by Adam Cece
On the day the scary things happened to Mr Yugel and Froggin, Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany needed to ask Mr Haurik some questions, but they didn’t have time to build a fire and ruin another school jumper by making the smoke signals.
So they went to see another adult who they thought could help them, because this adult seemed to know about everything that happened in Huggabie Falls. That adult was Felonious Dark. His agency on Digmont Drive used to be called Dark’s Weirdness Investigation and Eradication Agency, but it had recently been renamed: The Felonious Dark (Reformed EvilDoer) Non-Evil Promotions Agency.
Readers who have read the first Huggabie Falls book, also known as my favourite people, will be a bit confused now, because they will remember that Felonious Dark was a tall, thin, evil man who, along with a creepy scientist, was responsible for the extremely weird thing that happened in Huggabie Falls, and that he also once tried to feed Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany to vegetarian piranhas. So you’re probably wondering why Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany were going to see Felonious Dark for advice.
Well, as per Felonious Dark’s newly named agency, he was a reformed evil-doer, which means he no longer did evil things like sneaking into supermarkets after dark and swapping all the strawberry-jam labels with the labels for Señor Firebreather’s Super-Hot Chilli Paste.
Now, when I first heard that Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany were trusting Felonious Dark, I thought, oh dear, that’s a shame, these children will soon meet a grisly end and I will have to find three other children to write this book about. But it did seem that Felonious Dark was, mostly, or at least nearly almost, reformed.
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany entered the waiting room of Felonious Dark’s agency, which was still drafty and still had the same uncomfortable little steel chairs in the waiting room and the same large receptionist with the same purple curlers in her same red hair, but now, to show the agency was reformed, it had a welcome mat on the floor in the doorway, or, to be more precise, it had a welcome mat still in its box by the doorway.
The receptionist looked up and grunted when they walked in. ‘Go away,’ she snarled.
‘Gertrude,’ they heard Felonious Dark call out sternly from the room next door. ‘Remember what we practised.’
The receptionist sighed and took a deep breath. Then she began to strain and grimace with considerable effort, like she was trying to open a very tight jar of pickles. She winced as she stretched her mouth open, driving her cheek muscles back towards her ears, then slightly up, and inch by inch she prised her mouth open until she was exposing two tightly clenched rows of yellow teeth. As she held this pose, her eyeballs bulged and beads of sweat trickled down her face.
Cymphany leaned over to Kipp and Tobias and whispered, ‘Is she trying to smile?’
‘I think so,’ Kipp said, with an expression of disgust mixed with a little bit of fear on his face.
Tobias’s face went even more white than usual. ‘That’s the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said.
Felonious Dark appeared in the doorway. ‘Very good, Gertrude,’ he said. ‘Excellent progress. Children, a pleasure as always. Come in.’
As Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany entered Felonious Dark’s office, they heard the sound of a great expulsion of air behind them, followed by the sound of Gertrude slumping forward and collapsing on her desk.
‘Welcome to the Felonious Dark (Reformed Evil-Doer) Non-Evil Promotions Agency,’ said Felonious Dark as he swept his arms around the room, as if to show how reformed the entire office was. ‘Reformed evil-doer,’ he repeated, and he held up one finger. ‘Emphasis on the reformed.’
‘Hi, Mr Dark,’ Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany said at the same time.
Felonious Dark shook their hands in turn.
‘How’s the non-evilness going, Mr Dark?’ Cymphany asked.
Felonious Dark’s face darkened. ‘Very well, thank you.’
Tobias’s arm jerked, and he looked at his wrist. ‘Mr Dark, did you just steal my watch?’
Felonious Dark looked guilty. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and he pulled Tobias’s watch from his pocket and handed it back to him. ‘It’s not easy giving up evil-doing, but I’m trying my hardest.’
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany sat in the chairs in front of Felonious Dark’s desk, in the gloomy candlelit office. Felonious Dark had tried to brighten the room up and make it less ominous by putting a flower on his desk, but the flower looked like it had died quite some time ago. He had also purchased a giant pet lizard, since the children had last visited, which sat on his lap.
‘What have you come to see me about, children?’ Felonious Dark reclined in his chair and patted his giant pet lizard.
The lizard hissed at Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany and they all jumped, but then Felonious Dark snapped, ‘Hissy. No! Remember what we talked about.’ And then the lizard did the same thing that Gertrude had done a few minutes ago: with great strain, it stretched its green cheek muscles back and up to expose two rows of clenched teeth. It was very unsettling for Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany to watch a lizard try to smile like this.
‘You were saying, kids?’ Felonious Dark said, urging them to continue.
So Cymphany, Kipp and Tobias ignored the weirdly smiling lizard and told Felonious Dark about Froggin and the unbelievably scary spider he saw in his kitchen, and Mr Yugel and the equally unbelievable and equally scary shark in his vault. And about how they had both closed their establishments and left town immediately, and how it was quite a coincidence that both these seemingly unrelated unbelievably scary things happened at the same time, so maybe they actually were related.
Felonious Dark listened and looked thoughtful as they spoke, and when they were finished he stopped patting his pet lizard, whose face skin had changed from green to red, and who now had little beads of sweat rolling down its tiny lizard forehead as it strained to hold its smile. Felonious Dark stood up and walked to the wall and stared at it.
‘You know,’ he said after a few moments. ‘I really need to get a window installed here. It would be great for staring out of.’
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany waited. ‘Well, Mr Dark?’ Tobias said at last. ‘What do you think?’
Felonious Dark turned back from the wall. ‘It’s all quite unbelievable, I hardly believe it myself. But it sounds like someone is up to no good. Up to evil-doings, as it were. And usually people contact me if they want some evil-doings done, as not everyone knows I am reformed yet. I find it hard to believe that no one has contacted me…’ Felonious Dark twiddled his moustache. ‘Hmmmm…I wonder, if it could be…’
Cymphany looked at Kipp and Tobias and then said what they were all thinking. ‘What, Mr Dark? What do you wonder?’
‘There is someone else.’ He let go of his moustache. ‘Not quite as evil as I am…errr…I mean, not quite as evil as I once was, but still very high on the evil-ability scale. I haven’t seen him for a long time…but maybe…just maybe, he might be back.’
Kipp looked urgently at Cymphany and Tobias, as if to say, do you want me to be the one who says what we are all thinking this time? He took their return looks to mean yes, go ahead, and he said, ‘Who, Mr Dark? Who?’
Felonious Dark turned and opened his mouth to say something, but before he could answer, Gertrude burst into the room.
‘It’s horrible,’ she screamed. ‘It’s in the town square. It’s the scariest thing you’ve ever seen.’ And she bolted from the office, through the waiting room, and out the front door.
Felonious Dark, Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany stood there for a millisecond, and then they all ran out the front door as well.
Not one of them heard the sound behind them of a mini expulsion of air followed by the sound of a lizard slumping forward and collapsing onto a desk.
Kipp, Tobias, Cymphany and Felonious Dark raced after Gertrude into the town square to be confronted by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a skyscraper of a dinosaur with very small arms but very big teeth, which meant it was destined to be very bad at basketball but potentially very goo
d at biting things in half. Biting something in half was actually what it was doing as Kipp, Tobias, Cymphany and Felonious Dark ran into the square.
‘Is that our school bus?’ Cymphany asked as she skidded to a stop.
‘That’s half of it.’ Kipp pointed. ‘The other half is flying off over there.’
Tobias gulped. ‘I hope there were no children on board.’
Felonious Dark shook his head. ‘The school bus is being rented by the DFA today, the Dinosaur Fearers Anonymous group, for one of their field trips.’
In any normal situation, I’m sure Kipp, Cymphany and Tobias would have stared in wonder at Felonious Dark, as if to say how could you possibly know that? I am certainly wondering myself. But they were too busy watching the dinosaur swish its giant tail into the Huggabie Falls Demolition Services building, demolishing it, which was hilariously ironic, but any humour in the situation was completely lost on the Huggabie Falls DFA members, who were too busy screaming, flailing their arms and running for their lives. Many of them were wearing white shirts with the DFA logo on them: a dinosaur inside a red circle with a red line across it. Funnily enough, the dinosaur pictured in the logo was a brontosaurus, a non-meat-eating and non-threatening kind of dinosaur. Surely a dangerous Tyrannosaurus Rex, a T-Rex, like the one rampaging through town at that very moment, would have been a more appropriate dinosaur to have on their logo. Considering many members of the DFA were currently being picked up, flung into the air and swallowed whole by a T-Rex, that change would more than likely be proposed at their next general meeting, if there were any members of the DFA left to attend that meeting.
As Kipp, Tobias, Cymphany, Felonious Dark and Gertrude watched the T-Rex carnage, with the same look of horror on their faces as someone might have if they’ve just found out the world had run out of marmalade, something unexpected happened. The T-Rex stopped, mid-smashing-tail-swing, and sniffed the air. Then it turned its head and locked its eyes on Kipp, Tobias, Cymphany, Felonious Dark and Gertrude. It sniffed the air again. Its eyes bulged, its jaw dropped, and a glob of saliva dribbled from its open mouth.
It’s commonly thought that T-Rex’s have bad eyesight and can only see something if it moves. I’m no dinosaur expert, but that is an easy opinion to have when a T-Rex is not staring at you in the same way a starving man, trapped on a desert island, who has not eaten in weeks, might stare at a passing ship with a fried-chicken logo on the side.
Kipp, Tobias, Cymphany and Gertrude looked terrified. The only person who didn’t look terrified was Felonious Dark, because he was too busy looking guilty.
‘Now might be a good time,’ Felonious Dark gulped, ‘to mention that I have a piece of beef jerky in my pocket.’
Tobias looked at him. ‘I was wondering what that smell was.’
‘Okay,’ Kipp said calmly. ‘No one panic. We’ll be okay just as long as we don’t make any sudden move—’
‘Run!’ Gertrude screamed, and she turned and sprinted down Digmont Drive.
So that pretty much destroyed Kipp’s not-panicking plans. They ran down Digmont Drive and turned into Digmont Drive. Under them, the ground shuddered, and behind them huge thudding dinosaur feet pounded the earth.
Kipp caught up to Felonious Dark. ‘Why don’t you throw the beef jerky behind us, and maybe the T-Rex will stop and eat it?’
Felonious Dark shook his head as he ran, his arms pumping like pistons. ‘I have a sneaky suspicion that won’t work,’ he said between panting breaths.
‘Why is that?’ Cymphany screamed over the deafening dinosaur roar, which sounded like it was getting closer behind them.
‘Because,’ Felonious Dark said, ‘I did that about a hundred metres ago and the T-Rex is still chasing us.’
Cymphany shook her head. ‘This is ridiculous. What are we running away from? Dinosaurs don’t exist—they’ve been extinct for sixty-five million years. There is no way that this is actually happening.’
Tobias shrugged, which is hard to do when you’re running full pelt. ‘Maybe this one didn’t die out. Maybe it was sleeping.’
Cymphany glared at Tobias, which is also hard to do while you are running full pelt. ‘Asleep for sixty-five million years?’
‘Sure,’ Tobias said. ‘Once when I was really tired, I slept in till three-thirty in the afternoon.’
‘Tobias, I’m not having this conversation anymore,’ Cymphany said.
And at that exact moment, Kipp said, ‘Down here,’ and he ducked into an alley.
Cymphany, Tobias, Felonious Dark and Gertrude ducked right in behind him, just as the T-Rex thundered past.
Then the thundering stopped, and was replaced by a lot of crashing, and tail-bashing, which all sounded suspiciously like a Tyrannosaurus Rex doing a U-turn.
‘It will be back in a second,’ Felonious Dark said. ‘Thirteen actually. Tyrannosaurus Rexes take exactly thirteen seconds to do a U-turn.’
Again, if Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany had had more time they would have asked Felonious Dark how he could possibly know that obscure fact. But they didn’t have time, so Tobias just said the most completely obvious thing ever recorded as being said in human history: ‘We need to find a hiding spot.’
But the alley was a dead end, and all that was at the end of the alley was a sign for Huggabie Falls Pet Insurance, with a slogan under it that read:
No Pet Too Small, No Pet Too Big.
Again, the hilarious irony of this sign was lost on everyone in the alley. What wasn’t lost on Kipp, Tobias, Cymphany, Felonious Dark and Gertrude was a line of five blue portable toilets, portaloos. Kipp looked down the line of people. There were five of them. He looked back at the five portaloos. ‘Are you guys thinking what I’m thinking?’ he said.
A few seconds later, Cymphany sat crouched on a toilet inside one of the five blue plastic portaloos. It was quiet. Some would say too quiet, but then again what is too quiet? Quiet is just quiet.
‘Cymphany?’ she heard Kipp’s voice, and she looked confused, seemingly because his voice didn’t sound all echoey like she would have expected it to sound if Kipp was in one of the other four portaloos.
‘Yes, Kipp?’ Cymphany replied, and she jumped with surprise at how echoey her voice was inside the portaloo.
‘Why aren’t you hiding under the sign like the rest of us?’ Kipp asked.
Cymphany frowned. ‘That was what you were thinking!’
‘Of course,’ Kipp said. ‘To trick the dinosaur into thinking we were hiding in the portaloos, then hoping it would eat the portaloos, and maybe it wouldn’t like the taste of blue plastic, and it would run away.’
‘Right,’ said Cymphany slowly.
‘I thought,’ Kipp said, even more slowly, ‘you knew what I was thinking.’
Cymphany frowned again. It was what she did best. ‘As if anyone could know you were thinking that!’
‘I knew,’ Tobias said. And Cymphany’s face screwed up, as she made a mental note to have a stern talk with Tobias later.
‘I knew too,’ Felonious Dark said.
And then, a few seconds later, a third voice, Gertrude’s, said, ‘Actually, I didn’t know—I just followed Mr Dark.’
Cymphany rolled her eyes. ‘It doesn’t matter: I can’t hear it, so it must have gone. And, besides, like I said earlier’—she spoke like someone who puts a lot of faith in what they’ve read in textbooks—‘dinosaurs are extinct. There is no way there’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex out there. It’s not possible.’
At that exact moment there was a thundering roar and two giant teeth speared through the plastic of the portaloo. Cymphany reeled, presumably alarmed at the rather unpleasant, stomach-flipping sensation of the portaloo being lifted into the air and the door, which she had forgotten to lock, swinging open.
Kipp, who had crawled out from under the sign, found himself staring up at Cymphany, who was clutching onto and dangling from a toilet-roll holder. She looked down at Kipp in shock. ‘Either you just got a lot smaller,’ she said, ‘or I just got a lot
higher.’
The Tyrannosaurus Rex, who had the portaloo with Cymphany inside it in its jaws, threw back its head, flipping Cymphany back inside the blue plastic portaloo.
The dinosaur spread its stance, swung its head again and roared as it clamped its jaws down on the portaloo, which began to splinter and buckle.
‘Cymphany!’ Tobias screamed. ‘Jump. I’ll catch you.’
Cymphany smiled, as though she didn’t want to hurt her friend’s feelings. ‘No, thank you,’ she said, as if to say, the only thing Tobias was really good at catching was colds.
As the dinosaur’s jaw clenching continued, a plastic shard snapped off the side of the portaloo and the roof started to crumple.
‘We’ll all catch you,’ Kipp said, looking back to Felonious Dark and Gertrude, only to find they were about fifty metres away, running back down the alley.
‘Sorry,’ Felonious Dark called back. ‘I’m mostly reformed, but I’m still working on building up positive character traits like bravery and helping others. You could say I’m a bit of a work in prog—’
At that point Felonious Dark and Gertrude disappeared around the corner, and you couldn’t catch the end of the sentence, but I’m going to take a wild guess that it was ‘ress’.
‘Okay, then,’ Kipp said, as he turned back to look up at Cymphany. ‘Tobias and I will catch you.’
Tobias nodded, in a less-than-confident-but-willing-to-give-it-a-try-to-save-my-friend manner.
Cymphany shook her head. ‘It’s okay. I’m fine. As I’ve told you already, dinosaurs don’t exist.’ She didn’t seem to notice a faint voice, coming from the deep recesses of the dinosaur’s open mouth. ‘Help, we’re members of the Dinosaur Fearer’s Anonymous group, and we’ve been swallowed whole and are currently inside a dinosaur’s belly, which, due to our particular phobias, is entirely the last place we want to be right now. If you could be so kind as to throw a rope down, that would be great, but if not, please pass on our feedback to the DFA committee that, all things considered, this has not been one of the DFA’s best field trips.’