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Chapter Twenty Nine

The Sea Betwixt sped past beneath me in a flash, each raindrop stinging my skin like I was being pelted with little balls of ice as I flew through the storm at a bajillion miles per hour. My hair whipped behind me in a frenzy, like the blue tail of a white comet.

The pillar came rushing up to meet me, its pure white limestone standing out almost blindingly against the darkness that surrounded it. At first I had been worried that Globber wouldn't give me enough momentum to make it all the way there, and I would be forced to swim the rest of the way through violent, deepneck-infested waters. Now, however, I realized I was about to have the opposite problem.

“Jumping jambalaya!” I yelled as I came careening in towards the enormous hunk of solid rock. Thinking quickly, I pulled Prinkle and Prunkle from my belt and frantically began to charge them with magic. Then I gritted my teeth and forced myself to wait. This had to work. I was not going to go down in history as the first Hunter to die like a fly on a giant windshield!

At the last possible second, I pointed Prinkle and Prunkle straight at the pillar and fired them both off. Their glowing spring-snakes lit up the darkness like two bolts of blue lightning as they rocketed out of their cans, colliding with the white stone before they had even fully emerged. With the pillar on one end, and me on the other, the springs groaned as they were suddenly squeezed like a pair of glowing accordions. Sweat even colder than the rain poured down my face as I prayed to the whoopee cushion in the sky that this would work.

And to my disbelief, I slowly came to a stop. My arms vibrated with all the power that was being stored up inside those springs, but my nose brushed against the cold white limestone as gently as I always imagined a kiss from Ethan would—

BOING!

In the blink of an eye, I was launched back the way I'd come. Putting Prunkle and Prunkle back on my belt, I pulled Globber out again and whipped him toward the pillar. He hit the wet stone with a loud SPLAT!, and for a second I was terrified that the rain would keep him from sticking.

My fears were unfounded, though, since he globbed onto the pillar as tightly as he'd globbed onto anything. His string was stretched tight a second later, and I was yoinked back toward the pillar again like a bungee jumper who had no idea how bungee jumping worked.

When I was halfway there, I un-globbed Globber, letting my momentum carry me the rest of the way to the pillar, and then flung the sticky hand upwards. He pulled me up after him, keeping me from slamming into the pillar at terminal velocity.

Then, dangling above the Sea Betwixt from about a quarter of the way up the pillar, I finally stopped to take stock of my situation. I was alive! I didn't like how surprised I was at that, but I had more important things to worry about at the moment.

I could faintly see the Jiggly Trombone through the curtain of rain. They were sailing in a straight line away from the pillar, just like I'd told them to. It was hard to make out any details, but I couldn't see any deepnecks trying to climb onboard. Did that mean they had called off the attack as soon as the ship had started retreating, or was I just too far away to see them?

Or maybe they've already dragged your friends out of the ship, the cynical jerk who lived in my head whispered, and the deepnecks just stopped attacking because there's nobody left onboard!

Scowling, I punched myself on the side of the head, hoping that would convince the voices in there to be a little nicer. Then, moving quickly, I un-globbed Globber and flung him upwards.

Globber globbed onto the pillar again before I could fall more than a few feet, and his stretchy arm bounced me upwards. As lightning flashed above me, I settled myself into a pattern. Un-glob, re-glob, bounce, repeat. Globber was going to be my best friend for however long it took me to get to the top of this thing. I kicked myself for leaving the Escher Cube at home last night. Not that Opisthia would have let me bring—

A gigantic green hand came around the side of the pillar, followed by a nightmarishly massive face.

I was mid-bounce when it appeared, and the sheer shock of it nearly made me freeze up. Considering I was more than three thousand feet above the ground, that really wouldn’t have worked out well for me.

“GIDDERDUUUUUUNNNNNN!” Daggum roared. His voice was so loud that it visibly distorted the air around me and sent every cell in my body vibrating like a chihuahua that desperately needed to pee. I had hoped that I’d be able to make it to the top of the pillar without catching his attention if I stuck to the opposite side that he was on, but of course nothing in my life could ever be that easy.

I snapped out of my surprise and threw Globber. As I was pulled higher, I could only watch as Daggum clambered around the pillar. I had been under no illusions as to just how big he was, but seeing him up close like this really hammered home just how small I was. I really was a fly, I realized with a nauseous feeling in my stomach. But it wouldn’t be a windshield that smashed me.

Growling, Daggum slowly began to raise his hand. I was more than a hundred feet away, but the gust of wind it created was nearly enough to break my grip on Globber and send me plummeting helplessly down into the ocean below—and that was just the windup!

With a high pitched whine clawing its way out of my throat, I cast Globber to the side. That wouldn’t get me any closer to the top of the pillar, but I needed to put as much distance between me and Fishzilla as possible. Everything went dark as a colossal shadow moved to block out what little sunlight there was, and I chanced a look over my shoulder…

Just as Daggum swung for me!

From far away, his movements looked slow and clumsy, but now that I was practically right up in his armpit, I realized the truth: when you were as big as he was, you didn’t need to move fast to cover a lot of distance in a short time.

“Cheesy chicken enchiladas!” I yelled. I threw Globber again, but I already knew it wasn’t going to be enough. His hand was as big as a freaking football field! If I didn’t want to get turned two dimensional, I needed to think of something in the next three seconds!

A glimmer of sunlight caught my eye—faint, but blinding compared to the cave-like darkness around me—a few dozen yards below, and without thinking, I dove for it. Going further down the pillar was the last thing I wanted to do, but that was preferable to being turned into the world’s coolest hieroglyph.

The wind roared in my ears again as I plunged downwards. My eyes stung, but I refused to close them. I saw Daggum’s hand close in on me, and couldn’t stop myself from screaming when his scaly green digits became my everything. Above, below, all around me, it was nothing but Daggum.

And then, just like that, it was gone.

I had passed right between his fingers. A BOOOOOM unlike anything else I had ever heard in my life struck my right in the eardrums, and for a couple seconds my vision went fuzzy from the pain.

It occurred to me that I was only alive because of pure dumb luck. If he hadn’t left his fingers spread apart like that, I would never have been able to get out of the way fast enough. I shivered, forcing those thoughts out of my head. This wasn’t the first time I had come a hairsbreadth from death, and if the whoopee cushion in the sky loved me, it wouldn’t be the last.

While I waited for my eyes to refocus, I instinctively flung Globber out again. The now-familiar lurch as I reached his stretchy limit told me he had globbed onto something, but I couldn’t see what it was, and he yoinked me back toward the pillar—and for me to abruptly be yoinked back the other direction.

Oooh, yellow snowcones, I thought. My vision was starting to come back, but I had a terrible feeling I already knew what I was going to see when it did.

Sure enough, the world snapped back into focus around me, and the first thing I saw was the pillar getting farther away. The wind tore at me, trying to force me to let go of Globber, but I desperately clung onto him like the lifeline he had literally become. Spinning myself around, I bit back a scream of fear when I saw what I was flying toward.

Daggum stared dumbly down at me, dangling from the tip of one of his fingers like a booger that stubbornly refused to be flicked away. He opened his mouth, revealing pointed teeth the size of school buses, and I braced myself.

“GIDDERDUUUUUUUN!”

The sound of his voice, not to mention his rancid breath, slammed into me like a flying concrete wall. Every bone in my body ached with the strain of holding onto Globber.

Suddenly, the ginormous hand came to a stop, sending me swinging back and forth like a pendulum, and all that was visible in front of me was Daggum’s ugly face.

His lips parted again, and a long purple tongue the size of an eight-lane highway emerged. Thick, cloudy saliva fell from it in torrential waterfalls, and a smell like the sunbaked dumpsters behind every sushi restaurant in Japan attacked my nostrils. I almost clamped my hands over my mouth to keep from throwing up, but then I remembered they were a little busy holding on for dear life, and I settled for clenching my lips so tight that they nearly welded themselves together.

Why Daggum wanted to eat me, I had no idea. That would be like if you saw an ant crawling across your wall and thought “Oh boy, a tasty, filling snack!” I doubted Filet-O-Freak here would even be able to taste me before I was slurped down into the pit of horribleness that waited just behind his teeth. But I guess when you were as evil, ugly, and stupid as he was, you didn’t need to think about things like that.

As tempting as spending the rest of my short life in his tum-tum sounded, though, I had other obligations I needed to uphold.

He shook his hand, trying to drop me down onto his tongue, and I used the momentum that created to launch myself upwards. Un-globbing Globber, I was sent flying up into the stormy air, higher even than the clawed tips of Daggum’s fingers.

Suddenly having an idea, I threw Globber out again. He globbed onto another one of Daggum’s fingers, and pulled me after him. Faster than Daggum was able to react, I landed on that finger, planted my feet on his slimy green skin, and slid down it.

Across his finger, then the back of his hand, and then down the mountainous slope that was his forearm. The speed was nearly blinding as I careened toward the distant crook of his elbow, but his arm was so wide that there was no chance of me falling off the sides.

“GIDDERDUN!” he roared, sounding weirdly petulant for a monster big enough to eat blue whales like sardines.

Moving like a mountain that had just woken up and was still half asleep, he raised his arm up toward his face. Out came that disgusting purple tongue of his again, and I watched him press it against the scales just above his elbow—exactly like I had planned.

It wasn’t a good plan. It was actually a terrible plan. But it was the only plan I could think of, so that made it a good terrible plan by default.

A terrible sticky, wet sound that would haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life filled the air as Daggum licked his arm, trying to slurp me up like some kind of evil street sweeper.

I pulled out Prunkle and Prunkle, charging them and my shoes with magic as I slimeboarded my way down Daggum’s arm. With my hands and feet glowing, I released it out of my shoes and launched myself into the air.

Even though Daggum was only a few inches away—by his estimates at least—that still put his face far out of my magic jump’s reach. Luckily, I still had my toys. Once the momentum of my jump began to run out, I fired off Prinkle and Prunkle, sending me surging even farther across the gap. Then, putting them back in my belt, I whipped out Globber again and hurled him toward Daggum.

My trusty sticky hand hit the monstrous piece of surströmming (look it up) right between his eyes, and I zipped toward him like a fly who had just spotted the world’s biggest pile of doodoo.

“GIDDER?" Daggum asked in surprise, doing his best to cross his eyes as I dangled in between them, suspended over the three thousand-foot drop.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, you undercooked po’boy!”

“DUNN!”

“I’ve fought a living sewer before,” I said, “and it didn’t smell half as bad as you!”

That was only half true. I really have fought a living sewer, but as for whether or not it smelled better than Daggum, I couldn’t really tell you. After I was done beating the literal crap out of it, I had promptly done a swan dive into an empty pool to wipe it from my memory.

Luckily for me, though, blasphemous affronts to nature have surprisingly thin skin. As soon as the insult left my mouth, I felt Daggum’s entire body go tense with shock. A deep rumbling filled the air. At first I thought it was an usually long clap of thunder, but when Daggum bared his teeth and it grew even louder, I realized that he was growling at me.

“GIDDERDUUUUUUUUNNNNNN!” he roared in unknowable Lovecraftian fury, and raised his hand.

I braced myself, charging my shoes with magic. This was it. My entire plan, slapped together as it was, depended on how the next few seconds played out.

Daggum swung at me.

I kicked off of his face.

Day turned to night again as that gargantuan hand closed in one me. I angled my body downwards, the burst of magic from my shoes sending me streaking through the rain like an arrow from a bow. It felt like I was cliff diving in a green canyon that smelled like the poopdeck on a crab boat the night everyone there got food poisoning.

The poopdeck being where you, you know, poop, right?

The gap between Daggum’s hand and Daggum’s face was shrinking by the second, but I was already falling as fast as I could. All I could do was pray that I made it to the bottom before…

Suddenly, there was daylight again, and another unimaginably loud BANG! filled the air above me. Pain shot through my eardrums, and for a few seconds everything went silent.

Flipping myself rightside up, I spun around in midair just in time to see Daggum go reeling from the blow he’d just dealt himself. His other hand slipped free of the pillar, and the Lord of the Deepnecks plummeted down toward the water below as if God had decided to do a little catch and release fishing.

His mouth opened wide in what I assumed was one last indignant “GIDDERDUN!”, but thankfully all I could hear was the ringing in my ears.

Globber globbed onto the pillar, boinging me back upwards, and I fixed my eyes on my goal, still so far above me. Now that that was out of the way, I could focus on—

My hearing came back just as Daggum landed in the Sea Betwixt, sending up apocalyptic-sized tidal waves with a titanic SPLOOOOSH!

Plumes of water that would have looked like skyscrapers to a skyscraper came rushing upwards. I had just enough time to look down and give a feeble “Oh, sauerkraut,” before one of them hit me.

Up and down immediately lost all meaning. It was like a dam had been opened, and I’d been caught in the flood. All I could do was hold my breath and hope that it didn’t decide to snap my neck or slam me into the side of the pillar. My lungs started to burn. The world was growing dark…

And then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the water was gone. A freezing cold gust of wind slammed into me, shocking me awake again. I gasped down a breath, looking around.

The Sea Betwixt was gone. The pillar was gone. All I could see were dark gray clouds in every direction, occasionally disgorging a bolt of lightning. Where the flying blood-sucking tater tots was this? Had I drowned and gone to the most boring version of Heaven possible?

Then I looked down and saw the pure white circle below me, and my brain just about broke.

Daggum’s splash had carried me all the way to the top of the pillar!

Not that it would matter for much longer. My upward momentum had finally run out, and I was falling again. If I didn’t do something in the next couple of seconds, I was going to be right back where I’d been before.

Giving Globber a good throw, I managed to latch him onto the very edge of the pillar just as I went speeding past. I held onto him with a white-knuckled grip as he went taut, and then boinged me back upwards again.

I rocketed over the edge of the pillar a second time, doing a wild and totally-on-purpose cartwheel before flopping down onto the cold, hard stone as gracefully as a fish.

I had made it to the top.

I had made it to the top!

It was so hard to believe that I just wanted to lay there and wait for reality to figure out it had made a mistake and teleport me into Daggum’s stomach or something. But then lightning flashed, and something caught my eye when it reflected the light back into the clouds. I rolled over, still gasping for breath, and my eyes widened when I saw what all of this had been for.

A giant golden key.

I scrambled to my feet with new urgency and ran for it. That key was the…well, key to getting my family back. Every single thing I had done over the past three days had been leading up to this moment. I could almost hear my parents' voices, feel their warmth as they hugged me.

The key was almost as tall as I was, and it stood upright, inserted into the pillar's floor Sword in the Stone-style. Grabbing it, I heaved upwards, but it refused to budge. After thinking for a second, I strained against it again, trying to turn it to the left. Something deep inside the pillar groaned, and the giant stone lock gave way, rotating the key counterclockwise until—

“Yes!” I yelled when it suddenly came free. I pulled it up and out of the pillar, grunting with the effort. This thing weighed a freaking ton! I had to hold it in both hands, almost like a guitar.

Then I paused, looking around, as a new problem presented itself: how the toilet water cherry limeade was I supposed to get down from here?

As if to answer my question, the pillar shook beneath my feet and began to descend. It was like riding an elevator down from the top floor of a skyscraper, except here the skyscraper was the elevator. The ocean down below churned and waved harder than ever before as the mountainous hunk of rock sank into it. At the rate it was going, I would be back in the ocean in less than a minute.

The…deepneck infested ocean.

“Ohhh,” I said softly, watching as their pudgy green bodies took shape again down below. They were all huddled around the base of the pillar, waiting for me. “I see the problem now.”

A problem that I had already solved without even knowing it, I realized as I spotted the Jiggly Trombone’s sails billowing in the stormy winds. The ship surged through the ocean, completely untouched by our fishy foes. I could even see Ethan and Jade waving frantically for me from where the ship’s pointy front-bit used to be.

I had sent them away knowing that the deepnecks only attacked if you were within a certain distance of the pillar. If Ethan and Jade could get far enough away, they would be left alone. And now that the deepnecks were all gathered here at the pillar, there was nothing to stop them from coming to rescue me!

I looked down again nervously. I was barely a hundred feet above the water now, and even that was rapidly shrinking. I couldn't just stay here and wait for the entire pillar to sink. Even if the waters weren't filled with deepnecks, there was no way I'd be able to swim with this key weighing me down. And the deepnecks were keeping the Jiggly Trombone from sailing right up to the pillar. That meant I would have to meet them halfway.

“I need you one more time, buddy!” I told Globber, pulling him from my belt. Propping the key up on my shoulder with one hand, I globbed Globber on to the ledge facing the ship with the other. Then I turned and wobbled as fast as I could the other way. Reaching the far side of the pillar, I jumped!

Globber went taut almost immediately…but he didn't yoink me back upwards. It was the key, I realized! It must have weighed over a hundred pounds. Was that too much for poor, overworked Globber to handle? Was this where he finally snapped, leaving me to drown in a horde of bloodthirsty hillbilly fish—

BOING!

Globber pulled through at the last second, yanking me back up into the air and catapulting me off the pillar at slightly less than a bajillion miles per hour.

“I LOVE YOU, GLOBBER!” I screamed as I soared out over the Sea Betwixt.

I was rapidly approaching the Jiggly Trombone. I readied Globber for one last heroic rescue, but I needn’t have bothered because, with a skillful spin of the wheel, Captain Kook turned the ship in that way ships aren't supposed to turn again, and I flew straight into the sail like the world's biggest catcher's mitt.

The world spun, my head trying to come to terms with the fact that I had been going at approximately the speed of light, and now I wasn't moving at all. Well, I was moving. Just not in the direction I had been living two seconds ago. Specifically, I was moving downwards as I fell from the sail and crash landed on the Jiggly Trombone’s floor.

Ow.

“Henry!” Ethan yelled, racing to my side. “Are you okay?”

“Are you hurt?” Jade asked, kneeling on my other side.

I ignored them both, forcing myself to my feet and pointing at Captain Kook. “Get us the undercooked escargot out of here!”

“Wet Willies are accepted as legal currency in Australia!” he agreed, turning the ship to head back in what I hoped was the way back to Jah Beryge.

“HENRY!” Jade exclaimed, pointing.

I spun around. Behind us, the last few inches of the bright white pillar vanished into the ocean. The deepnecks were already getting ready to swarm the ship again. I drew Splatsy. Let them come. After everything I had done to get this key, I wasn't going to let them take it from me without a fight.

But then I saw what was rising out of the water behind them, and my heart fell into my stomach.

“Oh, ghost pepper poppers!” I yelled as Daggum’s colossal form emerged from the Sea Betwixt again. “Captain, full steam ahead!”

“This isn't a steamship, Henry!” Ethan yelled.

“So what?” I shot back.

“So that's not how it works!”

“Then do whatever you do to make these stupid boats go faster!”

“We can't! We can only go as fast as the wind—”

“Look out!” Jade warned us.

Daggum's arm reached back, then shot forward, and something came hurtling end over end toward us. Something big.

“GIDDERDUUUUNNNNN!” he howled one last time.

The thing began to descend, heading straight for us, and I was finally able to get a good look at it. It was a beer can. Daggum had thrown a beer can the size of a small cruise ship at us!

“Peanut butter and pepperoni sandwiches!” I cursed.

All I could do was watch as it came plummeting toward the Jiggly Trombone, light glinting off its shiny aluminum shell, the word Bru-Thulhu printed on the side in green letters the size of houses. But if I was right—and I prayed to the whoopee cushion in the sky that I was—as long as we kept going as fast as we could, we were going to be…

The beer can hit the water just a dozen or so feet behind the ship, sending up a splash that would have put Old Faithful to shame.

“Hold on to something!” I yelled.

Half a second later, the wave hit us, and the Jiggly Trombone was lifted about fifty feet higher. More importantly, we were pushed forward so quickly that the ship's mast bent at an alarming angle from all the air the sail was catching.

Suddenly, it wasn't raining anymore. Above us, the sky began to grow brighter. Little by little, the wave shrank as the giant beer can’s splash dwindled, until the sea was as calm as a baby's butt once again.

That's how that saying goes, right?

Gasping for breath, my blood feeling like it was being charged by Spazzy Basil, I turned to look behind us. I could still see the storm clouds casting their permanent shadow over the ocean, and underneath them was the hulking shape of Daggum. For a second, I was afraid that he would chase us all the way back to Jah Beryge.

Instead, folding his arms like a spoiled toddler, he sank back into the ocean to sulk.

We had made it.

With a sigh of relief, I fell backwards onto the Jiggly Trombone’s floor.

“Henry?” Ethan asked, worried. “Are you okay?”

“I'm going to take another nap,” I said, already half asleep. “Wake me up when we get there.”


NEXT CHAPTER 1/28/26