by Adam Cece
Al Dark clenched his fists. ‘I just told you my name is Al.’
Felonious Dark rolled his eyes at Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany. ‘What did I tell you. Touchy, this Yal bloke.’
Al Dark growled. ‘This is typical,’ he said. ‘Everyone has always ignored me because of my short name. Everyone always paid more attention to you and our other brother, Felonious Dark Two. Do you know how hard it was for me being pretty much invisible in our house?’
Kipp frowned. ‘I think I’m going to find out just how hard it is being invisible pretty soon,’ he said.
But Felonious Dark just huffed at his brother. ‘It’s not our fault you were so ignorable. You should have done something interesting.’
‘I tried,’ Al Dark said. ‘I did evil things all the time.’
Felonious Dark laughed. ‘Like what?’
Al Dark paused. ‘Errr…like that time I… errr…’ he growled. ‘Well even if I did do something evil, it wouldn’t have mattered. No one ever paid any attention to anything I did. I think Father thought I was one of the neighbour’s kids, who just coincidentally looked exactly like one of his kids. But Mother didn’t notice me at all.’
Felonious Dark blew air through his nose. ‘Mother was busy running her businesses.’
‘She seemed’—Al Dark leant forward—‘to notice you and Felonious Dark Two just fine. She was always telling you off. I could have ridden a camel through the lounge room and she wouldn’t have even noticed. And then she left me behind when you all went on holiday.’
Felonious Dark sniggered. ‘Oh, you’re exaggerating, Ral. People always forget something when they go on holiday.’
‘It was for three years,’ Al Dark said. ‘And all that time I had to imagine the wonderful things you were getting up to without me. Although I didn’t have to imagine, actually, because you kept sending postcards home—to the cat.’
Felonious Dark’s face brightened. ‘Claws Dark? Oh, I loved that cat. We had to send him postcards, he’s like family.’
This sent Al Dark into a rage. ‘But I was actually family. And why would anyone send a cat postcards? Cats can’t even read.’
Felonious Dark chuckled. ‘Okay, point taken, Kal.’
Al Dark was red faced and gripping his hair now. ‘My name is Al. Stop this right now. Stop pretending you can’t remember me. And stop pretending you never even noticed me when we lived together. Things have changed now. From now on people will know who I am. From now on people will notice me, and remember me, even Mother, because I’ll be the most important person, in the most important town on Earth. My town.’
‘Wait a second,’ Cymphany said, following this conversation with interest from her very slow-moving tortoise. ‘You’re the mayor of Near Huggabie Falls, aren’t you? I saw a picture of you once, but I’d forgotten all about it.’
Al Dark turned his head to her and smiled thinly. ‘Very clever, little girl,’ he said. ‘When I moved out of the Dark home, I became mayor of my own town. I wanted to be an important person, a memorable person, and who’s more important and memorable than a mayor? Only problem was no one wanted to live in my town. I couldn’t even get my town its own name. Just Near flipping-amazing-incredible-weird-and-interesting Huggabie Falls. And then it was like the holiday thing all over again, except this time everyone was off having fun in Huggabie Falls and I wasn’t even seeing the cat’s postcards.’
‘Oh, you’re not still going on about that are you, Sal?’ Felonious Dark rolled his eyes. ‘That was so two minutes ago.’
Al Dark glowered at his brother. ‘But now that I have the utterly indescribable thing, no one will ever ignore me or my town again. It will be Huggabie Falls that will be ignored, and Near Huggabie Falls and its mayor, me, will be the most important and memorable things on Earth.’
Felonious Dark still seemed to be finding all this quite hilarious. ‘Geesh, you seem to have an over-inflated sense of your own importance, Cal.’
‘It’s Al,’ Al Dark screamed, so loud that a volcano rumbled in a neighbouring country. But he quickly composed himself. ‘But I don’t care anymore. Without knowing what the utterly indescribable thing is, neither you nor your pesky kid friends can stop me. This conversation is over.’ He turned back around on his tortoise. ‘And, anyway, I can’t hear you, I think my tortoise and I just broke the sound barrier.’
‘You did not,’ Kipp said. ‘Your tortoise just stopped and ate grass for ten minutes.’
Just then Cymphany’s eyes spread wide. ‘Watch out,’ she said. ‘Al Dark is directing his tortoise at that broken bit of the fence line. He’s going to escape the track and get away.’
‘We’ll never catch him in time,’ Kipp hollered.
‘Not unless,’ Tobias said incredulously, arms flung out, ‘we get off the tortoises and walk.’
‘No you don’t,’ said the track attendant, who had appeared beside them. ‘It’s extremely dangerous to disembark from a tortoise once it’s reached top speed.’
‘And when are they going to reach that speed?’ Cymphany asked.
The attendant looked confused. ‘They already have, about two metres back. So about thirty-five minutes ago.’
Al Dark’s tortoise had almost disappeared through the gap in the fence.
‘He’s getting away,’ Cymphany said.
‘I really should fix that gap,’ the attendant said. ‘We had another tortoise escape yesterday. He could be up to twenty metres away by now.’
‘Oh, that’s it,’ Tobias said, unbuckling his harness straps. ‘I’m getting off.’
‘If you do,’ the track attendant warned, ‘you’ll be banned. You won’t be able to enjoy the thrills and spills of tortoise racing for’—she paused for dramatic effect—‘three days.’
‘Three days!’ said Kipp and Cymphany and Felonious Dark, and they started undoing their harness straps too.
Tobias was the first one to leap from his tortoise. As he did this he set off a chain of events. A number of things happened suddenly, and by suddenly I mean in the next twenty-six minutes.
1. Tobias’s tortoise, thrown off balance by the fact that its rider was suddenly gone, veered wildly off course and careered into Felonious Dark’s tortoise beside it, seven minutes later.
2. Felonious Dark roared manically as he finally got his harness undone six minutes and fifty-five seconds after Tobias jumped off this tortoise (they were very difficult harnesses to undo).
3. With only five seconds to spare, Felonious Dark jumped clear of the two tortoises, which then collided.
4. Felonious Dark’s tortoise was sent spinning out of control towards Cymphany’s tortoise, and smashed into it nine minutes later.
5. Cymphany finally got her harness undone eight minutes and fifty seconds after Tobias had leapt free. She wouldn’t have got her harness undone in time at all, but Kipp had freed himself a minute earlier and had leapt spectacularly onto the back of Cymphany’s tortoise to struggle and yank at her harness straps, trying to free her. It was a scary moment, because by this point Cymphany’s tortoise was off course, and it was going to miss the gap in the fence and run straight into it, and at this speed, there was a strong possibility someone would get a splinter.
6. At the last second Kipp helped Cymphany out of her harness, while the track attendant watched, and said to Kipp, ‘You’ve got invisible arms. Did you know that?’ Kipp fell off the tortoise, picked himself up and stared at his arms in despair for a second. But he was too busy rescuing Cymphany to respond.
7. Kipp and Cymphany dived free of the tortoises, rolling away as the tortoises slowly collided, squeezing into each other and ploughing (slowly) into the fence, flipping and spinning and rolling every which way.
Ten minutes later, when the crash was almost over, Cymphany said, ‘Look, we can’t wait around here forever. Let’s go after Al Dark.’
Kipp, Tobias, Cymphany and Felonious Dark apologised to the track attendant for all the mess, and ran through the gap in the fence.
On
the other side of the fence, Al Dark’s tortoise was about five metres in front of them and another tortoise, which must have been the escaped tortoise from yesterday, was about twenty metres in front of that.
Cymphany scanned the horizon. She couldn’t see where Al Dark had gone, but then something moving in the long grass caught her attention, and beyond that she saw a flash of checked suit, as Al Dark disappeared into a building.
‘There,’ Cymphany pointed. ‘That building.’
‘Oh, no,’ Felonious Dark said. ‘I hope my brother didn’t go in there.’
Kipp gulped. ‘Are you sure, Cymphany,’ he said, as if to say, I really hope you’re not sure.
Kipp’s gulp was nothing compared to Tobias’s gulp.
‘Oh this is bad,’ Tobias said. ‘That’s the worst place imaginable.’
I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the expression ‘the worst place imaginable’, because how bad the worst place imaginable is depends on the imagination of the person imagining it. For example, to a person with a poor imagination, the worst place imaginable might be a park where throwing frisbees has been banned. However, to a person with a really horrifying imagination, the worst place imaginable might be a park where throwing frisbees is compulsory.
But sometimes a place is so bad, so completely terrifying, that it is actually beyond anything anyone could imagine, even worse than the worst place imaginable. And it was such a place that Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany were standing across the road from.
‘Wow,’ Tobias said, looking at the place that was worse than the worst place imaginable, ‘this is even worse than that park we saw the other day, where throwing frisbees was compulsory.’
‘Maybe so,’ Cymphany said, ‘but if we want to catch Al Dark, we have to go in there, no matter how much we don’t want to.’
‘My brother Hal must have lost his mind to go in there,’ Felonious Dark said.
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany all glanced at Felonious Dark, but it seemed they had given up reminding him that his brother’s name was Al, and not Mal or Cal or Hal, and they all wondered if Felonious Dark was just pretending not to be able to remember his brother’s name.
Kipp clapped his gloved hands together. Kipp had been a bit freaked out by his suddenly invisible hands, so Cymphany found him a pair of gloves in her satchel.
‘I’m going in,’ Kipp said, as they continued to stare at the place that was even worse than the worst place imaginable. ‘I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ve been scared of turning invisible my whole life. This could be my last adventure as a visible person, so I say let’s go for it.’
Cymphany and Tobias looked at Kipp with the sort of look that suggests that maybe the person they are looking at might need a lie down. ‘It might also be your last adventure as a living person,’ Cymphany said.
They stood for a few more moments like that, staring across at a place that was worse than the worst place imaginable, and, even though they had all expressed a desire not to enter the place, they knew that eventually they would, because they needed to find out what the utterly indescribable thing that was happening in Huggabie Falls was, and they were certain that Felonious Dark’s identical triplet brother Al Dark was behind it, and that he was in the place.
The place was Mrs Turgan’s house.
Mrs Turgan’s house was tall and black and crooked, like someone had made a house out of pots and pans held together with thorny bushes, with lots of twisted chimneys jabbing into the gloomy clouds above it. The front yard was dense with long grass, which had lots of hungry eyes peeking out. Mrs Turgan’s shabby front fence had signs that read:
Kipp, Tobias, Cymphany and Felonious Dark stared in horror at the house. ‘It’s weird,’ Tobias said, ‘but I have always sort of wanted to see inside Mrs Turgan’s house.’
Kipp took a tiny step away from his friend, just in case what he had was contagious. ‘Are you completely bonkers? Why?’
Tobias shrugged. ‘Just curiosity, I guess.’
Felonious Dark shook his head. ‘Well, curiosity killed the cat. I’m not sure which cat, in particular, but the expression probably exists for situations exactly like this. Why would my brother Pal be crazy enough to go in there?’
‘When we get in there we can ask him,’ Cymphany said. ‘And we can also ask him about the utterly indescribable thing. We’d better hurry though. It’s Thursday night. Mrs Turgan’s witch aqua-aerobics night. But she’ll be back soon.’
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany pushed open the creaky gate and made their way cautiously down the overgrown path. They stepped up onto Mrs Turgan’s front porch, which was just a few rotting planks of wood that creaked and groaned as Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany cautiously walked across them.
Felonious Dark stopped and tapped one of the planks with the toe of his boot. ‘I don’t think those planks of wood will hold me,’ he said. ‘And—I don’t want to alarm anyone—but I think there’s a moat full of crocodiles underneath them.’
‘Actually, Mr Dark,’ Cymphany said. ‘They’re alligators. Alligators have shorter heads and more of a U-shaped snout than crocs. But I guess either way you still don’t want to cross.’
Felonious Dark shook his head. ‘I’ll go round the back and look for another way in.’ He left Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany on Mrs Turgan’s front porch and he picked up a stick and hacked his way through the garden and around the side of the house.
‘Hang on,’ Tobias said after a moment, looking at Cymphany alarmed. ‘When did you notice there were alligators under us?’
Cymphany shrugged. ‘Just before we all crossed the planks.’
Tobias’s look escalated from alarmed to very alarmed. And Kipp just bypassed alarmed and very alarmed and went straight to shocked. ‘Just before we crossed the planks,’ they said in unison.
Cymphany laughed. ‘It’s fine, you two worry warts. Those planks may look rotten, but they’re still easily strong enough to support three light children like us.’
It was at that exact moment that two of the three planks splintered and fell into the moat of alligators below. The alligators, who must have for a moment mistaken the planks for tasty children, chomped wildly and crushed the rotting wood to pulp in seconds.
Tobias and Kipp looked at Cymphany accusingly, while Cymphany pretended not to notice them. The only thing that broke the silence was a third plank of wood cracking and falling into the moat and being crunched into woodchips.
Cymphany smiled at Kipp and Tobias. ‘Look, I think we’ll just use this as a learning experience. While I am an expert in many things, I am not an expert assessor of wood-plank strength.’
Tobias tried the front door handle. ‘Locked,’ he said. ‘Which is not surprising.’
‘What do we do now?’ Kipp asked. ‘We’re stuck.’ His eyes scanned the house. I see an open window over there, but we’d have to cross an alligator-filled moat to get to it.’
Cymphany looked at the window and then down at the moat, and she seemed to be doing some mental calculations. ‘We could jump from plank to plank, across what’s left of this porch. But it might be a bit dangerous. I don’t think we can trust planks of wood anymore.’
‘Cymphany,’ Tobias said, ‘is there anything in your satchel that could help us? You always have something useful in there in moments like this.’
Cymphany raised an eyebrow at Tobias and Kipp. ‘I don’t always have something that can help us. Just because I’m often prepared and I often have a lot of useful stuff in my satchel, doesn’t mean I have something for every single… oh wait, hang on, here’s a grappling hook.’ She kept rummaging in her satchel. ‘And here’s a coil of rope.’
‘You were saying,’ Kipp smirked.
Cymphany made a pffttt sound, but otherwise ignored him as she attached the rope to the grappling hook. Then, she threw the grappling hook up and over what appeared to be a gargoyle with Mrs Turgan’s face on it. She tested the rope and assessed the short but perilous swing across to the open window.
The alligators watc
hed from below, quite curious, and very hungry.
Cymphany turned to Kipp and Tobias. ‘I’ll swing across.’
‘You will?’ Kipp and Tobias said in unison.
‘We can’t let you do that, Cymph,’ Tobias added.
Cymphany nodded. ‘I’m the most athletic of the three of us. I’ve got the best chance of making it.’
Kipp and Tobias glanced at each other. They couldn’t argue with that. They all remembered the time Tobias kicked a soccer ball and it actually travelled backwards. And while Kipp thought he and Cymphany were almost equal in athletic ability, he wasn’t going to debate the point, especially since the winner of that debate got the prize of swinging over a moat full of hungry alligators and into the house of a witch who was known to turn children into croissants.
‘Don’t worry,’ Cymphany said, in response to the worried looks on Kipp’s and Tobias’s faces. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Is this really our best plan?’ Kipp said, before Tobias could say exactly the same thing.
‘Well, we can’t just stand here on this doormat,’ Cymphany said. ‘Which, by the way, I think is made out of toenail clippings.’
‘That is so gross,’ Tobias said, quickly hopping off the mat.
‘It’s impressive recycling though, isn’t it,’ Cymphany said. ‘Who knew Mrs Turgan was so environmentally aware?’
Kipp and Tobias had already given Cymphany some strange looks, but the one they gave her now could have gone in the strange looks hall of fame.
Kipp smiled. ‘You are crazy, Cymph.’
‘No,’ Cymphany said. ‘This is crazy.’ And she leapt off the doorstep and swung herself towards the open window.
But when she was midway, the rope snapped.
Cymphany screamed. But it was too late—she was already plummeting. And she realised, with horror, that it didn’t matter how good a swimmer she was, there was no way she was going to get away from those alligators.