The League of Beastly Dreadfuls Book 1, page 12
“We still need to figure out your door,” Ollie mumbled, his cheeks puffed like a chipmunk’s.
“Prude stashes all the keys in her purse,” Quentin mused. “But she always keeps it with her.”
“And even if we somehow managed to steal the key,” Anastasia said, “she’d figure it out as soon as they went to lock me in my moldy room again.”
“Mold,” Ollie garbled. “Mold!” He sputtered the taffy out onto his palm and peered at the green lump. He poked it with his finger. He smiled at them. “I have solved the problem of the door key,” he announced. “Quentin, don’t swallow that taffy! We’re going to need it.”
And then he told them his idea.
“Ollie, that’s ingenious!” Quentin declared. “Now we just have to concoct a way to get Prude’s purse for a few minutes.”
“It’s hard thinking on an empty stomach,” Ollie bellyached. “Anastasia, don’t you have any other sweets? Did you see any chocolate in the kitchen?”
“Not in the kitchen,” Anastasia replied. “But there’s a Miracle Choco-Laxative bar in Room Nine if you’re interested.”
“Choco-laxatives?” Quentin echoed, his Adam’s apple doing a little double Dutch. “That’s it! I know how to distract the kidnappers!”
20
The Triumphant Zonk
UP IN ANASTASIA’S room, the League of Beastly Dreadfuls tore the wrappers from the sour watermelon taffies, one by one. Within a few minutes they had shucked exactly forty-two taffies, and they lined them up in a revolting green row.
Next Anastasia unpeeled the paper jacket from Dr. Whistlewind’s Miracle Choco-Laxative (swiped from Room Nine). It looked just like any normal candy bar, with the exception of the word Whistlewind stamped in teensy letters on each chocolate brick. Anastasia licked her forefinger and smudged the cursive impressions off every rectangle.
“Brilliant,” Quentin said.
“Thank you.” Anastasia selected the least ragged of the pink Scrummy wrappers and folded it around the Miracle Choco-Laxative. It didn’t fit perfectly, but it looked pretty good. She slipped the laxative bar into her pocket.
She checked her watch. “It’s getting close to lunchtime.”
“Ready!” Ollie grabbed a taffy. “Set!”
The next task was particularly odious to Anastasia, but it was necessary.
“Go!” Quentin commanded.
Anastasia pinched her nostrils shut and put the taffy into her mouth. She chewed. Oh, how she chewed! She chewed until the taffy was very soft, and then she spit it out and put it back on the floor. The Beastly Dreadfuls chewed each and every taffy, sticking them together to create one big gob.
“Well done,” Ollie said.
“Ugh.” Anastasia wiped a smear of green drool from her chin and squashed the taffy into her satchel.
“We’ll meet you downstairs,” Quentin whispered. Anastasia nodded and slipped out the door.
You can probably guess what our brave hero planned to do with the chocolate laxative bar. She was going to zonk her “aunties.” Now, deliberately feeding laxatives to some poor, unsuspecting soul is bad form. It’s morally unsavory. But Prim and Prude were diabolical child-snatchers, and the usual rules of What Is Nice and What Is Not Nice didn’t apply to them.
Anastasia trotted into the dining room and sat down at her normal place. The kidnappers were already sloshing Mystery Lumps around with their spoons.
“I’m telling you, I saw a whistle-bottomed whoopsie-will!” Prude said.
“Nonsense! It was a blue-pimpled nincompoop,” Prim retorted.
Anastasia withdrew from her pocket the laxative bar crinkling in the Scrummy paper. She smiled and tore the wrapper and broke off one of the chocolate squares.
“Well, a blue-pimpled— What’s that?” Prude asked, her hedgehoggy eyes latching on to the chocolate.
“I just found this candy bar,” Anastasia said. “It’s from Halloween. It’s been down at the bottom of my satchel all this time!”
“Candy bar?” Prim said.
“It’s a Scrummy,” Anastasia said, flashing the wrapper at them. “My very favorite. I could eat Scrummies all day. Isn’t it wonderful that I found this one?”
“Give that to me this instant!” Prim cried.
“Oh, but, Auntie—”
“Chocolate will rot your teeth,” Prim said. “Hand it over, dearie.” She wiggled her fingers, the silver eyeball twinkling on her pinkie.
Anastasia sighed and pressed the laxative into the old woman’s palm.
“Of course,” Prim said, champing her metal jaws, “chocolate won’t rot our teeth, will it, Prudie?”
Anastasia’s young soul throbbed with hope. Please, she thought. Please please please let this work. The laxative was, after all, probably one hundred years old. Perhaps the child-snatchers would throw the chocolate down in disgust after one bite.
“Shall we?” giggled Prude.
“Please don’t!” Anastasia protested in a great show of distress. “It’s my Halloween candy, after all. Please don’t eat my Scrummy bar.”
This is called reverse psychology, which is the art of convincing your adversary to do something by urging them not to do it. Certain stubborn and contrary people are very susceptible to reverse psychology. Anastasia, of course, really wanted Prim and Prude to devour every last morsel of the laxative. But she couldn’t tell them that. If she had presented the odious child-snatchers with the candy bar and begged them to eat it, Prim and Prude would most likely have refused to do so, simply in the spirit of being difficult.
“Little orphans don’t get to tell adults what to do,” Prim said briskly. She snapped the bar in two and gave half to Prude, and then they both gobbled the chocolate down.
“Delicious,” declared Prude.
“Scrumptious,” agreed Prim. “Now, Anastasia, eat your Mystery Lumps.”
Anastasia poked her Lumps with her spoon and silently counted: one mashed potato, two mashed potato, three mashed potato…
Prim’s teacup clattered to its saucer. Anastasia’s gaze snapped from her uneaten Lumps to the ancient biddy’s face, which had gone white as a sheet.
“Why, Primrose!” exclaimed Prude. “Whatever is the matter?”
“I…oh, dear…,” Prim mumbled, clutching the edge of the table. A dreadful noise rumbled from the seat of her chair. It sounded like a tuba being readied for the symphony.
“Primrose!” cried Prude. “At the table! Disgusting!”
“Oh, shut up!” Prim wailed as another stonking great noise rumbled forth. “Can’t you see I’m ill?”
“My goodness!” said Prude.
Vroooooom! growled Prim’s chair.
“Shocking!” Prude exclaimed. “Never in my life— Oh, my.” Her eyes widened as a colossal raspberry erupted from beneath her fur coat.
Blaaaat!
Tooooooooooot!
Primrose howled a word that is not fit to be printed within the pages of the respectable volume you now hold, and she leapt from her chair and dashed hollering out of the room. Prudence followed suit, clutching her bottom.
If Anastasia had merely zonked her kidnappers as a prank, she would have been hugging herself to keep her sides from splitting with delirious laughter. However, the laxatives were an imperative step in the Beastly Dreadfuls’ path to escape, and she had serious business ahead of her. She didn’t have time to sit around chuckling. She nicked around the table and seized Prude’s purse, abandoned in all the excitement. Unclasping the silver jaws, she peered inside.
There was the usual old lady paraphernalia, like crumpled tissues and ancient lip salves. There was the screwdriver the kidnappers used to unmirror the entry to Quentin’s room. There were peppermints, of course. There was also a book featuring upon its cover a rugged, mustachioed man clutching a wrinkled damsel to his chest.
“The Handsome Rogue Who Fell in Love with the Older Lady,” Anastasia whispered. “A Sizzling and Plausible Tale of May-December Romance.”
Quentin and Ollie burst into the dining room. “Did you find it?”
“Look at this!” Anastasia said, brandishing a small box labeled DR. PALSY’S MONOBROW WAXING KIT. “Prude must have a monobrow!”
“Ick!” Ollie said.
“And I bet Prim has one, too!” Anastasia said.
“Hurry!” Quentin urged.
Anastasia rummaged through the hodgepodge until her fingers closed around the manacle dangling with all the keys to all the doors in St. Agony’s Asylum. She squinted at the little silver numbers until she saw eleven, and she slid it off the hoop. “Here, Ollie.”
“Give me that jailer’s ring,” Quentin said. “I’ll go unlock the kitchen door.” He dashed from the dining room.
Anastasia pulled the taffy clod from her satchel. It was still warm and pliable from the Beastly Dreadfuls’ expert chewing. Ollie squished the key down into the green lump. Then, using the tippity-end of his fingernail, he ever-so-carefully prized the key out of the sour watermelon stamp.
Joy! Huzzah! Anastasia marveled at the beautiful imprint left behind by the key, her heart leaping and cartwheeling.
“Victory for the League of Beastly Dreadfuls!” Ollie crowed.
“Shake a leg,” Quentin panted, scrambling back into the dining room. “We have to move to phase two before the kidnappers return.” He flung Prude’s key ring to Anastasia. She threaded number eleven back onto the metal hoop and shoved the clanking jumble deep into Prude’s purse.
The League sprinted down the hallway to a large door. Quentin flung it open. “I’ll keep watch out here. Be as fast as you can.”
Ollie pulled a stool up to the stove and took a metal pot down from the wall and clunked it onto one of the burners. There was still some water sloshing in the kidnappers’ teakettle. He poured this water into the pot. When bubbles began to froth and fizz, he said, “The sugar, please.”
Anastasia fetched the sugar bowl and handed it to Ollie. He plucked out glittering cubes, one by one, and plopped them into the burbling water.
Watching her fellow Dreadful simmer the sugar, Anastasia strained her eardrums for a jangle from Quentin’s cage. If one of the child-snatchers caught them in the kitchen, their intricate escape plan would be dashed to bits.
“How’s the paste coming?” she asked.
“Gloopier by the moment,” Ollie reported. “Do you think I’d have time to bake a cake before we go?”
“No time for cakes!”
Ollie gazed at the scraggly trees outside. “It’s December,” he sighed. “Perhaps I could make a gingerbread lunatic asylum this year. I could use marshmallow fluff for the padded rooms down in the basement.”
“Hurry, Ollie,” Anastasia said.
“You can’t hurry confectioners,” Ollie said. But he held up the spoon and eyed the white paste. His face lit up with a smile. “It’s ready now.”
Anastasia took the taffy mold out of her satchel and laid it flat on the wooden counter. Arms trembling, Ollie hefted the pot and tilted it above the taffy. Anastasia watched anxiously as the sizzling hot sugar goop oozed down to fill the dent the key had left behind. She was afraid that the boiling sugar might melt the mold, but it did not. It filled the impression and bubbled in the shape of a Victorian key.
Ollie picked up the taffy mold with the delicacy of a jeweler handling a Fabergé egg. Lightly, with the pad of his index finger, he prodded the sugar paste.
“Do you really think this will work?” Anastasia asked.
Ollie nodded, handing her the taffy. “Hard as a jawbreaker.”
Anastasia pocketed the mold. “But I thought jawbreakers had cement in them.”
Ollie shot her a scornful look.
“Some kind of delicious, edible cement,” Anastasia added hastily.
Shockingly, Reader, jawbreakers do not contain cement. They are made of sugar mixed with water, cooked together at a very high temperature. That’s it.
“Now lock the door behind me and ride the dumbwaiter down to the basement,” Anastasia told Ollie. They clasped pinkies, and she sidled into the hallway.
“Just in time,” Quentin said. “I heard footsteps on the stairs!”
Anastasia skedaddled back to the dining room and leapt into her chair. She picked up her spoon. No one would have guessed that she had just committed a daring and defiant act with her Beastly comrades.
“Anastasia!” Prim lurched through the entryway. “Get to Room Eleven, dear. Prude and I are having—a lady never mentions—powdering our—anyway, we can’t watch you, so you’re going to have to play in your room today.”
“Poor aunties,” Anastasia said.
Thus we learn that, like elephants, laxative bars are best eaten one bite at a time—and never, never, never gobbled down all at once.
21
Squeak ’n’ Poo
ANASTASIA REMOVED THE mold from her pocket and set it on the floor, and then she used her bent safety pin to ease the sugar key out of its little key-shaped hollow, worried the entire time that it might crumble into tiny crystals. It did not. The key was lustrous and lovely. It sparkled like snow in the candlelight.
Holding her breath, Anastasia inserted the sugar key into the keyhole. Would it break? She twisted it ever so slowly. She rattled it. However, the lock wouldn’t budge.
“Biscuit crumbs!” Removing the key, she peered down at it. Bits of sugar clumped against one of the teeth. Anastasia chipped at them with her fingernail, but the key was too hard. It was strong as cement. She felt certain that the botched tooth was keeping the key from doing its important work. If only she had a file to shape the key!
And then she realized she had something even better than a file.
She had her tongue.
She carefully licked at the key, just as you would lick a jawbreaker in the safety of your own home. Delicious! Anastasia shaped the key one scrumptious lick at a time, until it was perfectly smooth. She fit it in the keyhole.
Click.
Anastasia turned the knob. The door opened just an inch before tugging against the chain. She pulled the door shut again and turned the key. She jiggled the knob. It stuck fast. She unlocked it again, certain that the sound of the key shifting the tumblers was the most beautiful sound in the entire world.
There remained the chain, but she had a plan for that. She scampered to her satchel and took out the powerful magnet shaped like a U, pilfered from the Treatment Room. She held it against the door and slowly ran it up and down. It latched to the wood, leech-like, a couple of feet above the knob. Anastasia wiggled the ends of the U. She could hear tiny clinks on the other side of the wood as the chain’s bulbous end clanked through the little metal track attaching it to the door.
Clunk.
She pushed the door open. The chain dangled harmlessly from its bolt on the wall.
Anastasia grinned.
She had just swallowed her first bite of elephant.
Glaring at her bowl of Mystery Lumps at breakfast the following morning, Anastasia stewed that if Prim and Prude were fattening Ollie up for his Shadowsilk, it was only fair that they treat her to something good before trying to feed her to the Creature in the Woods.
Prude was also squinting into her bowl. “Prim,” she said, “are we eating our Mystery Lumps with chocolate sprinkles now?”
“Of course not,” Prim replied. “Chocolate sprinkles are an extravagance this household cannot afford.”
Prude scooted her spectacles to the end of her nose and scrutinized her spoon. “Why, those aren’t sprinkles at all,” she said slowly. “They’re—”
“Look!” Anastasia cried. “By the pickle jar!”
They gaped in speechless surprise at the trim little figure standing at attention in the middle of the breakfast table. He gazed straight at Anastasia, eyes twinkling and alert, and then scampered bold as brass right up to Prude’s teacup and put his small pink hands on the rim and stuck his whiskery nose down into the milk-clouded tea. Prude stared at him in pale revulsion, then looked back at the little brown specks in her spoon.
“Mouse droppings!” she screamed.
“Filthy, plague-spreading vermin!” Prim screeched. “Kill it! Kill it!”
“No!” Anastasia hollered, but the umbrella was already crashing down on the tabletop, smashing the teacup into smithereens. The umbrella did not, however, smash the mouse. The mouse was a splendid acrobat. He leapt away unscathed. Prim squawked as the umbrella sprang open, then struggled to force it back closed.
“Vermin!” Prude shrieked, snatching up a fork and stabbing it down again and again as the mouse cartwheeled between the dishes. “Hold still and let me kill you!”
“Stop it!” Anastasia yelled, jumping out of her seat. “Stop!”
“He’s getting away!” Prim shrilled.
Crash! Smash! The umbrella whacked down, demolishing bowls and teacups and sending poop-sprinkled globs of Mystery Lumps spattering into everyone’s faces. The nimble mouse eluded every attack. He was a fine mouse indeed, and Anastasia brimmed with admiration for him. She went limp with relief when the mouse finally leapt from the table to the floor and zipped out of the room.
“Disgusting!” Prim seethed.
“Despicable!” hissed Prude.
“It was only a little mouse,” Anastasia protested.
“Only a little mouse!” Prim blazed. “Look at this table! It’s a complete wreck! All our lovely dishes smashed!”
“Well,” Anastasia pointed out, “you did that, after all.”
“That rotten scrounger used our breakfast for a chamber pot!” Prude wailed. “Just the thought of that nasty brute trespassing through our kitchen makes my skin itch! Oooooh, do I have the creepy crawlies!”
No sooner had she plunged her hand down her collar to scratch, however, than she yanked it back out and began wrestling from her coat as though it were on fire. “Oooooh!” she gasped. “Ooooooh!” The coat fell to the floor and Prude hopped away from it and up onto her chair with surprising agility for such a frail old person.
