The End of the World

LISA AND NILLY found Doctor Proctor in his workshop down in the cellar below the blue house. He was hammering on the soles of his balancing shoes. He lit up when he noticed them standing there.

“Come!” he said, pulling his swim goggles up onto his forehead and leading them into the laundry room. He carefully placed the shoes on a clothesline that stretched across the length of the room, first one shoe, then the other. And sure enough, the shoes balanced there on top of the clothesline.

“Awesome!” Nilly exclaimed, so happy and excited that Lisa had to loudly clear her throat twice before he remembered why they were there and his face took on a more serious look, more appropriate given the seriousness of the situation.

“We read about the moon chameleon,” Lisa said.

Doctor Proctor looked at her in terror: “You read about the . . . the . . . ?”

“And we understand why you didn’t want to tell us about it,” Lisa said. “It’s not suitable for children.”

“Where in the world did you read about the moon chameleon?”

“In Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist,” Nilly said. “Page three hundred and fifteen.”

Doctor Proctor sank into a chair. “But the moon chameleon is just a rumor. A ghost story from 1969, when the first moon rocket returned to Earth. The rumor went that something had come back with it. Or someone. Someone invisible. Or rather, someone that could camouflage itself to look like absolutely anything. Which is how it got the name ‘moon chameleon.’ People said it did the most awful things, but I forgot all that stuff until you guys told me about the invisible creature, the sock footprints, and that spelling mistake. Everything fit, true, but I didn’t want to scare you. It was just a ghost story, and as we all know, there’s no such thing as ghosts.” He looked up at Lisa and Nilly. “Right?”

They didn’t respond.

Doctor Proctor wrung his hands. “Oh my, oh my. What did it say about it in the book?”

Nilly summarized the entry, and Lisa helped out with the parts he forgot.

“In addition to being able to blend in with any background, it steals,” Nilly said. “Simple and deliberate sock thievery. It walks right into people’s homes, sneaks right past them while they’re watching TV, camouflaging itself to look like a weather map or a football game, and saunters right into their laundry room, where it grabs the socks out of the washing machine and puts them on. That’s what we saw in the school gym—wet sock footprints.”

Doctor Proctor rubbed his chin: “I’ve heard about the sock-stealing thing, but I never quite believed it.”

Nilly sighed and pointed at Doctor Proctor’s feet. “Look for yourself. You’re wearing one red and one blue sock. How do you explain that?”

“Explain, schmexplain,” Doctor Proctor mumbled. “I’m missing a red sock.”

“Exactly. Because mysteriously one red sock vanished right out of your washing machine, right?”

“No, it burned up when I tried to dry it in the toaster.”

Lisa laughed and Nilly groaned.

“Well anyway,” Nilly continued. “Every day, all over the world, socks are disappearing. These daily sock mysteries remain unsolved. People look at each other in astonishment and say, ‘Where in the world did they all . . .’ But since they’re just socks, people forget about their disappearance and don’t think about it anymore. Millions of socks! A myriad of foot garments! Galaxies of sewn, knitted, crocheted, knitocheted socks!”

“But what would a . . . uh, moon creature need socks for?” Doctor Proctor asked.

“What do you think?” Nilly asked.

“Uh . . .”

“His tootsies are cold,” Nilly said.

“But then wouldn’t shoes be better?”

Nilly made a face. “His toes aren’t made for shoes. The footprints show that moon chameleons have the longest, sharpest, and most unkempt toenails you can imagine. The kind that wear holes in socks right away. That’s why they have to steal new ones all the time. And, what’s worse, they’re invincible, they don’t have any vulnerabilities. Well, aside from a little bit of spelling trouble, that is.”

“What did you just say?” Doctor Proctor exclaimed.

Lisa cleared her throat: “According to Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist, moon chameleons are notoriously bad spellers.”

“Really awful spellers, actually,” Nilly said.

“And especially bad with double letters,” Lisa said. “That’s one of the few dead giveaways for a moon chameleon. When they try to camouflage themselves as a sign, let’s say one that says ‘Special on Vanilla Pudding,’ it usually ends up reading ‘Special on Vanila Puding.’

“V-A-N-I-L-A,” Nilly spelled. “Did you catch that?”

Doctor Proctor nodded.

“And P-U-D-I . . . ,” Nilly began.

“I think he’s got it now,” Lisa said.

“Good,” Nilly said. “So, when Lisa looked at what she thought was our marching-band banner and noticed that it said ‘Dølgen Schol Marching Band,’ she actually wasn’t looking at the banner at all.” Nilly lowered his voice. “She was looking right at a moon chameleon who was standing in front of the banner, quiet as a mouse!”

“Eeew,” Doctor Proctor said.

“Double eeew,” Lisa said.

“But what about speech impediments?” Doctor Proctor asked.

“Hypnosis,” Lisa said.

“Hypnosis?”

Doctor Proctor looked first at Lisa and then at Nilly, who nodded slowly. “It’s in A.Y.W.D.E.,” he said. “If a camouflaged moon chameleon can look into your eyes for more than two minutes, it can hypnotize you and make you do whatever it says. The only way you can tell if someone has been hypnotized is that they’ll have some type of speech impediment.”

“And the only way you can make them snap out of it,” Lisa continued, “is to use something that’s stronger than the hypnosis.”

“Like what?”

“Like something that’s even more hypnotic.”

“Or you can scare the bejeezus out of them,” Nilly said, baring his teeth at them. “Grrr!”

“Hm,” Doctor Proctor said. “I can see that you read the entry very carefully.”

Nilly and Lisa nodded.

“And that you’ve also understood that the speech impediments, misspellings, and sock thefts are not why this creature ended up in this book.”

They shook their heads. Lisa closed her eyes and concentrated.

“Page three hundred and sixteen,” she said, and started quoting: “No one knows where the moon chameleon lives here on Earth, but we do know they avoid daylight. If you should be so unfortunate as to see a moon chameleon in broad daylight, it means that something awful is going to happen. Something super-awful, actually. Something ultra-massively super-awful, to be completely precise. Or to be completely, totally, absolutely ultra-precise: the end of the world.”

It was so quiet in the cellar for a few seconds that you could have heard a pin fall into a haystack of dry grass. If not something even quieter. Then Doctor Proctor nodded gloomily. “The end of the world. That’s what the rumors used to say back then, too.”

“Yeah, well,” Nilly said. “Let’s look at the bright side of all this. If the end of the world weren’t upon us, we wouldn’t have this opportunity to save the world now, would we?”

“Ugh,” Doctor Proctor said with a shudder. Then he glanced out the cellar window and noticed that it had already gotten dark. “This was such unpleasant business, I think we ought to head up to the kitchen and have ourselves some Jell-O!”

*   *   *

AT THAT MOMENT one of the two sentries on duty at the gatehouse in front of the Royal Palace, which is a large, yellow, stuccoed-brick building in the middle of Oslo, pricked up his ears and stared at the open snow-covered square in front of him.

“Hey, Gunnar, did you hear something?” he asked, running his finger over his handlebar mustache.

“What did you hear, Rolf?” his colleague asked, tugging on his Fu Manchu mustache.

“It sounded like someone just walked by in front of us.”

“I don’t see anyone,” Mr. Fu Manchu said, staring out into the darkness. Then he turned toward the facade of the building, where there were lights on in only one lone window. “Well, at any rate, it wasn’t the king. He’s still up, working on his crossword puzzles.”

“Look!” Mr. Handlebar said.

Fu Manchu turned around. His colleague pointed at something in the snow in front of them. Fu Manchu pulled off his black uniform hat with that stupid tassel on top that looked like a horse’s tail, and bent down. “Looks like dog footprints,” he said.

“A dog that hasn’t had its toenails clipped in a long time,” Handlebar said.

“And walks on only two legs,” Fu Manchu said.

“Yup,” Handlebar said with a yawn. “People do such weird things with their dogs these days.”

“Excuse me,” a man said in a thick Swedish accent.

The two guards looked up.

In front of them stood a tall man with blond bangs, dressed in something that looked sort of like an admiral’s uniform. A large van with the words MAJOR MOVERS painted on the side was parked behind him.

“Yes?”

“I won the contest,” the man said in Swedish.

“Uh, yes?”

“I’m the new president. Could you please tell the king he needs to pack? And then perhaps you could help me carry in my things?”