Over the Underworld Read online

  Also by Adam Shaughnessy

  The Unbelievable FIB 1: The Trickster’s Tale

  2

  The Unbelievable FIB

  OVER THE UNDERWORLD

  by

  ADAM SHAUGHNESSY

  Algonquin Young Readers 2016

  For my mother, always.

  And for Jane, forevermore.

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Algonquin Young Readers

  CHAPTER 1

  The old man sat in his chair and watched the fire with his one good eye. Two ravens perched nearby, Thought and Memory. He ignored them the way one ignores familiar companions or unwanted guests.

  Sometimes he wondered which they were.

  As he gazed into the fire before him, he imagined he could see images of gods, giants, and mortals in the dancing flames. They acted out the events of their lives like performers in a show, each playing her or his role.

  Now events were occurring that forced him to think about the performance’s conclusion.

  Sitting there, alone, the old man thought about the days to come.

  He thought about the future.

  So far, it was going just the way he remembered it.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Mister Fox is a jerk!”

  ABE looked around to see if anybody was close enough to have heard Pru’s shout. Fortunately, he and Pru stood in a remote section of Middleton Cemetery. The only bodies nearby lay six feet under the ground and probably weren’t very interested in Pru’s frustration with their former mentor. They stayed quiet.

  ABE did, too.

  He’d learned that there were two things you didn’t talk to Pru about when she was in this kind of mood: One, Mister Fox. Two, everything else.

  It was best to just let her work through things on her own.

  “He said we’d see him again,” Pru complained.

  “Well, technically, he said it was true we wouldn’t see him.” The words were out before ABE could stop them. So much for staying quiet.

  Pru put her hands on her hips. “You know, ABE, one of these days I’m going to teach you that honesty isn’t always the best policy.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Pru said, letting her arms fall to her sides. She sat down on a tree stump and flashed ABE a smile. “It’s not you I’m mad at. Not really. Seriously, though. Didn’t you think we’d see him again?”

  “Yeah, I did. I mean, especially since you thought we would. You always understood him better than I did. Well, except for the time you thought he was Loki and tried to set fire to his house . . .”

  “Not helping, ABE. Don’t make me change my mind about not being mad at you.”

  “Right.”

  Pru sighed. “It’s been almost a year.”

  “Almost,” ABE agreed. Mister Fox had arrived in Middleton in his magical Henhouse, headquarters of the Fantasy Investigation Bureau—or, as Mister Fox called it, the Unbelievable FIB—in October of the year before. He’d come to investigate an invasion of gods and giants from Norse mythology.

  That’s what Mister Fox did. He investigated mysteries that involved magic and myth. But he didn’t do it alone. He couldn’t. He needed the help of kids. They had a talent for seeing magic where others couldn’t. So Mister Fox had recruited ABE and Pru to become Fibbers, junior members of his detective agency. Together, they’d vanquished giants and foiled the attempts of Loki, the Norse trickster, to recover a magical artifact called the Eye of Odin.

  But that had all happened last year. Now it was the end of August and school was about to start. Pru and ABE had spent the better part of a year waiting for Mister Fox’s return, hiking the wooded trails around Middleton at least once a week. Pru called it patrolling and insisted they do it just to be on the safe side. Their patrols almost always ended in the cemetery, where they could check to see if the Henhouse had returned.

  It never had.

  Neither had Ratatosk the Insult Squirrel. That’s what Pru called him, anyway. Really, Ratatosk was the messenger of the Norse gods. But since so many of the messages he carried were insults, he had developed a rather . . . unique . . . way of speaking to people. Despite that, Ratatosk had become their friend, and ABE missed his company as much as Pru did.

  In fact, all the Mythics (Mister Fox’s term for beings from Worlds of Myth) who had been in Middleton had left after their battle over the Eye. Even the town patriarch, Old Man Grimnir, who was really Odin in disguise, had left. According to the people who ran the museum wing of his mansion, he’d “gone traveling.” No one knew when he’d be back.

  “Mister Fox could still show up,” ABE said, slipping his looking glass, a gift from the detective, back into his belt.

  The looking glass resembled a normal magnifying glass. It had a wooden handle with a brass raven’s head at its base and a brass frame around the glass itself. But the device was anything but normal. One side of the glass was actually a mirror that had the power to banish Mythics back to their own world. The other side functioned like a regular magnifying glass, except it could also identify and track Mythics that appeared on Earth.

  “I know he could still show up. But will he?” Pru glanced at ABE out of the corner of her eye. “I still think we should try my idea to catch his attention in case the Henhouse goes by overhead.”

  “Pru . . . I figured it out. It would take about fifty-two fallen trees to spell out Mister Fox, come back. And that’s assuming all the logs were the same size. I’m not sure we could cut down that many trees. I definitely don’t think we should be setting dozens of dead trees on fire.”

  “Fine.” Pru stuck her tongue out. “I’ll come up with a new plan.”

  Pru stood up on the tree stump and pulled her own looking glass from her messenger bag. It looked a lot like ABE’s, only it had a squirrel’s head at the base of its handle. She held the glass to her eye and spun in a slow circle. When she’d completed one rotation, she sighed again and slipped her glass back into her bag.

  “What if this is it, ABE? What if he doesn’t come back and this is it? Just this . . . every day, forever?”

  ABE didn’t know what to say. A part of him did want to see Mister Fox again. Another part of him wasn’t sure. He still had nightmares about when Loki and his chief frost giant, Gristling, had abducted him and taken him to Asgard, the world of the Norse gods.

  Silence filled the space between them as the late afternoon sun warmed their skin. Finally, Pru glanced at her watch. “I guess we should be getting back. Tonight’s the open house. I can’t believe it’s time to go back to school already.”

  “Yeah,” ABE agreed. He found himself thinking of fresh school supplies and crisp new textbooks with spines t
hat crackled when you opened them for the first time.

  “What do you look so happy about?” Pru asked, eying him suspiciously.

  “Me? Oh, nothing.” Pru was coming out of her mood about Mister Fox. ABE didn’t want to push her buttons by admitting that he was actually excited about the start of a new school year.

  “I was just looking at the bright side of school starting,” he said instead.

  “Which is?”

  “Well, we may have to go back to school. But at least you—we—won’t have to see Mrs. Edleman anymore.”

  CHAPTER 3

  As he and his dad drove to the school that night, ABE wondered if he had been too optimistic earlier.

  It was true that, as seventh graders, he and Pru wouldn’t be in Mrs. Edleman’s class—or Cell Block E, as Pru called it—anymore. Unfortunately, Middleton was so small that the junior high school was just an addition to the elementary school. It didn’t even have its own entrance. So while he and Pru would no longer have to endure Mrs. Edleman’s tyrannical approach to public education, they were still likely to see their former teacher every once in a while.

  “So,” his dad said, “I bet you’re disappointed about school starting, huh?”

  “Me? Oh . . . yeah.” ABE folded up the class schedule he’d been studying and stuffed it in his pocket.

  “Right? I know I always hated the end of summer vacation when I was a kid. No more pickup games of Wiffle ball or touch football . . .”

  ABE fiddled with his seat belt as his dad’s voice trailed off. He tried to think of something he and his dad had in common that they could talk about to fill the sudden quiet. He was still thinking when they pulled into the school’s parking lot.

  “Well, here we are,” his dad said. “And look, there’s Pru and her mom.”

  “ABE, over here!” Pru said, waving, as he and his dad got out of the car. “Hey, Mr. Evans. Catch the game last night?”

  “Sure did, sport!”

  ABE walked around the back of the car and greeted Pru’s mom. “Hi, Mrs. Potts.”

  “Hi, ABE.” She ruffled his hair. She kind of had a fascination with his curly hair. He didn’t mind. “Hi, Gavin. No Maddie tonight?”

  “Working, unfortunately.”

  “That’s too bad. Well, shall we head inside?” Pru’s mom said. “Ready for a new year, Pru?”

  “If I say no can I have another month of summer vacation?”

  “Nice try, kiddo.”

  They joined the flow of people walking from the parking lot to the school buildings. The first fallen leaves of the season blew across the pavement in front of them as they approached the entrance.

  “What room are we looking for?” Pru’s mom asked as they stepped inside.

  “Thirteen,” Pru answered. “I can’t believe our homeroom is number thirteen. Like that’s not an omen.”

  “There are no such things as omens,” Pru’s mother said. “Don’t read anything into a room number. There’s no predicting the future.”

  Pru looked back at ABE and raised her eyebrows dramatically. He hid a grin.

  “Looks like this is us,” ABE’s dad said when they found the right room.

  ABE let Pru, her mom, and his dad go in first. He followed them but stopped short just inside the doorway, surprised by the appearance of their new homeroom.

  Mrs. Edleman’s classroom had been set up with neat rows of desks all facing the front of the room. The walls had been covered with rules.

  The desks in this new classroom had been clustered together into makeshift tables with four or five chairs around each. Posters of book covers and pictures of authors lined the walls. ABE beamed when he saw his favorite book, The Phantom Tollbooth, among them.

  He pulled out his folded schedule. It said what his classes were, and when. It also listed his teachers. He hadn’t paid too much attention to his teachers at first—he hadn’t recognized any of their names. Now he looked more closely and saw that he had the same teacher for homeroom and language arts, Mr. Jeffries.

  “Hey. Who’s that?” Pru asked as the four of them settled into seats around a table near the back and a young man with neatly trimmed stubble stepped to the front of the room.

  “The adult standing at the front of your homeroom?” Pru’s mother asked. “Well, if I was going to go out on a limb, I would guess that’s your homeroom teacher. Said the mother to her would-be-detective daughter.”

  “Funny, mom. Seriously, though. You think? But he’s wearing sneakers. Do teachers wear sneakers? Do they even own them? Weird. Imagine Mrs. Edleman in sneakers.” Pru shivered in her seat. “Ouch. I think I just broke my brain.”

  “Shush,” her mom said, giving Pru a playful nudge with her elbow. “You’ll get me in trouble. There’s no talking in class.”

  ABE smiled. Pru had said she and her mom hadn’t always gotten along so well. But they seemed to have a great relationship from what ABE had seen over the past year. He glanced at his dad, who directed a glassy-eyed stare to the front of the room.

  “Hi, everyone, and welcome to Middleton Junior High School,” the man with the stubble and sneakers said. He gestured to a poster on the wall beside the whiteboard. “One of my favorite poets, Jean Inglelow, once wrote:

  Children, ay, forsooth,

  They bring their own love with them when they come,

  But if they come not there is peace and rest . . .

  “Since you’ve all been good enough to show up tonight, I suppose I can say good-bye to peace and rest.”

  Chuckles and snorts of laughter filled the room. ABE was surprised that some of the laughter came from Pru.

  Not everyone was amused, though. A boy at the table next to theirs whispered to his friend, “Forsooth? Who says that? What does it even mean?”

  “Actually,” ABE said, turning in his seat, “sooth is another word for truth, so forsooth basically means ‘in truth.’ It’s an old English word and—”

  Beside him, Pru groaned. ABE turned back to look at her and saw his dad studying the table, red-faced.

  “I did the whole ABE-the-walking-dictionary thing again, didn’t I?” he whispered to Pru. She nodded. ABE heard snorts of laughter from the table next to theirs. He sank into his chair as his teacher continued speaking.

  “I’m kidding, of course. I’m thrilled to see everyone here tonight. I’m Mr. Jeffries. Everyone who’s too young to drive a car, I’m going to be your homeroom teacher and your language arts teacher. For everyone else in the room, I’m one of the people your child will likely be complaining about for the next nine months or so. Sorry for that.”

  More laughter.

  “Careful, kiddo,” Pru’s mother said, leaning in to whisper to Pru. “Someone might actually think you’re enjoying yourself at school.”

  Mr. Jeffries kept them a little longer. He explained the school’s website and gave out his e-mail address. Then he invited all the students (and their families) to walk around and meet the rest of their teachers in other classrooms.

  “Well, I guess that wasn’t too painful,” Pru admitted to ABE later in the evening as they left the gym. She’d checked first to make sure their parents were out of earshot behind them.

  “Yeah. Mr. Jeffries seems nice. And funny.”

  “A little, I guess. He’s an improvement over you-know-who at least.” Pru stopped short, her eyes suddenly narrowed. “Oh, man. Speak of the devil.”

  ABE followed Pru’s gaze. Mr. Jeffries was walking down the hall toward them, but he wasn’t alone. Mrs. Edleman walked by his side.

  “Abe,” Mrs. Edleman said, looking down over her glasses as they approached. “How nice to see you. And Prudence, of course.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Edleman,” ABE said.

  “Mrs. Edleman,” Pru said. ABE imagined he could hear western showdown music in the background.

  “Are these former students of yours, Mrs. Edleman?” Mr. Jeffries said. “How nice! I believe I have the pleasure of having them both in my homeroom. ABE and Pruden
ce, isn’t it? Sorry. I’m still learning names.”

  “It’s Pru.”

  ABE didn’t think Pru realized how snappish she sounded. Mrs. Edleman sort of had that effect on her.

  “So, um, did you have a nice summer, Mrs. Edleman?” he said to change the subject.

  “I did, Abraham, thank you for asking.”

  “It’s . . . uh . . . I’m not . . .” That wasn’t his name. ABE was an acronym, a nickname made from the initials of his real name, Aloysius Bartholomew Evans. Should he correct Mrs. Edleman? Before he could decide if it was okay to correct a teacher, his dad and Pru’s mom stepped up behind them.

  “Mrs. Edleman,” Pru’s mom said with a nod as she placed a hand on Pru’s shoulder. Mrs. Edleman returned the nod.

  “Mrs. Potts. Mr. Evans. A pleasure to see you both. Did you enjoy the open house?”

  “We did,” Pru’s mom said. “In fact, we’d just finished up and were about to go get some ice cream. Gavin and ABE, would you like to join us?”

  “Sounds good,” ABE’s dad said.

  “Yeah,” ABE agreed, admiring how quickly Pru’s mom had managed to get them out of the chance encounter with Mrs. Edleman.

  It just wasn’t quick enough.

  “Prudence,” Mrs. Edleman said before they could make their escape, “just remember, this is a new year. That means a fresh start. I’m sure you will make the most of it. There’s no need to repeat past mistakes and problem behaviors.”

  Pru’s face turned bright red. ABE followed her gaze from Mrs. Edleman to Mr. Jeffries, and he saw their new teacher watching the exchange with raised eyebrows.

  Pru was about to lose it. ABE needed to say something to distract her. What? He could ask Mr. Jeffries how he liked Middleton, since he was new to the school. Or was that a weird question to ask a teacher? He needed to say something.

  “Let’s go, Pru,” her mother said, instead, rescuing Pru (and ABE).

  ABE breathed a sigh of relief. Realizing that he was shifting his weight from foot to foot, he forced himself to stop. His mom always laughed when he did that, but in a nice way. She said it reminded her of when he was a toddler and just learning to walk. She said he would walk in place, like he couldn’t decide which way to go.