by Adam Cece
‘So,’ Kipp said slowly, turning his head away from Felonious Dark and back to Cymphany and Tobias. ‘If we destroy the spider scare balls, we destroy the hard-light holograms, and if we destroy the hard-light holograms we destroy everyone’s greatest fears?’
‘It looks that way,’ said Cymphany. ‘But that won’t do it entirely. Felonious Dark’s identical triplet brother and the top-hatted scientist can just make more. To stop this for good we need to destroy the Scare-a-Build 1000 too. And we need to rescue poor Conrad Creeps. The unbelievably scary things seem to be generated from his particularly scaredy-cat mind.’
There was a noise outside, and everyone rushed to the curtain and peeked out, but it was just a truck from the Huggabie Falls Imaginary Creatures Zoo rumbling past.
As everyone sat back down again, Tobias asked, ‘What’s your identical triplet brother’s name, Mr Dark?’
‘His name,’ Felonious Dark said, pausing for dramatic effect, ‘is Felonious Dark Two.’
It must have been the day for blank looks, because Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany all looked so blank you could hardly see their eyes, mouths or noses.
It was quite some time before anyone spoke. Eventually, Kipp said, ‘Felonious Dark too?’
‘Wow,’ Tobias said, ‘it must be very confusing at family dinners if you both have the same name.’
Felonious Dark wasn’t listening. He continued. ‘Ever since we were children he thought he was better than me because his name is longer than mine.’
Cymphany blinked, as if to say, this is making no sense at all. ‘But he has the same name as you,’ she said.
Felonious Dark sat up straight. ‘No, he does not. I don’t know where you got that idea. His name is Felonious Dark Two. T-W-O. He has three more letters in his name than I have in mine. Everyone knows that the longer your name is the better it is.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Cymphany scoffed, while secretly being very pleased that the name Cymphany was two letters longer than the name Tobias and four letters longer than the name Kipp.
‘It might be ridiculous,’ Felonious Dark growled. ‘But it has meant my brother has always been superior to me, and he’s always let me know it. We haven’t spoken in ten years… until he rang me today.’
Tobias laughed. ‘I bet you’re both pretty jealous of your third brother, then.’
Felonious Dark looked confused. ‘Why?’
‘Felonious Dark Three has more letters than both of you,’ Tobias said, looking very proud of himself for working this out.
Felonious Dark chuckled. ‘No way. He’s got it worse than anyone. You wouldn’t believe what his name is.’
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany leaned forward in anticipation. ‘What is it?’ Kipp asked.
Felonious Dark fixed his eyes on them. ‘Al,’ he said, very seriously. ‘It’s not even short for Alistair or Alvin, it’s just Al. It was so humiliating for him that he packed his bags and left home when he was only four years old.’
Cymphany, Tobias and Kipp shared amused expressions. ‘You know, Mr Dark,’ Tobias said. ‘I can’t believe you and your family haven’t always lived in Huggabie Falls. The Darks are certainly weird enough.’
For a moment everyone almost forgot that an hour ago they had been running from a Brussels sprout and dodging grand pianos, but then something scuttled across the countertop nearby.
‘Scare ball!’ Felonious Dark screamed, and everyone dived under the table. They cowered there, among the spiderwebs. After a few moments, Cymphany was brave enough to poke her head out.
When she saw what was scuttling across the countertop, she rolled her eyes, crawled out from under the booth table, and stood up. ‘It’s not a scare ball with spider legs. It’s just a regular spider with spider legs.’
‘A two-metre-tall spider?’ Tobias squeaked.
Cymphany scoffed. ‘More like a two-millimetre-tall spider.’
The tiny spider, who had been enjoying having this whole place to itself since Froggin had left, and was waiting patiently for these new occupants to clear off, was about to protest that it was actually two point seven millimetres tall, when Cymphany added, ‘Anyway, it’s an important reminder that we can’t stay here for too much longer, doing nothing. We need to leave and get on with stopping the top-hatted scientist and Felonious Dark Two.’
Kipp, Tobias and Felonious Dark and, especially, the tiny spider all agreed.
As soon as they were reasonably confident there were no Brussels sprouts with very bad Scottish accents hiding outside, ready to jump out and throw grand pianos at them, Kipp, Tobias, Cymphany and Felonious Dark left the Huggabie Falls Sanctuary for People Fleeing from Witches and Other Dangerous Flying Creatures.
Felonious Dark headed straight for the police station to report the top-hatted scientist and Felonious Dark Two for kidnapping Conrad Creeps and for scaring Huggabie Falls residents with hard-light holograms projected from scare balls. ‘And,’ Felonious Dark said angrily, ‘they need to make those carts at the House of Spooks quite a bit bigger so people don’t get stuck in them. I’ve still got pins and needles in my legs.’
‘That was all very bizarre,’ Cymphany said, once Felonious Dark had disappeared down Digmont Drive, in the opposite direction from the way she and Kipp and Tobias were going.
Tobias nodded. ‘I know. I can’t believe Mr Dark eats flies. I mean, I’ve tried them—who hasn’t? But it sounds like Mr Dark eats them often.’
Kipp and Cymphany stopped walking for five milliseconds and glanced at each other. Then they kept walking and looked straight ahead. It’s interesting that in one five-millisecond shared look you can actually have an entire silent conversation. The conversation Kipp and Cymphany had in their five-millisecond look went something like this:
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Were you thinking, why would Tobias have tried eating flies?
Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking.
Do you want to ask him about it?
Ummm…not really.
Me neither, there are some questions you’re better off not knowing the answer to, and I believe this is one of them.
I agree, shall we keep walking then.
Yes, let’s.
So Cymphany and Kipp kept walking, not ignoring Tobias’s bizarre comment about eating flies, but filing it away as something to bring up later.
‘And what about Mr Dark being a triplet?’ Tobias kept on chatting, unaware that a five-millisecond silent conversation about him eating flies had just taken place. ‘I can’t believe how much his brother looks like him.’
Cymphany and Kipp nodded in agreement. ‘It’s quite amazing,’ Kipp said. ‘They even wear the same suit.’
‘Anyway,’ Cymphany yawned, as they turned down Tobias’s street, Digmont Drive. ‘It’s been a very long and tiring day. Let’s all go home to bed, and by morning Mr Dark will have told the Huggabie Falls police officer about his identical triplet brother’s dastardly dealings with the top-hatted scientist, and they’ll have shut down that spooky House of Spooks and arrested the top-hatted scientist and Felonious Dark Two and there’ll be no more hard-light holograms bursting out of spider scare balls and terrifying the people of Huggabie Falls.’
Kipp nodded. ‘And everything will be back to normal.’
I’d like to just mention at this point that if that were to happen then I would be going back to my old job as a window cleaner of miniature model houses, because no one will want to read a book with an anti-climactic ending such as: And then Felonious Dark went to the police, the House of Spooks was shut down, and everything in Huggabie Falls went back to normal, which is to say back to weird.
But, lucky for me—because there just isn’t enough work in cleaning the windows of miniature model houses because people don’t care about their miniature model houses like they used to—that wasn’t what happened next. Here is what happened next.
At that moment Tobias frowned and said, ‘Why is my father out the front of our house, l
oading suitcases onto the roof racks of our car? He never leaves the house by the front door. He usually uses our secret exit, the one the debt collectors don’t know about.’
Tobias’s father was frantically rushing back and forth between the house and the car, heaving overstuffed suitcases onto the car’s roof, which was in danger of collapsing under the weight.
‘Dad, what are you doing?’ Tobias asked as he looked at the wobbly tower of suitcases.
Tobias’s dad spun around, squealed, and leapt into the air. ‘Oh, Tobias, it’s you.’ He put his hand to his chest and took a lot of deep breaths. ‘Quick, pack up all your stuff, we’re moving. Maybe to Antarctica. Or anywhere that’s as far away from Huggabie Falls as possible.’ His eyes darted up and down Digmont Drive, and he scampered back inside.
Kipp, Cymphany and Tobias glanced at each other and had another one of those silent one-glance five-millisecond conversations. It went something like this:
Well so much for—
No one else getting scared before morning. I know. Tobias’s dad is petrified.
Cymphany, it’s not nice to interrupt someone, even if it is in a silent five-millisecond conversation. I mean you didn’t do that before.
Hang on a second, what do you mean before? Did you guys have a silent five-millisecond conversation without me?
Sorry, Tobias, it was actually about you.
ABOUT ME?
Yes, it was about you eating flies.
Well, I never. It’s not nice to talk behind someone’s back, you know, even if it is a silent conversation held in a five-millisecond glance.
You’re right. Sorry, Tobias.
Yes, sorry, Tobias.
Now, shall we have a real spoken conversation, because it appears we have a new problem. And although you can say a lot in a five-millisecond glance, this really might need some actual spoken words to sort out.
Good point. I second that.
I third that.
So Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany started talking, about the new problem, which was the fact that Tobias’s dad seemed to be the latest victim of a scare ball. As they talked, they were unaware that, across the road, watching them from inside some bushes, some bushes that were just big enough to hide a grand piano, was a pair of tiny Brussels sprout eyes.
Please note: I have omitted chapter thirteen from this book and skipped straight to chapter fourteen, because thirteen is considered by some people to be an unlucky number. Now, I am not a particularly superstitious person, but my unlucky number is one million, four hundred and ninety-three thousand, nine hundred and seventeen. I find if you’re going to have an unlucky number, it’s better to have a really high one, as it is not going to come up very often. Although, once when I was shopping at Mega-Mart-Super-Warehouse, I saw on my receipt that I was customer number one million, four hundred and ninety-three thousand, nine hundred and seventeen. I gasped, and at that exact moment I was attacked by an angry wombat. But I’m not sure if it was due to the fact that one million, four hundred and ninety-three thousand, nine hundred and seventeen really is an unlucky number, or more to do with the fact that a human gasp sounds exactly the same as a wombat declaration of war.
Whatever the case, there’s already enough scariness going on in this book without me adding to it by having a chapter thirteen.
Don’t worry, you won’t miss anything, as I have taken all the words from chapter thirteen and put them in this chapter, and you’ll find all the words from chapter fourteen in chapter fifteen, and so on. So when you come to the end of the book you’ll have to subtract one to find the actual number of chapters in this book, if that’s something you want to know.
But, when you think about it, even though this is called chapter fourteen, it is really chapter thirteen in disguise, so it’s still just as likely to be unlucky, and there will probably be something super scary in this chapter like a spulling mistake or something—which is every author’s worst nihgtmare.
Tobias’s dad had something that was his worst nightmare: vacuum-cleaner salespeople, especially ones who come to your door and try to sell you a vacuum cleaner.
Tobias thought it was a pretty weird thing for his father to be petrified of. But he was pretty sure it had something to do with the time a vacuum salesperson came to their house, and his father signed up for a Super Sucker 5000, and because he didn’t read the fine print on his contract he also inadvertently signed himself up for the Mars Habitation program, to be one of the first human settlers on Mars. This wouldn’t have been such a problem, except for the fact that Tobias’s dad was also quite afraid of red dirt.
Well, on the day that Kipp, Cymphany and Tobias had discovered the top-secret lab, and seen the scare balls that were scaring Huggabie Falls residents out of town, Tobias’s dad had seen quite a lot of vacuum-cleaner salespeople walking up and down their street. And by quite a lot, I mean he had seen thousands of them. When Tobias’s mum came home, she found her husband huddled in the corner, sobbing and clutching a wooden spoon for protection.
‘Did you see?’ Tobias’s mum had said as she crawled into the house via the secret tunnel entrance. ‘They’re building a vacuum-cleaner-salespeople training centre next door.’ She paused, seeing her petrified husband crouched on the floor. ‘Oh, wait a minute, you don’t like vacuum-cleaner salespeople, do you? Hang on a moment, why are you packing up all my yoga mats?’
‘We’re leaving town.’ Tobias’s dad had mumbled. ‘There are too many vacuum-cleaner salespeople here now. We’re going to move somewhere where they don’t have vacuum cleaners, or even carpets, like…’ he paused, and thought hard for a moment. ‘Like maybe Mars? Perhaps that habitation program I signed up for might be the best thing after all.’
Tobias, Kipp and Cymphany tried to explain to Tobias’s dad, as they stood in the kitchen of the Treachery family’s house, that the vacuum-cleaner salespeople weren’t real, that they were hard-light holograms projected from a scare ball, and that Felonious Dark was on his way to fetch the Huggabie Falls police officer so he could arrest Felonious Dark Two and the top-hatted scientist and then all the scariness would stop.
But adults are known for not always listening to children, and this was one of those occasions. Tobias’s mum just chuckled. ‘You children have the wildest imaginations. I visited the House of Spooks this morning, and it was a hoot. The man in the lab coat and top hat, who insisted he wasn’t a scientist, was lovely. He even gave me two collectible House of Spooks orbs free of charge. Now, where did I put them? That’s strange. They were here a second ago. It’s as if they grew legs and walked away.’
‘The orbs are scare balls,’ Tobias whimpered, getting scared all over again in case one of them projected a Brussels sprout with a very bad Scottish accent and a grand piano. ‘And they can sprout legs.’
Tobias’s mum’s chuckle turned into a guffaw. ‘Honestly, you children should write a book. This is hilarious.’
Tobias put his shaking hands on his hips and with a quavering voice said, ‘Mum, what are you more scared of than anything else in this world?’
Tobias’s mum gasped and began to quiver. ‘Miniatures,’ she said. ‘You know when they make little cars and people and buildings and stuff out of plastic and then paint them so they look real. I swallowed a miniature Leaning Tower of Pisa once, and almost died. Miniature things send shivers up my spine. If things were meant to be that small, then they’d be that small! I never would have been able to swallow the real Leaning Tower of Pisa.’
Tobias’s eyes were darting left and right anxiously, probably because he was hoping the scare ball contained his mum’s fear and not his. ‘Mum, I’m willing to bet that if you go outside now, you’ll discover that on the other side of our house they are building a miniature world, or something very similar.’
‘Oh, that is preposterous,’ Tobias’s mum laughed, as Tobias’s dad bundled past her, heading out to the car with another packed suitcase. But Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany had very serious we’re-not-joking expression
s on their faces, and soon curiosity got the better of Tobias’s mum and she went out into the front yard and peered over the side fence.
She came back inside moments later. Her face was white and she looked like a ghost. ‘I’ll help you pack, Theodore,’ she said to Tobias’s dad, and she began shoving the television in a box.
‘This is getting urgent,’ Kipp said to Cymphany and Tobias, and they ran out of the house and towards the police station. ‘We need to find Mr Dark, and the Huggabie Falls police officer quick smart, before the whole town is infested with those horrible scare balls.’
But when they got to the police station they found Felonious Dark sitting on the front fence staring at the ground with his shoulders slumped.
‘Mr Dark,’ Cymphany said. ‘Did you find the police officer? We have to hurry. Tobias’s parents are going to—’
But before she could finish Felonious Dark interrupted ‘He’s gone. He’s left town.’
‘Left town?’ Kipp said. ‘Like, gone to a police officers’ conference or something, where they compare who has the shiniest badge?’
‘No. Left town for good. Officer Snaildraw is terrified of alpacas,’ Felonious Dark said, as a herd of alpacas wandered past the police station.
‘This is crazy,’ Tobias shouted. ‘I don’t care if Officer Snaildraw has left town, we have to save Conrad Creeps—he’ll probably be scared to death before much longer, and I’m sure being scared to death is another thing he is scared of—and we have to find and deactivate all those terrifying scare balls.’
Tobias was being quite a lot braver than usual. He was scared of many things, but it seemed the thing he was scared of most of all, apart from Brussels sprouts with bad Scottish accents, was his family leaving Huggabie Falls.
‘Although,’ Tobias continued, ‘I’m not sure how to stop scare balls. Do you think flyspray works on them? Anyway, you’ll help us, won’t you, Mr Dark?’
Felonious Dark looked up. ‘Is that what a reformed evil person would do?’