Xander and the Lost Island of Monsters (20 page)

ARROOOOOOO!
Inu howls from far away on the other side of the river. They're stuck on a pile of rocks.

“Peyton!” I scream.

Peyton waves and shouts, “We're okay! Meet you downriver!”

“Okay!” I shout back.

Jinx slows our boat a little bit with her branch. “What'd he say?”

“I could hear him like he was next to me. Couldn't you? He said he'll meet us downriver.” I look around for a branch to use as a paddle, but there's nothing.

“Huh. If you say so. You have some good hearing.” Beads of sweat stand out on Jinx's forehead. We bump into a massive pile of logs and debris, a small island of the stuff, slowing our trajectory to a crawl. Jinx looks relieved. “Okay. Hopefully we'll be good now.”

I hear water rushing around us. A fish (or possibly something I don't want to think about) swimming to our left. Wind rustling leaves.

Suddenly I remember: all those times I eavesdropped on the adults. Hearing the sea dragon swim underneath the ship. I smack my thigh with my hand. “Hey, I
do
have good hearing!”

Jinx kind of shakes her head at me. “Thanks, Captain Obvious. It's not like I didn't
just
say that.”

“I mean, it wasn't always good. I mean, I think it's been getting better.” I sit up straight. “I think that's my power, Jinx—hearing.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Unless we need to spy on people, Xander, that's sort of a limited skill. So I really hope you have something else to fall back on.”

Me, too. But I don't respond, because just then a jet of water hits us from a weird angle. The canoe dislodges from the debris and starts spinning down the river like we're on one of those water rides. Except this one isn't on a track. We pick up speed. I hold on tight to the sides, unable to do anything else. Through a veil of water I see Jinx doing the same. Water begins filling the bottom of the boat, and I can feel us going lower, lower, lower. Sticks that were floating on the surface are jerked under by the force of the current, then tumbled and borne away faster than I can blink. We're going to sink. “Jinx! What do we do?”

“I don't know!” She shakes her head, her hair flinging all over the place and whipping me across my eyes. I raise my hand to brush it away.

And then the bottom falls out of everything.

W
hite water churns all around me, pushing, crushing. I tumble head over heels, my body useless. I can't tell which way is up. I see blue and white both above and below.
Let me off! Make it stop!
I yell in my head, the way I did when I rode the world's tallest roller coaster at Magic Mountain. But all I can do is hold my breath and wait for it to stop.

Suddenly, everything's quiet. I've gone deaf.

I'm standing on the shore of a large pond or a smallish lake. Soft white sand comes up between my toes. My clothes are dry. I look around. Leafy trees, then pale dunes border the area. Ahead of me, across the water, is a waterfall twice as tall as my house.

And I'm watching Jinx and me falling down it, limbs flopping as if we are rag dolls.

I don't have time to wonder how this is happening. The other Xander and Jinx splash limply into the pond and bob up. They lie there motionless, floating facedown. Oh no—they're not going to make it. My stomach sinks.

The water needs to push them to shore.

Slowly, they begin to move.

Faster.
I watch the current give them one last little push toward the beach. The water is shallow there. I don't actually know if it is, but I want it to be.

Turn your head. Cough up the water. All the water, out of the lungs. Now.

A shock of cold comes over me, and I'm back in my body, hacking up a huge stream of river water. My lungs burn worse than they did when we had to run a mile in PE. It
is
shallow here, and I crawl onto dry land, little pebbles cutting into my hands.

Ahead of me I see Jinx lying on her side, her face out of the water. I manage to stumble to my feet, put my arms under her armpits, and drag her onto the white sand. “Jinx?” I shake her. She hacks up water without opening her eyes, keeps on breathing.

I glance back at the waterfall we just came down. I don't know how on earth we survived. Was I having an out-of-body experience just then, or was I dreaming? Did I really tell my body what to do?

Maybe I
can
affect reality, somehow. Just like I can program a computer game. My stomach does one excited flip. “Jinx!” I whisper. Not because I want to whisper, but because that's all I can manage. I cough up some more water. “Hey, Jinx, I saved us! Wake up! You're fine.”

Jinx doesn't move. I picture her waking up, and both of us being as healthy as two kids who did not just fall over a waterfall. I imagine myself floating up into the air, Superman-style, and flying us out of here on invisible wings like I'm Peyton….

Nothing happens.

I lie down beside her. “Jinx,” I try again, but she doesn't respond. Where are Peyton and Inu? Peyton
can
fly. He would have saved both of them. They're fine. They've got to be. He'll be showing up any minute now.

The sand feels as warm as a blanket. Sometimes sand gets too hot to touch, but this is so soft and I'm so tired. I have to close my eyes. All this trying-to-be-a-hero stuff is getting to me.

I don't know how much time passes before somebody nudges my ribs. “Jinx?” I ask sleepily as I open my eyes.

Above me stands a turtle boy. A somewhat human-looking creature nearly six feet tall, with arms and legs extending out of a green shell. He cocks his head and considers me with bulbous, wet black eyes. An olive-green third eyelid slides over in a blink.

I blink, too, thinking I'm dreaming again. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?” He sort of looks like one, except his hands and feet are webbed, and he has a shock of short, sleek black hair. Instead of a normal mouth, he's got a sharp beak. His face reminds me more of a chimpanzee than a turtle, though, and his skin is covered in sleek greenish-brown scales.

“Kappa!”
Jinx croaks from someplace next to me. I turn my head. She's prone on the beach, her arms and legs tied behind her with dirty rope. “Kappa.”

“Kappa?” I repeat dumbly. I don't know what a kappa is. Some kind of Greek fraternity? Like Delta Gamma Kappa?

The turtle boy pushes me roughly onto my back, then sits on my legs. Owwww. That does not feel good. My shins pop. “Get off!” I try to crawl away, but I'm pinned. The turtle boy says nothing, just sets about tying my wrists together with an itchy rope. Then my ankles. I try to fight back, but I might as well be fighting an ogre. He's like a trillion times stronger than me. He opens my octopus netsuke box, looks inside, and tosses it aside. He takes off my belt with the other netsuke and carries it to a dead, branchless oak tree with a black jagged gash in the middle of its trunk. He throws my stuff into the hole.

Half of Jinx's face is covered with sand. “Leave me here. I'll catch up.”

I kind of have to admire her optimism. She might be sort of a jerk, but at least she's a confident one. “I doubt either of us is going anywhere anytime soon,” I say.

The kappa speaks.
“Zurripty zung zoo!”
He gags Jinx with a cloth and ties it behind her head. Then he bends over and examines me, patting my pockets for more loot. His neck is crooked at a funny angle. The top of his head has a bald spot, which is indented like a bowl, and filled with something that looks like thick water. Clear Jell-O? He's holding his head carefully, as if he doesn't want the stuff to spill. The liquid smells like a thousand rotting anchovies. A couple of gnats buzz above it.

I wrinkle my nose. What is that? His brain?

The kappa throws another rope over a tree branch and ties the end clumsily around my feet. Then he yanks.

I go upside down. My heart pounds in my ears as the blood rushes to my head. “Stop!” I bellow. “Let me down.”

The kappa makes a snickering noise in the back of his throat. He pushes me, and I swing wildly back and forth. “Stoooppp!” I yell. “Please, I'm not going to hurt you.”

“No.” He laughs again from deep in his chest and shoves me again. “Dis fun,” he says in English.

So he understands me. And obviously he's bored, since he thinks swinging me around is so great. I bet he probably doesn't get that many people falling over his waterfall. As I sway back and forth, I grow so dizzy I feel like I'm about to pass out and my neck is going to snap clean off my torso. “Let me down! Look, I'm a lot of fun. We can be friends.” I'm babbling without thinking. Friends? With a monster? Not likely.

“No friendly.” He pushes me some more, clicking his tongue.

“If you eat me, you'll just be bored again.” He spins in my vision. Jinx flops around like a strangling fish. Maybe she can wriggle away, somehow, while I distract him.

The kappa sits down on the beach. “I keep. Swing, swing. Then eat, by and by.”

Ugh. The prospect of my neck snapping seems better than swinging upside down for who knows how long. I come up with something different. “Let me make you an offer.”

“Offer?” A fat pink tongue appears, and he licks off his beak.

I squish my eyes shut. I imagine fighting him, and before I can stop myself, I say, “Let's have a wrestling match. If I beat you, you free us. If you beat me, well, then you can eat me or whatever. But let the girl go either way.”

“MPPPHHH!” Jinx sputters incoherently, rolling helpless along the shore. “HWETOWJ!”

I know exactly what she's saying.
You're going to die, fool.

I kind of agree with her.

The kappa appears to consider my offer for a while. A supernatural creature against a small boy. Easy peasy. My stomach is churning, and my neck is throbbing. Maybe that's why I made such a stupid proposition.

But, hey, we're both still alive, and that means something.

The kappa gives me an extra-hard push, and I swing around wildly, feeling like I'm a yo-yo on the end of a string. “Yup yup,” he says at last. He snaps the rope around my ankles with his dagger-sharp claws, and I fall onto my back. Ouch. I roll over and crawl on my elbows toward Jinx.

“TWETWOJ!” She's incomprehensible with the gag in her mouth. She shakes her head, sort of.

The kappa puts his foot on my back, knocking me to the ground. “No girl. You.” He unties the rope around my wrists, and I stagger to my feet, rubbing my sore skin, waiting for the world to right itself. Oh no. How am I going to do this?

Without further hesitation, the kappa lunges for my upper body. Automatically, I drop down to the sand, onto my hands, in a push-up position. The kappa misses and falls, all the time trying to keep his head level. A bit of his liquid spills, and he lets out a little moan. He goes still until the sloshing stops.

Hmmm. That water-gel is very, very important to him. I scramble to my feet. All I have to do is get him to tip that bowl head.

The kappa lurches up and makes a high-pitched squawk, something between a monkey's scream and a bird of prey's caw. I prepare to dive away again, but then he feints to the right and moves left, jumping forward. This time, I'm not so lucky, and he tackles my legs. We both fall into the sand.

But I wiggle out of his grasp, turn around, and jump on his back. I wrap my arms around his neck and try to jostle the liquid. The kappa's neck is like a tree trunk, immovable. With an angry snarl, he flips over, pinning me beneath his shell.

I can't breathe. But we're at an impasse. He can't move, because he'll spill his head juice, and I'm trapped.

He rolls off me, freeing my arms. His scaly beak opens. “Heee, heee,” he laughs, his breath like a liquid fart coating my face.

I stretch out one arm and scoop up a big handful of sand. Then I reach up and plop it into the cavity on his head.

The kappa lets out a shriek and backs away.

I stand, scoop up another handful, and throw it in there. It sops up the liquid, turning it into mud.