Wise Acres

by Dale E. Basye

  Now, sir, a war is won!”

  Mr. Wilde shook his head. “It sounds as if the vice principal may be a couplet short of a sonnet,” the teacher murmured.

  Milton rubbed his sore, handcuffed wrist and sighed. He wasn’t sure what to do. It was like he and his team were trapped in some kind of mind field, full of dangers dredged from someone’s imagination. He needed time to think.…

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!” roared the beast, a thousand yards behind them.

  But Milton didn’t have time. And the vice principal’s words were like a restless mob in his head, shoving his brain back and forth between his ears, making meaningful thought next to impossible.

  Roberta tucked her sleek dark bangs behind her ears in concentration.

  “ ‘An era, midst its dim arena’ … ‘Party booby trap,’ ” she muttered before shaking her head. “We need to pass through that building up ahead. It’s important … at least to me.”

  “What makes you say that?” asked Milton.

  The girl shrugged. “Female intuition,” Roberta said, smiling mysteriously. “It’s like the GPS of a girl’s soul.…”

  After a brisk hike, Milton and the rest of Team One arrived at the coliseum. The large domed arena of crumbling stone was adorned with lavish yet ludicrous pieces of art.

  Roberta puzzled over the sculptures. “Gold log? Kayak? Bird rib, a car, a man, a maraca?”

  Clem Weenum—who, though the smallest, had gotten saddled with the task of pushing Moxie along on her dolly—scowled at the nonsensical sculptures.

  “What’s all of this junk?” he said. “It’s like a garage sale at a funny farm … and definitely not the funny ‘ha-ha’ type. Is that a car?”

  Roberta nodded. “A Toyota.”

  The children tentatively passed through an archway and stood before a heavy stone door engraved with a snake eating its own tail. The door suddenly whooshed open, releasing a frenzied din of scraping stone and machinery. The children and teachers were sucked into the spacious arena as if by a vacuum. The heavy stone door slid closed behind them, sealing them in.

  Milton warily scanned the deafening amphitheater. The floor was a series of revolving, concentric stone circles—six of them, spinning furiously in opposite directions—with a small, motionless circle of gray stone at the center. The whirring stone bands were engraved, like the door outside, with snakes consuming their own tails, end over end. Each of the rotating snake slabs sat slightly atop the other to create a small, gyrating mountain.

  “It’s like a big roulette wheel,” Winifred said with shock.

  “Yeah, in a casino for giants,” Mordacia said.

  Milton stepped up to the edge of the spinning marble floor. It was rather like a maxi-sized roulette wheel with something to prove. Yet instead of segments with numbers, the serpent bands sported phrases that whizzed by so fast that they were difficult to read.

  … OF CABBAGES AND KINGS … STEP ON NO PETS … IN WORDS DROWN I? … HE WAS, WAS HE? …

  On the opposite side of the coliseum—roughly 100 yards away—was an exit portal. It was open.

  Winifred pointed to the portal with her quivering arm. “It’s spinning too fast … but if we squeezed past this big wheel somehow,” she said tremulously, “we could get out the other side.”

  The walls of the dome pinched in at the middle, leaving no room to edge past the spinning serpent stones.

  “I don’t think so,” Milton said over the grinding whir. “I think the only way out is to somehow stop the wheels from spinning.”

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!”

  The beast scratched at the heavy stone door with several sets of claws.

  “Man, that thing has irritable growl syndrome,” Ursula Lambarst said as she stepped fearfully away from the door.

  “M-maybe it’ll go away,” Concordia mumbled while nervously petting the blond ponytail draped over her shoulder.

  The snark threw its sizable bulk against the door.

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!”

  Ursula scowled. “It’s either going to break in or get a clue and come in through the back,” she said. “It’s only a matter of time before—”

  Suddenly, a colony of screeching bats descended from the darkened domed roof. Winifred screamed as she tried to—ironically—bat the flying rodents away. The bats had oddly shaped bladelike wings and came at the children and teachers with fluttering thrusts, as if trying to stab them.

  Ursula stomped forward. “Waiting here is una estupidez,” she muttered, tying up her brown curly hair in a scrunchie. “I’m going to try to walk across. Maybe I can figure out what the roulette wheel means … ¡Vamos!”

  She pushed Milton aside.

  “Stop her!” Roberta cried.

  Milton tried to grab the back of the large, bulky girl’s coat, but she just barreled ahead with blind, graceless force like a runaway garbage truck.

  “No!” Milton yelled as Ursula stepped onto a revolving slab.

  Zorch!!

  A savage bolt of pure blue-white energy shot from one of the segments, reading OF CABBAGES AND KINGS. Ursula was pierced through the middle like an electric shish kebab.

  The flat pile of letters swayed back and forth, as if written on a large, invisible sheet of paper, before fluttering to the floor. Concordia gasped, her wide gray-blue eyes glittering with shock and tears. The arena was filled with the pungent smell of ozone, like the smell of a summer thunderstorm or an industrial-strength tanning booth.

  Roberta looked up toward the ceiling. “I saw something,” she muttered as the stabbing bats swooped in clouds of screeching menace. “Up there. When the lightning flashed …” She noticed a corroded metal ladder that was bolted to the side of the dome. Roberta climbed up on to it. “Don’t anybody move!” she called down.

  Moses cowered as bats darted across his back and tore his tweed coat. “Tell that to these stabbing bats!”

  Milton sighed as he looked out across the spinning snakes that hissed with furious, mechanical motion.

  “One of us should go first,” Moses said from behind Milton. “I elect our brave team captain. All in favor, say absolutely nothing.”

  Obviously this was some kind of maze, and—if Milton assumed correctly—there was a right way to cross it, with the reward being passage, and a wrong way, with the punishment being …

  Milton took off one of his shoes and tossed it at a gyrating snake of stone.

  Zorch!!

  A bolt of lightning shot out of the marble, striking the ceiling with a sputtering sizzle. Milton sighed.

  So—once again—it’s Carroll’s way or the highway. We’ve got to play by his ridiculous rules, or get zorched trying.…

  “Watch it!” Roberta called out from above. The ladder crept up the side of the concave ceiling. Roberta was now nearly upside down as she clung to the ladder. The ladder was crusted with bat guano. Roberta wiped off her hand. “Yuck, bats … stab-bats. That’s a palindrome. So is everything here—”

  She hooked her legs on a rung and called down to her team.

  “This whole place … it’s a Palindrome!” Roberta yelled over the whir of wheels and screeching of stab-bats. “Where a word or phrase reads the same forward and backward. Outside … all of those weird things … Gold log. Kayak. Bird rib. A car, a man, a maraca … even ‘a Toyota’ … all palindromes.”

  A lightbulb went off in Milton’s head. Luckily, he was no longer in the Metaphorest or he might have keeled over from his stroke of genius. Milton looked up at Roberta. “What’s your last name again?” he asked.

  “Atrebor,” she replied. “Why?”

  “Your name,” Milton said. “It’s a palindrome.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So, I think you’re the one who is meant to figure this one out.”

  Moses laughed bitterly and shook his head.

  “Way to delegate,” the boy cackled. “Oh … and delegate is a word that means ‘to have people do things you don’t want to
do.’ ”

  Roberta stared at the snake stones spinning beneath her.

  “Milton!” she called out. “The disks … each one is a line in a poem. Some are palindromes, some aren’t. But the way out of here is to make a palindrome poem. A meop emordnilap, I guess. So step on the first palindrome!”

  Milton tried to make sense of the blur of words. Then, around the bend, he saw the phrase STEP ON NO PETS coming at him.

  “Step on no pets?!” he called up.

  “Yeah!”

  Milton hunkered down, clutched his briefcase, and prepared to hop on to the phrase. Then, just as he was about to leap, Roberta shrieked.

  “No! Not that one … ‘In words, drown I’?!”

  “Are you sure?!” Milton said, trembling.

  “Yes! Do it!”

  Milton saw the phrase coming at him. He jumped, his whole body balled up like a fist. Suddenly, the first spinning disk screeched to an abrupt halt. Milton pried his eyelids apart to see if he had been “zorched.”

  “In words, drown I?” Milton muttered as sweat trickled down his forehead and onto his glasses. The first disk was motionless and silent, yet the others kept gyrating, as fast as ever.

  “Sorry,” Roberta said, her face flushed red from hanging upside down. “ ‘Step on no pets’ is a palindrome, but it was only written on the disk once. ‘In words, drown I?’ was on the disk twice. So it both begins and ends the poem, palindromically speaking: beginning right inside the entrance, where you were, and ending right at the exit, where we want to be. If we solve them all—”

  “If?!” Winifred exclaimed.

  “When,” Roberta corrected, “it will make a path leading straight to the door. Now I just have to find the next line.…”

  A screeching flock of stab-bats slashed at the air like a dark, homicidal cloud.

  Roberta squinted at the peculiar phrases whizzing beneath her, etched upon the second stone serpent.

  … OOZY RAT IN A SANITARY ZOO … I DID, DID I … NO, SIR, PANIC IS A BASIC IN A PRISON … DRAT SUCH MUSTARD …

  Roberta scrutinized the spinning disk for a few seconds before smiling.

  “ ‘No, sir, panic is a basic in a prison’!”

  Milton nodded, and just before the phrase whizzed past him, he leapt into the air, landing on the segment of stone. The stone snake stopped with a lurch. Milton lay flat on the cool stone and grabbed on to the etched letters, nearly rolling into the wrong phrase and “zorching” himself into a pile of Milton-shaped words.

  Mr. Wilde, who had been holding his breath for nearly a full minute, exhaled with relief.

  “Miss Atrebor seems to know what she is doing,” he said quietly as to not break the girl’s intense concentration.

  Roberta swung upside down from the ceiling like a ruddy, girl-shaped chandelier.

  “ ‘Revered now, I live on. O did I do no evil, I wonder, ever?’ … ‘Egad! A base tone denotes a bad age’ … ‘Cats meow, meow the cats,’ ” Roberta murmured before yelling suddenly. “ ‘Egad! A base tone denotes a bad age!’ ”

  Milton fought to focus on the blur of words. His eyes hooked onto the phrase as it sped near him. He jumped. The stone serpent screeched to a stop.

  Mr. Wilde and Mr. Dickens cautiously walked out to Milton using the newly formed path.

  “You’re halfway there,” Mr. Dickens said, putting his hand on Milton’s shoulder. “Let us take over for you … we, as your teachers, should have done that from the start.”

  Milton shook his head as he rose from the stone. “I’m good.”

  A colony of stab-bats swept past like a collection of black leather knives.

  Mr. Wilde stepped up to the edge of the next speeding snake. “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing halfway and then quitting,” the teacher said. “No shame in that, young man.”

  Roberta, sweating and her neck stiff from hanging, shouted from the ceiling. “ ‘Bombard a drab mob!’ ”

  Milton, after a moment’s hesitation, spotted the phrase and bounded up toward the next snake just as the correct palindrome approached. The stone disk seized, coming to a complete stop.

  “Next one is … easy,” Roberta gasped from above. Her olive skin was now a deep purple as she struggled to hold on to consciousness. “Air an aria!”

  Milton caught sight of the phrase as it sped around the bend. He hopped onto the segment and stopped the stone snake cold. Milton looked up at Roberta, grinning.

  “Just one more, Roberta!” he shouted. “The path is almost done. You’re doing great!”

  Roberta struggled to hang on to the ladder. Her arm was turning blue.

  “I … can barely see,” she replied. “My eyes feel like they’re going to pop out of my head.…”

  The colony of stab-bats swept upon Milton, slashing at his face and arms.

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!”

  The snark kicked two of its hooves through the stone door. Shards of rock danced across the Palindrome. It stuck its wet, hideous snout through the hole.

  “Roberta! It’s now or never!” Milton cried.

  Roberta wiped tears away from her throbbing eyes.

  … LIVED ON DECAF; FACED NO DEVIL … SATAN, OSCILLATE MY METALLIC SONATAS! … STEVEN, I LEFT AN OILY LION AT THE FELINE VETS … NO SIR! A PAPAYA WAR IS ON! …

  “It’s going so … fast,” she murmured. “I can barely … ‘Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!’ ”

  Milton stood at the edge of the last spinning snake. Being the shortest in length, it rotated the fastest. Milton’s eye snagged the word “Satan” and threw himself to the stone before he could think better of it. The self-consuming snake disk stopped abruptly, just as the snark kicked open the door and wedged itself into the arena.

  “We did it!” Milton yelled as he stepped onto the center disk, which simply had one phrase etched upon it: SWAP GOD FOR A JANITOR; ROT IN A JAR OF DOG PAWS.

  Moses ran past him for the back door, the path now completed. The teachers led the frantic children across the stepped walkway of palindromes. Milton ducked as the stab-bats swept over him.

  “Wait!” he called out. “Roberta!”

  Mr. Wilde ushered the children through the exit archway before rushing back to Milton at the center of the Palindrome. Just then, Roberta lost both consciousness and her hold on the ladder and plummeted down from the ceiling. Mr. Wilde skittered beneath her and—with a brutal “oomph”—swept Roberta up into his long arms.

  “In words, drown I,” the olive-skinned girl muttered before her eyes rolled back into her head.

  Mr. Wilde bounded for the exit with Roberta.

  A surge of stab-bats flew past Milton. He held the briefcase up to his face. Everything was a shiny black dance of confusion and pain as Milton tumbled to the floor.

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!”

  A mass of stab-bats converged upon the snark. Milton darted across the palindrome path as squeaks and snarks exploded behind him.

  He emerged from the arena into a darkened thicket. A big red eye seemed to blink at him before darting away.

  “My, what big teeth you have …,” Mr. Dickens muttered fearfully a few dozen yards away from Milton in the murk. Suddenly, Milton heard a tremendous gulp.

  A wolf howled in the darkness. The deep, forceful yowl strangled all traces of bravery from Milton’s body. His eyes slowly adjusted to the light.

  “H-hello?” he stuttered nervously.

  Milton could barely make out the children and teachers wandering the edge of the thicket in a wary daze. They were surrounded by a dense barricade of dead trees laced with glistening white webs.

  The children and teachers appeared intact, though Milton noticed something odd about Mr. Dickens. He looked taller … strangely swollen and twitching spasmodically.

  Probably from fear, Milton thought as he looked around him for the wolf. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something … something fierce and savage, right where Mr. Dickens was … but when he turned, the teacher was sti
ll just a twitching, swollen old man.

  “Mr. Dickens?” Milton asked, stepping closer.

  My, what big ears you have …, he thought. My, what big eyes you have …

  Milton’s blood turned to ice water. Whiskers sprouted from the teacher’s face. Thick fur grew up and over his collar. Muscles bulged against the fabric of the man’s suit until every seam was split.

  “Who—” Milton murmured, his throat suddenly coated in sandpaper.

  Every trace of Mr. Dickens was gone, replaced by a snarling, seven-foot-tall beast.

  “Wolf!”

  The wolf roared in Milton’s face. Its breath was like a raging funeral pyre full of searing heat, the smell thick, sharp, and nauseatingly sweet. With its mouth stretched wide, Milton could see a thatch of black and gray hair at the bottom of the wolf’s capacious throat.

  “Help,” a weak voice gurgled from the beast’s gullet.

  The thought of Mr. Dickens, curled up, pathetic and wet, inside of the wolf, instantly turned Milton’s fear into fury. A scream had been readying in Milton’s throat, but by the time it burst forth past his lips, it had become a savage, terrifying roar every bit the equal of the wolf’s.

  “Aaaaa​aarrr​wwwww​lllll​ll!!!!” Milton bellowed, his face flushed purple with exasperated wrath.

  The wolf staggered back on its haunches in shock. Its roar hung in the air with its sonic tail tucked between its legs. Suddenly, its eyes bulging out at the little glowering purple-faced boy perched defiantly atop his tiptoes, the wolf gasped in gape-mouthed terror. In one wet, shuddering retching plop, the wolf spat out Mr. Dickens. The teacher, covered in bile and semi-digested rodents, lay shivering on the ground. The wolf charged away and disappeared into the brush.

  Winifred rushed past Milton and knelt by the teacher’s side.

  “What did you do?” she asked Milton as she helped the shaken, slimy old man to his feet.

  Milton shrugged. “I must have scared the Dickens out of it.”

  24 · JOKES FALLING IN

  NOTHING FLAT

  MARLO BARRELED THROUGH the jungle, shoving aside the spindly trees like rival shoppers at a Going out of Business! Everything Must Go! Sale (though, as a kleptomaniac, Marlo rarely paid full price—or any price—while shopping). She could hear some of the other children and teachers panting behind her. A smothered growl reverberated throughout the jungle, so close and low that Marlo could feel it in her bones. She stopped suddenly. Marlo glanced fearfully from vine to vine but could see no trace of an animal. The downy hairs on her arms went stiff. Her body, somehow, could sense that she was being hunted. But by what?