Maddy West and the Tongue Taker

by Brian Falkner

  “This is taking too long!” Maddy said. “The witch will be back soon.”

  Dimitar rolled over onto his stomach, and Maddy and Kazuki, between them, managed to cut the same section of webs on the back of Dimitar’s legs.

  Dimitar grunted a couple of times, and they stopped, unsure what he wanted them to do.

  With his face pressed onto the hard rock floor, he brought his knees up underneath him, then lifted himself up until he was kneeling. He rested for a moment, then rocked back on his haunches, balancing carefully. Then he straightened his legs, lifting himself upright.

  His hands were still trapped by his side, and his knees were stuck together, but he could walk, in a sense . . . like a duck waddling.

  “We need to leave now — before the witch comes back,” Maddy said, and the giant looked at her without understanding but followed them to the stairs.

  Mr. Chester chirped and began to jump up and down.

  “What is it, Mr. Chester?” Maddy asked.

  Mr. Chester ran across the floor. He scampered up onto one of the shelves and came running back. In his hand he had three of the runestone necklaces.

  “Good boy!” Maddy said. “In case she tries to cast a spell on us. What a clever monkey!”

  Mr. Chester hopped from one foot to the other.

  Maddy put one on and handed one to Kazuki. Dimitar bowed down, and she managed to tie the other around his big, thick neck.

  Dimitar waddled across to the bottom of the stairs and stopped, looking at them. He strained against the webbing and slowly lifted one foot up onto the first step. He leaned forward and, balancing precariously, lifted his other foot up onto the step. It creaked and almost cracked under the weight. Another step and again the creak from the wooden step, louder this time. Footsteps sounded on the floor above them, and they all froze in place. Maddy stared up the staircase at the door, certain that the witch’s daughters must have heard them. But the door stayed closed.

  “Come on,” she said.

  One more step, then another. It seemed to take an hour, and Maddy was terrified the whole time that the witch would come back or that the girls would think to check on Dimitar.

  Finally, they were at the top of the staircase, and Dimitar paused, trying to get some strength back.

  “Wait!” Kazuki said. He ran back down the stairs and grabbed the glass tube full of smoke. It disappeared somewhere into his ninja suit and ran back up the stairs.

  They crept down a corridor. Ahead of them, Maddy could hear Pavla.

  “We have to hurry,” Maddy whispered. She couldn’t see or hear Anka anywhere and worried that the witch’s daughter might suddenly bump into them.

  The narrow corridor joined onto a much wider hallway. Through the door to the kitchen, Maddy could see Pavla. She was on the telephone. She had her back turned to them.

  Just as they were passing the kitchen, something moved in front of them. A sinister, scraggly shape uncurled itself from a corner. The witch’s cat!

  It arched its back and opened its mouth, hissing at them.

  Mr. Chester bared his teeth at the cat.

  Pavla stopped mid-sentence. She turned. Her mouth fell open. Maddy froze. So did everybody else.

  Pavla closed her mouth again. She turned her head away.

  From upstairs Maddy heard Anka call out, “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Pavla asked.

  “The cat? It’s hissing at something,” Anka said.

  “It’s just fussing,” Pavla said. “There’s nothing there.”

  Maddy looked at Kazuki and Dimitar, and all of them looked at Pavla, who kept looking in the wrong direction, refusing to see them.

  “Thank you,” Maddy whispered. She truly meant it.

  Pavla didn’t say anything.

  The cat continued to hiss as Maddy and her friends moved down the passageway, but walked out of their way as they passed the door to the kitchen and crept toward the front door.

  Mr. Chester chirped, waving his arms above his head in alarm.

  “Wait!” Kazuki said.

  Then Maddy heard it too — the witch’s car crunching up the gravel driveway.

  Mr. Chester scrambled down off Maddy’s shoulders and scampered toward a side passage.

  “Follow Mr. Chester,” Maddy whispered.

  The passage led to a laundry room, which had a door that led outside. They ran, and Dimitar waddled, down a short flight of steps to the side of the house.

  Maddy risked a peek around the corner of the house, peering through the thick leaves of an overgrown bush. The car had reached the top of the driveway. It followed the small turning circle with the old dead tree in the middle and scrunched to a halt in the gravel. The witch, dressed as Professor Coateloch, was just getting out.

  It made Maddy’s heart hurt to think that she had trusted this woman. Her parents had trusted this woman enough to let Maddy fly off to a different country with her.

  The witch headed toward the front of the house. Maddy waited until she was well inside the house and said, “Hurry!”

  She ran. Her feet skidded and slipped on the gravel of the driveway, but she didn’t fall. Beside her, Kazuki seemed sure-footed, his nimble black shoes finding stable patches amongst the gravel, while Dimitar waddled along behind and Mr. Chester scampered beside them.

  “Where are we going?” Kazuki said right in her ear.

  Maddy looked around.

  A big SUV was parked at the end of the driveway. It had to be Dimitar’s. She crept up to it and tried the door. It was locked. She looked at Dimitar and mimed unlocking it.

  Dimitar looked down at the pockets of his pants. It was no use . . . they were covered in thick spiderwebs.

  The witch’s old black car was parked in front of the house, facing back down the driveway.

  The doors were not locked, but there weren’t any keys in it.

  Kazuki opened the back door of the car. Dimitar leaned into the backseat and somehow shuffled himself across. He twisted and scrunched his knees up to his chest so Maddy could shut the door.

  She ran around to the front door, jumped into the driver’s seat, and slammed the car door shut behind her. Kazuki got in the other side and quickly went around all the doors, locking them by pushing a small black button.

  “Where’s the emergency brake?” Kazuki asked.

  In her dad’s car, Maddy remembered, it was a lever in between the two front seats. But this car didn’t have such a lever.

  Shouts sounded from the house behind them, followed by crunching footsteps on the gravel. Maddy looked around to see Anka running toward the car. The witch was just coming out of the front door behind her.

  Desperately, Maddy looked around the car but could see nothing that looked even similar to the emergency brake in her dad’s car.

  “There!” Kazuki said, pointing to a D-shaped handle on the dashboard.

  Maddy tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t move. She pushed it, but it wouldn’t go. She tried to pull it, and it came out a little bit.

  Anka was right alongside the car now. She tried the handles and yelled at Maddy when she realized they were locked. She banged on the windows.

  “Help me!” Maddy cried.

  Maddy and Kazuki both pulled on the handle and turned it. It snapped back into the dashboard, and slowly, slowly, the car began to roll.

  There was a huge crack from the window behind Maddy, and she looked around to see a large rock in Anka’s hand.

  The car was moving only at a walking pace, but it was getting faster every second.

  Another crack of the rock, and this time the window did break. Broken glass showered Dimitar as he lay on the backseat of the car. He might have been cut if not for the thick mat of webs covering his entire body.

  Maddy looked around and saw the witch close
behind them. The witch reached into a pocket in her dress and pulled out the car keys on the skull key chain. She pressed a button on the remote control. At the bottom of the driveway, the big metal gates began to close.

  Anka’s hand reached in the broken window, scrabbling at the black button that locked the door. She pulled it up then let go, reaching for the door handle on the outside of the car.

  Before the door could open, however, two little monkey hands reached up and pushed the button back down.

  “Good boy, Mr. Chester!” Maddy cried. The car started to roll more quickly through the broken gravestones of the small cemetery. At the bottom of the driveway, the gap between the gates was narrowing.

  Anka reached in and pulled the button up again, but as soon as her hand disappeared, Mr. Chester pushed the button back down.

  The car was going faster and faster now, and Anka was running alongside, trying to keep up. In front of them, the gates were half closed, with barely enough room for the car to fit between them.

  Anka made one last desperate grab for the button and managed to pull it up again, holding onto it this time so Mr. Chester couldn’t push it down. She pulled the door open as the car reached the gates.

  One of the gates crashed into the car door, slamming it shut. Anka jerked her hand away just in time, then skidded to a halt as the car narrowly slipped through the gap.

  “Maddy!” Kazuki yelled.

  The car was heading straight toward a huge tree on the other side of the road. Maddy grabbed at the steering wheel, but it was much more stiff and heavy than she had expected. She pulled it around to the right. The car began to turn, but far too slowly.

  “Help me!” she yelled, and Kazuki grabbed the wheel as well.

  With a spray of gravel, the big car slid around the sharp turn at the end of the driveway and out onto the road, missing the tree by only inches, and gathering speed as it hurtled down the hill through the forest.

  “We’re going too fast!” Maddy squeaked, twisting the steering wheel a little to the left, a little to the right, struggling to keep the car in the middle of the road. “I can’t reach the brakes.”

  Kazuki let go of the wheel and dropped to the floor.

  The car began to slow.

  “That’s better!” Maddy said.

  The car slowed more and more as they came to a small rise in the road.

  “We need to go faster,” Maddy said.

  Kazuki let go of the brake, and the car crawled up the rise, its weight carrying it forward even though the engine wasn’t running.

  They reached the top and, just as Maddy thought they had completely stopped, they tipped over the brink of the hill, and the car began to move again, slowly, slowly, then a little faster and faster.

  “Just say ‘brake’ when you want to go slower, and I’ll press on the brake,” Kazuki said.

  It was hard keeping the big car in the center of the road. The car veered to the left and the right as she battled with the steering wheel.

  Around a sharp corner, there was a thud from the front of the car and a nasty-looking black bird was there: a crow. It was the biggest crow Maddy had ever seen in her life. It was holding onto the windshield wiper with steely claws, peering in with cold bird eyes.

  Maddy yelped with fright.

  “Don’t worry about it! It can’t get in,” Kazuki said.

  But it could. It leaped off the front of the car with a rush of black wings, and next thing she knew, Maddy heard it scraping at the broken back window of the car. It had gripped the bottom of the window with its claws and was trying to pull itself inside.

  A screech came from the back of the car. Mr. Chester was hanging from a handle above the window by his tail. He kicked and flailed at the bird with his hands and feet.

  There was another, much bigger, thud from the front of the car, and the windshield cracked and shattered into a mosaic of a thousand little glass pieces that bent and bulged but somehow stayed together. In front of Maddy, only an inch or two from her face, were the red-rimmed eyes and the dripping, snarling fangs of a ferocious wolf. It scrambled to grip the hood as it pawed and bit at the shattered windshield of the car.

  Another thud, and another wolf joined the first, leaping off a high embankment to their left.

  Maddy could barely see where she was going now, with the cracked windshield and two wolves blocking most of her view, but she could tell by the sunlight that suddenly hit the side window that they were emerging from the forest. To the left of the car, there were still tall trees, but when she looked to the right, she could see nothing.

  She peered out and down. They were following the narrow road around the side of the mountain. To the right, the road dropped away into a steep ravine.

  The wolves bit and pawed at the windshield, a small hole rapidly growing as little shards of glass dropped inside the car.

  She hastily steered to the left as they veered dangerously close to the cliff edge. Behind her, Mr. Chester screeched and screamed as he fought off the large black bird.

  “Brake!” Maddy yelled as a sharp bend appeared in front of her.

  The car slowed and the two wolves on the hood slid away from her toward the front of the car before scrabbling their way back up to the windshield as the car swept around the bend.

  Now Maddy could see almost nothing. She struggled and strained for any glimpse of the road ahead. They were speeding down a mountain road with a steep cliff on one side and no idea where they were going.

  The hole in the windshield widened more, large enough now for one of the wolves to get a paw inside and reach for her.

  She screamed and shuffled as far away as she could without letting go of the steering wheel.

  Kazuki’s head popped up above the dashboard. He was sitting on the very edge of the seat, pressing on the brake pedal with his foot.

  Faster and faster the car rolled, the wind of its passage now blustering inside the car through the hole in the windshield and the broken window where Mr. Chester was still ducking and dodging the sharp beak and claws of the crow.

  The wolf with its paw in the windshield moved as it reached out for Maddy, and now she could see, through a clear patch, what was in front of them: a sharp hairpin bend and a deep ravine beyond it.

  “Brake!” Maddy yelled, and hauled the steering wheel around to the left.

  Kazuki’s body went rigid as both of his feet jammed down on the brake pedal.

  The tires locked and screamed, and the car turned, sliding sideways toward the flimsy wooden barrier that marked the edge of the cliff.

  Now the wolf had its jaws through the hole in the windshield. It snapped at Maddy. Long strings of drool streamed out from its mouth and splashed onto her face. The wolf couldn’t reach her yet, but the hole was widening rapidly.

  The big car slammed into the barrier with a crunch, and Maddy screamed, certain that they were about to burst through the railings and into the ravine. The railings fractured, slivers of wood flying out over the valley, but somehow, miraculously, the stout posts held.

  Maddy was thrown sideways into the door of the car, and Kazuki landed on top of her.

  The wolves flew off the car and disappeared over the barrier and down into the ravine.

  The car tipped and there was a moment when it seemed to be suspended in midair, and then it began to settle back down. The left wheels landed on the roadway with a thump that shook the entire car, and the car stayed there, crushed up against the barrier but somehow still on the road.

  “Wow,” breathed Kazuki.

  Maddy said nothing. She was quite surprised that they were still alive.

  “Mr. Chester!” Kazuki yelled.

  Outside the window, Maddy could see the crow flying off over the ravine. That was good. It was leaving them alone.

  But it was also terrible — in its claws, the crow held
the feeble, struggling body of a little capuchin monkey.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DRAGON'S TONGUE

  AT THE BASE OF THE MOUNTAIN, when the car had finally rolled to a stop, Maddy and Kazuki managed to attract the attention of a truck on the highway. The truck driver, a large lady named Basia, recognized Dimitar immediately. It turned out that she was a big wrestling fan. She cut him free with a box cutter and gave them a lift into town.

  Maddy wanted to find a police station and managed to convey that through a basic kind of sign language to Dimitar, but he shook his head and ushered them toward a café on the main street.

  The café was empty except for a young waitress with bright pink hair. She came up to the table as soon as they sat down and asked what they wanted. Maddy shook her head at first, but then realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast in the hotel. She was famished. And Kazuki hadn’t eaten at all. Maddy ordered a kind of doughnut served with yogurt called mekitsa and one for Kazuki as well. By miming, Dimitar let the waitress know that he wanted a cup of coffee. He didn’t try to speak.

  The waitress disappeared behind the counter.

  “We need to go to the police,” Maddy said again, and repeated, through miming, to Dimitar. He shook his head and pointed to his lips.

  Maddy nodded. He wanted to be able to speak when they tried to explain things to the police.

  “Where’s the glass tube?” she asked, and Kazuki produced it from somewhere in his suit.

  Maddy looked at it. The thin layer of foamlike smoke hid the black shape of the dragon’s tongue.

  Kazuki shook the tube up a bit.

  “Don’t do that!” Maddy said.

  “Why not?” Kazuki asked.

  “I don’t know,” Maddy said. “It might jumble up all the words.”

  Dimitar reached out and took the tube from Kazuki. He pulled out the cork. Nothing happened.

  He shook the tube like Kazuki had done, but apart from a few whorls and twirls in the smoke, nothing happened.

  Eventually, he tipped the tube upside down. The small piece of dragon’s tongue fell out onto the table in front of them and, as it did so, the smoke came out too. Now freed of the tube, it evaporated into a thin cloud around Dimitar’s face, and when he breathed in, it disappeared into his mouth and nose. Dimitar looked around, unsure.