Not to mention the fact that it could be hours before either of them came home. And during that time, the trolls and fairies could be doing God knows what to Beth on the other side of the fairy ring. They had to get her out now. There really was no choice.
He reached up, pulled the iron down off the shelf, and looked at Dill resolutely.
“No. We’re going back out.”
Dill pointed at the iron. “We don’t know if that thing’s gonna work.”
“The book said – ”
“The book said inside-out clothes were gonna scare it, too. Which they didn’t. Only my underwear saved the day, which certain people said was a bad idea.”
“And it WAS,” Peter shot back. He hefted the iron up in the air, and swung it like a weapon. It was quite heavy. “If it doesn’t like irons, we can still use it to clobber it over the head. That’ll knock it out, and we can go take it to fairy land and get Beth back.”
Dill held up the iron’s electrical cord. “Should we get it hot first?”
Peter raised his eyebrows. “Good idea.”
There was an outlet on the wall right next to the door. Peter plugged it in and sat it upright on the ground to wait.
The two of them discussed options for a couple of minutes, such as using the egg beater as a weapon, or maybe the ironing board, which stood folded up against the wall. Eventually they abandoned those ideas. The book said fairies hated irons; it said nothing about egg beaters or ironing boards.
“How do we know it’s ready?” Peter asked.
“Hold it up,” Dill advised him. Peter did, and Dill spit a tiny ptt of saliva out of his pursed lips.
Peter made a face. “EW!” Then he saw the spit sizzle, pop, and disappear from the iron’s surface. “Oooooh.”
Dill nodded wisely. “It’s ready.”
16
The second attack on the troll baby didn’t go so well, either.
Peter unplugged the iron. He waited until the troll baby sounded like it was far enough away from the laundry room, then burst through the door with the iron held out in front of him.
At first the changeling wheeled around, a look of fury on its face. Then utter bewilderment took over. Its mouth closed, its eyes bugged out even more, and its eyebrows (actually, the empty brow where its eyebrows were supposed to be) shot up on the green forehead.
Peter laughed. “It doesn’t like it!”
“Come on, punk,” Dill sneered at the changeling in the voice of an action-movie star. “It’s laundry day!”
“Huh?” Peter asked.
Dill changed the line. “It’s ironin’ day!”
“That’s stupid.”
“I don’t see you saying anything cool. ‘It doesn’t like it!’” he mimicked Peter in a high-pitched, girly voice.
“Shut up! I don’t – ”
“It’s moving!” Dill squealed. “Iron it, iron it!”
The changeling was on the move. It had crouched down on all fours and was now circling them slowly, teeth bared. A low rrrrrrrrrrrr rumbled from its throat.
Peter turned around slowly, keeping the iron between him and the changeling at all times. Dill followed his lead, keeping Peter and the iron between him and the changeling.
Peter accidentally stepped on the loosely trailing power cord, and tried to kick it away.
“What’re you waiting for?” Dill yelled.
“What’m I supposed to do?” Peter yelled back.
“Steam it, fold it, press it, I don’t know!”
Peter thrust the iron out a few inches. The changeling immediately scampered back a foot, then resumed its slow circling.
“YES!” Dill cried. “I’m gonna get ALLLL the wrinkles out of your face, Butt-Ugly!”
Peter lunged out again, but further this time. The changeling backed up quickly, never taking its eyes off the iron.
Dill cackled like a maniac. “HA HAAAA! I’m takin’ you to the cleaners, troll baby! I’m gonna – ”
The changeling suddenly darted forward, its teeth snapping midair. Peter and Dill both jumped back in panic.
“CRAP!” Dill shouted and whined all at the same time.
“Dill, you’re not helping!”
“Well you’re not either!”
“You’re welcome to take the iron and get up here instead!”
“Uh, no, that’s okay, you’re doing a great job.”
Suddenly the changeling bolted forward – though not at Peter or Dill. Instead, it aimed several feet to their right. Peter jerked back and watched, puzzled, as the changeling zoomed past. He realized too late what the little monster was aiming for: the iron’s electrical cord, which Peter had kicked off to the side.
The changeling snagged the cord in its jaws mid-stride and never slowed down. With a powerful yank, the iron jerked out of Peter’s hands and sailed through the air. It CLANGED on the floor, leaving a huge dent in the linoleum, then bumped and bounced crazily as the changeling ran out of the kitchen, pulling the iron behind it like a Chihuahua dragging a pull toy.
“You were doing a great job,” Dill amended.
They could hear the iron clanking and thumping around the house…and then nothing. Then came the skittering of tiny claws on hardwood floor.
“Uh oh,” Dill said.
“Back to the laundry room!” Peter shouted as the changeling roared around the corner on all fours, its face livid and eyes bulging out as much as ever.
Once more they just barely got the laundry room door shut in time.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
This time, it took more than a minute for the changeling to stop head-butting the door. Every twenty seconds or so, it would return for another BOOM! and then walk away again, muttering under its breath in troll babble.
“Do you think that gives it a headache?” Dill asked.
Peter sank down against the washing machine and put his face in his hands. “What are we going to do now?”
“Dude – the window.”
“We have to trap it, Dill!”
“The eggbeater?”
“No,” Peter moaned.
Dill placed one finger against his lips and frowned for a few seconds. Then he brightened up considerably.
“Okay…first we open the dryer door.”
Peter turned to look at the circular door on the machine next to him. Unlike the washer, which loaded from the top of the machine, the door was on the front side of the clothes dryer.
“Then you open the laundry room door,” Dill continued. “The troll baby’ll come running and jump at you. You duck, and it’ll fly through the air right into the dryer. I’ll be on top of it and slam the door shut, and BAM! Put a fork in it!” Dill punched the air in excitement. “We can even turn the dryer on if you want to! Yeaaaaah.”
Peter stood up, a light in his eyes and the gears turning in his brain. He opened the dryer door. A bunch of bedsheets and pillowcases were still inside, forgotten and unfolded.
He looked from the laundry room door to the dryer, then back to the wooden door. The light in his eyes died.
“It won’t work,” he said glumly.
Dill was outraged. “What?! Why not?!”
“The dryer’s not in a straight line with the door. If the changeling doesn’t jump from exactly the right place, it’s not gonna go in the dryer. Even if it does jump exactly right, the dryer hole is really small – it might not go in.”
“If, if, if. All I hear are ‘ifs.’ What about a good old-fashioned ‘We can do it, Dill, cuz you’re the smartest dude ever and that’s the best idea IN THE WORLD’?”
“What happens if I don’t duck in time?”
“Well, just make sure that you do.”
“Well, what happens if I do, but the changeling jumps too high? Then it’s gonna land on top of you on the dryer.”
Dill paused and thought about that. “Okay, new plan.”
“It was a good idea, though,” Peter reassured him. “If we just had a big enough hole for it to ju
mp into, and we were sure we could get it to jump straight in…”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Dill grumbled.
Peter’s eyes lit up again. He looked down at the dryer door, then searched the metal shelves lining the wall.
“Dill, I got it.”
“What,” Dill muttered.
“We’re going out the window.”
“THAT’S MY IDEA!” Dill sputtered.
“And it’s the best idea ever.” Peter started rummaging through the sheets in the dryer, looking for something.
Dill was slightly taken back. “Uh…I know. Thanks.”
Peter pulled a pillowcase out of the machine and held it up for inspection.
“Uh…are we going?” Dill asked.
“Get up on top of the washer and open the window. And see if you can get the ironing board outside.”
“Huh? Why?”
“You’ll see.” Peter placed the pillowcase on top of the dryer and turned to the metal shelves against the wall.
“What are you doing?”
Peter grinned over his shoulder. “Just taking a few things with us.”
Dill scrambled up on top of the dryer. “If we leave, how’re we going to catch the troll baby?”
“Simple. I’m coming back in.”
“WHAT?”
“But first,” Peter said cryptically, “we’ve got to get the hole ready for the troll baby to jump through…”
17
Twenty minutes later, Peter opened the kitchen screen door as slowly as he could. No matter how carefully he tried, though, it still made a long, low squeeeeeeaaaaak. He looked through the panes of glass in the wooden back door but couldn’t see the troll baby at all. Hopefully it had moved on to another part of the house. But he was still planning to look directly overhead before he opened the door all the way.
Fool me once, shame on you, troll baby. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Peter chuckled to himself. Not because he found the thought particularly funny, but because he was trying to ignore his heart hammering in his chest.
The screen was still shredded from where Mercy had tried to rip her way through it just a couple of weeks before. Grandfather hadn’t gotten around to replacing the wire mesh yet.
Last time I went through this door to get away from somebody trying to kill me; this time I’m walking through it to get to somebody trying to kill me.
Peter didn’t chuckle at that thought.
He opened the wooden kitchen door, making sure to look through the crack overhead for any signs of a green troll in a pink rainbow shirt. Once the door was open all the way, he looked behind the door, too, and everywhere else he could think of. Nothing.
Pausing for a second, he cocked one ear towards the kitchen and listened. No skittering of toenails, no troll baby muttering, no raspy breathing.
He walked slowly into the middle of the kitchen, his gaze flitting around as quickly as he could move his eyes.
No changeling.
Peter picked a spot in the middle of the kitchen where he could see both the doorway to the den and, on the other side of the room, the hall that led to Grandfather’s study.
Do I really want to do this?
No.
But I have to.
For Beth.
He took a deep breath and screamed as loud as he could, “HEY, SNOTBALL, I’M IN THE KITCHEN!”
From somewhere in the den he heard a quizzical grunt, “Gurn?” followed by the puppy-dog clacking of toenails on a hard surface. Within seconds, the changeling barreled over the top of the doorway, still on all fours and upside-down on the ceiling. Slobber dripped from its bared teeth and splattered on the floor below. Its eyes glowed with a ferocious hatred as it headed straight for Peter, who took off in the opposite direction.
Peter pumped his legs as fast as he could move them. He could hear the troll baby behind him as he rounded the corner into the hallway. There was the study, coming up fast on his left.
He blew past it and headed for the dining room.
Behind him, he could hear the chk-chk-chk of the changeling’s nails on the ceiling. He couldn’t tell exactly where it was – whether a few feet behind him, or a dozen – and he couldn’t look over his shoulder, not even for an instant. If he did, and stumbled and fell, or if he lost even a second to his pursuer…
Peter pushed the thought out of his mind as he ran through the cavernous dining room and headed for the main hall of the house.
There was a loud THUMP behind him, and suddenly the nails were scratching CRK-CRK-CRK along the hardwood floor instead of the ceiling. The changeling had decided to continue the chase right-side up, and from the sound of things, it was maybe ten feet behind him, if that.
Crap – it might not be enough…
Peter sped out of the dining room and into the main foyer. He ran to the front door and opened it a couple of inches. For the first time, he allowed himself to look back.
The changeling was hurtling around the corner of the dining room and into the hall, twelve feet away.
Peter stood there, doorknob in hand, frozen to the spot.
The changeling locked eyes with him. Without breaking stride, it catapulted into the air, straight for Peter’s head.
With every bit of speed he could summon, Peter flung open the front door and dove to the ground.
18
The changeling sailed right by his face – in fact, he could feel the breeze as the green claws swept past his hair. But missed him it did, and instead sailed right into the web of Scotch tape that crisscrossed the entire front doorframe.
Back in kindergarten, Peter’s Physical Education class used to play ‘Popcorn.’ The PE teacher had an old parachute, one she said that soldiers had had used in World War II when they jumped out of planes. All the kids would take a handful of the silk material and stand in a circle, then whip the cloth in a frenzy as the PE teacher threw dodgeballs in the center. The balls would shoot up in the air like popcorn kernels, fall back down, hit the billowing cloth, then shoot back up again.
Peter had always wondered what would happen if the class had held the outstretched parachute over an empty swimming pool and a kid had jumped off the high dive. When he and Dill were standing on the ironing board attaching the strips of Scotch tape across the doorway, each strip an inch apart in a tightly woven pattern that looked like a giant tennis racket, the question came back into his mind: what would happen?
He figured it would probably look something like what happened to the troll baby.
The changeling smacked right into the scotch tape and kept on going. There was no way the tape was strong enough to hold to the doorframe like a spider’s web – the troll baby was too heavy and going far too fast – but Peter was counting on that. Instead, the tape grid ripped off the doorway and closed around the troll like a butterfly net, and immediately stuck to itself. The changeling went flying through the air encased in a sticky, scotch tape cocoon.
Then it hit the brick steps outside and bounced. “AAG! EEG! OOG!” it screeched every time it smacked into a new step. By the time it hit the lawn in front of the porch, it was a helpless jumble of balled-up scotch tape rolling around in the grass.
But Peter knew it wouldn’t stay that way for long. Already the changeling was gnashing its teeth and trying to break free of its plastic bindings.
“Dill, the pillowcase!” he yelled as he raced out the front door and down the steps.
Dill darted out of the bushes and whipped the pillowcase around the taped-up ball. “Got it!”
Peter looked over at Dill’s house. None of the Bodinskis were outside, and since Grandfather lived on an otherwise deserted side street, that meant no one had seen anything.
Peter grabbed one edge of the pillowcase from Dill. “Come on!” he shouted. “We can’t let your family see!”
“My family’s seen weirder things!” Dill yelled back.
“What, weirder than us dragging a screaming troll baby around in a pillowcase?”
“I’ll just tell them it was your sister – they’ll completely understand!”
19
Both boys ran as fast as they could, dragging the snarling load behind them. They sped around the front of Grandfather’s house, down the side past the garbage cans, and into the backyard towards the rosebushes.
Peter could hear the changeling’s enraged screeches and the sound of plastic popping inside the pillowcase. It was just a gamble now if they could reach the mushrooms in time.
They sped past the roses and angled away from the garden patch, towards the stretch of open field where this nightmare had begun only two hours before. The pillowcase slid and bumped along the grass behind them.
Peter heard the sound of fabric ripping. He looked down and saw four tiny, clawed fingers shredding the cloth.
“HURRY!”
“I’M HURRYING!” Dill shrieked.
They mowed over at least a hundred mushrooms as they frantically searched for the fairy ring where Beth had disappeared.
“IS THAT – CAREFUL!” Peter warned.
“I AM, I AM!”
Then he saw it, plain as day: a perfect circle of brown toadstools, six feet ahead.
“STOP!” Peter cried.
Dill dropped the twitching pillowcase without being told twice. The cloth bag was thrashing and rolling every which way like some horrible cocoon about to produce the world’s most terrifying butterfly.
Dill eyed the fairy ring. “Dude, we don’t have to go in there, do we?!”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” Peter said frantically. Tiny green hands were tearing the pillowcase to shreds; in a matter of seconds, the changeling would be out. If it didn’t kill him and Dill on the spot, it might just jump in the fairy circle and go back to its own world. The idea of following it to a land of a thousand troll babies was about the worst thing Peter could imagine.
“Wait – dude, Beth’s a hostage, right? We’ve got a hostage, too!”
Peter eyed the snarling pillowcase. “You call that a hostage?”
Dill jerked his thumb at the fairy ring and whispered, “They don’t know that.”
As Dill’s meaning dawned on Peter, he smiled – Ahhhhh! – then just as quickly frowned again. “So?”
Peter And The Changeling (Story #3) Page 5
