CHAPTER 11

THE DIARY OF FIFI BUBBLEGUMME

MILLICENT AND HER PUPILS sat amongst piles of ancient leather diaries in various states of decay. They had already combed through 1,756 of them. It was 8:00 PM, and no information about the Kyrgalops had presented itself.

“Is it possible,” Eugenia said through gritted teeth, “that this Dr. Fifi Bubblegumme somehow knew everything about every single unnatural worm other than the Kyrgalops?”

Millicent thought for a moment. “I mean, anything’s possible.…”

Eugenia slumped over onto the floor. Dee-Dee had used rubber bands and a coat hanger to construct a machine that would hold her eyelids open, but she was snoring, so one couldn’t tell if she was actually reading or not.

That’s when Gertrude, half-asleep herself, unrolled an unassuming scroll of tattered sheets held together by a rubber band so ancient that it shriveled when she touched it. She scanned the handwritten pages until finally she saw what the group had been looking for all those hours. Was it a mirage? No! There it was, plain as day!

On the subject of the Kyrgalops

“I… I think… I found it!” Gertrude called out groggily.

She began to read aloud, straining to decipher the flowery cursive of Dr. Fifi Bubblegumme.

“I was born a poor boy in Transylvania in 1624. My mother was dead, and my father was a grape-stomper. For dinner, we typically shared a single bean.”

Eugenia yawned. “Skip to the Kyrgalops, please. I don’t need his whole life story.”

Gertrude peered farther down the page.

“One day, while foraging in a mossy grotto, I discovered a den of the most wonderful worms: a worm that could fly, a worm that could become flat as paper, a worm that could balloon into a ball and roll down a hill! These worms became my playmates, my confidants—”

“Again,” Eugenia said with a yawn, “I don’t need to know what this man had for breakfast, just get to the Kyrg.”

Gertrude scanned even farther down.

“When my father discovered my colony of fabulous worms, he brought me and my worm friends to the palace of the evil King Radu.

“‘I will give you two dollars for the boy and the worms,’ said the evil king. Well, my father was so poor and thought I might have a better life at the castle, so he took the deal—”

“Get to the Kyrgalops, already!” Eugenia said.

“Ah!” Gertrude said. “Here it is.”

“One day, King Radu came to me in a blind fury.

“‘Doctor Fifi,’ he said. ‘Please make me a worm that can eat through stone. Good King Nicolai of Wallachia has made a wall around his city five boulders thick. I need to get through there so I can kill everybody.’

“‘King, can I ask you something?’ I ventured. ‘You’ve already killed so many people in so many cities. Have you thought about why you feel the need to keep doing that?’

“‘You impudent wretch!’ said King Radu. ‘My father was mean to me, of course! Now make me a worm that can eat through stone, or else… I will… kill your father!’

“So, you see, I had no choice. I crossbred many different unnatural worms, until at last the day came when I hatched a fearsome worm, long as an anaconda and thick as a cow, sheathed in hard scarlet scales, with a round mouth lined with teeth harder than diamond. I called it the Kyrgalops.

“No reason. I just thought it was a good name.

“As King Radu unleashed the Kyrgalops on city after innocent city, I fled with my remaining Kyrgalops eggs to the town of Antiquarium, the Capital of Mad Science of the Northern Hemisphere, so that I could make sure they never terrorized the earth again.”

“I am sad now, and that annoys me,” said Eugenia. “Just tell us about the worm.”

Gertrude read on. “The Kyrgalops’s preferred habitat is salt water, where it can live harmoniously on a diet of algae and old shells. The male of the species lives as a parasite in the stomach of the female, never growing larger than a hamster…,” Gertrude read, “and then the rest of this sentence is smeared in mustard, or at least I hope it’s mustard.”

“Fine, skip that part,” said Millicent. “We’ve no time for the gender politics of worms.”

“The Kyrgalops becomes docile in the presence of the legendary Panacea Slug. What is a Panacea Slug?” Gertrude asked.

Millicent turned to Gertrude and spoke in low, jubilant tones. “Oh, a wonderful creature,” she said. “A legendary creature. Part human, part slug. Its slime is a curative for disease. An amazing creature. Then again it might be a myth—but wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were real?”

“Yes,” Gertrude whispered. “I actually love slugs.”

“As well you should,” said Millicent. And Gertrude felt full of something, the warm feeling you get when you say something weird and someone else says, “I know, me too!”

She read on. “The Kyrgalops can survive on a diet of crushed rock. However, it cannot resist the smell and taste of one softer item in particular: the small canine known in some communities as…

the Bichon Frise.

The worm can be lured to any location by a congregation of said dogs.”

“Aha!” said Millicent. “That’s why it bit the ponytail off the marble statue of the bichon! It wasn’t hungry for marble at all—it was hungry for the dog!”

The four paused to consider the gruesome implications.

“Well, that’s great,” Eugenia said, breaking the silence, “but how do we TRAP a Kyrgalops?”

Gertrude read on.

“The worm can crunch through any type of metal or stone, except for a rare unnatural mineral called Prismuth, which can only be found pearled inside certain oysters off the coast of Taiwan.”

“Ding-dong!” Millicent cried. “Prismuth! Of course! We simply have to build a cage out of Prismuth, then sneak into Mrs. Wintermacher’s office, transfer the Kyrgalops into the cage, carry it out to sea, et voilà! The town is saved!”

“Hold your horses, woman,” said Eugenia. “Where are we going to find this exceptionally rare mineral?”

Millicent thought for a moment. “I do not know yet. This will require a night’s sleep. But for now, we must replenish our strength, with the greatest of life’s offerings.”

An hour later, the Porches were still waiting anxiously at the dining room table while Millicent clattered around the kitchen. It sounded like she was playing basketball with a set of pots and pans. “Is she cooking in there,” Eugenia said, “or is a robot having a stroke?” Though soon enough it became evident that she was, in fact, cooking, as a familiar smell wafted in from the stovetop: the smell of tomato sauce.

Finally, Millicent returned with a round tray, on top of which sat a hot circle of bread slathered with sauce and cheese and dotted with olives. “Here it is: the greatest of life’s offerings.”

She set the tray on the table and breathed in the smell. “There is only one thing in this world, my pupeels, that can truly lift the spirit, fill the belly, and soothe the mind—and that thing is… say it with me…”

The Porches were silent.

“PIZZA,” said Millicent. “That thing is pizza.”

The Porches had never had a slice of pizza, as it was 1911 and pizza had not yet taken a firm foothold in the continental United States.

Gertrude took the first bite. It was, in fact, the finest thing she had ever tasted: It was the taste of warmth, of comfort, of bliss. Eugenia finished her slice in three bites. Dee-Dee pressed two slices together, then folded those in half, then in half again, to form a pizza layer cake.

Gertrude ate happily, exploring the many magical properties of mozzarella cheese, then remembered that there were still pressing matters at hand.

“Ms. Quibb, I’ve been meaning to ask—who is Talon Sharktūth?” Gertrude asked. “Mrs. Wintermacher said that name when we were spying on her and it seemed sort of important?”

“Ugh!” Millicent said, coughing her pizza back onto her plate. “Vile. I hate to ruin a perfectly good pizza party, but if you must know—and indeed you must—Talon Sharktūth was the founder of the KRA. He was a psychopath, a narcissist, a dental train wreck. They say his teeth were upside-down triangles, because he had done experiments with sharks! They say his eyes were black—again, from the shark experiments! They say he had no tongue—unrelated to the shark experiments! He became a very rich and powerful man by inventing creatures and gems and machines that could turn a quick profit—never mind that they were devastating for human and animal kind. Just before the Great Fire of 1761 there had been rumors that he had been working on a pièce de résistance, a magnum opus, a big thing: an elixir of life. They say that after the fire he fled with his horrible inventions to a secret underground vault in order to perfect his immortality serum, only to emerge when the time is right! May that vault never see the light of day.”

The four sat soberly, until Millicent threw her pizza down on her plate. “But let us not wallow in worry! I wish to commend you, my pupeels. This is the second day of the Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science and already you have absorbed plenty of useful information. You are fine pupeels and… well, it’s sappy. Never mind.”

“Please stop here,” said Eugenia. “I do not do sap.”

“Neither do I, but, well… I stole you all something, when we were at Mme Flambé’s Silver Spoons.” Millicent rolled her eyes to make it seem like it wasn’t a big deal. She pulled three silver spoons from the pocket of her lab coat and tossed them unceremoniously on the table. “There. You said you never got a silver spoon on your tenth birthday like all the other children in Antiquarium. So I stole spoons for you. That’s all.”

Dee-Dee cradled the spoon to her cheek. Eugenia put it in her pocket and nodded, trying with all her might not to smile or feel anything about it.

Gertrude looked at her reflection on the back of the spoon. Her hair was wild and filled with worms, her lab coat was wrinkled and filthy, and yet she looked… like herself. She felt a lump in her throat, a certain warmth, as if there was a parenthesis around the four of them, punctuation that said GROUP. And she was a part of it. It felt so wonderful, to be a real part of something.

“See? Mad scientists can have silver spoons too. But we do it on our own terms. Okay, enough mush. Eat your pizza.”

But before Gertrude could begin to express her gratitude, something horrific happened. As Dee-Dee opened her mouth to burp, a vine started growing out of it, wending its way through the air like smoke from an after-dinner cigar.

While Gertrude and Eugenia screamed, Dee-Dee watched with a detached sort of wonder.

“Oh dear,” Millicent said calmly. “I seem to have used Rapier Vine seeds instead of olives. They look so similar—I have got to get a label maker! No matter—let us turn this mistake into a learning opportunity! What you see here, my pupeels, are Rapier Vines in action. They can be very useful. They can even snap iron bars in two!”

The vines curled over the arms of the iron chandelier overhead, cracking it in half.

Eugenia and Gertrude started gagging, trying to get rid of the pizza they’d just eaten.

“Help Dee-Dee!” Gertrude cried.

“Help ME!” Eugenia cried.

Millicent just scowled and poured everyone a glass of orange juice. “Oh, don’t be so uptight, just drink this. The vine can’t survive in acid.”

The Porches guzzled the orange juice, and the vines were no more, and all was well again, except for Millicent, who seemed upset.

“For shame.” She hung her head. “Orange juice and pizza. It’s… so wrong. It isn’t done.”

And after a moment of tense silence, the children burst into laughter, the kind of laughter you can only laugh after you’ve been screaming.

“Here, girls,” Millicent said, tossing each of her pupils a tiny brown paper bag. “You should each have your own packet of Rapier Vine seeds. Keep them in your pockets, for a rainy day.”

And thus was the rhythm of life at the Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science. Danger, laughter, danger, laughter. Was their teacher a benevolent guide, or would she accidentally kill them all? Where would they find enough Prismuth to make a cage big enough to trap the Kyrgalops? Would they ever meet a Panacea Slug? These and other questions plagued the pupils.

But now was not the time for pensive wallowing. It had been a good day, and the only thing to do was be glad of it.

And that, my dear reader, is exactly what Mrs. Wintermacher thought as she eavesdropped outside Millicent Quibb’s kitchen window.

She surveyed her spy notes. “Kyrgalops cannot resist the smell and taste of the bichon frise.”

“Yes, that’s it!” she whispered to herself. “That’s exactly it! That is how we will lure the worm to the desired location!

WE WILL USE THE BICHONS.”