Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom

by David Neilsen

  Like a child being led resignedly to a dinner of lima beans and chopped beets, Jerry walked out of the gymnasium with Dr. Fell, honestly wondering if he would ever return.

  Though she had been frozen in terror during most of Jerry’s ordeal, seeing him marched to his doom snapped Gail into action. Suddenly all the reasons she was angry with him melted away, and she tore through the mass of obedient children on her way to the floor, shouting, “Wait! Stop! Mom! Stop them!”

  Stephanie Bloom either did not hear her daughter or did not want to hear; and by the time Gail had shoved her way out of the crowd, Jerry and Dr. Fell were gone.

  “Mom! You’ve got to stop him!”

  “What, dear?” asked her mother politely.

  “You can’t let Dr. Fell take Jerry!”

  “Now, now, no need to be greedy, Gail,” said her mother. “You already had an appointment with Dr. Fell. It’s your brother’s turn. But don’t worry, I’ll set up weekly follow-up visits for you when I get home.”

  “I—I—!” began Gail. But the sheer weight of having to disagree with her mother proved overwhelming, and she could do nothing but watch as Stephanie Bloom walked away. To add insult to injury, Gail was pretty sure she heard her mother mumble, “What a nice man is Dr. Fell” before leaving the gymnasium.

  And then the giant room was empty.

  Gail fought back tears as she thought about her poor brother in the clutches of Dr. Fell. He’d zap him into a Dr. Fell zombie, sure, but Gail had a hunch—a nasty, uncomfortable, miserable, awful hunch—that this visit, this appointment, would involve much more than that. She couldn’t say why, exactly, but every fiber in her being tingled in alarm. Jerry was in danger.

  “Dorknose is in serious trouble.”

  Gail didn’t turn around, so Nancy walked around to face her.

  “Isn’t he?” she finished.

  The friends faced off, each with her respective chip high on her shoulders. The anger from the day before still smoldered, hot from the twisted bonds that can be forged only from true friendship.

  “What do you care?” asked Gail finally.

  Nancy bit back each of the many nasty retorts that fell over themselves in her mind in their race to be used. Gail’s comment stung, but Nancy’s realization that it was a reasonable question stung even more.

  “I care…,” she began, searching for the right way to say what she wanted to say. “I care because…I care because he’s my friend.”

  Gail’s breath caught in her throat. Nancy continued.

  “I care because nobody deserves to be swallowed up by Dr. Fell, not even a total dorknose. I care because the three of us for some reason are the only three people in this entire town who are able to ward off his spell. I care because I’ve known your brother for practically his whole life. I care because you are my best friend and I have no idea why I’ve been so angry at you all day and I can’t stand not talking to you and I think it’s up to you and me to save Jerry.”

  It was as if a dam had ruptured. Gail was instantly weeping, and Nancy grabbed her friend, held her tight, and wept right along with her.

  After a few moments and a seriously good cry for both of them, Gail lifted herself out of Nancy’s embrace and wiped her eyes dry with the back of her hand.

  “He’s going to do something bad to my brother. I can feel it.”

  “I know.”

  “Nobody is going to do anything about it.”

  “We are.”

  Gail’s eyes widened in frustration. “What can we do? He’s taken him back to his house. We won’t get home from school for another couple of hours, and by then it could be too late. And it’s too far away to run over there.”

  “We’ll ride bikes.”

  “What bikes? Mine’s back in my garage.”

  Nancy puffed out her chest, confident. This was her area of expertise. “I didn’t say we’d ride our bikes.”

  Ten minutes later, Gail and Nancy had borrowed (Gail made Nancy promise they’d give them back when they were done) two of the many bicycles ridden to school and improperly locked up that day by the students of McKinley Grant Fillmore Elementary School. The school’s bike racks could accommodate maybe ten bikes, total, so by the time the twenty-third or twenty-fourth kid arrived each morning, there were bikes chained to trees, fence posts, traffic signs, and whatever else was available. The two Nancy managed to borrow had been chained to a fire hydrant, and it had been no work at all to simply lift the chain up over the top of the hydrant to liberate them.

  As the two girls pedaled furiously toward Hardscrabble Street, Gail prayed they wouldn’t be too late to stop Dr. Fell from doing something horrible—and horribly permanent—to her little brother. Just what that might be she tried not to imagine, but each passing moment brought up worse and worse fears, until by the time they were halfway there, Gail had convinced herself that Jerry’s very life was at stake.

  DESPITE THE ABUNDANCE OF terror that began coursing through his veins the moment Dr. Fell placed his surprisingly strong, unsurprisingly ice-cold hand on his shoulder, Jerry couldn’t help but be mildly intrigued in the back of his mind at the idea of riding home with Dr. Fell. This was entirely due to the fact that to this point Jerry had never seen, nor known anyone who had seen, Dr. Fell in a vehicle of any kind. He had literally walked into their lives one day. And aside from the large moving vans, not a single car or truck or motorcycle or skateboard or jet pack had ever been seen at his house.

  As Dr. Fell marched him out of the gymnasium and toward the certain doom that awaited him, Jerry struggled to guess just how, exactly, the two of them would be traveling back to the once-empty house at the end of Hardscrabble Street. Was there a magical portal shimmering in the school parking lot through which they would step? Would Dr. Fell strap Jerry to the back of a demonic beast that would bound away the miles at an impossible pace? Would they take the bus?

  After blinking through the harsh glare of the midday sun upon exiting the gymnasium and seeing neither a slobbering dragon preparing to take flight nor a sleek black hearse waiting for them in the parking lot, Jerry found the courage to ask, “How are we getting back to your house?”

  “Oh, my inquisitive little urchin. It is such a lovely day that I rather thought a sturdy and effortless constitutional was in order.”

  Seeing Jerry scrunch up his face in an attempt to make better sense of his words, Dr. Fell continued, “What I mean to say is—”

  “We’re walking?” interrupted Jerry.

  The faintest of sighs escaped from Dr. Fell’s lips—the only sign of his irritation at being interrupted. “Quite,” he said. “It is but a short distance, after all.”

  But Jerry, who lived four houses down from Dr. Fell, knew perfectly well it was not a short distance. McKinley Grant Fillmore Elementary School was easily a couple of miles from Hardscrabble Street. It would take almost an hour to get there by foot. Realizing this, Jerry was at once dismayed and elated—dismayed at the thought of walking next to Dr. Fell for that long, but elated at the thought that his sister might get home before them, and could maybe come up with a rescue plan.

  “I must admit, my fine young whippersnapper, that of my three would-be troublemakers, you have been the most impressively obstinate.” He turned Jerry by the shoulder to the left and led him down a back alley behind the school. “When your sister seemed her chipper old self a few short days after our appointment, I put it down to bad luck. When the Pinkblossom girl heard my song for less than a single afternoon, I realized I was up against a true adversary.”

  Jerry grew alarmed, both at Dr. Fell’s odd change of tone and at the fact that they were no longer on the main road. “This isn’t the way to Hardscrabble Street,” he said.

  “I happen to be privy to a most fortuitous shortcut,” remarked Dr. Fell, turning Jerry left around another corner of the building before continuing with his original narrative. “I must admit, good man Bloom, it had never occurred to me that my play structure would need to fall
under the whimsical zoning ordinances of this fine community in which I have found myself. When informed of your rather ingenious plan, I was forced to take immediate steps. Steps that caused me not an insignificant amount of hassle. This way, please.”

  Dr. Fell’s clawlike grip holding fast to Jerry’s shoulder, he roughly directed the boy in a third left turn around the corner of the building into an even darker, smaller alleyway.

  By now, Jerry was convinced they were not headed back to Hardscrabble Street, and he feared the worst. “Where are we going?” he asked, voice trembling.

  “Home, of course,” answered Dr. Fell. “We are nearly there.”

  “But we’re nowhere near Hardscrabble Street!” pointed out Jerry, panic’s tendrils wrapping themselves around his soul.

  “Oh?” said Dr. Fell, highly amused with himself. He once again turned Jerry to the left, guiding his pliant victim around yet another corner of the same building. Jerry stopped cold.

  He blinked. He rubbed his eyes. He stared. He was sure they had just turned left four times around the corners of one single building, which ought to have meant that they were more or less back where they’d started. Except they weren’t.

  They were in the middle of Dr. Fell’s playground.

  “Ah,” said Dr. Fell matter-of-factly. As if traveling two miles in less than five minutes while walking at a leisurely pace were nothing out of the ordinary. “Here we are, then. Come along.”

  His voice and tone were polite and jovial, but his manner was anything but. Dr. Fell’s hold on Jerry’s arm tightened to the point where his long, jagged fingernails dug into the boy’s skin—drawing small trickles of blood—as he tugged his newest patient out of the maze, up onto his porch, and into his lair.

  Having listened in detail to both his sister and Nancy describing their experiences in this odd, ominous room, Jerry had thought he’d be prepared for his first actual visit. He was not.

  The moment Dr. Fell’s heavy front door thundered shut, Jerry was practically blinded by the overabundance of purple assaulting his pupils. The room was so incredibly purple that for a moment, Dr. Fell’s purple top hat disappeared into the background and it looked as though his head had simply been sliced off in a neat line at the very top.

  “I would play the proper host and suggest that you recline leisurely upon my luxurious sofa while promising to be but a moment in preparation for your examination, but we both know you shall not be undergoing an examination this afternoon,” said Dr. Fell grimly.

  He sauntered toward the dark, stout oak door, on which hung a grim poster of two dead cats wearing ballet shoes, and yanked it open with a frightening show of brute strength. “I shall return momentarily,” he said, stepping through the dark portal into the mysterious room, the interior of which remained shrouded in secrecy.

  Not believing his luck, Jerry turned and ran to the front door. He was frozen for an instant at the sight of a disturbing portrait of four small, dead kittens lying together in a lump hanging on the inside of the door, but he averted his eyes and tried the handle.

  The handle did not budge. The door would not open.

  The fear within him rising second by second, Jerry turned and took in the room again, this time trying to look past the purple. His reward for this herculean effort was a panoramic view of dozens upon dozens of photographs of cats, most of them dead or dying, some rotting into skeletons. He recalled his sister describing these pictures but didn’t remember them being painted in his mind as so overly grim.

  Perhaps the most gruesome of the images adorning the walls was the portrait over the fireplace of an ancient cat stuffed into the costume of a clown. Its skin had worn thin and bare, with the poor thing’s colorful insides peeking through in spots. Yet what made it utterly horrible was the fact that rather than seeming dead, the feline depicted seemed very much alive. And it did not look happy.

  “Why, young Jerry, I am surprised at you,” said Dr. Fell, reentering the room from the shockingly dark darkness visible beyond the dark, stout oak door supposedly leading to the examination room. “Surely you have discovered the impossibility of reopening my front door by now. I would rather have thought you would already be hard at work searching for another form of egress.”

  “What’s in that room?” asked Jerry, pointing behind Dr. Fell at the splash of utter darkness still visible through the crack of the very slightly open, dark, stout oak door. “It’s not an examination room.”

  “How remarkably astute you are, my dear, sweet urchin. No, it is not, in fact, an examination room. As I am not, in fact, a licensed medical practitioner. But I assume you were already aware of that particular fact.”

  “I’d guessed as much,” answered Jerry. He backed away from Dr. Fell, who stalked forward with a truly unpleasant pleasantness about him. Jerry’s legs bumped against the end of the couch, and he quickly caught himself before he could fall to the floor.

  “Do be careful, Jerry,” hummed Dr. Fell. “Although I suppose if you were to accidentally become injured—even gravely injured—we could most certainly take care of whatever boo-boo you imposed upon yourself. I am so very practiced at remedying childhood traumas, as I would hope has been made abundantly clear.”

  Though his eight-year-old body shook with terror, something instinctual ignited the fight-or-flight reflex within. Jerry quickly reached down to a plate of rotten apples sitting on a side table next to the purple couch, grabbed one in his hand, and threw it with all his might at Dr. Fell—

  —who plucked it out of the air without batting an eye and proceeded to take a single, repulsive bite, all the while staring at his prey.

  “Really, Jerry,” said Dr. Fell after swallowing his bite. “Do you think to harm me with a piece of fruit?”

  “I wish I had something heavier to throw at you,” responded Jerry, quite shocked at his sudden bravery.

  “Yes. I do not doubt that for a second.” And then Dr. Fell leaped forward before Jerry could move and took the boy gently by the neck, smiling down into a face filled with tears. “Tell me, my fresh-faced urchin, would you like to meet my assistant?”

  GAIL HOPPED OFF HER bike and let it crash to the ground next to the play structure of Dr. Fell. Running faster than she had ever run, she flew over the few yards of dry, withered grass onto the porch and bounded toward the front door. Just before she could reach out and grab the handle, however, Nancy rode her borrowed bicycle right on up onto the porch and skidded to a halt directly in front of her frantic friend.

  “Get out of my way!” screamed Gail.

  “Are you crazy?” asked Nancy. “You’re just going to barge in there like Meaty Gluttonsen crashing a birthday celebration?”

  Gail frowned, a smidgen of doubt crossing her face. Matthew “Meaty” Gluttonsen was a very large (students were supposed to call him big boned) third grader who always seemed to shove his way into the classroom when cake, cupcakes, or other delicious forms of baked goods were being served—even if he was not, in fact, a member of that class.

  “Jerry’s in there!” Gail finally protested.

  “Yeah, and marching into a trap is totally going to help him!” snapped Nancy. “Think, Gail! Dr. Fell knows we’re going to come after your brother. He may be evil, but he’s not stupid. If you open that door, who knows what’ll be waiting for you. And even if there’s nothing there, what do you think you’ll find? An empty purple room and a big wooden door that we both know you won’t be able to open.”

  “I have to do something!”

  “Yes, we do have to do something. But we have to be smart about it.” Nancy climbed off her bike, guiding it with one hand while leading Gail down off the porch with the other. “We need a plan of attack. We can’t just make it up as we go, or we’ll be playing into the hands of Dr. Fell.”

  They retreated to the outskirts of the play structure, automatically filtering out the cheers of joy coming from those few lucky children who had managed to play hooky from school for the day. Leaving her bike to
crash to the ground, Nancy brought Gail over to a small operating room–like section of the structure and sat her down on the wooden examination table. “So hurry up and plan something,” grumbled Gail, eyes continually drawn to the creepy once-vacant house standing just yards away.

  “I am, I am,” said Nancy, sitting down next to her friend. “What we need is an advantage.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Something we can use that he won’t have planned for. Something that gives us a leg up on him.”

  The two girls sat in silence for a moment, as each did her best to come up with something, anything, they could use.

  “We could get our parents to help?” suggested Gail. Nancy shook her head.

  “What about a disguise? Like, I could knock on his door pretending to be a traveling salesman or something?” suggested Nancy. Gail shook her head.

  “Something from our exorcism room in your basement?” suggested Gail. Nancy shook her head.

  “Does your mom or dad have a…a gun? At home?” suggested Nancy timidly. Gail shook her head. Nancy breathed a sigh of relief.

  Suddenly Gail sat straight up with a start, her eyes wide as they stared off into nothing and a faint smile forming on her lips.

  “You’ve got something,” said Nancy.

  “I know what we have over Dr. Fell,” announced Gail.

  “What? Tell me!”

  Gail twisted around and flashed a look of triumph at her friend. “We were here first.”

  Every single child and almost every single adult on Hardscrabble Street, Vexington Avenue, Von Burden Lane, and Turnabout Road (Old Lady Witherton could not be bothered) knew there were many different ways to get into the large brick house at the end of Hardscrabble Street, which had been empty for a generation. It had occurred to Gail, however, that one person who might not be aware of the multiple points of entry was the individual who had so recently purchased the property.