Brass Monkeys (35 page)

While he did this, I was aware of Ray screaming something at me. It finally came through:
Devos was turning on the big suction engine
. Parts of the Rumble Fish began to break loose and whoosh upward. My shirt ballooned out. I saw Todd Lemon’s trumpet start to go so I grabbed it, but that was all I could do.

Our craft lurched straight up, caught in the furious updraft, and with a splintering impact we came to rest glued tightly to the underbelly of Devos’s craft.

Sections of the cabin began to break loose around me. I could feel my seat shuddering under me and I knew in a second it would rip loose. I glanced up and stared right into the whirling blades of the hovercraft’s suction engine.

While all this was happening, we continued to lose altitude. Our weight was too much for Devos’s craft, and now we both started falling swiftly toward the mountains. Suddenly there was a tremendous bang as if we had exploded, and for a moment I was knocked senseless.

When I recovered, I realized dimly that Devos had released us. We were drifting Earthward, lost in a fatal glide, and I could see why we had been freed. A looming mountain of books lay straight ahead. Clearly we were going to crash into it, and maybe Devos was too. I could hear the hovercraft’s engines bellowing wildly as the little man tried to claw out of there.

The mountainside rushed at us. I caught a glimpse of Devos’s craft striking the upper slope of the mountain and bursting into a huge ball of fire, but that victory was totally lost on me because a split second later we crashed, bellying into a huge mound of magazines. We bounded upward, hit again with a tremendous impact, then went blasting along on our belly until we smashed into a wall of hard-cover volumes and came to such a violent stop. I thought my teeth would fly out.

I sat there for several seconds in a daze. When I finally snapped out of it, I found I was nearly buried in
Collier’s Junior Classics
and staring at volume 9, titled
Call of Adventure
. Luckily the trumpet had survived the crash and was perched on some books just to my right. I felt inside my shirt and there was
Brass Monkeys
still safe inside the plastic sack.

I shoved the
Junior Classics
away from me, undid my straps, and leaned over to help Jack. He was conscious now and struggling to unbuckle his belt.

“I’m okay, kid,” he said in a dazed voice. “I’m fine. I just got hit in the arm.”

“You’ve got blood on your forehead.” My voice was shaking.

“Just flying debris. Get back there quick and help the others. I’m coming.”

“Right.” I picked up the trumpet and thrashed my way back to Harriet, who was struggling into a sitting position. She reached up and gave me a fierce hug. Ray popped up now, rising out of a mound of
Wizard of Oz
books.

“Holy Crow, I can’t believe it! I ain’t dead!”

We pushed on through the wreckage and found Teddy huddled over Lilah. She was sitting up, examining a wound on her leg.

“Is it bad?” I asked quickly.

Lilah read my lips and gave a little laugh. “Just a scratch. This is the bullet.” She held up a small metallic object.

Teddy looked amazed. “It’s a staple!”

Ray shot me a glance. “That’s old Devos’s favorite, all right.”

“That
and
tacks,” said Jack as he joined us. He held out a handful of nasty-looking ones. “I just pulled these beauties out of my arm.”

Lilah let out a sympathetic cry, but Jack shushed her and knelt by her side. “I’m fine. Let’s make sure you’re okay.”

The rest of us backed out of the way and Harriet, Ray, and I exchanged a look. We had caught the note of concern in Jack’s voice.

“Ring-a-ding,” Ray whispered. “It’s Lilah.”

Harriet and I grinned. The missing piece about Jack’s decision to join us snapped into place.
Lilah
. Now it made sense to me.

“You know what?” said Teddy. “There’s a big fire higher up.”

We all looked. Several hundred yards up the steep slope of books, I could see some wreckage on fire. Black smoke billowed into the air.

“It’s Devos,” I said.

Jack whirled around and stared at me. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “Dead sure. I think that’s why he let us go—he knew he was being dragged into the mountain. But he did it too late.”

We scrambled out of the Rumble Fish and stared up at the fire.

“I have to hand it to you, Bumpus,” said Jack. “That’ll upset the Big Lady.”

“Trust me, I didn’t do a thing,” I said. “The guy just went nuts trying to vacuum us up with his oversized Hoover and he didn’t know where he was going.”

“Speaking of not knowing where one is going,” said Teddy, signing and staring around at the book-littered landscape, “do we know?”

Lilah frowned thoughtfully. “Just before we went down, I’m pretty sure I saw the Bobbsey Twins right on the other side of this mountain. If that’s true, then this mountain is one of the Nancy Drew Pinnacles.”

Jack expelled his breath. “That means we have to climb over this baby just to get a glimpse of the Bobbsey Twins.”

I groaned. Even going a mile in this tangle of books would take forever.

“And I’m not one hundred percent sure the Bobbsey Twins are on the other side,” said Lilah. She shook her head apologetically. “It
looked
that way.”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing I’m sure of,” said Teddy, “it’s beginning
to
snow!”

He was right. Grainy flakes pattered down on the books and magazines.

“Snow? How can that be?” muttered Jack, signing it to Lilah. “That’s crazy.”

Lilah shook her head. “Maybe not. The drones have gossiped about snow for a long time. A few months ago some of them reported seeing ice storms in the Book Mountains. It’s because the Mountains are the farthest from the heat of the overhead lights. Also the high peaks are quite chilly at night. That combined with some cold springs coming down from the overhead roof—well, it makes snow!”

“Well, while we sit here and discuss it,” said Ray, “time’s flying and we ain’t getting anywhere.”

“Good point, Ray,” I said. “We can’t afford to just sit here.”

“Ssshh!” Jack hissed, then signed, “I hear something.”

We froze and listened while Lilah peered around.

“What is it?” I whispered to Jack.

He had turned pale.
“Bells,”
he said grimly. “Coming this way.”

I could hear the bells now, but they weren’t making the awful discordant sound I expected. Instead, they jingled brightly and happily like bells usually do in the winter. Then another sound started up—someone singing—a man’s voice. It was the kind of music that made you feel so happy you wanted to get up and march.

“That has to be McGinty’s music,” said Harriet, giving me an excited look.

“Has to be,” murmured Ray. “Man, it rocks.”

The singing and the ringing of bells grew louder and louder, and even though it sounded friendly, I saw Jack’s hands ball into fists.

A big sleigh driven by a lone man and pulled by six large hairy goats burst around a ledge of books and came straight toward us. The goats’ harnesses glittered with dozens of silver bells that jingled merrily.

The driver was a tall, gaunt-looking man dressed in a butterscotch-colored coat with a large brown fur collar. He looked unhealthily pale, his long thin hair was gray, and he was singing at the top of his lungs.

“Jeezo-peezo,” muttered Teddy. He was signing everything for Lilah. “Who is this character?”

I turned quickly to Ray. “Is it McGinty?”

“Absoltootly no way,” he said. “Not this guy.”

The goats came jingling to a stop. The man in the sleigh stood up and regarded us with piercing eyes that were framed by beetling, white brows. I thought he looked like an old and very mad prophet.

“Well! You’ve made a nice mess of things, haven’t you?” he cried. “If you were going to shoot Devos down, why didn’t you do it over the cheap paperback section? Who was the blithering idiot at the controls, might I ask?”

“I was,” said Jack. “Sort of.” He actually got a little red in the face.

“Really? Well, let me just say,” snapped the man, “you should stick to driving grocery carts. Look what you’ve done to my books!” His penetrating eyes swung over and found me. I could see him give my trumpet the once-over. “There’s a nice piece of sheet metal. But, I must say, trumpets bore me.”

I was about to snap back, “Tough luck, mister,” but he dismissed me with a flick of his hand. “Enough of this chatter. You’d better jump in if you know what’s good for you.”

“And you’d better slow down, buster,” said Jack. He had that flinty look in his eyes. “We don’t know who you are or where you think you’re taking us. We’re here to find one person—a guy named McGinty.”

The tall man burst out with a harsh laugh. “Aren’t you the snappy little man! I’ll tell you who I am—Harvey Haggerty at your service! And where would I be taking you? Why to my hideout, that’s where. And is McGinty there? Why of course he is! But if you insist on standing here yacking your heads off, you’re going to be joined very soon by that group of gentlemen.”

He pointed downhill to a distant knot of men coming rapidly toward us. Fear shot through me. Even at that distance I recognized their maroon coats and their storm-tossed hair.

Without another word we scrambled into the sleigh while Haggerty howled gleefully, “What’s wrong? Don’t you want to stick around and have a cup of tea with the Stormies?”

Before Teddy was completely seated, Haggerty raised his whip and snapped it over the backs of the goats. We set off with a wild lurch across the books that were now covered with a thin coating of snow.

As we raced up the side of the mountain, I heard Teddy cry out fearfully, “This is making me nervous!”

Haggerty’s only response was a wild laugh. We plunged on up the snowy slope, past craggy peaks of encyclopedias and huge outcrop-pings of reference books. We slid crazily across a slanting plateau of books by Madeleine L’Engle, then bounced wildly over some hillocks of Jane Yolen books. When we emerged higher up the trail, we found ourselves in a huge canyon of Judy Blume’s work. Twice the sleigh slid dangerously close to the humongous drop-offs and I thought we were goners, but each time the goats yanked us back and saved us.

Finally we came out into a high mountain pass where it was storming really hard. Haggerty pulled the goats to an abrupt stop and then began rummaging in a bag of junk he carried on the front seat of the sleigh. He finally popped up with an ancient-looking telescope and began studying the terrain below.

“No sign of the hairy knuckleheads,” he said. “They’re probably reporting to old Stingley Mingley right now and she’ll be buzzing like a wet wasp.” He snapped the telescope shut. “I’m glad I’m not in that smelly school of hers tonight!”

“But I have friends who are,” I burst out with a bit of temper. I couldn’t help it.

Haggerty turned and gazed at me for a moment and his eyes seemed to soften. “We’ve all had friends in there at one time or another, sonny. But so far we haven’t been able to do anything about it.”

I was about to argue this, but Haggerty snapped his whip and we started down into a small valley of paperbacks. Harriet squeezed my arm and pointed ahead. I could see the four peaks now—the Bobbsey Twins—just visible in the blowing snow. A few minutes later we went jingling past them.

“I’m getting awfully cold back here,” called out Teddy. “Are we about there?”

Haggerty snorted loudly. “Such a namby-pamby! No wonder we can’t defeat Mingley. Pull yourself together, man.” And Haggerty began bellowing out his earlier tune:

Hear the bells through sleet and snow, Crack the heavens and
let
it blow
.

Teddy leaned toward us and signed and whispered, “He’s a little flat.”

“He’s a little nuts,” added Jack.

“I think we should be nice to him,” said Harriet. “He just saved our lives.”

“Exactly,” said Lilah, and she reached over and patted Harriet on the back.

The goats pulled us through the blowing snow for another ten or fifteen minutes, and by that time we were all singing along. Even Jack was reluctantly joining in on the chorus.
Wind, snow, and bless my soul, Let’s dance, dance to the big drum roll
.

We had just completed the song for the third time when I spotted the first of the
Boxcar Children
books. At first they seemed to be scattered about willy-nilly, but then I realized we were actually heading up a large mound of them. When we topped that hill of books, I could see Haggerty’s house just ahead.

It was a small, two-story structure nestled under an overhanging cliff of books. Its neat stone chimney smoked merrily, and I could see several windows gleaming with light. When we drew closer, I realized Haggerty had built most of his house out of the only material close at hand:
books
.

“Very cool,” commented Ray. Then he added wistfully, “But I wish I had read more so I’d recognize this stuff.”

Jack leaned in, signing and speaking. “Well kid, you’re finally coming to the end of the trail. You wanted to find McGinty all this time and you’re about to get your wish.”

I nodded. “I’ve come a long way to give him
Brass Monkeys
.”

Lilah gave me a warm smile. “You’ve been so brave.”

“Hey, not me,” I said quickly. “Without you guys I couldn’t have done a thing.”

“For crying out loud, don’t get him started,” said Jack. “The next thing you know we’ll be exchanging hugs.”

Haggerty brought the goats to a stop with a loud, “Whoa, you hairy fools!” That sounded harsh, but you could tell he was fond of them because in the next breath he had jumped down and was petting them and saying silly things.

The rest of us got down, stretched, and looked around curiously. Right away Harriet and I were staring at the house made of books.

“I don’t recognize any of those titles,” Harriet whispered to me.

I nodded. “Me neither. I don’t think they’re children’s books.”

“Nice house,” said Jack, loud enough for Haggerty to hear. “It takes a smart man to build his foundation out of Beethoven, his first floor out of Brahms and Mozart, then top it off with a second floor made from Delius.”