And for all that, they never asked us the basic question:
What will you do with the rest of your childhood?
And when you’re done with it, what will you be left with? A world like Lenore’s? All your days spent tense and fretful, thinking about getting married and having kids, believing Up With People is cool, finding the trouble with everything?
“Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?” said Fezkul. “It’s like a — what would we call it? A tween-life crisis. But it’s not like middle age. You can’t exactly buy yourself a sports car and get yourself a mistress, can you?” I swore at him, and he said, “Oh, very adult, in an NC-17 way. That won’t cut it, but this might.”
“What might?”
Fezkul leaned forward, took a breath and opened his hands.
“Set fire to the grill.” Fezkul grinned wider. “Don’t let anyone escape.” His eyes took a fire to them — that mischievous fire that Mr. Natch had seemed so interested in.
“Kill Natch,” he said. “Kill him dead.”
“What?” I took a step back. Those teeth were so sharp, and they seemed like they were getting sharper. “No way.”
Fezkul shrugged and laughed. “Just kidding, kiddo.”
But I could tell that he wasn’t. And looking at me, I think he could tell I could tell that he wasn’t kidding, because his smile went away and he got a strange, desperate look in his eye that put out the fire like a splash of cold water.
“Really, dude,” he pleaded. “Big joke. No one’s going to burn down — hey!”
I was already running. I’m curious, sure — but curiosity has its limits. One of those limits was meeting a strange kid with pointed teeth who tried to talk me into burning down a crowded restaurant and killing the man who built it.
So I ran. I took off through the trees in the direction I thought I’d come. At that point, I figured there was nothing better than for me to get back with my sister and Nick, get into Nick’s car and get back home in time for school. I’d deal with the cliques and the consequences and the possible loss of my precious childhood — which I was getting pretty tired of anyway, truth be told.
I was also scared. This forest was pretty thick, and if Fezkul was some kind of forest spirit he could probably get me turned around so I’d be running in circles around the same tree until I fell down and died. But as I went further I could see that big highway overpass through the trees, and I realized: getting me lost wasn’t Fezkul’s game. Fezkul wasn’t the kind of forest spirit that got you lost in the magic wood.
Fezkul was the kind of forest spirit that made you do bad. Sort of like a gangsta-rap Pied Piper. He’d almost gotten me — no, scratch that: he had gotten me, for a minute there when I spilled the water on Oliver Natch’s power bar, then ran out of the door.
He’d gotten me, and I’d gotten away.
At least that’s what I kept telling myself as I ran through the woods, towards what I hoped was the noise of Natch’s Grill and Fun-Park, and not some evil forest trap for boys who didn’t like Fezkul’s tune.
It was some noise. There was a sound of shouting and screaming and laughing — a lot of laughing. It sounded like a lynch mob on a sugar high. There was a loud cracking sound, like timber snapping — then silence, and a big giggly cheer, followed by an even louder crash.
With that, I stopped running and started sneaking. The cheers following crash number two had a sound to them that I didn’t like — they were high and hysterical and maybe just a little bit crazy. It was the kind of cheer that could take pleasure in anything — even burning down the grill house and murdering Oliver Natch.
I was coming up to the ferns through which I’d chased Fezkul then, and crouched down behind a big boulder all covered in lichen. There was more noise coming closer. I could hear cheering and shouting — most of it high-pitched — but one voice that was a little lower. It sounded like this:
“Help! Toddlers! Ravening horde! Gah!”
Like that.
And then, crashing through the ferns like a rogue elephant, came the person I was least hoping to see (next to Fezkul and Oliver Natch):
Officer Tom Wilkinson.
He was a bit of a mess now. His shirt, which had been a perfect black, was now slick with different kinds of stains and colours: ketchup, mustard, what looked like chocolate milkshake. It would have been funny looking at the mess on him, but that wasn’t all of it. He was holding a cloth to the side of his head, and the cloth was soaking through red, and he was stumbling.
I stuck my head up. I could hear his pursuers, but I couldn’t see them yet. I thought about it for just a second, before I waved at him and said: “Hey. Over here.”
He stopped at that, then his eyes narrowed as he saw me and figured out who I was.
“You,” he mumbled. “You are in a world of trou—”
He never got the “ble” out. Because having stopped, he got really unsteady on his feet. Then he fell over into the ferns.
Even if you’re big for your age, like I am, let me tell you this: it’s not easy pulling a 200-pound-plus security guard through ferns and in behind a set of boulders, particularly when there’s a ravening horde of toddlers on his tail. You can do it. But easily? Ha. I laugh. We’d barely made it into the rock’s shadow before the ferns started to shake and quiver and the horde came through.
From where we were crouched, you couldn’t see more than the tops of their tyke-y heads, and the two-by-fours and golf clubs and baby canoe paddles that they were waving around like banners. With their little legs they were slow — which explained how Officer Tom had gotten away from them, injured as he was — and being pre-schoolers, they weren’t particularly thorough. A couple of years older and another foot higher, and one of them might have spotted the trail of broken ferns I’d left dragging Officer Tom to the boulder. As it was, they made their way past us and into the deeper woods chortling and gurgling and swinging their sticks in the air.
When they were gone, I leaned over Officer Tom Wilkinson. He was blinking groggily, his hand back over the little cut in his cheek.
“You,” he said.
“Me,” I agreed.
“Mister Natch,” he said, “told us to shoot you on sight.”
“Shoot me?”
Even for Oliver Natch, that seemed extreme, and Officer Tom confirmed it: “Figure of speech. We don’t get guns. Just these—” he slapped at his belt “—stun wands.”
I looked at his belt. There, in the loop, was a gleaming black wand, about a foot long.
“It’s got a battery,” he explained, “and it gives you a little electric shock — well, a pretty big electric shock. Completely non-lethal, but it stops you dead. Well, not dead. But you know what I mean.”
I looked at the wand and the wound on his head. “So why didn’t you use it to protect yourself?”
Officer Tom gave me a pained look. “I know,” he said. “But what was I going to do? They were little kids!”
I shook my head. Pathetic, I thought, and he nodded. “This was not my first career choice, you know.”
“Didn’t make it into the police academy?”
Officer Tom snorted. “You think that was it? Of course you do. Fat loser security guard working Labour Day at the Fun-Park. Must be a frustrated police academy wannabe because who else would be enough of a loser to get a job like this.”
“No no,” I started, but I must have sounded as insincere as I felt, because he said:
“It’s okay. I get it a lot.” He sat up and leaned against the rock.
“So what did you want to be?” I asked.
“You’ll laugh,” he said, and when I promised I wouldn’t, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. It had a picture of a dragon, and an email address, and the title: TOM WILKINSON: GAME CONSULTANT. I raised an eyebrow, and he nodded.