Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom Read online

  She was in the midst of considering what to do in case Dr. Fell had some sort of strange mind powers (could she get away with wearing a tinfoil hat to the appointment?) when Cecilia Pinkblossom came downstairs and gasped with a start.

  “Nancy? You’re…you’re going to go to your appointment with Dr. Fell this morning?” asked her mother.

  “Of course,” answered Nancy, trying to be as sweet and good-daughterly as possible. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well…I mean…,” sputtered Mrs. Pinkblossom, obviously a bit flustered. “You never do anything I tell you to do.”

  Nancy frowned. This was true, and it had never occurred to her that she’d raise suspicions by doing what she was told. “Well,” she reasoned, “I already put it off a day with that whole ‘I care about fractions’ lie, so, I mean, I may as well get it over with.”

  Her mother sagged a bit, saddened to learn that her daughter did not, in fact, care about fractions. “Oh,” she replied, dejected. “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  “Yeah, I mean, everyone else has seen the guy, right?”

  “Yes, of course. I simply assumed you’d rebel against the idea and run off to school instead. That’s why I asked Assistant Principal Richman to arrange for some of the janitorial staff to kidnap you at nine-thirty this morning and bring you to your appointment kicking and screaming if need be.” She frowned as if just thinking of something. “I really should call Assistant Principal Richman and tell him his help won’t be needed after all.”

  She scurried from the room to find her phone, leaving Nancy alone with the remnants of her soggy cereal.

  Cecilia Pinkblossom lived to be punctual. Normally that would be reason enough for Nancy to be late, but today she just wanted to get in there and get this over with. So it was that at 9:59 a.m., the two stood on Dr. Fell’s porch, Mrs. Pinkblossom’s right hand ready to knock on the front door while her eyes rested on the watch on her left wrist.

  “Just knock already,” groaned Nancy.

  Mrs. Pinkblossom hushed her daughter, and the two stood in silence a few moments more until the second hand reached twelve and she moved to knock.

  The door opened a fraction of a second before her knuckles could make contact.

  “My heart leaps with the syncopated beats of gaiety to meet a kindred spirit with regard to the necessity of precise punctuality,” said Dr. Fell from within. “I do fear this antiquated nicety has egregiously fallen from favor since the days of my own schooling.”

  He stood in the doorway, an imposingly towering figure all in the shadow of his purple top hat, which really didn’t seem large enough to be casting so much darkness. It was almost as if the light went out of its way to avoid touching Dr. Fell. For an instant, Nancy’s fight-or-flight instinct roared to life, warning her to get as far away from this dangerous predator as possible.

  Then he flashed his smile, and the instinct was swept away by warm fuzzies.

  “Oh! Dr. Fell!” stammered Cecilia Pinkblossom. “I am…That is…”

  “What I mean to say,” continued Dr. Fell without skipping a beat, “is—”

  “You’re glad we’re on time,” snapped Nancy. “We get it. Can we get on with this?”

  Dr. Fell’s eyes laughed even while the rest of him remained calm. “But of course,” he replied, stepping back from the doorway and politely gesturing for them to enter.

  Nancy pushed her way past her mother and into the home of Dr. Fell. The room was every bit as freaky as Gail had described. She’d never seen so much purple in one place. It dazzled her from every corner, every nook and cranny, every surface. It was like some big, ugly, purple goo monster had exploded inside Dr. Fell’s living room and splattered its purple guts in every direction.

  And then there were the cats.

  Gail had talked about all the portraits of kittens, but she hadn’t done the room justice. There were pictures of cats—both kittens and older cats—taking up every available inch of wall space. A kitten dressed as an astronaut stared at her next to an older cat dressed as a ballet dancer next to two kittens dressed up to look like elephants. Portraits even hung from the ceiling, with one overly crowded picture depicting what looked like an all-feline baseball team taking the field. Nancy recognized some of the pictures from Gail’s description—there was the kitten drinking milk, there were the kittens lying on beds—though they looked more like regular cats than kittens. Above the fireplace was the cat dressed like a clown—it actually appeared quite old and seemed to be losing its fur—frowning out at the room as if it did not approve of all the other cats and kittens present.

  “You really have a thing for cats, don’t you, Dr. Fell?” she asked.

  “On the contrary,” replied Dr. Fell. “I cannot abide the filthy creatures. Now then, can I offer either of you an apple?”

  Nancy jerked around, instantly alert, to find Dr. Fell holding a plate of bright-red apples. Nancy’s mother loved apples. Absolutely loved them.

  “I love apples!” squealed her mother with delight. “Absolutely love them!”

  She took the plate from Dr. Fell and descended upon the apples like a lion digging into a fresh carcass on the African savanna. “Jeez, Mom,” murmured Nancy. “Slow down—they’re not going anywhere.”

  “Theeth arr the bethst appllleth in thhh world!” cheered Cecilia Pinkblossom, somehow managing to speak, bite, chew, and swallow all at the same time.

  “I am so very pleased you find them to your liking, Madam Pinkblossom,” said Dr. Fell, turning his attention to the younger Pinkblossom. “And now, my sweet young Pinkblossom. Shall we begin?”

  He gestured with a straight, firm hand to the dark, stout oak door Gail had mentioned. Nancy had to agree with her: she didn’t remember that door being in the house when it had been vacant. A rather sad poster of two elderly cats trying to dance The Nutcracker had been pinned to the door in an attempt to unify it with the rest of the room. The effect, however, was less than successful. There was something very, very off about this eerily dark, solid door. It was an imposter. An artifact from another time and place that most certainly had no business being there.

  Nancy did not want to go through it.

  “I’m not getting any shots,” she said defiantly, though in truth more to put off approaching the door than from any implied upcoming vaccinations.

  “Duly noted,” said Dr. Fell.

  “And I’m not drinking anything. Or eating anything.”

  “Is that simply for the duration of your examination, or do you intend to commence upon a hunger strike?”

  He smiled down at her pleasantly. She glared right back up at him and was momentarily taken aback by how much taller he seemed to be now that he was no longer so hunched over. In fact, he didn’t seem to be hunched over at all anymore. Which was strange.

  What was going on with this guy? What was his secret? What was he after? She mentally went through her anti-Felligan checklist, making sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. She couldn’t take any chances; she had to get in there and stay Nancy rather than become zombie-Nancy.

  “All right,” she said finally. “Let’s get this over with.”

  He nodded, his hand never having wavered from its invitation. “Youthful possibility before ancient finality,” he said, which she figured was just his crazy way of saying “After you.”

  Confident she was prepared for whatever was coming, Nancy held her head high, walked forward, pushed the dark, stout oak door open, and entered the strange doctor’s lair.

  THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER GAIL and Jerry had tied Nancy to the chair in her basement, turned her upside down, and shaken free will back into her, the three kids sat outside on Nancy’s porch, staring down the block at the heaving throng of children gathered on the play structure in front of Dr. Fell’s house.

  Still shivering after her return to normalcy, Nancy quietly sipped a juice box, letting Gail and Jerry do most of the talking.

  “Seriously? You don’t remember anything?” asked Jerry.
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  “Leave her alone, Jerry,” said Gail. “It’s not her fault.”

  “But why do you guys keep blacking out the exact moment you enter that room? There must be a scientific explanation.”

  The girls didn’t have a scientific explanation, so the three friends sat quietly a moment more, their silence broken by the static-like roar of the children at the end of the street.

  “Did I say it?” asked Nancy finally.

  “Say what?” asked Jerry right back.

  But Gail understood. She lowered her gaze to the ground and nodded. A single tear rolled quietly down Nancy’s cheek, followed by a second.

  “It’s not your fault, Nancy,” reassured Gail. “You know that.”

  More tears followed the first two as Nancy looked back at her best friend in desperation, saying, “I thought I’d be stronger.” Gail just put an arm around her friend and let her cry on her shoulder.

  “What?” asked an increasingly worried Jerry. “What are you guys talking about? Say what?”

  “Think, Jerry,” snapped Gail. “What do they all say?”

  And Jerry understood.

  “ ‘What a nice man is Dr. Fell,’ ” he whispered, giving voice to the seven simple words that now struck fear into their hearts.

  Once Nancy heard the words aloud, her silent cry evolved into one of sound.

  Her inability to withstand the mesmerizing aura of Dr. Fell shot a sudden urgency into Jerry’s plan to expose the unnerving old man (who, they all agreed, seemed not quite as expressly old as he had weeks before). They swung by the House of Bloom to allow Jerry to gather needed supplies, before putting on their blank faces and journeying into the Neverland of Dr. Fell’s playground.

  As usual, the structure was swarming with innocent youth, each playing to their heart’s content. The flow of children over the structure’s platforms and poles and ladders and bridges was so complete, it was like a layer of skin stretched over the wooden entity—giving it a life of its own. The effect was so profound that for a moment, Gail, Nancy, and Jerry could almost see it breathing.

  Gail was the first to clear the illusion from her mind. “OK, Jerry. Where do we start?”

  The eight-year-old self-appointed building inspector furrowed his eyebrows in concentration, envisioning the best way to tackle the enormous task in front of him. Finally, he sighed and took out his tape measure, saying, “I guess we start measuring.”

  For the next half hour, they worked as a well-oiled machine. They’d move into an area, Nancy would growl away whoever happened by, Jerry would whip his tape measure around, yelling out things like “Left wall! Six feet, three inches high! Open pit! Four feet square! Rope ladder! Twenty-five-inch rungs!” and Gail would jot down everything her brother said.

  In this way they tackled in turn the amphitheater/roller rink, the star fighter cockpit, the undersea ruins, and the seedy streets of 1865 London. All the while Nancy kept growling, Jerry kept measuring, and Gail kept jotting. Some of the kids paused in their play to look questioningly at the trio, but Nancy would inevitably shoo them off, and for the most part they were allowed to work in peace.

  As the minutes passed and Gail’s notebook filled up with numbers, something else came over the three friends. A distinct and palpable feeling of alarm.

  They had never actually spent a lot of time on or in the play structure before, or at least not at a time when all three had their wits about them. Before, whenever they’d crossed over into the fanciful atmosphere at the end of Hardscrabble Street, they’d been very singularly focused—first on zombie Gail and then on miraculously not-dead Leonid Hazardfall. Now, however, they studied the structure itself and heard the laughs, shouts, and simple conversations of those cavorting within.

  Which led to their heightened state of alarm.

  Because beyond the various games or forms of play undertaken by the children, the number one topic of conversation was a rather gleeful recounting of just how many times each child had injured himself or herself on the play structure. It was almost as if the more times you hurt yourself, the more popular you became. Albert Rottingsly was heard boasting that he’d dislocated his shoulder, sprained his ankle, scraped the skin off his knee, and suffered a concussion all within the last week. Shelly Plentyson couldn’t stop talking about how she’d sliced open her jaw and fractured all the bones in her left hand on the same day. And Leonid Hazardfall (whose voice was now a deep baritone) had already not-suffered through a series of scrapes, snaps, and bloodings in the single day since his miraculous very-near-death experience.

  “This is a very dangerous playground,” commented Gail as Jerry measured the drop from the drawbridge down to the dirt moat at the entrance to Fantasy Castle.

  “You have to be nuts to play on this thing,” agreed Nancy.

  “Why do parents let their kids play here?” asked Gail.

  “You mean, why do parents actively encourage their kids to play here, don’t you?” asked Jerry. “Four feet, seven inches from bridge to moat.”

  Gail dutifully copied the numbers down.

  “Hey! Are you guys done yet?” asked a boy in a deep voice. None of the children recognized him, though Gail thought she might have seen him getting off the bus from Washington Madison Hoover Elementary School earlier that day.

  “Go away,” snarled Nancy.

  The kid, who looked to be perhaps a year or two older than Gail and Nancy, took an involuntary step back but then held his ground. “We kind of need to storm the castle, and you’re kind of ruining our play,” he said.

  “I’m almost done,” said Jerry as he tried to measure the imposing height of the castle walls by shoving the end of his tape measure up the side. Unfortunately, it was so high that his tape measure kept flopping back down and he was unable to get an accurate reading.

  “Yeah? Well, hurry it up. Me and my buddy are gonna scale those walls and surprise the orcs on the other side.”

  Jerry’s tape measure flopped back down once more. He grumbled and tried again.

  “You’re going to climb these walls?” asked Gail.

  “Totally!” replied the young boy, absently scratching at a small layer of stubble on his cheek.

  “But they’re so high!” worried Gail.

  “At least twenty feet,” agreed Jerry, “but I can’t get an accurate measurement. I think I need to get up there and measure from the top down.”

  “Twenty feet!” said Gail. “What if you fall?” she asked the boy.

  “We fall all the time. It’s no biggie.”

  “You’re lucky you don’t break your neck,” said Nancy.

  “Oh, I have. Twice,” said the boy. “But Dr. Fell always fixes me up. So, like, what do you need? Another minute?”

  Gail and Nancy and Jerry just stared at the boy in a mixture of wonder and horror. Finally, Jerry nodded. The boy, satisfied, gave a thumbs-up, turned, and ran back the way he’d come.

  “He broke his neck?” asked Gail.

  “Twice,” corrected Jerry.

  “I’m no doctor, but shouldn’t he be paralyzed? Or dead?”

  “So should Leonid Hazardfall,” Jerry reminded them.

  “How old do you guys think that kid was?” asked Nancy, joining the conversation.

  “I’d say maybe eleven or twelve,” said Jerry.

  “He had stubble,” said Nancy. “Like he was growing a beard.”

  “OK, then maybe he’s older. Like fifteen or sixteen.”

  “He can’t be. He goes to Washington Madison Hoover Elementary,” pointed out Gail. “That’s a K-six school. So he’s twelve at the most.”

  “Huh,” said Nancy.

  “Huh,” said Jerry.

  “Huh,” said Gail.

  “I was unaware that children of your generation found enjoyment in domicile-improvement scenarios. I am forever enriched by the never-ending multitude of imaginations that have descended upon my humble abode.”

  They didn’t have to turn around to know that Dr. Fell had someh
ow appeared out of nowhere yet again. They didn’t have to turn around to know he was standing in the sun yet somehow completely in the shadow of his purple top hat. They didn’t have to see him to know that he was smiling his pleasant, innocent, inviting smile on his pleasant, innocent, inviting face.

  But they turned around all the same.

  “Though I must admit that I am somewhat baffled by your choice of location for such wholesome play,” continued Dr. Fell. “I would have thought the condominiums or the model home would be a more practical and appropriate place to entertain fantasies of structural renovation.”

  “We…um…,” stammered Gail.

  “Oh, please, do not mind me, little urchins. I am simply here to post a copy of the building permit, which I have been neglecting to display. I want parents to know that their own city inspectors have blessed our childhood utopia as being completely safe. I wouldn’t want anyone to worry. I’m sure you understand, Mr. Bloom.”

  His smile grew so wide, it seemed to split his face in two, and Jerry felt a sliver of darkness worm its way into his heart at the mention of his name.

  “I…I…,” he sputtered.

  “I am so exceedingly pleased that you agree,” said Dr. Fell.

  As the three stood, transfixed, Dr. Fell whipped out a small hammer and twirled it around his fingers with one hand while displaying a plastic sheath holding an official-looking document in the other. He held the sheath up against the wall of the castle, then quickly hammered four small finishing nails into its four corners.

  “There we are,” he said. “Now there is no need for anyone to worry or wonder whether or not my monument to childhood frivolity is properly up to code.”

  There was a glint in his eye that caused all three children to flinch.

  “Now then. I trust the fine trio before me will continue their regalement within the friendly confines of the youthful garden of delights in which they find themselves.”

  As he had intended, the children continued to stare in silence.

  “What I mean to say is…have fun on my playground.”

  A sudden scream of pain echoed from somewhere deep within the structure. Dr. Fell stood up straight and tall and winked. “Ah. I believe my services are required. Good day.”