Chase The Rabbit: Gretch Bayonne Action Adventure Series Book #1 Page 3

  He cracked a smile and nodded saying, “Most likely, yes, Mr. Bay. Now, you see that ladder?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, you go up there and wait. Go to the second entrance up. Do not wander around. Wait just inside, and I will be up shortly.”

  I staggered into the back of the cargo area, having been cleared by security, past stacks of cardboard boxes and a large metal cage full of monkeys. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen.

  What the hell are all these monkeys doing on the Graf? I thought.

  An older man stood next to the cage. He had wild hair and a beard and was dressed in a bizarre looking uniform. It looked like something out of a circus. As I passed him, he whispered, “seven monkeys.” I turned towards him, but he was not even looking my way.

  Maybe I imagined that, I thought.

  A Chinese man stood in the corner smiling. I threw my small bag over my shoulder and started climbing the ladder. The first thing I noticed, about fifteen feet up, was that the temperature was rising. And to each side of me were yellow, hot walls that permeated with sweat. A low rumbling sound vibrated all around me. I was getting claustrophobic but kept climbing again, wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

  Then suddenly I found myself in another world. I was at the end of a steel runway that seemed to go on farther than I could see. It was about twenty feet wide, and on each side were massive round cells. They moved slightly, as if they were alive. The temperature was at least twenty degrees hotter by now. I put my hand on one of the huge red bellows that seemed to go up hundreds of feet. It felt like hot rubber. I could push it in a good foot without much resistance.

  These must be the balloons that make this damn thing float! I thought.

  I was in the belly of the beast. And it frightened the hell out of me. It was an entirely different view than what she looked like from the outside. The walkway seemed to go on forever. Although it was made of steel, it was the crisscross kind that had holes in it so you could see below. It was far from a secure feeling.

  I was in the middle of the guts of the ship, and got the impression that she could throw me up at any moment. There were no hand rails, nothing to hold onto. It felt like a rain forest without life. I thought they should have butterflies, plants, maybe some lizards running around inside. At least that would give the creepy place some atmosphere.

  I felt light-headed, like I was going to pass out, so I sat down and closed my eyes. Patricia came to my mind.

  Why the hell am I doing this? I thought. I could be home in Hoboken, writing stories about bowling alleys and baseball.

  I thought about the first time I’d met Babe Ruth. Then the rumbling noise increased, snapping me back into reality. The great rubber balloons pushed closer towards me. I felt like a tiny ant surrounded by red tongues about to be swallowed up. There was no place to run, either up or down. I was trapped.

  And just as my anxiety was about to overwhelm me, I heard a voice call out, “Gretch!” It was my Mother.

  “Yes, Mommy,” I answered. “I am here! Where are you?”

  “Wake up son,” she said. “You are in danger.”

  Suddenly the voice turned into that of a man with a German accent. “Bay, get up!” he said. It was Captain Clipboard.

  I tried to regain my composure as I stood up slowly.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I was up late last night.” I explained. “And this place is, um, very strange to me.”

  He extended his hands and helped me stand up. He seemed like a completely different person from the man who’d given me such a hard time earlier.

  “Yes, I understand,” he said. “I am sorry I couldn’t escort you up here personally, but I had duties and there were many people down there watching. Now come this way,” he said.

  I followed him down the steel corridor, not having any clue as to where we would end up.

  “My name is Klaus, and I am the chief rigger on the Graf” he said.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “You are Captain Clipboard.” He stopped and turned towards me smiling.

  “You may call me anything you like” he said. “Just, how do you say in America? Do not call me late for drinks!” He laughed at his own lame joke as I did my best to force a smile.

  “You, Mr. Bay, are a famous writer, no?” he asked as we continued walking.

  No,” I replied.

  “Right!” he said, looking at his clipboard. “You were added at the last moment by the other famous writer, Mr. Von Wiegand.”

  “He is famous, not me,” I said.

  “What?” Klaus said.

  “Nothing, never mind,” I answered. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Down here to your sling,” he answered. “We have no room for you anywhere else,” he explained.

  “What the hell is a sling?” I asked.

  “You know, your sling!” he said. “Um, your hammock, where you will sleep.”

  “I thought I was on the list as Monkey Man’s assistant,” I said.

  “Well, if you were,” Klaus said laughing, “you must have been promoted to writer!”

  “May I see that?” I asked, pointing to his clipboard.

  “No!” he replied. “We are airborne in twenty minutes and I have work to do.”

  It took us a good ten minutes to walk the spine of the Graf to reach our destination. And we were walking quickly. We stopped at a steel ladder that went straight up to the top of what I would call the ceiling, or roof. Passage ways ran off to each side, and in front of us was another two hundred feet which must have been the front end of the craft.

  “Now you wait right here, and after we have sailed, I will come up and fix your sling,” Klaus said.

  “Wait a minute!” I countered. “Why can’t I go with you?”

  “I will show you the rest of her later and introduce you to the crew,” he said. “But for now, I must go. You wait right here.” He walked to the right and disappeared.

  Son of a bitch! I thought.

  I sat down on the hard steel walkway and leaned against the ladder that shot straight up to the top of the beast.

  Looking down towards the tail, I watched in amazement as the great balloons expanded even more. Butterflies flooded my stomach like flies on a screen door.

  The ship was rising. I could feel it.

  Wait right here, my ass! I thought. I’m getting the hell out of here.

  I looked up the ladder and started climbing. I don’t know how many rungs it was. It seemed like a hundred, maybe more. When I finally reached the top, there was a round hatch about three or four feet wide. I turned the wheel and pushed upward and the damn thing opened. The top of the ladder had an extension on it that you could push up. It went about three feet up past the exterior.

  I stuck my head up and found myself looking out upon the world from on top the Graf. I couldn’t see much but the top of the ship and the horizon all around, but we were floating. And, as we climbed higher, I could see more and more of the landscape below. It was a breathtaking sight. For the first time in my life I was flying. And it didn’t feel anything like I’d imagined it would. I felt like I was flying, not in an airplane, but by myself, in the wind. It was such a liberating experience that I wanted to climb out onto her back. We started to turn, but it didn’t feel like I was turning, it seemed as though the land below us was moving instead. I could see the Hudson River far below us and just ahead was New York City. We were headed towards the Empire State Building.

  Then common sense took hold and I remembered that was where our official trip was to begin. There would be thousands of spectators watching, and someone might see my upper torso perched on top of the greatest airship ever built. So I went back down. I didn’t want to. It was just like this whole assignment…I didn’t want to do it but I had to.

  The second I got to the bottom of the ladder, Klaus turned the corner. Had I stayed on top ten-seconds longer, he would have known what I’d done.

&nb
sp; “Okay, Mr. Bay, you can come down now,” he said. “Follow me.”

  We went down a ladder and into a very narrow hallway that sloped down dramatically. I suddenly realized, we were walking on the steel skeleton of the bottom of the ship. There were no handrails, so it was difficult to walk normally. Then it leveled out. We passed several doorways to our right until we finally stopped at one and went inside. There were two men sitting on bunks in the tiny room.

  “These are riggers Abelard and Didi,” Klaus said. I shook their hands as Klaus introduced me.

  “Mr. Bay will be bunking on level A tonight,” he told the men. They smiled and nodded their heads.

  “We are honored to have you aboard, sir,” one of them said in broken English. I’d already forgotten which one was which.

  “Perhaps we will come up and visit later and play cards and drink rum,” the other said, smiling.

  “Okay,” I responded, reluctantly. “But I only play poker. For money. I have to warn you, I’m pretty damned good.”

  The men laughed as Klaus and I exited and continued down the thin, long hallway that seemed to go on forever.

  The giant balloon-type objects were to our right and curved up over our heads, making the walkway an L-shape.

  “How many of these balloons are there?” I asked.

  “They are cells, Mr. Bay,” Klaus answered, “and there are seventeen total.”

  By now I was feeling claustrophobic and wished I was back outside on the beast’s top.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. It seemed we’d been walking for ten minutes or more.

  “Just to the end,” he said. “I told you I would give you a tour, and that is what I am doing.”

  I drudged on thinking I’d made a big mistake by signing on for this trip. It was a free passage to Hollywood, but sometimes free has a price. And, sometimes a beautiful thing like the Great Graf, is really frightening and ugly inside.

  “Below us are the engines that make the hydrogen that fills the cells,” Klaus explained.

  I was barely listening to Captain Clipboard’s commentary on the Tour of Big Mistakes. I started thinking about Patricia, and my mind slipped off into vivid recollections of how beautiful and amazing she was.

  “And, what propels her are five Maybach engines,” he continued. “Four hundred and ten kilowatts, oh excuse me, that is 550 horsepower to you Americans!”

  “Yeah, fascinating,” I lied.

  We finally got to the end where there were a few more tiny rooms. Klaus introduced me, again, to a few riggers who also smiled broadly and said nothing memorable. Then we climbed yet another ladder and were at the very end of the corridor or spine of the ship. Except now we were at the absolute tail end of the Graf. I had started in way closer to the front, where the passenger cabin is. That meant we now had to walk the mid-corridor the entire length of the ship to get back to where we started, some 700 feet.

  It wasn’t just the distance that disturbed me, but the environment. It was like walking through the stomach of a giant whale. But this one was man made, constructed of rubber and steel. Like a movie, it wasn’t alive, yet seemed to be.

  We could have been in the bottom of the ocean for all I could tell. There was no way of knowing we were soaring through the sky at 65 mph with the most famous people on Earth, while the entire world watched. For me, it was a personal nightmare that wasn’t going to end anytime soon.

  Chapter Four

  By the time we reached the front of the Graf, I was ready to throw myself off the damned thing. The ladder that led up to her glorious top tempted me, but I didn’t want to die just yet. I thought about it though.

  Having taken the tour, I realized the midlevel of the ship where I would be sleeping was actually the largest. The rooms below where the riggers slept were like closets. I just didn’t want to be there by myself.

  “This is the best place for you to be,” Klaus said. “I will come back up and check on you tonight.”

  Suddenly, a strange rumbling noise came from above. We looked up, and on one of the overhead girders was a monkey pushing a ball. Then to our right there was another one, a monkey pushing what looked like a bowling ball. The ball seemed to fit perfectly inside the triangle shaped girders. We looked at each other dumbfounded. Klaus shook his head.

  “That acrobat, Alvon,” he said. “His monkeys must have escaped their cage!”

  I couldn’t imagine the belly of the beast being anymore surreal until I saw monkeys rolling bowling balls through her hollow bones.

  “I have to find him,” Klaus said. “You wait here!”

  “Oh no!” I shouted. “I am not waiting anywhere, I’m going with you!”

  We ran down the long corridor until we came to the ladder leading down to the end of the passenger cabin and nearly fell down the ladder of the cargo area. The cage was open and empty. No monkeys and no Alvon.

  We were out of breath and speechless so we sat down to collect ourselves on one of the many boxes filled with mail and postcards. But instead of the boxes being hard, like a chair, they fell over with us on top of them, as if they were filled with nothing but air.

  “I thought these were mail boxes,” I said. “What the hell is in them then?”

  We stood and ripped one of them open. It was filled with hundreds of camera flashbulbs.

  “Are these supposed to be here?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Klaus said. “I don’t know. This is a Hollywood charter. Maybe they are going to use them to take pictures.”

  Just then we heard a high pitched whistle in the distance. The sound got closer and closer. Strange rumbling noises closed in on us. It was the oddest sound I had ever heard, like we were under attack.

  Suddenly, monkeys flew out of nowhere and scurried into the cage. Then down the ladder came Alvon, smiling and shaking his head.

  “I am sorry. They are no harm,” he explained.

  The monkeys kept coming quickly, shooting into the cage as Alvon walked towards it.

  He began counting, “Three, four…they are highly trained and usually very well behaved, as you can see, six…” he said. “They are not used to being cooped up in a cage…seven! All present and accounted for!”

  “What the hell?” I screamed. “How could you let this happen?”

  “I went to get their food, and I guess I left the cage door open, and well, my apologies,” Alvon said. “I can assure you it will not happen again.”

  Klaus seemed to be relieved that the monkeys were secured again and wouldn’t have to explain to the captain what had happened. I was relieved too, that it was just monkeys and not an army of monsters hell bent on killing us.

  “Very well, then,” Klaus said. “Just see to it that it doesn’t happen again.”

  “Of course, sir,” Alvon said. “And Mr. Bay,” he continued, “I am a fan of your work. I write some myself, and I would like to show you something if you have the time.”

  I was never really comfortable with people saying they were fans of my writing. I figured he was just buttering me up for something. Unless you are going to pay me to write, I don’t really care. I just nodded and said, “Okay.”

  I was thinking This is crazy and I am not about to sleep up here with monkeys and a man who wants to show me his writings. So on our long walk back yet again to the front of the ship, I had a little talk with Captain Clipboard.

  “Klaus,” I said. “I understand Bela Lugosi is among the guests on board.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I believe he is.”

  “Well, I’m friends with him,” I explained. “And I would like you to get a message to him that I am here.”

  “I could probably do that,” he said.

  “And I won’t mention that you had monkeys running around loose rolling bowling balls,” I added.

  “I would appreciate that,” he said.

  We made our way back to the front of the ship and as promised, Klaus fashioned a “sling” as he called it, for me to sleep in that night. It consisted o
f a hammock and a lot of rope. Then he brought me dinner, Chicken Dijonnaise with asparagus and clams. I drank half a fifth of whiskey with dinner. Other than the bottle, I was alone, feeling like a prisoner under the most bizarre circumstances. No one came to visit me.

  The damned phone hanging from the ladder kept ringing. It was driving me crazy, so against my better judgment, I finally picked up the receiver.

  “Bay here,” I said.

  “Is this the Graf?” a voice asked.

  “No,” I answered. “This is Bay. The Graf can’t talk right now, she is busy flying a bunch of monkeys to some ridiculous game. Who the hell is this?”

  “This is Emil Wilde, KMOX radio in St. Louis, Missouri,” he answered, “and you are live on the air! Can I speak to one of the stars, please?”

  “They’re not here,” I said. “How did you get this number?”

  “It was scheduled,” he answered. “We were supposed to be patched through to the control room via short-wave radio. Is this not the control room of the famous Graf?”

  “Nope,” I said. “You reached the belly of the beast.”

  “Can you get me to the control room?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Just go down this ladder and make a left.”

  “I apologize, dear listeners, there seems to have been a mistake,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I added, “and I am the guy who made it by getting onboard this crazy damned balloon ride to begin with.”

  Click. He hung up.

  I eventually drifted off to sleep, thinking of this beautiful woman who had sent me on this wild rabbit chase. The strange sounds of engines below bellowing off and on woke me up throughout the night. Between half-waking and sleeping, I had dreams of my dinner with Patricia. There were half a dozen dream scenarios or more. In one, I found her husband then killed him so that I could have her for myself. In another, I was being chased by monkeys who could talk.

  “We know what you have done!” they chanted. “Shame on you, Bay!”

  It was a horrifying night. Then the monkeys’ voices turned into that of a man. “Bay, wake up!” Klaus said, “I have brought you breakfast.”

  I had a headache as deep as the Hudson is long. I fell out of the hammock like a pigeon in a thunderstorm.