Lair of the Grelgoroth Read online

  It had taken them, every Fourth of April for the past five years, to the Opening Day Fair, just as it had today. The van was just as much a part of the whole day as Strawberry Cream Éclairs and the mayor’s Opening Day speech.

  It sounded to Zach as if his parents were saying, in that way adults had of saying everything except what they actually meant, that it was time to get rid of the Putterwagon, and this thought made Zach’s heart drop into his shoes.

  “Well, Zach,” said his father. “We have something important to discuss with you.”

  Zach turned his head a-hundred-and-eighty degrees from one parent to the other as his mother said, “But we’ll wait until we get home, hm? We have your home-made chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream in the freezer.”

  “An excellent idea. All important things should be discussed over chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream,” Mr. Morgenstern agreed. “Desserts always improve weighty conversations.”

  Normally, Zach would have agreed. He loved desserts more than any of the Morgensterns, extended family included, and loved to make his own so that he could make them extra-sugary, extra-tangy, or extra-chocolatey as the occasion required. But the éclairs he’d eaten for lunch (he’d managed three—a new record for him, and half-an-éclair more than Ryder) roiled at the thought of the additional sweet confection. He was pretty sure he would give up ice cream for the rest of his life if it meant not having to get rid of the Putterwagon.

  The chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream was in a huge green tub. Mr. Morgenstern scooped generous amounts into their bowls, and he filled Zach’s bowl to the brim, but Zach only felt nauseous when he looked at the gooey chocolatey treat.

  Mr. and Mrs. Morgenstern had wide smiles on their faces but they were starting to look strained even as they sat down and held hands across the table.

  “Well, Zach,” said Mr. Morgenstern, and then stopped.

  “Zach, there are times,” began Mrs. Morgenstern, and then stopped.

  Zach was beginning to wonder if both his parents had lost the ability to speak at all.

  “You’re happy, aren’t you, Zach?” said his mother at last.

  “Yes,” said Zach, looking down at his ice cream. His dad had really piled it in. It looked like a mountain with little chocolate chip rock-climbers clinging to the sides.

  “We’ve tried to do the best for you,” said Mr. Morgenstern. “We’ve tried to give you the best we could.”

  “But we’ve also tried to give you a reason to strive and achieve,” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “Because it’s important that you have the motivation to do things off your own bat.”

  Zach wondered if this was something to do with his school marks. He hadn’t been doing any worse than usual, as far as he knew, though he had spent Wednesday afternoon trying to draw pictures of fighter jets on his folder instead of listening to Mrs. Appleby talk about the history of horticulture on Silvershine Island.

  “We know we’re not rich,” Mr. Morgenstern continued enthusiastically. Now they had started, they were speaking much more easily. “Not like some families in North Silvershine. We have only a few hundred dollars in savings, left from your great-grandfather’s silver fortune, in the Mercer Bank. But we’ve always had enough.”

  “Yes, just enough. We have, haven’t we, Zach?”

  Zach nodded. He was wondering now if his parents were about to tell him they had to move. They’d lived in this little house on Maple Drive for his entire life. His Grandfather Scott, on his mother’s side of the family, had built it himself, using the money he’d inherited from his father, who had come to Silvershine with his father to mine for silver. But Zach’s parents didn’t have highly-paid jobs. Maybe they couldn’t afford to stay in this house any longer. “Yes,” he said warily.

  “Yes!” repeated Mr. Morgenstern. “Exactly, yes. So we were thinking that it would make sense—”

  “Perfect sense!” interrupted Mrs. Morgenstern. They couldn’t seem to get the words out fast enough, now. “Absolute sense—”

  “To give some of what we have—”

  “To someone else as well.”

  Both his parents were watching him intently. Zach watched a chocolate chip rock-climber lose his footing and tumble down the side of the mountain. “Okay,” he said.

  His parents seemed encouraged by his calm response. They didn’t seem to realise it was only because he had no idea what they were talking about.

  “Well,” his mother went on, “what better way to do that than to give a home to another child?”

  Zach’s spoon dropped into his bowl. It splattered into his chocolate mountain, causing a miniature avalanche that probably buried a hundred little chocolate-chip villagers in the chocolate town down below. “You mean—”

  “A brother or sister, Zach. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?” Mr. Morgenstern’s voice had taken on a slightly hysterical tone.

  Both his parents’ eyes were shining with hope and something else—fear, he realised. They were afraid of what he would say.

  Zach was a little afraid of what he would say, too. But as it turned out he couldn’t speak.

  “What do you say, Zach?” asked his father.

  “I—uh—how—um . . .”

  Stuttering like this was hardly better than saying nothing, so Zach fell back into silence.

  “We tried to have another child after you were born, Zach,” explained Mrs. Morgenstern. “We always wanted you to have a brother or sister. We weren’t able to, and after a while, we accepted that. But lately we’ve been thinking about—”

  “About how lucky we are to have you, and how we think we would make just as good a job of raising another child—”

  “So we thought, why not adopt?”

  “We’ve made an appointment on Thursday evening.”

  “We’d love it if you came with us.”

  “You will, won’t you?”

  Both of them leaned towards him over the table. Neither of them was blinking, now. They looked like glassy-eyed crazy people. Maybe that’s what was really happening; his parents had gone insane.

  “No,” he said finally. He stood, picked up his bowl of ice cream and dumped it into the sink. The chocolate mountain with its brave little rock-climbers and poor, innocent little villagers tumbled down into the drain in a runny, muddy brown mess.

  Then he stalked up the stairs to his room, slammed the door, and resolved never to talk to his parents again.

  Chapter Two

  The next morning, Zach woke up feeling as if he hadn’t slept at all. His head buzzed and his ears rang. His whole body felt as though it was made up of helium balloons bouncing on strings.

  He didn’t want to go downstairs to breakfast, but when his dad knocked on his door for the second time, he had to open it and face the day.

  Mrs. Morgenstern was obviously trying to make it up to Zach. She was making pancakes, which were Zach’s favourite. And though they weren’t as good as the ones he cooked himself—he used buttermilk and whipped them up so they were extra-fluffy—he was hungry, having gone without his ice cream dinner last night, so he took the offered plate and gobbled two of them down.

  “Would you like to stay home from school today?” asked his dad.

  “No, thank you,” Zach said, remembering his vow never to speak to his parents and deciding he could break it for emergency situations. This was one of them. He never thought he would say this, but for some reason school was the only place he wanted to be today.

  Mr. Morgenstern looked shocked, and shared a glance with his wife that said this is very serious. “Well, then, I’ll drive you so you don’t have to take the bus.”

  “No, thank you,” said Zach.

  “You can come home at lunch time—”

  “No!” Zach dropped his last pancake with a sloppy-soundi
ng shlap and got up to grab his schoolbag. “Thanks, Dad, but I want to go to school, by bus, and stay there all day, just like normal.”

  “We’ll see you tonight,” said Mrs. Morgenstern before Zach ducked through the door.

  There were two high schools in North Silvershine. The Morgensterns lived halfway between them, but Zach’s parents had decided, when Zach finished primary school, that he would go to Middleview Hills Academy, because it “offered more opportunities” than Silvershine High, which was a nicer way of saying it had lots of fancy classes and equipment, and a uniform with little gold badges on the lapels that read “excellence is learning put into motion.”

  This was the type of thing that Mr. Abel Rivers, the Principal, liked to tell his students; the kind of thing that sounded important, but if you thought about what it actually meant, you soon realised it didn’t mean anything at all. But Mr. and Mrs. Morgenstern were willing to put up with this if it meant Zach got access to a photography lab and a website where his assignments were posted daily, with notes from his teachers.

  They were a little bit disappointed that Zach didn’t involve himself in extracurricular activities. He liked to run, but he didn’t belong to the cross country club. He was good at science, but he didn’t spend his lunch times in the science labs with Mr. Gary and the other kids who liked mucking around with acids and Bunsen burners. He always did well in English, but he usually only got B’s for his essays. He’d always liked the idea of being a fighter pilot. He had a collection of model fighter jets, which he’d spent hours building.

  But Silvershine didn’t have any need for defensive forces. The outside world didn’t even know Silvershine existed. The name “Silvershine Island” didn’t exist on any maps; all you would see if you looked at a chart of the Tasman Sea was a string of volcanically active islands known as Region R4. Since the collapse of the silver mines there was nothing about Region R4 to attract any attention, and Silvershine had become mostly self-sufficient.

  If Zach wanted to fly planes, the best option he had was to become a pilot for Silver Arrow Airlines, which was the only airline that flew in and out of Silvershine. They catered to Silvershine’s Very Important Business-people, who flew in and out to arrange the few affairs that couldn’t be dealt with on Silvershine Island itself, as well as the occasional Silvershine family that would take a holiday in another country. North Silvershiners differed on many viewpoints, but the one thing they agreed on was that they were pretty well-off on Silvershine Island, so no one was too interested in leaving for good—not even Zach.

  But you had to be great at math to become a pilot, in order to plot courses around the smog cloud in the South, which interfered with any kind of technology. Zach was good at math, but not great. When it came down to it, he was a pretty average student.

  Sometimes, Zach just wished he had something that made him stand out from the others, even if it was just being a complete goof, like Ryder, who could make anyone laugh and was never stuck for something to say.

  As Zach walked into school that morning he saw Ida standing on tiptoe, pushing a pin through a pink notice on the bulletin board. He was about to stop and read it so he had an excuse to talk to her when Lex rushed up.

  “Hey, Zach!” she said, spying him.

  “Hey,” Zach managed. He had noticed Ida was wearing the little gold locket he’d won for her, and his heart had jumped into his throat and seemed to be trying to strangle him.

  “I was thinking about the newsletter,” she said, narrowing her eyes behind her thick glasses. “We need new material. The newsletter is getting boring. Students don’t read it anymore. They stuff it into their bags, take it home to their parents, and their parents use it to line the kitty-litter box.”

  As if to prove her point, a paper airplane sailed past her head and crashed into the wall. It was last week’s issue of the newsletter, which featured a story on the Year Nine Beading Club and had a photo of a snail with a star-shaped pattern on its shell, courtesy of Vincent Myers, who had found it crawling around in the bike shed during a photography class. Lex picked the newsletter up angrily and looked for the culprit, but the hall was full of kids throwing things.

  She turned back to Zach. “You could totally do a cooking column, you know . . .”

  Zach hurried away.

  He found Ryder as soon as he walked into class 7A’s Social Studies room. He was saving their usual table at the back of the room, and jumped up when he saw Zach.

  “You missed a great game of Monster-tag at the Factory last night,” he said excitedly. “I went there after I took Mirry home. I wasn’t supposed to, but I snuck out anyway. Vincent was there.”

  “You won’t believe what happened to me after we got home,” Zach said. Surely, whatever Ryder had to say, it could wait. “My parents told me they’re adopting another kid.”

  Ryder rubbed his chin. “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Zach sat down with a huff. “Maybe I’m not enough of a kid or something.”

  “Well, that can’t be right. You spend your lunch money on junk food and you drink loads of PepitUp!, which rots your teeth, and you play games like Grand Race Supercar on the SonX console when you’re supposed to be doing your homework, right? Maybe you need to start throwing tantrums at the mall or something.”

  “You’re not helping,” Zach said, slapping the table-top.

  “Zachary Morgenstern! Is there a need for you to be hitting the furniture?” Their teacher, Mrs. Appleby, had walked in and was glaring at him.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Appleby,” Zach said apologetically, but it was too late.

  “I want you to sit up in the front.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “It’s always a madhouse after a public holiday.”

  Zach sighed and picked up his books. He’d only just gotten through his last enforced ban from sitting next to his friend.

  “Don’t drag your feet, Mr. Morgenstern. There’s a spare place next to Ida.”

  This might have been a welcome development if Zach had been in a better frame of mind.

  Ida was a good student. She paid close attention to the teacher and even dotted her “i’s” with little circles instead of dots. Zach tried to cover up his book so she wouldn’t notice his own sloppy notes.

  Halfway through the lesson, Ida pushed her notebook closer to him. Scribed neatly in the margin was a note:

  Thank you for the necklace.

  Zach grinned, and wrote back:

  That’s OK.

  Then, after another minute in which he agonised copiously, he added:

  it looks pretty on you.

  She turned to him and flicked open the catch. The locket split in half. Inside was a tiny photo of Chris Cambert from Beyond the Wall.

  She wrote:

  Haha

  and drew a little smiley face.

  When he looked across at her, she was blushing prettily. Never before had he wished he looked as buff as Chris Cambert.

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  The day passed excruciatingly slowly. Once the bell had rung, Zach grabbed his bag from his locker and met Ryder at the gates.

  “You coming to the Factory?” Ryder asked. He had his skateboard tucked under his arm. “I could show you what I found.”

  Zach shook his head. “I don’t feel like a game of Monster-tag,” he said. “I just want to go home and do my homework.”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Ryder said. “Come on! I’ll be the monster this time . . .”

  Ryder’s offer to play the monster was a generous one. Unlike Zach, Ryder wasn’t a good runner. He was big and solid, and he didn’t think creatively enough to find all the places other people might be hiding, so they often sat there for hours, waiting to be found, before getting bored, giving up, and going home. But Zach still didn’t feel
like it.

  They stopped at the corner of Punt Street. There were a few other kids from school here, as the kids from Middleview Hills Academy who lived in walking distance always waited for their brothers and sisters from the Lower East Primary School in this spot. Today this group included Ida Wentworth, who walked her sister home, and Lex Eckles, who sometimes walked with her. Ryder’s little sister came running up when she saw them. “It’s really not that bad, having a little brother or sister,” Ryder said.

  Zach was struck by a horrible thought as he looked at Miranda. Her dark pigtails were flying—she always seemed to be moving, even when she was standing still. Little brother or sister, Ryder had said. But who said anything about the new kid being younger than him? What if his parents chose someone older?

  “I mean,” Ryder went on. “There are times when it’s kind of handy. I broke one of Mum’s vases the other day. I told her Miranda did it.”

  “That wasn’t fair!” said Miranda, around a mouthful of hair. “I told her it wasn’t me, but she wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Well, it was only to get back at you for eating all the leftover pizza. It was my favourite, too.”

  “Only because you never take me to the Factory to play Monster-tag!”

  Ryder grimaced. “Actually, forget it, Zach. Little sisters are a pain.”

  “Hey Zach!” Lex called.

  “Oh, no,” Ryder hissed, turning away. “Can we pretend we didn’t hear her?”

  Lex bounded up to them. “Hey, Zach! Ryder! Can you help me hand these flyers out?” She shoved a piece of pink paper towards them. “They ended up in my newsletter inbox.”