The Underland Chronicles: Books 1-5 Paperback Box Set Read online

  It was a family joke now. How much time he spent in the bathroom. There was only the one bathroom in the apartment, and since Gregor had taken to locking himself in to read the prophecy, everybody had noticed. His mom kept teasing him about trying to look good for some girl at school, and he pretended she was right by doing his best to act embarrassed. The truth was, he was thinking about a girl, but she didn't go to his school. And he wasn't worried about what she thought of his hair. He was wondering if she was even alive. Luxa. She was the same age as him, eleven, and already she was the queen of Regalia. Or at least, she had been queen until a few months ago. Against the Regalian council's wishes, she had secretly flown after Gregor to help him on the mission to kill the Bane. She had saved Boots's life by taking on a pack of rats in a maze and allowing his baby sister to escape on a devoted cockroach. But where was Luxa now? "Wandering lost in the Dead Land? A prisoner of the rats? Dead? Or had she by some miracle made it home? And there was Luxa's bat, Aurora. And Temp, the cockroach who had run with Boots. And Twitchtip, a rat whose nose was so keen she could detect color. All his friends. All missing in action. All weaving through his dreams at night and preoccupying his thoughts when he was awake.

  Gregor had told the Underlanders to let him know what happened. They were supposed to leave him a message in the grate in his laundry room, which was a gateway to the Underland. Why hadn't they? What was going on?

  Not knowing about Luxa and the others...trying to decipher the mysterious prophecy on his own...the combination of these things was driving Gregor crazy. It was a huge effort to pay attention in class, to act normal around his friends, to hide his worries from his family, because any hint that he was planning to return to the Underland would throw them into a panic. He was constantly distracted, not hearing people when they spoke, forgetting things. Like now.

  "Gregor, your backpack!" said his dad as he and Lizzie headed out the door. "Think you might need that today."

  "Thanks, Dad," said Gregor, avoiding his father's eyes, not wanting to see the concern there.

  He and Lizzie took the stairs down to the lobby and braced themselves before stepping out into the street. A bitter blast of wind went right through his clothes as if they weren't even there. He could see tears spilling out of Lizzie's eyes; they always watered in the wind.

  "Let's hustle, Liz. Least it will be warm at school," said Gregor.

  They hurried through the streets, as fast as the icy sidewalks would let them. Fortunately, Lizzie's elementary school was only a couple of blocks away. She was small for her age, "delicate" his mom called her. "One good strong wind would blow you away," his grandma would say when she hugged Lizzie. And today Gregor wondered if she might be right.

  "You'll pick me up after school, right? You'll be here?" asked Lizzie at the door.

  "Of course," said Gregor. She gave him a reproachful look. He'd forgotten twice in the last month, and she'd had to sit in the office and wait for someone to come get her. "I'll be here!"

  Gregor plowed back into the wind with almost a sense of relief. Even if his teeth were chattering, at least he could have a few minutes without anybody interrupting him. Immediately, his thoughts turned to the Underland and what might be happening there now, somewhere far beneath his feet. It was just a matter of time before Gregor would be called back down — he knew that. That's why he spent so much time in the bathroom, studying the new prophecy, trying to understand its frightening words, desperate to prepare for his next challenge in any way he could. The Underlanders were depending on him.

  But the Underlanders! At first, he'd made excuses for their silence, but now he was just mad. Not only was there no word about Luxa or his other missing friends, Gregor also had no clue what had happened to Ares, the big black bat whom he trusted above anyone in the Underland. Ares and Gregor were bonds, sworn to protect each other to the death. The journey to track down and kill the Bane had been dreadful, but if one good thing had come of it, it was that the relationship between Gregor and Ares had become unshakable. Unfortunately, Ares was an outcast among the humans and bats. He had let his first bond, Henry, fall to his death to save Gregor's life. Even though Henry was a traitor and Ares had done the right thing, the Underlanders hated him. They also blamed the bat for not killing the Bane although, technically, that had been Gregor's job. Gregor had a bad feeling that wherever Ares was, he was suffering.

  As he pulled open the door to his school, Gregor tried to replace thoughts of the Underland with his math assignment. Every Friday, they had a quiz first thing. Then there was half-court basketball in gym, some kind of sugar crystal experiment in science, and finally lunch. Gregor's stomach was always growling at least a full hour before he reached the cafeteria. Between the cold, trying to make the groceries stretch at home, and just growing, he was hungry all the time. He got free school lunch and he ate everything on his tray, even if he didn't like it. Fortunately, Friday was pizza day, and he loved pizza.

  "Here, take mine," said his friend Angelina, plunking down her slice of pizza on his plate. "I'm too nervous to eat, anyway." The school play opened that night and she had the lead.

  "Want to run your lines again?" asked Gregor.

  Her script was in his hand in a flash.

  "Are you sure you don't mind? I come in right here."

  Like he didn't know. Gregor and their friend Larry had been running lines with Angelina every day for six weeks. Usually Gregor did it, though. The cold, dry winter air aggravated Larry's asthma, so reading out loud made him cough. He'd been in the hospital last week with a bad attack and was still looking kind of wiped out.

  "It's doesn't matter, you won't remember a thing," said Larry, who was drawing something that looked like a fly's eyeball on his napkin. He didn't look up.

  "Don't say that!" gasped Angelina.

  "You'll be rotten, just like you were in that last play," said Larry.

  "Yeah, we could barely sit through that," Gregor agreed. Angelina had been wonderful in that last play. They all knew it. She tried not to look pleased.

  "What were you again? Some kind of bug, right?" said Gregor.

  "Something with wings," said Larry.

  She had been the fairy godmother in a version of Cinderella set in the city.

  "Can we start now?" said Angelina. "So I don't totally humiliate myself tonight?"

  Gregor ran lines with her. He didn't mind really. It distracted him from darker thoughts.

  "Keep your head in the Overland," he told himself. "Or you'll just make yourself nuts."

  And he did a pretty good job of it for the rest of the day. He got through his classes and took Lizzie home and then went over to Larry's apartment. Larry's mom ordered out Chinese food for a special treat, and they went and saw the play. It was fun and Angelina was the best thing in it. When he got home, Gregor gave his sisters a pocketful of fortune cookies he'd saved from dinner. Boots had never seen fortune cookies and kept trying to eat them, paper and all.

  They went to bed earlier than usual because it was just too cold to do anything else. Gregor piled not only his blankets but his coat and a couple of towels on top of him. His mom and dad came in to say good night. That made him feel secure. For so many years his dad had been absent or too ill to come in. To have both parents tuck him in seemed like a real luxury.

  So he was doing all right, keeping his head in the Overland, until his dad leaned down to hug him good night and whispered in a voice his mom couldn't hear, "No mail."

  He and his dad had worked out a system. Gregor's mom had put the laundry room off-limits last summer. You couldn't blame her. In the last few years, first her husband, then Gregor and Boots had fallen through a grate in the laundry room wall that led to the Underland. Their disappearance was agonizing. How his mom had kept the family going both emotionally and financially through all this...well, Gregor couldn't say. She had been amazing. So it seemed a small enough thing to let her have her way about the laundry room.

  The tricky thing was...that m
ade checking the grate that led to the Underland impossible for Gregor. But his dad knew how anxious he was for news of Luxa and the others, so once a day he would make a brief visit to the laundry room and see if a message had been left for his son. They didn't tell his mom; she would have just been upset. It was different for her. She had never been to the Underland. In her mind, everyone who lived there was somehow connected to the abduction of her husband and children. But Gregor and his dad both had friends down there.

  So there was no mail. No word again. No answers. Gregor stared into the dark for hours, and when he finally fell asleep, his dreams were troubled.

  He woke late the following morning and had to rush to get to Mrs. Cormaci's apartment by ten. He went over every Saturday to help her out. There had been times in the fall when Gregor had felt like she was making up work for him to do because she knew his family was hurting for money. But with the weather so bad, Mrs. Cormaci actually did need his help. The cold made her joints ache and she had trouble navigating the icy sidewalks. She talked a lot about falling and breaking a hip. Gregor was glad he was really earning his money now.

  Today she had a big list of errands for him to run — the dry cleaners, the greengrocer's, the bakery, the post office, and the hardware store. As always, she fed him first. "Did you eat?" she asked. He hadn't but he didn't even have time to answer. "Never mind, in this cold you can stand eating twice." She placed a big steaming bowl of oatmeal on the table, loaded with raisins and brown sugar. She poured him orange juice and buttered several slices of toast.

  When he had finished, Gregor felt ready to face any weather, which was good, since it was ten below not even counting the windchill factor. Following the list, he ran from place to place, grateful to have to wait in lines so he had a chance to thaw out. After he had dropped his purchases on Mrs. Cormaci's kitchen table, he was rewarded with a large cup of hot chocolate. Then they both bundled back up to go to the two places where Gregor could not run her errands, the bank and the liquor store. Once they got outside, Mrs. Cormaci was on edge. She clung to Gregor's arm tightly as they confronted patches of ice, pedestrians half-blinded by scarves, and swerving taxicabs. They had a chance to warm up at the bank, since Mrs. Cormaci didn't trust automatic bank machines, and they had to stand in line for a teller. Then they went to the liquor store, so she could pick out a bottle of red wine for her friend Eileen's birthday. But by the time they had made their way back home, Mrs. Cormaci's fingers were so numb that she dropped the wine in the hall outside her apartment just as Gregor got the door open. The bottle broke on the tile, and the wine splattered all over the throw rug inside the entrance.

  "That's it, Eileen's getting candy," said Mrs. Cormaci. "I've got a nice box of chocolate creams, never been opened. Someone gave it to me for Christmas. I hope it wasn't Eileen." She made Gregor stand back while she cleaned up the glass, then gathered up the throw rug and handed it to him. "Come on. We better get this down to the laundry room before the stain sets."

  The laundry room! While she collected detergent and stain remover from the closet, Gregor tried to think of an excuse for why he couldn't accompany her. He could hardly say, "Oh, I can't go down there because my mom is afraid a giant rat will jump out and drag me miles underground and eat me." If you thought about it, there was almost no good reason a person couldn't go to the laundry room. So he went.

  Mrs. Cormaci sprayed the throw rug with stain remover and stuffed it into a washer. Her fingers, still stiff from the cold, fumbled as she picked the quarters from her change purse. She dropped one to the cement floor, and it rolled across the room, clanking to a stop against the last dryer. Gregor went to retrieve it for her. As he bent down to get the coin, something caught his eye, and he bumped his head into the side of the dryer.

  Gregor blinked, to make sure he hadn't imagined it. He hadn't. There, wedged between the frame of the grate and the wall, was a scroll.

  CHAPTER 2

  "Are you okay over there?" asked Mrs. Cormaci as she dumped detergent into the washer.

  "Yeah, I'm fine," said Gregor, rubbing his head. He picked up the quarter and resisted the impulse to yank the scroll out of the grate. Trying to appear like nothing had happened, he returned the coin.

  Mrs. Cormaci stuck the quarter in the machine and started it up. "Ready to grab some lunch?" she said.

  There was nothing for Gregor to do but follow her to the elevator. He couldn't retrieve the scroll in front of her. She would want to know what it was, and since she was already suspicious about the stories he used to cover his family's time in the Underland, it wasn't likely he could come up with a believable lie. Shoot, he hadn't even been able to make up an excuse to avoid the laundry room!

  Back at the apartment, Mrs. Cormaci heated up some homemade chicken soup and ladled out big servings. Gregor ate mechanically, trying to keep up his end of the conversation, although he was only half-listening. As they were finishing off some pie, Mrs. Cormaci glanced at the clock and said, "I guess that rug's about ready to go in the dryer now."

  "I'll do it!" Gregor sprang to his feet so quickly his chair fell over backward. He set the chair back up as casually as possible. "Sorry. I can change the rug."

  Mrs. Cormaci gave him an odd look. "Okay."

  "I mean, doesn't take two of us to change a rug," said Gregor with a shrug.

  "You're right about that." She put some quarters in his hand, watching him closely. "So, how come your family doesn't use our laundry room anymore?"

  "What?" She'd caught him off guard.

  "How come you and your mother walk all the way over to use that place by the butcher's?" she said. "It's the same price. I checked."

  "Because...the washers...are...bigger there," said Gregor. Actually, they were. It was not a complete lie if it were not the whole truth.

  Mrs. Cormaci stared at him a moment, then shook her head. "Go change the rug," she said shortly.

  The elevator had never moved so slowly. People got on, people got off, a woman held the door for what seemed like an hour while her kid ran back to their apartment to get a hat. When he finally made it to the laundry room, Gregor had to wait for some guy who had obviously not done his clothes for about a month to load up six washers.

  Gregor stuck the rug in the dryer next to the grate and fussed around with it until the guy left. The moment the coast was clear, he leaned down and yanked the scroll out of the grate. He stuck it up the sleeve of his sweatshirt and walked out. Ignoring the elevator, he slipped into the stairwell and closed the door securely behind him. He went up one flight and sat on the landing. No one would disturb him here, not with the elevator working.

  He slid the scroll out of his shirtsleeve and unrolled it with shaking hands. It read: Dear Gre gor,

  It is most urgent that we meet. I will be at the Stair where Ares leaves you when the Overland clock strikes four. We are at your mercy. "The Prophecy of Blood" is upon us.

  Please do not fail your friends,

  Vi kus

  Gregor read the note three times before it began to register. It was not what he had expected. It was not about Luxa and his other missing friends. It did not tell him about Ares. Instead, it was a flat-out cry for help.

  "The Prophecy of Blood" is upon us.

  "It's here," Gregor thought. His heart began to pound as a sense of dread coursed through him. "The Prophecy of Blood."

  He didn't really need a mirror to read it anymore, although looking at the lines sometimes helped him figure out parts. By now he knew the thing by heart. There was something in the rhythm of the words that made it get in your head and stick there, like one of those annoying songs on TV commercials. It played in his brain now, adjusting to the beat of his boots as he slowly climbed the stairs.

  Warmblood now a bloodborne death

  Will rob your body of its breath,

  Mark your skin, and seal your fate.

  The Underland becomes a plate.

  Turn and turn and turn again.

  Y OU see the wha
t but not the when.

  Remedy and wrong entwine,

  And so they form a single vine.

  Bring the warrior from above

  If yet his heart is swayed by love.

  Bring the princess or despair,

  No crawlers care without her there.

  Turn and turn and turn again.

  You see the what but not the when.

  Remedy and wrong entwine,

  And so they form a single vine.

  Those whose blood runs red and hot

  Must join to seek the healing spot.

  In the cradle find the cure

  For that which makes the blood impure.

  Turn and turn and turn again.

  You see the what but not the when.

  Remedy and wrong entwine,

  And so they form a single vine.

  Gnawer, human, set aside

  The hatreds that reside inside.

  If the flames of war are fanned,

  All warmbloods lose the Underland.

  Turn and turn and turn again.

  You see the what but not the when.

  Remedy and wrong entwine,

  And so they form a single vine.

  Gregor had survived two other prophecies by the man who had written this one. Bartholomew of Sandwich. It was Sandwich who had led the Underlanders far beneath what was now New York City and founded the human city of Regalia. When he died he had left behind a stone room whose walls were entirely carved with prophecies, his visions of the future. And not just the humans but all the creatures in the Underland believed Sandwich had been able to see what was to come.

  Gregor went back and forth on how he felt about Sandwich's predictions. Sometimes he hated them. Sometimes he was grateful for their guidance, although the prophecies were so cryptic they seemed to mean a lot of things at once. But within the loaded lines you could usually get the general idea of what awaited you. Like in this one...

  Warmblood now a bloodborne death

  Will rob your body of its breath,