coat man.
    “Nothing, sir.”
    The odd thing about being that close to the edge was that I could see that both Gramps and I were resigned to the fall. It was almost as if it was Fate’s game, not ours. She was the one dealing the cards. I think I knew then what was going on behind the wall in the garden. They had built the moon in that hideous building, the one once called the people’s palace.
    That was when my idea became a plan. I thought about it from all angles. I almost left the room — it was really taking shape.
    “You are both under house arrest.” The leather-coat man interrupted my thoughts, which was irritating as I had spun the whole thing in my head, 360 degrees.
    “Are you