The Island of Dr. Libris (15 page)

“Oh, woe is me!”

A young boy in tattered red shorts and a torn red vest slogged out of the forest, a crumpled red elf hat in his hands.

“I think that’s Jack,” said Walter. “I recognize him from the pictures in Alyssa’s library book.”

“He looks ever so sad,” said Pollyanna. “We should play the glad game with him!”

“First things first,” said Billy. “Um, Jack?” He waved at the boy. “Got a second?”

The boy seemed startled.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Do you live in the village?”

“No. But, Jack, we need to stop your giant from squishing everything and everybody on this island. You need to chop down your beanstalk.”

“I do? Oh, fiddlesticks!”

“Sorry,” said Walter. “It’s in the book. I’ve read it to Alyssa a hundred times.”

“So, where’s your beanstalk?” asked Billy.

“Why, it grows in the garden—right where my poor widowed mother tossed my magic beans.”

“And where exactly is your mother’s garden?”

“Right outside our kitchen window.”

“Great. Where’s the kitchen?”

“Inside our humble hovel of a home.”

“Stars and stockings, Jack,” said Pollyanna. “Billy needs to know where you live!”

“Come on, you guys,” said Walter. “Take it easy on Jack. He’s from a book for preschoolers.”

“Hear the cow moo,” said Jack. “Moo, cow, moo.”

“Take us to your house,” said Billy very slowly. “We can help you chop down the beanstalk.”

“When it ‘quivers and shakes from the blows your ax makes,’ ” said Walter, reciting a memorized verse, “the giant will ‘tumble down and break his crown.’ ”

“Oh, no. I cannot chop down my magic beanstalk. For I have not yet found the goose that lays the golden eggs. My mother and I need at least a dozen golden eggs to live happily ever after.”

“And
I
need to be home in a couple hours because my father is coming up to the cabin for a surprise visit and my mother won’t eat her pancakes.”

Jack blinked a lot. “Pardon?”

“Never mind. It’s complicated. But there’s not going
to be any ‘ever after,’ happily or otherwise, if we don’t stop your giant from crushing everybody on this island—including you!”

Billy and Walter followed Jack up a winding trail that led them deep into the forest.

Pollyanna didn’t go with them. She had to take a jar of jelly to somebody named Mrs. Snow. Apparently, Mrs. Snow lived in a
parallel
parallel universe. Billy figured once you started adding impossibly sideways staircases to your world, you could do it all the way to infinity.

“I spy my house!” cried Jack when they reached a tiny whitewashed cottage near a sunlit field filled with haystacks. A thick green beanstalk, its trunk the size of an oak tree’s, grew in the backyard.

“Great,” said Billy. “Go grab an ax and we’ll—”

Suddenly, the earth started to tremble. Billy nearly toppled over.

“Fee, fi, fo, fum …”

Billy looked up. He had to crane his neck way, way back to take in the enormity of what he was facing.

Jack’s giant was over fifty feet tall. His head, which was kind of small for his body, cleared the tops of the tallest trees and nearly scraped against the wire mesh dome. He had a bowl-cut hairdo and breathed through his mouth so heavily drool dribbled off his rubbery lips to puddle
on the ground below. His belly jiggled with every step he took. So did most of Jack’s farm.

Billy, Walter, and Jack ducked behind a haystack.

The giant bent down and plucked the thatched roof right off the top of Jack’s tiny cottage.

“Where are you, little thief?” droned the giant. “I can smell you.”

He took two enormous sniffs, his swollen nose working like a blubbery bellows to suck up straw and dust with each huff.

“Oh, dear,” whispered Jack.

“What?” said Walter.

“Yesterday, my mother was sacking black pepper for the miller man and—”

“A-a-a-choo!”

The giant was seized by an enormous sneeze.

The hot blast hit the haystack like a typhoon and sent straw flying. The three boys were blown backward in a snotty wind tunnel, right out into the open.

Right where the giant could see them.

Enormous knees creaking, he rose to his full height.

“You!” The giant pointed at Jack with a finger the size of a pool noodle. “You are the little thief who stole my singing harp!”

The giant took one giant step forward.

“Run!” shouted Billy.

He took off with Jack and Walter close behind. They
dashed between the giant’s booted feet and raced toward a tight tangle of twisting trails.

“Whaaa?” The giant bent at the waist, tucked his head between his legs, and watched the fleeing boys. “Why are you children upside down?”

After maybe ten minutes in a maze of trees Billy and Walter had not yet explored, they came to a tall chain-link fence. A squat cinder-block building with dark tinted windows sat in a small clearing on the other side. A satellite dish was mounted on its roof.

“What’s that?” said Walter.

“I don’t know,” said Billy. “But we should hide in there!”

Walter jiggled the gate. “It’s locked.”

“I’ll climb over it,” said Jack. “I’m good at climbing.”

He grabbed hold of the fencing.

ZZZZT!

It sparked and crackled. The jolt nearly knocked Jack out of his pointy-toed boots.

“It’s electrified!” said Billy.

“So it’d be perfect to hide behind,” said Walter. He rattled the gate again. The gate wasn’t electrified, but it was still locked.

“Never fear,” said Jack. “I’ll be nimble, I’ll be quick!”

“Um, I think that’s the wrong story,” said Walter.

“Never mind,” said Billy. “We can use it. Go!”

Jack scurried up a nearby tree to a branch that stretched out over the electrified fence. In no time he was safe on the ground on the other side—which was a good thing.

Because the earth started quaking again.

“Fee, fi, fo, fum!”

The giant thrashed through the forest.

He was close, and coming closer.

“Hide behind that building!” Billy shouted at Jack. “Hurry.”

Jack ran behind the cinder-block structure.

“N-n-now what?” said Walter as the whole forest trembled every time the giant stepped closer.

“We need to make up our own fairy tale,” said Billy.

The giant shoved aside two leafy treetops and peered down at Billy and Walter.

“Fee, fi, fo, fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman!”

Walter wheezed and pumped. Wheezed and pumped.

“Jack’s not here,” said Billy as coolly as he could.

“Where did he go?”

“Upstairs.” He jabbed his thumb toward the sky.

“That little thief stole my magic harp.”

“We know. He told us. And while you’re wasting your time down here, chasing after Walter and me, Jack’s back
up in the clouds grabbing your goose, the one that lays the golden eggs.”

“No!” said the giant, turning his massive body around as quickly as he could, which wasn’t very quickly at all. “He cannot have Goldie!”

“Then you better hurry home to protect her.”

“I will!”

And off he lumbered. Slowly. Very, very slowly. Each step thudded like it was taken by a twenty-ton elephant wearing cement work boots.

When the giant was finally out of sight, Walter was able to breathe a little easier.

“So, he’s going to climb back up the beanstalk to his castle in the sky?”

“Yup,” said Billy. “We’ll give him a five-minute head start. Then we’ll run back to Jack’s house, find an ax, and—”

A sharp reflection of something silver flared through the trees.

Billy grabbed Walter and pulled him down behind the nearest clump of shrubs.

A gangly six-foot-tall gecko—dressed in a shiny silver space suit—crept through the forest toting a silver ray gun. His curled silver tail slithered along the forest floor behind him.

“I don’t believe this,” said Billy.

“W-w-what?” stammered Walter. “Wh-wh-who is that?”

“The Space Lizard.”

The crazy island was spinning wildly out of control.

“Who?” asked Walter in a panicky whisper.

“From the comic books and video games.”

The Space Lizard flicked out his tongue and nabbed a robin’s egg from a nearby nest.

When the mother bird squawked, the Space Lizard hissed at her. His acidic spit shriveled a clump of leaves and blackened the branches of the tree.

“He eats eggs?” asked Walter.

“He collects them,” Billy explained. “Different eggs are worth different points.”

The Space Lizard had his visor rolled up into his astronaut helmet, exposing his long, twitchy snout, beady black eyes, and flittering tongue. His acid-blaster ray gun had so many bulges and bubbles along its barrel it looked like it had been designed by a guy who also made balloon poodles.

In the distance, Billy could see the giant climbing up the beanstalk, which had poked a hole in the mesh dome. He was telephone-poling his way toward a towering cauliflower of a cloud, which, when the sunlight shifted, really did look like a cotton-candy castle in the sky.

“Fee, fi, fo, fum!” The giant’s voice boomed like rolling thunder through the air. “I’ve come to get you, Englishman!”

The Space Lizard heard the giant, too. He twitched his head sideways. Tilted it up. Twitched it some more.

And then the Space Lizard hopped over a stump and
darted into the thick forest. It looked like he might be heading to Jack’s house.

Billy and Walter stood up.

“Billy? How did a monster from a video game end up on our island?”

“I don’t know. Maybe when Nick Farkas came out here yesterday, he brought along a couple of his
Space Lizard
comic books or that cheat guide his mother bought him.”

An ear-piercing boat horn blared in the distance.

“That’s my mom,” said Billy. “I’ve gotta go. My dad’s here.”

“But the giant,” said Walter. “When he finds out you were just making that stuff up about Jack and the goose, he’ll climb back down.”

“It’ll be okay. Jack’s safe.”

“Yes, I am!” shouted Jack from behind the cinder-block building.

Walter was still worried. “But what about the treasure? How can we dig it up if the Space Lizard—”

“Walter, my dad is here. My mom needs me. We’ll come back later to deal with everything else.”

“B-b-but—”

“Later!”

“Good luck at home,” said Walter once the rowboat was tied up at the dock.

“Thanks.”

“If you need anything …”

“I’ll let you know.”

Walter took off for the Hodgepodge Lodge. Billy made his way toward Dr. Libris’s cabin.

He noticed cookout supplies spread across the backyard. A small charcoal grill. Fancy barbecue cooking utensils that all matched. A grocery sack filled with marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers.

His dad probably brought all that junk up from the city. He loved making s’mores, even in their apartment’s toaster oven.

Billy picked up his pace.

His mom and dad were nowhere in sight.

So he headed around the side of the cabin and into the driveway, where he saw his dad’s convertible. A bunch of grocery bags were lined up on the gravel behind the rear bumper.

And then he heard his parents.

It sounded like they were around the corner, talking on the front porch.

“You really want to do a cookout, Bill?” he heard his mother say.

“It’s what we always do at the lake,” said his dad.

“That was a long time ago.”

“I thought it might make this … easier.”

“For who?”

“For Billy. Where is he, anyway?”

“In a hurry to tell him your big news?”

Billy held on to the side of his dad’s car for support.

He didn’t know what to do.

So he put on a brave smile and rounded the corner. It was time to play the real, live glad game.

“Hey, Dad!”

“There you are!” Billy’s father came down the porch steps and gave Billy a bear hug. “How you doin’, kiddo?”

“Not bad. How’s New York?”

“Crazy busy. Oh, that reminds me.” His dad broke out of the hug and went back to the porch to retrieve the shoulder bag he carried to work instead of a briefcase. “I swung by the Apple Store.”