The Extremely Weird Thing that Happened in Huggabie Falls

by Adam Cece

  Felonious Dark seemed to be enjoying himself. He took a coil of rope from one of the henchmen and moved towards the children.

  Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany clung to each other, and for each step Felonious Dark took towards them, they took a corresponding step backwards away from him. This worked fine for a while, but then the children found they couldn’t take any more steps backwards because they were backed up against one of the walls bordering the platform.

  ‘If anyone has any great escape plans,’ Kipp whispered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘then now would be a good time to tell the rest of us.’

  Tobias looked around. To the left were giant ten-metre-high vats of water, a forklift, and crates. To the right was piranha-infested water. In front was the drain, down which they had poured the weirdness cure. And scattered around the drain were the empty weirdness-cure canisters.

  ‘What about the forklift?’ suggested Tobias, making sure to talk softly so that Felonious Dark couldn’t hear him.

  Cymphany shook her head. ‘It’s no good. No one ever made a getaway on a forklift. They don’t move fast enough.’

  Kipp nodded. ‘Cym’s right. A forklift’s slow speed is probably great in a factory setting, where you don’t want high-speed accidents, but it’s not good for us right now.’

  ‘What about the drain?’ Tobias said. ‘Could we pull off the cover and escape down the drain?’

  Again Cymphany shook her head. ‘It’s no good. The drains are too narrow. Maybe if we were leprechauns we could fit, but not fully grown children.’

  Tobias frowned. ‘I think we might be trapped, I don’t—’

  Tobias stopped abruptly mid-sentence as he noticed something on the side of one of the giant vats. It was a little red handle with a sign above it that read:

  RELEASE VALVE NEVER USE

  ‘Cymphany,’ Tobias whispered. ‘What do they keep in big vats in water-treatment plants?’

  Cymphany glanced at the release valve and immediately knew what Tobias was planning.

  ‘Ordinarily,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t recommend turning a release valve unless you are one hundred per cent sure what you are releasing, but considering the fact we are about to be captured by a very evil man and a creepy scientist, I say twist away.’

  Tobias looked to Kipp.

  ‘If you don’t hurry up and twist it,’ Kipp said, ‘I’m going to do it myself.’

  But even that plan was rapidly becoming too difficult to execute, as Felonious Dark was now only a few steps away.

  ‘Someone will need to distract Mr Dark,’ Tobias whispered. ‘If he figures out too quickly what we’re planning then he might be able to get to the release valve before us.’

  Kipp nodded, and Cymphany and Tobias knew that Kipp was volunteering to be the distraction.

  Suddenly Kipp ran in the opposite direction to the release valve, straight past the drain. He leapt over one of the upturned canisters and kept running, towards the platform’s edge.

  The sudden movement seemed to please Felonious Dark, as if he’d been hoping the children would try to escape. A wicked smile oozed across his face as he watched Kipp running.

  As soon as Tobias and Cymphany saw Felonious Dark’s wicked eyes follow Kipp, they ran for the release valve.

  Kipp reached the edge of the platform and skidded to a stop. A puzzled look crossed Felonious Dark’s face. He put his hands on his hips. ‘Why did you bother doing that?’ he said.

  But before anyone could answer, the clanking of Cymphany and Tobias’s feet on the metal platform caught his attention and he spun around. His eyes darted between the release valve and the running children, assessing the rapidly narrowing gap between the two.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ Felonious Dark growled. He dropped the heavy coil of rope he was holding and catapulted himself towards the release valve.

  Felonious Dark was fast, scarily fast. But Tobias still managed to reach the valve first. Unfortunately, though, he didn’t have time to turn it before he was grabbed by the back of his jumper and flung to the ground.

  Cymphany tried to run past, but Felonious twisted and hissed at her like a king cobra snake.

  The violent hiss startled Cymphany so much she fell backwards and landed on her bottom with a heavy thud.

  Seeing the terrified looks on the two children’s faces, Felonious Dark sniggered. ‘Nice try, you little fools. But you are no match for me. Did you really think you could race me to the release valve? I am too smart and too fast for you.’

  ‘Hey,’ yelled Kipp, to the accompaniment of a metallic rolling sound. Felonious Dark’s eyebrows lifted a touch, and he turned around. Kipp was rolling one of the empty canisters towards him, pushing it as fast and as hard as he could.

  Felonious Dark watched curiously and calmly as Kipp rolled the canister closer and closer, and then he casually lifted one of his boots and stopped it with his heel. This action brought the canister to a sudden stop, but did nothing to stop the forward momentum of Kipp, and he was catapulted somersaulting through the air.

  Kipp yelped as Felonious Dark caught him by one of his ankles and held him, struggling and terrified, upside down, in the same way someone might hold a large fish they’ve just caught.

  Felonious Dark bent over and leered at Kipp’s upside-down face. ‘What do you think you’re doing, you silly little boy?’

  ‘Well,’ said Kipp, wriggling with the feeling of blood rushing to his head. ‘I was sort of hoping the heavy canister would roll into your legs and knock you over.’

  ‘Really?’ Felonious Dark smiled. ‘You children are quite stupid, aren’t you? Don’t you know anything about the laws of physics?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Kipp exclaimed. ‘We’re only in primary school.’

  Felonious Dark laughed. ‘Well you’d need a lot more force than that to knock me over.’

  He’s right you know. I mean I don’t know much about the laws of physics—hence I’m a storyteller, and not a scientist—but I know enough to know that you need a much greater force than one empty rolling cylinder to bowl over a fully-grown man, even a skinny one like Felonious Dark.

  ‘Will this do?’ said Cymphany, and as she said it, Felonious Dark heard three noises. The first noise was a loud metal twisting, winding noise—if Felonious Dark had to guess he would have suggested it sounded suspiciously like a release valve being turned. The second noise was a loud groaning, pipe-straining noise, like enormous pressure about to be released. And the third noise, which quickly followed, was a monstrous rushing-water sound. This last noise was, by far, the loudest and longest of all three.

  Felonious Dark only had time to thin his lips, crease his brow and say under his breath, ‘This is not part of the plan,’ before a super powerful jet of water cannoned into his back.

  Felonious Dark instantly released Kipp’s ankle, and Kipp hit the ground as Felonious Dark was sent flying thirty metres through the air.

  Felonious Dark was thrown so far that he had time to think to himself while he was up there, Well done, Felonious, you idiot. Way to watch the release valve. Maybe if you spent a little less time trying to make witty super-villain jokes and a little more time guarding release valves you wouldn’t be in this predicament right now. That metal floor down there looks rather hard. I’ve never been a huge fan of pain, so I doubt I’m going to enjoy the next few seconds.

  Felonious Dark soon found out that the metal floor was just as hard and painful as he expected it to be. He bounced off it, and the high-pressure blast of water pushed and rolled him along the ground, while he flailed and gargled, until he ended up in a crumpled drenched heap at the feet of the creepy scientist and the two henchmen.

  The creepy scientist rolled her eyes. ‘Honestly, Dark, could you get any stupider?’

  Felonious Dark groaned, wondering how many of his bones were broken.

  Thirty metres away, Kipp rolled over. ‘Good work, Cym,’ he shouted above the roar of the high-pressure water that was gushing from the release valve.r />
  Cymphany smiled. ‘What about you, Kipp?’ she yelled. ‘What a brilliant plan. You knew the cylinder wouldn’t knock over Mr Dark, but it would distract him just long enough for me to spin the release valve. Brilliant.’

  ‘Yes…brilliant,’ Kipp said, with the sort of bewildered tone someone might have if they are being given far, far too much credit for having any sort of brilliant plan.

  Cymphany slid under the jet stream of water. ‘But the creepy scientist and the henchmen are still between us and the door, and they’re headed this way,’ she shouted.

  Kipp and Tobias turned and saw that Cymphany was right. The creepy scientist and the henchmen were marching towards them.

  ‘No more games,’ the creepy scientist roared above the sound of the water. ‘You’ve become an annoyance. So, unless you have any more brilliant plans I’m afraid it’s curtains for you.’

  I personally have never understood the phrase, ‘It’s curtains for you’, but basically the creepy scientist was saying that the children were soon about to meet a terrible, terrible fate. And this fate was unlikely to involve curtains, or any other room furnishings, but it was more likely to involve piranhas asking for toothpicks so they could pick the little bits of children meat from between their teeth after they’d enjoyed a sumptuous three-course children meal.

  At this point in the story, I must tell you I have started to become very concerned, because books that end with three children dying a gruesome and horrible death are even worse-selling books than books that have less-climactic endings than the dictionary. I am starting to worry that at this rate I could be writing the most poorly selling book in history.

  *

  The creepy scientist smirked—she was only about ten steps from Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany, and she was walking rapidly alongside the stream of water towards them.

  ‘If you do happen to have a great escape plan, now would be the time to use it,’ she said, as if to say, I know you haven’t got one so let’s just get on with all this capturing-and-feeding-you-to-the-piranhas business, shall we?

  A faint voice could be heard above the roar of the water, so faint the creepy scientist had to turn her head to hear it.

  The voice said, ‘Will this do?’

  The creepy scientist wondered about this for a second before she said to herself, ‘Will what do?’

  Then the creepy scientist noticed something. It was a little red thing within the jet stream of water. Or, to be more accurate, it was a little red thing that was rapidly getting bigger. Then the creepy scientist worked out it had actually been a big red thing all along that had only appeared little at first because it was a long way away.

  The creepy scientist worked out exactly what the big red thing was just in time to dive to the ground as a canister—propelled by the enormous thrust of a powerful jet stream of water—rocketed past her head like a surface-to-scientist missile.

  The two henchmen, who were following behind the creepy scientist, took about one second longer than the creepy scientist to work out what the big flying red thing was. It probably took them longer because they weren’t quite as smart as the creepy scientist, hence they were henchmen and not creepy scientists themselves.

  The canister caught both of the henchmen in their chests. There was a massive thud as they were flung backwards across the platform, colliding with the wall next to where Felonious Dark still lay in a crumpled heap. The henchmen slid to the ground, unconscious, leaving two henchmen-shaped dents in the wall. The canister rolled away, with two henchmen-shaped dents in it as well. If you put the dents in the canister and the dents in the wall together, and tipped in some plaster of Paris, you could have moulded two perfect flying-henchmen-shaped statues.

  It was at about this time that the jet stream of water finally slowed down and gurgled to a stop, with all the water presumably now emptied out of the giant vat.

  The creepy scientist got to her feet and turned to see that both her henchmen had been knocked out and that Felonious Dark was lying sobbing on the ground.

  Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany glanced at each other—probably thinking, well, that almost worked perfectly. The creepy scientist stared at them. Perhaps she was trying to work out if they had any more brilliant plans.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the creepy scientist laughed. ‘You idiots. You may have poured away the weirdness cure, and taken out Felonious Dark and my henchmen, but won’t do you any good. I’ve still won. We didn’t need the rest of that weirdness cure anyway. There is already enough weirdness cure in the water, and now there is no stopping it. Unless you have this.’ The creepy scientist removed from her pocket a small vial of purple liquid. ‘This is a powerful weirdness-cure antidote. A cure for the cure, you could say. Just this little vial tipped into the town’s water supply will cure everyone within hours. But without it, the effects of the weirdness cure will become permanent by morning.’

  Now at this point in the story you’re probably thinking the same thing I was thinking, which is if I were a super-villain, and I had a fiendish plan, which most super-villains do, then the last thing I’d do is tell the heroes exactly how they can foil that plan. I mean, Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany already thought they’d foiled the creepy scientist’s plans, by emptying the last of the weirdness cure down the drain. And if the creepy scientist had just let them go at this point, the children would have gone home to bed and by morning the weirdness cure would have become permanent and the bad guys would have won—Huggabie Falls would have lost all its weirdness, and this book would be over. And I would have started crying again because books where the bad guys win are even less popular than books with less-climactic endings than the dictionary and books where the heroes meet a gruesome fate. I doubt I could even convince my own mother to buy a copy of a book where the bad guys win.

  Now, some untrusting readers out there might again be suspicious that I am manipulating this story, in much the same way as you suspected I planted that business card in the Kindle’s letterbox all those chapters ago. Your lack of faith in me upsets me, it really does. There is something known as storyteller integrity, you know, and that means never messing with the actual events of a story to make the story better.

  You don’t believe me?

  Okay, you got me, there isn’t such a thing as storyteller integrity, but, still, the fact remains that the creepy scientist was silly enough to tell the children her fiendish plan and exactly how they could stop it. And as Cymphany stood there looking at the defeated looks on Kipp and Tobias’s faces, she realised she had to do something—she couldn’t let the bad guys win.

  And as the creepy scientist laughed with triumphant glee, clutching the vial of weirdness-cure antidote in her hand, Cymphany came up with her own fiendish plan.

  She stepped forward. ‘Well, it seems that we tried our best but we still lost,’ she said.

  The creepy scientist stopped laughing abruptly. ‘Really? You’re giving up that easily?’

  ‘I am.’ Cymphany nodded. ‘But I’ve got one more thing to say.’

  The creepy scientist paused. She couldn’t see anything wrong with letting Cymphany say something—after all, she had won and there was no way they could stop her now.

  Cymphany stepped towards the edge of the platform. ‘I just wanted to say…’

  She took another step towards the edge of the platform.

  The creepy scientist hadn’t worked out that she was trying to get as close to the edge of the platform as possible.

  Cymphany sneakily slipped her hand into her satchel and grabbed a handful of something. ‘I really want to say…’ she said as she sprinkled something from her hand into the water.

  ‘I just want to say,’ she began again, ‘that the capital of Denmark is Copenhagen.’

  The creepy scientist chortled. ‘I have to admire you, Ms Chan. Even after being defeated you’re still being very brave, and still trying to be weird even though there is no hope.’

  Kipp and Tobias weren’t sure what Cymp
hany was up to. Was she really just telling the creepy scientist another one of her capital cities?

  ‘There’s just one more thing,’ Cymphany said as she took a step away from the platform and towards the creepy scientist.

  The creepy scientist raised her eyebrows. ‘Really?’ She was growing a little impatient. ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘Would you like a chocolate-chip cookie?’

  The creepy scientist blinked. ‘Chocolate-chip cook—’

  Before she could finish saying the word cookie, Cymphany revealed what was in her hand: crumbs of crushed up chocolate-chip cookies. And she threw the cookie crumbs all over the creepy scientist.

  The creepy scientist gawked at her, stunned. ‘What did you do that for, you silly girl?’

  Kipp and Tobias were equally confused. They’d been defeated, and, on top of that, now they couldn’t even enjoy chocolate-chip cookies on the way home.

  But before they’d had time to get too upset about it, something slapped the creepy scientist on the side of her face. The creepy scientist stumbled and frowned. She looked down. A hungry piranha was flip-flopping and thrashing about on the platform. A second later, another piranha leapt out of the water and bounced off the back of the creepy scientist’s head.

  The creepy scientist turned, slowly, towards the water. Flying through the air, straight at her, were hundreds of frenzied piranhas, all seemingly desperate for delicious chocolate-chip cookie crumbs, and all bearing their razor sharp fangs. The creepy scientist screamed like someone who has hundreds of piranhas flying through the air towards her.

  She slashed and smacked at the flying fish, but there were too many of them, and soon the creepy scientist had chomping piranhas all over her lab coat and one clamped on the end of her nose.

  The creepy scientist squealed in horror. She threw away the vial of weirdness-cure antidote so she could grab the nose-clamping piranha with both hands.