Escape from the Drooling Octopod!
ZONDERKIDZ
Escape from the Drooling Octopod!
Copyright © 2008 by Robert West
Illustrations © 2008 by C.B. Canga
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ePub Edition June 2009 ISBN: 0-310-86184-5
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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ISBN 978-0-310-71427-9
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®
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Editor: Barbara Scott
Cover design: Merit Alderink
08 09 10 11 12 ⢠5 4 3 2 1
For my wife, Helen, whose gentle patience and love were always more support than I could deserve, and for my three sons, Chris, Robbie, and Davidâeach so unique in personality but who share qualities of idealism, intellectual honesty, and an appreciation of life that continually make me proud beyond reason.
-RW
Table of Contents
2. Missing: Beauty and the Beast
8. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Beamer didn't have a clue where he was. He just woke up and . . .
boing!
â he was circling in the air around a castle. He'd have preferred an F â 18 or a stealth fighter. What did he get? A flying carpet. Talk about obsolete! He could forget Mach one. “Skateboard one” was probably pushing it. What was worse, the carpet had a temper.
How do you hang on to
these things?
“Whoa!” he yelped as he was suddenly flipped into the air. He managed to grab hold of the carpet's fringe just as it dived through a large window in the castle. “Whaaaaoooooooooo,” he exclaimed as his stomach turned inside out.
Incidentally, the castle was pink . . . yeah, pink, as in bubble gum, peppermint sticks, and Barbie toys. Come to think of it, so was the carpet â pink, that is. He hated pink. That was the color his big sister, Erin, wore all the time. Frankly, if he wasn't dipping through the hallways of the castle and holding on for dear life, he'd never have taken a flying pink carpet seriously.
The next thing Beamer knew, he was on the floor looking up at a pink crystal chandelier about the size of his house.
Whoa! If that thing falls on me, I'll be a sparkly porcupine â not to
mention dead.
It seemed like a good idea to get out from under it, but, for some reason, he couldn't move. He felt like he was wearing a straitjacket. He tried to wiggle free â no such luck. Then he looked down. That rascally carpet had wrapped around him like a cocoon.
Great! Now he was a bug in a rug!
“A little breathing room, please!” he called out to the carpet.
That was when Beamer noticed that he was rolled up at the foot of a huge pink staircase. It was shaped sort of like an hourglass, narrower in the middle than at the top or bottom. For all he knew, this could have been the very staircase where Cinderella lost her glass slipper. Why anyone would wear a glass slipper was beyond him. One step is all it would take for his sister to crunch it into smithereens.
Then she could forget being
found by the prince who was posing as a would-be shoe salesman. Of
course, if the only way this prince guy could recognize her was by her
shoe size, he probably needed glasses as thick as binoculars. Either that
or the fairy's spell on Cinderella included some major plastic surgery.
Suddenly Beamer heard loud crunching and splintering. He jerked his head up to see an elephant swinging on the chandelier. Yep, you guessed it â a pink elephant! The big pachyderm was filling the air with pink glass like a hailstorm.
Then Beamer heard something groaning and then wailing in a high pitch.
The chandelier is about to fall!
Beamer twisted and turned, trying to get the carpet rolling. But instead of rolling across the room, he started rolling up the stairs!
Hey,
what happened to gravity? You can't roll up stairs!
But then, what else could he expect from a flying carpet? “Ow! Ow! Hey! Whoa!” he yelped as he bumped along, lickety-split, up the stairs. The staircase must have been much taller than he thought. He just kept on bumping and rolling without coming to the top of the stairs. Of course, he wasn't seeing things all that well. Spinning around in that rug was making him pretty dizzy. Everything was swirling around like a pink tornado.
Beamer finally thudded to a stop. As the whirl of pink in his head slowed down, he noticed that he was no longer on the stairs. He also began having second thoughts about what he was wrapped up in. It wasn't a rug or a carpet or a straitjacket anymore. He was in a cocoon â a pink cocoon! What was worse, he was stuck in the middle of a huge pink spiderweb! He twisted and kicked, trying to break out of the cocoon. The web shook beneath him. Pretty soon it was shaking even more. He strained to tilt his head back. Then he saw it â a pink nightmare whose eight legs were churning in perfect order across the web. Soon he was going to be one big Slurpee for that hairy spider behemoth.
Soon it would be all over â no obituary, no tombstone, no nothing. Since none of this could possibly be real, Beamer MacIntyre wasn't even going to be history â he was just one more fantasy character crumpled and tossed into the trash can. He flailed about one last time, trying to escape â
Beamer thumped on a hard surface. “Ow!” he yelped in pain. Anxiously, he fought the confinement of the cocoon. Finally, he threw it off. But it wasn't a cocoon anymore. It was a blanket â his sister's pink quilt!
Yech! No wonder
everything was pink.
His blanket must have been in the wash and his mom snuck his sister's on his bed under the bedspread. He looked up and saw the ceiling with the ice-cream-cone water stain. He was back in his bedroom, on the floor next to his bed.
It was all a dream â a silly old dream.
He sighed.
Talk about twisted fairy tales!
“Beamer, you'll be late for school!” his mom called from the kitchen downstairs. “Stove, plate fo'ah low. Toastah own!” he heard her say. The only way to get the kitchen appliances to work in this house was to talk to them. But you had to talk to them nicely and in a Southern accent. Californian wouldn't cut it. That's where Beamer had come from â California. Living on Murphy Street in Middle America was turning out to be a whole new ball game.
“Mo-o-o-o-ommm!” a shrill voice shouted at the same time. “Where are my pink Nikes?” It was Beamer's big sister, Erin, otherwise known as Zero, Zero, Zero (0,0,0). Those are the coordinates for the center of the universe, which is what she thought she was. It was totally disgusting. As far as she was concerned, everyone and everything else in the universe revolved around her.
Also, at the same time, Beamer heard alternating thumping and slapping sounds on the staircase. That was the sound of a strange quadruped named Michael, his nine-year-old brother, who always came up the steps on all fours.
The last set of sounds came from his dad in the shower: “Too hot, too hot!” he said to the plumbing. “
Caolder
,
caolder
,
caolder
. . . ahhhh,
jaust raight
.”
This was why Beamer didn't have many sleepovers at his house.
