Dale E. Basye shook his head with rumpled wonderment.
“Wow … that’s incredible,” he said. “How did you develop this skill? It’s like bottled beans. Uncanny.”
Miss Parker elbowed Dale E. Basye, hard, with an elbow as sharp as her tongue.
“It’s kind of like dyslexia, I guess,” Annabelle replied, wiping beads of sweat away from her permanently sweaty upper lip. “Only I can control it.”
“Shhhh,” Marlo hissed. “I hear something. Over there …”
Marlo and Annabelle crept by the wall. Marlo could hear a steady “wow” noise that grew louder and louder.
Dale E. Basye covered his ears. “That din … it’s almost unbearable,” he grumbled.
“Wow … din … window,” Annabelle muttered.
Annabelle tried to grip the wall and open the window, but nothing would budge. A small cat floated in the air next to the source of the noise, clutched by invisible hands.
“Cat … held … latched. Darn …”
Hadley stepped in front of the sofa/oafs and onto a plush throw rug.
“Ooh,” she purred as her fingers stroked the cashmere pilings. “This is so cozy … I just want to curl up and—”
The small, shaggy blond girl began to grow in fitful spurts.
“Die!” Hadley screamed. “I’m dying!”
Annabelle squinted at the once-scrawny little girl as she shook her blond hair back and forth in agony.
“You’re not dying,” Annabelle muttered. “You’re growing. And it hurts.…”
Hadley was soon the size of a baby elephant.
“Grow … hurt,” Annabelle pondered. “Throw rug! That’s it! Get off the rug!”
Hadley heaved herself off the decorative carpet. The pale, quivering girl instantly began to shrink down from a size 57 back to her usual barely size 1 proportions.
Bree Martinet studied something puzzling by the wall opposite where the door had once been.
“Hey, what’s this?” she asked as she poked at seven strips of fabric hanging from the wall.
Annabelle chewed the words over in her mind. Marlo stepped toward Bree, cautioning the pouty, longhaired girl.
“You’d better stay away from them until Annabelle can—”
“Why?” Bree asked, before suddenly—
The Bree-shaped pile of words fluttered onto the floor. Miss Parker stifled a gasp.
Annabelle sighed as she stared at the seven drab strips.
“Seven strips … Vipers’ nests …,” she whispered sadly.
“Then there’s stuff here much more dangerous than furniture, apparently,” Marlo said, her voice shaky as she watched what was once Bree Martinet fluttering on the floor.
Suddenly, across the Anagram Hut, a can of soda pop, surrounded by bits of assorted snacks, appeared. The can floated closer and closer to the children. A number was written along the side of the can: 3.14159.
“Hmm … this one is tough,” Annabelle muttered, biting her lip. “Cola … food … and a long number …”
“The number,” Dale E. Basye offered. “It’s pi.”
“As in chocolate cream?” Marlo asked.
“As in the numerical value of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter,” Dale E. Basye clarified.
“Oh … right,” Marlo replied. “That’s what I meant. I mean, a chocolate cream pie is shaped like a circle.”
Annabelle shushed them so she could concentrate. You could practically hear the letters shuffling in her head as the can came at them, faster and faster.
“Okay … then that means, cola … food … pi … um …”
Mack Hoover pushed past her. “This is stupid,” he said irritably. “It’s coming right for us! Maybe I can just smack it away—”
“Wait!” Annabelle cried out as Mack swatted at the can.
“It burns!” Mack yelped.
“Your hand,” Miss Parker murmured.
“What was that?!” Mack Hoover gasped as he stared at the jumble of letters that was now his hand.
“Cola … food … pi … a pool of acid,” Annabelle explained. “Now, please, there’s not a lot of things that I’m good at, but I am good at this.…”
Marlo knelt down before a corncob, covered with worms that spelled out the word “mom.”
“What do you make of this, Graham the Word Cracker?” Marlo asked.
Annabelle looked over Marlo’s shoulder. “Cob … worms … wait: The worms have little hooks in them. So they’re bait. Cob, bait, mom …” Annabelle swallowed. “All right, guys, we’re in big trouble,” she said, slowly backing away from the corncob.
“Why?” Miss Parker asked with concern.
“I think Marlo is kneeling in front of an atomic bomb,” Annabelle squeaked.
Marlo turned, somehow even more deathly pale. She backed carefully away from the corncob.
“What do we do?” Flossie whined, hobbling to Marlo’s side on her good leg.
Marlo sniffed the air. Something odd tickled her nose. A rich aroma that her nostrils couldn’t quite place.
“There’s a strange smell here,” she said.
“There’s always a strange smell wherever you are,” Cookie retorted, hugging herself to keep from shaking apart.
“It’s not me. It’s not a stinky smell, so much as a—”
Marlo smiled. Her pleased grin looked like the sun rising over a craggy mountain peak.
“I got this!” she said, feeling in front of her. “You’re not the only wordsmith around here, Annabelle. It’s an odor. Otherwise known in the Anagram Hut as a—”
“Door!” Marlo and Annabelle exclaimed in delighted unison as Marlo pulled open the invisible door, exposing a portal leading back outside. The teachers and children raced outside before the odor dissipated, and their door closed forever.
“Great job, Annabelle!” Marlo said as the group followed a dusty path winding away from the Anagram Hut. The path was studded with hundreds of tiny tuning prongs and chirping brass crickets.
“Thanks,” Annabelle said shyly as they hiked up the ever-steepening path. “Everyone always told me I was crazy for the anagram thing.”
“Yeah,” Marlo replied. “Me too. Not for word stuff, but for most everything else …”
The dusty trail led up to a stone archway, a sort of long tunnel dug out of the stone.
Marlo stopped and squinted up at the archway. “Looks like the coast is—”
A deep roar, like a trio of howls twisted into a rope of sound, blasted through the archway.
“—totally the opposite of clear.”
A humongous reptile emerged from the curved stone passage above. The children screamed as the hideous lizard stretched open its jaws, revealing three rows of monstrous, misshapen teeth.
The enormous creature was like a dinosaur, only covered with thousands of flapping book pages for scales. Its terrible size and shape seemed in a constant state of flux, altering in subtle ways, making it hard to define. Its gnashing beak swapped various shades of red with its seething, pinwheel eyes. Its serpentlike neck twisted and curled, then contorted and coiled. Its cudgel-tipped tail thrashed at the ground before, a moment later, merely lashing at it. The beast’s talons were at one point keen and cruel, the next sharp and brutal: the same, only different.
“What is it?” Flossie croaked.
“It’s some kind of dinosaur,” Dale E. Basye managed once he regained control of his incapacitated tongue.
“No … not quite,” Roget murmured. The boy strode a few yards along the path, just before the trail began its precipitous climb up the rock face. The children were frozen behind him in utter horror. Something glinted just ahead. Roget bounded toward the object and plucked it from the ground. The blurry object—some kind of weapon—shape-shifted restlessly in the boy’s hands.
“I’ve got this one,” Roget said with quiet confidence. The children stared, dumbfounded, at the small boy with the shrewd, narrow face as he walked up to the morphing mo
nster.
Roget peered up at the beast and looked the savage creature straight in the …
“Eye, orb, peeper, optical organ,” the boy muttered.
Instantly, the creature’s face became more distinct, more defined.
Roget smiled, gripped the hilt of the blurry object in his hands, then—with a flourish—brandished his gleaming …
“Sword, saber, scimitar, blade …”
The weapon gained keen, deadly clarity in Roget’s hands. He stepped forward. Roget tromped along the trail leading up to the treacherous …
“Precipice, cliff, crag, rock face …,” Roget muttered, the ground becoming more solid beneath his feet with every step.
Soon, he found the—
“Den, lair, cave, burrow …”
—of the great beast.
Roget drew in a deep, steadying breath. Summoning every ounce of—
“Strength, might, muscle, vigor …”
—he could muster, Roget dug his feet into the ground, drew his arms back up over his head, and—
“Lobbed, threw, pitched, flung …”
—his mighty weapon into the air. It sailed forward with deadly speed and accuracy. It pierced the snarling creature’s—
“Chest, torso, breast, upper body …”
The beast thrashed, shifting shape after furious shape until, in an instant, the mighty—
“Thesaurus, lexicon, synonym finder, equivalence location tool …”
—was dead.
The once-fearsome beast fell from the top of the rocky escarpment and lay twitching in its final death throes several yards away from the children.
After a moment of stunned silence, Dale E. Basye shuddered. “A Thesaurus?” he muttered with disbelief.
Marlo snickered. “Wow, that thing is synonym toast,” she quipped. “Let’s hear it for Roget!”
The children and teachers gave the boy a stupefied round of applause. The surviving members of Team Two cautiously wended their way around the dead Thesaurus and trekked up the steep trail and through the musky archway. They emerged, greeted by a cacophonous symphony of burbling nonsense. Marlo clapped her ears as the sound rattled both her bones and her nerves.
“What’s that horrible sound?!” she complained. “And where’s it coming from?!”
From up ahead, Marlo could hear the familiar, nearly ceaseless and senseless commentary of Vice Principal Carroll, squawking through his loudspeaker.
“O frabjous day! Huzzah! Huzzear!
You’ve conquered every scrabble!
Yet, I fear, your coasts aren’t clear,
Near the Tower of Babble!”
26 · QUEASY AS A-B-C
MILTON AND HIS team milled outside of what looked like a giant concrete igloo, painted in faded, peeling red, blue, and yellow. It looked like it was built with massive blocks—twenty-six, by Milton’s count—with a long, horseshoe-shaped opening jutting out the front. Each of the cubes, like the alphabet blocks of a baby giant, had a single letter on it, barely legible, as if painted years ago and nearly wiped away by generations of strong wind, which didn’t make sense to Milton, as Vice Principal Carroll apparently had created all of this—this massive entrance exam to the War of the Words—in only the last few weeks.
Marlo and the straggling remains of Team Two joined the others outside of the building. Milton couldn’t help but smile when he saw his sister. He was filled with a cool gush of relief at the sight of her. Marlo grinned from ear to ear as she saw her brother, bedraggled yet not rendered a heap of flattened words. Wonderfully alive—well, intact at least—geeky, twerpy, and thoroughly Milton. The brother she couldn’t live without even if she tried.
Yet something kept their feet pinned to the cricket-infested shredded-paper ground.
Is she smiling because I’m okay and that she knows she can bully me in the debate? Milton thought, the slow insidious grip of paranoia seizing him around the brain stem. His smile faded until it was as vaporous and transient as a homeless ghost.
Was he smiling because he knows he’s super smart and good with wordy stuff and can beat me in the debate? Marlo thought as her grin snapped like a rubber band across the bottom of her face.
Seconds ago they had wanted to rush into each other’s arms. Now they were hip-deep in uncertainty.
“What would you have us do now, Team Captain?” Mr. Wilde asked.
“Snnnaaahhhhrrrrk!!”
Milton saw his sister trying not to look at him, but she was staring at him in that creepy way of hers out of the corner of her eye.
Milton sighed. “Well, the snark sounds like it’s on the prowl, and this place is crawling with wolf-beasts, so we’d probably better go inside this big Playskool igloo and just get it over with,” he said with frustration. He marched reluctantly toward the opening.
The teachers and children passed through the long archway and into the spacious, domed chamber. It was a sweltering, tomblike cave inside. Milton strained to see in the smoky darkness. His nostrils were assailed with the strong asphalt-and-motor-oil smell of hot tar. Milton heard an incessant bubbling, like someone had forgotten a swimming pool full of stew on a burner.
Spotlights streamed down from overhead, punching optic nerves like fists. Marlo’s eyes clenched closed in pain. It was like when her mom would rip down her triple-ply tinfoil blinds on Monday mornings, only magnified.
Each spotlight was trained upon a wide platter of stone, twenty-six of which were strung together over a gurgling pool of steaming tar in a sort of bridge. The stepping plates had a letter of the alphabet engraved upon them and were painted bright red. The bridge began with the letter “A” and ended with, unsurprisingly, the letter “Z.”
Vice Principal Carroll’s voice drifted into the building. Somehow he could comment on everything happening as it was happening.
“To survive the Abecedarium, you’ll be asked to use your cranium.
Tell a story with each letter—just one word, no less or better!
And in order alphabetical to avoid a nasty spectacle!”
A chorus of scrapes sliced through the gurgle of boiling tar. The entryway was now barricaded with thick candy-cane bars.
“Everything here is meant to push us along,” Milton said. “The longer we stay here, the more of us we lose.”
Milton could feel the heat of Dale E. Basye’s stare.
“Can I help you with something?” Milton asked.
The man eased out of his stupor.
“You must be … Milton Fauster,” he said softly.
“Yes, I am.”
Dale E. Basye swallowed. “Well, it’s nice to write you … I mean meet you … I think. I’m not really sure,” he said, his voice rolling slowly away like a pebble down a steep hill.
Milton looked at Marlo for guidance.
“It’s a long story …,” Marlo replied. “His story, apparently. I’ll tell you all about it later.…”
Marlo stopped abruptly, unsure whether there would even be a later, much less one shared between her and her brother.
“Aaaaarrrrrggghhhh!!”
A shriek exploded across the Abecedarium. It was snuffed out with blunt, horrific abruptness. Something fluttered to the ground along the murky edge of a spotlight. A tall, skinny stack of words beginning with the name “Concordia Kolassa.”
Cookie Youngblood screamed. Long spikes jabbed up randomly through the floor, with no rhyme yet deadly reason. One of the sharp, jutting spears pierced Flossie’s word-foot. She looked down and smirked.
“Guess there’s an advantage to having a short story for a leg,” the girl mumbled, brushing her orange hair out of her eyes as she frantically scanned the floor.
The long spikes thrust through the ground with haphazard savagery. Milton noticed that none of them seemed to puncture through the steps of the alphabet bridge.
“We’re supposed to get on the bridge,” Milton called out. “C’mon! Everybody, get on a letter. We have to write a twenty-six-word story or d
ie trying!”
“But there’s only twenty of us, idiot!” Moses spat back. “We can’t possibly—”
“Then some of us will have to double up!” Miss Parker shouted.
The children clambered onto the narrow bridge of lettered plates poised high above a pit of bubbling, searing-hot tar. Milton wheeled Moxie onto the bright red “A” just as a spear shot up through the ground and tore the cuff of his tweed pants.
The children and teachers scrambled to claim an empty platter. No one wanted to stand toward the end of the bridge, by X-Y-Z, so Milton edged his way along the row and occupied the red “X.” Marlo joined him, reluctantly, on the open “W” step.
After everyone was safely on the bridge, the chain of lettered plates clicked.
“What’s going—” Cookie gasped.
Each lettered plate began to tilt—click by click—with the intent of gradually tipping everyone into the gurgling tar below.
“It’s moving!” Winifred cried.
“We’re supposed to make a story,” Milton yelled, “or we’ll be hurled into the boiling tar!”
The children stared at Moxie, quivering on her dolly.
“Um …,” Mordacia Caustilo said from her “M” platter. “How is she—”
“A!” Moxie roared, her silver-sheathed tongue sticking out of her wide-open mouth.
“Bear!” Clem shouted.
“Came!” Moses exclaimed.
“Down!” Roberta yelled.
Lavena Duckworth opened her mouth, but—due to years of silent yet sassily expressive face-texting—no sound came out. The girl’s face muscles twitched spasmodically. Suddenly, the platter pitched her into the tar. The girl became nothing more than a Lavena-shaped collection of words the instant she struck the surface. The “E” platter clicked back into place as the entire bridge tilted forward.
Mr. Dickens straddled both the red “E” and “F” steps.
“Everest … From …,” he croaked.
“Great!” Flossie yelled, before straining to perform a straddle-split to reach the “H” platter. “Heights!”
“Indeed, Just!” Mr. Wilde exclaimed, the long-legged man occupying both red letters.
Wise Acres Page 19
