After quite a few glorious dashes and long slides, Lulu looked back
to see that her doorway was rather more than a foot up the wall. That
was considerably higher than she could jump. Even worse was the fact
that, though some wallpaper had come unstuck and curled away from
the wall to expose her door, she did not, at the moment, see any way
she could use it to climb up to the door..
“Oh dear, oh dear,” she thought as she drew a sad-faced lizard in
the dust on the floor, “how will I ever get home?” But Lulu never
let worry get the best of her.
“There must be a way.” she thought, now sketching a courageous looking
lizard in the dust to encourage herself. “And I, Little Lulu Lizard,
will just have to keep exploring till I find it. And this old house
is a really Super Neat place to explore!”
And with that cheering thought she set off to explore the ground
floor, taking short runs and delightful slides as she went, and keeping
both eyes open for exits.
“Wouldn’t my silly brothers love this!” she thought, a little sadly,
as she slid to a particularly fine tail-first stop. Then, in a moment
of self pity, she wondered if she would ever see her brothers again.
“So maybe I should be glad! Ha!”, she tried to exult.
But she continued to explore systematically by keeping a wall always
on her left side and the open floor always to her right. After a while,
Lulu found herself again in the front hall, looking into the big living
room where she had begun, and she realized she had made one complete
circuit of the first floor of the house. The big glass windows that
earlier in the afternoon had let in slanting shafts of sunlight to
warm the floor now showed an evening sky, and Lulu knew that soon
it would be dark.
“But it’s so warm here in the upper, that is, the real house,” she
corrected herself with a certain amount of self-satisfaction, “that
I might not feel like sleeping all night long.” She thought wistfully
of the cool but nice drowsiness that always overcame her mother and
her father and herself and her brothers as they snuggled all together
in one or another of their sandy nests under the house. As the last
light of day faded, Lulu crept out into the stairwell and toward the
big glass veranda door. Here, she calculated, tomorrow’s sunshine
would find her first thing in the morning, and let her get an early
start on finding a way to get home again.
As the extra deep quiet of nightfall enfolded the house, Lulu became
aware of fluttery noises, small thumps, and high-pitched chittery
squeaks that seemed to be coming from up the stairs that ascended
to the second floor of the house.
“I s-surely h-hope this h-house isn't h-h-haunted!” Lulu whispered
a bit fearfully to no one in particular.
“W-what
did you say?” a fluttery-ness high in the dark air over her head asked.
“YYYYikes!” wailed Lulu, and dashed for the living room, hoping to
somehow leap to her “door” and dive back through it to her old, never-scary,
underhouse world.
“W-wait a minute, w-would you?” said the flutteriness from right
over her head, even though she was running as lightning-fast as her
little lizard legs would let her.
The “door” loomed ahead and,--
“Ooowww--” Lulu cried in anguish as she realized she would never
be able to leap that high, and, --
“Look out!” shouted the flutteriness as Lulu skidded to a thumping
stop against the wall. The flutteriness flipped above her, folded
dark thin-skinned wings, and came to rest hanging upside-down from
the sill of Lulu’s “doorway”. There it was, grinning widely at her
from between enormous ears.
“W-who are you?” they both stuttered at once.
“I’m little --- well, I’m Lulu Lizard”, said Lulu, and then, determined
not to show that she was frightened, she added, “Why are you blocking
my door?”
“B-blocking your door?” said the little bat, for that is what the
flutteriness had turned out to be. “I’m not b-blocking your d-door.”
“You’re
hanging from it, ”said Lulu. “And how can I get home through it if
you’re hanging from it?”
“Huh! How c-could you get to it even if I wasn’t?” the bat asked
as he twisted and hung briefly by one foot in order to look curiously
up at the “door”. “Looks to me like where there used to be an electrical
outlet,” he added.
“Well, who are you, and how come you know so much?” Lulu asked.
“Oh. Sorry. I’m B-Bubba B. Bat. How do you do?” nodded Bubba.
“Bubba Bat?” asked Lulu, wanting to be sure.
“Well, B-Bartholomew Bat, really, --but I always stutter when I try
to say B-B-Bartholomew, so everyone calls me by the B-B-B part. I
kind of like it: ‘Bubba B. Bat’ conveys a certain boyish boisterousness,
don’t you think, Miss Lizard?”
“ ‘Lulu’ will do, please, Bubba. And I suppose you’re right,” said
Lulu, thinking of her brothers and wondering whether “boyish boisterousness”
didn’t have one more word than the idea needed. But then she thought
she ought to be polite, as her mother had always taught her to be:
“Yes... It’s a nice name,” she concluded. To change the subject she
asked, “But what did you call my door?”
“It’s where there was an old electrical outlet before they modernized
the house,” said Bubba. “This is a very old house, you know.”
“Yes, that’s what my father says. ‘Established’, he calls it. I guess
it really doesn’t matter what my ‘door’ is. I’ve spent the whole afternoon
looking for some other way to get back down to the underhouse area.
That’s where my family lives, you know,” explained Lulu. Then she
added: “My goodness, it sure is getting dark. I can hardly see you
way up there.”
“Well”, replied Bubba, “I’m not so good on flat surfaces. It’s my
bat-type legs. They seem backwards to non-flying people.

“But I guess I could join you on the floor, since we’re just getting
acquainted.” With a brief flutter he dropped down to face Lulu from
a few inches away on the wooden floor.
“I have a problem too,” he continued. “I was trying to find my own
way out of the attic this evening, so I wouldn't have to wait in line
with all my brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles
and all sorts of other relatives to leave the house by way of the
under-the-eaves knothole they’ve all used as a front door for generations.”
Bubba went on to tell how he had spent the afternoon, not hanging
from the rafters of the attic like all his relatives, but instead
exploring the floor of the attic for any crack or crevice that might
allow him to leave the house in the evening without waiting in a long
line. Every single one of his relatives, one after another, always
had to pause and peer out, blocking the big knothole that was their
doorway to the outside world. And every one of them had to hem and
haw indecisively there before flying out into the evening.
They
all did it without the slightest regard for the impatient hundreds
of relatives waiting and pushing and shoving in the line behind. It
had gotten to be more than Bubba could bear.
“Not me,” said Bubba. “I want a door of my own! And I thought I’d
found one, but it led into the hallway upstairs, not to the outside.
And then I guess I couldn’t find my way back,” he finished, a little
shamefacedly.
“My goodness, that’s quite a story,” said Lulu Lizard, “I had no
idea that there were hundreds of bats living in the top of our house.
But Bubba, why couldn’t you find your way back? I can’t get back to
my door because I jumped down, and there’s no way for me to climb
back, but you can fly. Couldn’t you just find the crack in the hall
ceiling and go back in it?
“It is not that simple for bats.” said Bubba, “We find our way around
mostly by the reflection of our voices. Ahem... maybe you have noticed
that I like to chatter on about things, and well, it gets to be a
habit. But you see, being in a room with big flat walls and ceiling
and floor can be very confusing. It’s like you might feel if you were
hemmed in by mirrors, but mirrors that did not show you your own reflection.
One tends to blunder about mistaking what’s mirrored for what’s real,
and vice versa, and , and...”
“I understand.” said Lulu, hoping she did and trying to imagine something
like that happening to herself. “I think I can help you find a way
out of the house,” she told Bubba sadly, “ but I don’t know if there’s
any help for me.”
“Wow!” said Bubba. “Do you really know a way out? But why can’t you...
Oh. I see! It’s this ‘door’, and you can’t climb up to it.”
“That’s right,” said Lulu. “But if it goes to the underhouse where
you live, how would I get out of there?” asked Bubba.“Oh, that’s no
problem, I’m sure,” said Lulu. “There’s latticework almost all around
the underhouse, and I’m sure you’ll have no difficulty with it.”
“Great!” said Bubba, “See ya later, Alligator!” and with a flip and
a few faint rustling noises he was gone!

On to Chapter 4!
Back to Table of Contents