Nelson gripped the pendant and raised it above his head so that the chain swung away from his neck.
Carla’s great eyes grew bigger at the sight of this tiny red stone that now dangled from Nelson’s outstretched fist.
“Master Nelson,” hissed Miser, keeping his googly eyes on the fleet of jelly freaks who were now grinding and chomping their new sets of teeth, “might I suggest you hold on to that item of jewelry until we have seen Celeste for ourselves?”
Carla had heard Miser’s whisper and answered his fears.
“I promise you will have her back, just as soon as you give me that pendant,” she said in her slow, dreamy tone.
Nelson looked at Miser, who made his feelings clear with a small but very distinct shake of his head. The rest of the monsters merely stared at Nelson, waiting to see what he was going to do.
With the pendant dangling from his right hand, Nelson raised himself to his feet.
Though Carla was huge and ugly, as he approached her Nelson could see the very real glimmer of hope in those bulging eyes of hers.
With every one of the six squelchy steps Nelson took toward her, Carla opened her great mouth wider and wider, so that by the time he was standing no more than a few inches from the edge of the pond, her mouth gaped as wide open as the trunk of a sedan.
Nelson looked back at his monsters, and all seven of them looked back at him with a mixture of fear and confusion. Without these extraordinary monsters, he would not have had a hope of saving his sister. Thanks to them, he now stood on the brink of getting her back.
The pendant swung on the end of its chain, drawn forward by Carla taking a great breath.
“Wait,” said Nelson, and Carla glared hungrily at the necklace hanging from his fingers. “When you took the pendant from Isabelle, you got burned. It was cursed or something. So if I give it to you, you’ll just get burned again.”
Carla blinked and replied slowly, “Ah, but not this time. No. This time I am ready. I shall be born again.”
“What’s that massive trout on about?” muttered Stan, and the other monsters hushed him. “Don’t you shush me! Who cares what happens to ’er? We just need Celeste!”
Nelson turned to look back into Carla’s great mouth, and without another thought he dropped the pendant in as if she was a wishing well.
As the very last link of the chain left his fingers, Nelson suddenly felt all hope was lost. He tried to grab it back, but it was too late.
Snap!
Carla’s mouth slammed shut, her eyes rolled back until only the whites could be seen, and she sank like a submarine into the bubbling black water. Gone.
The jelly freaks snarled and ground their teeth so hard their teeth crumbled like stale cookies in their rubbery mouths. This could have been a problem for them, had a second set of much nastier and larger teeth not already been tearing their way through the creatures’ gums to replace what must have been their baby teeth.
Nelson’s monsters jumped to their feet and ran to his side.
“Gah! She tricked us. The witch has tricked us!” hissed Miser.
Spike burst into tears and the others were too shocked to speak.
“Celeste!” yelled Nelson, turning to face the black trees in case she was being held somewhere among them. “Celeste!”
As if in answer to his call, a fresh green shoot suddenly popped up out of the mud between his shoes. Pop. Another one right beside it. Pop. And another.
The mud around the pond began to bubble, and luscious green shoots sprouted everywhere before blossoming into magnificent flowers.
“What’s going on?” cried Nelson, as he was knocked off his feet by an entire bouquet of yellow flowers pushing their way up through the ground. Not one of the monsters could answer him—they could only watch as the black jungle exploded with color and life. The oily mud churned, turning back to its original rich rust-brown clay. The bark of scorched tree trunks cracked and fell away like scabs to reveal fresh healthy bark beneath. A million luscious green leaves fanned out like magicians’ cards from a hundred thousand branches that were twisting and turning up toward the rays of sun breaking through the jungle canopy for the first time in ten long dark years.
The jelly freaks continued to swell and sprout new features while their bulging white eyes remained empty of any emotion, but they didn’t look as if they were about to attack anymore.
Nelson felt as if he was watching a nightmare turn into a dream. Above him, the buds of magnolia trees were opening so quickly that the blossoms exploded in snowy clouds of pink petals. Dead branches fell to the ground, where they were swallowed by the red earth and buried forever beneath tall, lush grasses rising from the jungle floor in great waves of bluey green and mustard yellow. Color and life consumed all that had been black and dead with the scale and spectacle of an Olympic opening ceremony.
Nelson felt his shoes fill with water and spun around to see the pond overflowing. The black water belched out of the ground before bulging as Carla broke the oily black surface once again. This time her entire body launched out of the pond, like a killer whale in a sea-park display, scattering Nelson and the monsters, who fled just in time to avoid being crushed. Carla’s phenomenal blubbery bulk slammed onto flowers and grasses and bushes and plants that were clamoring for their place in the sun. The tremor of her landing knocked everything, including the jelly freaks and several nice new trees, to the ground.
Behind her, the pond that had once been as black as an inkwell now overflowed with sparkling spring water and ever so slowly began to shrink, its grassy banks drawing tighter and tighter as if to close completely.
Suddenly Carla gave a great belch, opened her huge mouth, and Celeste slid out, down Carla’s fat purple tongue and into a bed of spiraling orchids.
Nosh, Spike, Puff, Miser, Hoot, Stan, and Nelson all cried her name in unison.
“Celeste!”
(Crush honked, of course.)
Nelson ran through the swaying grasses toward his sister, skidding to his knees at her side and cradling her sleeping head in his arms. Her blond hair was black now, and her skin as white as the moon, but these were utterly insignificant details compared to the gigantic and wonderful fact that Nelson had found his sister at last.
The monsters pushed and shoved like paparazzi trying to get near a movie star, knocking Nelson over.
“Hey, watch it,” Nelson laughed, but the monsters were desperate to be as close to Celeste as possible now, as if the ache that they had been cursed with since they were created would finally be cured.
It was the happiest day the jungle had ever known in its entire billion-year history. And it should have been for Nelson and the monsters too, but it wasn’t.
As warmth and color saturated the world around him, a rush of ice-cold horror ran through Nelson’s veins when he realized his big sister was not asleep in his arms.
She was dead.