A Tale of Two Proms (Bard Academy) (22 page)

“What did you and Lindsay see out there?” Ryan asked. He was also by the window, peering out.

“I don’t know, but it was something big,” Lindsay said.

As I looked out the window, a single giant oak swayed back and forth in the dark. The leaves on the trees were thick and crowded together, making it hard to tell without lights what was out there. But the sinking feeling in my stomach told me it was nothing good.

“I don’t see anything,” Ryan said. He was by my side and looking out.

“I really have a bad feeling about this,” Samir said.

“As bad as being a walking movie cliché?” Lindsay muttered.

Boom, boom, boom.
The ground rumbled under something big and heavy that was headed this way. 

Samir gave a little squeak of fear. We all held our breath. I scanned the trees, but they were all still.

“
Anything
?” whispered Samir.

Ryan shook his head “no.”

Boom…boom…boom.

 It was coming closer. I moved to the back window of the cabin and looked out. Something large and shadowy moved by the window.

“Wait, I think I saw…” But before I could finish my sentence, a giant fist punched in the front door of the cabin, splintering it to pieces like it was made of toothpicks. Everyone screamed and flattened themselves against the walls of the cabin, trying to avoid the huge, fat fingers. Blade grabbed a chair and broke it over the huge thumb, and the hand retreated.

“Giant!” screamed Samir, stating the obvious.

Adrenaline rushed through my veins and I was breathing hard.

“You think he’s from
Jack and the Beanstalk?
” Hana offered. I shrugged. My mind raced. How many other giants were fictional characters? That’s what he must be. One of the ones who’d escaped when Heathcliff and Catherine had opened the portal.

“Nope,” Blade said. She’d taken up position at the window opposite Ryan’s. A giant eye blinked at us outside the window. It was a single brown eye, in the middle of a massive face with a flat nose and a big gap-toothed mouth. The mouth, I noticed, was big enough to swallow any of us nearly whole. His teeth were large and pointed. He gave us a ghastly looking grin.

“Cyclops!” Hana shouted. “
The Odyssey.”
Hana smacked her forehead, as if she should have known. When Lindsay looked blank, Hana added, “You know? Homer?”

“As in Simpson?” Samir asked. But his joke was lost mid-tension as the giant’s face disappeared from the window and we all waited to see what he would do next. Suddenly he coughed and hacked like something was in his throat and then he spit something down on the ground.

I pressed my face against the window and saw a silver sash on the ground. It must’ve been stuck in his throat. I could just read the words “Prom Queen.”

“D’oh,” I said.

It was the very sash Parker had been wearing the last time I saw her. Now, it was wrinkled on the ground and wet with giant spit. I guess I did know who was screaming earlier. I glanced over at Samir, who shivered.

 “That thing ate Parker!” Lindsay exclaimed.

“It
what
?” Ryan cried.

 “Look! He just spit that out. Parker was wearing that…”

“Before she got on the bus and left us,” I said. We glanced at each other. Now we both knew that Cyclops had been following us in the woods. For whatever reason, it had been distracted by Parker and had gone after her instead of us. Maybe when she’d honked that horn. While I’d never been friends with Parker, I said a silent prayer for her and shuddered. Whatever she’d done to me, she didn’t deserve to become a Cyclops snack. 

 “How do you defeat the Cyclops?” Ryan had recovered from his shock and was now turning to Hana for practical advice. Ryan and Parker had been friends, and I had no doubt he would mourn her later.
If 
we survived.

“Odysseus blinded him,” Hana said with certainty. “Got him drunk first and then took out his good eye with a sharpened stake.”

“We don’t have beer,” Samir said, sounding panicked as he frantically searched through the food stores in the corner. “Just cans of tuna!” He held up some of the cans helplessly and dropped them back on the ground.

“Forget the beer,” Ryan shouted. “Work on the sharpened stakes.” Cyclops reached into the cabin again through the open front door and stretched his fingers across the floor and wall, looking for one of us. His hand was the size of a loveseat – no exaggeration. He grasped around. We all dove and ducked, but Samir was a beat too slow. The giant grabbed him by the shirt, and then wrapped a whole finger around his waist. Samir squealed. Blade, Lindsay, and I clamped on to him where we could; grabbing his arms and legs. The giant pulled, and then he pushed, sending Lindsay toppling off his hand and his knuckles and into the back window of the cabin, shattering the glass outward. Shards flew everywhere. One nicked my cheek, but I barely had time to feel it because I was too busy looking to see if everyone else was okay. I saw a few small cuts on Hana’s arm and one on Lindsay’s leg. They were all surface wounds, as far as I could tell. A shard of glass the size of an envelope landed by Ryan’s feet. He grabbed it suddenly and lodged it straight into the giant’s thumb. Blood spurted from the gash and ran down onto the floor. Ryan released the shard and it remained lodged there, like a giant glass splinter. We heard a howl of pain outside. The giant released Samir, who toppled awkwardly to the ground, and then the giant’s hand was gone.

“Why does he want
me
?” Samir wailed to us. “I’m not a pretty blonde girl!”

“You’re thinking about King Kong,” Hana said. “Cyclops likes to eat people.
Any
people.”

“Even Parker,” hissed Lindsay. I jabbed her in the ribs. It wasn’t nice to make jokes about the dead. “What? I’m just saying she probably tasted bitter.”

“A giant cannibal! Great,” Samir shrieked. “I’m not even that fat. Look at me! All bone!”

“He’ll want to eat at least two of us for a meal,” Hana said, managing to remain amazingly calm. “That’s just what he does. It’s in his story.”

“Great!” Samir said. “You’re saying I’m an appetizer like potato skins? I think I’m going to throw up.” He looked green enough in the face that I knew this wasn’t an idle threat. Samir didn’t handle life-threatening situations very well at all. Instead of a fight-or-flight response, he had a “have a mental breakdown” kind of built-in reaction to danger.

“He’s coming around again,” Blade shouted, her eye at the window, peeking around the curtain.

Ryan was on his feet and ready for battle again. “We have to take out his eye,” he said. “It’s our only chance.”

“And how do you propose to do that?” Samir asked her. “He’s like thirty feet tall!”

I saw a slab of wood on the ground, a broken chair leg.

“We could use this,” I said, grabbing it and holding it, jagged edge up. There were a few more broken pieces of wood on the ground near my feet. Blade took one and so did Ryan.

“He’s on the move.
To the back,”
Ryan whispered urgently. “Everyone stay by the windows. You see his eye, you stab it.”

Hana and Samir and Lindsay scampered to fill their empty hands. Hana and Lindsay found shards of glass. Samir, at a complete loss, came up with a can of tuna.

“Seriously?” Ryan asked him with a quirk of his eyebrow.

“No, you’re right,” Samir said, looking at the single can of tuna. He put it down and rummaged by the pile of food and came up with a giant oversized can of corn. “This is much heavier.”

Ryan just shook his head. He had flattened himself on the wall to the right of the open door. I stood on the left. Blade and Lindsay had taken up spots at the broken back window. Hana and Samir were huddled somewhere near the north side of the house, near the only unbroken window.

The six of us waited, the only sound we heard was the giant moving outside. His feet shook the ground with ominous-sounding booms. I looked out the open door and saw a giant foot moving. I swallowed, hard.   I glanced at Ryan and he nodded at me. Cyclops was coming.

Cyclops’ shirtfront appeared first, and then his neck, as he squatted down outside. I saw a flash of his hand first. My palm felt sweaty around the chair leg. Would I manage to hit him? Or would I miss? I’d never stabbed a giant before. Could I even do it? My heart hammered in my chest. Everything seemed to run in slow motion. I felt hot and cold all at once.

I could see the giant’s nose through the door, and then, almost as suddenly, his big eye blinking.

“Now!” screamed Ryan, and we lunged forward almost at the same time. Ryan, thinking quickly, stabbed his chair leg deep into the giant’s eye high to keep the lid from closing. I was a millisecond behind, my weapon sliding into the middle of the giant’s big iris, as if it was sinking just left of center in a bull’s eye. I was shocked by how easily it went in. There was hardly any resistance at all. It was like staking a giant bowl of Jell-O.

Serious ewwww.

I heard a gruesome squishing sound as it broke the surface, and then I let it go. The last thing I saw was Ryan’s stake and mine, poking out of his massive eye, before Cyclops disappeared from the window, shrieking. Samir screamed like we’d just stabbed him, and then he clamped both hands over his mouth, probably to keep from hurling. 

“Nice aim,” Ryan said, his voice shaky.

“You, too,” I said, feeling a little bit nauseous but trying not to show it. 

Outside, the Cyclops howled in rage and pain and surprise, like he’d been shot. He hopped around as he clawed at his face.

“Puts a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘I’d rather have a stick in the eye,’” Blade said, dryly.

“Not over, guys, not over!” warned Lindsay, who had smartly kept her eye on the giant.

Outside, Cyclops had yanked out the two chair legs, holding his eye shut. Angrily, he began stomping his feet. His massive sandaled feet began punching holes the size of SUVs into the dirt. He completely crushed a small tree near the corner of the house.

“He’s going to smash us to death,” Blade said.

“But he can’t see us,” Samir said.

“I’m not sure that will matter.”   The giant was weaving this way and that, randomly stomping. Eventually, his feet would find us, and when they did, he would make sure none of us lived.

“We could run into the woods,” Samir suggested.

“He’d chase us all night,” Ryan said.

“Yeah and what if he can smell us?” Samir asked.

“You’re thinking of the giant in Jack the Beanstalk,” Hana said.

“Maybe
all
giants can smell people,” Samir pointed out. “I mean Cyclops wants to eat us just like Jack’s giant wanted to eat him. Cannibal giants? They have a great sense of smell. Fee fi fo fum.”

“Hush, you guys,” Lindsay scolded us. “I have a better idea.” She held up
A Tale of Two Cities.
And then she opened it and began reading out loud from the book
.
The portal shimmered in the middle of the room, even as the giant’s angry footsteps outside shook the table. 

“Told you he could smell us!” Samir whispered frantically.

Cyclops’ left foot landed on the little porch of the cottage and crushed it to bits. If he stumbled closer to us, we would all be flattened. Everyone eyed the portal in the middle of the room as it glowed brighter.

“What about the French Revolution?” Hana asked us all.

“I’d rather be beheaded than squashed and then eaten by a giant,” Ryan said, and that pretty much settled the argument. When it came right down to it, I didn’t want to be flattened, either. None of us did. When the portal grew large enough, Ryan grabbed Hana’s hand and they jumped through. Blade and Samir were next. I grabbed all the vault books I could manage to hold from the shelves and stuffed them in my backpack. Lindsay was already through and I followed behind her, the last of our group. I was weightless for just a fraction of a second and then my feet hit the cobblestones of a street in Paris.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

People were everywhere and it seemed like they were all shouting. One man roughly bumped into me and kept on going without even a look in my direction. He had his fist in the air and was shouting “Liberté ou la mort!” and “Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!” Things were chaotic and I pressed closer to Lindsay, trying to protect her, I guess. I couldn’t see anyone else, and then, suddenly, the crowd parted a little and just ahead of Lindsay, I saw the others.

Our clothes again had been transformed. Blade, Hana, Lindsay and I were all in thick petticoats and long dresses. My outfit included a corset, which pinched my ribs together, making it a bit hard to breathe. On my feet were ankle-high lace-up leather boots. My backpack had magically transformed into a simple burlap bag. Inside, I was relieved to find the vault books were still all in there. They had made the transition.

Blade’s hair was back to blond and pulled up tightly into a bun held in place under a bonnet. Samir and Ryan were wearing boots and britches and coats with lots of buttons. 

We all looked a little like a cross between pilgrims and American revolutionaries.

“I really have to stop time traveling,” Blade said, holding up her dress. “I look like a Puritan.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re complaining about, since I’m the one who looks like George Washington,” Samir grumbled, as he scratched underneath his white powered wig.

Two men trounced through our little party and one of them nearly ran Samir over.

“We’ve got to get away from this crowd,” Blade said.

“There,” Ryan shouted, pointing to a bare stretch of sidewalk near a small cottage. We made it to the spot near an empty wheelbarrow and a stack of crates and huddled there, away from the suffocating crowd.

The sights and sounds of old Paris were a lot to process, but as I took them in, I quickly discovered sights and sounds had nothing on smells. Pungent, unforgettable smells. The past stank, literally. I realized some smells were coming from the people. The man who bumped into me probably hadn’t showered for months, if ever. But I also saw rotten garbage in the street and raw sewage running down one alley.