CHAPTER FOUR
Click, click, click, Moxie’s heavy shoes said as she crossed the platform. It must have been some kind of platform— like an enormous piece of butterscotch hard candy, it sat heavily on the moss below amongst an array of other identical discs. I jumped up and down a few times.
“What just happened?” Moxie asked quietly.
I advised myself that responding with a shrug in our current predicament would most likely seem flippant, a word which here means “Peculiarly dismissive of the fact that we had been in the attic of Black Cat Coffee mere seconds ago.” Instead, I mumbled something incomprehensible and inched towards the edge of the brownish surface. The ground, which appeared faint and scratchy from my angle, was only about two feet down from us.
“Well,” I said, “I’ll look around.” And my feet slipped off the side, hitting hard, flat earth. Was it earth? I almost expected it to creak like the attic floor as I took another step and ground the heel of my shoe into solid footing. Someone seemed to have painted stripes in the woven grass on either side of me, maroon streaks marked on the hard soil. They narrowed to a point off in the distance.
I looked back at Moxie, who had sat down cross-legged on the platform and continued to look worried. Developing in the back of my head was something that one of my associates might call a hunch, and I figured I’d better expatiate on it with Moxie.
A hunch, the way you or I would usually think of it, can mean a grotesque curve in one’s back that makes for health problems and unpleasant stereotyping. However, the word can also refer to a strange and nagging feeling in the back of one’s head, like an itchy scalp or a parasite latched onto your brain stem. It was this particular hunch, as I stood there like a sore thumb amongst a sea of saucers, that propelled me to ask, “Do you remember what a backgammon board looks like?”
Moxie frowned. “It’s got little triangles,” she said after a moment of thought, “on which to rest the little checkers.”
We both looked down.
“If the checker rests on the triangle, where do you come in?” I asked, and suddenly I jumped. I was not jumping to test the firmness of the ground, like before; I was jumping because, just as Moxie’s and my brainstorm was beginning to clear up, there came a blood-curdling sound. Moxie stared at me, eyes glassy with fear, and asked the question printed on the cover of this book.
“
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
The scream pierced my ears like a mishandled cotton swab, and Moxie jumped too. Our heads whirled around, scouring the saucer sea just as the Mallahan lighthouse used to do. “Please stay calm!” I called around me, remembering my education. “Help has arrived!”
We weaved senselessly between triangles and checkers, trying to follow the sound, until a fat wall appeared in the distance. As we got closer, I saw that its peak reached just over my head, and on its peak I saw the source of the screaming. Her eyes glued shut with tears and her arms draped over the side of the wall in anguish, a young girl lay in a crumple before me, screaming her head off.
“Miss!” I shouted over her screams. Moxie looked back and forth at me and the girl, unsure of what to do. “Miss, please stop screaming!”
There came a brief choking sound and the girl’s eyes popped open. Upon seeing us, she stopped screaming; instead, she leapt off the opposite side of the wall and peaked her eyes over the edge, whimpering. “Who are you people?” she whispered frantically. “What have you done with my brother?”
“We’re here to help,” I said.
“Go away!”
“What’s this about your brother?” Moxie enquired.
“He’s gone! Where am I? What are you doing here?”
“Please calm down,” I said carefully. “We don’t know where we are either. Now, can you think— where were you before?”
The girl continued to stare at me and made a choking sound again, her eyes getting even bigger.
“We were supposed to be in
vestigating,” she croaked. “Investigating the Swinster Pharmacy.”