There wasn't. It was as white and freckled as ever.
But a strange green cloud was building within the Strangulator's transparent body, gradually obscuring the unfortunate dragons he was digesting.
"... and then as the poissson reaches the head"
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continued the Strangulator, "the nervoussss ssyssstem sssssimply explodesss. ..."
He looked at Hiccup hopefully. Nothing seemed to be happening.
"That'sss funny," said the Strangulator.
"It doesn't sssseem to be working. ..."
"Maybe some people take longer," said Hiccup reassuringly. "You're looking a little peaked yourself, maybe you should lie down."
The Strangulator looked down at itself. The green cloud had now blown into every crook and cranny of its body, and was finally approaching its tiny brain....
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!"
screeched the Strangulator.
The nervous system of the Strangulator simply exploded.
All of its electric circuits lit up like lightbulbs. It thrashed around like a mad thing, knocking out great chunks of rock from the sides of the cave and sending treasure flying through the air in all directions.
Fishlegs hid himself underneath an overhanging
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rock in order not to be hit by the whirling coils. Toothless crawled into a crevice in the ceiling. For about a minute and a half the Strangulator threw itself wildly off the walls of the cavern, screeching a strange primeval agonized shriek. Then all of its tentacles stood out straight and stiff and it fell to the ground.
The Strangulator jerked a few more times in agony. Its tail with the dangerous tip lashed ferociously for a moment or two. And then all was silence in the Great Cavern. Huge clouds of dust gradually dispersed.
Fishlegs crawled out of his hiding place.
He scrambled over slimy rockfalls, slimy treasure and even slimier coils of Strangulator, looking for Hiccup.
Hiccup was dazed but alive. He'd had a tidal wave of a ride, thrown this way and that way until his teeth rattled. But the great coils of the tentacle wrapped around his body had cushioned him from any hurt.
He beamed at Fishlegs and Toothless.
"That was one STUPID Monster," he said.
"How did you DO it? How did you DO it?" asked Fishlegs again and again in amazement
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as he and Toothless unwound the tentacle from Hiccup's body.
For answer, Hiccup lifted up his shirt, and there, wrapped around his chest, was the very tip of the tentacle ... and in the gelatinous transparent flesh of it was a giant needle puncture mark, with the green poison clearly visible coursing underneath the skin.
What Hiccup had done was to pull his shirt OYER the end of the tentacle while Toothless was distracting the Creature. The Strangulator had so lost sensory contact with the ends of its tentacles that it did not realize that it was in fact injecting ITSELF under the white material of Hiccup's shirt.
"That particular plan," said Fishlegs at last, "required a Fiendish Amount of LUCK."
"It WAS lucky," admitted Hiccup happily, "but we're ALIVE, aren't we?"
Fishlegs grinned back at him and Toothless did three back somersaults in the air and a congratulatory cock-a-doodle-doo.
"And that swordfighting. Where did THAT come from? You've always been grim at swordfighting."
"Swapped hands," mumbled Hiccup, beaming but a bit embarrassed.
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" A left-handed genius who single-handedly defeated Alvin the Treacherous AND a Monstrous Strangulator," gloated Fishlegs. "This is going to look so GOOD when we tell everybody back home. I just can't WAIT to see the look on Snotlout's face when he sets eyes on this treasure. It makes that poxy little box he dug up on the Isle of the Skullions look pretty measly. "
"Yeeees," said Hiccup slowly. "But we ARE still trapped in an inaccessible underground cavern, aren't we? We have to GET OUT OF HERE first."
Fishlegs's face fell. "So we do," he admitted. "But the Creature must have some way from this cavern up to the caves in the Wild Dragon Cliff. ... I mean, look at those dragons in his digestive system, he must have been feeding off the Dragon Nursery for years. All we have to do is go through these Caliban Caves and --"
"N-n-no," said Toothless firmly. "T-t-toothless knows. Toothless grow up here. Other C-c-creatures in there much bigger and b-b-badder than that one....."
"Okay then," said Hiccup. "We go back the way we came. Let's hope that door still opens."
The door did still open.
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As they were opening it, Hiccup noticed a piece of paper nailed on their side of it.
It was a letter.
[Image: Men.]
It was written in the same scrawly handwriting as Grimbeard's riddle, and it was addressed to the "TRUE HEIR OF GRIMBEARD THE GHASTLY."
Hiccup took the letter off the nail and read it.
"Maybe Grimbeard the Ghastly wasn't so bad after all...," said Hiccup slowly.
"There you are," said Fishlegs, who was reading
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over Hiccup's shoulder. "He said it was YOUR treasure, to do as you liked with."
Hiccup sighed. He thought of the greedy look in Stoick's eyes when he held the Stormblade. He thought of Baggybum and Stoick arguing over the treasure chest.
"Yes," said Hiccup, "and I DO know what to do with it."
He picked up a piece of charcoal from the cavern floor, wrote some words on the bottom of the letter, and pinned it back on the door.
"STILL ... NOT ... READY...."read Fishlegs.
Fishlegs hurried after Hiccup, who was now looking at the cavern's exit hole to the sea, thinking hard.
"What do you mean, still not ready?" demanded Fishlegs.
"I mean," said Hiccup, "that the treasure is staying right here. That this is our SECRET and we tell NOBODY. If we get out of here alive, we just say we washed up on the shore a couple of beaches down, no mention of the existence of this cavern, nothing."
"You CANNOT BE SERIOUS," said Fishlegs. "We could be HEROES here, and besides, if we don't tell everybody what happened, they'll all go on thinking that Snotlout is the True Heir to the Hairy Hooligans."
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Hiccup looked miserable. "I guess that's right," he said. "But then if I really am the True Heir, I have to do what I think is the right thing for the Tribe, don't I? And this is definitely the right thing. That treasure is Bad Trouble."
[Image: An animal.]
Hiccup would not change his mind.
"Let's just concentrate on getting back home," he said.
It took Hiccup two or three hours of hard thinking to work out how to use one dragon to get himself and Fishlegs up through hundreds of feet of water and back to the surface without drowning.
The solution is quite simple, if you ever find yourself in a similarly tricky situation.
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A dragon's breath, even when it exhales, is composed almost entirely of pure oxygen. It is this that makes it so very flammable. All they needed to do was to rise to the surface (slowly so as not to get the bends) with Toothless swimming beside them and occasionally blowing into their noses when they ran out of breath.
A dragon never runs out of breath because just below its horns it has a fully working set of gills. As soon as it enters the sea it can shut off its lungs and get its oxygen from the water rather than the air.