Trapped in Transylvania (12 page)

When he said that, my mind returned to its usual state. It went blank.

At this point, Mr. Wexler sucked in such a huge breath that if Frankie hadn't held on to me, I think I would have gotten sucked right up his nose.

“You—you—you—” he sputtered.

Frankie cringed. “We—we—we—what?”

“You are just not applying yourselves!” Mr. Wexler responded. “It's so—so—disappointing! If you two worked more—if you worked at all!—you really could become good students!”

Frankie jumped. “What a great idea. How about we take the test when we become good students?”

The teacher shook his head slowly, then pointed down the hall. “To class. Both of you. Now.”

There was no reasoning with the guy. I had to act fast. I clutched my chest. “My heart is having appendicitis! Get me to the ER!”

I staggered down the hall to the front doors.

“Oh, no, you don't!” said Mr. Wexler, thrusting himself between me and freedom. “The only ‘getting' you'll do is to be ‘getting' to class, where—in eight minutes—you'll be taking my test on
Tom Sawyer!”

“But we're not prepared!” cried Frankie.

“Be creative,” the teacher said. “Stretch your minds. Dare I say it, think!”

Frankie scoffed. “Don't be ridiculous, Mr. Wexler. It's Devin and me you're talking to—”

He only grinned at that. “Come along, now. It's test time!”

Then, just when things looked darkest for us, there came a tremendous crashing sound from the end of the hallway.

Boom-da-boom!

And someone cried out.

“Help! Help me!”

Chapter 2

At the end of the hall was a walking pile of books. A huge pile. A teetering, wobbling, wiggling skyscraper of books! Not only that, but the books were sliding off the pile one by one, and one by one they crashed to the floor.

Boom-da-boom-boom!

“It's Mrs. Figglehopper!” cried Mr. Wexler. “Frankie, Devin, hurry and help her!”

We screeched over just as the last of the heavy books slammed to the floor.
Boom!

“Oh, dear-dear-dear,” said Mrs. Figglehopper, staring at the scattered books. “Dear-dear!”

Mrs. Figglehopper is our school's librarian. She always wears the sort of glasses that you look over or under, but never actually look through. And she always—
always
—talks about books. I decided to beat her to it.

“You dropped your books,” I said.

“It certainly seems I did!” she said, shaking her head.

“We'll help you restack your books, Mrs. Figglehopper,” said Mr. Wexler, “then it's off to class for these two. We're having a test!”

“Oh, but Mr. Wexler, wait!” Mrs. Figglehopper said. “I think it's obvious I can't carry these books all by myself. Can you spare Frankie and Devin for a few minutes while they help me take these to the library?”

Our teacher arched his thick eyebrows. Then, glancing up at the clock on the wall, he grinned.

“Ordinarily, I wouldn't let these two out of my sight. But even a few seconds in a library will do them good. Maybe if they are near all those books, some of the ink will rub off. Ink? Rub off? Ha! That's a good one, don't you think?”

We didn't laugh. But Mr. Wexler did, all the way down the hall. Then, just as he rounded the corner, he said, “Please have them in their seats and taking my test in … oh!… seven minutes!”

“They'll be there!” the librarian said, smiling as she handed books to us. “Now, you two follow me.”

With stacks of books in our arms we wormed our way through the various hallways to the school library.

“You know what I hate?” mumbled Frankie. “That we strained our brains on some book we didn't even have to read. How cruel is that?”

“Oh, flibbertigibbet!” said Mrs. Figglehopper, holding open the library doors for us. “Any reading is like exercise for you. Reading turns the light on in your mind.”

“But what if your mind really wants to sleep?” Frankie asked, yawning.

“Then books can wake you up!” the library lady said. “And speaking of books—which I always do!—I think you'd enjoy the real story of Tom Sawyer much more than that little picture book you're holding. Reading classics is not as terrible or as difficult as you think.”

I peered at Frankie beyond my pile of books. Because we've been friends forever, just one glance told me she felt as bad as I did. It was a bad, sad time for us.

Then we passed the clock on the wall over the checkout counter and we felt even sadder.

Our seven minutes had shrunk to six.

“I can't believe it!” said Frankie as Mrs. Figglehopper led us to the library workroom. “Just taking a wild number, let's say there are a total of maybe five hundred books in the whole world. Okay, so how many do we actually have to read? I mean, how many good grades do we have to get? Shouldn't we leave some for other people? Sharing is good, right?”

“Frankie speaks true words,” I added. “I say we already did the reading-a-book thing. Now we move on.”

Mrs. Figglehopper chuckled as she opened the door to the workroom. “Oh, but there are thousands of good books in the world, and everyone can learn to have fun reading. All you have to do is open the book. It gets easier every time.”

“Time?” said Frankie. “We have no time. We've only got five minutes to read that book!”

“Four, actually,” the librarian said calmly. “But you can't read
Tom Sawyer
quickly. Oh, no, that's no good.”

As we pushed into the workroom, my eyes instantly spotted an old broken set of library security gates standing against the back wall of the room. They looked like two sides of a doorway with no top.

“Zapper gates,” Mrs. Figglehopper calls them. Busted, she says they are. Not true, say Frankie and I. Frankie and me. I. Me. Whatever. The point is, those zapper gates aren't exactly as busted as Mrs. Figglehopper says they are.

How do I know?

I know, because Frankie and I were in the library workroom once before. And we found out the extra-hard way that those gates can do something very weird.

And very impossible.

“Before you go, let me show you something,” the librarian said. She pulled an old green book from one of the many shelves. “This is one of the very first copies ever published of the book you should have read. It's
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain.”

“It's too thick,” said Frankie, shaking her head sadly. “We never could have finished it, anyway.”

“This book is over a hundred and twenty-five years old,” the woman said. “And every bit as fresh now as the day it was written.”

I sniffed. “Doesn't smell so fresh.”

“True, and the covers are slightly cracked,” said Mrs. Figglehopper. “But look here!” She opened the book gently and turned to the very last page. On it someone had written something in thick black ink.

“Hey, even I know not to scribble in books,” I said.

Mrs. Figglehopper chuckled. “This is no ordinary scribble. It is the autograph of the author, Mark Twain. Having Twain's autograph in the book makes this one of the most valuable in our whole collection. I consider it a priceless treasure!”

The phone at the front desk began to ring.

“Go ahead, read the first page,” she said. “But be careful, some of the pages are loose. You have a few minutes before your test. Let me answer the phone, and then I'll be right back.” She left the room, trotting for the front desk.

The moment I turned to the first page, Frankie raised her head. She was looking at the zapper gates.

Her expression told me that she was remembering the weird thing that had happened the last time we were in the library workroom. I remembered it, too.

It had happened a couple of weeks before, in this very room.

One minute, Frankie and I are fighting over a book; the next minute the book falls between the gates, and—
blammo!
—the gates go all fizzy and sparkly and there's this huge blue light and a weird crack opens in the wall—in the wall!—and of course we go into it and—
shazzam!
—we are not in the library anymore.

We are in the book.

In the book!

That's right. Somehow we got dropped right into the story, with all the characters and everything! The worst part was that we couldn't escape the book until we read all the way to the last page.

Talk about brutal. Talk about exhausting. It's enough to make your head explode!

“Dev,” Frankie whispered, still staring at the zapper gates. “I've been thinking.…”

I looked at the gates, too. “Well, stop it,” I told her. “Thinking just gets kids like us into trouble. Besides, if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, you can think of something else.”

“It worked once.”

“Don't go there, Frankie!” I protested. “Okay, sure, maybe the gates worked once, but remember how we almost got totally deep-fried? I'd rather take a test.”

Frankie chuckled. “That's not a line you say often.”

“We're not going anywhere near the gates, Frankie.”

“Okay.”

“Because it'll probably turn out way bad.”

“I said okay.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Because I have an even better plan! I saw a show once about a guy who could read a fat book in, like, two minutes. All he did was run his hand down the page, and his brain did the rest.”

Frankie snorted. “Do you have his brain handy? Because I don't think yours will work the same.”

“Do you have another way out of this?”

Frankie looked at the clock. She chewed her lip.

“I thought so.” I began sliding my hand down the pages, flipping them over quickly as I went.

“Are you getting anything?” asked Frankie.

“A little,” I said.

“So what's
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
about?”

“There's a kid named Tom … and a closet and a wooden fence … there's a girl in here, too.…”

“This is not helping—” She reached for the book.

“Treasure … there's treasure!” I pulled it away.

“Give it to me!”

“You give it!”

“No, you!”

“Careful!”

“Oh, no!”

As if it were a basketball game and our fingers were straining to gain possession of the ball, we wrestled for the book. Then it happened. A page suddenly slid out of the book and fluttered across the room.

I gasped. “Oh, no! It's the scribble page! With the author's signature! It's valuable! It's priceless! We're dead meat if it gets torn!”

We tried to grab the page, but our hands clutched only air. The page floated swiftly across the room, then took a nosedive like a bad paper airplane. It twirled in a wild tailspin right between the zapper gates near the back wall.

“Nooo!” Frankie shouted, leaping for the page.

KKKKK!
The whole room went as bright as an exploding star. The next instant it was as dark as if someone had shoved a box over our heads. Suddenly, there was this huge crackling sound, and we saw the back wall—the wall just behind the zapper gates—crack right open.

Flickering blue light and wispy white smoke poured into the workroom.

“It's happening again!” I said.

Frankie's eyes were huge. “Boy, are you in trouble!”

“No, you!”

“No,
you!”

“Frankie! Devin!” the librarian called out. “Time's up! Mr. Wexler wants you back in class!”

She started tramping back toward the workroom.

“Oh, man,” I said. “We've got to get that page back!”

With pretty much no other thought in our heads, Frankie and I dived into the dark, smoking crack in the wall. We tumbled over and over until we hit something.

Something that said, “Hey! Get off my toe!”

Chapter 3

I blinked.

In the dim light I could see that Frankie and I were in our second closet of the day. Luckily, it wasn't a stinky one. But it wasn't empty, either. By the slim crack of light around the door, I could see a third person crouching in there with us, peering out. It seemed to be a boy.

I nudged Frankie. “Where are we?” I whispered. “And don't tell me we're in the book.”

“We're in the book,” she said, tapping the book's cover. “The zapper gates must have zapped us again.”

“You're still on my toe!” whispered the boy. “Get off!”

“Sorry!” I said, jumping back next to Frankie.

The boy was about our age, dressed in rumpled jeans, a white shirt that had once been a lot whiter, and a tattered vest of brown flannel. Also, he was barefoot.

“Just for the record,” asked Frankie, “who are you?”

“Hush!” said the boy. “My aunt Polly's just outside. She'll find us.”

There was a scuffling sound outside the closet. “Tom!” cried a voice.

The boy chuckled softly. “Aunt Polly's all mad because she thinks I stole her fresh strawberry jam that took her so long to make. But I swear I never had a lick.”

“Y-o-u-u—Tom!” cried the voice from outside.

“Tom's me,” he whispered. “Tom Sawyer. I never saw you in my closet before.”

“I'm Devin. This is Frankie,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you,” Tom said. Smiling, he stuck out his hand for me and Frankie to shake.

It was sticky.

“What's that stuff on your fingers?” asked Frankie.

“Jam,” said Tom. “Now, shhh. We can sneak out if we're careful.” Holding a finger to his lips, which he then took a moment to lick, Tom gently pushed open the closet door.

Thwack!
A thin hand came down from nowhere and grabbed Tom by his vest and hung on tight.

“There!” snapped a voice. “I might have thought you were hiding in that closet! Out into the light with you!”