Ben backed away.
He could still feel magic in the air, like some hand, powerful and heavy, ready to crush him.
Bushmaster must have felt it too, because the vole peered into the air above them, and then raced over to the dying sorcerer and plunged his own spear in, for good measure.
“Aaaaaaaaagh!” Amber shrieked, from deep inside the burrow.
“Amber?” Ben shouted.
* * *
Amber had felt the death of the wizard weasel. She’d felt his powerful grip release.
But just as suddenly, a second force attacked, far more brutal than anything that the weasel had mustered.
Behind her, there was a sound of rending stone and cracking rocks. Boulders and dirt slid aside, and Amber whirled, grasping for her spear, just in time to see a massive purple worm slithering out of an enormous hole.
He was like no worm she had ever seen. His skin was filled with horrible veins. He was larger than the biggest python she’d ever seen in the pet shop, and he seemed to her to pulse with evil.
Immediately she recognized him. It was the Wizard of Ooze!
Bursting into Amber’s burrow, the great worm shoved aside the rocks and soil. Immediately he began to sing: “Moonlight shines—”
But Amber recalled Lady Blackpool’s advice: don’t let that worm open his mouth.
“Oh, shut up!” Amber shouted in outrage. She hurled a spell before the vile worm could get started. She swatted her paw toward the great worm, and suddenly he rose above her, writhing helplessly.
His mouth was gone!
The worm squirmed, slamming his head against the side of the burrow.
Amber stared at him in surprise.
This attack by the weasels—it was just a distraction! she realized. The worm was trying to divert my attention.
Now that she had the advantage, Amber pressed it. She waved her paw as if hurling something, and giant thorns suddenly appeared in the air, flying like spears, lancing into the worm’s tender flesh.
The great worm floundered about uselessly, and Amber tried to think of some really horrific spell, some way to finally kill the worm before he had time to gather his wits and cast some spell of his own.
But at that instant there came a whooshing sound, and the huge worm lunged back into his hole. Amid squishy noises, the great worm vanished deep into his wormhole with astonishing speed. Air came rushing past Amber and went screaming down the wormhole.
Ben and Bushmaster bounded down into the tunnel and stared in awe at the massive wormhole.
The mouth of the hole was much taller than a mouse, and the sides of it were as smooth as if it had been drilled in metal. The wormhole ran almost level for as far as Amber could see. All around the sides, slime dripped and puddled.
“It’s like a tunnel straight to H-E-double-toothpicks,” Ben said, peering down the dark tube.
“It’s a magic hole—” Thorn said, crawling to his feet, “a hole that could only be dug by a very powerful sorcerer. Look—it goes on forever.”
Ben peered in. He couldn’t see its end. He picked up Amber’s magic clover and used its light to peer down the tunnel, afraid that he’d see the huge worm lying in wait. The tunnel seemed to go on for miles.
“Ben,” Amber cried. “Your leg!”
Ben looked down at his leg. He was bleeding profusely. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just a flesh wound.”
But Amber would have none of that. She rushed forward and cast a spell. Almost immediately, the wound closed and the blood stopped flowing. All that Ben had to show for it was a really nifty scar.
Thorn came and took the light, then peered down the wormhole.
“He’s gone,” Thorn said. “He was frightened. I could hear it in his thoughts. Amber surprised him. But he’s also angry. He’ll be waiting for us.”
Thorn sat down at the mouth of the tunnel, looking exhausted.
“You heard his thoughts?” Amber asked. “You really can do that?”
“It’s not so hard if you listen with your heart,” Thorn said.
“It’s a side effect,” Ben chimed in, “from when you made Thorn smarter than Einstein.”
“So,” Amber said slowly, trying to take it all in, “the Wizard of Ooze is gone?”
Thorn nodded. “He used a magic spell to get here, a very powerful magic spell that bored through rock and sand, one that must have hurtled him here at thousands of miles per hour. It was much like a wormhole in space—burrowing through time and various realities. It weakened the wizard to create such a thing. But he wasn’t worried. He has vast stores of power he’s been saving up for a century.”
Thorn fell silent for a moment. “He uses words to cast his spells, to focus them. So when he found us alive, he tried to use his song.”
“That didn’t work,” Amber said. “Lady Blackpool warned me not to listen to that.”
“We must press the attack. Now!” Thorn said, his voice rising with a sense of urgency.
“Why now?” Bushmaster asked.
“As soon as the worm gets his wits back,” Thorn explained, “he’ll make a new mouth for himself. And he’ll begin plotting revenge . . .”
Thorn paced across the room, paws clasped behind his back, head bent in thought. “He’s a powerful sorcerer. But not all of his power is his own. I could feel that in his thoughts. He was wearing the magic ring on his tail, the ring that gives him control over mice.”
Amber and Bushmaster peered at Thorn with worry showing on their brows. Thorn paced back and forth across the room, considering what to do. “This worm will use the ring to seize control of the entire world—unless we stop him . . .”
“Stop him?” Amber asked. “How?”
Thorn looked angrily toward the vast wormhole. Outside, the wind still howled, and faintly, in the distance, he imagined he could hear wormsong blowing in that wind. “We must take the ring from him and destroy it.”
* * *
Grinning wickedly, General Crawley followed the little army of mice through the woods. They had surrendered easily, just as he’d imagined that a bunch of dumb mice would.
Pea-brained vermin, he thought.
He reached into his pocket; his hand wrapped around the comforting form of a canister of nerve gas. As soon as he found the mice’s home base, he was going to drop it down the hole, give them a little taste of a weapon of mass destruction.
This will teach them to toy with the Big APE!
General Crawley would hardly dare to admit it to himself, but he was afraid of these mice. There was something unnerving about them, marching around in their little helmets and carrying their needle spears.
He glanced up in the fir trees above, imagining tiny mouse commandos parachuting down from the maples with whirligigs strapped to their backs and axes made out of razor blades in their paws. Or maybe down under the toadstools there might be mouse archers with tiny crossbows that could shoot a man right in the eye with a poisoned needle.
Just then the mice stopped beneath a pair of huge fir trees. Their leader, a bright-eyed youngster, peered up at him, as if begging permission to enter the hole. There were dozens of little mouse holes beneath the pine needles.
“Go on ahead, you little screwball rodent,” General Crawley said. “Go wake up your master. I’m just aching to cure him of his delusions of military superiority.”
Meadowsweet dived into the hole, followed by several mice.
General Crawley drew the poisonous gas canister from his pocket. His Special Forces troops saw what he was about to do, and they backed away.
Crawley pulled the pin on the gas canister and rammed it into the mouse hole. In sixty seconds it would explode, sending nerve gas in every direction.
Three seconds after that, every tree and animal within a hundred yards would be dead.
Chapter 18
THE TALE OF THE GERM MEN
I’d much rather marry a she-toad who is covered in warts
than one who is filled with se
lf-pity.
After all, those warts might cover a good heart.
But self-pity can lead folks to do all kinds of evil.
—RUFUS FLYCATCHER
“Balloons. That’s what they were after.”
“Oooooooooohhhhh!” Sebaceous Ooze wailed, his muffled voice roiling through the darkened halls of his underworld kingdom. He could hardly speak. It sounded as if he had a pillow in his mouth. “Wo-ooooooh!”
All about him, his minions quailed. Slobber goblins covered their ears to keep out the piteous moaning, while snot spiders and growling goos oozed for cover.
“Father, what’s wrong?” Fluke Gutcrawler begged to know.
Sebaceous Ooze whirled away, as if the sound of coherent words was too much for him to bear.
“Please, Father, just tell me!” Fluke begged. He really was worried to see his father in such a state of despair.
Sebaceous Ooze lunged toward him, and Fluke froze with terror as he saw his father’s face.
His father had no mouth!
Skin and flesh had grown over the orifice, and now Sebaceous Ooze tried to peel the flesh of his face back, struggling to open a new hole.
“Haaalp!” he cried out, his words all fuzzy, as if he spoke through a mouthful of sausage. “I have no mouth, and I must scream!”
Fluke Gutcrawler paled in horror.
“What can I do?” he begged.
“Use your powers, Fluke,” Sebaceous cried, the skin over his mouth vibrating like a drumhead. Fluke strained to make sense of the muffled words. “Make me a new mouth.”
“But I don’t know how to use my powers,” Fluke apologized. “I don’t know if I even have any powers.”
“Concentrate,” Sebaceous roared, and Fluke did. He bent his small mind to the task, imagining a mouth on his father’s face. He pictured it as a simple line at first, a caricature of a mouth, and then he “pushed” with his will.
There was a ripping sound, and blood flowed. The flesh peeled back on his father’s face, revealing a squiggly mouth that looked as if a small child had drawn it.
“There,” Fluke said. “Is that good enough?”
“For now it will have to be,” Sebaceous Ooze said, working his malformed lips in disgust.
“I really don’t know how to use my powers.”
“That’s because you’ve just grown a new head,” Sebaceous Ooze explained. “A week ago you were all intestines and heart, but the brain was last to mature. That’s why your head feels all strange and tingly, just as my fresh new tail is numb and tingly.”
Fluke’s mind seemed to explode. This was all a revelation to him. It seemed that for the past few days, he had been living through some crazed dream, seeing things but not understanding, feeling things but not knowing. Now it all made sense.
I’ve just grown a new brain, he thought. Of course, I was just half a worm, a tail with a few beating hearts, surviving as a new head grew. But now I’m mature, a new worm, whole and powerful!
Sebaceous Ooze peered at the walls of his cave penetratingly, as if he were thinking about how to redecorate. Fluke could just imagine his thoughts. “Well, I could move that big stalactite from here to there, and then paint it white with slime mold . . .”
Suddenly Sebaceous whirled and peered at Fluke. “It’s time for you to join me, my son. I propose that we test your powers. There are some mice coming, mice filled with terrible purpose. I want to give you your first taste of a real battle. I want you to help defeat them.”
“But I don’t have any powers, Father,” Fluke said. But then he recalled how he had just made a new mouth for his father.
“Of course you have powers,” Sebaceous growled. “I gave them to you. When I cut myself in half, I gave you a share of my greatness. There is magic within you—half of all the power that I had!”
“Cool!” Fluke said.
“Now, you must use it to destroy these mice. You must follow in my footsteps, and help me dominate the world.”
Fluke peered at his father, and wondered aloud, “You know, Dad—I can call you ‘Dad,’ can’t I?”
Sebaceous Ooze glared at him menacingly and said in a slow and suspicious tone, “Yes?”
“I’m not really much interested in dominating anything. Maybe it’s because I came from your tail, but I feel like I’m more of a follower than a leader.”
Sebaceous growled and thrashed his head, doing his best to subdue his rage. “You don’t want to dominate the world? What kind of worm are you?”
“A Wyoming thunder worm?” Fluke replied, not quite certain.
“And what do Wyoming thunder worms do?”
Fluke tried to remember. As if in a dream, he heard his father talking. “We slither across the plains all day, in herds of tens of thousands, and the sound of our approach is like the sound of a rising thunder?”
“And what do we eat?”
“Buffalo?” Fluke asked. Also a dim memory.
“And what else?”
“Uh, er, uh, any dingbat animal that’s stupid enough to get in our way?”
“That’s right,” Sebaceous said, trying to sound calm. “And now, you’re going to do what you’re told, and help me take over the world, or I’ll shove your head into a volcano until your brains boil!”
“But, Father,” Fluke begged, “if Wyoming thunder worms are so fearsome, where have they all gone? Why aren’t there more of us? Were they eaten by early birds?”
Sebaceous lowered his head in sadness. “Germ men,” he said, shuddering at some suppressed memory.
“Germs?” Fluke said. “We were killed by a plague?”
“Not germs. Germ men,” Sebaceous corrected. “From Germany. They came from Germany, the butchers.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Butchers!” Sebaceous roared, as if the terrible secret had been torn from him. “German butchers. They captured our people and used them as sausage casings!”
“I don’t understand!”
“The German butchers came,” Sebaceous roared, “and hunted us down. They found that giant worms made perfect sausage casings. They would grab a worm, stuff sausage down its gullet, hang it in a smokehouse for a couple of days, and presto—you have a nice salami, or maybe a Polska kielbasa. My father, my very own father, was torn from me and turned into nothing but a frankfurter, a snack for Oktoberfest!”
No wonder Dad’s such a whack job, Fluke thought.
“So,” Fluke said, trying to think of how to calm his sobbing father. “How does all of this make you feel?”
His father fell on the ground and just lay there like a spaghetti noodle and began to sob.
After Sebaceous had a good cry, Fluke ventured, “Isn’t there anything that you could have done . . . perhaps fight?”
“We tried,” Sebaceous said. “Oh what a battle we waged! But then the Germ men brought in reinforcements—clowns. When we saw them, at first we weren’t afraid. They came marching across the tundra wearing bright clothes, with enormous floppy shoes, flattening the sagebrush. They had smiles painted on their faces to hide their evil intent. And the sunlight shining on their frizzy orange hair made it look as if their heads were on fire.”
“Were the clowns sausage makers too?”
“No,” Sebaceous said, searching his memories. “Balloons. That’s what they were after. This was in the days before rubber and plastics were invented. Back then, clowns hunted giant worms. The elastic nature of our skin makes us perfect candidates to be turned into balloons. They would grab a worm, tie off its tail, blow air down its throat until it puffed up, and then tie it all off.”
“What would they do with the balloon then?” Fluke wondered aloud, horrified.
“Pop it,” Sebaceous said, “just to hear the bang. Or sometimes, they’d twist the poor worm into hideous shapes and give it to a child. My mother was thus given the form of a poodle.”
“Wow,” Fluke said, feeling sorry for Sebaceous. “No wonder you’re such a psychopath. You really need to get b
ack in touch with your inner grub . . .” But a sudden realization struck Fluke, and he whirled on his father. “You—you’re a coward!” he said. “You hid underground while your mother and father—your family—were turned into sausages and balloon animals. You’re the last of your kind because you’re the most craven!”
“I stayed hidden so that we might rise again!” Sebaceous cried. “I knew that the cruel Germ men would leave, taking their ragtag clowns with them. Someone had to survive. Someone had to make sure that the thunder worms would rise again!”
Fluke shook his head. He wasn’t sure. It seemed to him that his father was a coward. He was down here hiding half a mile underground when he should be soaking up the morning sun.
And now it was Fluke Gutcrawler who was choking on volcanic ash when he should have been drinking the morning dew. He was eating poor defenseless mice when he should have been out stalking buffalo.
“Will you join me, son?” Sebaceous Ooze said. “These mice will come thinking to do battle with one evil sorcerer. Won’t they be surprised when they find two?”
Fluke Gutcrawler had never wanted to be an evil global dictator. He’d never wanted to follow in the slime trail of his father.
“Imagine it,” Sebaceous whispered insidiously. “Sitting upon a mountain throne, the whole world bowing before you, calling your name: ‘Fluke. Fluke. Fluke.’” Sebaceous made a hissing sound, like a crowd of thousands cheering in the distance.
Fluke suddenly had a vision of himself, high upon a mountain throne, with millions of his own sons and daughters bowing down to worship him.
I’ll be loved by millions! Fluke thought. He smiled evilly. “As you wish, my father.”
Sebaceous Ooze grinned. “Now we must prepare for battle. We’ll arm our slobber goblins and prepare an ambush. Unless I miss my guess, our mice will be here soon. We must be ready for them. It’s slime time!”
Chapter 19
PREPARING FOR WAR
By proper preparation, a wise leader
wins the battle before he ever takes the field.
The Wizard of Ooze Page 11
