You Ain't Seen Nothing Yeti!

by Steven Butler

  BOOOOOOOOM! BOOOOOOOOM! BOOOOOOOOM!

  My heart sank in despair. What was Maloney sending to get us now?

  BOOOOOOOOM! BOOOOOOOOM! BOOOOOOOOM!

  Suddenly the dining-room door opened and the giant figure of Nancy stepped inside, brandishing a skyscraper-sized bottle of mango chutney.

  ‘FOUND IT, MY WEE BEAUTIES!’ she thundered joyfully. ‘SORRY I TOOK SO LONG. I’D LEFT IT ON THE—’

  Nancy’s mouth drooped open as she stared down at the nearly empty table and three shrivelled heads staring back at her.

  If it was possible for a shrunken head to look sheepish, this was the moment. I swear they’d have started twiddling their thumbs if they’d had any.

  Nancy turned her attention to the head with a ring through its nose and gasped when she saw the pine dryad’s feet … or roots … sticking out of its crusty mouth.

  ‘Mmmmmhhh … mmmmmhhh!’ he called from somewhere inside the ghastly thing. ‘HUWP MEH!’

  That was it…

  ‘OH, BLUNKERS!’ Nancy roared, darting forward and snatching up the jade knife and fork from the corner of the table.

  There was a tremendous flash of light and a loud WHOOOSHing sound as Nancy snapped the magical cutlery in half.

  ‘UUUUUUUUUGH!’

  Every single guest who had been celebrating was suddenly un-shrunk.

  The three monstrous heads exploded into nothing but clouds of dust and papery flakes of dead skin, as the unfortunate magical creatures packing their gobblesome gullets returned to full size.

  Arms and legs flailed in all directions as the table collapsed under our weight. The room instantly filled up and all the guests spilled out into the hallway like a living, breathing avalanche.

  ‘LOCK HER UP!’

  ‘Frankie, my boy,’ Nancy’s voice sobbed somewhere in the distance. ‘Where are you?’

  I found myself lying in a pile of wriggling guests with someone’s knee wedged against my ear and one of the anemononk’s tentacles slapped across my forehead.

  ‘I’m here!’ I grunted, feeling like someone had reached inside my skull and scrambled my brains with an egg whisk.

  ‘Oh, petal,’ Nancy said, carefully scooping me out of the squirming jumble of guests and putting me down on my feet next to her. ‘What on earth?’

  I looked up into Nancy’s eight eyes and tried to focus. The room felt like it was spinning.

  ‘Ummm,’ I mumbled as my thoughts swam around inside my head. ‘There was screaming…’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘And thorns … revenge…’

  ‘You’re not making much sense, dearie,’ Nancy said, placing two of her hands on my shoulders. ‘Think, Frankie. What happened?’

  ‘Heads!’ I blurted as the image of gristly Aunt Influenza sprang back to my mind. ‘Shrunken heads! Giant ones! MAUDLIN MALONEY! We have to stop her!’

  As fast as we could, Nancy and I untangled everyone from the pile.

  ‘This way … no, that’s your arm … just twist your foot to the left a bit, that’s right … pull it out of Ooof’s nostril!’

  We found Orfis and Unga lying dazed on the splintered remains of the dining table, while Mum, Dad and Zingri had been swept out into the corridor.

  Apart from the odd black eye and slobber-drenched hairdo, all of our guests were somehow pretty much unharmed, but BOY, WERE THEY FUMING! I’d never seen magicals look so hopping mad.

  ‘Tell them, Frankie!’ Mum said, rubbing a sore spot on her arm. ‘Tell them what you know!’

  I quickly explained to everyone the gnomad’s warnings about the hotel being in danger and how it seemed that Miss Maloney’s curses were coming true. She was obviously SO ANGRY that her summer-holiday plans had been ruined and had sent her unlucky charms to ruin our Trogmanay feast and cause chaos.

  ‘Who does she think she is? The cantunkerous turnip!’ Reginald Blink huffed.

  ‘That tricksy old trog-stomper!’ the impolump grunted, twitching his nose with rage.

  ‘Something’s got to be done,’ barked Gladys Potts.

  ‘I’ll happily eat her,’ Madam McCreedie said. ‘Call it a favour—’

  ‘NO!’ Mum interrupted. ‘I won’t have any guests being eaten … not again!’

  ‘But we can’t let her get away with more of these horrible happenings!’ Nancy said as determination spread across her spider-face. ‘I know just what to do.’

  With that, she spun on her four back legs and marched down the hallway towards reception with the rest of us following behind like an angry, dishevelled army.

  ‘OI! FUNGUS FACE!’ Nancy hollered as we entered the vine-covered reception hall.

  Maudlin Maloney had strung up a rope between the lepre-caravan and the staircase, and was hanging out laundry. She looked up and grinned a wonky grin at us all.

  ‘Come to apologise to manky old Maloney, have we?’

  Mum stepped forward, brandishing a mop she’d picked up from the cleaning cupboard on our way down the hall. ‘It’s you who needs to say sorry to us!’

  ‘Me?’ Maudlin laughed. ‘You must be brain-bonked! I’ve never said sorry in me whole whoppsy life. What do I have to be snivellish and sorry about?’

  ‘EVERYTHING!’ yelled Dad. ‘You’ve caused trouble from the moment you got here!’ he continued. ‘You cursed our guests—’

  ‘And called us disgusterous!’ Orfis added.

  ‘You’ve covered our reception in a thorn briar and tried to kill us at our Trogmanay feast!’ Dad snapped.

  ‘I did no such thing!’ grunted Maudlin.

  ‘Yes, you did!’ I shouted. I was too angry to care about being scared of the rancid leprechaun any more. ‘The gnomad warned me you were going to do something terrible.’

  ‘Learn to listen, quarterling,’ Maudlin said to me in a discomfortingly calm voice.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard what it told you. It said you were in danger, but not what you were in danger from. You made the rest up yourself and blamed poor old Maloney!’

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Frankie!’ Zingri hollered from the crowd.

  ‘Stop it!!’ I yelled. The old leprechaun was just trying to confuse us all. ‘You sent your shrunken heads to gobble us up!’

  ‘I WHAT?!’ For a second Maudlin Maloney looked genuinely shocked. She glanced down at her belt and scrabbled at where the grizzly bad-luck charms had been hanging earlier. ‘Where are me charms?’

  ‘You know where there are … or were…’ Nancy said, wedging her fists on her hips. ‘But your little trick didn’t work! Your stomach-turning trinkets have been blown to smitheroons!’

  ‘AUNT INFLUENZA!’ Maudlin shrieked. ‘What have you done, you brain-boogled EEJITS?’

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know exactly what happened in the dining room,’ Dad said.

  ‘You’re not fooling us,’ Mum added.

  ‘I hexed your trog hog!’ Maudlin said. ‘I made your minkle-meat taste like dryad droppings…’

  ‘THEN YOU TRIED TO KILL UTH!’ the Molar Sisters lisped.

  ‘I did no such thing!’ the leprechaun hissed.

  Was it me or was there smoke wisping out of her ears?

  ‘That’s it!’ Nancy snapped. She grabbed Maudlin by the scruff of the neck and pushed her inside the little caravan. ‘It’s time you had a good, long think about what you’ve done, you rambunking rudeling.’

  Then, with arms and legs moving at a terrific speed, Nancy wrapped the leprechaun’s entire home with layer after layer of web, until it looked more like a ball of yarn than someone’s home. The chickens clucked and cooed in alarm, but Nancy was a skilled weaver and made sure not to snag a single one of them as she wove.

  ‘It’ll take you a wee while to get out of that one!’ Nancy shouted through the web-covered front door. ‘Give us a yell when you’re ready to say sorry.’

  The tiny letterbox on the front door of the caravan flapped up between the strands of silken web.

  ‘NEVER!’ Maudlin bellow
ed through the narrow slot.

  BEDTIME

  ‘What do you think it’s like?’ Zingri asked in the darkness from the other side of the room.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Being swallowed alive?’

  ‘Dark,’ I said after a while. A judder crept up my spine as the thought of it made my skin crawl.

  ‘And smelly,’ Zingri added. ‘I bet the inside of a shrunken head would be super stinksome.’

  ‘Mmm-hmm…’ The clock on my bedroom wall had stopped working months ago, but I knew it must be extremely late. There was no way I was going to be feeling sleepy any time soon though, that was for sure.

  After Nancy had trapped Maudlin in her caravan, everyone had eventually shuffled off to bed. Mum had tried her hardest to keep the Trogmanay cheer going, suggesting trog nog and jiggle-dancing out on the patio, but no one really felt like it. It’s amazing how having your trolliday feast wrecked by colossal dead heads can spoil the party atmosphere.

  ‘It’s lucky no one was hurt,’ Zingri said. ‘Or chewed!’

  ‘Yep,’ I said. I couldn’t stop thinking about the gnomad’s warning. What if it wasn’t talking about the shrunken heads attacking our Trogmanay feast? What if there was worse to come?

  ‘Pffffffft!’ A flicker of flame burst into view in the fireplace and Hoggit puffed a few tiny fireballs across the room, lighting the candles on the windowsill and the shelf above my bed. ‘Groaaarrrr!’

  My pygmy soot-dragon uncurled himself from the grate, then scampered over to the bed and jumped on, wagging his tail.

  ‘Sorry, boy,’ I said, giving him a scratch under his chin. ‘Are we keeping you awake?’

  I looked across the room and saw Zingri’s face peering out of the folds of her hammock. She’d strung it up between the bookcase and the cupboard door, and it swayed gently from side to side as she wriggled to sit up.

  ‘Is that sort of thing normal around here?’ Zingri asked. She flopped one leg out of her swinging bed, followed by the other, then came to sit on the end of the duvet near my feet.

  ‘Is what normal?’ I said.

  ‘Getting gobbled up like a lump of leftovers?’ Zingri grinned and I could see she was just as awake as I was. ‘I heard that wrinklish mermaid in the starfish bikini…’

  ‘Berol Dunch?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Zingri said. ‘When we were out in the garden earlier today, I heard her gossiping with the werepoodle.’

  ‘Gladys Potts.’

  ‘They were talking about someone else getting eaten up just a few weeks ago at the hotel.’

  ‘Someone did,’ I said. ‘A goblin prince…’

  ‘A GOBLIN PRINCE?!’ Zingri rubbed her hands together with excitement. ‘That’s even better than us regular magicals nearly getting gobbled at dinner!’

  ‘He walked into Mrs Venus’s mouth by accident, when he was on the run from Squall Goblin pirates,’ I said.

  ‘SQUALL GOBLINS?!’ Zingri’s jaw dropped open so wide, it practically clattered across floor, and I knew I was going to have to tell her all about it … plus, I didn’t want to miss out on the chance to talk about meeting my hero, CAPTAIN CALAMITUS PLANK!

  ‘Lummy!’ Zingri wriggled down under the covers and got comfy opposite me, then I told her the entire messy story about Prince Grogbah, and the curse of the diamond dentures, and Tempestra Plank, and the box full of bones, and meeting Captain Plank (Tempestra’s dad), and the swash-bungling battle, and Mrs Venus falling asleep with her mouth open again, and the horrible, bone-crunching moment Prince Grogbah got grunched.

  ‘And what was the last thing he said?’ Zingri asked with wide eyes. ‘Was it “AAAAAAGH!”?’

  ‘I think he screamed, “NEVER!” when we told him to come back out,’ I said, pulling a face at the horrible memory. ‘The dooky little dollop refused to listen and…’ I shrugged, then mimed teeth crunching together with my hands.

  ‘That’s the best story I’ve ever heard!’ Zingri looked up at the poster of Calamitus Plank on the wall and laughed. ‘I can’t believe we missed all the action.’

  ‘We were cursed and nearly got eaten today!’ I said, throwing a pillow at Zingri. ‘That’s a lot of action too!’

  ‘I know,’ she giggled, ‘but a swash-bungling battle with a skeleton would be even better. I’ve never had one of those before!’

  ‘Wait till you see this,’ I said and hopped out of bed. I shuffled quickly over to a small gold box on the shelf above the fireplace. The snow and ice from the reception hall hadn’t reached all the way up to my secret bedroom above the library, but it was still freezing cold.

  I grabbed the gold box and darted back to the bed.

  ‘What is it?’ Zingri asked, trying to get a better look at what was in my hand.

  ‘This,’ I said, yanking the blankets over my legs, then holding the box up to the candlelight, ‘is the coolest thing of all!’

  I opened the gold box mega-slowly for extra-dramatic effect, then pulled out the diamond tooth that Calamitus gave to me after we won the battle and defeated Grogbah.

  ‘Ta-dah!’

  It sparkled and twinkled in the darkness, reflecting tiny stars all over the walls and ceiling. Dad had looped some string round the glittering tooth’s roots, so I could wear it round my neck whenever I wanted.

  ‘What is it?’ Zingri asked again. ‘It looks like…’

  ‘It’s one of THE ACTUAL diamond dentures!’

  ‘NO WAY!’ Zingri gasped, making a grab for it.

  ‘It’s true!’ I said and put the loop of string round my neck. ‘It’s magical. The dentures helped bring Captain Plank back from the dead. He was just a pile of bones before he got his knobbly hands on them again.’

  ‘That was the whole set of teeth though,’ Zingri grunted, trying to look unimpressed. ‘Just one tooth isn’t very magical.’

  I stuck my tongue out at my yeti friend and she laughed.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘But I still think it’s pretty terrific.’

  ‘Definitely,’ said Zingri, nodding. ‘We should build a snowgoblin tomorrow and stick the tooth in its mouth!’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘It might come alive!’ Zingri chuckled. ‘We could have a snow-servant to bring us trog nog and earwax crackers for the rest of the trolliday!’

  ‘Haha!’ I blurted. ‘Maybe you’re ri—’

  I was silenced by the sound of Hoggit growling. I looked down and saw the red glow between my little dragon’s scales had faded to a rancid green colour.

  ‘Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.’

  ‘Are you okay, boy?’ I asked and placed my hand on the top of his head. He was cold!

  Pygmy soot-dragons only ever glow green when they sense terrible danger. It’s one of the warning signs they use when living in packs in the wild.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ I whispered to Zingri.

  ‘Nah!’ she huffed and tossed back the pillow I’d thrown a few minutes ago. ‘You’re still just all bonejangled from earlier.’

  Hoggit growled again. Louder this time.

  ‘He never does this,’ I said as quietly as I could. ‘Not unless—’

  ‘SHHHHH!’ Zingri jolted to attention. Her eyes widened and the hair on her neck and shoulders bristled. She reached an arm across the bed and clapped her hand over my mouth.

  We had both heard it.

  The wallpaper was muttering again…

  WHISPERING WALLS

  As quietly as we could, Zingri and I climbed out of bed and tiptoed towards the voice. It seemed to be coming from the far corner, behind a stack of Great-Great-Great-Grandad Abraham’s books.

  ‘Don’t make a sound,’ I mouthed to Zingri when we reached the corner and glanced at each other with wide eyes. The muttering was barely louder than a sigh.

  We both silently removed the pile of books, one by one, to see what was behind it.

  There, wriggling across the enchanted wallpaper, was one of the jagged-toothed flytraps that had appeared o
n the printed vine pattern earlier in the day. It twitched its ugly leaves, and squirmed its tendrils in such a snakelike way, it made my skin prickle with goosebumps, despite being just a drawing.

  ‘It’s wandering in the hotel,’ the ghastly vine whispered. ‘Sneakish and angry and plotting, it is.’

  I looked up at Zingri.

  ‘Maloney’s broken loose!’ I hissed.

  ‘Stop the blighter,’ the vine mumbled again. ‘Stop the blighter in the blizzard … the sneakling in the snow … the stranger in the storm … or the end of the hotel is…’

  I held my breath, not daring to make even the tiniest of sounds.

  ‘The end of the hotel is here … tonight … destroy all magicals, it plots … and it will destroy…’

  Zingri stared at me, shocked and open-mouthed.

  ‘It will destroy all magicals … all of them!’

  SECRETS AND STRANGERS

  I clicked the dial on the arm of the chair and it started to slowly judder through the floor of my bedroom.

  The quiet whirring as it travelled down the track on the library wall suddenly seemed louder than gunshots and I winced at Zingri as the chair reached the ground with a bump.

  ‘Look!’ I whispered, pointing to the library doors. They were closed now and the glass in them was frosted with ice, but it was easy to make out the orange glow of a lantern and the shape of a squat person crossing reception on the other side.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Zingri quietly as we clambered off the chair and tiptoed across the floor.

  We reached the library doors and I twisted the frozen handle as slowly as I could, opening one side of them, just a crack. Then I placed my eye to the tiny gap and scanned the reception hall.

  Being a human kid with troll blood in my veins means I can usually see just as well in the dark as I can during the day, but the darkness was thicker than normal, like the kind Granny Regurgita likes to fill her bedroom with. There was strange magic filling the shadows tonight and it sent a shiver up my spine.