Jack Slater, Monster Investigator

by John Dougherty

  “Freeze!” she yelled furiously. The monster stopped, and looked round.

  Cherry was kneeling just a few feet away, looking meaner than I’ve ever seen anybody look – meaner even than our headteacher that time someone widdled all over the floor in the boys’ toilets. Her hands were rock-steady, and the bulb of that huge torch was pointed straight at the monster’s head. It turned, slowly.

  “Hey!” it growled. “You the girl been down here three days, lighting up the tunnels!”

  “That’s me,” Cherry said coolly. “Now, put the claws away and keep your paws where I can see them!”

  The monster did neither.

  “Three days a long time for batteries,” it said, its voice rumbling like a cement mixer. “Maybe your torch ran out of power.”

  “Maybe it has,” Cherry agreed, and her voice took on that cold, hard whisper again. “In all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But considering this is a Night Blaster 35 – the most powerful hand-torch in the world, and could light you up like you just stepped under a streetlamp – what you have to ask yourself now is: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you – punk?”

  The monster paused for a moment, considering this.

  Then it chuckled, and nodded its head.

  “Yep!” it said, raising all its claws and stepping forward.

  And that was when I hit it from behind.

  There’s no point hitting a monster with something hard and heavy.

  So I hit it with Freddy.

  THUD! A quick blow to the back of the knee! It stumbled and half-fell. I leaped up, grabbing a handful of monster-fur.

  THWACK! A well-loved teddy came down hard on the back of its head. There was a pause . . .

  . . . and then it slowly toppled, banging its head on the wall as it fell, and lay still.

  “Sorry about that, Freddy,” I said, giving him a kiss.

  I looked at Cherry, and we grinned with relief, and high-fived.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Thanks, yourself!” she answered. “That’s some teddy you’ve got there.”

  Then, of course, we had to take the guard’s keys.

  Problem was, the only wag to get them was to take the ring out of the monster’s nose.

  And the catch was on the inside.

  We wasted a couple of minutes arguing about whose job it was to snap the catch open. Cherry reckoned it was my job, because she’d saved my bacon twice. I reckoned it was hers because . . . because . . . because it just was, OK?

  She wasn’t convinced.

  So, I took off my watch and spent possibly the worst minute of my entire life up to my elbows in monster snot.

  “Guess this is what makes you such a good M.I., Jack,” Cherry remarked cheerily.

  “What is?”

  “You really know how to get up a monster’s nose!”

  I glared at her.

  “Button it, Jackson,” I said, “or it’s your turn for a mouthful of teddy.”

  Luckily for me, just at that moment the ring popped open.

  Unluckily for me, this must have tickled the unconscious monster’s nose. It sneezed.

  I was blown clean off my feet. Well – not clean, exactly. In fact, not clean at all.

  “Urggh!” I groaned, picking myself off the floor, dripping wet with something I’d rather not describe. “Anyone got a hanky?”

  Sadly, no one did. So I had to make do with Seymour. He was remarkably absorbent, really. Of course, I shook him as dry as I could before wrapping him up again in Cherry’s blankie and stuffing him back inside Mr Piggy.

  Then we went off to look for Bernard.

  We found the main chamber of the prison fairly quickly. It took me nineteen tries to find the right key, though.

  The door swung open slowly. I held Freddy the Teddy like a club, ready to hit any monster that came charging out at us.

  But none did.

  The room was huge – about the size of a football field – and it glowed with a faint luminous light like those glow-in-the-dark stickers you get; not enough to make a monster vanish, just enough to make him very uncomfortable.

  It was full of monsters.

  Luckily for us, they were all chained up. Well – paper-chained, to be precise. They were tied up with streamers and Happy Birthday banners, with balloons and with wrapping paper. Some were tied to the floor; some were tied to the ceiling; and all around the walls monsters were paper-chained up high, their feet and tails dangling, looking like the ugliest party decorations you ever saw. They were all muttering and murmuring and complaining to each other, but as they saw us the room went quiet – dead quiet.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Ahem – which one of you is Bernard?” I asked.

  They glared at us suspiciously.

  “Who wants to know?” growled a slimy-looking eight-armed creature.

  “Yeah – what this Bernard guy done?” added one that looked like a two-headed snake with spider-legs.

  “Nothing,” I said. “We’re here to rescue him.”

  There was a pause while they took this in.

  Then a big hairy yeti-type thing way over on the other side of the room raised his head and bellowed, “I’m Bernard!”

  “No you’re not!” a little three-headed furry blob called out. “I am! I am Bernard!”

  And suddenly the room was filled with the noise of hundreds of monster criminals all shouting out:

  “I am Bernard!”

  “No, I am Bernard!”

  “You know,” said Cherry, “I think I saw this in a film once.”

  I turned to the monster nearest me, who was bellowing, “I am Bernard” as loud as anyone, and pressed the “light” button on my wristwatch. It shut up very suddenly.

  “You know,” I said to it above the shouting, “this light isn’t big enough to light up a whole monster, but I always wondered what would happened if I held it really close to a monster’s toes. Or ears,” I added, looking down and noticing that it didn’t have any toes.

  The monster’s eyes widened. “Um . . . I might know where Bernard is,” it said in a deep, gravelly, but slightly shaky, voice.

  “Good boy!” I told it.

  “Girl!” it said, offended. “My name’s not really Bernard. It’s Shirley.”

  “Nice to meet you, Shirley,” I said. “Where’s Bernard?”

  “Well,” she said hesitantly, “I don’t know for sure if it’s him, but they’ve been holding someone in that room over there” – she pointed with the one tentacle that wasn’t chained to the wall – “since last night. I heard one of the guards say something about teaching him not to go blabbing to humans.”

  “Sounds like it could be him,” I said. “Thanks, Shirley. Come on, Cherry.”

  We made our way carefully across the room, swiping with Freddy at any monster that tried to grab us as we passed.

  “Bernard?” I whispered, stepping into the room. And then I stopped.

  This room was much smaller – about the size of a bedroom. It contained just two things: a lamp, and a monster. The monster was chained to the wall next to the lamp, and he was wearing satin pyjamas and “Timmy the Train” slippers – a monster’s idea of torture.

  “Bernard?” I said again, louder, and this time he looked up.

  “Jack?” he said, and I recognized his voice straight away. I dashed across the room, drawing my Swiss Army knife from its pocket.

  “Don’t worry, Bernard,” I said to him. “We’re going to get you out of here. Let’s get these pyjamas off you first.”

  “No – no time!” he said. “The lamp! It’s going to go off!”

  I looked, and for a moment didn’t see what he meant.

  Then I realized.

  The lamp was plugged in to a timer.

  The timer was set for 2:00 am.

  I looked at my watch. It was 1:59.

  And 55 seconds.

  There was no time to get to the plug.

  No time to find the swi
tch.

  Bernard was about to die.

  I dropped the knife and dived at the lamp, bringing it crashing to the floor beneath me just as the time-switch clicked.

  The lampshade collapsed. I felt the bulb suddenly warm beneath my stomach as it lit up.

  “Cherry! Get the plug!” I said, but she was way ahead of me. There was a click from the wall, and then she said,

  “OK, Jack – it’s off.”

  I rolled off the lamp and stood up. Bernard was still there, hanging from the wall, grinning at me.

  And not looking at all scary.

  In fact . . .

  “Are you sure you’re a monster?” Cherry asked suspiciously.

  Bernard scowled. He still didn’t look scary.

  “OK, OK,” he growled. “Just because you saved my life doesn’t mean you can take the mickey.”

  We looked at him, unable to believe what we were seeing. He sighed.

  “All right,” he said. “Here’s how it works. Monsters are born from the fears of children. So if a child is scared – really scared – of spiders and snakes, then a monster might be born down here with, say, the head of a snake and the legs of a spider.”

  “That makes sense,” Cherry said. “So you were born because some kid somewhere was scared of . . .”

  “Yeah, of a cuddly bunny rabbit and a fluffy duck,” Bernard snarled. “But he was terrified, OK? Not just scared. Let’s get that straight. One kid, once, was really, really frightened of me. Now, how about getting me down?” he added, fluffing up the feathers all along his floppy bunny ears.

  I popped the balloon and tore off the paper-chains. He ripped off the pyjamas and slippers. There he stood – two metres of cuddly bunny rabbit covered in soft, downy feathers that I’d have been willing to bet were primrose yellow. Cherry and I couldn’t help giggling.

  “Knock it off, both of you!” Bernard yelled. “Don’t you think I get enough of that down here?”

  “Sorry, Bernard,” I apologized. “I guess this is why you decided to become an informer.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Informing gives me something to do. The one kid I’m capable of scaring sleeps with the light on – and soon he’ll be too old to believe in monsters. Kids these days grow up too quickly. I’m telling you, there’s nothing more humiliating than—”

  “Not now, Bernard,” I interrupted. “We’ve got to get out of here. Can you get us home?”

  “Not from here,” he said, moving towards the door. “Once we get out, I can get you under any bed anywhere in the world, but the monster prison’s escape-proof. How did you get in past all the guards, anyway?”

  “Got lucky, I guess,” I told him. “We only saw one on the way in.”

  He stopped and looked at me, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “One?” he said. “No way. You should have seen about twenty. Come to think of it, how did you get past the monsters in the tunnels outside the prison?”

  I shook my head.

  “No monsters,” I said. “The tunnels are pretty empty just now.”

  His face fell. Both floppy bunny ears drooped.

  “Awww, no!” he exclaimed. “They must have started early!”

  “Started what?” Cherry and I said together.

  “The invasion! The monster invasion of London! That’s what I came to tell you about yesterday!”

  This was worse than I’d thought.

  “But how can they invade?” Cherry asked Bernard. “London’s so well lit at night! An army of monsters couldn’t ever survive there.”

  Bernard shook his big bunny head.

  “I don’t know what the plan is,” he said. “But I do know they’ve got some kind of a secret weapon. And I think I know where to find it – in the New Chamber.”

  “Yeah, yeah, very nice, big fluffy traitor bunny,” Seymour piped up weakly. I’d almost forgotten about him, he’d been so quiet. “What about me, you kids, hey? You gonna keep me tied up in this pig for ever till I die, huh? How about letting me go, yeah? Now you got the bunny you don’t need me, huh?”

  “No, we don’t need you, Seymour,” I said. “But we don’t want you running off to tell the other monsters where we are. Luckily, Bernard doesn’t need these pyjamas any more.”

  We left Seymour wrapped up and whimpering in Bernard’s cell and headed back through the main chamber. As soon as Bernard stepped through the door, one of the prisoners – a huge ugly brute with three heads – yelled, “Hey! It’s the Easter Bunny!”

  I whipped Freddy out of my pocket.

  “Button it, ugly!” I told it. “Or you’ll get a mouthful of teddy.”

  The head that had spoken stared at me, suddenly terrified, while the other two tried to pretend they’d never seen it before – not very successfully, since they were all joined at the neck.

  The room was silent as we left. Through the monster underworld we went, until we reached the entrance to the New Chamber.

  There was a lot of noise coming from inside.

  “Sounds like they haven’t left this place unguarded,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Cherry, “so what do we do? We need a plan.”

  I thought for a minute.

  “OK,” I said, “here’s the only thing that makes sense to me. Bernard, you show Cherry the way back home . . . no, listen” I added as she started to argue. “Someone’s got to warn Clyde, and it’s got to be you. He won’t listen to me, and Bernard’s a monster.”

  I was right, and she knew it.

  “You be careful, Jack Slater,” she said. “Bernard’ll be back for you in a few minutes. Good luck with the monsters in there.”

  “Monsters aren’t a problem,” I grinned, not feeling half as confident as I sounded. “Good luck with Clyde – that’s the difficult job!”

  I drew Freddy from my pocket again, and pushed open the door.

  The first thing I saw, oddly, was a bed – a Pumfrey-Soames skatebed to be precise – pushed up against the wall nearby.

  The next thing I saw was a monster.

  The next forty-three things I saw after that were also monsters.

  And they were all looking straight at me.

  There was only one thing to do.

  As the monster nearest me raised its ugly, cobra-like head to strike, I stepped into the room.

  “One . . .” I said loudly.

  The monsters looked at each other in puzzlement. On the one hand, I was in the monster underworld, and they had me surrounded . . . but on the other hand, I was in my pyjamas, there was a bed in the room, and they all knew the rules.

  “Two . . .” I counted, walking towards the bed as quickly as I could. “Three . . .”

  The monsters between me and the bed unwillingly moved out of the way.

  “Four . . .” I counted, reaching the bed and hopping into it.

  “Five!” I finished triumphantly, tucking myself in. The monsters surrounded the bed, not sure of what to do next. I looked up at them cheerily.

  “So . . . what’s the plan, monsters? Where’s the secret weapon?” I looked round, but couldn’t see anything even vaguely weapon-like.

  The monsters scowled.

  “Can’t we eat him?” one of them asked. The others shook their heads.

  “He got into bed by five,” another said. “It was a fair count.”

  “But it’s our bed!” the first one protested.

  “Doesssn’t matter,” a third – the cobra-headed one – hissed. “It’sss alwaysss dark here. No morning. Sssoon he needsss to go to the toilet. We can get him then.”

  I lay back and looked at the ceiling. They were right – I couldn’t stay there for ever. But if I moved, they’d get me. It looked as if my number really was up this time.

  And then I heard it – something a trained Monster Investigator has a finely tuned ear for.

  A monster had just appeared under my bed.

  This was not a serious concern. When you have forty-four monsters gathered around you waiti
ng for you to either starve to death or go for a wee, one more shouldn’t be a problem.

  And just maybe it might be a help.

  “Don’t worry, Jack, we’ll get you out of this,” Bernard’s voice said from somewhere below me.

  I looked over the edge of the bed. The sheet was twitching.

  And then Cherry’s face popped out.

  “Evening, monsters,” she said, pointing her torch at the nearest one. “Just stand back and you won’t get hurt.”

  One of the monsters screamed, “Eeeek! There’s a child under our bed!” The one next to it gave it a slap and told it not to be so silly. Keeping the monsters covered, Cherry crawled out and stood up.

  Then one of them snarled, “You been down here three days, kid! You got no batteries left!”

  Cherry grinned. She was enjoying herself.

  I wasn’t. I didn’t think she stood a chance of bluffing her way out of this one.

  “That may be so,” she said in that quiet, menacing voice. “In all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But considering this is a Night Blaster 35 – the most powerful hand-torch in the world, and could light you up like a pumpkin at Hallowe’en – what you have to ask yourself now is: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you – punks?”

  The monsters lifted their heads and roared – an angry, triumphant roar.

  They charged.

  Cherry switched on the torch. Strong, bright light flooded the room like an instant sunrise.

  The monsters vanished.

  Cherry turned to me with the biggest grin I’d ever seen.

  “We decided Clyde would be useless,” she said. “So we went back to my room and picked up my spare torch.”

  I grinned back. “Cool,” I said. “Nice rescue. Thanks.”

  “No problem. Actually, it was kind of fun. So . . . what’s the secret weapon, Jack?”

  I was about to tell her that I didn’t have a clue, when a horrible thought suddenly struck me. I felt myself turn pale.