Nenad Pavlovic
Everybody knows that Teenage Mutants Ninja Turtles live in the sewer, but I was beginning to doubt that they live in our sewer. While their sewer was a dry, spacey place, suitable for performing all sorts of neat skateboarding tricks, our sewer was just a dumb metal circle with a bunch of holes on it that gobbled up your marbles on an particularly unlucky shot, and in which you could throw stones to make a “ka-plonk!” sound, if you’re really bored.
On one rainy week which transformed our street into a puddle-dotted mudslide, I found out that there was more to our sewer than I’d previously known. First, it could clog (the Ninja Turtle sewer never ever clogged). Second, it opened. I don’t know how, it must’ve had some sort of a trick mechanism, because all the children from the street tried opening it a whole bunch of times and we never could. My dad said that the lid was just heavy, but I knew he was lying because Zach The Fifth Turtle could lift it no problem. I know Zach was almost fourteen and I was only nine, but he couldn’t have been that much stronger than me (could he?).
So, it wasn’t just a metal circle on the ground, under it was a hole, but it was dark and yucky, and I was pretty certain there were no Ninja Turtles in there. One good thing I learned that day was that all those marbles weren’t permanently lost: that plumber man got us a whole treasure trove of them from the bottom. They were all covered in mud though. My first neighbor said that it wasn’t mud, and found it very funny for some reason when I polished each and every one of them with my shirt. So, I learned that there were definitely no Turtles in our sewer, and I was about fifty marbles richer (weighing at almost three hundred, probably the richest in my street), all in all an OK day.
From all of this I gathered that the Ninja Turtles probably live in some other city. My best friend Mary Ann said that they must live in Italy, because they’re always eating pizza, but I suspected that she might be wrong; I don’t know much about the country, but I’ve never seen the Crooked Tower of Italy anywhere in the cartoon. And for some time, that was that on the subject of looking for the Ninja Turtles.
Later that same summer, my other best friend Alexander came to me and said that he made a radical discovery: he had found the actual sewer in which the Ninja Turtles live! And it wasn’t in Italy, or another city, but rather close, by the river! Of course, I had my doubts: his last two discoveries, the forgotten World War II weapons in a haunted mill, and the vampire’s treasure in another, unrelated haunted mill, turned out to be bogus (actually, that later one was never confirmed, we chickened out and never actually went inside). But this time he not only swore it was the truth, he was willing to show it to me next time we go fishing.
It was supposed to be farther down the river from the shallow rapids where we usually fished for chub. There were a lot of fantastic stories about the places down the river. If there really was a huge white rock from which one could jump into a deep pool full of monstrous catfish, there could also be a sewer housing real live Ninja Turtles (I say “real live” because I want to set them apart from the fake Ninja Turtles I’ve seen in the theater, which were obviously just some guys in costumes).
I was sure he was just pulling my leg, and a bit afraid that we’d get in trouble for going too far from our neighborhood, but just a short walk from the rapids, he stopped and pointed at the shrub. And it was there. Real-life entrance to the sewer, looking almost exactly like the ones in the show, and certainly big enough for a Ninja Turtle to slide from on a skateboard.
It was a summer sundown, the golden-red rays didn’t provide much light for spelunking, and we were weighed down by fishing gear and bags of embarrassingly small fish, but we promised to return the next day right after breakfast and become the Sixth and the Seventh Ninja Turtle by lunchtime.
It didn’t go as planned. The sewer entrance was there, but there was no way of getting to it: the sides of the riverbank were steep and sleek with mud and wet grass, and additionally booby-trapped with burrs and nettles. And we couldn’t even go around because there was too much water near and even inside the pipe.
“We gotta come back then the water level drops” said Alexander suspiciously like an adult.
“When will that be?” – I asked disappointedly, toying with my miniature flashlight which I was so eager to use that day.
“Dunno. By the end of the summer, I guess.”
I rode my bike to the river every day for the next couple of days to check if the water level dropped, but it was never quite dry enough to just walk inside the pipe without ruining your sneakers (and earning a spanking).
The search for the Ninja Turtles was never fully forgotten, but it did take second place to some other things that happened in the meantime. Mainly, the late-night movie marathons on Channel Eight. Boy, were those things great! It was like going to the video rental several times, only for free, and you could watch movies that you’d usually never get permission to. On some days, they played lame kind of movies, like dramas (or yawn-a-thons, as I called them), but on the other, there were comedies, Japanese cartoons with robots and ninjas, sci-fi’s, and my personal favorite: horrors!
Of course, I couldn’t stay awake that late, even if I was allowed to: that’s where the magic of VCR programming came into place (I think my dad never forgave himself for teaching me how to do it). The biggest thrill of the whole thing was not knowing what you’re gonna get: TV program just said “Movie marathon” and the type of the movies shown, without any actual titles, so watching the tape the next day was kind of like opening presents on Christmas. My last catch consisted of a movie called “Demons”, which my dad called “the dumbest thing ever”. I thought it was pretty cool, apart from it being named “Demons” when the monsters in it were actually zombies; I guess the guy who made it just didn’t know that much about monsters. So naturally, I was pretty excited when I inserted the last remaining tape I was allowed to tape over (which previously contained “Asterix”, “Horton Hears A Who!” and some weird movie with naked ladies) and set the recording time for midnight.
The next day, I got up at seven o clock, sat in front of the TV with a plate of sandwiches and pressed play, eager to see what kind of monster this movie will be about.
But it wasn’t even half way through the movie when I lost not only my appetite, but most of the color in my face. This scary movie wasn’t fun, it was terrifying! Almost all horror films were about a hero fighting, and eventually defeating, a monster that was obviously a man in a rubber suit or a special effect (never actually got what “normal” effects were). Or in other words, adults fighting a made-up thing. This movie was about children getting eaten by a thing that I had previously seen with my own eyes and therefore for certain known was real: a clown! And that wasn’t even the worst part: the place where the killer clown lived, his loathsome lair, looked identically like the place we almost went in to look for the Ninja Turtles. On the verge of tears, with the video on pause, I sat in cold sweat mulling over that thought: we almost went willingly onto a platter of a monster so terrible that even all the Ninja Turtles combined, even with the help of master Splinter, couldn’t possibly defeat.
When I saw Alexander later that day, he yelled “I know!” as he ran down the street towards me, and I instantly knew what it was that he knew. We promised that we’ll never even go near the awful sewer entrance, not for all the biggest catfish in the world, nor for a chance of meeting the Ninja Turtles ever again.
NENAD PAVLOVIC was born in Serbia in 1983. He majored in English language and literature at the University of Priština, Kosovo, and is currently living in Norway, working as a teacher and scribbling away every Friday night with a pint of cold lager by his side. His short fiction (mostly fantasy, sci-fi and horror, with a few exceptions) was featured in many magazines and short story collections published throughout the Balkans. He is also the author of the novel Hokus Lokvud which won the Mali Nemo award in 2013.