The Fantastic Fable of Peter Able

by Natalie Grigson

  “Alright, let’s go,” I said, still a bit confused.

  We raced up the stairs, slowing with each flight but not daring to stop. We were about halfway back to the maintenance closet when, suddenly, almost painfully, the tingling in my body ceased almost completely. I lurched and balanced myself against the railing for just a second, and shook my head to clear it.

  “You okay?” Jenny asked, stopping two steps ahead of me.

  I just nodded, but I could tell my inspiration from just moments ago was gone. I shrugged it off, hoping this might just be an author-bathroom-break kind of thing, as I wasn’t sure I could deal with all of this on my own.

  Several minutes later, we were standing at the top of the steps, out of breath, outside the small maintenance closet. I was just about to open the door when something told me not to.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Don’t open that door.” Okay, so it was Jenny who told me not to rather than any fancy inspiration or anything.

  “NOBODY MOVE!” somebody shouted from within the cafeteria beyond. It was hard to make out the voice through the layers of walls, and if I hadn’t been so enthralled the first time I’d heard the voice, I might not have recognized it. But there was no doubt in my mind—Gail the Assassin had found a way into the school and was in the cafeteria. And by the sound of it, causing quite a stir.

  There was one piercing, collective scream from the room before all fell silent. Jenny and I pressed our ears against the door, staring into each other’s terrified eyes and listening intently.

  I motioned toward the doorknob and held my finger up to my lips. Jenny nodded, and so I very carefully and quietly opened the door to the maintenance closet, just hoping this was a good decision.

  The little maintenance closet was just as we’d left it. Buckets were toppled over on the floor, partly covering the red, still wet puddle of blood, but not nearly enough. My stomach churned, and I averted my eyes. And there, tied up in the corner of the space, was Randy.

  Before I could so much as gasp, let alone shout a string of obscenities, Jenny silenced me with a spell. As it was, my mouth just moved noiselessly, and little white words of surprise shot out of my nose. I’d never been Silenced before, and it was quite unpleasant—kind of like squirting milk out of your nose when you’re laughing too hard.

  The words quickly settled themselves into the nooks and crannies of the room, and Jenny removed the spell, her clammy hand over my mouth.

  I knelt down next to Randy. His blue jeans were covered in dirt, and his button-up flannel shirt was stretched around the collar as though he’d been dragged along. He was still wearing his glasses, and beneath them his eyes were closed. His mouth was covered in several layers of duct tape, and his hands and feet were bound with some kind of metallic cord, cutting into his flesh unkindly. I put my hands on his shoulders and rocked him gently. Nothing.

  I shook him a bit harder. Still nothing.

  Finally, I ripped the duct tape from his mouth in one swift motion, ready to clamp my hand over his lips should he scream, but the only reaction was Jenny’s gasp. Randy didn’t move.

  The room spun around me, and for a second I felt like I was back in the last book of my series, kneeling down next to the still body of my sister, shaking her, screaming at her to wake up, to stop playing.

  “Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead,” I whispered, pressing my ear up to Randy’s chest.

  “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me . . .” It was all happening again.

  When I opened my eyes, Jenny was kneeling down next to us and pressing her fingers to his neck.

  “Well, he’s definitely alive,” she said in an exhale. “He’s just unconscious.”

  I nodded and leaned back against the wall, wiping the cold sweat from my brow, my heart still thumping painfully in my chest. It was too much; it was all too much. In the cafeteria, two or three people were talking in low voices, one of whom was definitely Gail. I couldn’t make out their words, nor did I particularly care to try. I looked from Jenny to Randy, one terrified but too proud to admit it and the other simply unconscious, for who knew how long. Neither of them would be here if it weren’t for me.

  My earlier confidence was gone. Where was this author now that I needed him/her? Unless I was being written to be tired, uninspired, and depressed, it seemed as though whoever had written me to take down the penguin earlier really had taken a bit of a break. I closed my eyes, wondering who this mysterious person was and what they were doing.

  “WHERE IS HE?!” Gail shouted, clearly just on the other side of the door. I listened as her footsteps trailed away, and sighed in relief.

  “Tell me where he is, and I will refrain from killing all of the students,” she said silkily, her voice quieter but still close enough to be clear.

  The room beyond stayed quiet, and I was overcome with gratitude. I didn’t even know most of the people out there, and yet—

  “Do you know what this is?!” Gail shouted. “Do you know what this CAN DO?!” Several people screamed from the other side of the door, and Gail laughed in response. “Now hand over the boy and nobody else needs to die. It really is too bad about that Stunt Double fellow, but that’s what you get when you try to be the hero, isn’t it?” She laughed again, and I felt the blood drain out of my face. She’d killed SD.

  “I saw him sneak under a table with that girl Jenny!” somebody yelped.

  I didn’t recognize the voice at first, but then she went on.

  “They were so overcome with their love for one another that they had to go under the table where all the penguins were! It was so romantic!”

  Oh God. It was Kiki, the psycho from Romance. If anyone would tell Gail everything, it was Kiki. She just didn’t seem capable of not talking.

  “Ah! So the vague threat of a nondescript Plot Device does work! Now, TELL ME WHERE—” But before Gail could even finish being menacing, Kiki was willingly filling her in.

  “Oh, they went off with one of the penguins—the big, fat one that looked like she was being written. They left through one of the doors,” Kiki offered.

  “Oh good! Then he’s already met Pen!” she shouted, clapping her huge hands like tambourines. In a much quieter voice that I had to strain to hear, she added, “Pen was supposed to go through the long-winded explanation scene and meet us back here five minutes ago. Something’s wrong. Now go, check the doors!”

  I’d no idea who she was talking to, but as she’d ordered, several pairs of footsteps began moving around the room. They were oddly light and almost impossible to hear since, luckily, they seemed to have started with the doors farthest from us. There were at least twenty doors off the cafeteria, all leading to different parts of the campus, but in the closet, it seemed only a matter of time before they found us.

  I didn’t dare make a noise in case Gail was lurking on the other side of our door. So once again, I put all of my effort into irritating, overwrought, and unnecessary internal monologue.

  What were we going to do if they found us?! Where would we go?! I could not believe that in this moment, the one moment I needed somebody to tell me what to do, the mysterious author who had guided me through the passageway and down into the dungeon seemed to have abandoned me! I suppose I should have learned my lesson five years ago when my first author sent me to Payne Academy, or even more recently, when he abandoned me and everyone else in my series! Could it have been him? Picking up the pen yet again, only to abandon me in my time of need?

  Jenny rolled her eyes impatiently and grabbed Randy’s feet. She gestured for me to get his arms, and once again, we disappeared through the closet’s secret passageway, moving a body. Honestly, this isn’t a usual thing for me.

  “Okay, now what do we do? If we go downstairs, we’ll be trapped in the Conflict hall if they come looking for us. If we go back out there,” Jenny nodded toward the door we’d just come through, “they’ll find us even faster.”

  “It’s quite a confli
ct,” I mumbled, trying to think of a plan, despite my fatigue.

  Jenny seemed just as exhausted, and carefully tried to lower her half of Randy onto the landing. She lost her hold, though, and he fell with a thud to the stone floor. He still didn’t stir, but the movement dislodged something from the pocket on his flannel shirt.

  At first it looked like a very, very old receipt. It was thin and clear and was covered in tiny writing. Leaning closer, though, I realized it was far too thin—it was transparent. It was a folded up piece of Plot Paper.

  I spread out the page across Randy, using his chest like a table. The tiny writing was undoubtedly his:

  The Adventures of Randy Potts, Detective

  Having just discovered that the penguin mastermind behind the terribly written, uninventive, and all around inferior mystery novel And Then There Were Two would be at the school dance, the Handsome Randy Potts raced off to campus to save his best friend. Of course Peter was an important character, but he was not the main character in The Adventures of Randy Potts, Detective, so it was up to our hero, Randy, to save his friend and Peter’s girlfriend, Jenny.

  Jenny raised her eyebrows at me when she read this last bit. So I guess Jenny was my girlfriend now.

  Anyway . . .

  To Randy’s dismay, by the time he reached the dance, Peter and Jenny had just disappeared beneath a table. A vapid, one-dimensional, silly character named Kiki obligingly told Randy that Jenny and Peter had been spotted talking to a penguin.

  This was worse than Randy had feared. Peter and Jenny did not yet know that it was all Pen’s idea to have Peter killed in the first place! That she had been influencing Christine’s story from the start! But they would have to know the truth, the whole truth (and nothing but the truth). So Randy reached for the one mightiest weapon at his disposal: The Plot Paper.

  Randy allowed Peter and Jenny to follow Pen into the maintenance closet as was written in that, again, terrible, uninventive, and all around inferior And Then There Were Two, where she would finally clear things up. She told them how up until this point, most of their story had actually been Christine’s, starting with their first class in Conflict, and why Pen so desperately wanted Peter dead. To Pen’s chagrin, though, Christine’s story was not the only one being written!

  Randy scribbled along more and more forcefully, and with his influence, his story, The Adventures of Randy Potts, Detective, took a surprising turn in which Peter Able beat Pen the Penguin senseless. Randy kept writing, guiding his author with his words, and Peter and Jenny whisked the penguin away to the dungeon and deposited him in one of the classrooms. On a side note, Randy just stepped in something gooey and would like to influence a new pair of shoes, preferably brown leather.

  Moving on: Peter locked the classroom door to keep Pen at bay, and then Peter and Jenny ascended the steps to the dance, where unbeknownst to them Gail was looking for them.

  Unfortunately, she found Randy before he could finish—

  On the page there was a hole here, as though the pen had been jerked violently, and there was no more.

  “Randy is the main character? Are we in Randy’s book?” Jenny asked, comprehension dawning. I looked at the paper, then at Randy’s face, then at my hand, which was entwined with Jenny’s.

  “I think there are two authors out there writing about the same thing . . . well, at least two,” I said, remembering the very early days after my first series had ended, and how I’d never quite gotten rid of that tingling feeling. “But I really don’t think Randy has been influencing anything until tonight—you know, emergency situation and all,” I said. “I wonder who the author is? Oh, I hope it’s somebody good. You know that Nata—”

  “It doesn’t matter who the author is! The point is, we can’t influence the plot without the main character writing on the Plot Paper! Look at him!” She waved her arm at Randy, who had a string of spit meandering down his cheek and onto the stone floor. “If we can’t wake him up, he can’t influence whoever is writing, and then what happens?”

  I thought about it for a minute, watching the drool begin to puddle. I couldn’t hear anything from the cafeteria, but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to from the passageway. We had to do something.

  “We decide what happens,” I said quietly. “Randy is out for the count. His author is probably just sitting Out There somewhere in a daze, wondering where the thread of his story went.”

  “Or hers,” Jenny amended.

  “Right. And we know Tabatha Christine’s not writing anything right now, otherwise Pen would be out of the dungeon and I’d be dead . . . So we pick up the slack. Who says a main character has to be the one to guide a story? We can change the endings to the stories Out There. Not with this,” I said, picking up the Plot Paper, folding it again, and tucking it back into Randy’s pocket. “But with what we do,” I said determinedly, jabbing Randy in the stomach for emphasis. He let out a small groan and continued on in his weird, hibernation-like state.

  “So here’s what we do. We stick Randy in the corner here, and we make a break for it. We’ll sneak out, come back with the Neighborhood Dragon, and take on Gail and whoever else is out there. We’ll get rid of them once and for all. The conflict will be solved. We’ll grab Randy and get the hell out of here. What do you think?” I asked, looking up at Jenny enthusiastically.

  Her face was pale and detailed in its horror. She was looking at the door behind me.

  “I think that sounds like a wonderful story,” Gail said. I spun around and saw her standing in the open doorway. Her hands were on her hips imperiously, and she was once again wearing a long, nearly floor-length skirt, the tips of her heavy combat boots just visible beneath. Her hair was pulled back from her face, revealing the soft glow of her skin and the little crow’s feet around her eyes. Light footsteps pitter-pattered up behind her. “Gather these three and bring them to the penguin,” she said, not taking her eyes from mine.

  Three burly little hobbits spilled into the space, each hefting a large black frying pan nearly the size of his torso. I braced myself, knowing all too well what was coming.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When I awoke, I was propped up at a desk with my hands and feet tied with the same metal-like rope that had bound Randy. It was digging into my flesh painfully, and as I struggled to free myself, I felt something warm trickle from my wrists onto my hands.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded, surprised to find that my mouth was not taped. Once my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw that I was in a small, dungeon-like room. The floor, ceiling, and walls were all rough gray stone. In rows around me were several small, empty desks, and in the front of the classroom was a tall, rather plain wooden podium. One of the Conflict classrooms. From nowhere, Gail appeared behind the podium, brandishing a thick, polished wooden wand and wearing a maniacal smile. With a flick of her wrist, Pen, Randy, and Jenny appeared beside her. And then the wand turned into a large silver butcher knife.

  She stepped in between Jenny and Randy, who both appeared to be sleeping now, though they were standing straight up on their own, unbound. Randy’s string of drool had turned into something closer to a long rope of slobber, dangling down to his midriff. Jenny, my girlfriend, was just smiling as though she were dreaming of something nice. My girlfriend. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to survive this, not just for Beth, but for Randy and for Jenny. Just to be able to call her my girlfriend out loud.

  Pen took Gail’s spot behind the podium, barely peering over the top, and from its surface, picked up a thin sheet of Plot Paper. She waved it in the air, teasingly, before laying it down and picking up the strange writing tool—the most fatal weapon in the room. She began writing frantically, and as she did, Gail held the knife up to Jenny’s dirt-smudged throat. Jenny’s mouth twitched and her brow furrowed; perhaps she sensed the cold metal.

  “Peter, it is time for you to make a choice,” Gail announced. “I had to choose to leave my family for their protection, because I loved them. But my sac
rifice was overlooked, and my dear, sweet husband,” she said, moving the knife to Randy’s neck and unknowingly slicing the string of drool in half, “chose you over me! So now you choose, Peter. Who do you choose to watch die first?”

  Gail slowly moved the knife back and forth between the two, laughing all the while, and Pen continued to write feverishly, her beak still fixed in that mad smile. The weird, tingling, out-of-control feeling was slowly creeping over me as Pen wrote and wrote. I felt my thoughts slipping, and then thoughts that were not my own entered my head. My mouth began to move of its own accord. It seemed as though Pen was finally influencing the ending to Christine’s book, and I knew what she meant me to say.

  “Kill me instead” is what I was meant to say.

  But what I said was, “This is bull—”

  Pen slapped the podium with her fat wing and looked up at me, her little eyes wide in shock. She then looked at Gail who was standing in similar confusion, no longer laughing, just moving the knife back and forth between the two hostages.

  Pen started scribbling on the Plot Paper again, punctuated something forcefully, and then looked up at me triumphantly. When she saw that I was standing up, hands and feet no longer tied, she looked . . . a little bit concerned.

  “How did you do that?” she breathed. “I didn’t write that!”

  “Christine’s novel isn’t the only one being written, Pen,” I said, and as I did, I finally realized the truth. If Pen wasn’t influencing my story and Randy certainly wasn’t either (his head drooped forward and he gave a little snort), then their books, their authors, even them, and Jenny, and me, all of us—we were all a part of something bigger. Something Big. And no, I’m not getting all philosophical or spiritual right in the thick of things. I mean Big. Like another story. Like something You might read.

  And with a new confidence that had nothing to do with Plot Paper, I snapped my fingers and produced a thin, roughly whittled wand out of thin air. I hadn’t done much magic since my series had ended—honestly, after failing to revive Beth with the most powerful spells I knew, I’d been scared to try anything too complicated. But the memory of my sister was like a stimulant. Rage, sadness, and love boiled up within me, and with a downward slash of my arm, the knife in Gail’s hand vanished, and she and Pen slammed into one another like magnets. They were now bound by the force of my will.