Bubble in the Bathtub Read Online Free

until she found her father’s flashlight and then they ran out onto Cannon Avenue, where darkness and silence had fallen over all the yards and wooden houses. The moon was curious and peeked out at them as they climbed over the fence surrounding the smallest house and the yard with the tallest grass. (Doctor Proctor had been away for a while.) They sprinted past the pear tree over to the cellar door and lifted up the doormat.
    And, sure enough, a key gleamed in the moonlight.
    They stuck it into the keyhole in the old, unpainted door, and the metal made a slightly spooky squeaking sound as they turned it.
    They both stood there looking at the door.
    â€œYou first,” Lisa whispered.
    â€œNo problem,” Nilly said with a gulp. He took a deep breath. Then he kicked the door as hard as he could.
    The hinges made a chilling creaking sound as the door swung open. A gust of cold, raw cellar air wafted out of the doorway, and something fluttered over their heads and disappeared into the night, something that might have been an unusually large moth or just an average-sized bat.
    â€œYikes,” said Lisa.
    â€œAnd ew,” said Nilly. Then he turned on the flashlight and strolled in.
    Lisa looked around outside. Even the usually welcoming pear tree looked like it was clawing at the moon with witch’s fingers. She pulled her jacket tighter around herself and hurried in after Nilly.
    But he was already gone and all she saw was total darkness.
    â€œNilly?” Lisa whispered, because she knew that if you talk loudly in the dark, the noise would make you feel even more alone.
    â€œOver here,” Nilly whispered. She followed thesound and saw that the cone of light from the flashlight was pointing at something on the wall.
    â€œDid you find the time soap?” she asked.
    â€œNo,” Nilly said. “But I found the biggest spider in the northern hemisphere. It has seven legs and it hasn’t shaved them lately. And a mouth that’s so big you can see its lips. Check out this beast, huh?”
    Lisa saw a very ordinary and not particularly large spider on the cellar wall.
    â€œA seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider. They’re extremely rare!” Nilly whispered, excited. “They live by catching and sucking out the brains of other insects.”
    â€œThe brains?” Lisa said, looking at Nilly. “I didn’t think insects had brains.”
    â€œWell that’s exactly why the seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider is so rare,” Nilly whispered. “It hardly ever finds any insects with brains to suck.”
    â€œAnd just how do you know all this?” Lisa asked.
    â€œIt’s in—”
    â€œDon’t say it,” Lisa interrupted. “In
Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist
?”
    â€œExactly,” Nilly said. “So if you’ll go find the time soap and the nose clips, I’ll work on trying to capture this rare spider specimen. Okay?”
    â€œBut we have only one flashlight.”
    â€œWell why don’t we turn on the overhead light, then?”
    â€œThe overhead li—” Lisa started to say, putting her palm to her forehead as if to say
duh
. “Why didn’t we think of that before?”
    â€œBecause then it wouldn’t have been so delightfully spooky,” Nilly said, pointing the flashlight at the light switch next to the door. Lisa flipped it on and in an instant Doctor Proctor’s laboratory was bathed in white light.
    There were kettles, pressure cookers, buckets, and shelves full of mason jars with different types of powder mixtures and chemicals. There were iron pipes,glass pipes, test tubes, and other kinds of pipes—even an old rifle with an ice hockey puck attached to its muzzle. And next to the rifle, on the wall, hung the picture that Lisa was so fond of. It was of a young Doctor Proctor on his motorcycle in France.
She
was sitting in the sidecar—the beautiful Juliette Margarine with the