LEONID HAZARDFALL WAS HEAVILY bruised, his left arm was wrapped in bandages, and he wore a large padded brace around his neck, but he was most certainly very much alive.

The horde of children emerging from school buses cheered with relief at the sight of their fellow playground enthusiast. The race to the playground became a stampede as the undeniable evidence of the boy’s miraculous recovery allowed them all once again to put their unshakable faith into the playground of Dr. Fell.

“I’m gonna go scale the mini Eiffel Tower!” announced a young boy from Washington Madison Hoover Elementary School.

“I’m gonna go play inside the ice castle!” announced a young girl from Lincoln Adams Coolidge Elementary School.

“I’m gonna go crawl through the catacombs!” announced an older boy from Southeast North Northwestern Academy.

Standing their ground as the stampede of happy children charged past, Gail, Nancy, and Jerry could only gawk at the shocking sight of Leonid Hazardfall being shockingly not dead.

“That’s amazing,” said Gail.

“That’s impossible,” said Jerry.

“That’s seriously wrong,” said Nancy.

“Isn’t it great that the kid’s all right?” asked the ever-perky Jewel Sparkledink as she ran past them.

“But he was dead!” Nancy called after her.

“Don’t be silly—he just had a bad fall,” said the only slightly less perky Shelly Plentyson as she followed in Jewel Sparkledink’s footsteps.

“He had no pulse!” pointed out Nancy in disbelief.

“So?” said impossibly perky Crystal Chintzington as she raced after Shelly Plentyson and Jewel Sparkledink. “He saw Dr. Fell, so of course he’s OK!”

Soon the flood of eager children washed past them, leaving the three alone on the sidewalk. Despite the invisible force drawing them toward the playground like a magnet, they held their ground a moment longer.

“I’m telling you, that kid was dead,” said Nancy. “I swear it. D-E-A-D dead.”

“Maybe it was a…you know…pulled-back-from-the-afterlife sort of thing,” suggested Gail. “What’s it called? When you die and then come back?”

“Reincarnation,” replied Jerry helpfully.

“Right! Maybe he’s reincarnated.”

“Except when you’re reincarnated, you come back as something else, like a cockroach or a squirrel,” clarified Jerry.

“I’d sooner believe he’s a zombie,” said Nancy. “They come back from the dead too.”

Jerry and Gail’s silence showed they weren’t about to disagree.

Behind them, another fleet of school buses arrived to vomit out the children of Ford Garfield Taft Elementary. The students immediately spotted their no-longer-dead classmate standing atop the mast and cheered.

“Look!” cried one little boy. “It’s Leonid!”

“Look!” cried another boy. “He’s alive!”

“Look!” cried a little girl. “The playground is still awesome!”

The doors of the buses opened and children ran into the waiting arms of the play structure, which swallowed them up like some diabolical children-eating sponge.

“I’m scared,” admitted Jerry.

Nancy nodded, but Gail, ever the optimist, turned to her friends with a forced grin. “I’m sure there’s a simple explanation,” she said. “Let’s go ask him.”

“What?” asked Nancy.

“Let’s talk to that kid and find out what really happened.”

Without waiting for a reply, Gail marched determinedly toward the ominous play structure of Dr. Fell. Jerry and Nancy silently fell into step behind her.

The buzz of excited children assaulted their ears as they crossed the boundary separating the playground from the rest of reality. Suddenly they were walking through Ethel Pusster’s all-you-can-eat sandcake party, then climbing over Aiden Grand and Zachary Fallowmold’s deadly wall of man-eating ivy, then crawling through a tunnel that three kids from Lincoln Adams Coolidge Elementary had turned into an abandoned mine shaft, before finally dodging six or seven wall ball players from Southeast North Northwestern Academy and reaching the wooden schooner atop whose central mast stood Leonid Hazardfall in full look-at-me-not-be-dead! glory. They quickly scrambled over the side and pulled themselves up onto the deck.

“Hey!” called out Gail in the universal language of preteens. “Hey, kid!”

Leonid looked down at the three of them, eyes wide with youthful abandon. “Tallyho!” he cried before leaping out into the air, grabbing one of the ropes meant to resemble rigging, and twirling to the ground with his legs kicked out dramatically behind him. All in all, it was a ridiculously dangerous move for a recently dead child to undertake.

He landed in a sprightly way in front of them and bowed. “Welcome, ye hearty maidens!” he cried before turning to Jerry. “And cabin boy!”

Gail couldn’t help but giggle a bit at Leonid’s flair. Nancy rolled her eyes and elbowed her aside. “What are you doing?” she asked, getting straight to the point. “You were dead, like, what? Five hours ago?”

“More like eight,” offered Jerry.

“Fine. Eight hours ago. How are you out here now, champing at the bit and being all piratey?”

“Bah!” Leonid waved his hand in front of his face as if he were swatting a fly. “ ’Twas but a flesh wound!”

“You weren’t breathing!”

Leonid stopped, and for a moment, a look of clarity pushed its way through his pirate shtick. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I was there! You weren’t breathing! You had no pulse! You were dead!”

Behind Nancy, Gail and Jerry nodded their support for Leonid being dead.

“Well…well…” Leonid Hazardfall appeared to be at a loss. Finally, he shrugged. “Well, I’m all better now!”

He squeaked out the last word, his voice cracking. He instinctively covered his mouth in embarrassment.

“You OK?” asked Gail.

The formerly dead eleven-year-old dropped his arms to his sides and shrugged. “Dr. Fell made me all be-eh-ter.” The two-syllable word became three as his voice once again cracked on the vowel.

“Why are you doing that?” asked an irritated Nancy.

“Doing what?”

“That thing with your voice.”

“I’m not do-oo-ing anything.” He forced the words through his breaking voice.

Nancy scowled. Gail looked concerned. Jerry stared off into space, concentrating.

“Avast!” yelled Leonid, once again in character. “Landlubbers, beware!” With that, he dashed off to find some landlubbers to conquer.

“That was weird,” said Gail.

“That was disturbing,” said Jerry.

“That was lame,” said Nancy.

“Why, if it is not my three favorite urchins! A supremely pleasant good afternoon to you all,” purred the pleasing voice of Dr. Fell. The children turned to find the good doctor slightly hunched over behind them, sipping his usual drink from an aquamarine glass through a honeydew-colored straw. He was dressed once again in his blacker-than-black old-fashioned suit despite it being a hot day with clear skies. Though he stood out in the open, he was almost completely in shadow thanks to his bright purple top hat, which shaded him (in an almost unnatural way) from the blazing sun overhead. “It brings me no small amount of gratification to chance upon the three of you—who have heretofore managed such complete avoidance of my generosity—displaying an unbridled joy within the confines of this magical nook.”

He smiled widely and easily dipped the front of his hat, as he always did, before continuing. “What I mean to say is—”

“We know what you meant to say,” interrupted Nancy, who had actually been stumped by a couple of the bigger words but wasn’t about to admit it. “We’re not stupid.”

Dr. Fell froze. It was only a fraction of a second, but they all saw it, and it made them all shiver in terror. A moment later, Dr. Fell regained his composure and smiled even more widely. “Of course not. Please forgive me, Miss Pinkblossom. I was simply striving for clarity.”

“Excuse me?” asked a very hesitant Gail. “Dr. Fell?”

Dr. Fell somehow managed to turn his attention to Gail without taking his eyes off Nancy. It was both remarkable and unnerving. “Yes, Miss Bloom?”

Gail stepped forward, very purposefully, in front of Nancy. She knew just how short her friend’s fuse could be and felt the need to intervene before an explosion occurred. “We were wondering…What did you…It’s just that…” She frowned. She knew what she wanted to ask but for some reason was unable to put her thought into words. Instead, she simply pointed up at the overly active Leonid Hazardfall and said, simply, “How?”

Dr. Fell took a long, slow sip of yellow liquid. Gail, Nancy, and Jerry waited patiently for him to finish. Finally, with a sickly satisfied sigh, he lowered the glass.

“How did I bring him back from the dead?”

A chill colder than ice shook the three children to their core. Their eyes widened, their hearts raced, and sweat oozed out of their pores.

Then Dr. Fell laughed. It was not an evil someday-I’m-going-to-rule-the-world laugh, but rather a good-natured I-can’t-believe-you-fell-for-that laugh.

“Oh, I am sorry, my little lovelies, but I simply could not resist a stroke of merriment at the expense of your overly eager imaginations. Young Mr. Hazardfall took quite the spill, indeed, but he merely had the wind knocked out of him. As you can obviously see, he is none the worse for wear, with the exception of a few bumps and bruises.”

“No way!” Nancy spun out of her daze with a vengeance. “He wasn’t breathing! He didn’t have a pulse!”

“I must disagree with your medical diagnosis. I assure you, the young man gave us a scare, nothing more. His injuries, though dramatic, were no match for my medical prowess. He shall live to dance a jig on his wedding day!” At this he danced a little jig, ending by kicking up his heels in a moment of extreme silliness.

The three children tried not to laugh.

“Whew! I am not the young man I once was,” he said, pulling a white monogrammed handkerchief from his coat pocket and dabbing his forehead. “Now, if you will excuse me, I must continue my rounds, as it were. It has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you all.”

He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket.

“Miss Pinkblossom, I look forward to our appointment tomorrow. Ten a.m. sharp.”

They watched him slink away into the forest of children that suddenly seemed to be running willy-nilly all around them. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, he was gone.

“That was also disturbing,” said Jerry.

Gail turned to Nancy, a look of concern etched on her face. “Do you think you can convince your mother to cancel your appointment with him?” she asked.

Nancy’s eyes narrowed into battle formation, and her notorious scowl settled onto her face. “No, but I wouldn’t even if I could. I’m keeping that appointment,” she announced. “I’m going to walk into the lion’s den and figure out just what Dr. Fell is up to.”