Ignatius MacFarland (7 page)

The creature that was working the cash register and getting the feel’s angry suction cup–popping directed at it looked like a fat four-foot-tall weasel with one eye and three arms.

Right then, another creature that looked like a leathery fox stuck its head out from the back room and yelled something I couldn’t understand. The weasel looked over, couldn’t see the fox because another creature that looked like what I can only describe as a giant eight-foot-tall purple baby with five arms and tiny eyes was in the way, and all of a sudden the weasel’s body expanded straight up like it had a spring inside it. And then it just looked like a really tall, skinny weasel that didn’t actually look like a weasel at all because of its big yellow eye and its three arms and the fact that its head wasn’t really shaped like a weasel’s head, anyway.

All right, look. I’m sorry if this all sounds really confusing and bizarre, but this stuff is super hard to explain. I mean, it’s not like I ever got As and Bs in English class. And it’s not like I had a camera with me during all this because my dad refused to let me have a cell phone with a camera in it because he said they were stupid. Anyway . . .

The creature that was making the coffee drinks didn’t seem to know what it was doing. It looked like a five-foot-tall praying mantis with lots of twiggy arms that it was using to make a bunch of drinks at once. But as it worked the huge espresso machine (that looked like the world’s biggest piece of junk and had steam coming out from a million different cracks and gaps), the bug kept spilling the drinks and overfilling the cups and dumping coffee grounds into the milk that was all gray and looked totally gross. And then every creature that got their drink from the bug would either drop it on the ground because the cup was too hot or try to drink it and burn its mouth or drink it and then make a face like it was the worst-tasting thing ever, and it was at that moment I couldn’t help but think maybe having an Artbucks in Lesterville wasn’t such a good idea.

Sitting around at the tables were other creatures of all shapes and sizes that kinda looked like animals and kinda looked like people and yet didn’t look like either one. I had seen in tons of science fiction movies and TV shows that while aliens always looked different than people did on Earth, they still had two arms and two legs and two eyes and a nose and a mouth like we all do. And that’s why I was so freaked out when I saw these creatures.

It seemed like somebody had tossed a bunch of body parts from every type of animal and person in the world into a box, tossed in a bunch of other weird stuff, and shook it up and whatever dumped out each time they tipped the box over would become some living thing. It was like being in a whole different reality, except for the fact that we were standing in a Starbucks that was called Artbucks and that the creatures were all wearing poorly fitting clothes that looked like what all my friends back home wore.

The reason I haven’t mentioned what they were saying was that I couldn’t
hear
what they were saying. It wasn’t that they weren’t making noise. It was because there was really loud music playing that was drowning them out. But it wasn’t weird alien creature music.

It was Frank Sinatra.

The reason I knew this was my dad is a huge Frank Sinatra fan and so we always had his music playing in our house, so much so that my mom would constantly tell my dad if he put on one more Frank Sinatra song she was going to divorce him. But then he’d put on another one and my mom would laugh and then they’d get up and dance and kiss and it would have been really sweet if it was in a movie and it wasn’t my parents doing it, which simply made it gross and disturbing.

But that’s why I can tell you that even though Frank Sinatra was playing in the coffee shop, it wasn’t
actually
Frank Sinatra that was playing in the coffee shop.

It was a recording of somebody who
wished
he was Frank Sinatra.

The music was really strange and was coming out of a bad sound system and sounded like the musicians on the record were playing toy instruments they had made in wood shop. The songs were close to being Frank Sinatra songs, but the words and the music weren’t quite right. It was like they were being performed by someone who couldn’t remember exactly how they went and so they just played them the way they thought they were supposed to go. And I can tell you that whoever was playing must have had a terrible memory.

But the worst part was the singer. His voice was really bad and out of tune, and he had the words all wrong. Which would have been okay but since he was the world’s worst singer, it was a pretty bad combination. I mean, I sing badly, but this guy made me sound like . . . well . . . Frank Sinatra.

I was so stunned by everything I was seeing and hearing that I was just standing there in the doorway even though I still had to go to the bathroom.

And that was when all the creatures in the Artbucks turned and looked at me.

They all gasped like they had just seen a ghost and I gasped like a ghost that had just been seen and before I knew what I was doing, I was running down the street away from the coffee shop, since I didn’t know if these creatures were friendly or were going to eat me. I ran around the corner looking for a place to hide and suddenly found myself in what looked like the center of town. And despite how scared I was and how much I wanted to hide, I stopped again and stared in disbelief.

And, trust me, you would have, too.

12

THE PLAY’S THE THING

Have you ever been to New York City?

If not, there’s a place there called Times Square, and it’s this super huge town center where a bunch of streets come together and there’s tons of stores and big billboards and neon signs and cars and people and it looks like the craziest place on earth.

I’ve never been there but I’ve seen it a bunch on TV because every New Year’s Eve they have a party there and thousands of people come out and watch them lower this big lighted ball. When it gets to the bottom of the pole everybody yells “Happy New Year!” and they kiss and hug and then it’s officially the next year.

Well, the reason I stopped running and stood there staring was that I was suddenly standing in Times Square.

Or what
looked
like Times Square.

A really terrible version of Times Square.

There were no old round buildings anywhere. They had all been replaced with new ones that were supposed to look like the buildings in the real Times Square. But just like the coffee shop looked like it was made by people who didn’t know what they were doing, these buildings looked like they were made by people who
really
didn’t know what they were doing. There were skyscrapers that were as crooked as chewed-up drinking straws, and they creaked and swayed whenever the slightest breeze blew. The lower buildings were close to caving in, and the creatures I could see through the windows walked slowly and nervously, like they knew that if they walked too fast they’d cause the place to collapse.

Occasionally a big piece of roof would fall off one of the skyscrapers and smash down onto the street, sending the creatures on the sidewalks running in all directions. There were big, poorly painted signs everywhere advertising poorly built stores and restaurants and places and products that I had seen tons of times on TV and in magazines, but now they all had different names.

McDonalds was McArthurs. Coca Cola was now Artha Cola. An ad for what looked like Disneyland said it was called Arthneyland. There was a big billboard for the new
Arthur Potter
book written by someone named J. K. Arthling. There was a Crate and Arthur, an Arthurcrombie and Fitch, an Arthurs Sonoma, a J.C. Artheys, and a store called Art that looked a lot like a Gap. There was even an underwear store called Arthur’s Secret.

The street signs read Sixth Artvenue, Seventh Artvenue, and Eighth Artvenue. The movie theaters were showing
Art Wars, The Artpire Strikes Back, Return of the Arti, Art of the Rings, Gone With the Art, Raiders of the Lost Art, The Artfather, Parts I and II,
and
SpiderArt.
There was an Art Central Station, a Madison Square Arthurs, an Artpire State Building, an Arthurgie Hall — there was even a Museum of Modern Art Art.

And it all looked really wrong.

There were creatures all over the place. And they were lumbering or slithering or hopping or crawling or rolling or oozing around the square as they shopped in the stores and ate in the restaurants and looked at the buildings and sat on the benches and acted just like the people I had always seen in all the pictures and movies and TV shows about New York.

The only thing that didn’t exist in any of the pictures I had ever seen of Times Square was a gigantic sign that was now standing right in the middle of everything, written in letters that were about twenty feet high, that read:

Artlish Only!

It was right then that a really loud bell rang three times. All the creatures stopped when they heard it, and then started running immediately in the same direction. I looked around in a panic. There must be some kind of an attack coming, I thought, waiting for the arrival of an invading army or fighter jets or who knows what, since everything I’d seen so far had been weirder than anything I could have imagined.

But nothing happened.

The creatures all kept running and then disappeared down Seventh Artvenue. Then there was nothing but silence. Seeing that nobody was in the square and seconds from peeing my pants, I quickly jumped behind a big garbage can and finally took the whiz that had been making my back teeth float for the last half hour.

As I relieved myself, all I could think about was how Ivan’s dad once got a ticket for public urination when the police caught him going to the bathroom behind a Chuck E. Cheese after he drank four huge Cokes at Gary’s birthday party and went out the wrong door looking for the men’s room. I suddenly wondered if a Lesterville police creature was going to appear out of nowhere and take me to some kind of jail that would be ten times stranger than the Artbucks. Not that they’d be wrong to. I mean, peeing anywhere other than a bathroom is a pretty terrible thing to do unless you happen to be out in the middle of the woods. I wasn’t proud of myself. But I have to say that I sure felt a whole lot better after I did it. Like my uncle Lou used to say, “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

I finished my business and started walking cautiously down the sidewalk, which was completely cracked and had holes all over the place. Now that I had gone to the bathroom, I was really hungry. So as I walked past the McArthurs, I took a deep breath to see if I could smell the hamburgers. I immediately started coughing and choking because the smell coming out of the place was more like somebody had just taken a huge dump in there than the smell of a place where hamburgers were being made. When I looked back at Seventh Artvenue, I saw that the creatures were lining up for something right around the corner. Curious, I kept walking forward to see what they were waiting for.

There, at the front of the line, was a big theater. The creatures were heading in to see a show. And when I looked up at the marquee to see what was playing, I saw something written on it that I never expected to see in a million years: