Humbug Holiday (2 page)

The workroom was a small room located in the front corner of the library. Inside were tables, a computer, and lots and lots of bookshelves filled with crusty old books.

The zapper gates were also in there, tucked against the back wall. I glanced at them quickly, but Mrs. Figglehopper stood in the way, holding out a copy of a thin red book. On the cover was a design of gold holly leaves and gold lettering.

“This is my last copy of
A Christmas Carol.
You must be very careful with it. It's quite old. By the way, do you know what it's about?”

“We know what it's not about,” I said. “Which is a start.”

Mrs. Figglehopper chuckled to herself. “Yes, well, ever since I was old enough to read, I have loved this book,” she said. “It was written in 1843 by the famous English novelist Charles Dickens. It's about an old miser named Ebenezer Scrooge.”

“Funny name,” said Frankie.

“Dickens was famous for his funny names,” said Mrs. Figglehopper. “Scrooge is very rich, but very stingy. His heart is cold. He won't use his money for good. He only wants to keep it. But money isn't good if it doesn't help anyone. Money is like … like …”

“Cookies?” said Frankie, casting a look my way.

“Exactly!” said the librarian. “If you keep cookies too long they'll get moldy and be no good for anyone. And it's the same with Scrooge. He doesn't share. He loves no one, helps no one, has no friends. He doesn't celebrate Christmas a single bit.”

“Sounds like a bad sort of man,” said Frankie.

“So what happens to this Scrooge guy?” I asked.

“Well, he is visited by—”

Brrrnng!
The phone rang. “Hold on.”

She picked it up, nodded once, said “Good,” then hung up and turned back to us. “Mr. Wexler needs me in the cafeteria. The turkeys have just come out of the ovens and I'm going to help carve them. In the meantime, this little red book has some loose pages in the front. Perhaps you could repair them for me before you take it. The glue is in the back of the workroom.”

“We'll be late for the Christmas Banquet,” I started to say, but Mrs. Figglehopper had already whooshed her way out the doors, heading for the cafeteria.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “While everybody's noshing on turkey and stuffing, we're stuck here repairing books.”

“It's just a few pages,” said Frankie. “We should be able to fix them in a jiffy and get back before the party starts. I'll set up the book, you get the special glue.”

“I will get the special glue,” I said, giving Frankie the eye, “but I'll take my backpack with me.”

While Frankie opened the book to find the loose pages, I poked around for the glue. Of course, the search for glue led me near those crazy old zapper gates.

I tried not to stare at them, but I couldn't help myself.

After all, they were the reason we had gotten good grades in English, even though reading was hard for us.

“The zapper gates,” I whispered.

Frankie looked up. “Just find the glue, Devin.”

The glue. Uh-huh, sure. But listen.

Ordinary library security gates are supposed to go all
zzzt-zzzt
when a book isn't checked out the right way. It was too bad—so Mrs. Figglehopper said—that these particular gates were busted beyond repair.

Uh-uh. No way. Wrong-o!

Frankie and I found out the hard way that these gates
do
work. Only not in any normal regular everyday way. No, no. If a book happens to go through
these
gates, a weird blue blinding bright light flashes out.

Sound impossible?

Of course, it's impossible! And even more impossible is what happens next. The wall behind the gates cracks open—that's right—it cracks open, and the book gets sucked right through the crack! And suddenly you find yourself getting sucked right through after it!

Believe it!

It's happened to Frankie and me a couple of times.

And each time it happens, we get all tumbled and rumbled and wumbled around and finally get thrown out smack dab in the first chapter of the book.

That's right. Frankie and me—in the book!

It's crazy. It's impossible. It's ultraweird.

But it happens.

So far, we've been lucky enough to make it back out again. But we've had to read our way to the last page every time. That's why we know the books so well and how we get good grades.

Anyway, I found the glue and went back to the table, pulling up a chair. “Move over a bit,” I said. “I want to see the book.”

Frankie pulled the book away, with a sudden sly look in her eye that I didn't like. “I'll share the book if you share your cookies.”

“Ha, I don't think so!” I said.

“Then, I don't think you can see the book,” she said.

“But it's not the same,” I protested. “If you share the book with me, the book is still there. But if I share my cookies with you, those cookies are gone.”

Frankie frowned. “They belong to the Christmas Banquet, anyway. They're for other people to eat.”

“Other people like you?” I said. “I don't think so.”

“I only want one.”

“Then show me the book.”

“Not without a cookie!”

“Not without the book!”

I made a grab for the book. She tried to seize my pack. Our arms got tangled. Our hands collided. And the next thing we knew the book was flying up in the air.

“Get it!” Frankie screamed.

We both jumped for the book. Too late.

The book fell right between the zapper gates.

Zzzzz
—
kkkkk
—
zzzzzt!
The room flashed with a sudden bright blue light that practically charred my eyeballs. We were thrown to the floor. Then everything quaked and the back wall cracked open and it sucked us through the gates and we tumbled and rolled and fell and bounced down, down, down, and finally out onto a dirty, dark street on a dirty, dark night.

Thick yellow fog rolled over us.

Frankie sat up next to me. We looked at each other.

“Um, sorry about the tussle for the cookies,” she said.

“Me, too, for the book,” I said.

We looked around at where we were.

“Do you want to say it, or should I?” she asked.

I groaned. “In the spirit of sharing, I have to say it's probably your turn. Go ahead.”

Frankie drew in a sharp breath, then said it.

“We're in a book—again!”

Chapter 3

I stood up and peered through the fog.

The blue light had faded and the zapper gates were gone. So was the crack in the wall we'd come through.

“Well, so far, so weird,” I grumbled. “We're totally in the book now. I hope it's a good one.”

Frankie scooped the thin red book up from the street. “And I hope it's not too dark to read.”

It nearly was.

The street we were in was narrow, but the fog was so thick that we barely saw the buildings on the other side.

“Okay, we're in some city, probably at night,” I said. “An old city, with lots of old stone buildings. We're definitely not in Palmdale anymore.”

“Not likely,” she said, flipping open to the title page. “It says here the book was published in London. That's in England.”

“The birthplace of English class,” I mumbled. “It's not present day, either. They have old-fashioned streetlights, which means they don't light up much at all. All in all, it's sort of a cold, gloomy place to put a Christmas story. I mean, hey. Where are the reindeer and snowmen and elves and presents for me?”

In the distance, a clock was sounding out the hour.

Bong! Bong! Bong!

“Three o'clock? Is that right?” wondered Frankie. “It's so dark.”

“Dark or not, three o'clock definitely makes it snack time!” I said, reaching around to my backpack.

But even as I did, a hand—a pale, white, very thin hand—darted out of the fog, grabbed my backpack right off my shoulder, and snatched it away.

“Hey, you!” I yelled. “Lay off the chocolaty goodness of my cookies! Give that back—”

But even as I tried to wrestle my pack free of the strange white hand—
whoosh!
—an icy wind swept around me and the hand was gone, and with it—
fwit!
—my entire backpack!

I freaked out. “Frankie, it's gone! Someone stole my backpack! I saw a hand! My cookies are in there! Who would steal cookies from a kid? Especially a kid who's me? And especially at snack time—”

The fog closed around us, leaving no trace of the thief.

“Maybe the book tells us!” said Frankie “Keep looking while I read!”

I scrambled up and down the cobblestone street, but it was so dark and the fog so thick I couldn't see anything. I had to face it. Whoever took my backpack had escaped.

I straggled back to Frankie. “Nope, he's gone. Weird creepy hand. I didn't even see the rest of him.”

“If it even
was
a him,” she said.

“Right. Huh? What do you mean?”

Frankie was standing under a street lamp whose yellowy light cast a dull glow onto the book's pages. “Devin, look at this. The actual title of the book is,
A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.”

“A g-g-ghost story?” I said. “Are you saying that hand was … a …
ghost
hand? Mrs. Figglehopper and Mr. Wexler never said anything about ghosts.”

“This story says something about ghosts,” said Frankie, looking up. “Devin, we're in an actual ghost story.”

I shivered. “I didn't sign on for ghosts. A Christmas story, maybe, but no ghosts. I'm not a fan of ghosts. Ghosts haunt people. Which means they'll probably want to haunt me. No, no, this is crazy. Who mixes ghosts and Christmas anyway?”

“Charles Dickens does. He's the guy who wrote it. Good thing it's a skinny book. Maybe your backpack won't be too hard to find.”

I wasn't so sure. Even a short book in this time and place didn't seem all that inviting. The weather, for instance, was going to be a problem for California kids like us. It was cold, bleak, and biting everywhere we turned. We could hear people on the other side of the street go wheezing up and down the sidewalk, beating their hands together and stamping their feet on the pavement to keep warm.

“I don't like this,” I said, shivering. “Let's read until we get to a good part. Preferably, the part where we find my pack, snarf down my cookies, jump through the zapper gates, and get back to Palmdale in time for a normal, ghost-free Christmas. You read first.”

Frankie snorted a snort at me. “Good luck. The fog is too thick to make out the words. And you know what happens when we skip ahead.”

I nodded. I knew.

It's one of the major rules of being in a book. If you try to cheat and skip ahead—even a few pages—everything goes kablooey. A big rip appears in the sky over your head and a huge lightning storm starts and you get tossed around until you crash-land in another part of the story. It's not something you want to mess with.

“Okay,” I said. “So if we can't read, where do we go? And don't tell me we go ghost hunting—”

Frankie chuckled suddenly. “We go right there!”

I peered through the darkness at what she was pointing at. Hanging not far away was a small sign.

On it were the words
SCROOGE AND MARLEY.

“Ebenezer Scrooge is the funny name Mrs. Figglehopper told us about,” she said. “Devin, I think we found our main character. Come on. Let's go listen to some English accents.”

We made our way through the thick fog and up to the door. It was old and wooden, with a grimy pane of glass in it. I put my hand on the knob and turned it, sounding a small door chime—
ding!
—as we entered.

Inside were two rooms. The tiny front room had a high desk in one corner. Behind the desk sat a small man in a faded coat, scribbling by candlelight in a book.

When we entered, he lifted his face in a surprised sort of way. “May I help you?”

“Hey,” I said. “I'm Devin. This is Frankie. We're looking for a guy named Mr. Scrooge. Are you Mr. Scrooge or Mr. Marley?”

The man's expression turned puzzled. “Oh, I'm afraid Mr. Marley is dead.”

Frankie and I looked at each other. We were thinking the same thing. Ghosts. Eeew.

“In fact Jacob Marley died seven years ago this very night,” the man said. “Such a pity to die on Christmas Eve, of all days!”

“It's Christmas Eve? Already?” I asked. “Wow, zero shopping days left. The local mall must be crammed with people—”

“Devin,” said Frankie, giving me a nudge.

Then I remembered. People in the books we drop into don't know anything outside their own stories. This guy had never heard of a mall. But looking at his faded clothes, I wondered if he did much shopping anyway.

The man nodded kindly. “My name is Bob Cratchit, by the way.”

“So,” said Frankie. “If you aren't Scrooge, then who
is
—”

“Cratchit!” a sharp voice shouted behind us. “What's going on out there!”

We whirled around and stared into the inner room.

A thin old man sat at a large black desk. His features were sharp. He had a long, pointed nose and a narrow, wiry chin. His cheeks were all shriveled up, his eyes were red, his lips were thin and blue, and his voice was sharp and grating.

When he saw us standing there, he jumped around his desk, growled like a bear, grabbed a ruler as if it were a sword, and charged at us!

“Yikes!” I cried.

“That,” whispered Bob Cratchit, “is Mr. Scrooge!”

Chapter 4

“Who are you two?” Scrooge demanded.

“Frankie!” said Frankie, huddling on the floor.

“Devin!” said me, huddling right next to her, “We're here to—”