What a Trip!

by Tony Abbott

  I grabbed the book. Flipping back a few pages, I reread the part where Fix twisted his weird little mustache tips at the Bombay train station.

  “His devious little brain was planning this all along,” I whispered to Frankie. “To get us thrown in jail and delay Mr. Fogg’s trip!”

  “Yeah?” Frankie snarled. “Well, it’s working.”

  “Your trial shall be next week,” boomed the judge. “And Mr. Fogg shall also be held accountable for the acts of his servant.”

  Passepartout squealed again, this time in outrage. “But we shall miss our steamer! And lose our wager!”

  “Excuse me,” said Mr. Fogg. “Judge, may we be set free by posting a certain amount of money as bail?”

  The judge breathed out heavily. “I suppose I must grant you that right. I hereby set bail at two thousand pounds. Once you pay, you will be free until the trial.”

  Mr. Fogg calmly plunked down his giant carpetbag, withdrew a wad of cash, and set it on the judge’s desk. “Two thousand pounds, sir.”

  “You may go, for now,” said the judge.

  Twenty minutes later, Fogg led us to the Calcutta harbor where the steamship Rangoon was moored.

  “Mr. Fogg, you shall lose your money,” Aouda said.

  “The money is not important,” said Fogg. “As long as we do not lose a moment. And on we go!”

  As we tramped up the plank and onto the ship, I turned to Frankie. “I’m sure glad to leave Detective Fix grumbling in the background.”

  “Something tells me he won’t give up so easily,” she said.

  Unfortunately, Frankie was right.

  Chapter 12

  The steamship Rangoon sailed past a bunch of cool islands as it steamed south from Calcutta. Vast forests of palm trees, green bamboo trees, and wild ferns sprouted out of the islands, while hot breezes swept over the deck and the ship rolled over the waves.

  Still, Detective Fix was all we could think about.

  “As unbelievable as it sounds, Devin, I know he’s on board,” said Frankie, as we patrolled the deck. “I haven’t seen him, but I feel him lurking.”

  “I do, too,” I said. “I say, we go on the prowl right now.”

  Well, we didn’t have to prowl more than a minute before we saw a sneaky guy darting up the stairs from a lower deck. It was Detective Fix, all right, in his regular suit, pointy mustaches, and all.

  I snorted. “This guy never quits. Let’s follow him!”

  Fix crept along behind Fogg and Aouda, muttering stuff to himself. We skulked along behind the skulker.

  “I lost him in Suez, I lost him in Bombay,” he was muttering to himself. “I lost him in Calcutta. If I don’t delay him for sure in Hong Kong, I will have lost him for good!”

  I turned to Frankie. “He’s just so evil!”

  “You get no argument from me,” said Frankie.

  “And who is this woman?” Fix wondered aloud.

  Even before Fix wandered off into the shadows again, we had something new to worry about.

  A ferocious storm whipped up from nowhere and began tossing the ship roughly from side to side.

  Passepartout came stumbling out of his cabin, shaking his fist at the sky and saying things in French that didn’t sound all that good.

  Frankie and I were a little panicked, too, but there was not much we could do about it. We could reread all we wanted, but the book’s pages got all blurry when we started to read beyond where the story was.

  Through it all, Mr. Fogg stood at the railing and gazed at the storm as if it were a still life. Nothing seemed to bother him. While Passepartout almost had a stroke with his moaning and groaning about possibly missing our next ship, the Carnatic, our fearless leader was so calm you would have thought the storm was part of his plans.

  “He’s very strange,” I said, trying to keep from getting pitched overboard. “I mean, I like him, but I wonder if he’s really human.”

  “Yeah. It’s like everything with him is mathematical and exact. Sometimes, I just want to run up behind him and yell ‘Blaga-blaga!,’ just to see what he’d do.”

  “He’d probably just say—‘Blaga-blaga, indeed!’”

  Splash! A big wave washed over the deck.

  “Let’s get inside,” I said. “The book’s getting wet. Not to mention me!”

  The storm blasted and howled for two days before it finally let up. Even though we lost a day, when we got to Hong Kong—on November 7, thirty-six days after leaving London—the steamship Carnatic, bound for Japan, was still waiting in the harbor.

  “We set sail at five o’clock in the morning,” said the captain of the Carnatic. “Bright and early.”

  “Arrgh!” Fix muttered to himself.

  “What luck!” said Passepartout.

  “There is no such thing as luck,” Mr. Fogg noted, scribbling in his book. “Now, Princess Aouda, as we are in Hong Kong, we must find your cousin.”

  The look she gave him then would have melted most people into a puddle, but Fogg appeared not to notice.

  We all got into a carriage and rode through the streets of Hong Kong. It was a busy place, with hundreds of buildings crowded into a small half-circle of mountains that slanted right down into the sea. There were English soldiers everywhere, and a lot of the people were dressed like the people back in London.

  Fogg found where Aouda’s cousin lived, but it turned out that he had moved to Holland two years earlier.

  A look of distress crossed Aouda’s face. In her sweet, soft voice, she said, “What should I do, Mr. Fogg?”

  Without a pause, Fogg said, “Princess, I should be honored if you would come with us the rest of the way.”

  She practically leaped for joy. “Oh, Mr. Fogg—”

  “Once in London,” Fogg continued, “we can make arrangements for your journey to Holland.”

  Aouda unleaped for joy. “Oh. Yes. Thank you, of course.” I don’t think she wanted to hear that last part.

  “Passepartout,” said Fogg. “Go to the Carnatic, and purchase five tickets instead of four.”

  Of course, Passepartout was delighted. He made it no secret that he liked Aouda a lot. He skipped all the way to the ship, and we skipped all the way with him.

  And it was a good thing we did, because when we arrived at the Carnatic to get tickets, we found that the captain had changed the time for sailing.

  “We leave tonight,” he said. “At midnight.”

  “We must tell my master at once!” said Passepartout.

  Now, who should appear just then, but Mr. Fix, the sneaky, snaky guy himself, popping out of the shadows with the ends of his mustache twisted up tight.

  “Have you heard?” asked Fix when he reached us.

  “That you’re bad?” said Frankie. “Loud and clear.”

  He gave us a look. “That our ship will leave tonight.”

  “And,” said Passepartout, “I must tell Mr. Fogg—”

  “Wait!” Fix said sharply. Then he grabbed Passepartout by the arm and tried to hold him. “I have something to tell you about your master—”

  “Oh, no you don’t!” I said. I tried to free Passepartout, but Fix leaped at me and grabbed my hand. I swung around and wriggled free of his grasp. The problem was that I staggered back into Frankie, knocking the book from her hand. It tumbled to the ground, bounced across the dock, and landed right at the feet of Detective Fix. He picked it up.

  “Don’t read that!” I said.

  “Why?” he snarled. “Is it Mr. Fogg’s notebook? Does it describe his crime?”

  “Crime?” said Passepartout. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Mr. Fogg being a bank robber!” said Fix. “There, I’ve told you! Yes, Mr. Fogg is a bank robber making his escape around the world! And I am a police detective sent here from London to arrest him!”

  He began to flip a page or two of the book.

  “Don’t do that!” shrieked Frankie. “Don’t read it!”

  There was a
reason Frankie was shrieking. We had learned the extreme hard way that if you flip ahead of where the story actually is, the whole scene rips in half and darkness crashes down on you. Crashes really hard.

  “Oh, the book is evidence, is it?” the detective said, flipping page after page. “It says here, the Carnatic, setting sail from Hong Kong at midnight on the seventh of November, directed her course at full steam toward Japan … wait … what is going on—?”

  “Oh, no, it’s happening!” I screamed. “Frankie, grab the book! Close it before—”

  But it was already too late.

  Kkkrrpp! There was a horrible ripping sound, and the sky above us turned instantly black. A sudden large V-shaped tear appeared over our heads.

  “Meltdown!” I cried, as we all toppled to the dock in a mess of arms and legs and the flipping, flapping pages of the old and crusty classic book.

  “Help!” Frankie cried out.

  “Help me, too!” I shouted.

  “Sacré bleu!” groaned Passepartout.

  But nothing helped. We were all tossed like a salad and tumbled over and over until everything went dark around us. The next thing I knew, the dock had vanished and I was falling, falling, falling—thud!

  I hit the ground hard. When I scrambled to my feet, I was still at the dock, but instead of its being night, it was now the next morning, and I was alone.

  Passepartout was gone. Fix was gone. Frankie was gone. The book was gone.

  And something else was gone, too.

  Chapter 13

  Instead of the really big steamship sitting in the water, there was a really big empty space.

  The Carnatic was gone. Departed. Left. Not there.

  “No, no, no, no,” I began mumbling to myself. “This is not good. This is bad. This is very, very bad.”

  I was stuck in—where was I?—Hong Kong, which is in China. Which is very far away from Palmdale. And the only way back home was with Frankie and the book. But I was everywhere they weren’t.

  “What if I never find Frankie again?” I groaned out loud. “What if everybody left me behind? What if I get stuck here in Hong Kong? What if I never get back to my life? I like my life! All that lying around. All that TV to watch. All that homework not to do. All the books I never want to read! No! No! No! This—can’t—be—happening! Oh, please, someone give me a sign—”

  “Indeed.”

  Now, I’ve made fun of that word before, but I was never so glad to hear it as just then, when my life was teetering on the edge of extinction. I whirled around and there was Phileas Fogg, calmly glancing at the big empty space that should have been a ship.

  With him was the beautiful Princess Aouda.

  “Oh, dear. Our ship has sailed,” she said softly.

  “Indeed,” Mr. Fogg repeated.

  “Aouda! Mr. Fogg! I’m so glad you found me!” I interrupted. “I woke up here all alone and didn’t know what I was going to do and my head started to—”

  “Where is Passepartout?” asked Fogg.

  The guy doesn’t go for people yelling and screaming. So I calmed down. I took a big breath. Then I told them everything that had happened. Well, I tried to. Because being dropped into books has all these rules, Fogg and Aouda only understood part of it. Among the parts they didn’t get was about Fix being a detective sent to arrest Mr. Fogg for robbery. Even though I tried about a hundred different ways to say that, Aouda and Fogg just weren’t supposed to know it yet. It was then that I heard another voice. A not-so-welcome voice.

  “Eh, did someone say my name?”

  It was Detective Fix himself, strolling down the dock with a suitcase in his hand. I felt like tackling him right there, for messing up the trip, for grabbing the book, and also for losing Frankie and Passepartout.

  But the dude was bigger than me. Besides, I didn’t want to be skewered by that mustache of his.

  Of course, Aouda and Fogg were polite to him.

  “Good morning, Mr. Fix,” said Aouda.

  “Our ship appears to have left,” Fogg added.

  “Oh, my!” said the annoying detective, twirling the twisty ends of his stinky mustache and pretending to be astonished. “Has it? How terrible! And the next steamer doesn’t leave for a week. Too bad, too bad. Ah, well. Nothing to do about it. Shall we find a hotel and wait here for the week? Here, Miss, let me get your bag—”

  “No,” said Fogg, putting himself between Fix and Aouda’s bag. “The leaving of the Carnatic is a minor difficulty, I admit. But you forget, Mr. Fix, that this is the harbor of Hong Kong, one of the great ports of Asia. With a little work, we shall find a ship to carry us across the China Sea to Japan. Devin, Aouda, let’s find a ship!”

  Fogg and Aouda stepped off quickly.

  Fix snarled under his breath. “But … but … arggh!”

  “Ha!” I said, storming off with Fogg and Aouda to find a boat bound for Japan. Fix stumbled along after us, of course. It seemed as if he was attached to Mr. Fogg by some kind of invisible rope. Every place Fogg went, Fix went, too. It was annoying, but I couldn’t stop him.

  It wasn’t too long before Mr. Fogg found a chubby little guy named Captain John Bunsby, standing on the deck of a small sailing boat called the Tankadere.

  After Fogg explained what we needed, Bunsby said, “It can’t be done—”

  “Oh, too bad!” said Fix delightedly.

  “—the way you suggest, Mr. Fogg,” the captain went on. “But if we go to Shanghai, China, you can pick up the American steamer there.”

  “Very good,” said Fogg. “From there, we’ll stop in Yokohama, then across to San Francisco, losing no time.”

  “Except for one thing,” I said. “What about Frankie?”

  “And Passepartout?” said Aouda. “They are lost—and we have no idea where?”

  Fogg wrinkled his brow, slipped out his notebook, and scribbled a few things. Satisfied, he closed the notebook. “I shall do whatever I can to find them.”

  “Oh, Mr. Fogg!” said Aouda, her eyes getting misty again. “Thank you.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I shall be back in one hour, and then we sail.”

  In an hour he was back, explaining that he had alerted the Hong Kong police that if either Passepartout and Frankie were found, they should be put on the next boat to Yokohama. He left a wad of money for tickets and other stuff to help them.

  It was pretty much all he could do.

  I didn’t like the idea of just leaving Hong Kong without Frankie, but I had to trust that if she had the book, she would do okay. Besides, Passepartout was a good guy. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her.

  When Captain Bunsby said it was time, we all got on board—even Fix wormed his way on—and set sail for Shanghai. The wind filled the sails of the Tankadere, and we swiftly made our way out of the harbor to open sea.

  “If we can reach Shanghai in time to catch the American steamer,” said Mr. Fogg, gazing at the water ahead, “and if, for some reason, Passepartout and Frankie managed to get on the Carnatic before it left Hong Kong, we can meet up with them in Yokohama. It all depends on making good time now, of course—”

  No sooner had he said this than the winds began to blow harder, the sky turned dark, and lightning flashed across the sky.

  “Storm coming up!” yelled the captain.

  “Indeed,” said Fogg, scribbling the word storm in his notebook. “Unforeseen, but not yet a problem.”

  Now I tell you, I don’t like these storms that just “come up.” One minute, I’m standing on deck, looking out at the water; the next minute, waves are crashing against the hull and I’m hanging over the side, losing my lunch. The only good thing about this storm was that the winds pushed the ship faster and farther on its way.

  Except that it turned out not to be just a storm.

  “It’s a tempest!” said Fix, waves splashing over him.

  “It’s not a tempest!” said a sailor. “It’s a typhoon!”

  “It’s no typhoon!” cried the
captain. “It’s a hurricane!”

  Except that it wasn’t a hurricane, either.

  It was Frankie.

  Chapter 14

  I could tell it wasn’t just a regular storm, because the lightning that flashed and the thunder that crashed were different from any storm I had ever seen before.

  They were exactly like the kind of meltdown that happens when you read ahead in the book.

  And Frankie was reading ahead.

  Seeing the sky start to rip in half usually freaked me out, but not this time. It meant that even though I’d get tumbled all around and probably all kinds of wet, Frankie was okay somewhere and reading.

  I kept searching the skies for what I knew was going to happen, and sure enough, there it was.

  A black V-shaped rip opened up in the sky as if we were all on a page being ripped in half.

  Kkkkkk! The clouds split apart. The ship reeled and rocked from side to side. Aouda stumbled into Mr. Fogg. He got all flustered and she just smiled at him as he steadied her. Fix slammed into one thing after another like a pinball. I had to laugh.

  Finally, I was thrown hard to the deck, and just as I was sloshing across it, heading straight for the heavy mainmast, I found myself tumbling over and over in the darkness. The next moment I was in blazing sunshine, sliding down to earth on something bumpy.

  It was a roof. The roof of a pagoda.

  The roof of a pagoda—in Yokohama, Japan!

  “Devin!” yelled a voice.

  “Frankie!” I cried out, flipping up off the curved edge of the roof and straight down into a goldfish pond.

  Splursh!

  Wet to the bone, I clambered out to see two very familiar people rushing up to help me out.

  “Devin! We found you!” cried Passepartout.

  “Told you I’d get him here!” said Frankie.

  “Yahoo! We’re back together!” I said. “But how?”

  Frankie gave me a big grin. “After Mr. Fix caused the meltdown at the Hong Kong dock, we found ourselves on the Carnatic sailing without you.”

  “Then, at dawn today, November fourteenth,” said Passepartout, “we arrived in Yokohama. We got off to wait.”

  “But we weren’t sure if you guys would get here on time,” said Frankie. “So I did some reading.”