Stop Those Monsters!

For Tobey and Amy, always

- Steve Cole

For Steph, Denis and Jasper

- Jim Field

OTHER STORIES BY STEVE COLE:

MAGIC INK ALIENS STINK

ASTROSAURS COWS IN ACTION SLIME SQUAD

TRIPWIRE YOUNG BOND

A MAGIC INK PRODUCTION FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN 2015 BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER UK LTD A CBS COMPANY TEXT COPYRIGHT © STEVE COLE 2015

ILLUSTRATIONS COPYRIGHT © JIM FIELD 2015 THIS BOOK IS COPYRIGHT UNDER THE BERNE CONVENTION NO REPRODUCTION WITHOUT PERMISSION ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THE RIGHT OF STEVE COLE AND JIM FIELD TO BE IDENTIFIED AS THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR OF THIS WORK RESPECTIVELY HAS BEEN ASSERTED BY THEM IN ACCORDANCE WITH SECTIONS 77 AND 78 OF THE COPYRIGHT, DESIGNS AND PATENTS ACT, 1988.

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A CIP CATALOGUE RECORD FOR THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE FROM THE BRITISH LIBRARY.

PB ISBN: 978-0-85707-874-2 EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-85707-875-9

THIS BOOK IS A WORK OF FICTION. NAMES, CHARACTERS, PLACES AND INCIDENTS ARE EITHER THE PRODUCT OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL PEOPLE LIVING OR DEAD, EVENTS OR LOCALES IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL.

PRINTED AND BOUND BY CPI GROUP (UK) LTD, CROYDON, CR0 4YY

Contents

CHAPTER 0 A NOTE FROM MAGIC INK PRODUCTIONS

CHAPTER 1 HELP! MY HOUSE HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED!

CHAPTER 2 THE SKY IS MADE OF MUD!

CHAPTER 3 WHAT’S A GIANT HAMSTER IN A TOGA LIKE YOU DOING IN A PLACE LIKE THIS? OH, HANG ON, NO, THIS IS EXACTLY THE PLACE I’D EXPECT TO FIND A GIANT HAMSTER IN A TOGA. SORRY!

CHAPTER 4 RUN FOR IT! RUN! GO ON, RUNNNN!

CHAPTER 5 DOWN, DOWN, DOWN

CHAPTER 6 SO! THIS IS OBLIVION, HUH? IT’S RUBBISH!

CHAPTER 7 ATTACK OF THE UNKNOWN FEARSOME MONSTER OF FEAR

CHAPTER 8 SNAKES ALIVE!

CHAPTER 9 AND THE ARTISTIC GORGON MAKES THREE

CHAPTER 10 GREENISH INTERLUDE

CHAPTER 11 IN A DARK, DARK WOOD THERE WAS—WHOA, WHAT IS THAT? I DON’T WANT TO KNOW! NO!!! KEEP AWAY! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!

CHAPTER 12 RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES!

CHAPTER 13 BEHOLD...CRUDZILLA! ALFIE CRUDZILLA.

CHAPTER 14 CAUGHT BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA. OR RATHER, BETWEEN KILLGROTTY AND A BUNCH OF OTHER BAD STUFF.

CHAPTER 15 SWAMPED!

CHAPTER 16 CREATURE DISCOMFORTS

CHAPTER 17 DOWN INTO THE RAPIDS OF DOOM

CHAPTER 18 BEWARE THE LASH OF FEAR OF MOTHER POISON (OF DOOM)

CHAPTER 19 THE INCREDIBLE APPEARING HOUSE OF MYSTERY

CHAPTER 20 THE TERRIBLE NEWS OF SADNESS

CHAPTER 21 THE GASP-MAKING REVELATION OF HORROR

CHAPTER 22 THE TROJAN HOUSE

CHAPTER 23 THE STARE OF CERTAIN DOOM

CHAPTER 24 MONSTER SMASH

CHAPTER 25 THE END?

Long ago, when people were apes, elephants were mammoths, tigers came with sabre-teeth and monkeys were smaller, fatter and a bit squirrelly . . .

The first monsters appeared on the Earth.

They squelched across every continent.

They lurked in every sea.

They evolved just like everything else.

They made guest appearances in many myths and legends (and were usually the best thing about them).

Only . . . see any monsters about you now?

No. No, you don’t.

WHERE DID ALL THE MONSTERS GO?

You are about to find out.

For the monsters have a world of their own: a world of mysteries without measure and dangers without end.

A world that few have visited, and fewer still survived to tell the tale. Or indeed any tale at all, apart from a very short and uninspiring tale that sounds suspiciously like:

This book goes further than any other to bring you, for the first time, the

WHOLE, REVOLTING TRUTH.

So STRAP YOURSELF IN

– it’s going to get

MONSTERY . . .

Er, sorry, I know you’ve just started reading this book and everything, but this isn’t really the easiest time for me to write.

My house has just been picked up by some crazy, freaky hurricane. Right now it’s being whirled about the sky like a giant’s conker, and I’m in the wardrobe, just trying to hang on.

Well, anyway, just look at the state of my room! All my DVDs thrown all over the place . . . tops, trousers and dirty pants everywhere . . . books and collectibles scattered over the floor (and on the bed) . . . okay, so my room normally looks like this anyway. In fact, my mum would probably be more freaked out that I haven’t tidied up yet than by the fact our house is hurtling through a hurricane, and – unless we had some really paranoid builders on this estate – no massive rocket jets underneath to help us safely land again.

So, basically: Noooooooooo, we’re gonna crash down on the other side of town, and everything including me will be smashed to pieces and I really don’t wanna think about that—

It’s probably a good job Mum is out with my dad for dinner tonight. Though I’m not sure Rachel Thing saw it that way (I can’t remember her proper surname.) Rachel Thing is the babysitter who was downstairs; I think she jumped ship (or house) not long after we took off into the air. I definitely heard her yell and the front door open, and after that . . . nothing. She’s only in Year Ten while I’m in Year Eight, so I’m not sure she’s even qualified to babysit. She might be qualified in skydiving out of low-flying houses, though.

I should have jumped too, before the house was so high. But I was so scared, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even shout for help. And now I’m wishing I collected airline sick-bags instead of monster movie memorabilia. Empty sick-bags, obviously (who collects full ones? Weird!). Because if the house keeps on rollercoastering through the clouds like this, I’m going to start redecorating my room in shades of Technicolor vomit. And that’s going to ruin my cool collection of vintage horror-film posters. If only I’d got them framed like Dad told me to, instead of using Blu-Tack, they’d just wipe clean!

Ooops, but there goes my bedside table, right into The Wolf Man’s teeth, so if they had been framed, the glass would’ve shattered and the air filled with lethal shards and everything would be at least 28% worse.

Blue sky and green fields flip past the bedroom window, but there’s a yellow glow, too, and it’s getting brighter.

The room is shaking like a space shuttle attempting reentry. The turbulence turns my stomach like the world’s worst waltzer.

Then –

It’s like my eyes are struck by lightning. I’m thrown out of the wardrobe and bang my head against the radiator.

OWWWWWWW! I yell. Sound from my throat, at last! I follow up the OWWWWWWW with some random shouting and cursing – it takes my mind off throwing up.

And so does the view through my window.

Because suddenly there’s no blue sky, no fields, no random flying animals caught up in the storm. There’s not even a yellow glow any more. There’s only darkness, rolling and roiling like the inside of a thundercloud.

And then – WHOOAAAAAAAAAA!!!!! – the whole house tips over and I’m thrown against the window, and it opens and . . .

I’m falling through darkness. It’s what you might call a ‘brown trousers’ moment. (Doubly so, as I actually AM wearing brown trousers. What were the chances?!)

I glimpse my house spinning away into shadows beneath me.

On and on, I fall. Tiny. Insignificant. Doing little fearful farts as I go. (You totally can’t blame me.) But I can smell something worse than those little butt-whimpers. Something rotten and rancid and all kinds of wrong—

And suddenly, I crash into it.

I woke up upside down in a tree.

It was a weird tree. It was white. Not like a silver birch, more like the unhealthy white of something that’s never seen any sun. Maggot white. And the leaves! They were furry – like big, squashed caterpillars. And the branches weren’t hard, they were spongy. Dozens of twigs hooked out from every squishy branch like creepy crab-legs. And it smelled disgusting, rotten; like something had died here.

Please, don’t let the dead thing be me, I thought. And please don’t let it be Rachel the babysitter. That would be super gross.

But no, she must’ve got out – I heard the front door. She totally left me to die! Or to fall into a tree, anyway. Just let her try claiming £7 an hour from Mum and Dad after this . . .

My brain felt scrambled. My senses felt fried. Was a part of me poached or hard-boiled? I didn’t want to know. I closed my eyes, hoping everything would look better when I opened them again.

It didn’t. I was still lying upside down in a maggot-white, squashed-caterpillary, spongy, crab-leggy tree.

Barely daring to move in case anything had broken in the fall, I craned my (apparently unbroken) neck to see what I could see. The tree was standing in a park of pink grass. You know those fake tinselly Christmas trees you get cheap from B&Q? The grass was kind of like that. It looked like foil.

Beyond the fake grass was a brown, muddy, car-less road, and on the other side of that was a row of funny, crooked houses made of yellow bricks.

The houses seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see in both directions. They were the same basic design, although weirdly, the doors were different shapes and sizes. I caught glimpses of movement through the windows. Curtains were twitching.

What’s the matter, I muttered, never seen a boy hanging upside down in a freaky tree that smells like death?

I raised my head towards my feet. At least the sun was shining, after that terrible darkness I’d fallen through . . .

I froze.

How could you have frozen? I hear you cry. You just said the sun was shining!

Yes, I did say that. Because I thought it was true.

But I was wrong.

It wasn’t the sun that was shining. It was a ma-hoosive light bulb, dangling down from the sky. Well, I say ‘sky’. I mean ‘roof’.

The sky was made of mud. Seriously. I stared at it for ages and ages, just to make sure. A roof of solid dirt stretched overhead for as far as I could see. Roots dangled down here and there, and other light bulbs hung from sockets in the soil.

That settles it, I said calmly. I have sooooooo got to be asleep. How can I possibly be underground? I’d watched a creaky old sci-fi movie called Things to Come on BluRay the other day, where future humans end up living in big