Nelson didn’t feel anything. He didn’t even hear a bang. He was supposed to have just exploded along with his seven monsters, and yet it felt as if nothing had happened. When he opened his eyes he and his seven monsters were enveloped by a thick, swirling blue smoke. Only now did Nelson realize he had been holding his breath. He gasped and the smoke rushed into his lungs, causing him to cough so hard Crush fell from his neck.
“I say, did that actually work? Are we there?” spluttered Hoot, shaking his head as if something was loose inside and he wanted to get it out. There was no way of knowing where they were right now—the smoke was too thick—but it didn’t sound as if they were in the cave anymore.
Nosh gagged and threw his arms out to push everybody back. Plop. Fizz. The stone fell out of his mouth and shook urgently on the ground like a beetle stuck on its back. Miser whipped up the stone in a flash and sealed it inside Brian’s clay pot, where you could still hear it trembling as if it wanted to get out. Still no one said anything. The smoke had rendered them all speechless. Their eyes were wide as they scanned the blue smoke for any sign of where they were. One thing was for sure: it was a hundred times hotter here than it had been in that cold cave. It even sounded as if the world around them was sizzling like sausages in a frying pan.
Nelson pulled his T-shirt over his mouth, turned around, and slowly raised a hand through the smoke. He’d not reached more than a few inches when his outstretched fingers discovered the unmistakable ridges of tree bark. As his fingertips tentatively traveled over the surface of the tree, Nelson wondered how anything so close to him could be hidden from sight. He leaned forward to see for himself what his hand had found and was rewarded by a horrific sight: a terrifying face loomed through the blue smoke, frozen in a silent scream.
Nelson jumped back and bumped into Stan.
“Oi!” snapped Stan, who was trying to look brave but not doing a very good job of it.
Nelson braced himself as if whatever he had touched would come for him.
But it didn’t.
“Master Nelson,” whispered Miser, “what have you seen?”
Nelson couldn’t answer, but that didn’t matter as Spike was able to answer for him.
“A bunch of boring trees. Look.” He pointed upward, and through the swirling smoke they could all clearly make out the silhouettes of trees.
Nelson looked back to the place where he had seen the horrible face and saw it was nothing more than the knot of a tree trunk. His mind had clearly played a trick on him. But the tree was black as if someone had painted it with a layer of tar. Nelson looked down at his hand. His fingers were covered in something oily and black.
Crush let out the tiniest of honks. Actually it was more like the sound of a puppy cowering in the kitchen on fireworks night. That one nervous, trembling note summed up just how they all felt at that moment.
* * *
The smoke finally began to drift away, like ghosts who had had enough of haunting for one night and were going back to bed.
As the world around them started to appear, Nelson clung to his pendant. The good feeling it provided had never felt more necessary.
Nelson and his seven monsters were standing in the middle of a scorched patch of jungle. The trees around them were baked black and leaned so far out from the clearing it was a miracle they hadn’t toppled over.
“Briii-aaan,” came a haunting female voice through the trees.
“Celeste!” screamed Nelson, setting off at full speed in the direction of the voice.
The other monsters gave chase, roaring and hissing and shouting and honking as loudly as they could.
Running was not easy. The jungle floor was a web of wet and rubbery vines covered in a layer of black oil, designed to trip up even the most sure-footed explorer. Nelson’s sneakers might as well have been greased with butter the way they slid out from under him at every step and sent him crashing to his knees. The monsters fared no better and stumbled among the gigantic black spaghetti-like tree roots.
Nelson stopped. In the short distance he had traveled, he had already managed to completely lose his sense of direction. Looking back, he couldn’t even see the patch of scorched earth anymore. This had to be the very worst rescue of all time.
Flop … Flop … Flop …
Nelson turned his head toward the sound of something or somethings landing repeatedly on the wet ground nearby. He held up his hand to the monsters behind him, ordering them to stop. And surprisingly, they did as they were told.
Flop … Flop … Flop …
This time the monsters heard it too.
Nelson proceeded cautiously and the monsters followed suit.
Flop … Flop … Flop …
As they slid past an impossibly large and equally sticky black tree trunk, Nelson and his monsters were greeted by a very strange sight indeed.
From a pond filled to the brim with disgusting-looking black water, lots of strange and extremely ugly little fish were leaping onto the mud. As the black water dripped off them Nelson saw that they had jellified bodies and huge white eyes that bulged from their heads with an eerie, soulless stare that matched Brian’s.
“Don’t drink the water,” whispered Nelson, remembering Brian’s final words as he lay in the straw.
Flop … Flop … Flop …
More horrid little fish joined the slippery pile that now lay gasping for air.
“Great! It’s just a bunch of stupid fish. She’s not ’ere, is she?!” barked Stan as he cracked his knuckles and looked around for another, more hopeful sign.
“Jellyfishes! Me eat one, please?” begged Nosh, who was drooling like crazy, but the others ignored him.
“We have to find Celeste!” said Nelson with rising panic.
“Then we must close our eyes and say her name,” whispered Miser, and the monsters settled into their usual trance.
“Celeste,” they chanted, and stood very still and did the pointing thing.
Nelson turned to see that they were all pointing directly at the pool of black water.
“That can’t be right. Celeste!” shouted Nelson, turning in order to broadcast his voice as far and as wide as possible.
“Spread out! Everyone spread out!” shouted Stan.
“Celeste! Where are you?” cried Nelson, and he felt Crush tugging at his leg. “Not now, Crush, please. Celeste! It’s me! It’s Nelson!”
Crush continued to tug on Nelson’s leg with even more urgency and honk like a car stuck in traffic.
“What?” snapped Nelson, looking down with an angry glare. Crush cowered.
“Stop it! I wasn’t going to hit you, you silly thing. What do you want?”
Crush pointed to the spot where the ugly little fish had landed.
Except that they weren’t ugly or little anymore. Or even fish.
In just a few seconds their jellified bodies had evolved into something far uglier and scarier. They were no longer gasping for breath, but breathing quickly and easily. Legs and claws had replaced the useless fins. And to top it all off, these ghastly creatures were already double their original size and growing larger by the second. You may remember learning that from this very pool of water had evolved the first creatures on Planet Earth. It appeared they still did, but this wasn’t the kind of evolution you read about at school. A process that used to take millions of years now happened within a few seconds. Had the water been pure like it used to be, these fish might have evolved into rather nice humans who would have enjoyed a chat, but now the water was polluted by Carla’s hatred and that was not to be the case.
Evolving this quickly was apparently a painful process, and the creatures squirmed and shrieked as their skins stretched like inflating balloons, new bones grew like splinters in their new limbs, and new joints popped and snapped into place.
“Jelly freaks!” shouted Nosh, who had decided he didn’t want to eat them anymore but would rather run away from them as quickly as possible.
“Nosh must have made a mistake in bringing us here. I suggest we leave quickly, Master Nelson. There is no sign of Celeste,” said Miser, as he and the other monsters backed away from the evolving fish creatures.
Nelson’s mind whizzed around for an answer to the question all of them were thinking at this very moment: what the heck do we do now? But that only brought even more questions flooding into his head. Where on earth were they? If they all thought of Celeste when they used the Bang Stone, then why wasn’t she here? Had they traveled all this way for nothing? Nelson grasped the pendant, closed his eyes, and tried to bat all these doubts and fears out of his head.
“Celeste!” he yelled again, but his voice was much, much louder than it had ever been before. It echoed through the thick jungle with all the power of a lion’s roar.
The monsters joined in. “Celeste!” they screamed in unison, and they would have continued, had it not been for another tug and warning honk from Crush.
“Honk! Honk! Honk!”
Nelson and the other monsters turned to see what Crush was honking about, only to discover something terrifying: what only moments ago had been ugly little fish sprouting limbs were now as large as dogs and heading straight for them.
Until now I have assumed you could sort of imagine what these evolving creatures looked like, but just before things turn very nasty indeed, here is a picture of how the fish had changed into what was about to make our heroes run for their lives. Remember, this is just a rough drawing. Not even the greatest artist in the world could capture just how terrifying these things really were.
“Run!” shouted Nelson. But most of the monsters had already had the same thought and were running as fast as they could. Even Puff, who normally shuffled barely faster than a slug, was tearing through that jungle, fueled by a rocket tank’s worth of fear, as fast as his fat paws would carry him.
Nosh tore through bushes and bounced over roots and vines in his bowling-ball mode, his pink body almost completely covered in the black goo. He had no idea where he was going and neither did any of the others. The only thing they were worried about now was staying ahead of those horrible creatures. None of them had turned around to look again, which was a good thing, because their pursuers had already doubled in size once more.
You would have thought Hoot would have a huge advantage in being able to fly, but remember that he is also spectacularly stupid, and on this occasion he had managed to slam straight into a branch. His beak made a sound like a church bell striking one o’clock, before he fell to the ground right in front of Nelson. Nelson tripped over him and threw his arms out to brace himself for the inevitable fall, but before his hands hit the ground he felt himself being yanked backward as if on a bungee cord.
The sound of the monsters screaming and running for their lives was suddenly muted, and the world around Nelson became blurry, like it did when he rubbed his eyes in the morning. He was upside down and felt as if he was being squeezed on all sides, like a supermarket chicken breast trapped under plastic wrap. It all happened so quickly that it took him at least twelve seconds to realize he had been eaten whole for the second time in twenty-four hours!
* * *
He was inside the belly of one of those awful creatures who had been chasing them through the jungle. He couldn’t believe he had come all this way just to wind up being a mutant’s snack. A smelly mutant too. The creature’s guts grumbled around Nelson and he felt the belly he was in swinging from side to side. The mutant was moving, and as it did, it grew: its ghastly, throbbing veins threading their way through its ever-expanding jellified flesh like red worms.
It wasn’t just Nelson who had become a snack. All of his monsters were now squirming inside the bellies of these terrible creatures, who were turning around and heading back to the pool they had sprung from as fish less than a minute before.
* * *
Nelson’s breathing was speeding up. The air inside this creature was running out and it wouldn’t be long before he would turn blue and pass out. His heart thumped so hard in his chest he could feel it beating in every part of his body. It was precisely at this moment that the creature’s stomach contracted sharply and Nelson suddenly shot up and out of its mouth, as if he was a slippery bar of soap popping out of a squeezing fist. He experienced a brief moment of what can only be described as whoosh! before tumbling through the air and landing with a loud slap in the black mud surrounding the pool.
Seven more slaps followed, and Nelson looked up and saw his seven monsters being blasted from the mouths of the hideous and ever-evolving jelly freaks. Crush was the first to get to his feet. He came and hugged Nelson around the neck as the other six slopped through the mud to cluster around him. Nelson’s vision was blurry from the mud in his eyes, but he could tell the monsters were as frightened as he was.
“One … two … three … four … five … six … seven…” said a ghostly female voice, and Nelson whipped around to see a gigantic whale-like face staring at him. Of course, Nelson didn’t yet know who this horrible creature really was—that was all to come.
* * *
You would have thought Nelson would be used to seeing weird creatures by now, but this big ugly whale thing certainly took the cake. Not only was her face as large as a sofa, but those eyes were so like a human’s it made for a doubly disturbing sight.
“Seven little monsters and one little boy,” said the whale thing, its mouth so huge that it took her twice as long to say things as it would you or me. “I’m sorry my little friends had to eat you in order to bring you here to me.”
“H-how come it can see you guys?” whispered Nelson.
His monsters shrugged and shook their heads. “It takes one … to know one?” suggested Puff, though he spoke in barely a whisper.
“But where is my beloved Brian?” said the whale thing, its eyes peering into the trees behind them.
“Ah. I think I might know the answer to this one. I think she means that awfully large fellow who was out cold in the cowshed?” said Hoot in a bright and cheerful voice, as if he’d guessed the answer in a jolly quiz game. It was too late to punch him to shut him up, but Stan did it anyway. Whack!
“Ouchy!”
“Shut it, birdbrain,” whispered Stan angrily.
“You mean my husband is … dead?” asked the whale, as it placed two of its rubbery fins in the mud surrounding the pool.
Nelson instinctively backed away, his bottom sliding through the mud as he pushed with his heels and his elbows. Brian was her husband? This couldn’t be his auntie Carla … could it?
Stan was squaring up to the creature. “Maybe ’e’s dead. Who knows? Anyway, it was ’is own fault! The stupid bloke tried to smash us off the road!” Stan was trying to sound like his usual tough self but not doing a very good job of it.
Crush let out a low honk, though not in fear of Carla. He was more worried about the jelly freaks, who were beginning to grow their first set of teeth. What a horrible sight it was! At least they hadn’t had them earlier, or Nelson and his monsters might have been chewed to bits instead of just swallowed. Judging by the growls and howls coming from the pack, growing teeth this fast was an extremely painful process.
“Oh, my poor Brian,” said the whale, closing its eyes and taking a deep breath. Nelson could feel the air around him being sucked into that huge mouth before it let out a loud and extremely smelly sigh.
“At least he did what I wanted,” said the whale, looking Nelson straight in the eye. “I asked him to find you, and here you are.”
“Where’s my sister?” said Nelson, in a voice that was much louder than he had been aiming for. It was the voice of someone who was not to be trifled with.
“You must love her to have come all this way to save her.”
“She’s my sister.”
“Yes, and I will give her back to you very shortly.”
Nelson and the monsters all felt the same shot of hope hit them square in the chest.
The whale thing continued: “But first you must give something to me.”
Nelson didn’t hesitate. “Anything. What do you want?”
“Only that pendant I see you have around your neck.”
“The pendant? Why?”
“It belonged … to my sister,” said the whale. Her eyes rolled up to the sky. It’s hard to tell if a water creature is crying, but it definitely looked as if she was getting a bit emotional.
“It’s your sister’s? Wait—does that mean … you are my auntie Carla?” said Nelson, finally putting the pieces of that blasted jigsaw together.
Carla nodded and batted her eyelids.
Nelson put his hand to his chest and felt the pendant. A remnant of the story Uncle Pogo had told him flashed into his mind: the father who poured all his love into a stone in order to save his dying daughter. How it had saved the sick daughter but caused the beginning of a rift between the girl and her twin. At the time Nelson had thought his uncle was making it up, but that was before monsters came into his life and he had made an incredible journey halfway across the planet with them to save his sister. The world was very different from how it had been only a few days ago. Now it was a place where magic could happen. A place where monsters really did exist. And therefore, a place where a father really could save his dying daughter by pouring every single drop of love he had in his heart into a stone.
* * *
Carla, this hideous creature, the twin who survived, wanted her father’s love in return for Nelson’s sister. It seemed like a good deal. He would miss the waves of hope and peacefulness the pendant gave him in times of need, but he could live without those. What he couldn’t live without was his sister. Nelson reached into the neck of his T-shirt and pulled out the pendant.