A Giant Problem

by Tony DiTerlizzi

  But Jack had given up, and even his last present was stupid. Maybe he thought they could clean it out and go swimming.

  Nick kicked the side and watched the water slosh, then walked back to the car. He slid into the backseat with a shake of his head.

  “I don’t understand,” Laurie said. “Who’s that guy?”

  “Just drive,” Nick said. He handed her the papers. “It’s over.”

  Jules pulled the car away from the curb, ignoring the grate of metal on road.

  Laurie unhooked her seat belt and turned around. “What do you mean? Nick!”

  “Jack’s leaving. He’s giving up. He says we should give up too.”

  The car banged into a steep hole and ground hard.

  Laurie nearly fell into the backseat. “How do we give up?” she shouted at Nick. “He said all of Florida is going to burn!”

  “Hey,” Jules said. “I’m driving here!” He hit the gas, but the wheel just spun.

  Jules got out and walked around the car. “Nick, come help me,” he called.

  Nick slid out of the backseat and leaned down to look at the pothole. The more he looked at it, though, the more it looked like the beginning of a sinkhole. Muddy water pooled along with chunks of fallen asphalt in the pit. He’d seen them before, but never on a road; they didn’t happen that fast.

  “Weird,” Nick said.

  “Forget about staring at it. There’s some lumber by that guy’s garbage. Grab it and we’ll see if we can make a ramp to get the tire out.”

  They shoved a plank into the hole, and when Jules pushed the gas again, this time the car moved forward and away from the ramshackle house, the gross kiddie pool, and any hope of someone to tell Nick what to do.

  The worst part was that he knew he hadn’t really taken Jack seriously. Nick had wanted to give up. He’d figured that someone else could handle things. Now he still had no idea what to do, but he was afraid there really was no one else. His stomach hurt.

  That night in the hotel room, Nick couldn’t sleep. He looked through the books that Laurie had shoved into her backpack. First, he flipped idly through Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide, staring at the pictures of giants. There was nothing new there.

  He picked up another book. Fairy tales. Princes. Princesses. Nothing that seemed like it would help.

  He thought about when he’d met the people who had put the guide together and about what the woman had said to him. Fairy tales about giants. But what did reading a story about a tailor or whatever have to do with this?

  His flipping stopped on the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Nick stared at the page. The illustration showed a picture of a piper followed by a sea of rats, no giants in sight. Rats, lured by the sound of his music.

  Then the rats disappeared but the town didn’t pay up, and the piper lured the kids the same way he did the rats.

  With the pipe. With music. Like Taloa had lured the giant. But, of course, Taloa was gone, and with her, any luring.

  Maybe he could find Taloa. Or her sisters, if she hadn’t found them already. He groaned. He had no idea where to even begin to look.

  At his groan, Jules rolled over in his sleep and scratched his nose.

  Then Nick did remember something from the field guide. He flipped frantically to the page. Mermaids. Better than nixies at luring people with their song. Maybe they would be better at luring giants, too. Away from houses that could be burned and people who could be stomped. Away.

  Nick wondered if it could be possible. Just the thought filled him with a sick excitement.

  The next day Nick’s dad loaded them into the car and they drove to Mangrove Hollow. Fire had blackened the lawns, and in one place the pavement was cracked in a circle as though some massive thing had crashed into the center of it.

  The boulders were still where they had been hurled, one crushing a newly planted tree.

  But the worst thing was seeing the houses. No longer promising a neighborhood full of kids and fun, no longer promising the fulfillment of his parents’ dream, no longer promising anything.

  “It’s not so bad,” said Nick’s dad faintly.

  “Insurance will cover it,” Charlene said, putting her hand on his arm.

  “Some of it, anyway,” he said, his voice so low that Nick had to strain to hear him.

  Their house was even worse. Not burned like most of the others, but collapsed, one side slumped into a pile of shingles and the other stripped to beams. Clothes, furniture, and other familiar things stuck out from the piles of wallboard.

  Nick waded through the debris. It was hard to balance on things, but he was determined to find something. Something that was his.

  “Get away from there,” said his dad.

  “Just a second,” he called, staring at the shards of televisions, the bent metal of his dad’s exercise equipment. He thought of the boxes of his mother’s things, buried deep in the rubble of the garage. He thought of stupid stuff—the ugly clay ashtray he’d made for his dad, the pictures of him with his classes, a stuffed rabbit that Jules used to sleep with and had given to him and he had kept under his bed.

  “Come back!” his dad yelled. “That’s dangerous.”

  Nick knew he should go back, but it seemed to him that there was nowhere to go. Among the tattered remains of the couch, the tattered roof shingles, Nick found a melted video game console. As he picked it up, he saw one of his models. A boat, his Viking ship, totally undamaged.

  He reached for it and slipped. A nail went into his foot.

  Nick howled.

  Charlene climbed toward him. “Hold on to me,” she said. “Stand up slowly, okay?”

  His Viking ship

  “I told you not to climb out there. What got into you?” His dad’s voice sounded strange, strangled.

  “Not now, Paul.” Charlene pulled Nick up. He hung on to the boat, not caring about the pain in his leg. “He’s going to need a tetanus shot.”

  “He’s got to be careful!” His dad looked around, but Nick wasn’t sure what he was looking for.

  “Chill out, Dad,” Jules said.

  “I’m not going to chill out,” their dad yelled. “Nicholas has been acting out ever since Charlene and Laurie moved in, and I have had enough.”

  With Charlene’s help, Nick managed to get back to the grass. He pulled off the flip-flop and looked at the blood on his foot. It was too smeared for him to see where the nail had gone in.

  “Nicholas,” his father demanded, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “You don’t want me to feel anything or think anything, anyway. I’m just supposed to do whatever you say.”

  “That’s not true, Nicholas,” his father said. “That’s not fair.”

  “It is true. All you care about is your stupid development and your new marriage—you don’t care about the past! You don’t care—”

  “Nicholas!” his father said, and Nick went silent.

  Laurie stared at the wreckage of the house. Her eyes shone with water.

  “Don’t cry,” Nick told her, and all of a sudden he was afraid he was going to cry too. “Don’t be such a baby,” he said, clenching his jaw. “You never even really lived there.”

  The look of shock and hurt she gave him was enough to drive back his own tears.

  Cindy was holding his key ring.

  Chapter Seven

  IN WHICH Nick Dances to a New Tune

  Back at the hotel Nick choked down a piece of rubbery pizza sitting on the king-sized bed in the grown-ups’ room. His foot was freshly bandaged by a nurse at the doctor’s office, and his arm was still stinging from the tetanus shot (it turned out he was due for a booster).

  Lying on the scratchy coverlet, listening to the newscaster on the television announce that three fires had broken out in neighboring areas, Nick felt about as bad as he could imagine feeling. His dad watched the screen and chewed mechanically, ignoring the things they’d said before.

  If life were more like
the movies, they would have had a long talk and gotten closer or something. Instead, awkward tension hung, heavy and terrible, over Nick, making him wish he’d never spoken in the first place. But the boat was safe, and that was worth any amount of his dad’s displeasure.

  A knock on the door made him turn. Jules sprang up and let his girlfriend, Cindy, into the room.

  “Hey,” she said with an awkward wave.

  “Our room is over there,” Jules said. They walked through the dividing door, and a moment later the television switched on.

  Charlene and Nick’s father exchanged a glance.

  “Why don’t you two go watch television with Jules,” he said. “Keep them company.”

  Laurie shrugged, picked up another slice of pizza, and headed for the other room. Nick followed, not looking at his dad.

  Jules and Cindy were crouched in the bathroom, and Cindy was holding his key ring.

  “What are you doing?” Nick said, his voice going shrill as a scream.

  “Hey, keep it down,” said Jules. “I’m showing her the hobgoblin thing. What did you think I was doing?”

  “Amazing,” Cindy said. “Wow. You guys caught that?”

  Laurie frowned. Clearly, in giving Jules the Sight she hadn’t realized that he was going to act like he owned it. Clearly, she’d never had an older brother.

  “Laurie caught it,” Nick said.

  Laurie crouched down and fed Sandspur a chunk of her pizza. He devoured it in a single swallow and then looked at her expectantly. The leash that attached him to the pipes looked pretty well gnawed, so maybe he’d gotten hungry.

  “Did you tell her the part where we’re all going to die?” Nick asked.

  “Not yet,” said Jules.

  “What?” asked Cindy.

  Jules sighed. “Nick and Laurie say that basically, well, there are giants, and the giants are going to burn everything the way they burned Mangrove Hollow.”

  “That’s crazy,” Cindy said.

  “It was on the news,” Laurie said.

  “Giants were on the news?”

  “No,” said Laurie, “things burning were on the news. More and more things burning.”

  “You know the story about the Pied Piper?” Nick asked. “Maybe this is far-fetched, but what if we could lure the giants with singing?” Maybe if they had Taloa around, it would have been a better plan, but he was glad that she’d left before everything had been destroyed. He was glad that she was probably safe.

  And, anyway, they needed something that could swim in the sea. Leading the giants away from the development wasn’t going to be enough anymore.

  “That story didn’t end well,” Laurie said.

  “Lure the giants?Lure them where?” asked Jules.

  “Where were you when you saw the mermaid?” he asked his brother.

  “Why?” Jules asked.

  “The nixie’s song lured a giant, so merfolk singing should work even better. If we lure the giants into the ocean, then they won’t be able to burn anything. No one will be in danger, and then maybe after a swim the giants’ll go back to sleep. We just need the merfolk to help us.” He grinned as he said it. He wasn’t good with fighting and he wasn’t all that brave, but he could figure things out. Tab A into slot B. It made sense. It was just crazy.

  “Okay, hold on, genius. Where are they going to go? Out to sea? And then just drown like rats or something?”

  “According to this field guide we have, sometimes they live underwater for long periods of time,” Nick said. “They’d probably survive.”

  “So what good is the plan if they don’t die?”

  “Well, as long as one of the mermaids kept singing, they’d probably just listen. And after a while they go back to hibernating. Plus, if they get lost out there in the ocean, it might take time for them to find their way back … enough time for us to think of something else.”

  “The things I saw didn’t look helpful,” Jules said. “Those mermaids or whatever. I think they tried to drown me.”

  “It’s a good plan,” said Laurie. “Maybe the mermaids felt threatened. Maybe your surfboard looked like a shark?”

  “That’s stupid,” said Nick.

  “I was defending you!”

  “Look,” Jules said, “asking homicidal or neurotic or stupid mermaids for help—I don’t think you can call that a good plan. But I guess it’s our only plan. It can’t hurt to try.”

  “Now?” Laurie said.

  “I’ll drive,” said Jules.

  Laurie slung her bag over her shoulder, opened the door, and looked out into the hall. “Come on. Bring Sandspur.”

  Jules locked the door between the rooms quietly and then followed her. Nick untied the hobgoblin’s leash and led him along behind them.

  “They’re going to hear the car,” said Nick. “What with the bumper dragging.”

  Jules looked up at the dark hotel, sighed, and clicked the button on his keys that would unlock their father’s shiny new SUV. “We can take Dad’s if we’re quick.”

  There were two beaches in town. One was on the shore of the estuary, where little kids would play in the gentle waves, but the other one was over the bridge to the strip of land that met the Atlantic. That was the place for serious surfers.Jagged sea-sculpted stones jutted from the sand in strange configurations so that the sea splashed up through the gaps, giving it the name Roaring Rocks. In the darkness sand whistled across the beach.

  “Now what?” Jules asked.

  Cindy pulled her zipped hoodie tighter around herself. “Are you guys messing with me?”

  “What if I got in the water?” Nick asked. “I could call to them.”

  Jules laughed. “Can you even swim?”

  Nick frowned.

  “Of course he can,” Cindy said, walking over to him. “Right, Nick?”

  “I swim,” he said as firmly as he could, grateful for Cindy’s warm hand on his shoulder. He didn’t want to admit that going out alone into that dark water seemed about the worst idea he could imagine. He tried not to think about how sharks often feed close to shore at night, riding the waves with their mouths agape. Not that merfolk were much better.

  He waded out, saltwater stinging the cut on his foot. “Please,” he called, “people of the sea. Um, we know you’re there. Please help us.”

  “Hey,” Laurie said, pointing. “Look there.”

  On a rock outcropping with waves breaking over it, dark shapes slid into the water.

  “What?” Cindy asked, but they ignored her, watching as things moved among the waves, things that might just have been the shock of white foam, a clump of seaweed, a piece of driftwood carried along by the current to crash against the shore.

  Then heads bobbed to the surface, dark shapes on the waves. Like a school of fish, they turned at once toward the shore. Their hair was long and dark with wetness. Their eyes were pale as the moon.

  “You called to us,” they said.

  “We need your help,” Nick said.

  “Land and sea are no allies. You steal from us. You upset the balance. We would steal from you in return.”

  Nick tried to understand their words, to pick apart the strange music of their voices. They didn’t sing, like Taloa, but the chorus of their voices sounded like song. “If you could just sing, really sing, you could lead giants to the water.”

  “You called to us .”

  “Why would we do that, dry dweller?”

  “They’re burning the land.” Nick hesitated. “They can’t burn the ocean.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Cindy asked. Her voice sounded too high, scared.

  “Take her hand,” Laurie told Jules.

  Nick looked back and saw his brother slide his hand into hers. She gasped, looking out at the waves, and jerked her fingers out of his grip. A moment later she hesitantly took his hand again.

  “You’re doing great,” Jules called to him. “Keep talking.”

  “We care nothing for your burning land. It must die
to be reborn. It must be washed clean with fire. That is how it is and how it must be.”

  “Can we give you something back?” Laurie called. “Something we’ve stolen? Would that make you help us?”

  Nick thought of a program he’d seen on sharks and how their fins were being turned into soup and how dolphins were getting tangled in the plastic netting that holds soda cans together. He wasn’t sure they could give anything back that the mermaids might want.

  “Give us something new,” they said. “Bring us a new fish. A fish that has never swum in our sea, a new fish for all of what you have taken.”

  “But we can’t create a new fish!” Nick said.

  The merfolk swam closer, surrounding Nick. He looked back at the shore again and Jules dropped Cindy’s hand. He dropped his keys in the sand and started running toward the sea.

  “Wait,” Laurie called to Jules, but he wasn’t paying attention. She followed him to the edge of the waves and spoke to the merfolk instead. “So if we bring you a fish that you’ve never seen, one that’s never been in your sea, you’ll sing for us?”

  “Yes,” they said as one.

  Jules waded out toward Nick, but a few merfolk swam between the two of them.

  Nick swallowed hard. “What if we can’t?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

  He expected wet hands to close on his arms, but it was Jules they grabbed. Three mermaids fastened their long fingers on his legs and unbalanced him. He fell into the waves and disappeared below them.

  “We will take this one. Our theft from the land. Bring us a new fish by dawn or forfeit him forever to the sea.

  “And burn,” they said, and turned as one to splash deep into the sea.

  They sat in the car with the windows rolled up and the doors locked, Cindy in the driver’s seat, clutching the key ring. “Did I really see that?” she kept repeating. And then, “I really saw that.”

  “We have until dawn,” said Laurie. Beside her, even Sandspur was still and grave.