by Jason Segel
“Okay, okay.” It was Rocco. “Calm down, Charlie. What’s going on, Jack?”
Charlie almost told his friend not to waste his time. But Jack seemed perfectly happy to talk to Rocco.
“You know how I always climb the oak tree at recess?” he said.
“Sure,” Rocco said gamely, though Charlie doubted Rocco paid much attention to his nine-year-old brother’s recess routine.
“Well, today when I got to the second branch, I found a note from Indy,” Jack continued. “It said, ‘I have something to show you.’ And it asked me to come here after school. Indy’s my friend, so I came.”
Charlie shook his head. “INK turned everyone in Orville Falls into sleepwalking zombies, and then she nearly burned down our house, and my brother says she’s his friend,” he grumbled.
“That’s enough, Charlie,” Paige said.
“This is what she wanted to show me,” Jack told Rocco. He handed the older boy the little bottle.
“What is it?” Rocco asked.
“I don’t know!” Jack said. “Indy called it her father’s formula. I figure it’s got to be something important, but Charlie scared her away before she could tell me.”
“Oh, come on!” Charlie cried. “We all know it’s the poison she made from the belladonna! She was probably trying to test it on Jack.”
He expected to hear Jack say it wasn’t true, but it was Rocco who came to INK’s defense. “We don’t know what she was planning to do with it,” he said. He gave the contents of the bottle a sniff and his nose wrinkled in disgust. “It’s not perfume, but we don’t know for sure that it’s poison either.” He passed the bottle to Alfie. “Do you think you can do some tests and find out what’s in this stuff?”
“Sure,” said Alfie. “I can give it a shot.”
Charlie could barely believe his ears. Two of his best friends in the whole wide world seemed to be siding with Jack.
Neither of the Laird boys had taken a single bite of their tofu surprise. Jack was constructing a fortress with the white cubes, while Charlie was mashing his tofu into a nasty white paste.
“Traitor,” Charlie mumbled under his breath.
“Jerk,” Jack replied under his.
Andrew Laird put down his fork. “Okay, that’s enough. You guys want to tell me what the heck is going on?” he demanded.
“They’re just having a spat,” said Charlotte, who knew the whole story and had refused to take sides, much to Charlie’s frustration. “Something about a girl at school.”
“The argument needs to end now,” Andrew Laird said. “We don’t call each other names like that in this house.”
Just then the phone rang and the lecture ended as Charlie’s dad stood up to answer it. “Hello?” he said. “Yes, this is he.” For the next thirty seconds, Charlie watched the expression on his father’s face change from confusion to surprise and then finally settle on anger.
“That was interesting,” he told his family as he took his seat at the table. “Your principal just called, Charlie. She wanted to apologize for suspending you this morning. Seems the teacher who accused you and your friends of vandalism confessed that she hadn’t actually caught any of you in the act. She’s resigned from her position.”
Charlie sat up straight in his chair. That wasn’t what they’d planned at all. Ms. Abbot wasn’t supposed to resign. Ollie was going to take credit for his artwork, his mom would probably pay to have the school repainted, and everything would be perfectly fine.
“And while I’m glad to hear that you aren’t a vandal,” Andrew Laird continued, “I do have one question for you: where exactly did you go when you were sent home at eight-thirty this morning?”
Charlie couldn’t help it. He glanced at Charlotte.
“I picked Charlie up from school,” she confessed.
“That’s what I thought,” Andrew Laird said. “And you didn’t bother to tell me because…?”
Charlie could tell Charlotte was nervous. The fork in her hand was shaking so hard that a lump of tofu fell off it. “Because I knew Charlie was innocent, and I didn’t want to upset you,” she said, sticking fairly close to the truth.
“Well, it didn’t work. I am upset,” Andrew said as Charlie watched in horror. He’d never seen his father and stepmother argue like this before. “I don’t like being excluded from important family business as if my opinion doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sorry, Andy,” Charlotte said. Charlie wished she could sound a little more convincing. “I should have called you.”
“He’s my son,” Andrew told her. “I’m glad you two have gotten so close, but the secrets have to stop. If Charlie’s suspended from school, I need to know.”
Charlie stood up from the dinner table and dropped his napkin on his plate. “Don’t get mad at her. It was all my fault,” he said. “I’ll punish myself. I’m going to my room.”
“Charlie!” his dad called as Charlie rushed up the stairs. “Come back and eat your dinner!”
But Charlie couldn’t face it. In a single day, his best friends had turned against him and he’d started his whole family fighting. It was better for everyone if Charlie locked himself away alone in his bedroom.
—
When he got there, he lay down face-first and fully clothed on his bed. A split second later, he was knocked to the ground by a fat, smelly sheep. When Charlie stood up again, he was dripping with foul-smelling muck and on the verge of tears.
Why was he back in ICK’s dream? Why was he being forced to spend his nights in a sheep pen? And what did it say about him that he shared a dream with a villain?
He heard someone humming in the distance. But this time the sound of the lullaby wasn’t comforting. Instead, it reminded Charlie that he was completely alone, and he found himself doing something he never would have expected.
“ICK!” he shouted. “I mean, Isabel! Isabel Kessog! Are you out there?”
There was no answer aside from the whistling wind.
“I’m not here to fight you! I just want to talk!”
Charlie gave up and took a look around. The moon was out for once, and he could see that he was in the field outside Orville Falls, just below Kessog Castle. And the sheep that surrounded him were the ones that had escaped right before ICK and INK were sent to the lighthouse in Maine.
Something had happened here, Charlie knew. That was why it had become the scene of ICK’s never-ending nightmare—a dream so bad that she always came back to it. It had something to do with the lullaby that seemed to scare ICK to death. But no matter how hard he tried, Charlie couldn’t figure out what it could be.
Andrew Laird stopped the car in front of Cypress Creek Elementary. Charlie pulled the door handle, gave the door a light nudge with his shoulder—and tumbled out onto the sidewalk.
“Sorry!” Ollie Tobias had pulled the door open at the very worst moment. It was eight in the morning, but Ollie was buzzing with so much energy that Charlie half expected him to explode. “I didn’t mean to make you fall, but I gotta talk to you right away.”
“Ollie Tobias, just the person I wanted to see.” Charlie’s books had spilled out of his backpack and he was cramming them back inside. “You said you were going to take credit for all your art yesterday. Why didn’t you?”
“I was busy with a new project! When the muse calls, I gotta listen,” Ollie said. Then he looked up to see Charlie’s dad watching them. “Have a nice day, Mr. Laird!” he called cheerfully, shutting the car door.
“So what do you want now, Ollie?” Charlie demanded.
“Not here,” the boy told him. “In private.” He guided Charlie into the school, toward a room that had recently served as a broom closet. When Ollie opened the door, Charlie saw that it was now painted to resemble a small Italian grotto.
“Step inside my office,” Ollie said.
Charlie complied, and Ollie closed the door behind them.
Out in the hallway, the first warning bell rang. “Okay, what is it?” Charlie
asked.
“Did I ever tell you about my pet monkey?”
Charlie groaned. “Oh, come on! You’ve got to be kidding, Ollie. I don’t have time for this. I’ve gotta get to class.”
“No,” Ollie insisted. “I’m not kidding. He was a capuchin monkey, and his name was Dingleberry, and he was totally evil.”
“Yeah, probably because you gave him a name like Dingleberry.”
“Give me a break!” Ollie said. “I was five! Dingleberry was the coolest name I could think of. But listen, Charlie! He really was a horrible monkey. He used to yank my hair when my parents weren’t looking. And he’d do stuff around the house like paint pictures on the walls with grape jelly or poop in a corner. Whatever he did, I’d always end up getting blamed for it.”
“A monkey painted pictures on your walls with grape jelly?” Charlie asked skeptically.
“All right, all right, that was me,” Ollie admitted. “But I swear I never pooped in a corner or put bugs in my mom’s face cream or covered the neighbor’s cat with maple syrup. It was all Dingleberry. You’ve got to believe me, Charlie.”
Charlie put one hand on the door handle and the other on Ollie’s shoulder. “I believe you. But as much as I’ve enjoyed this trip back to your extremely strange youth, I really have to get to class. Big things are happening, Ollie, and I can’t be stuck in a broom closet all day.”
“I know big things are happening!” Ollie practically screamed. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you! Just wait for one second. I’m getting to the point!”
“Fine,” Charlie said with a sigh. “But let’s get there faster.”
“Okay, okay! My mom gave Dingleberry to a rescue center when I was six, after she caught him cutting my dad’s hair with pruning shears at three o’clock in the morning, but I had bad dreams about that monkey for years. And last night I had another.”
“Ollie, you read Charlotte’s book. You know what you have to do to beat your nightmares…,” Charlie began.
“Of course I do! I memorized that book from cover to cover. So last night when I saw Dingleberry, I didn’t run away. I stood right there, and I told that monkey I wasn’t scared of him anymore. And guess what, Charlie. He wouldn’t leave. He told me—”
“Your monkey could talk?” Charlie said, trying not to laugh.
“It was a nightmare!” Ollie cried. “Dingleberry told me he had something to show me. He said something bad was about to happen in the Netherworld. I didn’t really understand everything, ’cause he was speaking with a Portuguese accent. But he mentioned some kind of prophecy, and he made it pretty clear that he wasn’t going to let me wake up until I went with him.”
“What did you do?” Charlie asked.
Ollie scrunched up his face. “I didn’t have much of a choice, did I? When a monkey appears in your nightmare and tells you there’s trouble brewing, you let him show you what he needs to show you! And oh, man, Charlie, am I glad I did.”
Charlie felt dread settle over him like a cold, wet blanket.
“Dingleberry took me to a house in the Netherworld. It was in a town that kind of looked like Cypress Creek, and it was a little white house….”
“A little white house?” Charlie repeated incredulously. “You don’t see many of those in the Netherworld.”
“Yeah, I know!” Ollie said. “This place looked totally normal. I’m tellin’ you, Charlie, it was super creepy. When you find a regular-looking house in the Netherworld, you know there’s gotta be something really awful and disgusting inside.”
“And?” Charlie asked. “Was there?”
Ollie took a deep breath. “I’m getting to that part. So anyways, we get there, and Dingleberry tells me to be really quiet, and he took me up to one of the windows and made me look inside. And guess who I saw in there, Charlie. That horrible girl! The same one who was here—the one we all saw in our dreams.”
“There are two girls, remember?” Charlie asked. “The one in Cypress Creek is INK. If you saw one in the Netherworld last night, it was probably her sister, ICK.”
“Whoever it was, she wasn’t alone. The whole house was filled with Nightmares. And I’m talking about some of the scariest Nightmares I’ve ever seen! You’d have to be a real sicko to dream about some of that stuff. And the Nightmares were all gathered around ICK. I couldn’t hear what she was saying to them, but it looked like she was giving them orders. ICK’s planning something, Charlie. I swear it.”
Ollie paused to catch his breath. Then he looked at Charlie as if searching for some kind of reaction. “Well? What do you think?”
Charlie felt sick. “I think it sounds like ICK has been making some new friends,” he said.
That night, after school was out, dinner was eaten, homework was finished, and most normal people had gone to bed, Charlie was preparing for his latest trip to the Netherworld. Unfortunately, so was Jack.
“I told you, you’re not coming with me!” Charlie hissed loudly. “I need to find out what ICK is up to. And bringing you on a surveillance mission is like walking around with a giant sign that says LOOK AT ME. You’re practically a celebrity—like Justin Bieber. Everyone in the Netherworld knows you, and they all either love you or want to kill you.”
“Sorry. You can’t stop me from coming,” Jack replied defiantly, looking as serious as anyone wearing Captain America pajamas with a giant white star on the belly could possibly look.
“Oh yes, I can,” Charlie growled.
It was midnight, and the boys and their stepmom were standing right outside the bedroom where Andrew Laird was blissfully dozing. So when Charlie and Jack started to squabble, Charlotte quickly herded them back downstairs to the landing, where a portrait of Silas DeChant peered at them from the wall.
“Boys!” she whispered frantically. “Keep it down! If your father hears any of this and thinks we’re keeping secrets again, we’re all going to be in big trouble. He’s still furious that I didn’t tell him about Charlie’s suspension from school.”
“Fine,” Charlie said, keeping his voice low. “But I’m not taking Jack to the Netherworld. He’s not even on our side anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” Jack said. “Just because I met Indy in the park, I’m suddenly Benedict Cumberbatch?”
“It’s Benedict Arnold, you moron,” Charlie replied.
“That’s enough!” Charlotte hissed.
“ICK is up to something,” Charlie said. “We need to find out what it is, and we can’t risk Benedict here blabbing all about it to ICK’s sister.”
Charlotte turned to Jack. “Are you going to tell INK about anything you see in the Netherworld tonight?” she asked.
“No!” Jack cried.
“Then that’s that!” Charlotte told Charlie. “If your brother promises he won’t tell INK, he won’t.”
“But—” Charlie started to protest.
“Stop it right now! Your brother is not a traitor!” Charlotte said, a little too loudly. Her head swiveled toward the second floor, and she waited for a moment, as if worried she’d woken her husband. Then she continued in a whisper. “I don’t know why Jack feels the need to hang around with that weird little girl-creature, but I do know that he’s not going to do anything that puts us at risk. He’s just like your mom.”
It felt like a punch in the gut. “What do you mean?” Charlie asked.
“Veronica used to give everyone the benefit of the doubt,” Charlotte said. “I was the skeptic. I never believed anything unless I had proof. But that’s why your mom and I always made a good team—and that’s why you and Jack do too. You’re all head, Charlie—and Jack’s all heart. If you put the two together, you can’t be beat.”
Charlie looked down at Jack, trying not to feel jealous that his brother was the one who’d ended up just like their mom. “ICK and INK made the Tranquility Tonic, remember? Have you forgotten what it did to the people who drank it? Have you forgotten that it nearly destroyed three worlds? Why do you still talk to INK when you kn
ow what she’s done?”
“Correction,” Jack said. “I’ve tried talking to India, but you always show up and butt in before I can ask her about the tonic.”
“Then maybe you should spend less time chitchatting and get right to the point,” Charlie spat.
“You want me to sit down and say ‘So tell me, Indy, why did you and your sister decide to turn everyone in Orville Falls into Walkers’? You really think that would work? Besides, I was planning to ask Indy about the Tranquility Tonic that day at lunch, but then you came over and interrupted us. Who knows? Maybe INK had a good reason for making it that we just haven’t thought of.”
The idea was completely ridiculous. “You think there could be a good reason for creating something as evil as the Tranquility Tonic?” Charlie asked his brother.
Jack shrugged.
“See what I mean?” Charlie asked Charlotte with a sigh.
“I know,” his stepmother agreed. “It seems nuts to me too. But you know what? Your mom would have said the very same thing. Now, do you boys think you can be quiet long enough to go back upstairs? It’s getting late, and I still have locks to open.”
“Yep,” Jack whispered, and Charlie nodded reluctantly. Then they both followed Charlotte to the second floor.
When the final lock was removed, Charlotte stood back and held the tower door open for the boys.
“Please be careful, and please be quiet!” she whispered, pointing to the bedroom where the boys’ dad lay sleeping. “And please, please, please try to be nice to each other!”
She stayed behind on the second floor while Charlie and Jack climbed up to the octagonal room that held the entrance to the Netherworld. The portal opened the second they passed over the threshold.
“Show-off,” Charlie grumbled. It had always bugged him that his little brother could open the portal faster than anyone else.
“I thought you were supposed to be nice tonight,” Jack observed.
“Whatever,” Charlie replied with a huff.
They crossed through the portal and into the black Netherworld mansion—which was identical to the Waking World purple mansion in every way but its color. Looking out the tower’s window, they saw the nightmare version of Cypress Creek below them. Charlie spotted a giant, bloodthirsty hound chasing a screaming little girl. A sea monster emerged from a nearby koi pond and wrapped its tentacles around a man on a riding mower. Pterodactyls had cornered several people in the ATM kiosk at the local bank and were attempting to break through the glass with their beaks.