MystikQuest - Jeff Schanz (reading books for 4 year olds TXT) 📗

as everyone else, he also evaluated situations quickly and saw options that other people might be blinded to. Right now, he knew the creature was blustering and may not be in a good position to follow through with its threats. Unless, of course, it really was a goblin, and had something like magic.

Seriously, dude? Magic?

Wes picked up a Bic lighter which he used to light campfires. Right now, it would help to see this opossum-goblin better. Might even scare it. Some animals were afraid of fire. He flicked the Bic on.

The creature lifted an arm to shield it from the flame’s light. Its arm-raise looked weak. The arm also looked less like an opossum and more like a monkey. Human-like, hairy, small, and slender. This didn’t help identify the creature any better since there were no monkeys in Connecticut, and certainly, none that spoke English, much less were multilingual. Certain birds could mimic human speech, but Wes had never heard of monkeys, or any other animal, that did it. There were apes who could use sign language, but that still didn’t… Focus, Wes!

The creature in front of him wasn’t a monkey, or an opossum. It was something unknown. Regardless of what Wes thought it might be, it was real, and intelligent enough to speak and understand English. So? So… Wes decided to go with it, accept the situation, and proceed with caution.

“You haven’t answered me,” said Wes in a voice that sounded tougher than he felt. “What are you? Why – why are you in my treehouse?”

The little creature made a wet hiss, sounding like some blockage was in its throat. Wes was about to wave the Bic at it to force better compliance when something suddenly occurred to him. Nobody would believe him when he told whatever story this ended up being. His cell phone was still in his pocket, useless as a phone since his camp was in a dead zone for reception, but the camera on it worked just fine. Wes slipped the phone from his pocket, thumbed the screen and held the phone up in front of the creature. His thumb tapped the virtual button and the camera light popped.

The creature screeched, flailed at the air with its hand, then twisted around in the corner where it cowered. Wes did a cursory check that the picture came out, then he lowered the phone as something else caught his attention. On the creature’s leg, visible now that the creature had twisted around, was a wound. At least, Wes thought it was a wound. The edges of a jagged area of flesh along the creature’s thigh were glowing bright orange, like the wound was a piece of paper being consumed by a flame. As the flesh peeled back from the burning wound, underneath was green goo which glistened on top of what looked like muscles and tendons. Is that its blood? It kinda looks like blood if it wasn’t so – you know, green. The wound kept spreading, the glowing edges expanding like waves. This creature was either being burned alive or consumed by some kind of… Don’t you dare say magic, dude. But it was hard not to say or think the word magic when Wes was witnessing what was right before his eyes. The green blood was now turning to ash as the orange burning edges spread to its body. The wounded leg now appeared to be half the size it had been. The little creature is disintegrating!

Wes held the Bic closer. The creature was probably in too much pain from its smoldering wound to even notice what Wes was doing. Its eyes were closed, teeth were gnashed, and his whole body shook with intense tremors. Despite the little creature’s death threat, Wes hated seeing anything in pain, and was vainly searching for some way to stop the creature’s distress. What could he do? Throw water on it? All he had was orange soda. Throwing orange soda on an open wound sounded like a bad idea.

The little creature shouted something which startled Wes. He wasn’t sure he caught the word correctly until the creature repeated it even louder.

“Master!” it cried.

Me? No, not Wes. The creature peeled its eyelids back, its eyes darted frantically searching for something. Glazed, watering, and almost cross-eyed, it appeared to be seeing nothing. Not the treehouse, not Wes, nothing on this earth. Was the creature going into shock? Wes’s studies at school were far advanced of most eighth-graders, and he knew a little medical stuff and biology. Not a lot, but enough to know that physical trauma can induce shock, and this matched the textbooks even if it was a green-blooded opossum-goblin.

“Master!” it called, pleading to the air. It held out a trembling fist, clutching some kind of rock in its fingers. “I found it, Master! Please! Please come and take it. Please, come…” A shudder went through the creature as it coughed on something wet. “Please,” it gargled. “I can’t – can’t make – can’t get…” Its mouth convulsed, cutting off more words and substituting agonizing sounds.

Wes felt useless, wanting to help even though this thing wasn’t friendly. Perhaps only its pain made it threatening. Wes fumbled around the floor for something to aid the creature, but had nothing he could see that would do any good. He was about to pick up the orange soda and dump it on the creature when something incredible happened in this already inconceivable scene.

The creature exploded in a flash of flame and smoke. Cripes! Wes launched himself against the wall of his treehouse, making the whole structure creak loudly. He yanked up his arms, checking for injury, thankfully seeing none. No burns, no cuts, and not even any green blood from the little thing that exploded. Shouldn’t there be guts and goo all over me? Nothing on his jeans, nothing on his arms, nothing on the floor. Nothing anywhere except glowing embers floating down through the smoky air. As the embers settled and turned grey, an unseen breeze whisked the ashes into an impromptu pile that seemed to be diminishing even as it gathered.

Just like the whole thing had been a weird dream, the opossum-goblin was gone, leaving in its place only a pile of ash that was disintegrating even further. Wes’s mouth was slack, stumped for any utterance that could possibly be appropriate.

“Whoa,” he finally said. Epic words, dude. There was simply nothing to be done or said when a goblin blows up in your treehouse, except apparently say, “Whoa.” Wes got his knees under him and crawled over to where the goblin had just disappeared. The only thing left besides grey ash was that little rock the goblin had held in its hand when it was pleading to its unseen master. The rock didn’t look significant enough to warrant all this fuss. It was just a plain ol’ chunk of…

“Hey,” said Wes aloud. “That’s my arrowhead.”

Wes doubted it was actually an arrowhead, even though it did have the familiar shape, which was why he thought of it that way. The woods of Connecticut could be a treasure trove of relics, sometimes buried under dense dirt or crumbled stone walls. One of Wes’s friends found a stash of musket balls once. At a local flea-market, Wes’s favorite vendor sold ancient stone arrowheads claimed to be unearthed from a new housing project dug up from an old field. Ever since then, the boys made it their mission to dig around for old relics. Wes found the suspected arrowhead under layers of solidified deposits when he dug out his firepit, but he could never be sure if it was a relic or just a worthless rock. He kept it anyway, assuming someday he’d have it checked by someone knowledgeable. And here was his assumed worthless rock the creature had been trying to steal.

Wes picked up the rock. He half expected some magic sensation to course through his hand from the unexpected power the rock may have had. A power that had been there all along, which Wes never knew, yet he creature had known, and had traveled from another dimension to retrieve the magic stone, dying in the attempt to get it to his mysterious master. Sure. Not. Wes felt nothing. It was just a dumb rock. He put it in his pocket.

He wondered how to tell his friends what happened when he heard a distant but familiar voice.

“Wes!” It was his stepfather. “Wes! Time to come in!”

Oh, yeah. Right. There was a party tonight at his friend AJ’s house. Grown-ups only. Wes was familiar with these soirees, happening every couple months or so. Since a lot of people couldn’t get babysitters, or didn’t want to, and many of the kids knew each other anyway, the kids would be thrown in some room together while the parents all hung around drinking and talking loudly, ignoring the kids, assuming they’d have a great time stuck in a room. Yay. So much fun. The good news about tonight was AJ had a basement to himself, decked out in furniture, an old TV, and their favorite movies. However, they weren’t going to be watching movies tonight. They would be playing their MystikQuest game while their parents got plastered upstairs.

Leaning out the treehouse entrance, Wes shouted, “Coming!”

He wondered how he could possibly convince his friends about this bizarre encounter since the only things left were goblin ashes, which looked like regular ashes and were essentially gone anyway, plus the stupid old rock that they already knew about.

“Yeah, but it’s important now” …he’d say.

“Like how?” …they’d say.

Like, I don’t know. He had nothing to prove that anything had happened. Frak! Yes, I do! The cell phone picture.

He picked up the phone and swiped through the gallery. Boom! There it was! The opossum-goblin in all its glory, right there on his phone. Ha! Suddenly, he very much wanted to get to that party.

“Coming!” Wes shouted again. He scrambled down the ladder and sprinted up the hill.

CHAPTER 3

 

 

Carpeted basement stairs creaked as Wes pelted down them. A round dining table that occasionally doubled as a poker table was set with stacks of paper, books, a cardboard screen illustrated with fantasy creatures, and several corrals of colored dice. AJ’s house was the best place for the friends to host their MystikQuest games, and tonight’s forced gathering was a good excuse to play.

Three boys sat at the table, two of them, Marc and AJ, waving as Wes careened down the stairs. Initially, he planned to just blurt out what had happened that day, then he decided to be more adult about it and curb his excitement. Wes was determined to appear more adult now that he was an official teenager.

“Hey, Wes,” said Marc. Marc only managed an eye dart and chin nod because AJ was still in process of jawing about some rule of MystikQuest that Marc wasn’t comprehending, and likely didn’t care about.

Marcus “Marc” Stephens was one of the few black kids in Wes’s high school. He was rope thin with narrow shoulders and teeth that were slightly too big for his mouth. Marc’s father had played football in the Canadian professional league before he quit and became a finance manager for a car dealership. Much to his father’s disappointment, Marc hadn’t inherited an ounce of athletic genes. He instead joined the chess club, entered science fairs, played MystikQuest, and wished someday to be a real-life Jedi Knight. His concession to his father was to wear football jerseys, especially when he wanted to get on his dad’s good side. Today’s ensemble was a throw-back jersey from the New York Giants: Phil Simms, number 11, MVP quarterback of Super Bowl 21. Though Wes wasn’t a football fan, his brain soaked up all sorts of information and stored it, enabling him to know lots of things he had little interest in.

“Hey,” said AJ to Wes, with the same chin nod as Marc, but no eye glance. He had inserted the “hey” in the