Creature Keepers and the Swindled Soil-Soles

by Peter Nelson

  Dedication

  To Dad, who’s still leaving me big footprints to follow.—P. N.

  To Dinesh—my brother and very first fan.—R. R.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Jordan Grimsley wasn’t running away from what had him so terrified. He was running toward it. And he was running faster than he’d ever run in his life.

  He could almost taste the fear in his throat as he ducked and leaped through the thick, dark jungle, racing frantically to face the creature he knew was waiting for him. It was the fear that drove him. Because it wasn’t a fear for his own life. It was a fear he wouldn’t arrive in time to save someone else’s.

  The strange thing was, Jordan couldn’t recall who exactly it was he was rushing to save. He knew he knew the person. It was someone he loved very much. He could feel it. But this person’s name, their face, their identity, was hidden in the shadowy jungle of his memory, just out of reach.

  Jordan burst out of the jungle and tore across a moonlit field toward a group of small, crumbling stone houses. Standing beside a stone wall was a frail-looking old man with a short, white beard. The man looked familiar, and didn’t seem nearly as frightened as Jordan was—in fact, he casually raised an old camera and pointed it at Jordan. Jordan wondered why this old man would want his picture.

  CRACK! The ground suddenly split open. It formed a fiery red line that separated the two of them. The glow nearly blinded Jordan as he skidded to a stop to keep from tumbling in. He looked down. Orange lava bubbled inside the deep, wide crack. Jordan felt the intense heat hit his face and looked up to see that the man was safe. As he did, something suddenly leaped out of the crack between them and landed on the old man’s side of the chasm. It was tall and lanky, and stood on long hind legs dripping with the hot, red goo. The terrible doglike creature’s glowing red eyes were immediately familiar to Jordan. He realized this was who he was rushing to face—Chupacabra.

  The creature growled loudly as it towered over the little old man. Jordan looked down again and was afraid to leap over the magma-filled crack. Feeling helpless, he tried to yell for the old man to run. But no sound came from his chest.

  FLASH! The old man’s camera blasted white light in Chupacabra’s face, blinding it for a second. As the beast recovered, it raised its claw to strike the little old man, who lowered his camera and simply smiled at Jordan. And that’s when Jordan recognized him.

  He was a man Jordan had never met, but whom he knew very well and cared a great deal about—his grandfather George Grimsley. He nodded to Jordan, then shut his eyes. In a panic, Jordan looked down, picked up a large stone, and hurled it as hard as he could. WUMP! The stone struck Chupacabra in its snout. It snapped its head toward Jordan. In an instant, the creature sprang into the air, leaping over the chasm. In the next instant, it had Jordan pinned to the ground.

  Chupacabra’s red eyes seemed to burn into Jordan’s. He could feel its hot, horrible breath on his face. Jordan shut his eyes and tried to scream—

  “Aaaaah!” Jordan’s eyes popped open. His sister’s bored-looking lizard stared at him, just inches from his nose. Jordan kicked and squirmed beneath the fat, scaly reptile and fell out of his bed, tumbling onto his bedroom floor. Then he heard his sister’s laughter.

  Abbie was holding Chunk, her pet iguana, over him. She wore her typical outfit of all black, and her black-eyelined eyes twinkled through her jet-black hair. She smiled down at her brother. He must have looked funny, because Abbie didn’t smile very often.

  “Why’d you do that?” Jordan asked angrily.

  “To wake you up,” she said. “You were having a nightmare. Hope I was in it.”

  Abbie scanned Jordan’s bed and nightstand. Both were cluttered with books on cryptids, mythological creatures, and mysterious monsters. There were also multiple copies of Weekly Weird News, a newspaper that blared such headlines as HALF BOY, HALF POSSUM SPOTTED IN PIZZA PARLOR! and BIGFOOT PART OF ANCIENT ALIEN RACE? and GLOBAL WARMING CAUSED BY LEPRECHAUNS!

  “You’ve gotta stop reading this stuff before you go to sleep,” she said. She dropped Chunk on Jordan’s bed and picked up an old, leather-bound book sticking out from under his pillow. “Including this old relic.” She flipped through it. “Is this Grampa Grimsley’s actual handwriting?”

  “Yes. But it’s not a vampire book, so you wouldn’t be interested in it. It’s his research journal. Pretty dry stuff. Grampa Grimsley was technical. Like me.”

  “You mean boring. I bet he was creative. Judging by his handwriting, I’d say he was a little of both.”

  Jordan snatched the journal from her. “His handwriting isn’t important. It’s what he wrote that matters.” He flipped to another page. “See? Here’s a passage about cryptosapiens. He says that in his travels he came across folktales about creatures who could change from their animal form into human form, and back.”

  “Sounds cool. I’d totally be a lizard.”

  “That’s just it. Grampa Grimsley didn’t care if it ‘sounded cool.’ He was all about research and discovery. And what he discovered was they were pure myth. He didn’t let the fantasy get in the way of the facts. Like I said—technical. Like me.”

  Jordan got up off the floor, turned on the computer on his desk, and pulled out a small collar-like object with an even smaller antenna wired to it.

  “It’d still be cool to be a lizard-girl,” Abbie said, looking down at Chunk.

  Even though Jordan and his fourteen-year-old sister disagreed on practically everything, they were both equally excited for their summer vacation—and not for the normal reasons. In fact, not much had been “normal” for either of them ever since their last vacation, just a few months ago. Their spring break began horribly when their parents drove them to southern Florida to help fix up a run-down house they’d inherited from Jordan’s long-lost grandfather, George J. Grimsley, and turn it into a retirement home. It was located in an old folks’ community, newly renamed Eternal Acres, and sat at the end of a street that dead-ended on the edge of a vast, smelly swamp in the middle of nowhere.

  The Okeeyuckachokee Swamp, as Jordan discovered, served as the perfect hiding place for a command center of a secret organization known to nearly nobody as the Creature Keepers. Before he died, Jordan’s grandfather had founded the Creature Keepers to protect and keep safe all the cryptids of the world—at least the ones he was able to track down and befriend duri
ng the course of his life’s work. These were creatures that some people believed in, but whose existence had never been proven. As Jordan learned, it was the Creature Keepers’ duty to maintain George Grimsley’s legacy and make sure it stayed that way. The sacred vow of this secret society was to help, hide, and hoax—a vow Jordan and Abbie took at the end of their spring break, when they were made honorary Creature Keepers themselves.

  “Hey,” Abbie said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Jordan was putting the small electronic collar around Chunk’s neck. “Relax. This is the same Global Cryptid Positioning System tracking device I had Doris deliver to all the Creature Keepers to put on their beasts,” Jordan said. He turned the device on and then turned to his computer. “After Nessie’s kidnapping, it became clear to me that we could use a more technologically advanced tracking system. With these tracking devices, central command can know the whereabouts of all the creatures, anywhere in the world. This particular one will help me sleep easier in my own bedroom.”

  Their last adventure involved a kidnapped cryptid, which turned the entire Creature Keepers operation upside down. Not helping was the fact that the cryptid in question was one of the best-known, relatively speaking: the Loch Ness Monster. Jordan and his sister ended up finding Nessie and rescuing her from a mysterious, sinister man named Señor Areck Gusto. But Gusto was able to make off with Nessie’s special coat of scales, her Hydro-Hide, which allowed her to control and keep the world’s bodies of water in balance. Luckily, she grew them back. Luckier still, Gusto was blasted out of a volcano and met a very unpleasant landing somewhere in the mountains of southern Mexico.

  Jordan hit some keys on his computer and pulled up a program showing a map of the world. He typed in “Chunk.” The screen zoomed in on a map of his country, then his state, then his city, and finally his room. There was a small, blinking dot representing Abbie’s iguana, who’d apparently crawled under his bed.

  “Bingo,” Jordan said. “Target identified.”

  Abbie pulled Chunk out from under the bed and took off the collar. “Chunk’s not a runaway cryptid, you dork. He’s family.”

  This struck Jordan as an odd thing to say. He’d come to think of the Creature Keepers and the cryptids he’d met as family. A really weird, super-top-secret family, but family. In addition to Nessie, Jordan and Abbie were introduced to creatures they wouldn’t have dreamed in a million years they’d get to see, never mind meet and hang out with. There was Bernard, a Florida Skunk Ape who despite his foul stench was really great to be around. And Peggy, a Giant Desert Jackalope with a tendency to slip into a catatonic daze when presented with any shiny object. Lou was a tough, good-natured demon-like creature known as the New Jersey Devil. And Kriss was the shy, legendary West Virginian Mothman, whom Abbie may or may not have developed a slight crush on.

  But the two creatures Jordan found to be the most unique of this extended family were, surprisingly, human. Doris wasn’t a cryptid at all, but rather a very nice old lady who had more curiosity, life, and adventure in her little pinkie toe than most people an eighth of her age. This may have had something to do with the fact that up until very recently, she was an eighth of her age. Like nearly all the Creature Keepers, Doris was magically kept at about the same age as Jordan and Abbie—twelve or fourteen years old—by an elixir taken from the waters of the Fountain of Youth. But the supply was wiped out because of a mistake Jordan had made—a mistake he still felt horrible about, and would do just about anything to go back and make right, if only he could.

  Eldon Pecone, on the other hand, was just a few years older than Jordan and Abbie, yet had an old-school way about him that was more like a grown-up—a slightly dorky grown-up. Eldon was a proud Badger Badge–wearing, by-the-book, First-Class Badger Ranger, which made him the perfect person to run a large-scale, top-secret, international operation like the Creature Keepers, with Doris’s help, of course. He was also one of Jordan’s very best friends, and although they had little in common, they’d been through a lot together. Of all the amazing creatures and characters he’d met last spring, it was Eldon who Jordan was most looking forward to seeing again.

  2

  Eldon had been on Jordan’s mind more than usual lately, ever since he’d received a postcard from him a few weeks ago. The postmark was from Brazil, and it had a picture of a little cantina called El Encantado on it. There was a blurb describing the place as a “charming and colorful cantina located on the small, remote floating village of Palafito, anchored to the banks of the Amazon River.” Jordan agreed it looked charming and colorful enough. But what really interested him was what Eldon had written on the back of the card:

  Howdy, Jordan!

  Hope this finds you swell. Spooring isn’t easy down here in the Amazon, but I’m counting on my Badger Ranger training to serve me well in my continuing search. Wish me luck, and hope to see you soon!

  Your pal, Eldon.

  Spooring was an ancient tracking technique that Eldon swore by and excelled at, and he had a First-Class Badger Badge to prove it. In Jordan’s opinion it was a lame, outdated method for both tracking and keeping track of the cryptids the Creature Keepers were responsible for. It certainly couldn’t compare to the GCPS devices he’d gotten Doris to distribute to all the cryptids for him, one of which Abbie had just tossed on his desk.

  “Does Eldon know about your little critter trackers?” Abbie pulled Eldon’s postcard off a map of South America pinned to Jordan’s wall. “Seems like you and Doris slipped that little upgrade in while Eldon was out of town. He’s not gonna like it when he gets back.”

  “He’ll love it, once he sees how well it works.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “C’mon. You know as well as I do that for the Creature Keepers to be effective, we have to move into the modern age. Especially if—” Jordan stopped short. He and Abbie shared a look, and she pinned the postcard back on the map.

  “Especially if Gusto’s still out there,” she said. “I know.”

  They both got very quiet for a moment, remembering the terrible things Areck Gusto had done. In order to kidnap and steal Nessie’s powerful Hydro-Hide, Gusto had somehow managed to form an alliance with the only bad cryptid Jordan was aware of—Chupacabra. This was the creature in Jordan’s nightmare, but over spring break he had been all too real. Chupacabra had a vendetta against Jordan’s grandfather, and for some reason, he and Gusto were convinced that Jordan was actually his Grampa Grimsley, disguised with the help of the Fountain of Youth elixir. It wasn’t true, but that hardly mattered. Chupacabra wanted Jordan dead, and Gusto agreed to help him in return for sacred information: the whereabouts of some of the cryptids. With the help of Jordan’s sister and their brave new friends, the evil duo didn’t kill Jordan. In fact, Chupacabra was swallowed up in a pool of fiery lava. As for Gusto, he got the Hydro-Hide he wanted but was blasted out of a volcano. Everyone was hoping they’d soon hear from Eldon that he didn’t survive.

  “Hey, kids! Come for breakfast!” The sound of their father’s voice from down the hall startled them both. “Your mom and I have a surprise for you!”

  They opened the door to the hallway and were immediately smacked in the face by an oddly pungent and rather unpleasant odor.

  “Ew,” Abbie said.

  “Smells like Dad’s ‘surprise’ might be that he discovered an omelet recipe that uses onions, liver, and ripe cheese,” Jordan added.

  They followed the wafting stench down the short bedroom hallway to the kitchen/breakfast nook/den/living-room area of their city apartment and stopped short at what they saw.

  Standing awkwardly between Jordan and Abbie’s grinning parents was Bernard, the Florida Skunk Ape. He was crudely shaved, with patches of black fur jutting out of his otherwise pink, stubbly skin that had been nicked in some unfortunate spots. And he was dressed in a familiar disguise: a way-too-small, super-uncomfortable-looking Badger Ranger uniform.

  “Surprise!” Mrs. Grimsley squealed. “It�
�s Ranger Master Bernie!”

  “Hey!” Jordan said. Standing there in his pajamas, he felt the very odd sensation of déjà vu. He wanted to hug his big, stinky friend, but knew better than to blow Bernard’s cover in front of his parents. “Uh, what on earth could possibly ever bring you here, Ranger Master Bernie?”

  “He came all the way up from Florida,” Mr. Grimsley said. “Just to deliver some very exciting news!”

  Abbie covered her mouth and tried her best not to laugh, while holding her nose from Bernard’s skunky odor. Bernard fidgeted in his wedgie-inducing undersized khaki shorts. “Yes! Hello, Badger Rangers!” Bernard blurted awkwardly. “I personally came to personally invite you as my personal guests to the Badger Rangers’ Forty-Seventh Annual International Badgeroobilee!”

  “Hooray!” Mrs. Grimsley burst like contents under pressure. “So exciting!”

  “Yes sirree,” Mr. Grimsley said proudly. “You two must’ve done something right on your Badger Ranger campout last spring, because you’ve been chosen to represent South Florida Badger Clan Seventy-Four—on the international stage!”

  “Well, Canada,” Mrs. Grimsley said, suddenly more sober.

  “It’s another country, Betsy. It counts.” Mr. Grimsley handed Jordan a slick, four-color brochure. “We know how unfair it was to ask you both to give up your spring break to help us with your grandfather’s house. So when this opportunity came along, we figured, heck, you deserve it! But we told Ranger Master Bernie the only way we’d agree to let you go is if he personally came and surprised you with the good news!”

  “Surprise,” Bernard said.

  “All the arrangements are made,” Mrs. Grimsley said, holding up two plane tickets. “You leave today!”

  “Leave for where, exactly?” Abbie snatched the plane tickets from her. Jordan flipped through the brochure. It had photos of clean-cut rangers enjoying camping, hiking, fishing, and roasting marshmallows by an open fire. It described all these exciting activities, plus the big finale—building and torching a massive “Bonding Bonfire Beach Badger,” whatever that was.