by Steve Cole
For Tobey and Amy, always
- Steve Cole
For Steph, Denis and Jasper
- Jim Field
OTHER STORIES BY STEVE COLE:
MAGIC INK ALIENS STINK
ASTROSAURS COWS IN ACTION SLIME SQUAD
TRIPWIRE YOUNG BOND
A MAGIC INK PRODUCTION FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN 2015 BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER UK LTD A CBS COMPANY TEXT COPYRIGHT © STEVE COLE 2015
ILLUSTRATIONS COPYRIGHT © JIM FIELD 2015 THIS BOOK IS COPYRIGHT UNDER THE BERNE CONVENTION NO REPRODUCTION WITHOUT PERMISSION ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
THE RIGHT OF STEVE COLE AND JIM FIELD TO BE IDENTIFIED AS THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR OF THIS WORK RESPECTIVELY HAS BEEN ASSERTED BY THEM IN ACCORDANCE WITH SECTIONS 77 AND 78 OF THE COPYRIGHT, DESIGNS AND PATENTS ACT, 1988.
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A CIP CATALOGUE RECORD FOR THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE FROM THE BRITISH LIBRARY.
PB ISBN: 978-0-85707-874-2 EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-85707-875-9
THIS BOOK IS A WORK OF FICTION. NAMES, CHARACTERS, PLACES AND INCIDENTS ARE EITHER THE PRODUCT OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL PEOPLE LIVING OR DEAD, EVENTS OR LOCALES IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL.
PRINTED AND BOUND BY CPI GROUP (UK) LTD, CROYDON, CR0 4YY
Contents
CHAPTER 0 A NOTE FROM MAGIC INK PRODUCTIONS
CHAPTER 1 HELP! MY HOUSE HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED!
CHAPTER 2 THE SKY IS MADE OF MUD!
CHAPTER 3 WHAT’S A GIANT HAMSTER IN A TOGA LIKE YOU DOING IN A PLACE LIKE THIS? OH, HANG ON, NO, THIS IS EXACTLY THE PLACE I’D EXPECT TO FIND A GIANT HAMSTER IN A TOGA. SORRY!
CHAPTER 4 RUN FOR IT! RUN! GO ON, RUNNNN!
CHAPTER 5 DOWN, DOWN, DOWN
CHAPTER 6 SO! THIS IS OBLIVION, HUH? IT’S RUBBISH!
CHAPTER 7 ATTACK OF THE UNKNOWN FEARSOME MONSTER OF FEAR
CHAPTER 8 SNAKES ALIVE!
CHAPTER 9 AND THE ARTISTIC GORGON MAKES THREE
CHAPTER 10 GREENISH INTERLUDE
CHAPTER 11 IN A DARK, DARK WOOD THERE WAS—WHOA, WHAT IS THAT? I DON’T WANT TO KNOW! NO!!! KEEP AWAY! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!
CHAPTER 12 RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES!
CHAPTER 13 BEHOLD...CRUDZILLA! ALFIE CRUDZILLA.
CHAPTER 14 CAUGHT BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA. OR RATHER, BETWEEN KILLGROTTY AND A BUNCH OF OTHER BAD STUFF.
CHAPTER 15 SWAMPED!
CHAPTER 16 CREATURE DISCOMFORTS
CHAPTER 17 DOWN INTO THE RAPIDS OF DOOM
CHAPTER 18 BEWARE THE LASH OF FEAR OF MOTHER POISON (OF DOOM)
CHAPTER 19 THE INCREDIBLE APPEARING HOUSE OF MYSTERY
CHAPTER 20 THE TERRIBLE NEWS OF SADNESS
CHAPTER 21 THE GASP-MAKING REVELATION OF HORROR
CHAPTER 22 THE TROJAN HOUSE
CHAPTER 23 THE STARE OF CERTAIN DOOM
CHAPTER 24 MONSTER SMASH
CHAPTER 25 THE END?
Long ago, when people were apes, elephants were mammoths, tigers came with sabre-teeth and monkeys were smaller, fatter and a bit squirrelly . . .
The first monsters appeared on the Earth.
They squelched across every continent.
They lurked in every sea.
They evolved just like everything else.
They made guest appearances in many myths and legends (and were usually the best thing about them).
Only . . . see any monsters about you now?
No. No, you don’t.
WHERE DID ALL THE MONSTERS GO?
You are about to find out.
For the monsters have a world of their own: a world of mysteries without measure and dangers without end.
A world that few have visited, and fewer still survived to tell the tale. Or indeed any tale at all, apart from a very short and uninspiring tale that sounds suspiciously like:
This book goes further than any other to bring you, for the first time, the
WHOLE, REVOLTING TRUTH.
So STRAP YOURSELF IN
– it’s going to get
MONSTERY . . .
Er, sorry, I know you’ve just started reading this book and everything, but this isn’t really the easiest time for me to write.
My house has just been picked up by some crazy, freaky hurricane. Right now it’s being whirled about the sky like a giant’s conker, and I’m in the wardrobe, just trying to hang on.
Well, anyway, just look at the state of my room! All my DVDs thrown all over the place . . . tops, trousers and dirty pants everywhere . . . books and collectibles scattered over the floor (and on the bed) . . . okay, so my room normally looks like this anyway. In fact, my mum would probably be more freaked out that I haven’t tidied up yet than by the fact our house is hurtling through a hurricane, and – unless we had some really paranoid builders on this estate – no massive rocket jets underneath to help us safely land again.
So, basically: Noooooooooo, we’re gonna crash down on the other side of town, and everything including me will be smashed to pieces and I really don’t wanna think about that—
It’s probably a good job Mum is out with my dad for dinner tonight. Though I’m not sure Rachel Thing saw it that way (I can’t remember her proper surname.) Rachel Thing is the babysitter who was downstairs; I think she jumped ship (or house) not long after we took off into the air. I definitely heard her yell and the front door open, and after that . . . nothing. She’s only in Year Ten while I’m in Year Eight, so I’m not sure she’s even qualified to babysit. She might be qualified in skydiving out of low-flying houses, though.
I should have jumped too, before the house was so high. But I was so scared, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even shout for help. And now I’m wishing I collected airline sick-bags instead of monster movie memorabilia. Empty sick-bags, obviously (who collects full ones? Weird!). Because if the house keeps on rollercoastering through the clouds like this, I’m going to start redecorating my room in shades of Technicolor vomit. And that’s going to ruin my cool collection of vintage horror-film posters. If only I’d got them framed like Dad told me to, instead of using Blu-Tack, they’d just wipe clean!
Ooops, but there goes my bedside table, right into The Wolf Man’s teeth, so if they had been framed, the glass would’ve shattered and the air filled with lethal shards and everything would be at least 28% worse.
Blue sky and green fields flip past the bedroom window, but there’s a yellow glow, too, and it’s getting brighter.
The room is shaking like a space shuttle attempting reentry. The turbulence turns my stomach like the world’s worst waltzer.
Then –
It’s like my eyes are struck by lightning. I’m thrown out of the wardrobe and bang my head against the radiator.
“OWWWWWWW!” I yell. Sound from my throat, at last! I follow up the “OWWWWWWW” with some random shouting and cursing – it takes my mind off throwing up.
And so does the view through my window.
Because suddenly there’s no blue sky, no fields, no random flying animals caught up in the storm. There’s not even a yellow glow any more. There’s only darkness, rolling and roiling like the inside of a thundercloud.
And then – “WHOOAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!” – the whole house tips over and I’m thrown against the window, and it opens and . . .
I’m falling through darkness. It’s what you might call a ‘brown trousers’ moment. (Doubly so, as I actually AM wearing brown trousers. What were the chances?!)
I glimpse my house spinning away into shadows beneath me.
And suddenly, I crash into it.
I woke up upside down in a tree.
It was a weird tree. It was white. Not like a silver birch, more like the unhealthy white of something that’s never seen any sun. Maggot white. And the leaves! They were furry – like big, squashed caterpillars. And the branches weren’t hard, they were spongy. Dozens of twigs hooked out from every squishy branch like creepy crab-legs. And it smelled disgusting, rotten; like something had died here.
Please, don’t let the dead thing be me, I thought. And please don’t let it be Rachel the babysitter. That would be super gross.
But no, she must’ve got out – I heard the front door. She totally left me to die! Or to fall into a tree, anyway. Just let her try claiming £7 an hour from Mum and Dad after this . . .
My brain felt scrambled. My senses felt fried. Was a part of me poached or hard-boiled? I didn’t want to know. I closed my eyes, hoping everything would look better when I opened them again.
It didn’t. I was still lying upside down in a maggot-white, squashed-caterpillary, spongy, crab-leggy tree.
Barely daring to move in case anything had broken in the fall, I craned my (apparently unbroken) neck to see what I could see. The tree was standing in a park of pink grass. You know those fake tinselly Christmas trees you get cheap from B&Q? The grass was kind of like that. It looked like foil.
Beyond the fake grass was a brown, muddy, car-less road, and on the other side of that was a row of funny, crooked houses made of yellow bricks.
The houses seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see in both directions. They were the same basic design, although weirdly, the doors were different shapes and sizes. I caught glimpses of movement through the windows. Curtains were twitching.
“What’s the matter,” I muttered, “never seen a boy hanging upside down in a freaky tree that smells like death?”
I raised my head towards my feet. At least the sun was shining, after that terrible darkness I’d fallen through . . .
I froze.
How could you have frozen? I hear you cry. You just said the sun was shining!
Yes, I did say that. Because I thought it was true.
But I was wrong.
It wasn’t the sun that was shining. It was a ma-hoosive light bulb, dangling down from the sky. Well, I say ‘sky’. I mean ‘roof’.
The sky was made of mud. Seriously. I stared at it for ages and ages, just to make sure. A roof of solid dirt stretched overhead for as far as I could see. Roots dangled down here and there, and other light bulbs hung from sockets in the soil.
“That settles it,” I said calmly. “I have sooooooo got to be asleep. How can I possibly be underground?” I’d watched a creaky old sci-fi movie called Things to Come on BluRay the other day, where future humans end up living in big underground cities. That must be it! I was dreaming and the idea must’ve sneaked into my dream.
Phew.
I tried to pinch myself awake, but nothing changed. Maybe I was in a really deep sleep?
Or . . . perhaps it was more serious than that? “Perhaps,” I breathed, “when I fell, I bumped my hea— ADDDDDDDD!”
I fell out of the tree and bumped my head. And as I struck that spongy, unnaturally-tinselly ground, I heard a great gasp of surprise go up from the edge of the park.
Dizzily, I looked round – and did a pretty good gasp of my own. While I’d been staring at the light bulb in the sky, different-sized locals had crept out of the different-sized doors in their houses, crowding together to watch me.
I say ‘locals’.
I mean
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. THINGS, of all shapes and colours. At least thirty of them. Some had huge, boggly eyes, others had little squinty peepers on stalks. Some had mouths full of teeth, and some had only green gums to gnash together. And I knew – I just knew – that these weren’t people dressed up, or animatronics, or CGI projections.
The monsters were REAL.
Now, this might sound strange to you, but for a few moments I wasn’t afraid. Not properly afraid. I felt maybe 32% afraid, but around 36% excited and 32% full of wonder. See, I’ve always loved the idea of real-life monsters. I was never scared of creepy creatures under the bed. In fact, I used to leave out milk and biscuits to entice them into my room. I used to sleep under the bed sometimes, in the hope I’d find one there.
I even wrote letters to the Tooth Furry – no fairies for me, thanks – in the hope I’d wake up to find a small flying monster, covered in fluff, wrestling with my manky molars.
I know all kids are supposed to do cute, quirky stuff like this. My mum said it was because I wanted to be like my grandad, who got me into creaky old monster movies in the first place. He used to stay up late to watch them, like, a hundred years ago, with his dad – in the days of black-and-white portable TVs, when there were only about two channels and you could only get a picture by turning a dial and sticking a wire coathanger in the back, etc etc. (Have you heard adults spout this sob story like it’s our fault we were born in the age of HD on demand? Deal with it, guys.)
Anyway, I lay there in a daze, still kind of expecting to wake up in my home (wherever the flip it was now). And I reached out a hand in a way I hoped looked friendly and unthreatening, and said: “Hey . . . !”
It was a total monster stampede. It was like I was the scary one, getting up from the weird, pink grass on my wobbly legs. As the dust cloud cleared I saw that just one monster had stayed behind.
For a moment I wasn’t sure it really counted as a monster – it looked more like someone had inflated a hamster to the size of a sheepdog, dressed it in a grubby toga and taught it to walk on its back legs. It was plump and fluffy, with bright black eyes open as wide as its mouth as it stared at me.
“Hey!” squeaked the hamster thing. “I’m Verity. How you doing?”
“Uh . . . me?” I looked cautiously behind me in case the giant hamster (called Verity?!) was talking to someone else. “I’m . . . Well, I’m . . . ”
“Human!” Verity clutched her little paws together and smiled, showing big, beavery buckteeth. “You are, aren’t you? A human being? An ”
“Um, yes,” I agreed.
“” she squealed, and bundled towards me. “”
“Wha—!” If I’d actually needed proof that this monster was real, rather than some sort of giant hologram, I got it there and then. As Verity clutched me clumsily to her I felt her heart pounding through her musty toga, spluttered on a mouthful of fur, was scratched by a whisker and felt the rasp of her tongue as she gave me a lick on the face.
“”
“Oooooh!” Verity suddenly broke off her hug attack and gazed at me, entranced. “Tell me, human, what is this human thing called ‘Urphhh?’ Is it your name?”
“No! My name’s Bob.”
“,” she repeated in a low voice. “”
“And I went ‘Urphhh’ because you . . . well, you . . .” I suddenly noticed just how big and sharp those teeth of hers were. “Er . . . no reason.”
“Are you normal, Bob-ob-ob?” Verity asked eagerly, doing a sort of stutter on the last ‘b’. “Are you, Bob-ob-ob? Are you?”
“Um, it’s just ‘Bob’—”
“See, I’ve always dreamed of spotting a human being, Bob-ob-ob. I never knew they could find their way down here to Terra Monstra.”
“To where?”
“Terra Monstra. Or, , to you!” Verity gave me a wink. “But, you know, monsters, schmonsters, Bob-ob-ob. Who cares? There’s thousands of ’em down here.”
My mouth felt dry. “Thousands?”
“Yeah, monsters galore. But no humans! Humans live way up topside. They’re super-ultra-rare! That’s why that bunch of cowards ran away from you.”
I was kin
d of glad they had. “What were they scared of?”
“Well, , I guess,” Verity said brightly. “See, they know all the old stories about humans. They think that any minute now you will start a war, or pollute the environment, or make a species extinct, or start an evil bank that will cripple the monster economy . . .”
“I wouldn’t do that!” I spluttered. “Humans do good stuff too.”
Verity winked. “Ah, you say that, but . . .”
“They must do!” I tried to think of something but my mind was blank. “Anyway . . .” I eyed her warily. “You don’t seem very scared of me.”
“I’m not! I understand you better, see? Cos I’m a human spotter!” Verity couldn’t stop herself from giving me another lick on the face. “Yum! Cheek of Bob-ob-ob!”
“Eww!” I cringed, and took a step backwards, afraid she’d get a taste for it. “What do you mean, a human spotter?”
“I mean,” she said slowly, as if I was thick, “I spot humans up topside through my uncle’s humanoscope! Uncle Voshto built it to peer into your funny human world. He used to be Professor of Humanology at Disgusting University down on Level Two. When I grow up I want to be just like him. He knows about humans. Not like those scaredy-blaggle monsters over there.” She turned to the row of houses. “It’s all right, scaredy-blaggles! This human is a boy human! He’s a bit stupid but he means well!”
There was no movement from the houses, just the odd twitching curtain. Here I was, alone in an unknown world of monsters, and THEY were afraid?
“What a cheek!” I said.
“Mmm, yes.” Verity licked my face again. “Cheek of Bob-ob-ob! It’s deelish...!”
But I was barely listening any longer. I guess the shock of my fall and the hurricane and all that was wearing off, and panic was gearing up to take its place. Suddenly my head was crowding with questions, a whole load of them, ready to burst . . .