The Island of Dr. Libris (13 page)

“If you don’t take me out to the island
right now
, I’m going to scream so loud Mommy will hear it and so will Mrs. Gillfoyle and so will all the neighbors and then they won’t let
anybody
go out to the island ever again!”

Billy looked at Walter.

Walter looked at Billy.

Alyssa smiled proudly.

“Okay,” said Billy. “Let’s go.”

“We’re taking her?” said Walter.

“I don’t think we have a choice.”

When they reached the clearing on the other side of the locked gate, Pollyanna was waiting for them.

“Pollyanna,” said Walter, still sort of pouting, “this is my little sister, Alyssa.”

“Why, hello, Alyssa,” said Pollyanna, dipping into a curtsy. “I’m very glad to make your acquaintance.”

“You’re pretty,” said Alyssa.

“Why, thank you. I think you’re pretty, too.”

Alyssa held up her backpack. “Would you like some of my snack?”

“My, aren’t you precious? Say, do you know what we should do?”

“What?”

“We should have a picnic. Doesn’t ‘a picnic’ sound so much grander than ‘a snack’?”

“It does, it does!”

Billy grinned.

This might actually work. Alyssa and Pollyanna could have their picnic in the open field that used to be Paris, Sherwood Forest, and Hercules’s wrestling pit. Meanwhile, Billy and Walter would hike to Tom Sawyer’s cave, where the prehistoric monster from the Jules Verne book would give everybody from Hercules to D’Artagnan a common enemy—something to fight instead of each other.

It would also scare off the Sheriff of Nottingham for good.

Or so Billy hoped.

“Come on,” Billy said to Walter. “Alyssa will be safe here with Pollyanna. Let’s go find the others.” He pulled Dr. Libris’s copy of
Tom Sawyer
out of his backpack and started reading from Chapter 29. “ ‘The mouth of the cave was up the hillside—an opening shaped like a letter A.’ ”

“So it has to be up on that mountain that looks like a tooth,” said Walter.

Billy nodded. “Its massive oaken door will be unbarred.”

“Really?”

“Says so in the book.”

“Then let’s go! You’ve got the Jules Verne book, too, right?”

Billy tapped his backpack. “We better hurry. It’s nearly noon.”

Billy and Walter followed the narrow path through the forest, crossed the empty Sunday school meadow, and climbed a steep trail into the craggy hills that formed the base of the molar-shaped mountain.

Soon they were edging their way along what was basically a narrow cliff. On one side there was an abrupt one-hundred-foot drop into a leafy abyss; on the other, a sheer wall of gray stone climbing to the sky.

“Look,” said Walter. He pointed up the trail to an open wooden door shaped like the letter “A” cut into the face of the mountain.

“That’s the entrance to the cave,” said Billy.

Behind them, they heard the clomping of heavy boots.

“Quick,” said Billy. “We need to hide!”

“Where?”

“In the cave!”

Billy and Walter scampered along the ridge, their feet sending loose pebbles cascading over the edge to patter on the treetops far below.

Fortunately, the trail widened in front of the cave.

The two boys ducked through the doorway. In the deep gloom, Billy could hear a steady
drip, drip, drip
of water plinking from the cavern’s ceiling. The chamber was pitch-black and colder than frozen pizza crust. Billy heard Walter do a double pump on his asthma inhaler. He thought he also heard a flap of wings.

Is it a bat? Or one of Jules Verne’s hideous make-believe monsters?

Finally, Billy’s eyes adjusted to the darkness.

The cave was just like Mark Twain had written it: “a vast labyrinth of crooked aisles that ran into each other and out again and led nowhere.”

Looking around, Billy didn’t see anybody else. No Tom Sawyer, no Hercules, no Robin Hood, no Maid Marian.

“Where are they?” squeaked a panicked Walter. “They said they’d be hiding here.”

Billy put a finger to his lips and led Walter behind a limestone ledge into a cramped side chamber where they could still keep an eye on the mouth of the cave.

Five seconds later, the Sheriff of Nottingham and the four musketeers were standing right outside.

Billy could see their dusty boots.

“Huzzah!” cried the sheriff outside the open door. “This is the cave!”

Limping forward, he slid his silver dagger out of its jeweled scabbard.

So much for Tom Sawyer’s cave being such a great hiding place
, thought Billy.

D’Artagnan drew his sword and stepped into the dank main chamber.

“Make haste, musketeers!” cried the sheriff. “Illuminate thy lanterns.”

Swinging their sputtering lights, the sheriff and the four swordsmen inched their way deeper into the cavern’s first room. Billy and Walter ducked down behind a short wall of slick stone.

“Billy?” whispered Walter. “Where’s Jules Verne’s underground monster?”

“I dunno.”

“We need the monster for the plan to work.”

“I know.”

“Well, maybe you need to read that bit again.”

“Yeah.”

Lying down on the cold cave floor, Billy eased the book out of his backpack.

In the flickering lantern light bouncing off the walls above him, he silently reread the scariest paragraphs of Chapter 40.

Nothing happened.

“Maybe you have to read it out loud,” suggested Walter. “Like I did with the Junior Wizard card.”

“Voilà!”
cried Athos, holding down his hat plume so it wouldn’t scrape against the cave’s ceiling. “Are these not footprints?”

Walter nudged Billy with his knee. “Read it, Billy. Read it out loud!”

Billy read as speedily and loudly as he could.

“ ‘I became aware of something moving in the distance …’ ”

“Ah-ha!” cried the sheriff, waving his lantern back and forth, trying to find Billy in the dark. “Sir William of Goat! I do recognize thy voice!”

Billy, still flat on his back behind the short limestone divider, kept reading. “ ‘I looked with glaring eyes. One glance told me that it was something monstrous. It was the great “shark-crocodile.”…’ ”

“Pardonnez-moi?”
said Athos to nobody in particular. “What is this ‘shark-crocodile’?”

“ ‘About the size of an ordinary whale,’ ” read Billy in reply, “ ‘with hideous jaws and two gigantic eyes, it advanced. Its eyes fixed on me with terrible—’ ”

“Run for thy lives!” Robin Hood’s and Maid Marian’s voices rang out from deep within the cave.

“Oh my!” screamed Tom Sawyer from further down in the maze of tunnels. “Run away!”

The three of them raced up from the darkness, past Billy and Walter’s hiding spot, through the entry hall, and out to the sunlit ledge, to which the musketeers had retreated to, once again, strike their “en garde” pose.

“Seize them!” shouted the sheriff.

An earsplitting, rock-shaking, earthquaking roar echoed off the walls of the cavern.

Hercules, still deep inside the cave, shouted, “By Zeus! It is the sharkodile! The most monstrous beast I have ever encountered!”

The musketeers backed away from the mouth of the cave. So did the sheriff, Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and Tom Sawyer.

This is it
, thought Billy.
I’m going to be killed by a book.

He wanted to flee but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. His brain said, “Run!” but his bones didn’t budge. He was frozen, right where the sharkodile could sniff him out and gulp him down for a quick between-meals snack. Walter
was lying right beside him, trying his best to disappear into the stone-slab cave floor.

“Fear not, good friends!” Hercules charged up from the darkness. “The sharkodile shall not harm you this day!”

The muscleman scooped Billy and Walter up off the floor and, cradling them under his gigantic arms like a pair of footballs, hauled them out of the cave to safety.

Or so they hoped.

But it wasn’t exactly safe outside the cave.

“Arrest those outlaws!” roared the Sheriff of Nottingham, who was waiting on the cliff. Billy’s plan to scare him off with Jules Verne’s monster hadn’t really worked. “Slap them all in chains!” he yelled.

Nobody listened to him.

Because a hideous creature the size of a school bus—with the scaly green body of a crocodile but the head of a great white shark—thrust its jaws out of the cave and growled. Its breath smelled like moldy cheeseburgers.

“Stand back!” cried Hercules. “For I have battled beasts such as this before.”

“Aye!” shouted the sheriff, retreating in fear. “I shalt stand back—all the way back to London!”

“Coward!” cried Maid Marian.

“He who lives and runs away,” said the sheriff as he hobbled down the hill, “may live to fight another day!”

Billy ignored the sheriff (who had finally done what Billy knew he would) and focused on the mouth of the cave.

Squirming and squealing, the mammoth sharkodile had wiggled halfway out of the A-shaped entrance.

D’Artagnan lunged at it with his sword.

The beast snapped the steel blade in half as easily as if it were a Twizzler.

Inch by inch, the growling sharkodile squeezed its massive body further and further out of the cave’s tight doorway.

“Watch out!” shouted Tom Sawyer. “That thing’s gonna pop!”

The sharkodile roared and, with one last gigantic grunt, muscled its way free.

“Quelle horreur!”
screamed the musketeers as the beast rumbled forward.

The sharkodile took aim at D’Artagnan, the man who had poked at it with his sword. Snarling, it stretched its jaws open as wide as it could. Its teeth were glistening triangles the size of shovel blades.

But an instant before the sharkodile could crush D’Artagnan in its bear-trap jaws, Hercules shoved the young musketeer aside and hurled himself into the giant creature’s fearsome mouth.

Feet firmly planted between two razor-sharp incisors, Hercules pressed his hands against the ribbed roof of the monster’s humongous mouth to become a human wedge locking the beast’s chompers wide open. His arm muscles quivered. His tree-trunk legs shivered. Billy had never seen such a feat of pure bravery and strength.
No wonder they made up myths about the guy
, he thought.

“Robin?” Hercules grunted.

“Aye?”

“Can you hit this darkened tooth? The one closest to my left hand?”

“Aye, marry.”

Robin Hood let loose an arrow. It zipped through the air and struck a tooth that was as black as coal. The instant the arrowhead hit, the tooth popped out of the sharkodile’s mouth like a flicked kernel of dried corn.

The beast stopped snarling.

Hercules hopped out of the monster’s mouth.

Billy couldn’t believe his eyes.

The sharkodile actually seemed to smile. Then it started licking Hercules with its very long, extremely wet and sloppy tongue.

“It had a cavity,” said Hercules with a titter, because the sharkodile’s tongue was tickling. “Needed its tooth pulled. Is that not right, my friend?”

The sharkodile purred.