He Laughed With His Other Mouths by M. T. Anderson
Jasper smiled. “Yes?”
One of the mouths was just about to say something when another one bellowed, “I don’t wish to change the subject, but Jasper Dash, did you arrive alone? All by, shall we say, your onesies?”
“I did, sir.”
“See, that’s a strange thing. I got a second alarm signal, as if someone else had followed you, ha ha. Wouldn’t that be lovely? If we had more company? More friends, more fun?” The Dirrillill inspected him. “Do you know anyone who might have followed you?”
Jasper thought about his mom, back on Earth, and his friends Lily and Katie. He was a little embarrassed he’d left them behind, especially when everything was going so well with his . . . gosh, with his father, you could say. His father the Dirrillill.
“No,” said Jasper. “No one else was supposed to follow me.”
“You’ve got company at your party,” said the Dirrillill. “We’re going to Earth’s teleportation station anyway. Let’s see what we find.”
With a quick motion of his hand on the floating controls, he swooped the car in a circle and flashed across the plains.
SOMETHING THAT BEGINS WITH “DANGER”
Lily and Katie sat side by side on one wing of the antenna. They looked out over the weird landscape. They dangled their legs and tapped their feet together.
“Nowhere,” said Katie. They had found some of Jasper’s footprints, but after a while, the ground got too hard. They couldn’t follow his path anymore. They had given up. Katie said, “I can’t believe he left without us. I could kill him right now. Who runs away from your friends to a dangerous other planet?”
They were getting worried.
Lily wondered how much air they had left in their tanks.
Then suddenly, Katie grabbed her arm.
“What is it?”
Katie babbled, “I see something. I spy with my little eye, something that begins with . . . What actually is that? M? F? C? R? Q?”
Something skimmed along toward them through the purple sky.
It was a flying car.
The two of them scrambled down to meet it.
It slowly sank down and came to rest.
Lily and Katie were a little worried when the door opened. They didn’t know what they’d see.
But there was Jasper, smiling a big smile inside his space helmet and holding out his arms.
“Jasper!” yelped Katie with happiness.
And then they saw behind him, in the shadows, a hideous tumble of arms and eyes and legs and noses.
Lily blew her hair up out of her eyes to get a better look.
And the eyes stared right back at her, full of suspicion and rage.
DEATH RAYS FOR EVERYONE!
“Lily! Katie!” exclaimed Jasper. “By the glittering eye of Thoth, it’s good to see you again! Look! This is the Dirrillill. He is something that is kind of like my father!”
The Dirrillill stepped heavily out of the flying car and held out many hands to shake. Too many. It was like meeting ten people at once.
As Katie and Lily shook some of the hands and introduced themselves shyly, Jasper said, “Why, isn’t this swell? Fellows, I’m fit to burst!”
The Dirrillill said, “Grand to meet you.”
Katie said to Jasper, “You just went off and left us! We’re your best friends! We felt hurt, and then we got attacked by a thing with goggle eyes!”
Jasper looked embarrassed for a second. Then confused. Then he said, “Well . . . but . . . I’ve just met . . . well, Mr. Dirrillill, is it all right with you if I call you my . . . my father-like thing?”
The Dirrillill laughed heartily. “Of course!” he said, and slapped Jasper on the back several times from several different directions.
Now that Lily had been introduced to the Dirrillill, she felt bad for thinking that he had looking angry and evil. Sometimes it’s difficult to feel good about someone who has more than two hundred teeth. Lily made a decision: She was going to like this Dirrillill for Jasper’s sake, no matter how strange he might look.
The Dirrillill bustled inside and over to the teleporter booth. “So—what do you all say we pop back to your home planet for a little bitty look-see?” He touched the controls while his mouths blabbered backward, “I really do love going to new places and meeting new people.”
“No!” said Katie. “There’s a monster there. Or at least, there was an hour ago.”
The Dirrillill swiveled. “A monster?” he said. “Do tell.”
Katie and Lily told the story about the thing that had invaded Jasper’s home and chased Jasper’s mother off into the woods.
“Mother?!?” said Jasper. “We have to go right now and save her!”
Lily opened the door to the booth.
Katie looked at the Dirrillill and said, “I’m not sure that, uh, everyone is going to fit in Jasper’s booth on the other side.” She raised her eyebrows. “I think that even if we go one at a time, everyone might not fit in alone. Everyone is a little big for booths.”
The Dirrillill said, “I take it that you are speaking of me and my magnificent plurality. Jasper Dash, will I fit in your receiving booth?”
Jasper looked uncomfortable. He shook his head.
“I see. I see.” A look of anger passed quickly over the Dirrillill’s parts of faces—like a crowd at a baseball stadium doing The Wave—but then it was gone. “That’s a disappointment. I would like to go to Earth and save your mother. I tell you what: What about let’s stop by the Final Fortress of the Dirrillillim—my own home sweet home—and I’ll show you around, pick up some more equipment I may need on Earth, and then we’ll send you back to your home planet so you can enlarge your teleporter booth and then your—ha ha!—your chubby pal the last Dirrillill can zap back over with you and see your super planet. Sound grand?”
“What about my mother?”
The mouths said: “Your mother . . .” “Yes . . .” “Your mother . . .” And finally one piped up, “Please, tell me, Lilah and Caitlin, when did you teleport through? Did you say an hour ago?”
“Lily and Katie,” said Katie. “Yeah. It was like an hour and fifteen minutes ago.”
“Well! Ah! There we are!” The many mouths smiled. “Time moves differently here. We’re on a different world. If you fled from some beastie, is that what you say? Yes, so you fled from this fiend an hour ago in the time of this planet. Well, that is only a few minutes on Earth. Maybe a few seconds! If you go back now, he’ll still be there, crouched by the booth and waiting to snap you up like a rubbidith with too many phylooges.”
Katie said, “What’s a rubbidith? What’s phylooges?”
“A local animal. Private joke. Too complicated to explain. But look, my other mouths get it.” The other mouths were grinning toothily. “Look, children, come with me. We’ll go over the mountains to the Final Fortress of the Dirrillillim, my home. We’ll get the necessary parts and equipment to enlarge the booth on Earth and we’ll get, oh deedly dee, a whole stack of weapons. Then we’ll come back, send the three of you through to polish off whatever space monster is moving in slow motion, chasing your excellent mother. Then, young Jasper Dash, you will enlarge your teleporter booth for me. Sound grand?”
“Yes! You can give Lily and Katie some electric rays too, so they can fight this monster?”
“Of course! Of course!” The many smiles smiled. They smiled very wide. They said, “Yes! It will be death rays all round!”
You and I have read other chapters in which Mrs. Dash heard about the secret evil of the Dirrillillim, so his promise to deliver death rays for everyone probably does not sound very reassuring to us. But remember, Lily, Jasper, and Katie hadn’t heard anything the Garxx of Krilm had said in their holographic moving picture show. So the three kids thought they were going to zip back to Earth shortly and stop a space monster in its tracks, saving Jasper’s mother and solving the mystery of the alien invader.
So they said things like, “Great!” and “Let’s go!” and (Lily) ?
And they all bundled into the Dirrillill’s flying car without a fight and let him drive them farther and farther away from the interstellar gateway back home.
LIGHTS OUT FOR THE DIRRILLILLIM
Katie did not like the Dirrillill. She did not trust him. She was watching him carefully.
He steered the flying car through the green glass mountains by twiddling his fingers in the air, touching glowing controls that appeared and hovered around him.
“La dee dee, la dee dah,” he said.
The whole time, he was watching Katie back, watching Lily, and very carefully watching Jasper.
Jasper’s brows were tugged down, and his mouth was serious.
Katie asked, “How’re you doing, Jasper?”
“I’m just dandy, Katie, but I won’t rest easy until we’ve saved my mother.”
“Here we are,” sang one of the Dirrillill’s mouths, “on an adventure together! What fun! What fun!”
Katie did not think that “fun” was a word the Dirrillill should be using. She could tell the Dirrillill was lying about something. Katie was a world expert on many-armed monsters, because of her experience as the heroine of the Horror Hollow books. So she knew this monster was secretly evil. It bugged her. She watched him swoop them over vast, hairy plains. She said, “Wow, sir, you’re really handy with this flying car. Reeeeeally handy. Handy, handy, handy.”
Jasper and Lily looked up, a little shocked that Katie was making jokes about all the Dirrillill’s hands. The Dirrillill stared straight at her—at least a few regions of it did.
She stared right back into several of the eyes, as if to say, Listen, buster: If you hurt my friend Jasper, you’re going to be in trouble.
And the eyes looked back at her, saying things like, Don’t meddle with me, and You are powerless here in my domain, and Ha ha! and Mm-hm? and of course the classic, My dear, you cannot possibly imagine my evil plans.
In ten minutes they were on the other side of the mountains, and they had come to a giant city. It was dead. There were looping ramps and huge, bulgy apartment buildings. There were hovering fountains, which now just dribbled a little water. They hung above dried-up gardens.
“Once the capital city of a great Dirrillillim empire,” said the Dirrillill. “Now they’re all gone but me.”
Jasper looked out in wonder at the wild buildings and crashed airships. “What happened?”
“None of us got along very well with each other.”
Now the three kids started to notice huge, clean holes in a lot of the buildings. They couldn’t tell whether the holes were a popular architectural detail or the scars of disintegration rays.
“Of course, you want to see the sights!” the Dirrillill’s many mouths exclaimed. “Over there’s Mount Yondo. Once volcanic. Now full of secret caves.”—“That’s the old Palace of Justice there. Unfortunately, no longer staffed.”—“Crashed over there is our Guvnalillalla Stadium. Where we played guvnalillalla.”—“And down that avenue, the big building with all the fins is the opera house. As you can imagine, opera was a great art with the Dirrillillim. I mean, we have so many mouths, each one of us can sing as a whole chorus. You should have seen the costumes, back in the day. Unfortunately, with only one of us left, opera is a dead art. I have recordings of some of the great performances of our golden age. Lussminniffine Ssabriss as Queen Toast, walking through her empty castle, wailing for her lost children. Six thousand years later, it still brings a tear to the eye.” He pointed to one of his eyes. “This one.”
The kids were amazed by everything they saw. But at the same time, there was something sad about this empty and desolate city. There were no lights to be seen. All the windows were dark. Most reflected the red, angry sky. The planet felt huge and dead. The lights would never go on again.I
“What happened to everyone else?” Lily asked, aghast.
“It is tragic,” said the Dirrillill. “Very tragic. Oh, the savagery of the Dirrillillim, the need to conquer and rule. We fought so long and so hard with ourselves that all of us died. Except me, of course, ha ha.”
“Gee,” said Jasper, “I’m sure glad you were safe! How did you avoid getting killed when there was all that mass destruction?”
“Oh, lo, lo-dee-lo-lo,” hummed the Dirrillill. “I don’t recall exactly. I was safe behind those walls.” He pointed at a huge, glowing, spiraling metal castle covered with antennas. “The Final Fortress of the Dirrillillim,” he said. “My place.”
* * *
I During World War II, there was a song called, “When the Lights Go On Again All Over the World.” It was too slow and sappy for Busby Spence. (The numbers he liked on the radio were “Let’s Put the Axe to the Axis,” “Six Jerks in a Jeep,” and the one where Spike Jones farted in Adolf Hitler’s face.)
But “When the Lights Go On Again” was one of Busby’s mother’s favorites. While Busby lay on the couch, reading Jasper Dash stories, the song would croon out of the radio, recalling men risking their lives in fleets halfway across the world, soldiers setting up camp on unimaginable isles, boys lying with rifles on battlefields in French farmyards while bombs shook the ground around them.
It had been two years since Busby had seen his father.
Busby Spence lifted up his head.
“When the lights go on again
All over the world,
And the ships can sail again
All over the world,
Then rain or snow is all
That may fall
From the skies up above.
A kiss won’t mean good-bye,
But hello to love.”
Busby Spence saw that his mother was slow-dancing alone in the kitchen, with her face down, as if it were pressed into someone’s shoulder. A wet plate was still in her hand.
And the radio sang:
“When the lights go on again
All over the world
And the boys are home again
All over the world . . .”
DINNER WITH THE DIRRILLILL
The Dirrillill switched off the shimmering force field around the castle. He flew the car into a parking space on the roof. The force field snapped back on, a glowing carpet of energy that was draped over the whole fortress. There were several other old, ruined ships sitting on the roof.
The hulking Dirrillill heaved himself toward the door and clambered down. “Let’s go in and get you some ray guns. Jasper, I’ll draw up a quick plan for how you can create a larger teleportation booth. It shouldn’t take you long. We’ll be on Earth in the twitch of a mufftagreeb.”
Jasper said, “How long is that?”
Some shoulders shrugged. One mouth said, “We’ll be there in a couple of hours,” but another one corrected, “I mean, a couple of hours in our time, ha ha.” A third mouth explained, “Only a few bare little minutes will have passed on Earth. Sorry for the old force field. Since I am the last of the Dirrillillim, everything is kind of run-down around here.”
The old force field around the building was droopy and heavy like a big tarp. It hung all over everything. They had to lift it up and hold it over their heads while they walked across the roof toward a door. When they got to the door, which slid aside, the Dirrillill very politely propped the force field up with several elbows so they all could get inside.
The inside of the tower was a weird mixture of ramps and open spaces and bulbs and globes. The kids followed as the creature waddled through huge hangars of alien weaponry.
Jasper said, “Sir—sir, I just am so happy to meet you. And, well, I hope it’s okay if I say that I’m very proud to be going on this adventure with you.”
Lily and Katie exchanged a glance. They could both hear that Jasper was trying to talk in a lower, more manly voice than normal. He was almost shivering with excitement.
Shyly, the Boy Technonaut admitted, “I’ve always dreamed of, um, meeting you, sir, and . . . well . . . defeating invaders. Together.”
“Sure, sure,” said the Dirrillill carelessly. “It’s grand. Grand! So, when we get to Earth, what sights will you show me?”
“Gee,” said Jasper, “I don’t know where to start. First, after we save her, you’ll have to meet my mother. Her name is Dolores.”
“I shall be delighted.” (In fact, Katie thought that the Dirrillill looked kind of bored on most of his face-parts—like what Jasper said didn’t really matter.)
Jasper continued, “Then maybe we’ll all go out for ice cream at Persible Dairy. Then we could go on a world tour. We could fly to the Eiffel Tower in France. Or to Ayers Rock, in Australia. It’s a big rock, and—”
“A big rock,” said the Dirrillill, swaying along on his several legs. “Fascinating, fascinating. I am really looking forward to this visit. Ice cream is . . . ?”
As they passed through a hall of missiles and bombs, Jasper tried to explain about ice cream. He talked about the cow and the milk and the udders.
The Dirrillill listened and said, “So, to welcome me to your world, you offer me a fluid that drips from the bottom side of an animal, but cold.”
“Why, when you say it like that, it doesn’t sound so good, sir, but let me tell you, ice cream is a swell treat.”
“Lovely.”
“Just one bite, and it’s not just ice cream you can taste: It’s also summer, and vacation, and green, growing things, and sitting on the porch, licking your spoon, and the bees.”
“Stinging insects?”
“I’m trying to paint a picture, sir.”
“Green . . . On your world, it is the color of growth?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jasper. “It’s beautiful. All the trees and the grass are green. It’s the color of chlorophyll.”
“I don’t know her, but she sounds adorable. Here, green is the color of decay. For the Dirrillillim, green means death and putrefaction.”
They had come to a large kitchen. There were weird appliances all over. The kids had no idea how any of them actually produced food.