Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom Read online

  Jerry opened his mouth to protest but then gave up and slumped back down into his chair.

  “Well?” prompted his sister.

  He looked quickly left and right, then leaned forward and spoke in an almost whisper. “I’m working on a way to prove Dr. Fell is not what he says he is.”

  “You mean like a space alien or something?” asked Nancy in a sarcastic tone far too loud for Jerry’s liking.

  “Will you keep it down?” He waved his hands toward the table to illustrate “keeping it down.”

  “Oh, come on, Dorknose!”

  “I’m serious!” seethed Jerry through his teeth. “Everybody at school’s a Felligan!”

  Nancy scrunched up her eyebrows in confusion. “A what?” she asked.

  “You know. Dr. Fell…hooligan. Felligan.”

  Nancy snorted through her nose.

  “They really aren’t so much hooligans as zombies,” commented Gail.

  “Yeah, but Fellombie doesn’t really work,” admitted Jerry. “Neither does Fultists or Fellultists if you try to call them all cultists. Trust me, I went through all the possibilities.”

  “And you wonder why you don’t have any friends,” muttered Nancy.

  “Look, the point is,” continued Jerry, choosing to ignore her tease, “you can’t say anything bad about Dr. Fell at school. Am I right?”

  The girls nodded—Nancy somewhat reluctantly, but she had to admit he was right.

  “So we need to keep this quiet. And no, I don’t think he’s a space alien.”

  He stopped talking as two giggling girls walked by, paying no attention to the three conspirators at all. In fact, they seemed so incredibly uninterested in Nancy, Gail, and Jerry that all three children had the uncomfortable feeling they were being watched.

  “Go on,” whispered Nancy once the two girls had taken a seat a few tables away. “What are you thinking, then?”

  Jerry allowed himself a brief smile and nodded at Nancy in acknowledgment of her whisper. “I think he built the playground to lure kids to his house so that they get injured and he gets rich.”

  The girls stared at him, ready to laugh him off but not quite able to dismiss his theory.

  “How, exactly?” asked Gail.

  “Yeah, he generally doesn’t charge when he fixes up a scrape or a cut or whatever,” said Nancy.

  “No, but how many kids have been seeing him for regular checkups? Those aren’t free.”

  “I dunno,” said Nancy. “It seems a little too simple.”

  “Grown-ups are always simple!” countered Jerry. With which neither girl could disagree.

  “But what about Bud Fetidsky’s leg?” asked Gail.

  This was a puzzle, and Jerry didn’t have an answer. Finally, he shrugged. “Maybe it really wasn’t as bad as we thought it was,” he admitted.

  The three children stewed on this for a moment, each trying to make sense out of the seeming impossibility of Bud Fetidsky’s miraculous healing powers.

  “All right, Dorknose,” said Nancy. “What’s your plan? How are you going to prove your theory?”

  “I’m not,” said Jerry. Both girls were about to protest, but he held up his hand. “I just don’t think it’s something we can prove. But I do have a plan to stop him.”

  He heaved his backpack up onto the table and pulled out two large, dusty books more likely to be used to frighten children than actually to be read. With as minimal a flourish as possible (and a quick glance to see if the two girls at the other table were paying attention—they weren’t), he opened one of the massive tomes and flipped forward through the volume until he came to a candy wrapper crammed into the spine between two pages.

  “What in the world is that?” asked Gail.

  Jerry looked up and smiled. “City building codes,” he answered. He then placed his finger midway on the page and read aloud. “Any external structure measuring a quarter again the square footage of half the total acreage contained within the nominal residence of the property shall adhere to all laws and regulations pursuant to human habitation or else be summarily removed pending certain litigation.”

  He looked up at them, beaming.

  “I didn’t understand a single word of that,” said Nancy.

  “There was half of something in there, right?” asked Gail. “You said the word ‘half.’ ”

  “Yeah, I didn’t get it at first either. But I asked the librarian to explain, and it’s actually pretty simple. What it means,” said Jerry, grinning from ear to ear, “is that Dr. Fell’s playground cannot possibly have been built legally. If that’s true, it will be torn down. By law. All I have to do is take some measurements today after school, and Dr. Fell’s little get-rich-quick scheme is over.”

  Nancy and Gail shared a look that surprised them both. They liked the plan. It was a good plan. It would work. All that was left was to visit the playground after school and let Jerry take his measurements, and they would give Dr. Fell the surprise of his life.

  But when school ended and they followed the throng of eager children toward the beckoning paradise of the play structure, the surprise of their young lives was already waiting for them.

  High atop the crow’s nest, waving his shirt back and forth like a flag and shouting “Argh, mateys!” was the decidedly not-dead Leonid Hazardfall.

  LEONID HAZARDFALL WAS HEAVILY bruised, his left arm was wrapped in bandages, and he wore a large padded brace around his neck, but he was most certainly very much alive.

  The horde of children emerging from school buses cheered with relief at the sight of their fellow playground enthusiast. The race to the playground became a stampede as the undeniable evidence of the boy’s miraculous recovery allowed them all once again to put their unshakable faith into the playground of Dr. Fell.

  “I’m gonna go scale the mini Eiffel Tower!” announced a young boy from Washington Madison Hoover Elementary School.

  “I’m gonna go play inside the ice castle!” announced a young girl from Lincoln Adams Coolidge Elementary School.

  “I’m gonna go crawl through the catacombs!” announced an older boy from Southeast North Northwestern Academy.

  Standing their ground as the stampede of happy children charged past, Gail, Nancy, and Jerry could only gawk at the shocking sight of Leonid Hazardfall being shockingly not dead.

  “That’s amazing,” said Gail.

  “That’s impossible,” said Jerry.

  “That’s seriously wrong,” said Nancy.

  “Isn’t it great that the kid’s all right?” asked the ever-perky Jewel Sparkledink as she ran past them.

  “But he was dead!” Nancy called after her.

  “Don’t be silly—he just had a bad fall,” said the only slightly less perky Shelly Plentyson as she followed in Jewel Sparkledink’s footsteps.

  “He had no pulse!” pointed out Nancy in disbelief.

  “So?” said impossibly perky Crystal Chintzington as she raced after Shelly Plentyson and Jewel Sparkledink. “He saw Dr. Fell, so of course he’s OK!”

  Soon the flood of eager children washed past them, leaving the three alone on the sidewalk. Despite the invisible force drawing them toward the playground like a magnet, they held their ground a moment longer.

  “I’m telling you, that kid was dead,” said Nancy. “I swear it. D-E-A-D dead.”

  “Maybe it was a…you know…pulled-back-from-the-afterlife sort of thing,” suggested Gail. “What’s it called? When you die and then come back?”

  “Reincarnation,” replied Jerry helpfully.

  “Right! Maybe he’s reincarnated.”

  “Except when you’re reincarnated, you come back as something else, like a cockroach or a squirrel,” clarified Jerry.

  “I’d sooner believe he’s a zombie,” said Nancy. “They come back from the dead too.”

  Jerry and Gail’s silence showed they weren’t about to disagree.

  Behind them, another fleet of school buses arrived to vomit out the children of Ford
Garfield Taft Elementary. The students immediately spotted their no-longer-dead classmate standing atop the mast and cheered.

  “Look!” cried one little boy. “It’s Leonid!”

  “Look!” cried another boy. “He’s alive!”

  “Look!” cried a little girl. “The playground is still awesome!”

  The doors of the buses opened and children ran into the waiting arms of the play structure, which swallowed them up like some diabolical children-eating sponge.

  “I’m scared,” admitted Jerry.

  Nancy nodded, but Gail, ever the optimist, turned to her friends with a forced grin. “I’m sure there’s a simple explanation,” she said. “Let’s go ask him.”

  “What?” asked Nancy.

  “Let’s talk to that kid and find out what really happened.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Gail marched determinedly toward the ominous play structure of Dr. Fell. Jerry and Nancy silently fell into step behind her.

  The buzz of excited children assaulted their ears as they crossed the boundary separating the playground from the rest of reality. Suddenly they were walking through Ethel Pusster’s all-you-can-eat sandcake party, then climbing over Aiden Grand and Zachary Fallowmold’s deadly wall of man-eating ivy, then crawling through a tunnel that three kids from Lincoln Adams Coolidge Elementary had turned into an abandoned mine shaft, before finally dodging six or seven wall ball players from Southeast North Northwestern Academy and reaching the wooden schooner atop whose central mast stood Leonid Hazardfall in full look-at-me-not-be-dead! glory. They quickly scrambled over the side and pulled themselves up onto the deck.

  “Hey!” called out Gail in the universal language of preteens. “Hey, kid!”

  Leonid looked down at the three of them, eyes wide with youthful abandon. “Tallyho!” he cried before leaping out into the air, grabbing one of the ropes meant to resemble rigging, and twirling to the ground with his legs kicked out dramatically behind him. All in all, it was a ridiculously dangerous move for a recently dead child to undertake.

  He landed in a sprightly way in front of them and bowed. “Welcome, ye hearty maidens!” he cried before turning to Jerry. “And cabin boy!”

  Gail couldn’t help but giggle a bit at Leonid’s flair. Nancy rolled her eyes and elbowed her aside. “What are you doing?” she asked, getting straight to the point. “You were dead, like, what? Five hours ago?”

  “More like eight,” offered Jerry.

  “Fine. Eight hours ago. How are you out here now, champing at the bit and being all piratey?”

  “Bah!” Leonid waved his hand in front of his face as if he were swatting a fly. “ ’Twas but a flesh wound!”

  “You weren’t breathing!”

  Leonid stopped, and for a moment, a look of clarity pushed its way through his pirate shtick. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I was there! You weren’t breathing! You had no pulse! You were dead!”

  Behind Nancy, Gail and Jerry nodded their support for Leonid being dead.

  “Well…well…” Leonid Hazardfall appeared to be at a loss. Finally, he shrugged. “Well, I’m all better now!”

  He squeaked out the last word, his voice cracking. He instinctively covered his mouth in embarrassment.

  “You OK?” asked Gail.

  The formerly dead eleven-year-old dropped his arms to his sides and shrugged. “Dr. Fell made me all be-eh-ter.” The two-syllable word became three as his voice once again cracked on the vowel.

  “Why are you doing that?” asked an irritated Nancy.

  “Doing what?”

  “That thing with your voice.”

  “I’m not do-oo-ing anything.” He forced the words through his breaking voice.

  Nancy scowled. Gail looked concerned. Jerry stared off into space, concentrating.

  “Avast!” yelled Leonid, once again in character. “Landlubbers, beware!” With that, he dashed off to find some landlubbers to conquer.

  “That was weird,” said Gail.

  “That was disturbing,” said Jerry.

  “That was lame,” said Nancy.

  “Why, if it is not my three favorite urchins! A supremely pleasant good afternoon to you all,” purred the pleasing voice of Dr. Fell. The children turned to find the good doctor slightly hunched over behind them, sipping his usual drink from an aquamarine glass through a honeydew-colored straw. He was dressed once again in his blacker-than-black old-fashioned suit despite it being a hot day with clear skies. Though he stood out in the open, he was almost completely in shadow thanks to his bright purple top hat, which shaded him (in an almost unnatural way) from the blazing sun overhead. “It brings me no small amount of gratification to chance upon the three of you—who have heretofore managed such complete avoidance of my generosity—displaying an unbridled joy within the confines of this magical nook.”

  He smiled widely and easily dipped the front of his hat, as he always did, before continuing. “What I mean to say is—”

  “We know what you meant to say,” interrupted Nancy, who had actually been stumped by a couple of the bigger words but wasn’t about to admit it. “We’re not stupid.”

  Dr. Fell froze. It was only a fraction of a second, but they all saw it, and it made them all shiver in terror. A moment later, Dr. Fell regained his composure and smiled even more widely. “Of course not. Please forgive me, Miss Pinkblossom. I was simply striving for clarity.”

  “Excuse me?” asked a very hesitant Gail. “Dr. Fell?”

  Dr. Fell somehow managed to turn his attention to Gail without taking his eyes off Nancy. It was both remarkable and unnerving. “Yes, Miss Bloom?”

  Gail stepped forward, very purposefully, in front of Nancy. She knew just how short her friend’s fuse could be and felt the need to intervene before an explosion occurred. “We were wondering…What did you…It’s just that…” She frowned. She knew what she wanted to ask but for some reason was unable to put her thought into words. Instead, she simply pointed up at the overly active Leonid Hazardfall and said, simply, “How?”

  Dr. Fell took a long, slow sip of yellow liquid. Gail, Nancy, and Jerry waited patiently for him to finish. Finally, with a sickly satisfied sigh, he lowered the glass.

  “How did I bring him back from the dead?”

  A chill colder than ice shook the three children to their core. Their eyes widened, their hearts raced, and sweat oozed out of their pores.

  Then Dr. Fell laughed. It was not an evil someday-I’m-going-to-rule-the-world laugh, but rather a good-natured I-can’t-believe-you-fell-for-that laugh.

  “Oh, I am sorry, my little lovelies, but I simply could not resist a stroke of merriment at the expense of your overly eager imaginations. Young Mr. Hazardfall took quite the spill, indeed, but he merely had the wind knocked out of him. As you can obviously see, he is none the worse for wear, with the exception of a few bumps and bruises.”

  “No way!” Nancy spun out of her daze with a vengeance. “He wasn’t breathing! He didn’t have a pulse!”

  “I must disagree with your medical diagnosis. I assure you, the young man gave us a scare, nothing more. His injuries, though dramatic, were no match for my medical prowess. He shall live to dance a jig on his wedding day!” At this he danced a little jig, ending by kicking up his heels in a moment of extreme silliness.

  The three children tried not to laugh.

  “Whew! I am not the young man I once was,” he said, pulling a white monogrammed handkerchief from his coat pocket and dabbing his forehead. “Now, if you will excuse me, I must continue my rounds, as it were. It has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you all.”

  He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket.

  “Miss Pinkblossom, I look forward to our appointment tomorrow. Ten a.m. sharp.”

  They watched him slink away into the forest of children that suddenly seemed to be running willy-nilly all around them. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, he was gone.

  “That was also disturbing,”
said Jerry.

  Gail turned to Nancy, a look of concern etched on her face. “Do you think you can convince your mother to cancel your appointment with him?” she asked.

  Nancy’s eyes narrowed into battle formation, and her notorious scowl settled onto her face. “No, but I wouldn’t even if I could. I’m keeping that appointment,” she announced. “I’m going to walk into the lion’s den and figure out just what Dr. Fell is up to.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, NANCY prepared herself for the day’s appointment. Although she felt she would be better able to fend off the spell of Dr. Fell than her friend had been, she had still taken precautions. The basement was once again set up for an “exorcism,” complete with chair and rope and single lightbulb; and Gail and Jerry had promised to hang her upside down and shake her back to reality if she fell under the man’s spell.

  As she wolfed down her breakfast cereal, Nancy tried to figure out how Dr. Fell was doing whatever it was he was doing. She wanted to be ready for any possibility. He was too frail and weak to be physically overpowering anyone (though she had to admit he didn’t seem quite as fragile as he had when they’d first met him). She supposed he could be injecting people with some weird, freaky serum while telling them it was a flu shot or a vaccine, but if that was the case, then she simply wouldn’t let him inject anything into her. And she wouldn’t eat or drink anything he offered her either. Another possibility was that he was hypnotizing his victims, so she practiced slamming her eyelids shut at a moment’s notice—she was pretty sure you couldn’t be hypnotized when your eyes were closed.

  She got a little worried about the possibility that he was pumping some sort of crazy gas into the examination room. She couldn’t exactly wear a gas mask during her visit without arousing his suspicions, and she couldn’t really hold her breath for very long. But then she figured that if Dr. Fell were using gas, he’d be gassing himself, too, and that didn’t make any sense.

  And if she saw him slipping a gas mask on, she’d just run out of the room.