"Wow!" gasps Lanker, "I want to find one and get my pot of gold!" Lanker exclaims with great joy, as he begins to clap.
"Lanker! Lanker!" calls his mother. "Boy you get in here right now," his mother yells from the living room. Lanker eases the closet door open, then crawls down the hallway toward the lamp stand sitting around the corner of the doorway to the living room, where his mother called from. Soon Lanker eases around the corner and the lampstand, toward the seat adjacent to the bay window on the other side of the room.
"Where on earth have you been?" asks his mother with excitement.
"Nowhere, only in the hallway there."
"Who were you talking to?"
"Nobody," Lanker answers quickly.
"Well, you sure were carrying on a full conversation with somebody, it sounded like to me. Was it your imaginary friend?"
"Yes., well, kind of."
"Ok, you can go on and play, but you check in with us once in a while. We don't like it when we go a long period of time without hearing from you, son."
"Alright mother," Lanker snaps with a smile.
"You know," says his grandmother from the dining room, "about three years ago, our wealthy relative, Uncle Arnold, bought your cousin, Sue, a brand-new doll house for Christmas. He decided to keep it right here with us. I don't know what happened to it exactly. It got to missing a few pieces here and there somehow, but the main part of it is somewhere in the back of the house. I thought about asking Tom to throw it away the first chance he found, but I've never gotten around to it. You can play with that, Lanker, if you find it. None of us don't care."
Lanker eases back into the hallway, crawling along on his hands and knees toward the forgotten closet. Lanky Swanky Jane was still there, lying motionless on the floor upon her back.
"Well, that sure was a close one," says Lanker, as he wipes his forehead with his right hand.
The doll only lays there motionless upon her back.
"Are you awake? Jane?"
He grabs the limp cloth doll, shaking her, and calls out to her, but she replies not, while only remaining in her unresponsive state of being.
"Jane! Wake up! Don't go out on me like this."
Lanker shakes the antique rag doll a few more times, then tosses her back down onto the dusty bare wood floor of the closet. Now in a sad state of despair, he crawls out of the closet and back into his bedroom, climbing into his bed, soon falling asleep. While asleep he dreams, he is back in the big house, with Whammy and all of their friends. The feeling is as if he were right there, among all of them, once more again. In his dream he can talk face to face with her, he can hug her again after what was feeling now like the passage of so much time.
"How is your mother?" he asks her.
She answers in a somewhat shy way, "fine."
"How are you doing?"
"Very well, thank you."
"I am so glad about that. It makes me feel good only to lay eyes upon you after so many long days and weeks now."
"I missed you also," Whammy replies in his nighttime dreams.
"I wish we could play together again," she says.
"I wish we could play together again," he replies.
"What happened where we can't?" asks Whammy.
"I don't know, but something did," Lanker says.
"I thought your mother saw a ghost."
"She did, I think, or something like that," replies Lanker.
"But the ghost didn't have to scare her away," Whammy replies.
When he awakes it is Saturday morning. There is nothing he was aware of, planned for him to do. He decides to drop into the closet, to see what was going on with this hole he found a while back in the wall. He climbs out of the bed, crawling over to the closet inside the rear right corner on the wall, in front of his bed. Only for the sake of being safe, he stuck the spring-loaded knife into the gap between the hardened plaster of his right cast and his skin, immediately below the knee. He bends down toward the fist sized chewed out hole. He knocks three times, but with no response.
"Is anybody home?" Lanker asks aloud.
There is no answer, so he decides to ask again.
"I say there, ahoy! Is anybody home?"
Suddenly he hears a stir, then out fell a thumb sized creature with scrambled up hair and extremely wrinkled blue denim overalls. This dazed figure gazes somewhat angrily at Lanker, placing both hands upon his hips, then spouts.
"For your information I have just made it home less than an hour ago. I have had a rather tough day of it, if any person should ever ask me. No being other than a mouse would ever know, let alone understand this woeful life a mouse sometimes leads."
"Wow, a talking mouse!" shouts Lanker, as he bends down to observe the figure with whom he was speaking. The mouse shakes his right fist at Lanker.
"You're darn tootin' I can talk!" the mouse snaps. "I can cuss and fight as well. So don't you ever forget that, not even for a single moment. You look rather small and insignificant for a human, I should say. So, tell me, son, by the way who are you?"
"My name is Lanker, Lanker Doo-lezz."
"Well, that is a decent sounding name, I might add," snaps the mouse.
"It's the only name that I have," the little boy replies.
The mouse smacks his forehead with his opened palm.
"Oh, please don't tell me, he is trying to be some sort of a wise guy now."
"No, it's the truth!" Lanker continues on.
"You're rather small and insignificant for a human, but what on earth do you want with me? Are you in league with the cat? Worse yet., the ferret?! I fear ferrets far more than cats because they are more intelligent than cats and can go everywhere I can. But what do you want with me, human?"
Lanker pauses for a moment. He didn't know how to answer the mouse, so off the top of his head he gave him the first statement entering his mind.
"I need help finding a pot of gold."
"Pot of gold? What use do I have, of a pot filled with gold? What kind of pot? How much gold?"
The mouse then suddenly jerks his head backwards, while placing both fore paws upon his hips, then huffs.
"Furthermore, what's in it for me? I personally don't have any use for gold, you know."
"What do you want, then? With gold I can get anything," replies Lanker to the mouse.
"A hat filled with pecans would be excellent! Roasted pecans would be even better. A jar filled with peanut butter would be grand. But a mouse with an unlimited supply of cheese, is the stuff born from the fairy tales of man! That being said, however, I am most certainly not one to turn down a real opportunity. True opportunity does not come around often in this world, let me tell you. So, what is it, my small insignificant lad?"
"When I get my gold, you'll certainly have yours. I can tell you that much for sure!"
"Now," says the mouse with a serious expression on his face, "what makes you think gold might be around here?"
"I heard Grandfather say my ancestors were Irish, old Irish. My people were once wealthy, and everybody knows the old Irish put part of the value held in their estate back in gold, never to be touched. It has to be around here, somewhere," whines Lanker as he scratches his head.
"I tell you, boy, I have never heard of such a thing. If a pot of gold is around here, then this secret was never told to me..., ere uh, shall we say, told around me, and I hear everything when I am moving around inside these walls, let me tell you. Every squeak of the bed springs, every grunt, every moan, every cuss word, every secret, every dark plot, I hear them all. I tell the spirits! You didn't know that there were spirits in this house, did you?"
"What spirits? You mean ghosts?"
"Of course, I mean ghosts, and everything else as well. I know all about you. I know about your feet, the casts, the operations, you crawling rather than walking. I heard it all being said right here inside this house, long before you ever arrived."
"Wow!" fires Lanker. "I wish I could become small, like you are, then we both could go on a search for that pot of gold here inside these walls. Maybe this is where Grandpa hid his pot of gold. We could have all kinds of adventures then!"
"Fat chance," snaps the mouse, "but whatever. I must warn you, however, being small like I am, may have some real advantages, but also many possible dangers; cats and ferrets, just to name a few. Even chickens are bad when one is this small, son."
"I'm game," replies Lanker.
The mouse suddenly begins to fall all over himself with laughter.
"I honestly do not even know why we are having this conversation. You can't make yourself this small. Doing so is impossible! You simply can't do it, boy!"
"Oh, yes I can," Lanker snaps, "I was shown how by a ghost. I was shown how to zip through keyholes and a whole lot more, by this ghost conjured up by my friend, Whammy, rubbing on a crystal ball."
If you can, then such a thing will be so grand!" snaps the mouse.
He motioned with his right arm for Lanker to come along inside his hole house. "Come along!" he says aloud, as he turns and walks away inside.
Lanker begins to gaze into space focusing his concentration on the skies, while imagining a full moon since none was shining outside. Only the brilliant morning sun radiated forth its light. He soon begins chanting the hallowed sublime verses.
"Steeples and temples,
books and bells,
Seek this power
that you should know so well.
Birds and bees
may do as they darn well please;
so, for some tasty milk cream and fresh pecan pie,
change me into a mouse's size!"