I was too surprised by the question to answer.
“Great!” she nodded, as if I had said yes. “Count down with me . . . cinco, cuatro, tres, dos, uno, go!”
“Wait, you want me to jump out of this plane right now?!” I exclaimed.
“No, I wanted you to do it when I told you to GO!” she replied. “But now will have to do.”
With one sharp kick, Doratea shoved me out of the plane with her boot.
“Stay where you land. I will meet you as soon as I draw Señorita Kenstein away!” she yelled as I fell. “Hasta luego, amigo!”
At least, that’s what I think she said. I was too busy looking at the white ground rushing up at me.
A hot jolt of panic spread down my arms.
It warmed the inside of the parka the explorers had given me, even though I was falling through air that was way below freezing.
WHOOOMP! Suddenly, I got a mouthful of snow as I face-planted in the tundra. But Doratea had brought me in just low enough. I was okay.
I got to my feet. From where I was standing, all I could see was snow and ice.
As I tried to think of what to do, a loud, rattling noise kept distracting me. I looked around for where that noise was coming from. And then I realized it was my teeth chattering.
I was Freezing!
Just as I was starting to feel sorry for myself, I remembered my cousin. He had been lost out here for who knows how long.
If I was freezing, he was probably feeling worse.
A lot worse.
I opened my journal to where I had stuffed the copy of Robert’s map. There were a dozen paths traced on it. I had no idea which Robert had taken. I also didn’t know how long it would take Doratea to come back. If I waited for her to start looking, it could be a long time before we found him.
I didn’t know if he had that long.
Each path was marked with a different symbol — a pickaxe, a pile of coconuts, a canteen. I didn’t know what they meant. And yet, there was something familiar. But what? If one of the symbols was reminding me of something I’d seen, there was probably a clue on one of the pages of my journal.
And that’s when it hit me. Robert’s email! Doratea had shown up right after the explorer handed it to me at the club. Things had been so rushed, I had shoved it into my journal and forgotten all about it. It had to have the clue I needed.
My hands were shaking with excitement (or maybe frostbite) as I read it:
Robert was holding a glass of champagne in the photo. Was that the clue I was looking for? On his map, one of the trails was marked with a canteen. That wasn’t exactly a glass of champagne, but it was pretty close!
I raced to follow that path. With my big feet, it was kinda like having a pair of snowshoes, and I made good time across the snow. Pretty soon, I came across some footprints. I’d done it!
Yeah, I’d done it all right — I had managed to get myself completely lost!
The footprints I had found were mine. Somehow, I had gotten turned around and crisscrossed my own tracks. I wasn’t on the right path. The champagne glass in the photo hadn’t been a clue after all.
And just as I realized I had no idea where I was, it started to snow. Hard.
“Don’t panic,” I told myself. “I’ll figure something out.” But all I could think was: what was I thinking?
I was no explorer! I had trouble following a map to get across my hometown! Which it looked like I’d probably never see again.
I didn’t know how far I was from where Doratea told me to wait for her. I’d probably freeze before she could find me.
A WHOOSH of wind and ice ripped past me.
I may not have been an explorer, but I knew a blizzard when I felt one.
Snow poured down on my journal, soaking the pages.
I knew what I had to do. I wrapped up my journal as carefully as I could and buried it deep in the snow. Maybe someone else would find it and the map — someone who could figure out what object marked the right way to go.
Marked the right way to go! That was it! That was what I remembered!
I dug up the journal as quickly as I could. In the article, I read about Robert’s trip to the tropical island . . . Yes! There it was!
When Robert had explored the island, he had used coconuts to mark the right way to go!
I opened the map. One of the dotted lines was marked with coconuts! That had to be the right path.
I had been right that the clue I needed was on one of the pages in my journal. I just picked the wrong page before.
It stopped snowing as I followed the coconut path on the map. It led me up a large mound of snow that gave me a view of the icy shore.
And that’s where I saw Robert, bobbing up and down in the water.
His lower half was covered by a refrigerator-sized block of ice. His head and chest stuck out of the top of the ice block, allowing him to breath. But his arms and legs were pinned inside the hunk of ice. He was trapped.
I couldn’t believe it. I’d done it! I’d found him! I’d had to come all the way to Antarctica, but I’d finally found a member of my family!
I raced down the other side of the mound, straight toward Robert.
As I ran, I thought of what I would say to him. I wanted to make a good first impression for once. So I tried to think of just the right thing to say to break the ice.
But then . . . the ice broke!
“WHHHULP!” I cried as the sheet of ice I was running down cracked and sent me sliding on my back with my legs in the air.
I clutched at the ice around me, but it was too slick. I couldn’t stop myself.
I was heading feet first right toward the freezing water.
“Hullo there!” shouted Robert cheerily as I slid toward him. “Not to be a bother, but you had better stop yourself before you splash in here, or I dare say you’ll end up an ice cube like me! How about you put your barking huge clodhoppers to good use!”
“MY WHAT?” I shouted.
“Your large feet,” said Robert. “Put them down to get some traction.”
I put my feet flat against the ice. I started to slow down. I stopped right at the water’s edge.
“Thanks!” I gasped.
“Jolly good of the old boys at the club to finally send an explorer to rescue me,” said Robert. “Even if you are a bit of a peculiar-looking one.”
“I get my looks from my dad,” I told him proudly. “But I’m no explorer.”
I told him my whole story.
I told him everything I’d written in here up to now (even the embarrassing parts — he was family, after all). I told him how I hitched a ride with Doratea so I could find him, because I was the son of Frankenstein’s Monster and was looking for my family. I told him how I was related to him through his father’s feet. “Which makes you my cousin,” I said.
Robert just looked at me. The only noise for miles was the lapping of the water on the ice.
That’s when I realized how crazy I must have sounded. I had just come halfway around the world (Or was it more than that? I didn’t even know!) to find him. And now he wouldn’t even believe we were related!
There was only one thing to do. I started untying my boots.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I want to show you my feet!” I said. “I can prove we’re related!”
He just looked at me, even more confused. “My dear boy, why would you do that?” he asked. “Of course we’re related!
“The very first person to ever find his way to this place was me.” He smiled proudly. “You, my boy, are the second. If that doesn’t prove you’ve got the blood of an explorer in you, I don’t know what will!”
I didn’t think I could feel any happier than I felt right then. Until I heard the familiar RMMMMMM of Doratea’s plane circling over
the water!
Minutes later, the seaplane splashed down a hundred yards or so off shore. CRUNK! The cockpit door popped open and a rubber raft flopped out.
But Doratea didn’t jump out of the plane and onto the raft.
Fran did!
“HHHHRRUNH!” I grunted as I tried to pull Robert out of the water. The block of ice probably weighed a thousand pounds. And I had to be careful not to slip, or else I’d end up Popsicled too.
It was no use. And Fran was getting closer.
“Where’s Doratea?” Robert shouted at her. “What did you do to her?”
“Not as much as I would have liked,” said Fran with a creepy smile. “She had a surprising number of items in that little purple backpack of hers.
“But no matter,” continued Fran as she motored closer. “I left your friend floating in the ocean. She cannot help you now.”
I stopped pulling. There was no way I was getting Robert out of the water. And even if I did, it wasn’t like I could carry him in that huge block of ice.
But there was no way I was leaving him. Not after waiting my whole life to find him.
There was only one thing to do. Just as Fran’s raft hit the shore, I leaped at the water . . . and landed on Robert’s block of ice! Bracing myself with my big feet, I didn’t slide off. Instead, my momentum pushed us out to sea.
Right toward the plane!
“Good show!” exclaimed Robert.
Fran growled and raced after us in her boat.
I stuck my big feet in the water and kicked.
We had a lead, but she was gaining.
“When we get to the plane, you won’t be able to get me inside like this,” Robert said matter-of-factly. I guess to an explorer being ridden like a boat while being chased by the crazy daughter of Dr. Frankenstein wasn’t anything to get too worked up about. “You’ll have to tie me to one of the pontoons.”
Fran was just yards behind us when we reached the plane. I flung open the cockpit door and climbed in, my feet instantly turning to Popsicles as soon as I took them out of the water. I quickly found a rope. But as I tied Robert’s block to the pontoon, I suddenly realized: “Wait! Who’s going to fly the plane!?!”
“You are!” he said cheerily.
“Me?” I cried. “I don’t know how! There’s no way I can fly a plane!”
“It’s the duty of explorers to go where people think they cannot,” said Robert. “Even if the people who think that are themselves!”
Fran was right there, reaching with a knife to cut Robert loose. I didn’t know which button to push. So I pushed them all. The windshield wipers wiped. The wing flaps flapped. The lights lit up.
And then, I just barely heard Fran curse me as the engine roared to life and drowned her out.
A couple days later, I got an email from Robert.
I had a big smile on my face as I taped Robert’s email to a blank page in my journal.
It was still a little cold and soggy from the Antarctic waters, but all the pages I had from Dr. Frankenstein’s journal were still inside.
And somewhere out there, Fran was looking for the rest of my cousins. But I knew nothing bad would happen to them . . .
I was standing on the corner of Spring and Second Streets when the whole city of Los Angeles shook!
As the ground RRRRUMBLED I grabbed the mailbox next to me and wished everything would just stop moving!
And then it did.
That’s when I realized I’d just survived my first earthquake. It had only lasted a second or two. It must have been a really small one on the Rictor or Richter or whatever-you-call-it scale.
Nothing was damaged and no one was hurt.
In fact, no one else seemed to notice the earthquake at all. I guess here in Los Angeles, little earthquakes like that one were pretty normal. Everyone around me just kept driving or walking.
The only thing that seemed weird to them was me.
That wasn’t too surprising. Anyone who’s met me knows I can make a pretty odd first impression.
Maybe it’s because my feet are too big for my legs. Or because my left hand is way bigger than my right. Or because one eye is blue and the other is bright green.
Or maybe it’s because I’m the son of . . . FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER!
Not that any of the people passing me in downtown Los Angeles knew that. I had only just found that out myself.
I never knew my dad, but I had read about him. I’d only bothered to print out one of the newspaper articles I’d found and taped it here in my journal, because they were all pretty much the same.
Apparently, my dad tended to freak people out.
Some people are scared of genetically modified food. Imagine how they felt meeting a genetically modified MAN!
Actually, I imagined how they felt a lot. I wished I could’ve traded places with them and met my dad. But he disappeared after leaving me at Mr. Shelley’s Orphanage for Lost and Neglected Children® when I was just a baby.
Let’s recap, shall we?
No one knew who had left me. So Mr. Shelley, the orphanage director, named me John Doe.
J.D. for short.
Growing up in the orphanage, the one thing I wanted was a big family. Then one day I found the journal of Dr. Victor Von Frankenstein. I discovered that my dad was Frankenstein’s Monster, which meant I had a HUGE family!
Well, kind of.
I inherited my mismatched arms and legs and hands from my dad. The way I figured it, the people he got body parts from were my relatives. I have their hands, feet, and eyes, the same way other kids have their grandmother’s ears or their great-uncle’s nose.
Those people were probably all dead. (At least, I hoped they had died before Dr. Frankenstein took out parts of their bodies and put them in my dad!)
But those people probably had kids and grandkids. They would be related to me too — they’d be like my cousins!
All I had to do was find out who they were by tracking down where each part of my dad came from.
And I had to find out fast. Because I wasn’t the only one looking for my cousins!
Oops! Sorry. I got a little ahead of myself. I forgot to write down why I had traveled 2,000 miles to Los Angeles in the first place.
It had been a week or so since I had found out my dad was Frankenstein’s Monster. So far I had tracked down one cousin. His name was Robert, and he was an explorer whose grandfather’s feet had become my dad’s feet.
I found him in Antarctica and helped get him out of a tough spot. He was still there now, searching for the woman he was going to marry.
If you’ve forgotten the rest of that story — and I can’t believe you ever would — just look back at the earlier part of this journal!
My journal was the most valuable thing I owned. Partly because it was pretty much the only thing I owned. But also because it contained every clue I had found about my cousins.
Taped inside it was every clue I had found about my cousins. Including the pages I had gotten from Dr. Frankenstein’s journal.
Dr. F’s journal told the story of how he created my dad. I only had copies of a few pages from it, but they were the best clues I had.
After my adventure with Robert, I had gone to stay with his friends at the Explorers Club.
They were so happy I had found Robert, they offered to get me anywhere in the world I wanted to go.
Now I just had to figure out where to go to find my next cousin.
The problem was, I didn’t have Dr. Frankenstein’s whole journal.
If I had had the whole thing, it would have been a lot easier to figure out where all the parts that went into my dad came from. But the only one who had the whole journal was Fran.
Fran Kenstein (crazy) was Dr. Frankenstein’s daughter. She wanted to create a new monster. But there had been so
mething special about the mix of body parts that went into my dad.
To build a new monster, Fran needed body parts with the same DNA. And the only way to get them was to take them from my cousins.
I had beaten her to Robert. Somehow or another, I had to get to the rest of my cousins and warn them about her before she could find them.
Sitting in the library at the Explorers Club, I kept looking at one page from Dr. Frankenstein’s journal. It had a detailed drawing of one of my dad’s eyes.
But who had Dr. Frankenstein taken it from?
I was sure there had to be a clue on this page. Mostly because the word “clue” was written on it.
“Clue Hammer.” What did that mean? Was the hammer a clue? Was a clue hammer what Dr. Frankenstein used to get the eyeball out? (Ew!) Was there even a kind of tool called a “clue hammer”?
Borrowing the explorers’ computer, I did a quick search. I learned that there was no such thing as a tool called a clue hammer. But there was a Samuel “Clue” Hammer! He was a famous private detective in Los Angeles in the 1940s.
I wasn’t entirely sure what a private detective did. Was it different from being a public detective?
I kept clicking and reading what I found. Turns out, Samuel Hammer held the record for most cases solved in the history of Los Angeles (also, there was no such thing as a public detective).
I found a lot of photos of Samuel Hammer, but since they were from the 1940s, they were in black and white. I couldn’t tell if he was the one the bright green eye came from.
The Frankenstein Journals Page 3