by Tom Fletcher
“REALLY! I guess the first part of the plan must have worked.”
“Plan? What plan?” Ella asked.
Norman suddenly realized he’d better not tell Ella that they had only invited her in order to use her as live bait to lure a bunch of creepy monsters out in the hope of catching them.
“Well?” Ella said, tapping her foot impatiently.
“Ella, those dreams you had…”
“The ones about the monsters under my bed?”
“Exactly! Those weren’t dreams, Ella. They were real. They are real.”
“Who?” Ella said.
Norman raised a shaky finger, pointing at the shadows under Lucy’s bed.
“The Creakers,” Ella jumped in again as she started to realize what was going on and just how serious the situation had become. “We need the grown-ups,” she said.
“We need Lucy!” said Norman.
OK, we’re about to dive down into the Woleb with Lucy. Are you ready? You might want to go to the bathroom before reading this chapter. I’d hate for you to have a little accident. No? OK, don’t say I didn’t warn you. By reading on, you agree that the author accepts no responsibility for any toilet-related mishaps you may have as a result of being scared by the following chapter(s).
Lucy crept along the creepy, stinky corridor, following the wretched voices of Guff, Grunt, Scratch, and Sniff as they creaked deeper into the Woleb.
She stepped over the little wooden signs, reading the names of all her Whiffington neighbors, and her tummy gave a little flutter as she thought of all the children above, waking up to another grown-up-less day, not knowing anything about this place, not realizing what was at stake.
Of course, Lucy knew exactly what was at stake. And you know too.
If Lucy couldn’t find the grown-ups, if she got lost down here, she might never find her way out, and the children of Whiffington would never see their families again.
Suddenly a second corridor appeared in front of her, one she was sure hadn’t been there a moment ago. She scratched her head as she stared at the fork in the road and the choice she now had to make. Should she go left? Or right? Or should she take the third tunnel?
The third tunnel?
Where did that come from? Lucy thought. That definitely wasn’t there a moment ago.
She glanced back the way she had come—and stared in disbelief.
It was now a dead end!
The Woleb was changing.
It was moving!
Like it was alive.
Lucy felt crushed.
“I’m never going to be able to find my way around here. This is impossible!” she said, and slumped to the sticky floor in a huff.
As those words came out of her mouth, they felt so strange. She’d never said that anything was impossible before. She usually hated those words.
Her mom’s voice suddenly popped into her head: Impossible isn’t real. It’s just in your mind.
Lucy’s heart sank. It meant that down here, in this backward place, impossible was very real.
Impossible.
Mind.
Lucy’s head went fuzzy—and then her thoughts suddenly became crystal clear, as though her mind was an old TV and someone had just tuned it properly.
“Wait a second. If the thing I’m trying to do—rescue the grown-ups from nasty monsters—IS impossible…then down in the Woleb, where everything is what it isn’t…it is totally POSSIBLE!” she cried. “It’s the one place in the world where I can do this!”
Lucy jumped back to her feet. She’d had an idea.
“I know exactly where I’m going,” she announced as loudly as she could, her voice echoing down the multiple tunnels and hallways that had appeared around her. “I don’t need a MAP! The last thing I would ever want is a precise, detailed map of the entire Woleb. If anything, a MAP would just slow me down.”
Lucy waited hopefully. There was a deep silence. She peered down each of the twisted routes ahead of her as they wound deeper into this weird world.
Then, all of a sudden, something caught her eye. Something stuck to the wall of one of the tunnels. She ran over to it, her heart skipping in her chest. It was a giant map spread out on the wall, like the ones you see in shopping malls.
Lucy grinned. Her plan had worked! She had tricked the Woleb!
“Oh no, not a map!” she said out loud. “This isn’t helpful at all…”
Lucy took a step closer to get a better look at the map. She thought her swimming goggles might be playing tricks on her, so she lifted them up to check, but…nope. The map was unlike any Lucy had ever seen before.
It looked like this:
It looked like Whiffington Town, but sliced in half, like an apple. Underneath the town there were no layers of rock or a hot lava core, like Lucy was used to seeing in the maps of the earth in her earth science lessons at school. Instead, there was a complicated network of tunnels winding downward into the ground—tunnels that led to a large Creaker city.
Lucy gasped. It was unbelievable. If you stood back, it looked like an enormous black spider was living somewhere inside the planet, with all its legs poking up to the surface—a secret monster beneath all the homes in Whiffington.
She leaned in to take an even closer look…
And the spider suddenly moved.
“AHHHH!” Lucy cried.
The Woleb was alive! As the spider on the map stretched and shifted one of its knobbly legs, Lucy heard a great creak from the tunnel ahead of her and saw the entire thing bend and stretch before settling down, now leading to a new location. No wonder all these tunnels appeared out of nowhere. This whole world was moving. Changing.
Lucy took a breath and leaned in again. Now she could read some of the locations in the Creaker city.
There was a public swimming pool filled with live rats and cockroaches…
A restaurant serving leftover brussels sprouts from Christmases past. The most expensive sprout on the menu was one found in a garbage can at Buckingham Palace in 1953, which had been severely undercooked and partially chewed, possibly by royalty. Possibly not.
There were shops selling stinky old shoes with holes in them…
Shops selling stinky old socks to match the stinky old shoes…
Shops selling ice cream, which was actually scoops of human earwax…
Shops selling belly-button-fluff blankets…
A market with only rotten vegetables…
A lumpy river of spoiled milk…
And just about every gross thing that Lucy could imagine. Actually, this place was so gross that a nice girl like Lucy wouldn’t even have been able to imagine it.
As Lucy scanned the map, she noticed a small red dot with an arrow pointing to it. Above it were the words YOU’RE NOT HERE.
Lucy smiled to herself. She knew it meant that this was exactly where she was. She was beginning to figure out this backward place.
“This map is so unhelpful. But what would be even less useful would be to know where the grown-ups are being kept. I definitely don’t want to know that!” she said loudly, and waited.
Suddenly a great hole opened up in the wall to her right, like giant tree roots twisting themselves open. A new spider’s leg appeared on the map next to the spot where she was. She traced it with her finger to see where it led, and her tummy did a little flip when she reached the end. There was a picture of what looked like a fair-ground on the map, with these words written above it:
Suddenly a scream echoed through the new opening, which gave Lucy the chills.
Because it wasn’t a Creaker screaming…
It was a grown-up.
Grunt, Guff, Scratch, and Sniff creaked through the Woleb, carrying Mr. Dungston’s stinking coat.
“His Rottenness be awful pleased with Grunt when he sniffs this,�
� said Grunt.
“And Guff,” said Guff.
“And Scr—” began Scratch.
“And Sniff!” added Sniff happily. “Sorry, Scratch,” he quickly added.
They all wound their way through the crooked, winding, twisted tunnels, deeper into their backward world.
“Shall we stops off on the ways for snacks?” asked Guff hopefully, rubbing his rumbling round belly.
“No, you flabby rotbag! We be gettin’ this to His Rottenness rights aways,” Grunt barked.
“But, Grunt, we’s be ’avin’ a long night wot with that crafty kidderling. We at least deserves some sludge,” Guff pleaded, giving Scratch a little nudge.
“Oh yeah, some old sludge would go down a trick,” Scratch agreed.
“All wrong, all wrong! We stops for a quickybit, but just one slop,” Grunt said sternly, caving in to the demands of Guff’s greedy belly.
They turned a sharp left (which went right) and almost walked straight into the wall of the tunnel, but just as their pointed noses were about to bash into it, a brand-new hole twisted open. Entwined tree roots and mud cracked apart, and a new path was revealed.
As they creaked through the hole, a great raucous sound filled the new tunnel. It came from a building in the distance. I say a building, but it was more like a pile of bricks, rubble, smashed glass, and bent steel that might have once been a building but had long since been demolished. Swinging from the top of the ruin was a bent, rusty old sign, which read THE BOG TAVERN. The Creakers had banded together to bring this whole derelict building site down into the Woleb, and it was now the place they all went to have a slop or two of sludge after a long night of creaking.
The Bog Tavern was always busy. As they stepped through the doorless doorway, the glorious stench of damp and mold filled their snotty nostrils, and they heard a discordant song from the Creaker playing a strange, creaky instrument in the corner. It had the bashed-up keys of an old piano, the dented horn of a trombone, three bent pipes from some bagpipes, one broken guitar string, and a little triangle on top, all cobbled together into one.
“Oh looks, they gots Belch playin’ the bogpipes tonight. ’E’s awful, ’e is. Can’t play a single note wrong!” Guff said, rubbing his claws together gleefully. He loved the Bog Tavern.
Grunt trudged to the bar, and a respectful hush fell over the rotten room as every stinking Creaker in the place realized who had just set claw inside.
“What’ll it be, Grunt?” barked Squelch, the landlord, breaking the silence.
“Four slops,” Grunt replied. “And make ’em quicks. We gots important business.”
“And some pork rinds!” Guff added to the order, followed by one of his stinky butt-puffs.
“Wrong away. Anythin’ for the king’s most untrusted Creakers,” Squelch muttered with a dip of his bald, scabby head.
They made their way through the crowds of Creakers who were busy sharing creaking stories.
“I nearly gots dusted last night,” one old Creaker called Bulge said as he gulped the last mouthful of sludge from his glass. “Chubby kidderling fell outta bed and landed on me. I broke the rotten thing’s fall so it didn’t wake up, see? So there I was, trapped with this heavy lump of a kidder on me leg—and then the bright started comin’!”
“What did y’ do, Bulge?” asked Barf, the wrinkly Creaker sharing his table.
“Had to gnaw me own leg off, didn’t I!” And with that, Bulge plunked his dark green leg on the table, and all the Creakers who were listening cheered and clinked their goblets together in celebration. Everyone loved it when a Creaker escaped being dusted. “I’ll stick it back on somehow!” Bulge laughed.
“Bunch of twitnits,” Grunt huffed grumpily as he and Guff found space at an empty table. Scratch and Sniff made their way to join Belch on the bogpipes and began singing along to all the songs they didn’t know.
“You’re always rotten in the face when you comes in here,” Guff said to Grunt as he perched his bottom on an upturned stool.
“Look at ’em all. All these useless lumps of Creaky flesh. Wastin’ away their hours in here, tellin’ nonsense waffle to each other.”
“It’s just whats we do, Grunt,” Guff said.
“Not me. Not Grunt,” Grunt whispered. “I be wantin’ more.”
Guff stared. “More? More ’n what?”
“More ’n Creakin’,” said Grunt. “It always be the same. Sneakin’ up there into the human world, where everythin’s the right way up. Stealin’ their garbage, night in and night out. Never gettin’ to see my Creakerlings back home.” He pulled out a little photo of his hideously ugly Creaker children to show Guff.
“Ahh, they gets more disgustin’ every year,” Guff said politely.
“Thanks, I know. Just likes their mother.” Grunt sighed fondly at the photo before tucking it away.
“But this be the Creaker way, Grunt. Creakin’ is what we does. It puts muck on the table and mulch over our ’eads,” Guff said.
“Have you never thoughts in your noggin what it might be like not ’avin’ to creak abouts? Not ’avin’ to do the nasties up there? Not stealin’ things that isn’t ours?” Grunt replied in a hushed voice.
“Four quick slops,” interrupted Squelch before Guff could answer, spilling most of their sludge on the table as he put their overflowing goblets down. “Made ’em just the way you like, Grunt. Rotten eggs, cheese flakes, broccoli juice, and I put some extra snot drops in for you tonight too. On the house,” Squelch added as he wiped his nose.
“Cheers.” Guff grinned, stuffing the whole bag of pork rinds in his mouth—including the foil wrapping.
“Cheers,” Grunt muttered, and made to take a swig of his sludge. But before the chipped glass touched his cracked lips, the whole building site around them began to rumble.
The rumble became a shake.
The shake became a jolting Wolebquake! Broken bricks broke again and fell to the ground.
Slops of sludge smashed and spilled. The cracked glass in the windows shattered completely.
“Takes cover!” ordered Grunt as he dived on top of Lucy’s dad’s stinking jacket to protect it.
“Grunt!” cried Scratch.
“Guff!” called Sniff.
“What’s goin’ on?!” yelled Guff over a mouthful of pork rinds.
The rumbling slowly calmed down. The shaking settled. The Wolebquake was over, and the whole Bog Tavern was silent in shock.
“What the muck was that, Grunt?” grumbled Squelch the landlord as he climbed out from under his bar.
Grunt got to his feet, brushing debris from the precious, stinking coat.
“That,” he replied grimly, “is a kidderling in the Woleb.”
Lucy sprinted down the tunnel, following it deeper into the Woleb. The screams were growing louder with every step she took.
She rounded a crooked corner and the spider-leg tunnel opened up into a great cave, stretching out far above her head where the roots of trees poked through mud and dirt. The sticky ground beneath her feet suddenly became a row of neat, polished green paving stones, and this path led down to something so strange Lucy had to take off her swimming goggles to get a good look at it.
Right in front of her eyes was a ginormous underground theme park. It was massive! Bigger than any fairground or theme park Lucy had ever seen.
Farther along the path was a giant entrance with bright, shiny turnstiles and a curly-swirly sign over the top that said:
But Lucy knew that in the Woleb this meant it was a fun place. A place where dreams do come true.
“But whose dreams?” Lucy asked herself quietly so the Woleb wouldn’t hear her thoughts.
Her mind was interrupted by the screams again as the carriages of an enormous roller coaster whizzed by and did a huge loop-the-loop high up over her head, the track skimming the caver
nous, rooty roof above. The seats of the roller coaster were packed with passengers dressed in their pajamas and nighties, all waving their hands high above their heads.
And that’s when Lucy realized two things.
The passengers in the roller-coaster cars were all grown-ups.
And it was these grown-ups who were screaming—but they weren’t screaming in pain or fear. They were screaming with laughter and happiness.
Lucy saw their faces as the roller coaster shot by. They were giddy with excitement, wide childish smiles stretched across their faces as they waved their arms in the air.
What the jiggins?! thought Lucy as she rushed down the shiny green path to the turnstile and gave it a push. It spun around and whacked her on the bottom, shoving her into Creakerland.
She was suddenly hit by the most delicious, sweet smell. Lucy closed her eyes and breathed it in deeply. It was the smell of sugar and caramel, freshly baked cookies, and steaming hot chocolate. It was the nicest thing she’d smelled since being down here, and it seemed completely out of place in this rotten world.
As she looked around, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. There were rides and roller coasters that looked so mind-bogglingly fun that she found herself being drawn toward them, desperately wanting to ride them. Some had stomach-churning twists soaring so high it hurt her neck to keep looking at them.
There was a merry-go-round that whizzed around so fast and didn’t stop until the grown-ups riding it couldn’t hold on any longer. They just let go, flying into the sky, landing in huge piles of pink fluff.
“Cotton candy!” Lucy whispered in amazement as she watched the grown-ups eat their way out of these pink fluffy piles of deliciousness, which were as tall as the houses of Whiffington.
There were popcorn machines on the rooftops of all the buildings, continuously popping fresh, buttery popcorn, which burst into the air and fell like warm, delicious popcorn-snow over their heads.