“What happened to her?!” Peter screamed.
“Butt-ugly happened to her!” Dill yelled back.
They raced through the den, into the front hallway, and past the staircase into the dining room. Peter looked over his shoulder, but Beth was nowhere to be seen.
Peter reached out and slapped Dill’s arm. “Hold on, hold on,” he whispered.
“Dude!” Dill snarled as he kept running. “Maybe you wanna be Butt-Ugly Monster Baby’s next snack, but I don’t!”
“She’s not following us!”
They stopped running, crouched down, and looked around the doorway back into the main hall. Beth was nowhere to be seen.
“That wasn’t her tongue,” Peter said in shock.
“Well, it is now,” Dill said. “Either that or she stole it out of an elephant.”
Peter shuddered. “And those teeth!”
“Maybe Beth turned into the Big Bad Wolf or something,” Dill suggested.
“What?!”
“You know – Little Red Riding Hood? ‘My, what big teeth you have’? ‘My, what a big tongue you have’?”
“Little Red Riding Hood didn’t say, ‘My, what a big tongue you have’!”
“She would’ve if she’d seen it. And remember, the Big Bad Wolf ate Granma in that story. I don’t wanna be Granma.” Dill looked thoughtful. “Hey, maybe we can get Beth to eat your grandfather…”
Peter looked back around the corner: no Beth. “What are we gonna do, Dill? We can’t hurt her – she’s my sister!”
“That’s not your sister,” Dill scoffed.
“Maybe it is. Maybe the mushrooms did that to her.”
“Yeah, right. Stoo-piiiid.”
“It’s not any stupider than her turning into the Big Bad Wolf,” Peter snapped.
Dill threw up his hands. “I’m just trying to help. You don’t appreciate it, figure it out on your own.”
Peter was about to retort when he felt something plop on the back of his neck. Terror surged through him and he jerked around, ready to see a razor-toothed monster baby standing right behind him –
Nothing was there. Peter wiped his neck and looked at the clear goop sliming the palm of his hand. Suddenly, three more plops splattered his shoulder.
What the heck?
“Peter,” Dill whimpered under his breath. Peter turned around and saw Dill’s head was craned up, so he looked up, too.
Beth was fourteen feet above them, upside-down on the ceiling. Her body was in crawling position with her hands and knees on the ceiling itself, but her head was pointing up (or down, depending on how you looked at it, since she was facing the floor) as she stared at Peter and Dill. Long, stringy strands of saliva dripped slowly from her fang-filled smile. Another drop plopped on Peter’s forehead.
“Hhr-hhr-hhhhhhhhrrrrrr,” Beth chuckled.
8
“AAAAAHHHH!” Dill and Peter screamed as they took off through the dining room and down the hall.
Peter looked back over his shoulder. Beth was racing upside-down across the ceiling, crawling faster than any baby in the history of the world.
And she was gaining on them.
“SHE CAN CRAWL ON THE CEILING!” Peter shrieked.
“NO DUH!” Dill howled back at him.
Peter tried furiously to think. On the entire first floor, there weren’t many doors they could lock – it was mostly one giant series of hallways and big, open rooms.
Except for the doorway under the stairwell, which was locked – and which Peter was not supposed to open on pain of death, according to Grandfather.
And…the doors to Grandfather’s study. Which was coming up in a matter of yards. Peter could see the doors up ahead – closed. He just prayed that they weren’t locked. “Dill, in here!”
Peter grabbed the back of Dill’s shirt collar with his left hand and tried the door handle with his right. Click. It opened.
“Ggggkkkh!” Dill gagged as Peter yanked him into the study.
Peter had a fleeting glimpse of an upside-down, monstrous grin just as he slammed the study door in Beth’s face. There was a thump on the other side, then garbled baby cursing that sounded like “Rar-ar-ar-ar-arrrrrr!” Then BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG on the wooden door.
Then silence.
Suddenly, there was a shuffling sound across the surface of the door itself, like something was crawling over it. Seconds later, the doorknob started to twist.
“Dude, lock it, quick!” Dill yelled from where he lay on the hardwood floor.
Peter leapt over and clicked the deadbolt lock just as the thing on the other side started to rattle the door back and forth. He could imagine Beth kneeling on the other side, doorknob between her hands as she rocked up and down, trying to force the door open with the weight of her body.
After a few seconds and another batch of grumbling “Rarrarararrrarrrarrs,” the sound of crawling slipped across the door and disappeared.
Silence.
Dill looked around in shock. “Where are we?”
9
Peter followed his gaze. The room was truly spectacular – thirty feet high, with every wall housing giant shelves packed with thousands of books. A dozen more shelves filled up the middle of the room. There were no windows, but there was a glimmering chandelier that hung over a giant mahogany desk. On the desk sat a tiny, stained-glass lamp and a stack of open books. The smell of old paper filled the air, and an ancient clock tick tick ticked over the entrance to the study.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Peter asked.
“Cool?” Dill repeated in disbelief. “Dude, you’ve got a library in your house.”
Peter nodded like, Aaaaannd…?
“Dude, that’s about the worst thing I can even think of.” Dill looked back at the study door and shivered. “Except for having a Butt-Ugly Monster Baby crawling around on the ceiling, maybe.” Dill reconsidered. “Maybe.”
“There’s nothing wrong with having a library in your house,” Peter said reproachfully.
“It’s bad enough in schools, now I gotta live next to one?”
“We’ve got bigger problems,” Peter snapped. “What are we gonna do about Beth?”
“I don’t think that’s Beth.”
“Dill, come on. It looks like Beth.”
Dill’s eyebrows shot up in disbelief. “You think that looks like Beth? When did Beth get a mouth outta Lord Of The Rings and start crawlin’ around like Spiderman?”
“I don’t want to think it’s Beth, either, but…what if it is?” Peter asked helplessly. “What if the mushrooms did that to her?”
“Then I guess we better find out how to stop the mushrooms.”
“How?”
Dill scowled and threw up his hands in exasperation. “Dude, we’re in a freakin’ library! Where else are you gonna find out about mushrooms?”
“On the internet.”
“Uh-huh. And where’s your computer?”
Peter sighed. “In the kitchen.”
Dill pointed to the study door. “Which is out there with Butt-Ugly Monster Baby. So, you wanna get on the internets, be my guest! Just close the door behind you.”
Peter looked around. Dill did have a point…maybe there was something in here about mushrooms turning babies into horrible, fang-toothed monsters that could crawl up walls.
“Alright, alright. Come on and help me.”
Dill frowned. “Come and help you where?”
“In here – looking at the books.”
“What, are you kidding me? I don’t read.”
Peter frowned in disbelief. “You can’t read? How the heck do you do anything in school?”
“I can read, dummy, I just don’t. You got a TV in here, I’ll watch it for research, but I don’t do libraries.”
“Maybe I should let Beth in here, and then we’ll see if you ‘do’ libraries or not,” Peter threatened.
Dill glared at him like, Oh, so it’s gonna be like that, is it?
“FINE. Where
’s the mushroom books.”
“I don’t know, you start looking over there, I’ll start over here.”
Dill grumbled loudly as he took off for the other side of the room.
10
Peter started at the bottom of the stacks closest to the doorway and immediately began to despair. Many of the volumes were so old that the faded titles on their spines couldn’t be read, so he had to pull out each book and look inside for the title page. And even when he did that, most of the books were impossible to understand, either because they were full of words he didn’t recognize – Eternus Pugna Inter Bonus Quod Malum or Die grosse Enzyklopädie über Däumling, Feen und sonstig überirdisch Geschöpfe – or words that kind of looked like English, but not really: The londes of fairie folke can nought be speyde by the eyes of mankynde, except without aide of spelles or sondry thinges in Natur which leade in normal course as doores to swich londes.
“What the HECK?!” Dill shouted from his side of the room.
“What?!” Peter yelled back.
Dill stuck his head around a bookshelf. “This stuff is all gobbledygook! It’s like a buncha monkeys banged on a buncha typewriters and this is the crap they came up with!”
“I think it’s other languages, Dill.”
“This is America! They should write in American!”
Dill walked over to the study door.
“What are you doing?” Peter asked in alarm.
“I’m not reading books in Monkey Talk! I DON’T EVEN READ BOOKS IN AMERICAN! Come on, let’s see if Beth’s still out there.”
“That’s a really bad idea,” Peter warned.
“You know what’s a really bad idea? Sitting inside here with stupid monkey books all day! Jeez, Gramma, come on, let’s just take a look!”
Peter reshelved his own book of ‘gobbledygook’ and joined Dill at the door. Now that Dill actually had his hand on the doorknob, he didn’t look quite so confident.
“Uh…okay…I’m just gonna open the door and we’re gonna peek out.”
“Okay.”
Dill softly undid the deadbolt and pulled the door back slooowly, just far enough so that both boys could see through.
Beth sat upside-down about ten feet away from them, her plastic diapie pants planted firmly on the ceiling. She was next to the lighting fixture outside the study, a hanging lamp with a dozen curved arms that ended in tiny, flame-shaped light bulbs. She was crunching contentedly on one of the glass lights; from the looks of it, she’d eaten about six of them so far.
She saw the boys immediately.
“Raaa-rararararraaaa!” she screeched as she bolted across the ceiling on her hands and knees.
Dill slammed the door and clicked the deadbolt back in place. Up above him, there was a BANG BANG BANG which shook the wooden door like a battering ram.
“Raaa-rararararraaaa!” Beth muttered outside in the hallway.
“I’m just gonna go check out some more deeeee-lightful books over here,” Dill said quickly as he jogged back to the shelves.
11
Peter sank down on his rear end and put his face in his hands. It was hopeless. There must have been two or three thousand books in the room, at least; many of them were on top shelves, far out of reach. They would have to climb to those (which might appeal to Dill). Even if they looked at every single one, it would take hours…maybe even days before they found anything that could help them. By that time Mom would surely have come home, straight into the clutches of a monstrous, rampaging baby.
Peter slowly lifted his head and propped up his chin on one palm. He surveyed the room and racked his brain for a plan. There had to be a better way...
His eyes drifted to a particular wall of books. Speckles of light played across them slowly.
Peter frowned. Speckles of light? Where were those coming from?
He looked up and had an aha moment. The chandelier. The light had to be from the crystal shards that hung from its graceful frame. But curiously enough, no matter where he looked, those specks weren’t shining anywhere else in the room.
Peter stood up and walked over to the shelf. As he got closer, it seemed that a majority of the little pinpoints of light were dancing around one book in particular: a worn, leather-bound giant titled Fairieland: Portals To The Other World And Its Denizens.
Peter heaved the giant volume off the shelf and cracked it open in the middle. The first page he turned to had a picture of an old painting. In it, a mother looked down fearfully into a baby’s cradle, where a toothy, wild-eyed infant snarled up at her.
The baby in the cradle looked unnervingly like Beth. Of course, the baby in the painting was wearing a bonnet, not a pink rainbow t-shirt and plastic potty-training pants. But the mouth – especially the teeth – were the same.
“Dill!” Peter shouted.
“What?”
“I think I found out what happened to Beth!”
12
Peter lugged Fairieland over to Grandfather’s mahogany desk and placed it on top of a pile of already-open books. Dill peered over Peter’s shoulder as he read.
The language was slightly more difficult than what Peter was used to, but a piece of cake compared with the londes and sondry thinges of the other stuff he’d looked at.
“Changelings are the offspring of fairies or trolls exchanged for human children. When a human child is kidnapped, the immature fairie left in its place will assume the human’s appearance down to the smallest detail. Shapeshifting abilities or fairie glamour spells initially allow the supernatural being to look identical. But as time goes by, the changeling will begin to exhibit features – both physical and behavioral – that betray it as inhuman.”
Peter gasped. “Dill – it’s not mushrooms at all! Beth got kidnapped and replaced with a troll baby!”
“Beth’s a troll baby?”
“Yeah!”
“Dude, that makes a ton of sense. When do you think it happened, back in California before you moved here?”
“What? No, doofus, today.”
Dill squinted in disbelief. “I dunno, man. She’s been acting like a troll baby ever since I met her.”
“She never grew teeth like that before!”
“I didn’t say she looked like a troll baby till today, I just said she acted like a troll baby.”
“She never crawled on the ceiling before, either!”
“How do you know? What, were you watching her every single minute?” Dill walked off from the table flapping his arms like wings. “Maybe you go off to school and she’s like, ‘Oh, la la la, time to crawl on the ceiling now cuz I’m a troll baby!’”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m bored. Just tell me the good parts.”
Peter shook his head and started reading aloud. “‘The changeling child will gradually grow uglier in appearance and potentially malformed. It will also become ill-tempered and given to screaming and biting.’”
“Duuude, that proves it – she’s ALWAYS been a troll baby!”
Peter ignored him. “‘Beautiful children are in greater danger of being traded for changelings. Beauty, particularly blond hair, attracts fairies and trolls.’”
Dill snorted. “Well, we know a blind troll got her then.”
Peter grew defensive. “Hey, Beth is…cute. She’s a punk, but I think you could call her beautiful…for a little kid.”
“Dude, she’s beautiful like monkeys are beautiful. Maybe they’re beautiful to other monkeys, but that’s about it.”
Peter shook his head and kept reading. “‘In modern times, the stories of changelings have been attributed to various developmental disorders in children. In earlier ages, a child mistaken for a changeling might have simply been mentally retarded.’”
Dill howled with glee. “Ha ha! You’re a changeling, too, dude!”
Peter glared at Dill. “Shut up. ‘The detection of changelings is simple but hazardous. The most reliable method is to throw the changeling in a fire, whereupon the ch
angeling shifts forms and flies up the chimney.’”
“Ooooh, cool!” Dill cried.
“We are NOT throwing it in a fire,” Peter insisted. “Listen to this: ‘However, if the parent is wrong, as could quite possibly be the case with autism or Downs Syndrome, this method often results in the death of the innocent child.’ We are NOT throwing it in a fire.”
“Dude, I think at this point it’s pretty safe to say that thing ain’t Beth. I say we throw it in a fire.”
“I am NOT going to throw any babies in a fire, even if they ARE troll babies!”
“Fine,” Dill grumbled.
“‘Less violent approaches can be taken to trick the changeling into betraying itself as a fairie or troll,’” Peter continued. “‘Changelings may initially appear dull and unintelligent, but they possess a certain wily cunning and wisdom.’”
“What does that mean?” Dill asked.
“I think it means that they seem stupid to begin with, but then they turn out to be really smart.”
“I guess your sister’s not a troll baby then, cuz she’s just plain stupid.”
“Then I guess that means you’re definitely not a troll baby,” Peter retorted.
“Yeah,” Dill agreed, then frowned. “Wait, what?”
Peter continued reading. “‘One of the most popular methods is to brew beer in an eggshell, upon which the changeling will express shock, as in one popular story: I have lived a hundred years and seen many things, but I have never seen beer brewed in an eggshell!’”
Peter looked up from the book. “How do you brew beer?”
Dill shrugged. “I dunno, but my dad’s got a lot in our fridge if that helps any.”
Peter shook his head. “Call me crazy – ”
“Crazy!” Dill shouted and pointed his finger at Peter.
Peter glared at him in disgust before continuing, “ – but I bet it already knows that we know it’s a troll baby, and it doesn’t really care.”
He kept on reading: “‘The changeling’s betrayal of itself is one of the main ways humans can view fairies out of their normal element in fairieland. There are other methods, such as a bewitched ointment that allows the viewer to see fairies, which are normally invisible to the human eye.’”