As he pedaled out toward the Playalinda Beach area and the Gremlin Hollow, Rolf heard Shep mumbling under his breath while the dog trotted alongside the bike.
"What's the matter now?" Rolf asked.
"Your manners," answered Mr. Sheperton. "An absolute disgrace. The way you treated that girl . . ."
"Who? Rita?"
"You know very well that I mean Rita. You were shockingly rude to her."
Rolf felt a twinge of guilt, but he said nothing. With a shake of his head, he said, "Ahh . . . who cares?"
"You should," Mr. Sheperton replied. "And you do, I know. You can't hide your feelings from me, Rolf. You like her very much. She's the one you were showing off for when you took that fall off the high board—"
Rolf's bad leg ached suddenly at the memory of it. "I wasn't showing off!" he growled. But both he and the dog knew he didn't mean it.
Mr. Sheperton kept grumbling as Rolf pedaled along the highway.
"Uh, Shep—I mean, Mr. Sheperton," Rolf said after a few minutes of hard pumping up a small rise in the road. "Don't say anything to the gremlins about me and Rita, will you? They don't have to know that she was even around when I hurt my leg."
Shep snorted. "It's a bit late to keep the matter secret, with that trickster Baneen riding around on your handlebars all this time."
"Baneen? Handlebars?" Rolf blinked.
Something like a small noiseless explosion popped in front of him and Baneen was suddenly smiling up at him. Just as Shep had said, the gremlin was perched on the right handlebar of Rolf's bike.
"Well, well, well, well!" cried Baneen cheerfully. "And a beautiful day it is, to be sure. Ah now, and why would you be wanting to keep the fact of your friendship with such a fine young lady a secret, lad?"
"Never mind," snapped Rolf, recovering from his surprise. "What about you? Where did you come from? And how come you're here, anyway?"
"Why it's pure chance, pure chance—and just a mite of worry mixed in," said Baneen. "We gremlins having the second sight and all, it was a bit of a blow to me when I chanced to look in on you this morning and found you hadn't got the wee things we asked you to pick up for us. Ah, what will we do now, poor, helpless gremlins that we are—I asked myself? Lugh must hear of this, I said; and I went to find him. But before I did indeed find him, I changed my mind. It's a terrible thing, the wrath of mighty Lugh—"
"Poor, helpless gremlin that he is, of course," sneered Shep.
"Ah, don't be twisting my words now, don't," said Baneen. "I thought of the wrath of Lugh and I thought of the lad, here, and I thought it would do no harm to speak to Rolf first. So I made a small spell in a twinkling to bring me to you—and here now, I find you have the little things after all."
"That's right," said Rolf. "They're on the back of my bike, there."
"So indeed I see," said Baneen, casting a bright inquisitive glance past Rolf's elbow to the brown paper bag pinned in the bike's rattrap. He switched his gaze to the scrub grass and bushes beside the road. "You can turn off here, lad."
"Here?" Rolf asked, surprised. He looked and saw a trail he didn't recognize snaking away through the brush.
"It's a bit of a shortcut we've fixed up to our Hollow," said Baneen.
Rolf turned down the trail, which turned and twisted in strange ways. In seconds, it seemed, he was completely out of sight of the road they had just left.
"How far—" he started to ask.
"Not far, not far at all!" said the gremlin. "In just a second now, we'll be there. Once again it's yourself who'll be setting eyes on the high mysteries and secret workings of us gremlin-folk, that none but you know about. And it's certain sure that I am that none but you does know; because a fine lad such as yourself wouldn't have told anybody about us, would you now?" His voice and eyes suddenly seemed sharpened all together. "Not even that fine young lady you were talking with less than an hour ago?"
"Rita? Why would I—" Rolf broke off suddenly, stopping his bike and putting his feet down on the sandy soil. For they had come suddenly upon the lip of the Gremlin Hollow. Down below, he could see hordes of gremlins hard at work stretching out the large kite-shape of O'Rigami's. The Grand Engineer stood patiently off to one side, watching the work. Further away, Lugh was busily directing still more gremlins who carried, dragged, and tugged strangely shaped chests and boxes across the sand. A few gremlins were floating a foot or so off the ground, guiding green-colored crates that floated alongside them.
Everything in the Hollow was noise and bustle, a thousand tiny voices chattering and screeching at once. And, as usual, the gremlin magic was playing tricks with Rolf's vision. The kite once again looked as big as a jetliner, while the Hollow itself seemed no more than thirty or forty feet across.
Rolf started to pick up the sentence where he had left it, but before he could get out another word, Shep set up a furious barking.
"What's that? Stop! Stop immediately, do you hear me! Turn that thing round and get it out of here. . . ."
Rolf and Baneen turned together to look, because Shep was facing away from the Hollow, in the direction of the beach.
"Great Gremla protect us!" yelped Baneen. "It's a monster, headed right this way to destroy us all!"
"It's a bulldozer," Rolf yelled.
The machine was indeed roaring in their direction. It topped the rise that separated the Hollow from sight of the beach, and bore straight down toward the Hollow itself.
"Hey, it's going to tear up the kite!" Rolf cried.
"Stop! Stop, I say!" barked Mr. Sheperton.
But the bulldozer came right on.
"It's no good! It's no good!" cried Baneen, hopping madly on Rolf's handlebars. "Sure and we're all invisible here within the magic wards about this place. We're going to be scooped up like peas on a spade and drowned in the sand!"