The Northern Frights Page 8

  The eye slipped out of the witch’s hand and started rolling across the floor.

  “My eye! Give me my eye!”

  The witches started crawling along the floor with their hands out, desperately searching for the eye.

  The monsters in the class were laughing. Whenever one of the witches got close to the eye, a monster kicked it across the room to one of their friends like a game of eyeball soccer keep-away!

  “Where is our eye?” the witches continued pleading. “Why won’t any of you give us back our eye?”

  Eventually, the eyeball landed at the feet of Ezelba the Witch Girl. She was again eating a box of human-shaped chocolates and refusing to share with anyone else, but she stopped stuffing her face to pick up the eyeball. She put it in her backpack and zipped it shut.

  “It’s so dark!” moaned Ms. Coven. “Where’s the eye? In a mouse hole?”

  Ezelba put a finger to her lips, ordering the class to stay quiet. The monsters obeyed and told the teacher they couldn’t find it.

  “Fine,” said Ms. Coven. “We will teach you without the eye. But if we find one of you is keeping it from us, you’ll wish you were never born!”

  The threat seemed to have no effect on Ezelba, who just smiled to herself and got wand fives from her friends.

  Gathering back around the cauldron, the witches continued, “We’re not going to even tell you what this potion does anymore. You’ll have to find out on your own.”

  “Unless you give us back the eye!”

  Ms. Coven went back to throwing items into the cauldron. “Take notes on the ingredients that go into the brew!” Ms. Coven had to feel and sniff each ingredient before throwing it in, which made everyone snicker.

  Petunia was diligently taking notes when Wendy tapped her on the shoulder and handed her a note. Rolling her eyes, Wendy said, “The boys wanted me to give you this.”

  Petunia unfolded the note. It read: Who do you like more? Jason or Fred? Circle one.

  Did she really have to pick one right then? Was that the rule of note passing? She turned around, and Jason and Fred were flexing their muscles.

  Luckily, she didn’t have to decide at that moment because the note flew out of her hand and floated across the room, landing on the desk of Ezelba.

  “Rules of the class,” said Ezelba the Witch Girl. “If someone passes a note, everyone gets to read it.”

  Ezelba read the note aloud and started cackling. “Those boys must be blind. How could they like someone purple? You look like you took a bath in prune juice!”

  “Quiet!” Ms. Coven shouted. “You should be writing down the ingredients of the potion. Toe of tiger, feet of frog, nose of newt, and eye of hog. Speaking of eyes, has anyone found our eye yet?”

  Nobody was paying attention to Ms. Coven. The class saw Petunia was getting upset and wouldn’t let up. “Purple girl! Purple girl! We’ll eat you, then we’ll burp a girl!”

  Petunia wanted to dig herself into a hole, but then Fred and Jason stood up on their desks.

  “Enough!” Fred shouted. “If you have a problem with Petunia, you have a problem with us.”

  Then Jason pulled out his hockey stick from his backpack, and Fred pulled out his silver hammer. Jason tossed a hockey puck in the air and smacked it with his stick. The puck flew around the room, ricocheting off the walls and shattering jars of specimens. The students ducked out of the way. Then Fred raised his silver hammer and smashed his desk into a million pieces.

  “What’s going on?” Ms. Coven demanded. “We can’t see what’s happening! We have no eye!”

  Wendy pulled out her Monster Math calculator and shouted, “Negative thirty-six!” The monsters in the class felt their blood curdle in fear at the horrifically small number.

  With the students distracted, Lattie leaped out of her seat, did a triple somersault in the air, skipped over a troll’s head, then landed on Ezelba’s desk with the grace of a cat. She looked her right in the eyes and said, “Before dispensing your opinion, remember first if anyone asked you for it.”

  “O-okay,” said Ezelba, shaking. “I won’t tease her again. Just don’t ninja me or something.”

  Petunia smiled, seeing that her classmates actually cared about her enough to stand up for her.

  Lattie snatched the note out of Ezelba’s hand, bounced off the ceiling, and dropped the paper in Petunia’s lap, capping her maneuver with a spectacular backflip onto the rim of the cauldron, where she placed Ms. Coven’s eye back in her hand. Like a sleight-of-hand artist, she must have sneakily snatched the eye back without anyone noticing! I gave her a standing ovation but no one could hear my ghost hands clapping.

  “You found our eye! Thank you so much young . . . human? Well, perhaps we won’t be feasting on you after all.”

  A zombie girl turned to the witch girl and said, “Hey, Ezelba, maybe we shouldn’t mess with these human kids.”

  Suddenly, the door burst open and Silence the Yeti entered, carrying a young seal that was wearing a polka-dot tie.

  “Ms. Coven,” spoke Silence. “I wanted to make sure this seal wasn’t one of your students before I ate him.”

  Ms. Coven examined the seal with her eye. “Nope. Never seen him. Eat away.”

  “Hurray!” said the yeti, getting ready to stuff Charles the Seal into his gigantic mouth.

  The seal barked, “I’m not a seal! I’m Charles Nukid. I got turned into a seal by a fizard!” At least that’s what Charles thought he said, but all the class heard was the bark! bark! of seal calls. Charles couldn’t believe he was about to meet his end by being eaten by a yeti. Talk about embarrassing.

  The yeti was just about to chomp down on Charles’s seal head when Petunia yelled, “Wait! That’s not a seal. That’s Charles Nukid!”

  “Huh?” said the yeti, taking Charles out of his mouth.

  “Look on his flipper!” On Charles’s flipper was the backpack with the guitar sticking out. Then Millie the Millipede crawled up the guitar neck.

  “Millie!” Lattie shrieked in a rare outburst of emotion. She leaped onto the yeti, and Millie crawled onto her shoulder, coughing up seawater and nuzzling her cheek.

  “If this is your friend,” said Ms. Coven, “a student transforming into an animal is the number one rule not to break! You may continue with your meal, Mr. Yeti.”

  Hearing that he was breaking the rules filled Charles with renewed vigor. If it was his time to die, by golly, he would die following the rules. He began thrashing and squirming in the yeti’s hands. A slippery oil exuded from his seal skin, and he slid right through the yeti’s grip, landing on the floor. Then he paddled his flippers and slid on his belly up and down the aisles as the angry yeti chased after him.

  Lattie was still riding on the yeti’s shoulders and covered its eyes. “You cannot hunt what you cannot see!” Lattie exclaimed. The yeti tripped over a desk and crashed down onto two other desks, smashing them to bits.

  The class cheered, “Go seal! Go seal!” Even Ms. Coven cheered with them.

  Ezelba pointed her wand at Charles, and he rose into the air. “There’s one way to settle this,” she said. “Abra vitulina!” There was a flash from her wand, and Charles transformed back into his human self, wearing the gray shorts, white dress shirt, and polka-dot tie.

  The class erupted in laughter.

  “Look at him,” cackled Ezelba. “What kind of silly outfit is that?”

  “Yeah, and he’s as skinny as a toothpick!” laughed the troll girl.

  “Let’s call him Toothpick!” the zombie girl suggested.

  “Toooothpick! Toooothpick!” the class mocked.

  Charles sighed. Even halfway around the world, he couldn’t escape that dreaded nickname.

  “Don’t call him Toothpick,” said Ms. Coven. “Charles is a part of our class now.” The class begrudgingly quieted down. “Besides,” Ms. Coven added, “he has no chance of lasting long here. He has the skinniest noodle neck I’ve ever seen.”

  “Noodle-neck! Noodl
e-neck!” the class chanted.

  Charles didn’t like that nickname any better. His friends didn’t care what his nickname was. They were so overjoyed that he was back they gave him high fives and patted him on the shoulder.

  Class resumed with a few small changes. Silence the Yeti was passed out on the floor, so the students whose desks had been crushed by his fall were using his white fluffy back as their desk.

  Finally, Ms. Coven finished her brew by chanting, “And the final step so you won’t die, the wing set of a dragonfly.”

  She placed a dragonfly wing in the cauldron, and the potion dramatically changed color from sludgy black to bright green. Then she placed small black cauldrons on everyone’s desks and ladled a scoop into each one.

  “Since you’ve been paying such close attention,” said Ms. Coven, “I’m sure you’ll know exactly what to do with these.”

  Nobody had been paying close attention. Not even me.

  The ogre took a small sip. He turned into a newt. A brown furry monster rubbed some on his hand. He turned into a toad.

  Ms. Coven cackled, “Nobody is allowed to leave this class until you’ve used this potion properly.”

  That’s when Charles had an idea. He remembered seeing the painting on Marlin’s wall of a Scream Academy soccer team with dragonfly wings. Didn’t Ms. Coven just add a dragonfly wing into her brew?

  It was a long shot, but he decided to take a chance. After all, it couldn’t be any worse than being a seal, right?

  Charles took a spoonful and poured it down his back.

  “Charles! What are you doing?” his friends shouted. But a second later, dragonfly wings sprouted from his shoulder blades and he started flying around the room.

  “Whoo-hoo!” he cried. “This is awesome.”

  Soon everyone had copied him, and they were flying around the room. “Good job, Noodle-neck!” said the troll girl. “We’ll call you Charles Nukid from now on!”

  The lunch bell rang, and Charles flew straight into the lunch hall. But the potion wore off unexpectedly, and he fell right into a big tub of noodles.

  Lattie fell from up near the ceiling, but was caught in the arms of the same troll she had saved the first day at Scream Academy. “Now we even,” said Tommy the Troll. It stomped away before Lattie could even express her gratitude. I guess some creatures have their own way of saying thank you.

  Charles crawled out of the tub and was covered in noodles. All the monsters laughed.

  His nickname went back to being Noodle-neck.

  16

  Lattie and the Trampoline

  During lunch, everyone from Ms. Coven’s class came and sat at the table with the Scary School kids. Even the abominable snowkids rushed over and fought with the other monsters over who would get to sit next to them.

  Charles began telling the story of what happened after he fell in the chasm. He told them about how he survived the fall by using his guitar, how he freed Marlin the Fizard, and how he barely survived the shark chase in the ocean.

  The monster kids were so enthralled that they didn’t even touch the caribou carcass lying on the table.

  Eventually he got to the part about how Marlin predicted that he was destined to battle the Ice Dragon. He chose not to mention that he was supposed to die doing so. That just didn’t seem cool. But as soon as Charles said “Ice Dragon,” a low, menacing growl could be heard at the table. It wasn’t coming from any of the monsters. It was coming from Lattie.

  It was a morning much like any other at the ninja monsterstery. The thick fog rolled through the mountain pass like a soft gray river, and the magnificent red temple sat atop the snowy mountain peak like a gleaming cherry on a mound of ice cream.

  This was where Master Three Claws trained his monster pupils in the ninja arts. Only those deemed worthy were allowed to live and study at the temple, and the competition for admission was fiercer than a bearodactyl protecting its cubs. Unfortunately, the only students who ever applied were savage monsters, so Master Three Claws didn’t usually get the most disciplined students, but he enjoyed the challenge of molding his ferocious disciples into focused thinkers and fearless masters.

  Master Three Claws had a wrinkled face that looked something like a shar-pei dog, but with the long ears and whiskers of a lynx, and the chubby body of a teddy bear. He appeared incredibly appetizing to any monster that looked upon him, which was why self-defense was so important to him.

  He was not called Three Claws because he had three claws. In fact, he had no claws. His paws were actually as puffy and harmless as a declawed kitten’s. He was called Three Claws because of the three scars that ran diagonally across his wrinkled face, where a monster with three claws had once slashed him.

  It was that encounter that made Three Claws realize that he would have to find other ways to defend himself against the vicious monsters that wanted to make a meal of him.

  But, as I was saying, eleven years ago, on a morning much like any other, something extraordinary happened. Master Three Claws was supervising the monsters in their daily chores—preparing for a long day of training in combat and stealth—when there was a loud knock at the monsterstery door.

  “Oh, goody!” said one of the monster students. “Breakfast is here!”

  Master Three Claws bopped the monster on the head with his staff and said, “The superior man does not, even for the space of one meal, act contrary to virtue.”

  The monster grumbled and continued mopping the floor.

  Master Three Claws opened the temple doors to find a small basket sitting on the doorstep. In it, a human baby was wrapped in a blanket with the name LATTIE stitched into it.

  The monsters immediately smelled the human flesh, dropped their mops, and ran to the entryway.

  “Oh, master! You bring us a human baby for breakfast! What a gift!” A monster with long tusks made a lunge for the baby, but Master Three Claws snatched him by the tusks, twirled him over his head, and threw him across the room.

  “This is not your breakfast,” said Three Claws, “but it is certainly a gift.”

  That night, Lattie was asleep in the nursery that the frustrated monsters had been ordered to build. But the sweet smell of human meat was too much to resist, and three of them snuck in to have a midnight snack.

  Using their ninja skills, they tiptoed into the nursery and were so quiet they didn’t even wake the sleeping baby or stir Master Three Claws, who was sleeping nearby. They lifted the blanket and whispered: “I want the legs!” “I want the arms!” “I want the belly!”

  The biggest monster reached down, drooling in anticipation, but then felt something bite its finger. “Ouchies!” the monster shouted, seeing a baby millipede with huge fangs clamped onto its finger. The millipede swung herself onto the next monster and bit him on the ear, then bit the next monster on his snout.

  Crying in pain from the millipede’s potent poison, the monsters ran back to their rooms. Master Three Claws had noticed the baby millipede crawl into Lattie’s basket when he first found it and knew that it and the child would be lifelong friends.

  By the way, in case you’re an animal expert, it’s true that millipedes don’t usually bite. They actually can’t. But Millie is a millipede mixed with a rhinoceros beetle, which has one of the strongest bites in the animal kingdom. I guess that makes her more of a monster-pede!

  Two years later, Lattie was already well into her ninja training. She learned to kick and chop before she could even walk. Her favorite food was sweet sugar cookies, and Master Three Claws was careful to give them to her only as a very special reward. This drove Lattie crazy. She was so tired of the rice and spinach she had to eat at almost every meal.

  One day, she saw Master Three Claws place the box of cookies on the top shelf in the kitchen pantry. Lattie tried all morning to jump up to reach them, but she didn’t even come close. That made her so mad she stomped her foot on the floor until the floorboard beneath her broke apart, revealing a small, hidden crawl space filled w
ith old rubber mats. They looked like they hadn’t been used for hundreds of years.

  That gave Lattie her very first brilliant idea.

  She ran to her room, pulled out the springs from her bed and attached them to a rubber mat. In no time she had assembled a crude trampoline. It took some practice, but soon she was able to jump off the trampoline all the way to the top shelf, where she smartly removed just one sugar cookie from the box so Master Three Claws wouldn’t notice. Then she hid the trampoline in the crawl space and replaced the floorboard.

  It was a lot of work for one cookie, but when all you have to eat is rice and spinach and the occasional codfish, it’s totally worth it.

  One year later, Lattie went into the kitchen for her daily routine of swiping another sugar cookie, but she found that a whole new set of shelves had been built above the ones already there. The box of cookies was now placed even higher than before. It took weeks of jumping on the trampoline before Lattie was finally able to reach the cookies at the new height. The next day, the cookies were placed on a higher shelf, and it took more weeks of jumping to reach those ones. And so it went until a year had passed, and the cookies were on a shelf all the way at the ceiling, and there was no place higher for them to go.

  Or so Lattie thought.

  One morning, Lattie walked into the kitchen, and the box of cookies was gone. Oh no, Lattie thought. Master Three Claws has finally caught on to my trick.

  Of course, Master Three Claws had caught on long ago, but four-year-old Lattie didn’t realize that.

  That day, a very angry Lattie entered the Combat Hall for her daily lessons in combat. The hall’s ceilings were fifty feet high and the walls were a sheer polished stone. Hanging on the sides was a collection of swords and helmets and weaponry that would be the envy of the grandest ancient army. But the prized possession was a sword encased in glass marked THE SWORD OF GOLD.