by Adam Cece
‘Don’t be silly, Mr Dark,’ Tobias said, climbing onto Bugsplatter’s back. ‘And besides, why don’t you just call yourself Felonious Dark One. Then you’ll both have the same number of letters in your names.’
Felonious Dark’s eyes went wide. ‘I could do that?’ His chest puffed out with a sense of pride. ‘Felonious Dark One. A sixteen-letter name. I never dared dream I’d have a sixteen-letter name.’
He gave Tobias a swift nod. ‘Go! Save your friends. We’ll take care of my brother and the lab-coated scientists. Finally, my brother and I face each other as equals.’
Brussels Sprout was last to board Bugsplatter. Bugsplatter flapped her wings and lifted them into the air—just as the crowd of Huggabie Falls residents and their greatest fears met the crowd of scientists led by Felonious Dark Two like two rampaging armies on a battlefield.
There have been many great battles in history: the battle of Waterloo in the Napoleonic Wars, the Battle of Troy during the Trojan War, and one of the all-time most epic battles—the battle between the fans of the television series Space Patrol and the fans of the television series Patrollers of Space at the Huggabie Falls Science-Fiction Film and Television Convention, over which series had the more ‘captainy’ space captain.
But the battle that raged in the streets of Huggabie Falls that day put all other battles in history to shame. As you might have already worked out, it took place between the Huggabie Falls residents and their greatest fears and the newly named Felonious Dark One on one side and an army of lab-coated scientists (who were menacing, yes, but slightly less menacing than the henchmen the creepy scientist had helping her in the first Huggabie Falls book) and Felonious Dark Two on the other side. This battle had a Tyrannosaurus Rex in it for starters. Everyone knows that a battle with a Tyrannosaurus Rex in it is at least ten times more awesome than one without a Tyrannosaurus Rex in it. Sadly, T-Rexs have been absent from many of recent history’s battles, which is largely due to the fact that dinosaurs became extinct sixty-five million years ago.
Also doing their best to make the battle more awesome were: charging bathtubs with rubber duckies in them; a flying witch on her broomstick turning scientists into bowls of custard; clowns riding tiny bicycles and jousting at the lab-coated scientists with French loaves, knocking them into spiderwebs spun by two-metre-tall spiders; pigeons pooing on scientists with military-strike accuracy and blinding them, enabling Huggabie Falls residents to lock those lab-coated scientists in blue plastic portaloos; and, in the middle of it all, a man reciting really bad poetry, like:
War, War, all around me.
What a bore.
When someone hits a golf ball they scream ‘fore’.
Why don’t they scream three?
It confuses me.
Amid the chaos, Felonious Dark One and Felonious Dark Two stood on opposite sides of Digmont Drive, hands poised by their sides as if they were two gunslingers in the Wild West. They eyeballed each other fiercely and were not distracted as an octopus made of feathers galloped past. That was Coach Peltin Pilkon’s fear, but now Coach Pilkon was piggybacking on the feathered octopus, and the two of them were racing around the street unleashing tickle-bombs on lab-coated scientists until the lab-coated scientists were giggling so much that other Huggabie Falls residents could tie them up.
Felonious Dark One and Felonious Dark Two did not notice this or any of the other bizarre battles happening around them, as they were totally focused on each other. The poet, too, was transfixed. He looked at each of them in turn:
Felonious Dark One versus Felonious Dark Two—I hope neither one of them steps in pigeon poo.
At last Felonious Dark Two spoke. ‘Shall we settle this in the same way we’ve always settled our disputes, brother?’
Felonious Dark One nodded with the extreme confidence of a man who now had sixteen letters in his name. ‘You’re on.’
This earned a snigger from Felonious Dark Two. ‘You have not beaten me in forty years.’
Felonious Dark One shrugged. ‘Well, today seems as good a day as any to change that.’
Some of the Huggabie Falls residents and their greatest fears and some of the scientists had noticed something momentous was going on, and they began to gather round. The poet clapped his hands together.
Two brothers wage an epic war.
Last one out should shut the door.
Tobias’s mum, who was nearby, and who had a scientist in a headlock, heard the bad poetry and laughed. ‘It’s terrible but, you know what, it’s growing on me. I can’t believe I was ever scared of bad poetry.’
Felonious Dark One and Felonious Dark Two walked towards each other until they were chest to chest. Each one’s eyes were locked on the other’s.
‘The loser,’ Felonious Dark Two snarled, ‘leaves Huggabie Falls forever, and takes his army with him.’
Felonious Dark One nodded. ‘Agreed.’
They each took a single step away from each other.
‘Now draw,’ Felonious Dark Two bellowed.
The poet gasped. The Huggabie Falls residents gasped. A ghost fainted. And even the Tyrannosaurus Rex tried to put his hands over his shocked mouth, but as T-Rexs only have little arms he just looked like he was trying to give someone a high ten.
The air in the street went still. A tumbleweed tumbled past. Everyone knew they were about to witness something extraordinary.
Mr Treachery, who was stealing a transfixed lab-coated scientist’s wallet, whispered to Mrs Treachery, who took the wallet from her husband and put it in another transfixed lab-coated scientist’s pocket. ‘When is it going to start?’ he said.
And then it started.
Felonious Dark One and Felonious Dark Two each whipped one hand up. The hands clasped together. Each man’s fingers curled around the other’s, locking the two hands together into a ball—a ball with two thumbs poking out the top. The thumbs bowed at each other, and Felonious Dark Two sneered. ‘Last chance to give up, little brother. You’ve never beaten me. A few extra letters won’t save you now. This will be the grand championship of thumb wars. Unless you’re so terrified you want to surrender already.’
‘I will never surrender,’ Felonious Dark One said, with impressive determination.
Felonious Dark Two raised his free hand and roared, ‘Let the thumb-war championship begin.’
And it began. The thumbs dodged and weaved and taunted each other. Every now and then a thumb would leap forward and attempt to squeeze the other thumb flat, but the other thumb would dodge free just in time.
‘What are they doing?’ the feather octopus asked Mrs Turgan, who was standing with her broom and holding eleven bowls of custard.
‘Arrrgh!’ Mr Haurik cut in. Somehow he had moored his ship, got a tub of popcorn, and was stuffing his face with it. ‘They’re having a thumb war. To win a round, you have to pin your opponent’s thumb down for a count of three. First to win three rounds is the champion. Arrrgh!’
Felonious Dark One and Felonious Dark Two adopted side-on fencing stances, with their free arms aloft behind them for balance. They moved round and round in a circle, their eyes locked in intense concentration.
‘It’s a thing of beauty,’ said one of the lab-coated scientists, despite the fact he was lying on the ground with Ms Suddlehoney’s sloth sitting on his chest.
The entire town—including all the greatest fears and all the lab-coated scientists, most of whom had been overpowered, watched the thumb-warring brothers.
The epic duel waged on. These men were obviously thumb-war hotshots. A couple of times one thumb would sucker punch the other in the knuckle, and someone would scream out, ‘Keep it clean.’
Suddenly, Felonious Dark One’s thumb lunged. Felonious Dark Two’s thumb tried to dodge, but it wasn’t quick enough and, in a flash of thumbs, it was pinned. Felonious Dark One shouted, ‘One, two, three,’ and then he roared in triumph.
(These four stars above are a little trick I’ve been told authors use when they want
to switch to a new place, within a chapter. I doubt it works, but I like stars.)
Inside the House of Spooks, Cymphany, Tobias, Bugsplatter and Brussels Sprout didn’t go to the secret lab, where they expected the top-hatted scientist would be hiding. Instead, they went straight down to the cells.
It came in very handy that Bugsplatter had acid saliva, as she was able to burn the locks off the cell doors. ‘It also comes in handy for burning extra holes in belts,’ Bugsplatter said proudly.
Bugsplatter sizzled opened the cell doors for Kipp’s parents and Kaedy and Conrad Creeps. ‘Thanks kids,’ the voice of Kipp’s dad said. Then Bugsplatter sizzled open Kipp’s door and everyone expected him to come running out. But he didn’t.
Cymphany and Tobias found their friend sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor of the cell, staring at a tall ornate mirror. Kipp didn’t say anything. He just kept staring at the mirror.
‘Kipp,’ Cymphany said, kneeling beside him. ‘We have to find that top-hatted scientist. Who knows what he plans to do next?’
But Kipp didn’t take his eyes off the mirror. Tobias looked at it and frowned. ‘How come I can see myself in the mirror, and you, Cymphany, but not Kipp?’
Cymphany looked in the mirror and saw that Tobias was right. Even though Kipp was sitting on the ground between them, in the mirror it was like he was—
‘In the mirror I’m invisible,’ Kipp moaned. ‘The mirror is showing me my greatest fear, my horrible future. I don’t want to turn invisible.’ Kipp wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. ‘It will be like I’m not here at all.’
‘Oh, Kipp,’ they heard Kipp’s mum’s voice say from behind them. ‘It isn’t so bad. I mean, your father and I have the most epic games of hide and seek.’
‘It’s true,’ Kipp’s dad said. ‘They can last for months.’
Despite the fact Kipp still looked sad, his parent’s joke made him smile—just a tiny bit—but he was still hunched over. Cymphany put her arm around him.
‘We know you’re going to turn invisible one day, Kipp,’ Cymphany said. ‘And that’s scary. But even if we can’t see you, to us you’ll always be here, and’—she smiled—‘we’ll always be here for you.’
‘Always,’ Tobias added.
Kipp looked at his friends and brightened up. He stood up and turned away from the mirror. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a top-hatted scientist to stop.’
Tobias grinned. ‘I’ve always wanted to say this,’ he said, and he held a fist in the air and shouted, ‘To the secret lab!’
(What do you know? The stars work.)
Outside, the thumb war raged on. The whole town crowded around and cheered their favourite player, and—considering the number of Felonious Dark Two banners being waved about—it seemed most of the crowd was cheering for Felonious Dark Two.
And the crowd was probably cheering for Felonious Dark Two because he was now winning. Felonious Dark One had started well and won the first round and then the second, but now the scores were even and in this the deciding round Felonious Dark Two was obliterating Felonious Dark One. A contest hadn’t been this one-sided since a woolly mammoth once challenged a guinea pig to a pie-eating competition.
In anticipation of Felonious Dark Two’s victory, someone had even managed to get Felonious Dark Two: The Great Thumb War Champion T-shirts made up, and most of the crowd was already wearing them.
Felonious Dark One and Felonious Dark Two still had their hands clenched together. Felonious Dark One was on the ground on his knees, and Felonious Dark Two was looming over him, gloating. He was especially good at gloating—he’d had lots of practice, having beaten his brother at everything they’d ever done in their entire lives.
Felonious Dark Two sneered at Felonious Dark One’s bulging fearful eyes and the sweat running down his forehead. ‘So,’ Felonious Dark Two announced, ‘I’ve won the last two rounds, with ease, and now I shall win the third and finish this contest once and for all.’
‘You’re cheating,’ Felonious Dark One blubbered. ‘It’s like your thumb is twice as long as mine.’
‘Our thumbs are exactly the same length, you nincompoop,’ Felonious Dark Two snorted. ‘We’re identical triplets.’
Felonious Dark One had been ultra-confident when he’d won the first two rounds. But he wondered now whether his brother had only been letting him win to fill him with a false confidence so that his eventual loss would be even more humiliating.
After that, the next two rounds had barely lasted five seconds each. Now Felonious Dark Two was one round from victory, and Felonious Dark One’s thumb was staggering with exhaustion.
‘Let me remind you,’ Felonious Dark Two said, ‘That whoever loses this round has to leave Huggabie Falls forever, with all your townsfolk and their greatest fears.’
And then, with lightning speed Felonious Dark Two’s thumb launched and flattened Felonious Dark One’s thumb, holding it down in an unbreakable grip.
Felonious Dark One tried to wrench his thumb free, but it was no good. He looked up into Felonious Dark Two’s eyes, which were full of triumph.
Felonious Dark Two began the victory count: ‘One.’
(I love these four-star breaks. I think I’ll keep using them.)
Inside the House of Spooks, Tobias, Cymphany, Kipp, Bugsplatter, Brussels Sprout, Kaedy and Kipp’s parents raced to the secret lab. Conrad Creeps wasn’t with them, because he had been too scared to leave his cell, plus he was also scared of racing, and secret labs, and final confrontations. Everyone agreed it really had to be tough being Conrad Creeps.
As they all burst through the door to the secret lab, they saw the top-hatted scientist. He was standing on a raised platform above the hard-light-hologram-generation machine. He wasn’t wearing his top hat anymore—he was lowering the electronic flashing and bleeping cap, which was connected to the hard-light-hologram-generation machine, onto his bald head. The machine was humming, and the hum was getting louder and louder—it sounded like an aeroplane getting ready to take off. And the hard-light laser-shooting hairdryer things were glowing as if they were ready to burst into action.
‘He’s creating a scare-ball creature,’ Kipp yelled.
‘Correction,’ the top-hatted scientist said, although, as we’ve already established, he wasn’t wearing his top hat right then. So maybe we should call him the electronic-capped scientist from now on. He spread his arms out wide. ‘I’m creating the ultimate scare-ball creature.’
Tobias gulped. ‘Okay, that sounds really bad. If he has just been creating non-ultimate scare-ball creatures up till now, then I’m not looking forward to seeing what an ultimate one looks like.’
The electronic-capped scientist sneered. ‘You kids think you’re so smart, convincing the Huggabie Falls residents to befriend their greatest fears. But wait till you see the unbelievably scary creature my imagination can create. Once everyone sees this creature, they’ll run screaming from town and not even a raised drawbridge will stop them.’
The electronic-capped scientist closed his eyes and put his fingers to the sides of his head. He looked like he was straining and imagining hard. The machine was so deafeningly loud now, and the hard-light laser-shooting hairdryer things were beginning to form a meshed shape that was almost as high as the ceiling. As the shape took shape, everyone gasped.
‘That looks flipping scary,’ Brussels Sprout said in a very bad Scottish accent.
Even Bugsplatter’s face went white with fear, and, considering her face was orange and purple before, that was a significant colour change.
Kipp gasped. ‘I’m afraid he’s right. One look at that and the residents of Huggabie Falls will run for their lives.’
Cymphany’s eyes were darting desperately around the room. She rummaged in her satchel for something to help them—maybe a ladder or something they could use to get up to the top-hatted scientist. But hoping to find a threemetre ladder in a small satchel was probably a tad ambitious. The only thing she found was a sew-on
badge from the Dinosaur Fearers Anonymous group. She had been given it by Truman Trotter, one of the DFA members who had been swallowed by the T-Rex and who had joined some other swallowed DFA members and formulated an unlikely but ultimately successful escape plan.
I’ll have to take a moment here to write Yippee, because it’s great news that Truman Trotter survived. Remember, he was the minor character in this story I was going to make a major character in a future story? So, that’s brilliant news for my future writing aspirations, but I appreciate it’s probably who-cares-can-we-just-get-on-with-the-story-now? news for you, so I’ll get back to the story.
Truman Trotter had given Cymphany the badge when she had seen him trudging out of town still soaked in T-Rex stomach fluids. Truman had announced he was leaving the DFA and was going to join a quilt-making club instead, because quilts, generally-speaking, didn’t eat people.
Cymphany frowned at the badge. ‘Well, this is useless against that,’ she said, tossing the badge aside. ‘The top-hatted scientist is right. I can’t imagine anything scarier than that monster.’
Bugsplatter must have agreed, because she fainted.
But Tobias was frozen—staring at the DFA badge Cymphany had just thrown on the ground. A curious expression was spreading across his face. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, and he raced out of the secret lab and down the hall.
Cymphany and Kipp looked at each other, and had another one of those millisecond, shared-in-a-glance conversations. I won’t write out the whole conversation here, as it would take up at least four pages, but I’ll just give you the abridged version, which was:
Where could Tobias possibly be going at a time like this?
If he’s going to get more free popcorn, then he is in big trouble.
Outside, Felonious Dark Two roared, ‘Two.’ He had taken an extraordinarily long time between counting one and counting two in his final victory count. This was due to the fact he had Felonious Dark One’s thumb clenched in an unbreakable grip, which ensured his victory. So he was taking his time and revelling in the moment immensely. Because he knew that once he counted the third count, his brother would lose, and he and all the residents of Huggabie Falls along with their greatest fears would leave town forever.