Elliot and the Goblin War (11 page)

The woman in the stall looked a little like Dorcas, the really mean school lunch lady—but only
if
Dorcas had been turned into a zombie, and only
if
Dorcas wanted to serve children for lunch instead of the mystery meat they usually served. Except this woman was way less cool than zombies and, if possible, even uglier.

She was a woman whose face looked like one of those shriveled apple heads. If you could count the age of a tree by its rings, then maybe you could count her age by her wrinkles. If so, then she was at least seven hundred years old. She had wrinkles on top of her wrinkles. Her tattered clothes were wrinkled. Even her white hair was wrinkled.

“Her name is Agatha, Your Highness,” Mr. Willimaker said. “Agatha, this is King Elliot.”

“Stare if you must,” Agatha said, wiping her tears with a fistful of toilet paper. “Few people can turn away from my beauty.”

Elliot giggled and then stopped himself by clasping a hand over his mouth. He didn’t mean to be rude, but that wasn’t what he expected her to say. Beauty was definitely not the word running through his mind.

Her withered skin looked as if it were made of dry oatmeal. Her face had no less than a dozen warts. Her right eye bulged out from her head so far, he wondered why it didn’t fall out. Her hands reminded him of the display skeleton in Ms. Blundell’s classroom. Her fingers looked twelve inches long.

“What?” she asked. “You don’t think I’m beautiful?”

Elliot remembered the rhyme his first-grade class had said every day at the end of school: “I am beautiful because I’m me. I’ll be the best that I can be.”

He said, “I believe you are the best you can be.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

Dear Boy Readers: When any girl asks you if she’s beautiful, it’s always a good idea to insist quickly that yes, she is, no matter what she looks like. Even if she has worms in her hair and only one tooth (that for some reason is polka-dotted), you should still find something nice to say about her. If you tell her that she is not pretty, then I hope your family has a bomb shelter in your backyard where you can live for several years, because that will be the only safe place you can hide from her and all of her friends.

Agatha pointed a finger at Elliot. “I happen to be the most beautiful woman in all of everywhere. Since you can’t see that, I’ve decided to curse you.”

Elliot took a step back. “That’s not very nice. Did you know I got a zero on my spelling test just to come help you?”

“Quiet,” she hissed. “It’s hard to curse you when you’re talking. Here is the curse: I am a hag. My beauty is plain. Because you can’t see it. You’ll soon feel a brain.”

Elliot blinked. “Eww. What brain?”

“I think she meant you’ll soon feel pain, Your Highness,” Mr. Willimaker said. “One moment, Agatha.” Mr. Willimaker shut the door to the toilet stall and then pulled Elliot several steps away.

“What’s a hag?” Elliot asked. “Why is she here?”

Mr. Willimaker shook his head. “Actually, she’s a has-been hag. As you can tell from her curse, she’s sort of lost her touch.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“She came to Burrowsville last night looking for a place to stay until she figures out how to get her cursing powers back. She keeps cursing all the Brownies, and it’s starting to upset them.”

Elliot couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d agreed to get a zero on a spelling test because of a has-been hag who’d lost her powers of cursing? “Can’t you just send her away?” he asked.

Mr. Willimaker bit his lip. “I had this idea, Your Highness. It’s probably a terrible one, because my ideas usually aren’t very good, but I thought maybe she could help us win the Goblin war.”

“How?” Elliot demanded.

“What if she does get her cursing powers back?” Mr. Willimaker asked.

Elliot grinned. “And then she curses the Goblins?”

Mr. Willimaker nodded. “Exactly. But we have to find a place for her to stay in the meantime.”

Elliot opened the bathroom stall again and held out a hand for her to shake. “We started out badly, Agatha. My name is Elliot.”

She took his hand and shook it and then quickly pulled his hand to her mouth and bit his finger.

“Ow!” Elliot pulled his hand away. “What was that for?”

“I cursed you to feel pain,” Agatha said. “Look, it already happened.”

Elliot almost smiled. “Only because you bit me. If you make it happen, then it’s not a real curse.”

“It was a real pain, though.” Then tears formed in Agatha’s eyes. “Oh, you’re right. What kind of a hag am I if I can’t even curse a human child?”

“I’m sure you’re a very good hag. Maybe you’re just tired.” Elliot rubbed his bit finger but stopped as he heard a voice in the hallway. Someone was coming into the bathroom. He shoved Mr. Willimaker into Agatha’s stall and hissed, “Keep her quiet!”

He slammed the stall door closed.

Tubs!
Of course, it had to be Tubs who came in.

Tubs’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing in here, Penster? I told you this was my bathroom.”

Elliot shrugged. “I checked for your name on the bathroom door. It said ‘boys’ bathroom.’ Since your name isn’t ‘boys,’ I thought it’d be okay.”

Tubs ran that idea through his mind. About halfway through it got lost in empty space, so Tubs let it drop.

“Move,” Tubs said. “I want to use that stall.”

Elliot kept his back firmly against the stall door. “It’s for people who need it. Use a different one.”

“I don’t want a different one. I like a stall with a lot of space.”

Elliot’s legs shook, but he held his ground. Behind him, he thought he heard Agatha sniffle.

“What was that?” Tubs asked. “Are you hiding someone in there?”

Elliot smiled. “Like who? A beautiful young woman disguised as a hag who’s just waiting to curse you?”

Tubs paused. “Uh, maybe. Now move!”

“You can’t have this stall, Tubs.”

Tubs darted to Elliot and grabbed his arms, lifting Elliot off the ground. “Ever been flushed down a toilet, Penster?”

Elliot never had. And it didn’t sound fun. He kicked and squirmed, but Tubs kept a tight hold on him as he carried Elliot to the other stall.

“What the—” Tubs said.

Elliot looked down. Tubs’s pants had fallen down around his ankles. Tubs set Elliot down and pulled his pants up again. They fell again, almost as if someone yanked them down. His underwear had little red hearts on it. Elliot had to bite his tongue hard to keep from giggling. Tubs pulled his pants up, this time keeping his hands on them to hold them in place.

“Tell you what,” Tubs said. “If you don’t tell anyone about my pants, I won’t tell them you’re hiding someone in here.”

“Deal.” Elliot nearly laughed as Tubs ran out of the bathroom. He opened the stall and smiled down at Mr. Willimaker. “Thanks for that.”

Mr. Willimaker bowed his head. “My pleasure. Now, what shall we do with Agatha?”

Elliot scratched his chin. “Why don’t you come home with me for a few days, Agatha? I’m sure my parents will let you stay, and you can keep my Uncle Rufus company.”

Agatha stood. “Okay, but I still may have to curse you again.”

That didn’t matter to Elliot. The way he figured, ever since he met the Brownies, he’d already been cursed.

Dear Reader: May I suggest that before you become too interested in whether Elliot survives the next Goblin attack, that you close this book now. Remember that chapter 15 is coming up next, and that is the very chapter in which several readers lost valuable body parts. It probably won’t happen to you, but it might, and many readers who went on to read chapter 15 later regretted it.

Take the example of Libby Frackenflower, a very smart and talented fifth grader who was the captain of her baseball team. She didn’t heed this warning. Having decided that if she could outlast the meanest teacher in fourth grade, Mrs. Pinchey, then she could certainly survive a chapter of this book.

Sadly, both of Libby’s arms fell off about three paragraphs before the end of chapter 15. Now, do not worry for Libby Frackenflower. She has become very good at swinging a baseball bat with her teeth and catching the ball with her belly button, but we feel certain that if she could go back and un-read chapter 15, she would.

You may be laughing at Libby, which isn’t polite. But if you can’t help it, then please don’t laugh while drinking hot cocoa, or else you might giggle the marshmallows right out of your nose.

Dear Reader, please stop now. Because the start of chapter 15 is going to be so good that you’ll find you’ve reached the end before you know it. And for some of you, it will be too late.

The good news was that Elliot’s family had warmly welcomed Agatha the hag into their home. (If you want to call her Hagatha, that’s fine. Elliot already thought of it too, even though he didn’t dare say it. Don’t call her Nagatha or Ragatha, though—no matter how grumpy she is or what her clothes look like—because that’s just rude. You can also call her Betsy, but don’t expect her to answer, because that’s not her name.)

Elliot introduced her as honestly as he could. He told his family that she was a lost woman he met in town who just needed somewhere to stay for a few days.

“She has nothing,” Elliot told his parents. “I just feel like we need to help her.”

Elliot’s father put his arm around Elliot’s shoulder. “I agree. We have almost nothing, and that’s way better than plain old nothing. So, yes, we have to help her.”