The Curse of the Werepenguin

by Allan Woodrow

  “Get him!” yelled one of the villagers behind Blazenda, pointing to the Baron-penguin.

  “No! Stand back!” ordered Blazenda. “The boy has to be the one to do it.”

  The villagers hesitated, staying close to the tree line, as did the others.

  The Baron-penguin spat on the ground.

  Bolt lunged toward him, tooth in hand. The tooth’s sharp point neared the creature’s penguin hide.

  But the beast was not so easily defeated. He leapt aside and at the same time back-swatted Bolt with a powerful wing. Bolt landed on the sandy ground, dazed. His hand hit a rock, and the tooth slipped from his grip.

  Bolt was toothless.

  The world spun. Bolt scanned the ground around him, but his vision was blurry and unfocused. Where was the tooth?

  There it was, by the edge of the shore, just a few feet away. He crawled onto his side and reached out his arm.

  A wave rolled in from the sea and when it ebbed, the tooth was gone.

  Bolt screamed and jumped up, ready to dive into the water to find his weapon, when a wing slapped his head. The Baron-penguin stood once more above the fallen Bolt, his beak curved into a hideous smile.

  “Face it, Humboldt. You will never defeat me.” He raised his wing, ready to crash it down on Bolt’s head. Bolt winced, picturing a hammer smashing into a watermelon, with Bolt’s head as the watermelon.

  The wing never lowered. A small penguin rammed into the Baron-penguin’s legs, and the Baron toppled over. It was Bolt’s penguin brother, whom Bolt had embraced earlier and seen again at the bandit camp. He stood on top of the Baron’s stomach, jumping up and down.

  The penguin barked. Family! Family!

  Growling, the Baron-penguin flicked the penguin away as if he were nothing more than a troublesome guppy. Bolt’s brother flew to the ground and landed on the sand with a loud thud.

  A small rock bounced off the Baron-penguin’s head. Then another rock, and then what looked like a bobby pin hit him in the eye. The monster blinked, but did not appear to be injured, or even mildly inconvenienced.

  “Go, Bolt! Get the tooth! I’ll distract him!” Annika urged, hurling more rocks at the Baron.

  Bolt staggered to his feet and ran toward the Blacker Sea. He dove into the foamy waves, his eyes searching the bottom, but could see nothing but sand and rocks.

  A moment later he heard the Baron leap into the water behind him.

  Up ahead, in the sea, the killer whale jumped and splashed—nine tons of ferocious, penguin-eating hunger. The surface exploded from its weight. Bolt could have sworn he saw the orca lick its teeth when it realized Bolt was swimming in its direction.

  But Bolt needed that tooth. Where was it?

  Fear erupted inside Bolt’s head as he kept his head above water, gasping for air. His penguin instincts were warning him to turn away from the whale. The orca was his natural enemy. But those same instincts shouted, We are family! Bolt kicked faster. His webbed feet motored him forward. The tooth was at the bottom of the sea. Bolt dove, a wing and an arm outstretched to grab the weapon.

  Bolt was a thunderbolt. Fierce. Unstoppable.

  The Baron grabbed one of Bolt’s legs as Bolt’s fingertips grazed the tooth. Bolt kicked to free himself. He rolled under the waves, but the Baron-penguin wouldn’t let go. Bolt rolled three more times, but the monster’s grasp was too firm. Bolt lashed out with a wing, slapping the beast alongside the head, but the Baron-penguin merely laughed. The waves silenced the sounds, but Bolt saw the monster’s mad and gloating grin. The tide took them farther out to sea as they jabbed and slapped, rolled and kicked, in and above the waves. The tooth was behind them, somewhere.

  The killer whale neared them, watching. Bolt ignored the near-paralyzing fear that coursed through him. If the Baron shared that fear, he did not show it. Bolt had been bobbing above the surface, but the Baron grabbed Bolt’s hair and forced his face back under the water.

  Bolt didn’t have a penguin head yet, just the start of a beak. He couldn’t hold his breath as long as a completely transformed werepenguin could. He thrashed with all his might.

  The Baron adjusted his grip, and Bolt lifted his head from the water and breathed the welcome air. The misty sea salt splashed down his throat, and he choked.

  “You don’t have a chance,” the Baron growled. “You aren’t nearly as strong as I am. I have one hundred years of penguin-ism. Prepare to meet your end. We are not family. I will make the bandits and the villagers and the penguins all suffer for your insolence.”

  Behind the Baron, the sea erupted.

  The orca rose out of the depths, its mouth stretched open. Bolt kicked the Baron-penguin with his webbed feet, forcing himself away from the whale while putting his enemy directly into its path. The orca chomped its killer whale teeth down. The Baron howled, but it was too late.

  The whale swallowed the Baron in one gulp.

  The enormous mammal released a happy burp before diving under the water and disappearing into the sea.

  From the shore, the villagers cheered, raising their torches. Members of the whale Brotherhood, or Sisterhood, or something else–hood, hugged bandits, and bandits hugged penguins. Günter hugged Franz.

  Bolt let his mind drift over the shore. The heavy cloud of hate from the Baron was dissipating, but it was Bolt’s calm and loving thoughts that soothed the penguins. Soon, all the penguins barked, “We are family!”

  It would take time, but soon every penguin mind would be restored back to its innocent, peaceful nature.

  The penguins, every last one of them, looked at Bolt as he swam in from the sea. Raising his head from the waves, he could see them. They raised their wings. For a moment, they looked like the statues in the graveyard. They saluted Bolt.

  He couldn’t imagine feeling more part of a family than he felt at that moment.

  Bolt had everything he ever wanted.

  The waves pulled Bolt back to shore. As his webbed feet touched the sandy shoreline, Annika ran up to him. “Are you OK? I mean, other than being a half-penguin monster?”

  Bolt looked down at his wing, his penguin stomach, and his webbed feet. “I guess so.”

  “Stop him!” yelled Günter, running toward Bolt with Franz by his side. “The boy is a menace!” He held a new, extra-crispy loaf of French bread over his head.

  Other whale folk ran behind him, as did some villagers. A few raised pitchforks. Others held shovels. “Stop the whale hater!” the people cried.

  “I really don’t hate the whales, although that orca was pretty frightening,” said Bolt, cringing. He had no desire to fight all these villagers, and doubted he could anyway, not alone. Had he beat the Baron only to meet his end here, on the beach?

  Maybe he could still bolt.

  But before he turned to flee, Annika jumped in front of him. “Leave Bolt alone. He just saved all of us.”

  “He’s a monster,” insisted Günter. “Get out of my way.”

  The other villagers yelled, too. “Get him! He’s a monster!”

  Vigi Lambda ran up next to his daughter and rubbed his fingers along a crisp red apple. “You’ll have to go through me, too.”

  “And me.” A scratchy ancient voice cackled through the other sounds, along with what sounded like wind chimes playing the Alphabet Song. It was Blazenda, and she locked arms with Vigi and Annika. “This boy is the chosen hero.” She turned her head to Bolt. “But I have to admit, I thought you were chosen to be slaughtered by the Baron.”

  “He is a hero,” agreed Annika. “Thanks to Bolt, Baron Chordata is no more.” Although she spoke his name, no one screamed or fainted. The mood lightened. Villagers nodded their heads. Pitchforks were lowered. Shovels were dropped to the ground.

  Even Günter put down his French bread. “Well, maybe he doesn’t hate whales all that much.”

  “Come l
ive with us. We can be like brother and sister,” said Annika, taking Bolt’s non-wing hand in hers.

  “We’ll look past your flippers,” said Vigi. “I’ve already added a warty, greenish daughter today, why not a penguin-ish son, too?”

  Bolt looked into Annika’s eyes. It was tempting. A sister. A family. Maybe even a real family.

  “I know we’re bandits and we live in a forest,” said Annika. “Which isn’t always very comfortable. But nothing is more important than family.”

  “Even kidnapping and carriage robbing are less important, although only a little less,” added Vigi Lambda.

  “They are right,” said Günter. “Family is everything. I had a daughter once. She vanished one night. I always assumed she was kidnapped, but I never got a ransom note.”

  “Wait,” said Vigi. “Is your address 919?”

  “No, it’s 616, why?”

  “No reason,” said Vigi, coughing and looking away.

  Annika put her arm around Bolt. “See, Bolt? You told me once that you would always be unwanted. But I want you. My father wants you. All of Volgelplatz wants you. You taught me there is nothing more important than family. A family can be a mom or a dad or a grandparent. But it can also be a group of bandits or a village.”

  Bolt felt his skin tremble as the moon finally peeked out from behind a cloud. His small penguin friend stood by the side, wing to wing with the other penguins. It barked.

  Brother?

  Above, the clouds slowly drifted away from the moon. “Thank you, but I have a family already,” Bolt said to Annika. “And they are waiting for someone to help them find their way. My brothers and sisters need me. We are family.”

  The storm clouds lifted. Light from the pure, unfiltered, always-full Brugarian moon beamed down over the water and onto Bolt. Bolt dashed beneath the water, and the penguins, thousands of them, ran after him and joined him in the sea.

  EPILOGUE

  Midnight at the St. Aves Zoo

  The man stopped talking. It took me a moment to remember where I was, here at the St. Aves Zoo. My watch showed it was a minute before midnight. The time had gone quickly.

  I sneezed again and reached for my tissues. I wiped my nose. There was only one tissue left.

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “That’s the end of the story.”

  “The end?” I shrieked. “How can it be the end? What about ‘Happily ever after’ or ‘And then Bolt turned back into a human’? There are a million ways to end a story, but yours was not one of them.”

  “Make-believe tales may end, but life does not. It just goes on.”

  “What happened to Bolt?”

  “He found the family he always wanted. He was loved, and he loved back, and that’s really the most important thing.”

  “Was Bolt ever adopted?”

  The man shrugged.

  “Was his curse lifted?” I persisted.

  The man shrugged again.

  “There’s a lot of shrugging going on,” I pointed out.

  The man shrugged one more time.

  “What of the girl? Annika?”

  “No one knows for certain what happened to her. But I’ve heard tell of a Brugarian bandit, a woman, although she goes by the name Vigi Lambda. Many say she is the greatest bandit who ever lived.” The man smiled, a smile of longing, but not of regret. Whatever choices he had made in life, he was content with them. “Should I have the penguins ready for you, when you depart in the morning?”

  I frowned. I scowled. My shoulders sagged. “No. I cannot take your penguins. My employers will be disappointed, but how can I break up a family, or remove them from such a comfortable home? Your story, it seems, has done its job, my friend, even if it means I can no longer do mine. But still, I thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For opening my eyes. I’ve always thought of a zoo as merely a cage for animals, for them to be gaped at for the public’s amusement. But perhaps animals deserve a happy home and a family, too. I have a lot to think about.”

  The man bowed. “I am glad my story could enlighten you. Now, it is only a few seconds before midnight and I must take my leave. When midnight strikes, my work here is just beginning.”

  I sneezed not once, but twice. I used the very last tissue. By the time I looked back up, the man had neared the penguin exhibit. He waddled the entire way.

  “In the end, Bolt was wanted,” the man said, looking back at me as he opened the exhibit door. “He loved his home. He found a family. He couldn’t have asked for a better life.”

  He walked through the door and as he did, his jacket rode up his back. I could have sworn it revealed a black penguin tail just starting to grow.

  “What are you doing here?” A guard, burly and strong, grabbed my arm. “It’s midnight. The zoo closed hours ago. You need to leave, sir.”

  “The man I was talking to just now,” I said, as the guard led me away. “What was his name? The penguin caretaker.”

  “There’s no penguin caretaker here,” huffed the guard. “You’re imagining things.”

  I looked back to the exhibit one last time. Fifteen penguins barked at me.

  Although I could have sworn there had only been fourteen penguins just a moment before.

  TURN THE PAGE TO BEGIN READING . . .

  1.

  My Life as a Penguin

  It was a city of snow: the glaciers were its skyscrapers, the floating ice sheets its roads, and the thousands of penguins barking along the seashore its remarkably well-dressed, tuxedo-clad citizens.

  Humboldt Wattle—people had called him Bolt back when there were other people around to call him anything—was almost thirteen but not quite, and he was a penguin, but also not quite and certainly not at that very moment. He sat in the snow on a hill wearing only a pair of ripped sweatpants and a thin, tattered T-shirt. That outfit would have been quite insufficient to keep anyone else comfortable in this frozen tundra, but Bolt was cozy. He couldn’t feel cold.

  Bolt could, however, feel the thoughts of his penguin brothers and sisters waddling along the shore, although he was not one of them. Not truly. He would never lay an egg, or at least he hoped he wouldn’t. He would never molt. He would never spend his afternoon frolicking in the arctic sea.

  He would only frolic in the arctic sea at night.

  For such was Bolt’s plight, to turn into a penguin under a full moon. But those nights! They were glorious! He would swim with his family, yowl with them, and carouse with them.

  It was too bad full moons were so few and far between. The rest of the time, Bolt was merely human, or at least mostly so. For despite his outside appearance, Bolt had penguin blood surging inside him. He could read penguin minds. He could talk with them, play with them, and love them. Always.

  But. There was a something deep down inside the birds, a barrier that was hard and round and slightly crusty, and no matter how hard Bolt tried to be penetrate that crust, he couldn’t quite do it. That crusty something was primal and ancient and alien to Bolt, and it separated him from the rest of the rookery. Before joining this colony, before even coming to Brugaria, Bolt had been an unwanted orphan. It seemed that, no matter what he did and how far he traveled, he would never truly feel wanted, not completely, on land or in sea.

  For that was his curse: the curse of the werepenguin.

  As Bolt sat on his snowy hill, he rubbed his fingers against a slim gold chain around his neck. That chain had once held a killer whale tooth, but the tooth had been lost when Bolt fought the Baron, the diabolical despot who had bitten Bolt and left him like this, part penguin and part human. Bolt had survived the battle, and the Baron’s remains, if any were left, sat inside the stomach of a sea mammal.

  After the fight, Bolt had led the penguins here, hundreds of miles away, far from other people, where they could live i
n peace. Bolt needed to protect them. It was what he was chosen to do.

  Many new penguins had joined the colony since then. Word of the young werepenguin, who treated penguins not as his servants but as his family, had spread far and wide, told from the glubs of fish, the chirps of birds, and the legs of ice crickets.

  Bolt stood up, stretched his legs, and strode down the hill. His walk was part waddle and part human, just like the rest of him.

  “Good afternoon,” barked a nearby penguin, and Bolt smiled. Bolt had never been able to perfect any sort of clear penguin bark, at least not in his human form, but he thought the words Good afternoon to you and the penguin smiled, as best a penguin can, which is not much of a smile at all.

  Penguins show their emotions through their eyes, mostly. Beaks are not very expressive.

  Bolt added, Have a great day, Lara. I mean Sara. Clara? No, Dara. Sorry about that.

  Most penguins look the same, even to each other, but each have their own unique smell. Bolt’s mostly human nose was a weak sniffer compared to a penguin’s, so he relied on his mind-reading to identify most penguins.

  As Bolt walked through the colony, nodding and smiling to his brothers and sisters, sometimes messing up their names but not usually, he heard a shout, not a bark but an actual humanlike cry. It took him a few seconds to realize he wasn’t imagining it. Yes, it was a human voice, a girl’s voice, calling out in the distance.

  No, that was impossible. The colony was at least fifty miles from any human town.

  “Bolt!”

  Or maybe it was possible.

  Bolt turned and there, in the horizon, was a girl, waving. A short penguin stood next to her, panting, a small rubber bone in its beak.

  Bolt ran toward the figures, his fowl-blood-powered legs skimming across the ice with more traction than if he wore snow boots. He bounded across the snow as the girl with the waving hand, a girl who was about Bolt’s age with blonde hair held up by bobby pins, collapsed. She fell first to her knees, and then the rest of her buckled and flopped to the ground like a dead fish. The small penguin next to her bent down beside her and gave a doglike bark.