The Mystery of the Mystery Meat (15 page)

NO MATCH FOUND.

She whimpered. She tried several variations.

NO MATCH FOUND.

“They don’t know where it is, either,” Steve said on the Scary-phone.

Her fangs clacked. “Okeydoke,” she said. “Me say bye now, later.”

“Let’s check in with each other in a few,” he said. Then he hung up.

“Scary, me so desperation,” Pretty said, tears rolling down her cheeks. She paced back and forth, her kitties trailing after her, batting at her tentacles.

This was all her fault. She had tried to summon a boy so she could hurt Freekin’s feelings and look at what had happened instead. If only she could fix what she had done, go back in time and…

And…

Her eyes flashed and zoomed. Her ears flapped as she bounced like a pogo stick on her tentacles. “Me summoning someone else,” she informed Scary. “Us going to graveyard right this minute young man!”

“Zibu,”
Scary said.

Through the dark and spooky night, Scary flew Pretty to the graveyard and landed not far from Sweeny Burton’s empty grave. Pretty hopped out and Scary turned back into himself. Pretty was very nervous, but she was determined to go through with her daring plan: to summon Lord Grym-Reaper from the Afterlife and ask him for his help. It was a terrifying idea—enough to
put her in a coma—but she was from the Afterlife, and she couldn’t think of anyone more powerful than the dreaded Lord of the Dead anywhere, on either side of the veil of life.

Lord Grym-Reaper was the only member of the Afterlife Commission who could cross over to the Land of the Living and back again. Human beings never remembered seeing him when they died, but he was always there. He threw back his robe and looked upon them, and then they crossed over and woke up in the Afterlife.

Dear Reader, you certainly do remember that Pretty is a very little monster, and despite her apparent boldness, the Afterlife Commission intimidated her. They were quite powerful, after all.

She had no idea if her spell would work and, if it did, what Lord Grym-Reaper would do when he realized she had summoned him. But she would do
anything
to save her Freekin.

So she was uncharacteristically quiet when she cleared her throat and began her spell, managing only to whisper, so quietly that not even Scary could hear her. She shut her eyes tightly and fidgeted with Lilly’s purse.

“GAZEEKELILI GAZEEBA, WAHOULA,”
she murmured.

Nothing happened. She tried again.

“GAZEEKELILI GAZEEBA, WAHOULA.”

Maybe the snowy ground beneath her feet shifted a bit.

“GAZEEKELILI GAZEEBA—”

“Oooooooh,” Scary said.

Pretty opened her eyes.

Before her stood a hearse. A skeleton in a chauffeur’s uniform sat in the driver’s seat, and in the back, Pretty saw the silhouette of Lord Grym-Reaper.

Then she grabbed Scary’s hand and the two stumbled toward the hearse. Scary was quivering from head to toe.

“Woodiwoodi,”
he whispered.
“Woodiwoodiwoodi.”

“It okay,” Pretty soothed him, but she had no idea if that was true.

The hearse window unrolled and the two Underworlders beheld Lord Grym-Reaper in his hooded robe; they could see nothing of his face but his sinister black eyes, fixed on them.

“Um,” Pretty said uneasily. “Me say hi, sir.”

“It was
you
who summoned me?” he asked. Each syllable was like an ice cube dropped down the back of Pretty’s jumper. “I must remember to get my hearing checked. I could have sworn it was, well, you know.” He paused and then whispered, “The Man upstairs.”

“Me so sorry to disturb sir.” She bobbed low on her
tentacles. Scary nodded in agreement and cast his eyes toward the ground.

“Well, it’s too late for apologies now. I already made the trip all the way over here. You might as well tell me what it is you want,” said Lord Grym-Reaper.

“Oh, we having many big problems, Lord Grym-Reaper, many, many, many,” she began earnestly.

His face brightened. “People don’t know this about me, but I like good gossip as much as the next guy,” he said as he patted the seat next to him. “Come inside,” he said as the hearse door opened by itself.

So Pretty crawled inside and sat beside the imposing being, swinging her tentacles as the whole long story poured out of her.

“So Franklin was chased off by a mob, and his one true love—the girl he must kiss—has been taken to a fermented fat factory?”

“Uh-huh, yes sirree,” she said. Her ponytail ears bobbed as she nodded. “Horatio Snickering III, him so undead, him taking her!”

“What?”
The dread lord was shocked.
“Another
person has returned to the Land of the Living from the Afterlife?”

She nodded.

“I will not permit this!” Lord Grym-Reaper decreed.
“We will leave immediately—”

“Pretty!” a voice cried from beyond the gates of the cemetery. It was Tuberculosis.

“Uh-oh, Freekin’s goth buddy,” Pretty whispered. “Him have so many friends.”

“Send him away at once,” the dread lord commanded, grabbing his hood and pulling it over his head to conceal his features. “No human may look upon me and live.”

“Hey, Pretty!” Steve was there, too. And Raven. They were climbing over the iron fence!

“Stop them,” Lord Grym-Reaper ordered her. “It is not yet their time to meet me.”

Pretty had an idea. She opened Lilly’s purse and peered inside. Assured that she could pull off her plan, she smiled hopefully at Lord Grym-Reaper. “Please, they helping, please,” she said. “Pretty fixes things.”

Less than a minute later, Steve, Raven, and Tuberculosis were gathered around Lord Grym-Reaper’s limousine. The chauffeur’s tinted window was up, concealing the skeleton driver from their view.

“I can’t believe that you won a car in a beauty pageant,” Steve said. “And that in the middle of all this confusion, they delivered it to you! But it’s perfect timing. They’re rounding up the adults and people are starting to ask
questions and it’s a huge mess. We can use some wheels.”

“Yeah, we’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Tuberculosis added. “And I, for one,
can
believe that you won the Miss Snickering Willows Mall beauty pageant.” He smiled first at Pretty, lingering on her face, and then peered in through the half-open passenger window at Lord Grym-Reaper as well. “And that you won first runner-up, Miss Reaperina. It’s very nice to meet you.”

“Her Grimelda,” Pretty corrected him. “
Grimelda
Reaperina.”

The dread lord remained silent. Pretty thought he was beautiful. She had hurriedly but skillfully applied a thick coat of makeup to his ghostly face, complete with blue eye shadow, rosy red cheeks, and scarlet lips. Scary had transformed into a wig of thick black curls and a glittering tiara. Pretty was so grateful that Lord Grym-Reaper had agreed with her scheme to disguise him.

“So, us taking Grimelda home, you keeping car, you looking for kids,” Pretty said.

Lord Grym-Reaper shifted in his seat. Pretty grabbed his hand, hidden inside his robe. “Okeydoke, Grimelda my dear?” Lord Grym-Reaper sort of growled.

Nestled among the crags and precipices of the Snarkshire Mountains, the fermented fat factory
disgorged stinky puffs of oily smoke as it burbled away in the night. Freekin had run all the way there; since he was undead, he never got tired, and he could run very fast. By the time he got there, his left foot was flapping again, but he had made it.

The fermented fat factory was built of bricks coated with decades of congealed fat secretions, which had rotted and attracted hundreds of thousands of ants, cockroaches, and rats. The creatures swarmed all over the bricks, seemingly able to defy gravity.

Two enormous iron doors hung open in invitation, and Freekin went through them, then down, down, down into the bowels of the factory to the dark, dreary cavern that he had seen on the DVD in Henrietta Snickering’s mansion.

Lilly was twenty feet away, dressed in a prison jumpsuit of Mystery Meat gray. Her lovely blond hair hung in sweaty, oily lanks around her shoulders. She was standing on a stepladder, bent over an old-fashioned cast-iron cauldron, stirring the barf-colored contents with a large stick, and her face was drawn and tired.

“Lilly!” he shouted, run-flapping, run-flapping toward her.

“Freekin!” She straightened. “Freekin, no, it’s a trap!”

“Hello, Franklin,” said Horatio Snickering III as he
and his diabolical great-great-great-great-niece Henrietta stepped from the shadows, placing themselves between Freekin and Lilly. Henrietta was wearing all white, like a nurse, with long rubber gloves that stretched past her bony elbows. Her evil little dog, Mortadella, squirmed in her arms and yipped at Freekin.

“You’re finally here. It’s very nice to meet you, young man.” He smiled, and a maggot dropped out of his mouth. He flicked it away with a casual air.

“Indeed,” Henrietta agreed. “It’s nice to meet you, but it will be even nicer to turn you into Mystery Meat.”

“You can’t do that,” Lilly said. “You won’t do that!”

“Viggo, make sure no one else shows up,” Horatio Snickering said to the shadows. Viggo appeared, his buggy eyes gleaming as he smiled unpleasantly at Freekin.

“And Miss Weezbrock,” Horatio added, “do be quiet, or we will have to gag you.”

Horatio pulled a rotten handkerchief from his pocket and showed it to Lilly. Lilly clamped her mouth shut and stared at Freekin with pure and utter misery.

“Your little girlfriend has proven to be quite Curious, which will make her quite delicious,” Henrietta said. “She couldn’t stop asking questions: ‘Where are you taking me? Why are you doing this? Are you going to kill me?’ And my personal favorite: ‘Freekin, where are you?’”

Freekin glared at the Snickerings. “I’m here, Lilly,” he told her, then he shifted his gaze back to the Snickerings. “You told me to come if I wanted to save Lilly. So now what?”

“You will take her place, of course,” Horatio Snickering III said grandly. “You will step into the cauldron and boil away.”

“No!” Lilly cried, her eyes and mouth going wide with terror.