Every one was stunned into silence.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” said the Chief. “You have until tomorrow evening, at the Costume Cabaret.”
CHAPTER 18
In which Elliot tells his parents what he really thinks, and Jean-Remy starts a rumor
The next morning, Elliot awoke to the sound of his mother and father in the bathroom, getting ready for the day. It was Saturday, the day of the Costume Cabaret, and he lay alone in bed, feeling groggy and disoriented. After his parents had dragged him back to the hotel, he had hardly slept. He was too worried about his friends. In fact, he worried so much he had made himself sick. Before finally falling asleep, his head had throbbed, his stomach had churned, even his fingers and toes had tingled, especially the fingers of his right hand. . . .
Now, lying in bed the following morning, he was surprised to feel a faint prickling in those same fingertips. He couldn’t help but bring his right hand up to his face and—
“AAIIIEEEEGH!”
“Elliot! What is it?” His parents came rushing out of the bathroom.
Before they could see his hand, he whipped it back under the covers. “I-I’m fine,” Elliot assured them (although this was definitely not true). “I was just having a nightmare.”
His mother sat down on the edge of the bed and peeled a few locks of hair off Elliot’s forehead. “What was it about?”
Beneath the covers, Elliot used his left hand to explore his right. He felt . . .
Hair!
It started at his wrist and went bristling all the way down to his fingertips—which were topped off with what felt like curving claws. Something was very, very, very wrong with his hand, and he was just about to show his parents when his father said, “Nightmare, huh? Maybe that’s what happens when you hang out with Archie and his ‘creatures’ all the time.”
Elliot’s mother giggled. “Oh, Peter! You’re such a bully sometimes!”
Elliot’s frustration from the night before returned to him. Whatever was wrong with his hand, his parents didn’t deserve to see it. They wouldn’t understand. They would only panic. Even worse, they would probably try to take him to the hospital. When he thought of what Dr. Heppleworth had told him about testing potions on customers at The Smiling Mudsucker, he knew that medicine wouldn’t help him. This was a creature problem, and only creatures could help him. He didn’t need a doctor; he needed Uncle Archie and his friends.
“I’m fine,” he told his parents. “It was just a bad dream. I’d better get dressed. Could you pass me my yellow rugby shirt? It’s in my bag.” His yellow rugby shirt was a little too big for him. Specifically, the sleeves were a bit too long.
“Here you go,” said his father, lumping the shirt on the top of the covers. “Hurry up. We don’t want to be late for our breakfast reservation.”
Elliot pulled the shirt on under the blankets. When he finally emerged, the long sleeves hung (thankfully) well past his fingertips. As always, he topped off the oversized shirt with his bright green fishing vest.
“You sure it isn’t too hot for all that?” asked his father, pointing to Elliot’s layers of clothing.
“Don’t tease him, dear,” said Elliot’s mother. “That’s the style. You know how kids are these days. It’s all baggy this and saggy that. Sleeves must be the new thing.”
Elliot nodded emphatically. “There’s a kid at my school, his sleeves go all the way to the floor! Everyone thinks he’s super cool.”
Outside, the perimeter of the market square was lined with food stalls. Huge banners shouted:
Welcome to Simmersville! Tonight only! The Simmersville food festival’s all-singing, all-dancing dinner-theatre-style costume cabaret!
As they neared the other side of the square, Elliot spotted Leslie and her mother. They were behind the dim-sum stall, busily handing out cardboard cups of dumplings.
“Can we go say hi?” Elliot asked his parents, but they pulled him past without stopping.
“We’ll come back later,” said his mother. “The best time for the stalls is just before the cabaret.”
Elliot realized his parents were perfectly willing to spend the entire day sampling food at local restaurants. For him, that was impossible. He had to find Uncle Archie and the creatures.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Right here,” said his father.
They had come across the market square and entered one of the alleys. Restaurants lined both sides, but where Elliot’s father pointed there was only a hazy gap. There was something there, but as much as Elliot stared, all he saw was an indistinct smudge.
“Right where?” he asked.
Elliot’s father smiled at his wife. “I told you he was going to love it.”
“Love what ?”
“Look closer,” said Elliot’s mother. “It helps if you squint a little.”
Elliot narrowed his eyes and cocked his head to one side. He saw something: a restaurant. Just barely. He felt like he was looking at it through pebbled glass, or through the wind and rain of a terrible storm. There was the vague shape of an awning and an entrance, with squiggles of indecipherable green writing above it. Then he understood.
“This whole restaurant—it’s been blurrified!”
“That’s right,” said his father. “It certainly didn’t look like this last year.”
“So you see,” his mother continued, “this particular restaurant owes quite a lot to that mad uncle of yours. You, too, I suppose.” She gave Elliot a little squeeze.
“It’s called The Green Fairy,” his father explained. “Everything about it is inspired by the Impressionist period of French painting.”
Elliot’s mother clapped her hands. “It’s like eating haute cuisine inside an actual Monet or Renoir!”
Elliot didn’t share his parents’ enthusiasm for the restaurant itself, but he did feel an unexpected swell of pride. When he and Leslie had helped the creatures invent the device that became the Impressionisticator™, they had been aiming for an invisibility machine. It was nice to see the device being put to good use.
They stepped inside, and it took Elliot’s eyes a moment to adjust. There was something beautiful, even breathtaking, in the way the restaurant seemed to be painted from the bright pastel colors and wobbly brushstrokes of an Impressionist painting. When the maître d’ seated them at their table, Elliot was relieved to see the menus hadn’t been blurrified. Then again, as soon as Elliot began reading the (perfectly legible) menu, he realized that its clarity wasn’t the issue. The problem was that everything was in French.
“Where’s Jean-Remy when you need him?” he whispered to himself.
Unable to read the menu, Elliot’s eyes wandered the room. He noticed there was one corner that was still in the process of being blurrified.
Over near the patio, the maître d’ held a bright orange Impressionisticator™, which looked a bit like an alien ray gun, except instead of a hole going down the barrel, it featured a faintly glowing, half-asleep eyeball peering out from the end. When the man pulled the trigger, the Impressionisticator™ played a lullaby, and the eyeball began to close. As it did, he waved the device over the corner of the room. Slowly, that part of the restaurant became blurrier and blurrier.
“Complimentary hors d’oeuvres,” said their waiter. He had arrived at the table with glasses of water and a cheese plate.
“Is that mimolette?” asked Elliot’s mother, pointing to something that looked like a fossilized cantaloupe, like a softball covered in very unappetizing sawdust.
Elliot’s father rubbed his hands together. “Rare stuff!”
The waiter departed, and Elliot’s mother picked up the oddly shaped knife lying beside the cheese. “Now then,” she said, “why don’t we start by teaching you how to use a cheese knife?”
When Elliot reached for it, his mother
pulled away, making a little tutting noise. “Elliot, please. Roll up your sleeves.”
Elliot froze. “But you said it was ‘the style,’ remember?”
“Perhaps out in the street when you’re playing with your friends, but not here.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “This is The Green Fairy.”
Elliot whipped both hands under the table. “Can I go to the washroom?”
“No! They just brought us mimolette!”
“But I don’t want any mimolette.”
“Elliot, how can you say that?”
“It’s not like we ordered it. It’s complimentary.”
“Son,” said his father. “You ought to know that a boy’s first slice of mimolette is a rite of passage. Being able to speak intelligently about fermented milk products is one of the most important parts of growing up! Now, I want you to put your hands back on the table, roll up your sleeves, and eat this fancy cheese like a man.”
Elliot couldn’t do it. Under the table, his hands (or rather, his hand and his claw) were balled up in angry fists. “No,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about food. Or discuss it, or critique it, or analyze it, or anything else that isn’t eating it!” Elliot couldn’t help pounding his fist (the normal one) on the table. “I hope you know that if this was creaturedom, you guys wouldn’t even exist! Because they don’t have critics in creaturedom. They think it’s rude to criticize someone else’s hard work, especially when you can’t even do that thing yourself, and I think we all know—you guys can’t even cook!”
Elliot’s parents were stunned. His father’s jaw hung slack. His mother’s lower lip quivered slightly, and she looked nervously around the restaurant.
“Like I said, I need to go to the bathroom!” Elliot stormed off, the cuffs of his rugby shirt wrapped tightly around his fists. He had never shouted at his parents that way before. As he stalked around the corner toward the toilets, he wondered if his anger had something to do with his hand. Maybe he had changed on the inside, too. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking, an excuse for telling his parents that in creaturedom . . . they wouldn’t exist.
As soon as he was alone in the bathroom, Elliot rolled up his sleeve. He almost screamed when he looked at his hand. Thick, moss-green hair had already spread all the way up to his elbow! Yellow-green claws, like the talons of an owl, poked out from his unnaturally long fingers.
What was he going to do?
“You know,” said a voice behind him, “you should really have someone examine zat arm.”
“Jean-Remy!”
He spun around, and there was the fairy-bat himself, perched atop one of the toilet stalls.
“I must admit,” he said, looking around the Impressionistic washroom, “zere is something about zis restaurant zat reminds me of my home.”
Elliot was too curious to discuss the decor. “I thought you were captured. What happened?”
“I escaped, ze same as you, in one of ze expectavators.”
“But what about the others?” Elliot asked.
“I fear zey have all been captured. You, me, and Leslie, we are ze only ones who can rescue zem.”
“Leslie. We’ll have to go find her.”
“Zere is no need! I’ve already collected her.”
Jean-Remy pointed out through the bathroom’s tiny window. Leslie stood outside, holding a steaming cup of dumplings.
“Great,” said Elliot, “but if we’re going back to Hepple-worth’s, we can’t let anyone see us. I have an idea of how we can sneak back, but we’ll need a diversion.”
Jean-Remy smiled. “Leave zat to me. . . .”
If you were there that morning, in Simmersville’s hazy French restaurant called The Green Fairy, you would have witnessed something very odd. First, you certainly would have noticed the unusual, out-of-focus decor. You might have also noticed a handsome couple in a booth near the wall, sitting at a table with three chairs (one of them empty), hungrily eyeing a cheese plate.
And then . . .
Soaring out of the bathroom came a tiny man with beautiful pearlescent wings, dressed in a disheveled tuxedo. He zipped from one waiter to the next, tipping trays of plates and glasses of wine so they crashed and clattered on the floor. In no time, the whole restaurant was in chaos. (In fact, following this extraordinary incident, a persistent rumor developed that the restaurant was truly haunted by an actual green fairy.)
Yes, if you were there that morning, you would have probably been caught up in the chaos. Like everyone else, you probably would have missed the young boy in an oversized yellow rugby shirt, crawling along the back wall to a table, where he picked up something that looked like a science-fiction ray gun with a glowing eyeball on the end. He shoved this strange implement into one of the many pockets in his green fishing vest and crawled away through the patio doors.
CHAPTER 19
In which Leslie becomes a gray haze, Jean-Remy muses on the secret of invisibility, and Elliot isn’t quite himself
What happened to your hand?!”
“I think it was something I ate,” Elliot told Leslie.
They were in the alley behind The Green Fairy. Elliot’s right hand looked as if it were part wolf, part bear, and—judging by the curved talons extending from his fingertips—part owl.
“Looks like you’ve grown . . . a paw.”
“I think it’s because I ate ‘the Special.’ ”
“It looks like the hand of a . . .” The word caught in Leslie’s throat.
“A creature,” Elliot said.
“What are we going to do?”
Elliot jammed his fist back into his pocket. “My uncle and the others will help us. We’ve got to find them. Not to mention stop the Chief from turning this whole town into ghorks!”
Leslie cracked her knuckles. “We’d better get started.”
There were three settings on the ImpressionisticatorTM:
1. Partly Hazy
2. Mostly Indistinct
3. Totally Blurrified!
Elliot turned it up to full power. Leslie, in her characteristically all-black outfit, became a kind of pale gray haze. Elliot was transformed into a yellowish-green organic blob. Jean-Remy became nothing more than a silver puff of cloud.
With so much activity at the festival, it was easy for them to sneak through the crowds unnoticed. When they left the market square, they found they had to move more slowly to avoid being spotted. When they arrived at the Heppleworth Food Factory, the offices were mostly deserted. The only people there were a handful of security guards. Being Totally Blurrified!, they snuck past the security gate with only the merest looks of suspicion.
“What was that?” they heard one of the guards say to his partner.
“What was what?”
“Something just blew past us.”
“Aw, you’re seeing things,” said the other.
“Something just ran by the guardhouse, I swear!”
“Oh, yeah? What’d it look like?”
“Like a . . . like a . . . hmm . . . maybe you’re right. I’ll get my eyes checked.”
The lobby of the spoon building had been cordoned off with pylons and construction barriers, which made it appear that the wreckage caused by the crash of the Coleopter-copter was nothing more than an ongoing renovation. Sadly, there was no sign of the flying machine itself. Elliot assumed the ghorks had torn poor Hercules to shreds. They skirted around the barriers and headed for the Heppleworth expectavators.
“You know what?” Leslie whispered to Elliot. “If we stand still, this really is like being invisible.”
“Maybe being invisible isn’t about people not seeing you,” he answered, “it’s about people not noticing you.”
“In zis way,” whispered Jean-Remy, with a note of sadness, “ze world is full of invisible people.”
When they ca
lled the expectavator, it too was deserted. Leslie and Elliot were a little disappointed not to find Sunny, the spring-heeled optimistimonster, waiting for them on his bounding leg.
“Which button do we press?” Elliot asked.
There were so many. Wilted Hydrangea beside the Water Cooler in the Accounting Department. Heppleworth’s Organic Vegetable Soup-Stirring Machine. Northeast Corner of the Packaging Plant behind the Broken Shrink-Wrapper. Then there was the whole section devoted entirely to dungeons. Dungeon #1, Dungeon #2, Dungeon #3, and on and on. But there were so many! Which one was the right one? Which one would lead them to their friends? At last, Jean-Remy hovered up to a few buttons improbably mounted in the ceiling.
“What about zis one? It says Secret.”
“Secret what?” asked Elliot.
“Secret nothing. Just Secret. If you have kidnapped not only one but two creature departments, would you not want to keep it a secret? What greater secret zan zis could ze ghorks be hiding?”
“He has a point,” said Elliot.
Leslie wasn’t convinced. “How can it be secret if they have a button for it?”
“It is on the ceiling,” Elliot suggested.
“Fine,” said Leslie. “Press it, and we’ll hope for the best.”
“Mais bien sûr!” said Jean-Remy, tapping the button. “Hope is precisely what we must do! Expectavators, after all, zey are powered by hope, so let us try to be as hopeful as possible.”
“I hope we find our friends,” said Elliot. “I hope Gügor found his true love, I hope there’s no such thing as a Sixth Ghork, and I hope we can stop the Chief from turning everyone at the festival into ghorks.”
Gobbled by Ghorks Page 11
