Ignatius MacFarland (11 page)

“But then I started seeing all the stuff he was doing, how he was trying to pass off everything from our frequency as stuff he came up with, and how he was acting like he was some kind of god or something. He was forcing everybody living here to speak English and to dress like we do and making them build all his buildings and having his army beat them and throw them in jail or worse if they didn’t do whatever he said. And so I started giving him a hard time about it, telling him to stop acting like such a dictator and trying to tell all the creatures in this world who he really is and what he’s doing. And the next thing I knew, some of his guards came and locked me in his basement and told me I couldn’t leave. Like, ever.”

“So you escaped?” I asked, feeling sort of sick to my stomach that Mr. Arthur turned out to be such a mean guy.

“Yeah. When he came to see me and tell me that he couldn’t let me ruin things by telling everybody what was up, I jumped on him and got him in a headlock and told his guards that I was going to break his neck unless they let me go. Fortunately, he’s such a wuss that I was totally stronger than him, and he was completely freaked out that I might hurt him. So he told all the guards to back off and I kept him in a headlock and dragged him all the way to the front gates. And once they opened them to let me out, I kicked him in the nuts and ran away. His guards have been after me ever since.”

“So did you tell everybody that he’s a fake?”

“I tried, but he told the whole town that I was trying to kill him and that I was this evil spirit from another world and he put my picture all over the place and since everybody here has to believe everything that he tells them, they all just scream and run away when they see me and then they tell his army where I am and his goons come after me and try to kill me.” Then she sighed and shook her head. “To be honest, it’s getting pretty old.”

She looked around like she was figuring out where to run next but I could tell that she was actually trying not to show me how depressed she was about how her life was going at that moment. It was the first time I had seen her actually act like a normal person and not some mean girl or kung fu master or drill sergeant. And I sorta felt sorry for her.

“Then why did you come back to town?” I asked.

She gave me a look like she couldn’t understand why I would ask her something so stupid and said as casually as you would if you were telling somebody you were about to go to the grocery store . . .

“Because I’m trying to figure out how to get the town to turn against him.”

I stared at her for a few seconds, then I took off my backpack, opened it, and pulled out my dad’s Shakespeare book. I held it up to her and, with my next six words, tried to sound as cool as I possibly could.

“Do you think this might help?”

17

PUH PAH

As Karen and I ran through the woods — well, actually, I sort of stumbled along as she ran, pulling me by my shirtsleeve — I had never seen her look so happy. Granted, I hadn’t known her that long and “I had never seen her look so happy” is usually a sentence you say when somebody you’ve known for years who never smiles finally smiles. But it was still true. I mean, I hadn’t seen her happy at all in the short amount of time I had known her.

When I showed Karen the Shakespeare book, her eyes lit up the way they might have if I had given her a diamond ring or something else that girls go all nutty over. Then she grabbed it from me, flipped through it to make sure I hadn’t just handed her a phone book with a Shakespeare cover glued onto it, and said, “Now they’re really going to believe me!” And then she grabbed my shirtsleeve and that’s how we got where we currently were, which was running through the woods.

She darted in and out of all the odd-looking trees that were fortunately much farther apart than they had been around the dead field. All the strange colors of the different plants and leaves in the forest sort of made it feel like we were running through the woods during the fall. But the extra purples and blues and other colors that didn’t really look like anything I had ever seen before made it seem like somebody had melted a box of crayons and poured it all over the forest.

“Where . . . are we . . . going?” I asked as I tried to catch my breath, which isn’t easy when you’re running at top speed.

“We’ve gotta show this to Herfta,” she yelled over her shoulder to me. “And don’t ask me who that is. You’ll see in a minute.”

“I wasn’t . . . going . . . to ask you.”

“Sure you were. It’s only normal to ask who someone is when somebody tells you that person’s name but then doesn’t tell you anything else about them.”

“Then why’d you tell me not to ask?”

“Hey, just because it’s normal for you to ask doesn’t mean I want to answer. If we get into a situation where just because you’ve arrived in a completely different world that I’ve been in for a year you feel it’s okay to start asking me ‘
What’s
that?’ and ‘
Who’s
that?’ and ‘
Why
is that like
that?
’ every five seconds, then I’m going to end up wanting to kill you after about three minutes. And since I’m going to need your help now, I think it’d be better if we do everything we can to make sure you don’t drive me crazy.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What if you drive
me
crazy?”

“Then you can feel free to keep your mouth shut about it.”

“Hey, that’s not fair.”

“Tough. I was here first.” She looked back at me and I thought I almost saw something close to what some people might call a “playful smile” on her face. For two seconds, I started to wonder if she was deciding that she might actually not completely hate having me around. That was, until she yanked on my shirt and said, “God, would you run already? You’re slower than my grandma.”

And so, not wanting to be slower than anybody’s grandmother, I did my best to try to speed up.

After what felt like half an hour, I was ready to die. We had been running nonstop, and I was sweating like a pig. The cat raced along next to us the whole time, and Karen didn’t seem tired at all. I had to wonder if living in a strange world surrounded by bizarre creatures and getting chased by strange armies that want to kill you would make anybody into a person or cat who could run for half an hour and not get tired. Karen didn’t even look like she was sweating.

Karen suddenly stopped running and since I was so deep in thought about gross stuff like her sweat glands, I basically plowed right into her, knocking her down and knocking the Shakespeare book out of her hand.

“Don’t you ever watch where you’re going, kid?” she yelled at me as she jumped back up and grabbed the book off the ground.

My body was so happy to have stopped running that suddenly my legs turned into Jell-O and I collapsed onto the ground in front of her, panting like I had just . . . uh . . . well, like I had just run for a freakin’ half an hour straight. “I . . . think . . . I’m going to . . . die,” I said, unable to catch my breath as the cat jumped onto my chest and stared at me.

“All right, drama queen,” she said with a shake of her head. “We’re here anyway.”

And that was when I opened my eyes and looked up at the sky.

Yikes.

We were in the middle of a dense patch of those trees that had the spikes and thorns all over them. But these trees were really tall. I mean, like, skyscraper tall. And way up at the top of the trees was an entire city of tree houses. Except they were way more elaborate than regular tree houses. There were round ones and oval ones and huge ones and tiny ones and yet none of them had any kind of bridge or walkway between them. It looked like whoever lived up there had to jump from one house to the next, which seemed insane because it looked pretty impossible to jump that far and, even if you could, chances were you’d eventually miss and fall hundreds of feet to your death. What a weird place, I thought as I moved the cat off my chest and stood up to get a better look.

And that was when I noticed something.

At first it just looked like a lot of birds were flying around the treetops. But then I quickly realized that what I was seeing was a bunch of people with wings, just like the girl I had seen when I first woke up in the dead field, and they were flying around from house to house and building to building, hundreds of them. As I watched them fly, I saw that their treetop city looked like it went on forever in all directions, with some buildings so big that they covered the tops of four or five trees and blocked all the sunlight from getting down to where Karen and I were.

WWWWWWHHHHEEEEEETTTTTT! Karen whistled super loud and I almost had a heart attack because she did it right behind my head. I’d tried my whole life to be able to do one of those loud whistles — you know, the kind where you put your fingers in your mouth and blow really hard (some people can do it without even using their fingers, although they have to do this weird curly thing with their tongue against their teeth and their lips all pursed like they just ate a lemon or something) — but had never been able to do it.

“God, warn me when you do that!” I said, my heart now racing even faster than it had been from running.

“Toughen up, you wuss,” she said as she squinted up at the treetops. I saw the cat look up. Suddenly its eyes filled with fear. I threw my head back and saw a bunch of flying people coming down toward us. They were flying so fast I was sure they were going to zoom right past us and smash into the ground like pennies tossed off the Empire State Building. The cat took off running as fast as it could and disappeared into the woods as I stood sort of paralyzed. As the flying people sped toward us, I could see that they were as strange looking as the girl I saw over the dead field. Their arms and legs seemed to be extraordinarily long and their bodies were pretty skinny, which I guess makes sense. I mean, it’d be pretty hard to fly if you were fat. My cousin Ernie had a parrot that was really fat and all it did was sit in its cage all day and say “super-duper party pooper” over and over again until you wanted to strangle it.

When they were almost on top of me, I screamed and ducked down as if that would do any good if a flying guy landed on top of me. Whoosh! A blast of air hit me, and leaves and dirt blew up all around as the flying people used their wings to stop themselves. Then their feet softly touched the ground, as if they hadn’t just been zooming toward the earth at a billion miles per hour.

“
Poo pa-poo pah fuh puh
,” I heard a voice say. But the voice didn’t really “say” any of it. It sounded more like a really quiet person was trying to blow a piece of fuzz out from between his lips.

I looked up to see that the voice was coming from the tallest person I’d ever seen. Everything about him was stretched, as if he were made out of wax and somebody had heated him up and then grabbed his head and feet and pulled to make him longer, like a big piece of taffy. He was standing with a bunch of other flying people, both men and women, who looked a lot like he did, only not as crazy tall.

“
Pah poo fuh puh hoo poo
,” said Karen back to the super tall guy. But she said it almost the same way that he had said it, all soft and breathy, which impressed me because it didn’t sound anything like her normal, occasionally obnoxious voice. She said it really fast and excited, which made her kind of sound like a cat having a sneezing fit. Then she held up the Shakespeare book to him and said another bunch of
pah
s and
puh
s, and pointed at me.