by Adam Cece
Kipp shrugged his shoulders. ‘Same for me, I’m afraid. We went to the park yesterday. My parents watched television. My father helped me with my homework. All completely normal stuff. It was horrible.’
‘The strange thing is,’ Cymphany said, ‘I was always envious of you guys, with your weird families. You don’t know what it’s like being a girl from the only normal family in town. That’s why I started all the capital-city stuff—I wanted to make myself more weird.’
Kipp smiled. ‘I’m glad you had a reason—we just thought you’d gone crazy.’
Tobias nodded. ‘Completely potty.’
‘But,’ Cymphany continued, ‘now that my family is finally weird, and I’ve got everything I always wanted, I just want them to be normal again. I don’t want to be known as that weird jam girl forever. I just wanted a little bit of weirdness. I mean, my dad is talking about filling all our mattresses with jam. He kept talking about how soft it would be to sleep on.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘I am not sleeping on a jam mattress.’
Kipp nodded. ‘Well, let’s consider what we know so far. We know that Mr Dark is hiding something. He could even be behind all this extremely weird stuff that is happening.’
Tobias and Cymphany agreed, so they decided that after school they would hide outside Felonious Dark’s office again, as they had done on Friday when the previously magical Mrs Turgan had caught them and attempted to kill them with bloodthirsty vampire bats.
For the rest of the school day there was no chance whatsoever that Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany would concentrate on any schoolwork. On Monday mornings Mrs Turgan usually taught them geography, followed by English and then mathematics, or she spent the morning zapping children with her wand, whichever took her fancy. But instead, Mrs Turgan spent the whole morning curled up in the corner, sobbing.
Ug Ugg was usually more than happy to take over when Mrs Turgan didn’t want to do any teaching, or when she was too busy transforming a child into a cumquat, but Ug Ugg was absent, which was astonishing, because Ug Ugg hadn’t missed a day of school in five years. So the children had to teach themselves, which, to their credit, they mostly did.
Cymphany usually enjoyed the geography part of Monday mornings, because she worked hard memorising capital cities, but today her mind was far away, thinking about horrible jam, and how nice it had been when she was normal.
And Tobias quite liked Monday-morning English, usually, but he too spent the whole morning, as his mum would say, ‘off with the fairies’. Funny thing was, he was quite happy about the new situation—his parents weren’t treacherous anymore and the inside of his house was bathed in sunlight.
In the time when they would usually be doing maths, Kipp fell asleep. He was tired because he hadn’t slept much all weekend. He wouldn’t usually have dared do this if Mrs Turgan was her normal self, because Mrs Turgan loved turning napping children into pillows.
Eventually, the children left a bawling, thumb-sucking Mrs Turgan and went to physical education class, where Henrietta Humpling told Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany she was actually not one-third werewolf and one-third vampire anymore. ‘I am now just Dutch,’ she explained.
‘How is that possible?’ Tobias asked from behind the pommel horse, where he was hiding from Coach Peltin Pilkon, who was in the process of forcing children to do rope climbs.
‘Yeah,’ said Kipp. ‘A person’s race can’t just change.’
‘Well,’ said Henrietta. ‘It appears as though there was a mix up on my birth certificate, and my grandfather on my mother’s side was not a vampire, and my grandmother on my father’s side was not a werewolf. It turns out everyone was just Dutch, so now I’m just entirely Dutch.’
‘And how do you feel about that?’ asked Cymphany.
‘Well, it’s pretty good, I suppose. At least I can now have a normal breakfast, instead of having cornflakes with a glass of blood.’
‘Yeeeck,’ said Tobias, with a similar expression on his face to Cymphany’s blegh face from earlier.
‘I know.’ Henrietta nodded. ‘Disgusting, isn’t it. I never really liked cornflakes either.’
‘Chin,’ said Tobias.
‘Cornea,’ said Cymphany.
‘Calf muscle,’ said Kipp
‘Ummm…’ said Tobias, thinking hard for a moment. ‘Chin bone.’
‘Protest,’ shouted Cymphany, with a triumphant smile on her face. ‘Chin and chin bone are not two separate answers.’
‘They are so,’ said Tobias.
‘Are not.’
‘The chin is the whole chin area, and the chin bone is one part of the chin.’
‘As if!’ Cymphany laughed. She was using her satchel as a pillow as she lay on her back on the grass. ‘You’re treacherous, Treachery.’
‘Well, then.’ Tobias opened his mouth and pointed inside. ‘My answer is cavity.’
‘Cavity!’ Cymphany sat up. ‘Cavity is not a part of the body.’
‘It’s a part of my body,’ Tobias said. ‘The dentist said it will be till I stop eating so many Fizz Blast lollipops.’
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany were playing their favourite waiting game, the name-a-part-of-the-body-that-starts-with-the-letter game. It was a great game for passing the time because you could easily spend a whole hour debating whether bum crack and bum crevice were two separate answers or the same thing, and time was something Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany had plenty of. They’d been hiding across the road from Felonious Dark’s office all afternoon.
‘Anything yet?’ Tobias asked Kipp, whose turn it was to keep watch to see if anyone left Felonious Dark’s office, especially if it was Felonious Dark himself.
Attention readers: I should warn you, at this point, that this is one of the longer chapters in the book. You might be thinking, so what, just let me get on with it will you? It’s only getting longer the more you jabber on about it. But I just thought I’d give you warning in case you were thinking to yourself, I’ll just finish this chapter before I go and get myself a drink, or before I go to the toilet. It might be best you go to the toilet now, and get yourself a drink and maybe even make yourself a sandwich, because having three regular meals a day is very important, and then you will be nice and relaxed and able to enjoy this chapter fully, because everyone always enjoys things more with an empty bladder and a stomach full of delicious peanut-butter-and-salt- and-vinegar-potato-chip sandwich. So if I were you I’d go right now, and I’ll put extra spaces in so you have plenty of time to get back and don’t miss anything.
All done? Good. Now, where was I? Had I got to the bit where Tobias said, ‘Anything yet?’
Oh yes, that’s right, I had.
‘No,’ said Kipp. ‘Mr Dark’s receptionist has been out for thirty coffee breaks in the last hour, but apart from that, nothing.’
Now you, as an astute reader, have probably already worked out we’re not here to read about the children doing the letters C to Z in the name-a-part-of-the-body-that-starts-with-the-letter game, and you would be correct, because seconds later Felonious Dark did emerge from his office building.
‘Wait a second,’ said Kipp. ‘Forget what I just said. It’s Mr Dark.’
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany scrambled to their knees and crawled together behind a bush, aware they hadn’t been all that well-hidden spread out lying all over the grass.
Felonious Dark stood in front of his office, extended his long thin neck to look up and down Digmont Drive, and mumbled something to himself before skulking off down the road.
Cymphany adjusted her glasses and bit her lip. ‘I guess we’d better follow him,’ she said.
‘We need to keep our distance,’ Kipp said. ‘We don’t want Mr Dark seeing us. He doesn’t seem like a very nice man.’
I have to note, at this point, that Kipp saying Felonious Dark didn’t ‘seem like a very nice man’, goes down in history as one the biggest understatements ever uttered by anyone—perhaps second only to when Huggabie Falls resident Mr Jackson Jolley pulled back the cu
rtain and peeked outside during the great blizzard of eighty-seven, and said to his wife, ‘I’d better get my coat. It looks a tad nippy outside.’
Legend has it that if you peer deep into the iceberg that still roams the surface of the bottomless lake, you can see a glimpse of Jackson Jolley’s frozen form in the middle, with a boy-is-my-face-red expression on it.
Tobias must have thought Kipp’s comment was sort of obvious too, because he nodded as if to say, you can say that again.
So Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany followed Felonious Dark down Digmont Drive, where he turned left and went up Digmont Drive, then crossed over Digmont Drive and made his way down Digmont Drive.
‘Did you ever wonder,’ said Tobias as they hid behind a street lamp, ‘who the idiot was who decided to name every street in Huggabie Falls Digmont Drive? It’s incredibly confusing.’
‘I often wonder why a lot of things in Huggabie Falls are the way they are,’ said Cymphany, as they ducked behind a picket fence. ‘I don’t think any other town is so full of weirdness.’
After they’d spent all that time and effort keeping their distance and hiding from Felonious Dark, Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany bundled around a corner and almost ran straight into his back. Only Kipp’s quick thinking saved them as he lunged and pushed Tobias and Cymphany behind a red parked car.
Felonious Dark was chatting to a man in white overalls who was standing on a ladder painting a street sign. As Kipp, Cymphany and Tobias tumbled to the ground behind the parked car, Kipp held his finger to his mouth—the international signal for shush.
Cymphany pointed, Kipp and Tobias nodded and the three of them crawled on their stomachs under the car until they were centimetres away from Felonious Dark’s feet. Felonious Dark’s pants were too short, exposing his white ankles and grubby socks. Cymphany held her nose and scrunched up her face, because the smell wafting from Felonious Dark’s feet was very unpleasant. Tobias and Kipp’s faces looked similarly disgusted, but at least they could all now hear what Felonious Dark was saying to the man painting the street sign.
‘Are you changing the name of the street?’ Felonious Dark asked.
They heard another voice, which must have been the painter’s, say, ‘Yeah. The local council passed a new bylaw this morning. Now streets can be called names other than Digmont Drive.’
‘Really? That’s surprising,’ Felonious Dark said, and even though Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany couldn’t see his face they could tell he was smirking.
‘Not really,’ the painter laughed. ‘We should’ve done it years ago. It really is flipping confusing. I mean, can you imagine trying to deliver mail in this town? No wonder the last thirty Huggabie Falls posties have gone insane.’
Tobias raised his eyebrows and glanced at Kipp and Cymphany, as if to say, weren’t we just talking about this?
‘So, what is this street going to be called now?’ Felonious Dark asked.
‘Tim Street,’ the painter said. ‘Because that’s my name, Tim. And the street is being named in honour of me, because I’m the one with the paintbrush.’
Felonious Dark chuckled. ‘I suppose that’s fair enough,’ he said. ‘Keep up the good work, my man.’
Felonious Dark said his goodbyes to the painter and was on his way.
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany waited till Felonious Dark was halfway down the road before crawling out from under the car. Tim the painter was a big man with a bushy red beard. He seemed a little surprised to see three children crawl from under a car, but he smiled anyway. ‘Hi, kids. Nice day for a walk down Tim Street.’
He had finished painting the street sign Tim Street in big black letters. He took off his cap and wiped his forehead with it as he stepped back and admired his work.
‘This weirdness is—’ Cymphany stopped. ‘Wait a minute, I mean, this normalness is spreading at an alarming rate.’
Kipp nodded. ‘We have to find out what Mr Dark has to do with all this.’
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany said goodbye to Tim, and continued following Felonious Dark. Eventually they all ended up one kilometre out of town at the misty lake, which was called Misty Lake.
Misty Lake was so named because it was: a) a lake, and b) always covered by a thick blanket of mist. If you ever go for a boat ride on Misty Lake you’ll find you won’t be able to see more than three metres in front of you, which is useless information, as boat rides on Misty Lake are strictly prohibited, since the lake is the source of all of Huggabie Falls’ drinking water.
Considering this fact, Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany found it odd that tied to a small jetty at the edge of the lake were two little wooden sailboats. Actually, come to think of it, why did a lake where boats rides are prohibited have a jetty in the first place?
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany sat crouched behind some bushes. They were further surprised to see Felonious Dark climb into one of the little sailboats, untie it from the jetty and sail off into the mist.
While we are on the subject of nonsensical things, a boat sailing into the mist seems like a contradiction to me. Because the word mist implies still, non-windy air. If there was any wind, say the sort of wind required to ‘sail’ a sailboat, then it would surely blow all the mist away, and the lake would henceforth be called Windy Lake. So, I’m not exactly sure how Felonious Dark managed to sail his sailboat away into the mist, but, as I’ve said before, I’m just a storyteller, and I have no control over these things. Perhaps this is just one of the many, many, many weird things about Huggabie Falls that cannot be explained, or maybe Felonious Dark had a little, completely silent and undetectable motor attached to the back of his boat—whatever the reason, we haven’t got time to find out right now.
‘I suppose we’d better follow him,’ said Kipp.
‘Not across Misty Lake,’ Tobias said, shuddering. ‘What about the piranhas?’
Now, if you know anything about dangerous marine life, then you will know piranhas are carnivorous freshwater fish with very sharp teeth. They’re usually only found in waterways of the Amazon rainforest, but it so happened that Misty Lake was also full of them.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ said Cymphany. ‘They’re vegetarian.’
‘Vegetarian?’ Tobias said. ‘Really?’
‘My father told me,’ Cymphany said, as though that confirmed it, even though her father was not a marine biologist, or even a fisherman, and therefore nowhere near being an expert in these things.
‘I’ve heard that too,’ said Kipp. ‘The Misty Lake piranhas are the world’s only vegetarian piranhas.’
Tobias thought about this for a moment. ‘I don’t know why I’m surprised. This is Huggabie Falls, after all,’ he said.
So Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany ran down to the second sailboat, only to find it wasn’t in very good shape for sailing across a lake. In fact, it wasn’t in good shape for sailing across a bathtub: it was full of holes and half sunk.
‘Well, this is no good,’ said Cymphany. ‘This thing is more submarine than boat.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said Kipp, pulling something shiny and red from the sand at the edge of the lake. ‘What about this small red bucket?’
‘Don’t be silly, Kipp,’ Tobias said. ‘We won’t all fit in that little red bucket.’
Cymphany raised one eyebrow at the cheeky, grinning Tobias. ‘Hilarious, Treachery. And good plan, Kipp. We can use the bucket to bail water out. Now, we’d better hurry, you can’t see very far on Misty Lake and Mr Dark has already got a big head start on us.’
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany climbed into the half-full-of-water boat, which sat even lower in the water once it contained three children. The water level inside the boat immediately started to rise, but Cymphany was able to keep it down with swift bailing. Neither Kipp, Tobias nor Cymphany knew how to sail, but there were two oars, so Kipp and Tobias rowed the boat out across the Misty Lake while Cymphany used the little red bucket to bail water out as fast as she could.
For a while, the water level in the boat seemed to at least be st
aying the same, maybe even going down a bit, but soon Cymphany frowned. ‘I think we’re sinking. I don’t get it—my bailing was working, but now, no matter how fast I bail, the water inside the boat is still rising, and the edge of the boat is still sinking.’
‘I’ll bail; you row,’ said Kipp to Cymphany, as if to say, perhaps I can bail a bit quicker than you can, which is obviously what we need.
A few minutes later, the situation was still not improving. Tobias took a turn at bailing and put every ounce of effort he had into it, but the boat’s rim was getting closer and closer to the water.
‘This is hopeless,’ said Tobias as he looked around. ‘I can’t see Mr Dark anywhere, and we’re almost sunk.’
‘You’re right,’ said Cymphany. ‘I think the shore is back that way.’ She pointed into the mist. ‘If we row and bail hard, we might be able to make it back without having to swim.’
‘Wait,’ said Kipp. ‘Can you hear that?’
As people often do when the phrase ‘can you hear that?’ is used, Tobias and Cymphany stopped talking and listened. There was a faint thrashing and splashing noise. The children began to scan the water.
‘There!’ Cymphany pointed.
Kipp and Tobias followed the line of Cymphany’s point and saw in the distance a cluster of about a hundred thrashing objects in the water, which was moving rapidly towards the boat.
‘I think that’s a school of piranhas?’ said Tobias. ‘The way they’re feverishly thrashing around reminds me a little too much of Mrs Turgan’s killer vampire bats,’ he said, as if to say, I hope you were right about that whole only-vegetarian-piranhas-in-the-world business, Kipp.
‘They do seem to have a hungry look about them, don’t they,’ said Kipp, as if to say, I hope I was right about that whole only-vegetarian-piranhas-in-the-world business, Tobias.
‘I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,’ said Cymphany, frowning. ‘They’re definitely vegetarian. But I do wonder why are they coming towards us? Does anyone have a stick of celery in their pocket?’