Night of the Giant Everything (7 page)

The cookies.

The big chocolate chip cookies. The cookies I was standing in …

I ate
two
of them at my piano lesson. And he watched me with such a strange smile on his face.

He watched me eat the cookies with so much excitement. And he didn’t take his eyes off me until I had eaten every last crumb.

I thought about how heavy they were. How rich.

I ate TWO of them on the afternoon before I shrank.

What did he put in those cookies?

Some kind of
shrinking
ingredient?

Suddenly, I put it all together. Why didn’t I realize?

Mr. Pinker’s doll town. The little houses and stores and buildings in his back room.

He didn’t want me to see them.

Of
course
he didn’t want me to see them.

Because that’s where he planned to keep the kids he shrinks. The kids he shrinks with his cookies.

Kids like me.

He planned to keep us in those little houses.

My teeth were chattering. My whole body shuddered. My knees started to fold, and I almost fell off the cookie tray.

Mr. Pinker seemed so kind, so nice.

But it was all an act. An act to trap kids like me.

So we could live with those dolls in his tiny dollhouses?

I had to get away from there.

I couldn’t let him see me.

I had to get home. I had to tell my parents about Mr. Pinker and his cookies. I had to show them what he did to me.

I turned and started to the edge of the cookie tray.

My plastic shoe got stuck in a ball of cookie dough.

As I struggled to pull it out, Mr. Pinker reached for the tray.

Then—to my horror—he lifted the tray off the counter.

Still talking into the phone, he swung the tray into the air.

“No, Mr. Pinker! Please—noooo!” I cried.

He didn’t hear me. He didn’t see me.

He pulled open the oven door.

I felt a blast of heat.

“Mr. Pinker—noooo!”

I gazed around. Could I jump off? No. No way.

Waves of heat rolled over me, burning hot. Burning my face.

Pinker swung the cookie tray down and shoved it into the oven.

I shut my eyes. The heat burned my skin. My face felt on fire.

I tried to breathe, but the air burned my nostrils. Burned my throat.

The oven rumbled loudly. A wave of heat knocked me to my knees.

“C-can’t … breathe. Too … hot …”

Behind me, I heard a cry.

Mr. Pinker?

The tray shook beneath me. I struggled to keep my balance as the tray began to move again.

Out of the blinding heat of the oven. Into the cool air. The tray swung high. Then it landed gently back on the white kitchen counter.

I wiped the sweat off my face with both hands. I brushed back my soaking wet hair.

And when I could finally see again, I gazed up
at Mr. Pinker staring at me. His eyes bulged and his mouth was wide open. He gaped at me through his owlish glasses.

“Steven? Is it you?” he murmured.

“I … I …” My mouth felt burning hot, so dry I couldn’t speak. “Water …” I gasped.

He filled a glass with water from the kitchen sink. But the glass was too big for me. He shook his head, thinking hard. Then he returned with a tiny plastic measuring spoon filled with water.

He held it for me, and I lapped up the cool liquid like a dog.

When I finished, he set the plastic spoon down and brought his face close to me. “Steven—how did this happen to you?”

“You
know
how!” I screamed. “Your cookies!”

“Excuse me?” He scratched his fringe of hair. “My cookies? What about my cookies?”

“You—you put something in them!” I cried. “Your cookies made me shrink. You want to put me in that town you built!”

Mr. Pinker squinted down at me. “My cookies? I didn’t put anything in the cookies, Steven. They are supermarket cookies.”

I gasped. “Huh?”

“They come out of a tube. I get them at the market in the mall,” he said. “You just slice
the dough and roll them into balls and put them on the baking tray.”

I blinked a few times. My heart was pounding. “You don’t add anything to them?”

He shook his head. “No. Just slice, roll them, and bake them.”

“But—but —” I sputtered. “All those dollhouses.”

“It’s just a hobby,” Mr. Pinker said. “I love building things.”

I stared hard at him. He was telling the truth. He didn’t shrink me.

I was back where I started. Clueless.

He brought his face down closer to me. “When did this happen to you, Steven?”

“This afternoon,” I said. “I did a magic act at school. And when I got home … I shrank right out of my clothes.”

“Home,” Mr. Pinker repeated. “Home. Aren’t your parents home? Have they seen you? Have you told them?”

“What time is it?” I asked.

He glanced at the kitchen clock. It was a big copper-colored sun. “It’s nearly eight-thirty,” he said. “They must be home by now.”

I nodded. “Yes. Probably.”

“They must be worried about you,” Mr. Pinker said.

“They’ll worry even more when they see me,” I replied.

“I — I’m so sorry,” Mr. Pinker said. “I’ve never seen anything like this — except in movies, of course.”

He pulled out a cell phone. “What’s your home number?”

I told it to him. He tried it.

“No answer,” he said.

Next, we tried their cell numbers. No answer.

“I’ll take you home,” he said. “We’ll wait for them.”

He picked me up around the waist and carried me out to his car. He set me down in the passenger seat.

“The seat belt is too big,” he said. “Just hold on to the door handle.”

I had to reach up to grab the handle.

Mr. Pinker drove to my house very slowly, even though there were no other cars on the street. He kept asking me if I was okay.

How could I answer that question?

I knew maybe I’d never be
okay
again.

He pulled the car up our driveway. Then he carried me to the front door.

He stopped when he saw the two men sitting on the front stoop.

They were both young and dark-haired and had solemn expressions. They both wore white
lab coats over white pants. They had small badges pinned to their chests.

They jumped up when we came close. One of them reached for me.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

“I’m Dr. Marcum,” the man said. He took me from Mr. Pinker and sat me down in the palm of his hand. “This is Dr. Beach.”

“We’re from the University Lab for Experimental Research,” Dr. Beach said. He had a scratchy, hoarse voice. His dark eyes narrowed as he studied me in the other scientist’s palm.

Dr. Beach turned to Mr. Pinker. He fingered the badge on his lab coat. “We’re going to take care of this young man,” he said. “We have his parents’ permission.”

Mr. Pinker studied them. “Where are Steven’s parents?” he asked.

“They had to go out,” Dr. Beach said. “They asked that Dr. Marcum and I take Steven to our lab to make him tall again.”

Mr. Pinker shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t let you take Steven until I talk to his parents first.”

“We are wasting time,” Dr. Marcum said. “Every second counts.”

“Sorry,” Mr. Pinker insisted. “I cannot let you take him.”

“You have no choice,” Dr. Marcum snapped. He wrapped his fingers around me tightly. And both men started to run toward the street.

Mr. Pinker cried out. He made a wild grab for me.

Dr. Beach stuck out his shoe and tripped Mr. Pinker, who went sprawling onto his stomach on the grass.

Dr. Marcum’s fingers gripped me tighter, so tight I could barely breathe.

Their shoes thundered down the front lawn.

They had a white van waiting at the curb. Dr. Marcum shoved me into the backseat and slammed the door.

I heard Mr. Pinker shouting from the lawn. But the two men leaped into the front of the van, and we squealed away.

“Let me go!” I tried to scream, but my voice came out in a tiny, hoarse cry. “Take me home!”

I turned and saw a birdcage beside me on the seat. I peered inside. “Bugsy!”

They had taken the bird, too.

The van squealed around the corner.

“Where are we going? Do you really know how to turn me back to my normal size?” I demanded.

“Yes,” both men said at once.

“We’ll take you to the lab on campus,” Dr. Beach said. “It won’t take long.”

“But … how did you know how to find me?” I asked.

“We saw your dad’s ad online,” Dr. Beach said. “The ad said you found a missing brown bird. That’s our bird.”

“We’re happy to have him back,” Dr. Marcum said. “He escaped from our lab.”

“We’ve been experimenting with birds,” Dr. Beach said. “Bugsy is a hawk. He was a gigantic hawk. But we shrank him down to the size of a parrot.”

I stared into the front seat. The van hit a bump and I went flying into the air. I landed hard. The cage bounced with me. Bugsy uttered a squawk.

“You—you’ve been shrinking birds?” I asked.

“We’ve been testing the effects of Human Growth Hormone,” Dr. Marcum explained. “And Human Shrink Hormone. We had great success with this hawk. But then he escaped.”

“The bird is dangerous,” Dr. Beach said, almost in a whisper. He looked at me. “You see what the bird did to you.”

“Huh?” I uttered a sharp cry. “The
bird
did this to me?”

They both nodded. “You must have come in contact with the hawk’s tongue,” Dr. Marcum said.

“The Shrink Hormone is carried in the bird’s saliva,” Dr. Beach explained. “I know it sounds crazy. But any contact with the bird’s tongue will result in shrinking.”

The bird’s tongue?

I thought back. I remembered Bugsy nibbling my finger. And then … at the talent show. When I made him appear in my act. He—he
kissed me.

Yes. I remembered the feeling of the bird’s scratchy tongue down the side of my face.

And then … a few minutes after that … I started to shrink.

So
that
was it. Now I finally had the answer. A bird’s
tongue
did this to me. How
crazy
was that!?

As we raced down the street, the two men talked quietly to each other. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

A few minutes later, I saw the university campus outside the van window. I saw the green circle surrounded by old brick buildings. Then, a row of campus stores and restaurants.

The van picked up speed and kept going.

“Hey, wait,” I shouted. “We went past the campus. I saw it back there.”

“Our lab is not really on campus,” Dr. Marcum said. “We’re almost there.”

I knew I couldn’t trust them. They had stolen me and Bugsy.

But what could I do? I couldn’t escape.

Maybe they WILL return me to normal,
I thought. I crossed all my fingers and hoped.

A few minutes later, the van turned off the road and rumbled over a bumpy gravel path. The path wound through some deep woods. We stopped in front of a long, low building hidden far back in the trees.

The building had no sign on the front. It was white stucco with a flat red roof. A row of windows ran down the long front. The windows were small and they were all shut.

“This way,” Dr. Marcum said. He lifted me carefully out of the van.

Inside the lab, I heard the screech and squawk of birds. The air smelled sharp and sour.

We walked past a front desk. No one was sitting there. As we made our way deeper into the lab, the bird squawks grew louder. And the sharp odor in the air made my eyes water.

Dr. Marcum carried me down the long aisle, past two rows of birdcages. Some of the cages
held flapping birds, all different kinds and colors. Some cages were empty.

“Tell me,” I said. “How are you going to turn me back to my old size?”

“We’re not,” he said.

He opened a cage door. Then he pushed me inside and clamped the door shut.

“Let me out of here!” I screamed. “You can’t DO this to me!”

Dr. Marcum shook his head and frowned at me. “We can’t let you out,” he said. “We need to keep you top secret.”

I grabbed the cage bars with both hands. “But—but—but —” I sputtered. A wave of panic swept down my body. I struggled to breathe.

“We don’t want anyone to know about our secret experiments,” he said. “It might scare people.”

“But I’m not one of your experiments!” I cried.

He brought his face close to the cage. “You are now,” he said. “Don’t worry, Steven. We’ll feed you and take care of you. Till we figure out what to do with you.”

“Do
with me?” I cried. “You mean … you don’t know how to make me big again?”

“Not really,” he said.

Down the long rows of cages, the birds squawked and flapped. A big yellow bird in the cage beside mine chewed at its cage bars.

“We can try some experiments,” Dr. Marcum said. “But we can’t let you out.”

“But Mr. Pinker knows what you did. And my parents know who you are,” I said. “My parents saw you and —”

“Your parents never saw us,” Dr. Marcum said. “They weren’t home. We broke into your house and took the bird. We saw your clothes on the floor. And the missing doll clothes.”

“Then we saw tiny footprints in the soapy water on the floor,” Dr. Beach said. “Those little shoes left prints all over the living room. It didn’t take us long to figure out somebody had been shrunk. So we waited on the stoop to see who would show up.”

I shook the cage bars. “Let me out!” I screamed. “You can’t keep me here. Let me out!”

My shouts scared the big bird next to me. He stopped biting his cage bars and began flapping his huge wings hard.

Dr. Marcum turned away and walked down the row of cages.

I shouted after him, but he didn’t turn back.

I squeezed the metal cage bars till my hands hurt. My voice was hoarse from shouting. I knew
no one could hear me over the caws and chirps and honks of the birds.

I held my hands over my ears. The sound was deafening.

I had to think. But how? I sat down on the cage floor and rested my back against the bars.

How could this happen to me? Here I was a real person, but so small. Sitting in a birdcage. In a lab hidden in the woods on the edge of town.

Did I know a magic trick that would make me disappear from this cage?

No. My tricks were only
tricks.
They weren’t going to help me with anything real.

I stood up and started to pace back and forth on the metal cage floor. I stared at the door, which was tightly latched.

This is a birdcage, I thought. It’s made to hold birds inside.

But I’m not a bird. I’m a person. I know how to work that latch.

All I have to do is push it hard, undo the latch, and the cage door will slide open.

Dr. Beach and Dr. Marcum weren’t even good at keeping birds prisoner, I decided. After all, they let Bugsy escape.

So, it will be even easier for me to get out of here.

This idea gave me some hope and new energy. I raced to the door and studied the latch. It was
just above my head. I had to stand on tiptoe to reach it.

But it was a simple latch, like a hook that caught over a cage bar.

“No problem,” I said out loud.

The big bird in the next cage had stopped flapping its yellow wings. It was watching me now. I suddenly realized the bird looked like a canary. But it was huge, as big as a turkey.

I leaned forward and climbed on tiptoe. I reached up and grabbed the latch with my right hand. I pushed.

No. It didn’t move.

I pushed harder. No.

I slumped down and took a deep breath. Then I raised myself back up and grabbed the latch with
both
hands.

I pushed. Pushed. Pushed harder, straining every muscle.

No. I couldn’t loosen it. I couldn’t budge it.

With a sigh I stumbled back from the door. I wiped sweat off my face with the sleeve of my jumpsuit.

Time for Plan B.

But what was Plan B?