Ravenspell Book 2: The Wizard of Ooze (13 page)

Chapter 21

HIS FATHER’S SON

We can’t always choose our relatives,
but we can choose how to get rid of them.

—FLUKE GUTCRAWLER

“We are the conqueror worms!”

Fluke Gutcrawler whirled around the room, dancing. He sang:

Both of my feet feel lighter than air,

That’s why I’m dancing, like Fred Astaire—

The old soft shoooooee . . .

Scooby bebop—what else can I do?

Suddenly the floor of the cavern twisted violently and began to buck. The whole world was shaking. Fluke lunged for cover just as a huge stalactite dropped from the roof, crashing nearby, sending out shards of broken rock.

A hot wind surged through the cavern, rushing in from a side tunnel. Slobber goblins screamed in terror and pain.

“Father!” Fluke cried.

Just then Sebaceous Ooze wormed his way into the room, slobber goblins at his side, snot spiders swarming around him like his personal guard.

He was smiling a wormy smile. “Nothing to worry about,” Sebaceous told his son. “Nothing to worry about at all.”

“But, Father,” Sebaceous Ooze cried, “the ground was shaking.”

“Just a little tremor,” Sebaceous said. “The volcano is about to blow! We should all be very happy. It’s our big day. We should be very happy indeed.”

Fluke wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t well learned, either. His brain had just recently grown in, and though it functioned well enough, he still hadn’t been properly schooled.

“Father,” he asked, “what happens when this volcano blows?”

Sebaceous grinned wickedly. “Well, it’s like this. The center of the earth is very hot, very hot indeed. All of the rocks and metals are constantly boiling down there.

“Meanwhile, the crust of the earth is just a thin layer of cooler rocks, only a few miles thick. This thin layer of rock is like skin, over an infected pustule. In some places, this skin is rather thin. And where it thins out, volcanoes are likely to form. Sort of like a pimple on the face of the earth.”

“Oh,” Fluke said. “So, what happens when this pimple pops?”

“Well,” Sebaceous said, “normally a little bit of molten rock and poisonous gas shoots up into the air.

“But that’s what happens when a normal volcano blows. The volcano that our mice are digging is far from normal. Here in Wyoming, we happen to be sitting right on top of the world’s biggest pustule, you might say. There is a tremendous amount of pressure down beneath us, and when our mice have finished digging deeply enough, that pressure will naturally be released.

“Then, of course, hundreds of square miles of the earth’s surface will explode upward, high into the atmosphere!” Sebaceous Ooze chortled. “Magma will shoot so high that some of it will become space-borne. Clouds of volcanic ash will roar into the sky, and their residue will rain down on Kansas, covering the ground with burning ash to a depth of twenty feet. Many of the world’s cities will be blanketed by dust, and the whole Corn Belt will be destroyed, causing a massive famine. Poisonous gases will kill everything aboveground within five hundred miles. The ash floating in the upper atmosphere will mix with water and come down in the form of acid rain. The skies will be darkened for years, and the sunlight bouncing from the upper atmosphere will cause a climactic shift, starting an ice age that will destroy most of the world’s vegetation!”

Sebaceous Ooze was so delighted at the prospect that he whirled around the room, slime and spittle flying from his mouth, unable to fully express his joy.

“Are you sure that you want to do this?” Fluke asked.

“Sure?” the mad worm cried, his voice growing higher and higher. “Am I sure? Of course I’m sure. The explosion will instantly kill any clowns or butchers that are yet in hiding and will deal a major blow to the rest of the world. They’ll be reeling for decades, and in that time, you and I can cut ourselves in half, and cut ourselves in half again and again, building an army of super worms, clones that think just like we do!

“We’ll build an army of slobber goblins that will charge across the land, hacking apart anything that is found left alive. Rats, cockroaches, humans, French poodles—they’re all done for!”

Suddenly he shouted in a fanatic crescendo, “We are the future! We are the conqueror worms!”

Chapter 22

WAR OF THE WORMS

It is true that one may die in battle,
but those who give in to evil suffer a worse fate.
For the wounded conscience easily festers,
bringing death to the spirit.

—RUFUS FLYCATCHER

A slobber goblin as large as a Doberman came thundering toward her.

Ben hefted the enchanted clover stem to use as a torch, and its ruddy light filled the old rock rabbit burrow. “Time to go.” His quavering voice betrayed his nervousness.

Their plans were made. Ben was going to carry the torch into the enemy burrow, lighting the way, so that Amber could cast her spells. Ben’s abilities as a jumping mouse would naturally be put to the test as he leapt over the heads of slobber goblins, dodging the hail of spears that they threw, and avoided the spells that the Wizard of Ooze himself might hurl.

The mice had eaten one last somber meal, as Amber made a toboggan from the leavings in the rock rabbit nest. She’d formed the body of the toboggan from a slab of bark, stripped from the trunk of a nearby aspen. The runners were carved from twigs. Then she magically tied the pieces together with bits of dry vine from morning glory flowers.

In the interior of the toboggan, Amber packed a few leaves and bits of straw and dried flowers to help cushion their bottoms if the ride got bumpy, and to help keep them warm. The dry flowers gave off a sweet scent, like dying summer.

Now the mice peered down the dark wormhole, and Ben swallowed hard.

“Hold on,” Amber said. She waved her paw. The toboggan lurched and began a rumbling journey through the dark tunnel.

There was little to see. Ben’s light didn’t shine very far, and by the time he could see anything, the ground was just whizzing past him. He gripped the bark on the toboggan with white knuckles as the toboggan careened through the cave.

A hundred miles per hour they traveled, two hundred, then three. The wind whistled through Ben’s helmet, plastering his whiskers flat against his face. He squinted, trying to watch the path ahead.

Above them, there was only rock, striated in various colors—the red of iron ore, the green of copper, the gray of limestone, and the tan of sandstone.

Once, Ben saw a bright flash, and he wondered if the great worm had tunneled through a vein of gold ore. But the little toboggan was racing too fast for him to see.

“More speed,” Thorn shouted to Amber, the wind beating at them fiercely.

The toboggan lurched forward, whirled down the tunnel at hundreds of miles per hour, then suddenly swerved and did a slow spiral.

For a second, the toboggan was upside down, and Ben screamed in terror. He felt as if he’d left his stomach somewhere far behind.

That’s when the ride began to get crazy. Ben’s heart beat so fast, he could hear it in his ears, and their little vessel whirled through dark tunnels that twisted like a snake. The runners screamed in protest, throwing up a rooster-tail of worm snot.

“I must have been wrong about this tunnel being straight,” Thorn mused. “It winds all over the place. I suppose the great worm had his reasons for taking such a twisted course. Notice how we are traveling through solid rock. Apparently there are obstacles all around that we can’t see—underground rivers and lakes, caverns and chasms, hard stone and sand. The monster worm must have been avoiding these!”

So the path wound about, lurching this way and that, avoiding pitfalls that Ben could barely imagine. Ben felt as if he were riding a roller coaster down to H-E-double-toothpicks.

Ben scrunched his helmet down tight and gripped his spear. Around his shoulders he had some fishing line coiled, with a treble hook for use as a grappling hook. He was ready for battle on an instant’s notice.

Amber shouted, “I’ve been thinking. When we get to the worm’s lair, I don’t want to get put under his spell. I don’t want to hear any wormsong. Maybe I should make us all deaf for a while.”

“That could be dangerous,” Thorn said. “We wouldn’t be able to hear if one of our friends called for help.”

Ben pondered a moment, wondering how to solve the problem. The toboggan swerved and plunged. His stomach went out from under him, and he nearly lost his breakfast.

“How does sound work?” Thorn asked Ben.

“I don’t know much about that,” Ben said. “All I can tell you is that air is sort of like water. The sound flows through the air in waves, just like waves flow through water.”

“Are you telling me that the air and water are the same in some way?” Thorn asked.

“They’re both made out of little particles,” Ben said, “smaller than a speck of dust. Earth, air, water. They’re all made from little particles. And when the particles are packed close together, you can see them, and things look solid.”

“So,” Thorn said, his eyes brightening at a discovery. “Solid objects, like dirt, or like me and you, are just densely packed particles?”

“Yeah,” Ben said.

“And liquids are loosely packed particles, while the air is even more loosely packed!”

“Yeah,” Ben said.

Thorn seemed to look inward, pondering all of this, and Ben had the disturbing feeling that the young mouse suddenly understood far more than Ben did.

“Amber,” Thorn said, “all you have to do is wish that you won’t hear anything the worm says!” Thorn got excited. “That way, when the worm speaks, it will set off a sound wave. But your wish will send out its own wave, duplicating the precise frequency of the worm but moving in the opposite direction, and thus canceling it out!”

“What good will that do?” Amber asked.

“We won’t hear the wormsong,” Bushmaster said. “But we’ll be able to hear each other just fine!”

“So wished,” Amber said.

The toboggan picked up speed just then and veered around a corner so fast that Ben was afraid his head might pop off.

At least I won’t hear the wormsong, he thought, feeling proud. Ben didn’t understand anything about particle physics, but he’d explained it well enough that Thorn could figure out a solution to their problem.

For the moment, that was good enough.

* * *

Amber crouched low in the toboggan and felt it rumbling beneath her, the runners bouncing over uneven spots in the stone. She was scared to death.

Oh, the journey didn’t scare her. She decided that if they reached a cave-in or something, all that would happen is that they’d slam into the rocks at several hundred miles per hour and break every bone in their bodies. She’d just end up as a lumpy pile of fur. She wouldn’t know what hit her, wouldn’t feel a thing.

Life’s up. Time to call it quits.

No, it wasn’t dying that frightened her. It was living with the fear of failure. She couldn’t let the other mice live in slavery.

Yet she’d felt the terrible power in the great worm. She knew of his malice. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to beat him.

So she sat and prepared her spells. One spell to shut him up. Another to blow him up. A third to burn him up. A fourth to freeze him.

What’s the best way to kill a worm? Amber really didn’t know. She knew that birds ate worms—robins, but that didn’t help much.

Amber had wished that she’d know when it was time to slow the toboggan, and after long minutes spent just visualizing what she should do in a fight, she just knew. They were coming up to the worm cave.

She smelled the stench of sulfur in the air that whipped past, and she began to slow, but not soon enough!

The toboggan suddenly lurched out of a hole flying at sixty miles an hour into the dim recesses of a cave lit with the ruddy glow thrown by lava. The cave was vast and black. Stalactites hung down from the roof, while stalagmites rose up from the floor, all like long, black fangs.

And everywhere on the floor, on the stalagmites, was a vast army of creatures. Slobber goblins as large as a human child perched on stalagmites like wicked gray gnomes. Snot spiders hung from the ceiling. Growling goos, booger babies, mucus monsters and more all rolled about on the cavern floor.

But that wasn’t what scared Amber. For among these horrors was something far worse.

Mice—hundreds of thousands of them, a zombie army, all staring up blankly at her as if she was an enemy and they planned to gnaw her tail off.

And there at the back, rising up like a cobra, was the Wizard of Ooze himself!

The toboggan was flying through the air, several feet off the floor, heading straight for the far wall.

“Aaaaaagh!” Bushmaster shouted, his screams of terror joined by those of Thorn and Ben.

Amber knew that she would have to act fast.

“Silence!” she shouted at the great worm, erasing the crooked little mouth he had apparently made for himself.

But that was the only spell she had time to cast. The toboggan slammed into the wall, and Amber went flying. She smacked into the rock and saw stars.

A tremendous pain wracked her. It felt as if her head had split open, and suddenly she could hear the ocean sloshing behind her ears.

She never felt herself fall to the floor, but she tried to climb to her feet and realized that many paws were grabbing her, pulling on her.

Trying to help me, she thought.

But then she felt sharp claws prick her skin, and she realized they weren’t trying to help. Zombie mice were holding her, raking her with their claws.

Amber opened her eyes and tried to lurch away. She was on the floor with the wreckage of the toboggan lying in splinters nearby. Through a gray haze she saw Thorn and Bushmaster unconscious, with zombie mice dragging them away by their tails.

My people, Amber thought, as she peered at the enslaved mice, her heart breaking.

Only Ben seemed to have survived the crash unscathed. His little helmet was shoved crookedly over his head, and he whirled about, poking with his spear, shouting, “Back. Stay back! All of you!”

I’ve got to help him, Amber thought, just as someone pulled her tail and began dragging her across the room.

Her eyelids felt as if they weighed a ton, and they closed under their own weight. It was with great difficulty that she forced them open.

And there was the Wizard of Ooze, towering above her. The worm had no mouth, not any longer. But she could feel his power, vast and menacing, ready to crush her.

The great worm whirled, exposing his back side. Amber gasped in astonishment. There, on the back of his head, was a second mouth!

The Wizard of Ooze had outsmarted her.

The worm spoke, and Amber strained to hear.

Wait, she thought, I cast a spell so that I wouldn’t be able to hear him. But she didn’t need to hear the worm to understand what he said. She read his wormy lips.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!” Sebaceous Ooze intoned.

Amber’s head was swimming in pain. She couldn’t think clearly. She knew she was in danger but didn’t know what to do. She was too astonished at the realization that the worm, in preparation for her assault, had cast a spell that gave him two mouths!

The worm began to utter a second curse, and at that moment, Benjamin Ravenspell leapt in front of Amber, brandishing his spear.

“You stay away from her!” Ben cried.

Then there was a whoosh sound, a rush of air. The enormous worm sucked Ben off the ground and down his throat, just like a vacuum cleaner.

As quick as that, Ben was gone.

“Darn you!” Amber roared, her head suddenly clearing. “Your father was a hamster, and your mother was a spaghetti noodle!” She waved a paw in the air, lifting the worm’s massive body from the ground, and sent him hurtling into a nearby stalactite.

Sebaceous Ooze hit the pillar with a thwack, like a slab of meat slamming down onto the butcher’s block.

He landed on the ground with a thud, and Amber cast a spell to rid the wizard of his second mouth.

And suddenly something large blocked her view. A slobber goblin as large as a Doberman came thundering toward her, crushing zombie mice with every stride. Snot spiders and booger babies followed at its back.

Something yanked her tail, and Amber whirled to see zombie mice dragging her from the battle.

I can’t be distracted, Amber thought. I’ve got to fight the wizard!

She whirled around, but at just that moment, she saw the great wizard worming his way around a corner into a side tunnel, making his escape.

I have to get him! Amber thought.

With a wave of her paw, she sent the slobber goblins and all of their kin flying. They parted like the Red Sea, flying to the right and the left, leaving a path straight ahead for Amber.

Only the zombie mice blocked her way.

“I wish you were free,” she intoned.

Suddenly, dead mice with rotting bones protruding from their wasted hides dropped in their tracks, while live mice blinked in surprise and twitched their whiskers as they sniffed the air and peered about in confusion.

“Out of my way!” Amber shouted. She cast a spell that made her seem to be a monster, an enormous robin with glowing golden eyes, standing five feet tall, a robin so huge and mighty that it could swallow a Wyoming thunder worm in a single gulp.