Zorgamazoo

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Zorgamazoo

 

RAZORBILL

 

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
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Copyright © 2008 Robert Paul Weston

All rights reserved

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eISBN : 978-1-101-00269-8

Before we begin you may want to arrange:

 

a blanket,
a cushion,
a comfortable seat,
and maybe some cocoa and something to eat.

I'll warn you, of course, before we commence,
my story is eerie and full of suspense,
brimming with danger and narrow escapes,
and creatures of many remarkable shapes.
Dragons and ogres and gorgons and more,
and creatures you've not even heard of before.
And faraway places? There's plenty of those!
(And menacing villains to tingle your toes.)

 

So ready your mettle and steady your heart.
It's time for my story's mysterious start…

 

We begin in a subway, under the ground,
where people in trains go rolling around,
in hurrying haste and in scurrying mobs,
wandering off to their ponderous jobs.

 

Much of the time they would linger in vain.
They would stand in the station awaiting a train.
They would push in between the ticket machines,
like fish huddled into a tin of sardines.

 

They clutched at the purses and cases they brought,
anxious and angry and overly wrought,
hoping a train would come barreling past,
pick them up quick, and dash away fast!

 

There was one little girl who waited as well:
a girl by the name of

While everyone else was busy or bored,
this one little girl should not be ignored.
For unlike the crowd, she was never inert.
Her senses were sharp and awake and alert.

 

She kept to herself, but she wasn't alone.
She was joined by her guardian, Mrs. Krabone,
who stood with Katrina, clutching her hand,
in the flickering light of the passenger stand.

 

They were hunched near the tunnel
of mortar and brick
where the lighting was dim and shadows were thick,
where Katrina was curious, squinting her eye…
she could swear that a
creature
was shuffling by.

At first it was vague, just a shadowy form,
like a ship in a mist or the fog of a storm.
So she gaped with a steady, unfaltering stare,
to determine for certain:

 

Yet try as she might, the tunnel was black,
obscuring the path of the train and the track.

 

She nearly was ready to give up her search,
when the subway arrived in a lumbering lurch.
It showered the station in glimmering light,
and that's when she saw something scurry from sight!

 

“Hey, Krabby!” she whispered. “There's something I see.
It's smaller than you, but it's bigger than me.
It's loping around in the tunnel, I swear!
It looked like a warthog, or maybe…a bear!”

 

“Don't call me ‘Krabby!'” spat Mrs. Krabone,
in a violent and rather vociferous tone.
“You're a fool and a fibber!” the woman accused.
“Such ludicrous lying is never excused!”

You see, my good reader, this had happened before,
since Katrina Katrell—well, she loved to explore!

 

On her way home from school, whenever she could,
she would cut through a park or a forested wood;
and more often than not, in some part of a park
where no one else went until after dark,
she would see something strange, something utterly odd,
something hulking or hairy…and possibly clawed.
She then would run home, with a story to tell—
where Mrs. Krabone would do nothing but yell.

 

“Katrina!” she'd holler. “You ignorant thing!
Your brain must be made out of paper and string!
All this rot about yetis and monsters in lochs!
They're nothing but lies! They're nothing but crocks!”

 

Old Krabby, you see, was a bit of a witch.
In the pit of her heart was a serious glitch.
She didn't have time for the fanciful things,
like pirates and gadgets and creatures and kings.

She believed that a girl should be perfectly prim,
and shouldn't be guided by whimsy and whim.

As such, she was certain Katrina was nuts:
Too lively, too feisty, and too full of guts.

 

Yet the two were related. Yes, that much was true,
but
how
they were linked—well, nobody knew.

 

Their relation was distant, hard to define,
yet connected somehow by a family line,
like forty-first cousins, ten times removed
(the bloodline, however, had never been proved).

 

 

 

And so, once again, they had come to collide,
with each of them taking their opposite side,
as they stood near the tracks, where under the ground,
Katrina thought beasties were creeping around.

 

“But Krabby!” she cried. “It really is true!
It looked like a thing that escaped from a zoo!
But I'm not a dullard! And I'm not a dunce!
So you gotta believe me, if only this once!”

Mrs. Krabone said nothing at first.
Her face went all flushed, as if ready to burst.
Then her lips twisted up into sort of a grin,
and she wrangled Katrina by ear and by chin.
Leaning in close, so Katrina could hear,
she whispered maliciously into her ear:

 

“You listen to me. This
lying
must end.
When we get home, here is what I intend:
I will call up my friend, a Lobotomy Doc,
a talented man at the butchery block.

 

His scalpels are polished to shimmering shine.
He'll slice from your eye to the top of your spine.

 

He'll cut from your brow to the top of your head.
Your brain? He'll replace it with something instead,
something quite nice, like a pastry or cake,
or why not a succulent caribou steak?

 

Your original brain, he will lock in a box.
For that's what they do, those Lobotomy Docs.”

Before the poor girl could swallow her fear,
Mrs. Krabone gave a tug on her ear.
So writhing and wriggling and wincing in pain,
Katrina was bullied inside of the train…

 

The subway struck up with its
clackity-clacks
,
rolling into the tunnel and over the tracks.

 

Katrina sat quietly watching the wall;
it was smeared with graffiti and scandalous scrawl.
She was searching the dark for the thing she had seen.
What was it?
she thought.
What could it have been?

 

At first, there was nothing that seemed out of place,
but everything changed…when she made out: