Maddy West and the Tongue Taker

by Brian Falkner

  “Come on, Dimitar,” Maddy said. “Say something.” She pointed at her own mouth and flapped it open and shut as if to remind him how to do it.

  Dimitar opened his mouth. He counted to five in a voice that sounded rusty and awkward, as though he hadn’t used it in a while. His face broke into a huge smile.

  “I can speak!” he said.

  “That’s fantastic!” Maddy said.

  “Wonderful!” Kazuki said in Japanese, and Maddy translated for Dimitar.

  “It was terrible,” Dimitar said. “I couldn’t understand anyone, and nobody could understand me.”

  Kazuki gave her a sad look when she translated that for him, and suddenly she understood: that was every day in Kazuki’s world.

  Dimitar picked up the piece of dragon’s tongue and put it back in the tube, pushing the cork in tightly as if afraid it would somehow steal his voice again. Maddy took the tube and examined it. The top of the tongue was rough and lumpy, a bit like her own when she looked at it in the mirror. It was small, about the size of her little fingernail and not much thicker. The strangest thing was the way it quivered and moved. It gave her the creeps. She put the tube in a pocket where she wouldn’t have to look at it.

  “Now we must go to the police,” Maddy said. She would have jumped up then and there if the waitress hadn’t arrived at the table with her and Kazuki’s mekitsi. They smelled wonderful.

  “We have to be very careful what we tell them,” Dimitar said. “Perhaps it’s best not mention the witch.”

  “When I told you we’d been kidnapped by a witch, you didn’t laugh. You didn’t tell me not to be silly,” Maddy said.

  Dimitar nodded. “But for me, this is not so unusual. My father was a kind of a . . . a magic man. My grandfather also.”

  “I met your father,” Maddy said.

  “You did?”

  “On a train,” Maddy said. “Although it may have been in a dream. He said he would watch out for me.”

  “But he is gone,” Dimitar said. “And he can’t look out for you.”

  “I think he tried,” Maddy said.

  “How?” Kazuki asked, after Maddy translated for him.

  “Mr. Chester,” Maddy said. “He’s far too clever for a monkey. He’s like a little guardian angel.” She stopped and dropped her eyes. “Or he was like a little guardian angel.”

  “I will miss my father’s monkey,” Dimitar said. “I miss them both.”

  The terrible image came back to Maddy of Mr. Chester struggling in the claws of the crow. She tried to shut it out of her mind, but it made her want to cry.

  “Mr. Chester was a good friend,” she said.

  “But he did fart a lot,” Dimitar said.

  Maddy laughed.

  “Now we must hurry to the police station,” Dimitar said. “Before the witch does anything.”

  “The witch wouldn’t dare try anything now, would she?” Maddy asked. “Now we’ve escaped. We know what she has done and where she is.”

  “It is because we have escaped that I am afraid,” Dimitar said. “She knows we will be going to the police. She knows she will be arrested. She might disappear, or go into hiding, or do something much worse. Who knows what she will do?”

  “Then we must go, before it’s too late,” Maddy said, and repeated it in Japanese for Kazuki.

  “It might already be too late,” Kazuki said, his eyes wide.

  He was staring over Maddy’s shoulder out the front window of the café.

  “What?” Maddy asked, twisting around to look.

  Through the large plate-glass windows, the dark shape of the mountain rose up in front of them. Smoke was pouring from the top of it, and a light yellow mist was spreading out in all directions. It was filtering across the blue of the sky, turning it green and staining the puffy white clouds with an ugly yellow tinge.

  “That is the strangest thing.” The waitress had just arrived at their table with Dimitar’s coffee. She was also peering out the window.

  The mist was moving quickly, extending its yellow tentacles out through the sky in all directions.

  “It’s her,” Maddy said. “It’s a spell!” Her hand instinctively went to her neck, feeling for the runestone that the witch had said would protect them.

  Whatever spell the witch was casting, it was on a much grander scale than before. What had been a wisp of smoke in the witch’s lair was now a huge plume of yellow smoke, belching up from the mountain. It looked like a volcano about to erupt.

  “I’ve lived here all my life,” the waitress said, “and I have never seen such a strange urgh as that before.”

  “Urgh?” Maddy asked.

  The waitress looked confused. “I meant mist,” she said. “Those mountains often get covered in mist, but not at this time of kwuffle. And never a strange yellow blibblob like that.” She frowned. “I remember one gwurble when I was just befubloodle and I globiddy gunga onka onka.”

  “It’s the tongue spell!” Kazuki said. There was a strange haze in the room now, and Maddy noticed the thin layer of smoke that was curling under the door of the café.

  “The smoke,” she said. She jumped up and began to stuff paper napkins under the door, but it was clear that she was too late. The smoke was no longer coming into the café. Instead, thick and lumpy, it was seeping back outside.

  The waitress had a look of utter confusion. She set the coffee cup on the table, and her hand found her mouth, touching her lips and cheeks as if to make sure they were still there.

  “Bungadoodle quar quar ombo poppa humba homba elbo no no umm mmmm,” she said.

  She covered her mouth with her hands and rushed back behind the counter.

  “It’s the tongue-taking spell!” Maddy said, in both languages.

  “I was afraid the witch would do something like this,” Dimitar said. “She’s trying to cover her tracks.”

  “Quickly!” Maddy said. “We must get to the police.” They jumped up and ran toward the door.

  The police station was a few doors down the street, but a crowd of people, congregating from every direction, surrounded it.

  Confusion was spreading and turning to panic. Maddy watched two men fighting outside a barber’s shop yelling gibberish at each other. Other people were trying to calm them down and separate them, but they had no words to do so.

  Everywhere people were milling around. Some were silent. Perhaps they were afraid to open their mouths for fear of what they might say. Others were shouting nonsense at anyone around them, none of whom, of course, could understand it.

  Everybody looked scared and angry.

  It occurred to Maddy, at that moment, that apart from the witch and her daughters, she, Kazuki, and Dimitar were possibly the only people in the town who still had the ability to talk to one another. They started to make their way through the crowd toward the police station, and Dimitar pulled Maddy and Kazuki close to him to protect them. As the crowd got thicker, he picked Maddy up and put her on his shoulders like she was a small child. He then picked up Kazuki and held him on his hip with one arm as easily as if he weighed nothing at all.

  Maddy looked around at all the commotion and the angry people, and it made her sad. It made her angry, too. Angry at the evil witch who had caused all this.

  “Turn around,” she said, and Dimitar did. There was no way through and no point anyway. The police, too, would be under the witch’s spell by now. How could the police help — how could anyone help — when they couldn’t tell them what was going on?

  “Ask Dimitar if he has a phone,” Kazuki said.

  A phone! Why hadn’t I thought of that? Maddy wondered. She asked Dimitar, and he quickly produced one from his pocket.

  “Can I call my parents?” Maddy asked.

  Dimitar nodded. “Of course.”

  He showed her how to call England
, and she dialed the rest of the number herself, but after five or six rings it went to voicemail.

  She handed Kazuki the phone. “Try your parents.”

  “I’ll call Dad’s cell number,” Kazuki said.

  He dialed and then put the phone to his ear. Maddy could hear the ringing sound coming from the tiny speaker.

  After just a few rings, the phone was answered.

  “Dad! Dad!” Kazuki said, then froze, and his face went white.

  “What is it?” Maddy asked.

  Kazuki lifted the phone away from his ear. Maddy could hear Kazuki’s father’s voice quite clearly, even if it was a little bit tinny.

  “Lordy-doody, muckle boo, ba boomba boomba.”

  Kazuki tried a couple more times to talk to his father, but after that, Maddy reached out and took the phone from him.

  “It’s no use,” she said. “The spell must be spreading farther and faster than we could possibly have imagined.”

  “All the way to England?” Kazuki asked.

  Maddy rested a hand gently on his arm. “I forgot to tell you — your parents were flying to Bulgaria to look for you. They are here already.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  RECIPE FOR A THUNDERSTORM

  THEY LEFT THE CROWD and walked back along the main street. Dimitar stopped suddenly outside a sports shop. He pushed open the door, which jangled an old-fashioned bell inside, and entered.

  “What are you doing?” Maddy asked, but Dimitar just gave her a grim look.

  The shop was much bigger inside than you would have thought from the small window on the street front. It opened out into a large room filled with sports equipment of all different kinds. The largest displays, near the front, were all for soccer, with balls and shin guards and a variety of shirts from different soccer teams.

  There was no sign of a shopkeeper, yet the shop was clearly open, and a cup of coffee was cooling on the counter.

  “We have to stop her,” Dimitar said, and Maddy knew he was right even though it gave her chills just thinking about it.

  She looked at Kazuki, wondering whether to translate Dimitar’s words for him. He must have been reading their minds however, because he said it too.

  “We have to go back,” Kazuki said. “Before midnight.”

  “Dimitar and I will go back,” Maddy said. “You stay here, just in case . . .” She stopped because she couldn’t actually think of an “in case,” but the last thing she needed was to be worrying about Kazuki when they were heading into such danger.

  “I have to come,” he said. “I promised to protect you.”

  “Okay,” Maddy said. “You can be our lookout. You can go invisible and keep a lookout to help us stay safe.”

  “Okay,” Kazuki said, and he looked quite relieved. “Can I borrow the phone again?”

  Maddy translated, and Dimitar gave him the phone.

  Kazuki played around with it for a moment, pressing icons until he found a mapping program. He found their location on the map, then located the witch’s house, high in the mountains. He pressed a few more buttons then handed the phone back to Maddy.

  Dimitar, watching closely, raised an eyebrow.

  “I found the map coordinates for the old house,” Kazuki said. “I emailed them to my mom and dad.”

  “Clever!” Maddy said and explained it to Dimitar.

  Dimitar went to the baseball stand. He picked up a wooden bat and swung it a couple of times, single-handed. Happy with the weight and feel of the bat, he picked up another one. Kazuki looked briefly around the shop, then found a pack of baseballs, which disappeared somewhere into his ninja suit.

  Dimitar took out his wallet and left some bills on the counter, then walked past the counter to the rear of the shop. A set of car keys was hanging on a hook by the back door. Dimitar picked them up as he passed.

  The door led out to a small loading dock. A white van was parked there, and it had the name of the shop emblazoned on its side.

  They all sat in the front seat since there was no backseat, and Dimitar drove out of the parking area and along a narrow delivery lane that seemed only just wide enough for the van. He found the highway and turned toward the mountains.

  Maddy sat in the middle. The two baseball bats leaning against the seat jostled against her leg as they drove.

  “Look at the mountain,” Kazuki said.

  They all looked. It was different than before, but that was because they could only see half of it. The upper half was hidden by thick black thunderclouds in a perfect ring around the mountain. It was most unusual because the rest of the sky was clear. The clouds roiled and flashed with lightning, and the thunder rolled around them as the van rushed down the highway in that direction.

  “That’s a strange thunderstorm,” Dimitar said.

  “She made it,” Maddy said softly.

  They turned off the highway onto the mountain road and began to climb. Soon they were in the forest, and not long after that, they were in the midst of the thunderstorm as well. Maddy could see the rain in front of them like a curtain across the road. In just one second, the windshield went from totally dry to awash with flowing sheets of water that the wipers did little to clear.

  It was as black as night under the thunderstorm, and it was a wonder that Dimitar could see where they were going, Maddy thought. That worried her, especially with the steep drop that she knew was just to the side of them.

  Around them, lightning burned the sky. Once, twice, it lit up the inside of the van like a camera flash, then a whole barrage of strikes that sounded like machine-gun fire turned the thunderstorm’s night back into day.

  Some of the strikes were close, and the dark forest around them exploded momentarily into light as a tree was struck. The air was thick with the strange smell of electricity.

  Wind also beat at the van, hammering it one way and then the other as Dimitar fought to keep it in the center of the road. He was driving slowly to avoid driving off the road in the dark, but still Maddy grabbed at the edge of the seat whenever the wind caught the van on a sharp corner. The van tilted up several times, to the point where she thought it might tip over on its side. After a few turns like that, Kazuki’s hand crept into hers, and that steadied her.

  Still, the rain kept falling, flooding across the windows. In the forest around them, Maddy was conscious of movement. Dark shapes crept amongst the trees and followed the van on its painstaking journey up the hill. Once or twice, Maddy thought she saw the glow of animal eyes reflected in the lightning.

  They rounded another sharp corner, and the van suddenly stopped. Maddy peered over the dashboard, trying to see why. It took her a moment to see it, and she wondered how Dimitar had managed to stop in time to avoid a collision.

  The branch of a tree had crashed right across the road. It was huge — from one of the heavy oaks in the forest. The branch was almost a tree in itself. The scorched end showed why it had fallen.

  Dimitar started to open the door of the van, and rain sprayed inside, propelled by the wind. Then there was an eerie noise.

  “Wolves!” Maddy cried, and Dimitar paused and then picked up one of the baseball bats before opening the door again.

  “This is the horn,” he said, and pressed the middle of the steering wheel. It made a long beep. He looked back at them and said, “If you see a wolf, sound the horn.”

  Dimitar got out of the car, mindless of the teeming rain that soaked him in a second. His long hair plastered down over his head, and his beard ran a river down his chest. He strode toward the fallen branch, the baseball bat held firmly in one hand. He scanned the forest around him, but when no wolves, or crows, or animals, or birds of any kind emerged, he put the bat on the ground within easy reach and began to pull on the branch.

  Maddy rested her hand lightly on the horn, trying to watch everywhere at the same time.
She thought she saw movement in the trees to the right of where Dimitar was working. She almost pressed the horn, but Dimitar had heard it or seen it as well. He let go of the branch and picked up the bat, waiting and watching for a moment. Nothing came into view. It might have been the wind.

  He put the bat back down and resumed hauling the heavy branch.

  Maddy doubted if any normal man could have moved the branch at all, but Dimitar hauled it right to the side of the road, clearing a path before climbing back into the van.

  “Are you okay?” Maddy asked. “You’re all wet.”

  “It’s just water,” Dimitar said. He wiped his face with a grimy hand that left smears of mud down his face and made him look even more fearsome than before.

  They drove carefully past the fallen branch and rounded another corner.

  The hillside dropped away to the left and now, across a small valley, they could see the dark walls and wicked spires of the witch’s hideaway.

  Maddy shuddered and felt Kazuki shrink down in the seat beside her. Seeing that house, appearing and reappearing like a mirage through the sheets of rain that fell into the valley, made her want to turn and run away.

  They emerged from the rain as suddenly as they had entered it. One moment they were being lashed by gushes of water and the next they were driving under a cloudless sky, rapidly darkening with the approach of night. Out across the valley now, they could see the storm, a giant ring around the mountain. It was still flashing and thundering amidst the turbulent clouds but was clear in the center.

  The storm wasn’t done with them yet though, and just as the road turned sharply back toward the storm, there was another huge burst of light and a simultaneous crash of thunder. An entire oak tree was falling out of the storm front right before their eyes, its mighty trunk cleaved by the terrible swift sword of lightning.