The Creakers

by Tom Fletcher

  So Lucy did the only thing a person can do when there’s nothing more a person can do.

  She had a good old cry.

  She howled and wailed, sitting on top of the laundry basket with the four hideous Creakers trapped under-neath, listening to her sobs. The tears started filling up the insides of her swimming goggles, but she didn’t dare take them off. She definitely didn’t trust the Creakers.

  “What’s the kidder doin’?” said Scratch.

  “What a rotten noise!” said Sniff, plugging his floppy ears with his long fingers.

  “I’m…crying…you…horrid…things,” Lucy sobbed.

  “Cryin’? What is cryin’?” Sniff asked, and out of the corner of her teary eyes Lucy could see all four Creakers peering up at her through the bars of the laundry basket.

  “Haven’t you ever seen anyone cry before?” Lucy sniffed.

  “No,” the Creakers said together.

  “We be creakin’ when kidders are a-snoozin’. We never seen a cryin’ human befores,” explained Grunt.

  Lucy wiped away the tears that trickled down her cheeks and sniffed up a sob.

  “Well, crying is what you do when you’re really, really sad about something,” she said.

  “Cryin’ is bad?” Guff asked eagerly. “Us Creakers usually be likin’ the bad stuff!”

  “Actually, my dad used to say that crying is a good thing. It’s when all the sad stuff inside your mind builds up so much that it starts to leak out of your eyes. It’s good to let it out,” said Lucy.

  The Creakers went quiet beneath her, like they were really thinking about what she’d just said.

  “Sometimes I thinks I might have too much bad stuff inside my noggin,” admitted Scratch, peeling a bit of skin from his itchy scalp and popping it into his mouth. “Every night it’s creakin’ here and creakin’ there. Snatchin’ grown-ups one day, dozyin’ kidders the next…” His voice started to sound rather strange, almost like he was trying not to laugh.

  “I knows what you mean,” said Sniff, who started giggling a little.

  “All we be doin’ is the nasties, night in and night out!” agreed Guff.

  And with that, the three of them cracked up in fits of laughter.

  Lucy stared down at them. What horrible creatures, she thought. Laughing at someone who’s upset!

  But then she remembered that these Creakers were from a backward world—and that when they laughed, it actually sounded like crying. So did this mean that now that they were laughing they were actually upset? It was all very confusing and rather odd.

  “Pull yourselves together, you twozzles,” hissed Grunt. “The kidderling be puttin’ you under kidderling spells, makin’ you all humany and washy-brained. Naughty human magic!” He glared up at Lucy through the bars of the laundry basket.

  “I’m not putting them under spells!” protested Lucy. “I don’t know any spells at all. Humans can’t do magic! I just told you a story, that’s all.”

  “Exactly. Stories are magic. They puts ideas in your noggin that weren’t in there before. They makes you think all different ’bout the world,” barked Grunt grumpily, and the other Creakers snapped out of Lucy’s story spell and came back to their rotten senses.

  All of a sudden something seemed to happen that made the Creakers shift awkwardly. Their wrinkly ears pricked up like a cat hearing a mouse squeak. Then Lucy heard the church bell chime in the distance. What time was it? Lucy started counting.

  “It’s gettin’ early!” Grunt said.

  “The dark be nearly over,” said Guff.

  “Let’s us be goin’ back to the—” began Scratch.

  “Woleb!” finished Sniff.

  “Nope,” Lucy said, tightening the straps of her goggles. She shifted around until she was comfortable on top of the basket and stared straight at them in the mirror. “You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what I want to know. Why are you here and what have you done with our grown-ups?”

  The church bell stopped. It was five o’clock. Almost morning.

  “Tell ’er, Grunt. It’s the only ways,” said Guff. “We be dust if she don’t let us be goin’ back!”

  “Dust?” Lucy asked, but the Creakers pressed their ugly lips together tightly, and she could see they weren’t going to say any more. She tried again. “Tell me everything, or you’re staying here!”

  There was a silence as Grunt thought about what to do. He was caught in a rotten pickle…though actually Grunt loved rotten pickle, especially when it was in a moldy cheese sandwich. This was more like being caught in a fresh strawberry for Grunt—which he hated!

  “Tell ’er, Grunt!” whispered Sniff nervously.

  “Yes, Grunt,” said Lucy. “Tell me what I want and I’ll let you go, but I won’t ask you again. What have you done with the grown-ups?”

  “All wrong, then, Grunt be tellin’ the tricksy kidderling. But Grunt be gettin’ in the troubles for this,” Grunt muttered.

  “Troubles be better ’n dust!” said Sniff, trembling a little.

  Grunt sighed and ran his claws over his spiky nailed back.

  “It be simply easy to understand. We Creakers, we be hatin’ them stupid grown-ups,” he said.

  “Hating the grown-ups?” said Lucy.

  “HATIN’ ’em like the smell of roses on a sunny mornin’.”

  “Hatin’ ’em like the taste of raspberry-ripple ice cream.”

  “Hatin’ ’em like a warm ’ot-water bottle on a cold night,” all the Creakers agreed, shuddering.

  “But why?” asked Lucy.

  “Them stupid human grown-ups be takin’ all the stinkerful waste and…and…”

  Lucy noticed that Grunt was getting very agitated as he tried to spit out these words.

  “…they WASTE it!” he spat.

  “They waste what?”

  “They waste the WASTE!” all the Creakers barked in unison.

  “All the glorious garbage.”

  “All the rotten leftovers.”

  “All the stuff you silly humans use once and then get rids of, they takes it and chucks it in the watery oceans,” said Grunt.

  “They buries it under the ground!” added Guff.

  “Or they burns it all up into smoky clouds. Hidin’ it outta sight, outta brain, but worst of all, outta reach of us—”

  “Creakers!” said Scratch and Sniff together.

  “Right,” said Lucy. “So…what’s the problem with all that?”

  The Creakers bashed their sticky hands on their slimy foreheads and let out frustrated moans.

  “Innit obvious, you silly kidderling?” answered Grunt. “We Creakers don’t just loves the stuff you be gettin’ rids of. We NEEDS it.”

  “It’s what the Woleb works on,” Guff explained. “All them things your grown-ups be thinkin’ is rotten and nasty and wants outta their homes—we Creakers wants to ’ave it.”

  “Oh, I see! To reuse it?” said Lucy.

  “YES!” they barked.

  “That’s why we be snatchin’ up all the grown-ups, takin’ them away, just leavin’ the messy kidderlings behind,” Grunt explained.

  “You little muckers knows how to make good muck,” Guff said approvingly. “And you not be clearin’ it up. We be able to come and takes all the mess we wants now. We takes it back and builds stinkerful homes.”

  “You make homes out of garbage?” Lucy asked.

  “Oh yes!” Guff said enthusiastically. “We makes the worst rotten homes in all the Woleb! Big smelly ones where the walls are made of lumpy cardboard egg boxes and the windows outta fizzywhizz bottles.”

  “I got a pure banana-peel rug!” said Scratch.

  “And my pillows is plastic bags stuffed with empty tin cans!” boasted Sniff.

  “I…I see,” said Lucy. She tried to imagine their
homes, built from the garbage she would throw in the trash can. They sounded rather awful to her, but the Creakers seemed very proud of how disgusting they were.

  “So if we lets your stupid grown-ups go on hidin’ it all in the ground…,” went on Grunt.

  “Or the oceans…”

  “Or the sky…”

  “We be havin’ nothin’ to live by anymores,” Guff finished. “We not be able to survive in the Woleb.”

  Lucy took a moment to really think about everything they’d said. She thought about all the mess she made, and where it went when her mom threw it away, and about all those truckloads of trash bags she used to see her dad drive off to Whiffington Dump each day.

  “Now the kidderling be lettin’ us go? Like she prom-ised, yes?” said Grunt.

  “Before the sun dusts us all!” blurted Guff.

  “Be quiet, you twit!” snapped Grunt, shoving Guff so hard that Lucy felt the laundry basket wobble beneath her. “You be tellin’ her our weakyness!”

  “The sun…dusts you?” Lucy asked. Her brain was whirring. “Do you not like sunlight?”

  Grunt sighed, and in the mirror Lucy saw him shoot Guff a nasty look.

  “The sun be too nice,” he grumbled.

  “And warm.”

  “And loverly.”

  “And kind.”

  “Our dark green skin be too fragile to see it. That’s why we live in the Woleb, under the beds. Sunlight can’t gets to us down there. We be turnin’ to dust if we gets caught in it,” explained Sniff, reaching into his pouch and pulling out a sprinkle of Dozy Dust.

  “You mean—you mean that Dozy Dust is made of…of…”

  “Dusted Creaker,” Sniff said sadly, placing it back in the pouch and pulling the strings tight. “That be why its magic works so good and powerful.”

  Lucy thought of all the times she’d had little golden crumbles in the corners of her eyes when she’d woken up. She’d never wondered what it was before—but now she suddenly had a strange, uncomfortable feeling in her tummy. That dust meant that a Creaker had lost its life. They might be rotten, nasty-looking things, but Lucy was beginning to think that they actually weren’t all that bad.

  “Look! It be the bright!” cried Guff, pointing his flabby claw to the sliver of warm orange light that had just crept in through Lucy’s curtains.

  Their time was up!

  Has your mom or dad ever burned the dinner? Or maybe a piece of toast at breakfast time?

  Do you remember what it smelled like?

  It’s horrible, isn’t it?

  Well, that very same smell suddenly wafted up Lucy’s nostrils.

  “HOT! HOT! HOT!” the Creakers cried as the first pools of wonderful morning sunlight reached the basket they were trapped in and cut through the bars like knives. Lucy looked down and gasped as she saw their skin puffing up like bubbling molasses at the first drop of light.

  “Lets us go!” Grunt growled.

  “Oh my goodness! I’m sorry!” Lucy said, leaping from the basket at once. She lifted it off the four Creakers and rushed to the curtains to draw them closed, buying the creatures some time.

  But when she turned back around, her heart thumped in her chest. The Creakers were tugging her dad’s grubby coat off Ella’s floppy sleeping body.

  “Hey! That’s my dad’s!” cried Lucy.

  “Stupid little kidderling. Never trust a Creaker!” Grunt cried as he put the coat on himself, wearing it like a royal robe. Then, in a split second, he slid underneath Lucy’s bed, much faster than Lucy had seen the Creakers move before. Guff, Scratch, and Sniff followed, giggling and laughing in their weird, twisted way as they slipped into the blackness below.

  “No!” Lucy cried—but it was too late. They had gone, along with her dad’s coat, back to their backward Woleb!

  She quickly shook Ella. “Wake up, you sleepyhead!”

  “But…but I only like the pink marshmallows…,” Ella mumbled in her dreamy voice.

  Lucy jumped onto her bed, bouncing up and down and shaking Norman.

  “Wake up, you useless boy!” she called. “There’s no Scout badge for sleeping-through-a-crisis!”

  Actually, there is a Scout badge for sleeping-through-a-crisis. It looks like this…

  It was hopeless. Norman and Ella were too heavily under the Dozy Dust’s magic to be woken. Lucy was on her own—and she had to think quickly.

  “That’s right. I’ve got to think quickly,” Lucy told herself firmly. “I’m the only person who knows where the grown-ups are and how to get there. I’ve got to find Mom. I’ve got to get her back!”

  Lucy dropped to the floor and peered into the dark space beneath her bed. The wooden boards appeared to be normal, but Lucy knew better now. She reached out slowly and prodded one with her fingertips.

  The floor wobbled!

  The wormhole to the Woleb was still open! But as Lucy thought this, the floor gave a little shake, and a bubble rose to the surface and popped, as though it were some sort of living jelly. Lucy pulled her hand back quickly and felt the warmth of the morning sun as it illuminated her room through the thin curtains.

  The sunlight must be making the wormhole close! thought Lucy. That’s it—it’s now or never.

  She pulled the straps of her swimming goggles tight, pushed her bangs to one side, took a deep breath, and slid headfirst into the shadows beneath her bed.

  The floor swallowed her up whole. In an instant, she sank into the squashy-swishy, wobbly-bobbly floor—she was back in the Woleb once more.

  Lucy tried to relax, to let the sticky walls tighten and stretch around her and finally spit her out into the strange Woleb tunnel. She flipped upside down, or was it downside up? Either way, she felt awfully dizzy again as she toppled onto her bottom next to the hole that led to her bedroom.

  Suddenly the hole started to glow a glorious orange, like a warm sunrise, before shrinking and disappearing completely.

  “The wormhole must close in the daytime and stop sunlight from getting in, protecting the Creakers and the Woleb from being dusted,” Lucy murmured. “But that also means…I can’t get out! I’m stuck down here now—at least until it’s nighttime in Whiffington again.”

  A Creaker laugh echoed down the steamy corridor, and Lucy saw four twisted shadows scurry off in the distance.

  “We gots the stinkerful jacket!” she heard Grunt cackle.

  “Scratch be usin’ it as a duvet to sleep in.”

  “Sniff wants it as a rotten rug!”

  “Guff be makin’ a pair of whiffy coat curtains with it.”

  “None of yous be ’avin’ this stinkin’ thing. We be takin’ it to the king!” Grunt hissed.

  “The king?” Lucy whispered to herself.

  “All hails the king!” the Creakers snapped in unison as they marched deeper into the tunnel.

  The King of the Creakers. He must be the worst of all of them! Lucy thought.

  And she was right. The Creaker King was the worst Creaker in all the Woleb—but even worse than that, what Lucy didn’t yet know was that to rescue the grown-ups and to get her mom back, Lucy was going to have to face him…

  Don’t tell her!

  The campfire was warm and cozy, and the smell of toasting marshmallows made Norman’s tummy rumble with excitement.

  He twisted his marshmallow around in the flickering orange flames, getting the most perfectly even toast you could possibly imagine. This one didn’t look black and charred like they usually did, and it didn’t go all sloppy and fall off his stick. It was golden and crisp. It was warm and bubbling. It was, quite simply, the sort of toasted marshmallow you only see in your dreams.

  Which is exactly where it was. In Norman’s dream.

  Suddenly his cozy little campfire was interrupted by the most irritating sound Norman had ever heard. It was like
a siren wailing through the sky, filling the air with annoyance.

  “What on earth is that sound?” Norman cried, dropping his marshmallow into the flames to cover his ears as the sound got louder.

  Norman sat upright in Lucy’s bed.

  “Norman? It’s me, Ella!” Ella called, looking all scruffy and tired.

  “I fell asleep?” Norman croaked.

  “Guess so. We both did!”

  “You fell asleep too?”

  “Uh-huh.” Ella yawned, popping on her pink heart-shaped shades to hide her tired eyes from the crack of sunlight coming in through the curtains, making Lucy’s bedroom glow.

  “Where’s the jacket?” Norman asked, noticing that Ella was no longer wearing Lucy’s dad’s coat.

  “Dunno,” Ella said with a shrug. “Woke up and it was gone.”

  Norman’s brain was only just warming up. He couldn’t work anything out yet.

  He caught Ella’s yawn and rubbed his eyes. That’s when he noticed the little golden crumbles of sleep fall onto the bedsheets. The little speckles that had been in the corners of his eyes.

  His heart leapt.

  “Lucy!” he gasped.

  “She’s not in there,” Ella said as Norman scrambled out of bed and stumbled across to the wardrobe.

  “She’s—”

  “Gone?” Ella interrupted.

  Norman nodded.

  “She’s probably just downstairs making breakfast.”

  “No, Ella—you don’t understand. They’ve snatched her!”

  Ella dipped her head and peered over the top of her sunglasses with a raised eyebrow.

  “Who?”

  “The Creakers! They must have snatched her in the night once we fell asleep!” Norman whispered.

  “Snatched? Really?” Ella questioned, seeming rather unconvinced.