“Off to work or school, so it’s just us to take care of you,” he said.
Agatha tapped Uncle Rufus on the arm. “Elliot will be thirsty, dear,” she hissed. “Will you get him a drink of water?”
Dear? Just how long had Elliot been asleep?
As soon as Uncle Rufus left, Agatha turned to him. “Your uncle knows about me, but that’s all. He thinks the Goblins came to find me and knows nothing about the Brownies. Your secret is safe.”
“Can we tell him?”
Agatha shook her head. “If he figures it out, then that’s one thing. But the secrets of the Underworld don’t belong to you. You can keep their secrets, but it’s not your right to tell them.”
Elliot lay back on his bed. “Why did you save me from the Goblins? Ever since I met you, all you’ve done is curse me.”
“Yes, and you’re still cursed.” Agatha stood and brushed her hands together. “But I didn’t curse you to die by being scared to death, now, did I? What kind of hag would I be if you died before I’d finished cursing you?”
“Oh,” Elliot said. So maybe the fact that Agatha had saved him wasn’t such good news after all. “But your curse came true. You told me I’d face the leader of the Goblins, and I think he was there last night.”
Agatha shook her finger at him. “You’re not getting out of the curse that easily, young man. I didn’t curse you to lose—and trust me, you were losing very badly. I cursed you so that you’d face your fears and win.”
“Looks like my fears are going to face me, whether I want them to or not.” Elliot took a deep breath and then asked, “Do the Brownies know what happened?”
“Yes. Mr. Willimaker has been here several times since last night. He’s very worried about you. Fudd visited you too. He didn’t stay long, just checked your heartbeat and banged his head on the wall. I’m sure Mr. Willimaker will visit again soon.”
“I’m sure he will.” Elliot had seen more of Mr. Willimaker lately than his own family. “So that’s what it’s like, being scared to death, huh?”
“You were only mostly scared to death. Trust me, there’s a big difference. But the Goblins will be tired after that big show. You’re probably safe for the rest of the day.”
Probably safe. That also didn’t sound like good news. Elliot chewed his lip and then asked, “Agatha, is there someone in the Underworld named Kovol? Fudd said something about him, that he’s asleep.”
Almost all of the color drained from Agatha’s face. All of the color but a strange shade of yellow, which was very unsettling. Elliot was relieved when the color returned and she said, “Kovol. Why would a nice boy like you want to know about him?”
“I just want to know. He’s pretty evil, right?”
Agatha frowned. “He’s a demon, not a kitty cat. Of course he’s evil.”
Elliot leaned up on his elbows. “Is he someone so scary that nobody even dares to say his name aloud?”
“Are you kidding? We say his name all the time!” Agatha chuckled. Then her face darkened and she added, “But seriously, though, he is scary. He’s the last of the Underworld demons. He’s been asleep for the past thousand years, and the last I heard, he was still sleeping peacefully. You don’t have to worry about him, Elliot. Just worry about the Goblins. They’re trouble enough for one human boy.”
Uncle Rufus returned with the water and handed it to Elliot. At about the same time, Mr. Willimaker appeared at the foot of Elliot’s bed, scaring Elliot so much he jumped and spilled water all over the room.
“I’ll…uh, get you another glass,” Uncle Rufus muttered. Obviously, he couldn’t see Mr. Willimaker. “This time I’ll bring one with a lid.”
Agatha winked at Elliot as she followed Rufus out of the room. He wondered if she winked because she could see Mr. Willimaker, or if she were closing her eye to keep her bulging eyeball from falling out of her head.
Elliot turned to Mr. Willimaker, who bowed so low his nose nearly touched the blankets. “Your Highness, I can’t believe what happened. Had I known—”
“Had you known, then what?” Elliot interrupted. “Could you have protected me from the Goblins?”
Mr. Willimaker shook his head. “Well, no, I’m afraid not. The Goblins are much stronger than us Brownies. It seems they are stronger than you too.”
Elliot stubbornly folded his arms. “No, they’re not. I just wasn’t ready for them last night. Now I am, and that’ll never work on me again.”
Mr. Willimaker smiled and sat on Elliot’s bed. “I believe you, Your Highness, and admire your bravery. What are your plans now?”
“I dunno. Get better and hope they don’t try to kill me again before I go back to school tomorrow? My Uncle Rufus takes good care of Agatha, so I don’t have to worry about her being here.”
Mr. Willimaker smiled. “Yes, I saw Agatha when I poofed in here. She seems happier.”
“She saved me from the Goblins. I think she’s going to get her cursing powers back. When that happens, we’ll find a way for her to curse them once and for all.”
“What if she doesn’t?” Mr. Willimaker asked.
Elliot hadn’t thought about that. “This war has to end before the Goblins get me,” he said. “Better start thinking, Mr. Willimaker, because if Agatha doesn’t get her cursing powers back, it’ll be up to you and me to solve this problem.”
Mr. Willimaker swallowed a lump in his throat. If Elliot needed his help to solve this problem, then they were definitely in trouble.
Patches had decided there were worse things than being stuck in the cave full of carrots. It was better here than at school, where all the other Brownie kids still teased her about her father and the field mouse scare. It was better than being stuck in the rock hole, where she had only gotten a single carrot after she told them an idea to get King Elliot. However, it was not better than going on vacation to Underworld World, the happiest place under the earth. But that was an entirely different matter.
For now, all Patches cared about was being stuck. Every time she tried to sneak out, the Goblin guarding the cave peeked inside as if he’d heard—or smelled—her. Trapped with nothing to do but eat carrots left Patches with more than enough time to think about what might have happened to King Elliot. She’d barely slept all night, so anxious for him that she’d only managed to eat 214 carrots.
It was with great worry the next morning that Patches heard Fudd and Grissel return to the rock hole. Their voices were angry. Patches felt a little relief. If they were arguing, then things had probably not gone the way they wanted with Elliot.
The guard quickly ran off when Grissel ordered him to go away. Then Fudd and Grissel began talking right outside the entrance to the carrot cave.
“Your plan to scare King Elliot to death failed!” Fudd said. “How could it fail? You told me you’d use your scariest Goblins!”
Grissel growled. “I did. They were so good they almost scared me to death.”
“Then what went wrong?”
“It seems your king has a hag. Her beauty forced us away.” Grissel threw out his chunky hands. “Why didn’t you tell me Elliot had a hag?”
Fudd sounded offended. “They told me that the hag was broken. I didn’t think it was important.”
“Well, she wasn’t broken last night. Maybe her curses don’t work as well as usual, but when she transforms, she puts off a lot of light. She burned my eyes!”
“Ouch. That’s why they’re so red.”
Grissel whimpered. “No, that’s because after I came back I tried to put some burn cream on them. I guess you can’t put the cream right on your eye.”
Fudd huffed. Even a river troll knew that. “So what now?” he demanded.
“We’re done,” Grissel said. “Let the Brownies have a human king if they want. We’ll continue our war against the Brownies as we have for the last three years. Pretty soon we’ll have eaten every Brownie, and there won’t be anyone left for the human boy, Elliot Penster, to rule.”
“No!”
Fudd said, stamping a foot. “The idea is for you to get revenge against Elliot and for me to become the Brownie king! We had an agreement.”
“Whatever happens next, you’ll have to do it on your own,” Grissel said. “So far we’ve done all the work. If you want to get Elliot, then it’s up to you.”
Fudd kicked at a rock. It rolled into the cave, not far from where Patches was carefully listening to every word.
So the Goblin plan hadn’t worked! Elliot was alive! For now.
“You tried the not foolproof plan, and it failed,” Fudd mumbled. “You tried the Chocolate Cake of Horror plan, and it failed. Then last night you tried the foolproof plan, and it also failed. So maybe it’s time to try something that isn’t either one. Something no one can protect Elliot from, because it’s never been done before.”
“I like it,” Grissel said. “Better yet, I love it. Whatever it is, it’s got to be great!”
“That’s right,” Fudd agreed. “If it’s never been done, then it’s never failed yet. And something that has never failed is certain to succeed! We’ll do something final. Something really, really awful.” Fudd thought about all the plans he’d formed that first night in Elliot’s room. Then he smiled. The last idea was so crazy that it just might work. It was evil, cruel, and only required a bit of black market Pixie magic. Besides, rule number twelve in the Guidebook to Evil Plans clearly stated, “Think big. Small plans have never produced great villains (page 33).”
Fudd turned to Grissel, his grin so wide it showed most of his pointy teeth. “Wait until tomorrow,” he said. “After tomorrow, Elliot Penster, king of the Brownies, will be no more.”
Inside the cave, Patches gasped. They were going to get Elliot this time. And there was nothing she could do about it. She had to make a run for it. Her short Brownie legs weren’t made for running really fast, but the Goblins didn’t know she had escaped the hole. Hopefully they’d be so surprised that she’d get free before they caught her.
Patches waited until it was quiet outside and then took a deep breath and began running. She ran from the cave as fast as she could—maybe as fast as any Brownie had ever run before. But even a fast-running Brownie is still pretty slow. It was no trouble at all for Grissel to grab on to her hair as she exited the cave and pull her back to him.
“Did you think I couldn’t smell you in there?” he snarled at her. “Where were you going in such a hurry?”
“I had to warn King Elliot,” she said. “I have to help him.”
“You will help him,” Grissel said with an evil grin. “You’ll help him lose.” He tossed Patches to a couple of Goblins waiting nearby. “Tie her up good. I have a feeling we’re going to need her help soon.”
Due to being almost dead, Elliot had missed school on Thursday. By late afternoon he was completely alive again. He was so completely alive that the rest of his family decided he must’ve only had a case of the stomach flu the night before. Wendy baked him another cake to celebrate his getting better. Elliot thought it was chocolate, but it was actually a very burned white cake. He crunched it down anyway. Reed brought him a whole bag of pickle relish from the Quack Shack in case he felt like having any. (He didn’t.) And Kyle and Cole flooded the woods behind Elliot’s house again. Not really to celebrate Elliot getting better. It’s just what they liked to do.
The next day was Friday, and if you remember from chapter 9, Elliot had to stay after school for detention because his teacher thought he’d made a joke during science class. He couldn’t explain to his teacher at the time why he had Brownies on his mind. And now he was fairly certain that even if he tried to tell the teacher that he was the king of the Brownies, it would only earn him more detention.
As it turned out, getting detention probably saved Elliot’s life, because while he was at school, Fudd used his Pixie magic plan. When Elliot came home later that afternoon, he noticed one very different thing about his house. His room was gone.
It wasn’t simply that everything in his room had disappeared, although that was true. It was that where he once had four walls, a door, and a window, there was nothing.
Elliot patted on the hallway wall where he used to have a door to enter his room. But it was only solid wall.
He walked outside and stared at the new shape of his home, which now looked as if it were missing a piece, right where his room had been.
“What’s wrong?” Wendy said, walking outside.
Elliot pointed at where his room wasn’t. “My room is gone.”
“Hmm, you used to have a room there. How strange.”
“Strange? Do you think?”
Reed came out to join them. “What are you looking at?”
“Our room is gone,” Elliot said. “Look.”
“Oh, bummer,” Reed said. “I had a new pair of shoelaces in there.”
Elliot threw up his hands. “Everything was in there!”
“No need to get so angry,” Wendy said. “So what if your room disappeared? Did you ever think about the poor kids in this world who never had their own room at all?”
“It doesn’t strike you as odd?” Elliot asked.
“I already said it was strange, didn’t I?” Wendy said. “But look at Reed. He lost his shoelaces and he’s not complaining.”
“I’m complaining a little bit,” Reed pointed out. “I really liked those shoelaces.”
Wendy and Reed entered the house, fighting about who had to call their parents at work and let them know that there was one less bedroom in the house.
“Consider it good news,” Cole said. Elliot jumped. He hadn’t realized the twins were behind him.
“What’s good about this?” Elliot asked.
Kyle shrugged. “We were home when it disappeared. It happened right after you usually get home from school. If you had been in your room when it happened, you would’ve disappeared too.”
“So you saw it?”
Cole shook his head. “I don’t know if you can see something disappear. It’s just that we were in your room looking at that shiny bracelet you had, and then your room started to shake. So we ran out really fast. We shut the door and turned around, and the door was gone.”
“Where’s Agatha?” Elliot asked. Maybe one of her curses had worked. Could she do that? Did she have that much magic?
“Agatha hasn’t been here all day,” Cole said. “She said she was tired of cursing our family and wanted to curse some of the other people in town for a while.”
Elliot’s shoulders slumped. He had hoped this would have been Agatha’s doing. Because if it wasn’t her, then the Goblins were already trying to kill him again. It was a warm Friday afternoon, the start of what should have been a nice weekend. He’d gotten all of his homework done in detention, and wherever in the universe his room was, he’d already cleaned it this morning…so he was really looking forward to a relaxing weekend.
But as you well know, Dear Reader, nothing ends the fun of a weekend faster than someone trying to kill you all the time.
“Anyway, you’re going to be in trouble when Mom comes home,” Kyle yelled to Elliot as he and Cole ran away.
“What for?” Elliot yelled back.
“Remember that time we lost our gloves at school? We were grounded for a week. But you went and lost your whole room!”
As soon as his brothers had left, Elliot turned and shouted, “Mr. Willimaker!”
“No need to be so loud, no need for that,” said a voice from the trees in Elliot’s backyard. “I’m already here.”
Elliot trudged into the trees a little ways. He found Mr. Willimaker sitting on a fallen tree stump, his head in his hands and a wide frown on his face.
“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Willimaker said. “This is all my fault.”
Elliot pressed his eyebrows together, wondering why Mr. Willimaker might need to apologize. After all, he hadn’t scared Elliot half to death or made Elliot’s room disappear. Elliot didn’t know that Mr. Willimaker was actually thinking about how he had written Ellio
t’s name in as king. Queen Bipsy had been one of Mr. Willimaker’s last friends in the entire Brownie kingdom. She had believed in him when no one else did. That’s why she trusted him to choose the name of the next king. She would be so disappointed now to see that once again, instead of making things better for the Underworld, he had only made them worse.
The future wasn’t looking too rosy for Elliot now either.
“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” Mr. Willimaker repeated.
“You didn’t do this,” Elliot said. “Was it the Goblins?”
“It must have been, but I don’t understand how they could’ve done it on their own. Making an entire room disappear needs Pixie magic. But Goblins can’t use other creatures’ magic. They can only use their own. So they must’ve had help.”
“Whose?”
Mr. Willimaker sighed. “I wish I knew. I hate to say it, but I fear it might be a Brownie who has done this. We don’t have a lot of magic of our own, but we are very good at borrowing it from other creatures. If only we had Patches back. She could help us figure this out.”
“Can I help to get her back?” Elliot asked.
“I wish you could come with me to the Underworld. The Pixies could poof you there. But since they just helped the Goblins, I don’t think they’d help us.”
Elliot nodded. “I don’t think I’m allowed to go to the Underworld anyway. My parents don’t like me to go to new places by myself.”
Mr. Willimaker smiled sadly. “King of the Brownies, and you still need permission from your parents.”
“But if my parents knew why I was going to the Underworld, they’d probably understand,” Elliot said. “We can’t trust the Pixies to poof me there, but you could do it, right?”
Mr. Willimaker’s eyes widened. “No, sir. I wouldn’t dare, not even to rescue Patches. My magic isn’t strong enough to poof a human anywhere. I’d probably get your feet into the Underworld and your head and maybe a few of your fingers, but I’d lose the rest of your body. It’d be very hard to rescue Patches with only half of your body.”
Elliot and the Goblin War Page 8