Chapter Twenty-Eight
Minds Gone Awry
During the time in which Neil and Jack had been phoning Coach upstairs, things had taken a decidedly drastic turn for the worse in the chamber below. The stronghold of the Black Hats was rapidly coming undone, as the wrath of Pan Gu increased. The beast seemed to be confused by the strange place it had awoken in, and it was none too pleased.
As a means of embodying this displeasure, the dragon was thrashing and smashing about, and its body proved to be a formidable wrecking ball of destruction. Pieces of steel and broken machinery went flying this way and that, busted loose by tooth and claw, tail and snout. The creature was a whirling, twirling instrument of decimation.
Maria and Sara were still pressed flat against the floor, attempting to take whatever small amount of shelter they could find. Nonetheless, they felt horribly exposed as the awakened monster proceeded to destroy their current surroundings.
The shrieks and bellows of the beast were dreadful to behold, and they reverberated within the chamber like the cries of a banshee. The sisters looked at each other in terror, as they desperately tried to formulate a plan of escape.
They could not return the way from which they had come, for a sweep of Pan Gu’s astonishing tail had sent a massive amount of debris crumbling before the doorway. Was that the only way out, the sisters wondered? Surely not, for how had Ebenezer gotten down here? He hadn’t come through the same passageway as the sisters, they were sure of that. There must be another way out!
The rapid destruction of the chamber was certainly of imminent concern, of that there could be no doubt – after all, there seemed to be a very good chance that the ceiling would come crashing down pretty soon, at this rate. But what was of perhaps even greater concern was the bizarre transformation that had occurred in the adults.
Evelyn, Jasper, and Ebenezer were all acting… strange. Very, very strange.
It was as if the whole lot of them had lost their minds. They were wandering about in slow, directionless, shuffling steps. Their eyes had glazed over, and they seemed to be completely oblivious to the total carnage that surrounded them, not to mention the rampaging monster. Sparks flew by their heads, and crumbling debris fell only feet from them, but they didn’t even flinch.
“Ms. Magellan!” Maria cried out. “Ms. Magellan, what are you doing? Are you okay? We need to get out of here!”
“This would be a really fantastic time to pull yourself together!” Sara pointed out.
Evelyn did not yield the slightest reaction to their words, and the sisters were sure that they had not been heard. Somehow, the curator had become severely out of sorts.
Maria and Sara studied Evelyn’s strange behavior for a moment more, and then they turned their attention to Jasper and Ebenezer. The two villains were behaving in an identical manner, meandering about as if they were in a stupor of inconceivable proportions.
The sisters reflected upon what Evelyn had told them earlier, when they had been approaching the chamber. She had claimed that, according to Magellan’s journal, legend spoke of Pan Gu’s influence in reverent terms.
It was a creature with the power of a hurricane, and the legends also said that it was possible for people to lose their minds, simply by looking upon the creature in its natural form. Was that what was happening now, they wondered? There seemed to be no other explanation.
But why were Maria and Sara not equally flabbergasted by what they were witnessing? Sure, their minds were blown, metaphorically speaking… but they were completely in possession of their faculties, as far as they could tell. It appeared that the responsibility of reversing this absurd problem would fall upon their shoulders… the problem that Ebenezer and Jasper had so eagerly created in their shortsighted ambition.
It seemed as though their young brains were impervious to whatever mind-boggling effects Pan Gu might render upon those who witnessed his terrible, awesome presence. As they processed this weird reality, they recalled what they had been told by a similarly strange monster, a benevolent, kind-hearted creature they had encountered in their own town: Titus, the swamp beast of Hollow Oak.
Titus had said that children (or little ones, as he called them) were different from adults. He had said that though little ones could observe and interact with creatures like him, doing such would be impossible for adults. They would “look right through him”, as he said, for their eyes would refuse to see, and their hearts would refuse to believe.
Their minds would convince them that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, and they would shortly forget the encounter entirely. Such was one of the sad, strange occurrences of adulthood.
For children were young, and they still believed in the wonders of the world. But grownups… grownups had been stripped of their imaginations as the years toward adulthood had marched on… they were, quite simply, incapable of processing that which went beyond the norm.
“Well, I guess we’ve got to repair this monumental mess!” Maria hollered to her sister. “It doesn’t look as though the rest of these folks are going to be much help!”
“I believe you hit it right on the head, there, Maria,” Sara agreed.
Pan Gu had once more reared upon its hind legs, searching the ceiling with its swirling, hurricane-like eyes. Its nostrils flared, black smoke erupted from its mouth, and it pounded at the pillars of the chamber with its forelegs.
Maria gripped Sara’s shoulder for comfort, and her sister squeezed right back. As they watched in horror, a colossal piece of the ceiling came crashing down, exploding into a plume of dusty debris. Miraculously, nobody was struck, though the pair of them coughed and sputtered upon the cloudy air.
When the dust began to clear, they blinked away the tears that were forming in the corners of their eyes, and they focused on what had been left behind. Pan Gu was still demolishing the place with a terrific amount of zeal, that much was for certain. But of greater significance was what the monster’s most recent damage had revealed.
The massive control panel that had operated the Spectro-Solar Blaster 1000 had largely been wiped out… erased by a single swipe of Pan Gu’s tail. Behind it, the sisters could see the rungs of what appeared to be a service ladder.
And that led them to the logical conclusion that such a ladder must lead up and out of their current predicament. They had only to make their way over to it, and climb to freedom.
“Maria, let’s make a break for it! This thing is going to tear the place apart… we don’t have much time,” Sara told her sister.
“Wait a second, we can’t leave Ms. Magellan,” Maria said. “She won’t be able to defend herself!”
“Hmm… this is true,” Sara agreed. She was torn between the need to escape, and the need to help Evelyn, but she knew that her sister was right. They couldn’t leave Evelyn behind, for she would be helpless in her current condition. “Okay, let’s go get her – but we need to be quick!”
The two of them sprung from the floor and sprinted for the discombobulated curator. They immediately realized that keeping their footing was going to be a bit harder than they had anticipated, for the place was bucking, and shaking, and coming apart at the seams… it was like trying to retain balance in the middle of an earthquake.
Maintaining low centers of gravity, the sisters quickly reached Evelyn, and each of them stood by an opposite side, grabbing one arm to support the dazed curator.
“Ms. Magellan, can you hear me?” Sara asked. “You’ve got to get it together! We’re in great danger!”
Evelyn didn’t react to the words. Her glasses were askew, perched crookedly upon her nose, and those brilliant green eyes, which had once seemed to be so clear and alert, now lacked focus. The sisters were deeply concerned for her well-being.
“Please, Ms. Magellan, we need to get out of here!” Maria cried in her ear, but to no avail.
“Do you think we should slap her?” Sara asked.
“Um… I dunno… I’ve never exactly, uh… slapped anybody
before,” Maria said.
“Well, neither have I, but I think this might be the occasion that demands such action,” Sara said, as pieces of flaming wreckage came crashing down only feet from where they stood. “It’s not like I want to slap her!”
“Well, then, go ahead and do it!” Maria encouraged. “I’ll get your back, if she starts swinging!”
“Okay, here goes… I’m sorry, Ms. Magellan, but this is for your own good. I think this is what you do, when somebody’s hysterical, and time is of the essence,” Sara explained remorsefully. Grimacing, she reared back with one arm. As she brought it forward, she cried out, “Boo-yah!”
Sara’s open palm collided with Evelyn’s cheek, and her glasses went flying from her nose. Maria caught the soaring spectacles with one hand, while retaining her grip on Evelyn with the other. The curator seemed to be mildly affected by the slap, but she remained largely out of sorts, mumbling incoherent gibberish to herself.
“I’ll give it a go,” Maria offered. She let go of Evelyn and came around to face her. As she offered her own slap, she cried out, “Hullabaloo!”
The combination of slaps seemed to revive Evelyn, and she looked around in confusion, murmuring quietly to herself. “By the compass of Columbus, I was having a terrible dream…” she muttered.
Sara gripped the curator by her shoulders and shook her as hard as she could. “Ms. Magellan, listen to me! It was no dream! We’ve got to get out of here!”
Evelyn wearily looked around, as Maria gently secured the eyeglasses on the bridge of her nose and behind her ears. “This can’t be…” she murmured, as she took in the vast amounts of ongoing damage.
The sisters realized that Evelyn was not going to be much help, and they hurried her along to the service ladder. Once there, Sara forced Evelyn to wrap her arms around her shoulders, so that she could carry her up the ladder. Fortunately, the curator was a petite woman, though it would still be quite the burden for the eleven-year-old Sara.
“Ms. Magellan, you’ve got to hold on!” Sara hollered over the chaos. “Can you do that for me? Can you hold on?”
Evelyn weakly nodded, and the sisters had no choice but to hope that she was up to the task.
“What about Jasper and Ebenezer? Should we go back for them?” Maria asked.
Though the villainous Black Hats had, quite literally, brought this undesirable fate down upon themselves, the sisters were reluctant to leave them behind. It seemed terribly unfair to leave them at the mercy of Pan Gu in their current, bedraggled conditions.
Sara looked over her shoulder, studying the unraveling carnage. She hesitated, trying to decide what the best course of action might be.
But before she could speak, another one of Pan Gu’s destructive motions caused a fiery ball of broken machinery to land perilously close to the sisters. It effectively blocked their retreat, and they now had but one option as to where they could go – up.
“Never mind, there’s nothing we can do!” Maria cried out. She had her hands raised to her face, as she tried to block the heat from the fire. “We have to get out of here!”
Sara nodded in agreement. Then, placing her hands upon the steel rungs of the service ladder, she began climbing, desperately hoping that safer areas were above them.