The Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless Read online

  For my future child. Just the idea of you

  puts the biggest smile on my face.

  I can't wait to meet you and to bite your little feet.

  May be it was the smell of the Snargle's horrible breath, blowing from its rancid, rotten, razor-toothed mouth. Or was it the horribly loud clang, crash and clunk that thundered from the Snargle's slithery snout that woke me? Yes, that was it. It was a sort of twelve-human-skulls-tumbling-together-inside-a-barrel-barreling-down-a-rocky-mountainside noise that filled the evil cavern.

  Either way, there's really nothing worse than a snoring, overweight Snargleflougasaurus, its lizardlike, spotted, yellowish belly rising and falling with each stinky breath. Ugh. It's like a poisonous soufflé made with the world's most vile ingredients.

  As my eyes adjusted to the smoky darkness, I realized there was one thing far worse than a Snargleflougasaurus: finding my bruised and bloody father locked in a giant ironclad birdcage suspended over a bottomless pit of fiery molten lava.

  That's definitely worse.

  Did I mention that my little brother, Max, and I were trapped in a giant ironclad birdcage too? It was terrible. Even though I am a McFearless, I have to admit that I was pretty scared. I had to find a way to get us out of there before it was too late. The fate of my family—and possibly the world—was at stake.

  Calm down. Deep breath in, deep breath out. I've got to relax. Deep breath in. I can do this, I told myself.

  My name is Minerva McFearless. I live at 1523 Rockinghorse Lane in Whistlesqueak. I'm eleven years old, and these are the things I can do:

  I can read and write in Monstrosity, which is very exciting because Monstrosity is the secret language that all monsters use to communicate, and it's the oldest language on the planet. Unfortunately, I'm not so good at speaking Monstrosity. It sounds like I'm trying to gargle two starving miniature weasels desperately fighting over a half-filled tin can of peanuts.

  I can do a one-handed cartwheel into a round-off, usually on the first try.

  Without bragging, I'm a really smart kid. And I am great at geography. I can name all of Whistlesqueak's surrounding cities within a three-hundred-mile radius in alphabetical order, starting with the picturesque palazzi of Applelonia and going all the way up to the haunted hillsides of Zarmevil. In fact, there are 208 cities, to be precise. And if I wanted to, I could name them all backward. My dad is always telling me I'm too smart for my own good and that's why I'm always getting into trouble.

  My nine-year-old brother, Maxwell McFearless, on the other hand, is one of the most annoying brats on the planet. Here are some very good reasons for saying so:

  He likes to pull my hair.

  He chews with his mouth open, and food bits are always flying out. It's so gross.

  He's constantly digging holes in our backyard and burying my stuffed animals against their will. In fact, he has transformed our backyard into a dreadful cemetery. On rainy days, you can see tiny, stuffed, fuzzy hands sticking out of muddy, soaked graves. Every time I go out there, I imagine their cute yet ghostly voices calling out to me:

  “Why didn't you save us, Minerva? How could you let Max do this to us, Minerva? We'll never forgive you for this, Minerva. Never.”

  Unfortunately, my diabolical brother mixed horse manure into the dirt, so digging up my animals is out of the question. My father told me he'd make Max dig them out and wash them, but I'm afraid of poop germs. I feel so guilty. It makes me want to punch Max right in the face. He makes it hard for me to love him, but I do. Because, for better or worse, he's my little brother, and there's nothing I can do to change that.

  However, I do feel that it's my job as an older sister to give Max equal parts love and torture, which I try to do on a regular basis.

  At that moment, Max was next to me, lying facedown on the rusted floor of our filthy birdcage prison. His nose was two inches away from the monster flotsam of undigested bone fragments and other gross chunks of uneaten gore that littered our dangling domicile of death.

  I could make out the bump on the back of his head, in the exact spot where the Snargle had clobbered him with its tail. The swollen lump on my own cranium was throbbing and pounding something awful. If Max's head felt half as bad as mine, he was really going to hate it when I woke him up.

  By pinching him really hard.

  Really, really hard.

  Look, I know what you're thinking. How could I be so cruel? What if the Snargle heard his cries of pain and turned its attention toward us? Well, the truth is … Snargleflougasauri are notorious for their deafness, and it was time for Max to wake up.

  Plus, I'll take any opportunity I can get for a little revenge.

  “Max, wake up,” I whispered soothingly as I squeezed a sensitive patch of skin (just below his armpit) with my fingernails.

  “Ow! Why'd you do that?” Max yelped.

  “Stuffed animals,” I replied.

  “Arghh, my head,” Max moaned, rubbing his little scalp all over. He focused his bleary eyes on me. “I can't believe you pinched me. What's wrong with you?”

  “I had to wake you up somehow, didn't I?”

  Max scowled. Then a winning thought seemed to come to his criminal mind.

  “That didn't hurt me at all, Mini,” Max taunted.

  “It did too, you liar,” I answered, instantly annoyed.

  “No, it didn't, Mini,” Max said.

  “Max, stop calling me that!” He knows I hate it when he calls me Mini. I'm a year and two months older than Max, but he's two inches taller. I hate being bigger but smaller!

  Life is so cruel. Maybe I should have pinched him again.

  “Minerva? Max! Is that you?” Our father's weary voice brought Max and me to instant attention. “I thought I'd never see you again.”

  “Oh, Daddy, are you okay?” I cried.

  “I'm a little banged and bruised, but I'll survive.”

  “Well, don't worry, we're gonna get you out of here,” Max said … and then he whispered to me, “Won't we, Minerva?”

  “No!” snapped my father. “I don't want you kids doing anything. It's too dangerous. Hold tight. I'll find a way to get us all out of here somehow.”

  “But, Dad, we can do it. We're tough,” I said with a great deal of determination.

  “Yeah, we made it here all by ourselves,” bragged Max, looking a little upset by our father's lack of confidence in us.

  “And we even fought monsters,” I added huffily.

  “Listen to me, children. I know you both think that you know what you're doing. But trust me, you have no idea what we're up against here. A creature unlike any other, the most vilely vile, the most horribly horrible, the most murderously murderous monster of them all.”

  I gasped. “You don't mean—”

  “Yes,” our father replied. “The Zarmaglorg—the king of evil. And we're deep within the demonic depths of Castle Doominstinkinfart—a place no mortal has ever escaped.”

  “Oh, no!” Max and I cried.

  “Oh, yes. I'm afraid it's true. He has been torturing me nonstop ever since I got here. He desires the evil magic held within the Enotslived Diamond.” I suddenly realized that my father—the magnificent Manfred McFearless, the most McFearless man in the world—was scared.

  Not good at all, I thought.

  “Mini, Dad, you might want to see this,” sputtered Max. He poked his head through the iron bars of our cage and pointed at the fiery pit below.

  A millisecond later, an explosion of tremendous fury burst from the odious depths. The blast sent our cages crashing into each other, smashing Max and me into the bars of our hanging prison. We were tossed about like
two unlucky kittens zipped inside a suitcase mercilessly dropped off a cliff. I was thrown into the rusted lock of our cage door, knocking all the air out of my lungs. And Max whacked his jaw so hard that I was sure he had shattered all his teeth. A cacophony bounced around the stalactites that hung from the cavern ceiling. Massive swarms of unhappy bats detached themselves from their cozy hiding places and flew around us in a panicked frenzy.

  Thirteen more massive balls of billowing fire erupted from the chasm below. Flames licked angrily at the cave walls and flew right past our cage, singeing the hairs off my brother's head. The smell of brimstone, burnt hair and fried bats was too much to bear, even for a McFearless.

  Then, just as quickly as it had started, the quaking and baking stopped. For the time being, we were spared the cruel fate of being broiled alive. I determined three things as soon as the smoke cleared:

  We were still breathing. (Good.)

  The lock on our cage was busted. (Really good.)

  The Snargle was finished with its nap. (Not so good.)

  To keep warm, Max and I headed upstairs to sit by the fireplace in the library. That's my favorite room in the house. There are hundreds of books, maybe even thousands of them, crammed from floor to ceiling into thirty-foot-high wooden bookcases. A jam-packed collection, ranging from fact to fiction, modern to medieval, comedy to tragedy and mystery to history. There are massive leather-bound dictionaries in strange languages, which weigh a ton, and huge atlases containing maps of places I hope to explore someday.

  My happiest memories of my mother, Molly Adelaide McFearless, take place in the library. She also loved that room. I can still see her hazel-brown eyes; her soft, dark hair; her thin, pretty nose and her smiling lips, full of kisses. She used to sit in her favorite green velvet chair by the fire, directly under a very creepy oil painting of my great-great-great- grandfather—Maximillius McFearless. That's where I like to sit now. She'd read lots of stories to us, and we'd laugh at the funny voices she'd create for all the strange people who lived inside the pages of the books. She exposed us to complicated mathematical equations and astonishing scientific texts with expertly drawn images of amazing animals, bizarre birds and peculiar plant life. (These were my favorites.) She told us tales about brave and adventurous sea captains who had battled giant waves, aboard cannon-firing pirate ships, in search of glorious golden treasures. (These were Max's favorites and what I like to call silly little boy stuff.)

  Another reason I love the library is its magnificently painted ceiling depicting a magical midnight sky filled with faraway stars, bright moons and dazzlingly colored planets. When Max was three years old, my mother climbed up one of the tall, rickety old library ladders with a paintbrush in one hand and a palette of paints in the other. Barefooted, on the highest rung, she scanned the frescoed cosmos for the perfect place to start painting. Balancing herself precariously, she dipped her paintbrush in gold and stretched up on the tips of her toes. The ladder wobbled beneath her ever so slightly as she started to paint.

  “Minerva,” she said as droplets of gold fell onto her cheek. “Did you know that I started this tradition when you were born?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, I did. You were my inspiration. Do you know which one I painted for you?”

  “No,” I said as I watched the ancient ladder shake under the strain of my mother's weight.

  “Right there,” she said, pointing at a beautiful pinkish constellation of eight vibrant stars that formed a perfect heart around one ruby-red spark-ling sun in the middle.

  “You, my little Minerva, are the one in the center. Can you see it, the red one surrounded by eight guiding stars?”

  I did see it, and I loved it.

  “Eight is the number of forever, and that's how long I'm going to love you, Minerva. Forever.” Then she blew me a kiss and went back to work.

  I was getting very nervous, but she didn't seem to care or notice how much the ladder groaned. She merrily continued her painting, each brushstroke purposely placed and gracefully executed, until at last she was finished.

  “Voila! Minerva, what do you think?” she asked. “It's a comet for Max with a golden shimmering tail for my golden boy.”

  I told her I liked it, but really I didn't. I liked my constellation better.

  Flop, crick, flop, crack, flop, creak. I crossed my fingers as she descended the dangerous ladder. Once safely on the floor, she hurried toward me, grabbed me in her loving arms and showered me with endless kisses. That was my last happy moment with her alive. She died a couple of days later.

  (Mom, if you can read this all the way from heaven, I want you to know that I really miss you, Dad misses you, and Max is a jerk, but he misses you too.)

  Like I said, it was the anniversary of my mother's death, and my father likes for this to be a day of celebration. So every year, just like he used to do for my mother's birthday, my father rides the same horse down the same stretch of road to the same bakery and buys the same incredibly yummy seven-layer grapefruit cake with the best cream cheese frosting ever (my mother's favorite). Then we throw a little family party for just the three of us in honor of her passing.

  After putting on his rain gear and his riding boots, my father squeezed us both tightly. He kissed us each on the forehead and told us that he'd be back in time for dinner. Then he gave us the rules:

  Lock the doors behind him.

  Be nice to each other.

  Above all else, stay out of trouble.

  Then off he went, galloping down the muddy road, in the middle of a terrible storm, for his Molly.

  I'm happy he suffered no injuries or broken bones. But I will say that he blew a massively disgusting, embarrassing snot bubble out of his left nostril while crying his eyes out and screaming at the top of his lungs. Now, I know that this sounds harsh, but in my defense and for the record, it was an act of justifiable retaliation for the heinous acts of cruelty that I endure on a daily basis. You see, my brother, Tyrannosaurus Max, purposely shattered my small handblown glass baby rabbit figurine for no reason. An item of mine that I happened to be extremely fond of. Just so you know, I was severely punished. I wasn't allowed to play outside or leave the house for a whole two weeks in the middle of summer.

  Finding trouble, on the other hand, is when you unknowingly do something you didn't know you shouldn't do.

  For example:

  Max and I were reading leisurely by the fireplace in the library, surrounded by candlelight, all warm and toasty, waiting for our father's return. Max was sprawled out on the dark wood floor with his head in some pirate book. He had one finger up his nose, enjoying a good pick, and his other hand was incessantly twirling his stupid marble. He never goes anywhere without it, for some lame reason, and every time he reads about pirates or pretends to be a pirate, he makes believe that it's a priceless jewel from his secret pirate chest: “Behold the Jewel of Bebladar. Only a mighty pirate king such as myself could have found such a wondrous beauty. With this priceless gem, I shall buy a fleet of pirate ships and sail away upon the treacherous seas of greed in search of my pirate destiny.”

  He is so annoying.

  Meanwhile, I was in my mother's favorite chair, trying my hardest to stay focused on a fascinating zoological study on the trials and tribulations of raising an abandoned newborn vampire bat. But that night, for some reason, I couldn't stop staring at the creepy painting of Maximillius McFearless directly above me. I think I've always been freaked out by it because Max kind of resembles him in a weird sort of way. Well, except for one big difference—Max has two eyes and Maximillius has only one, with an eye patch where the other should be.

  Suddenly—Burrrahhurrrp!—an impressively long and loud strawberry juice-induced belch blasted out of my brother's mouth. Thankfully, it took my mind off the creepy painting of Maximillius. But unluckily, Max's burp smelled like a fruity combination of rotten sausages and lumpy sour milk. It couldn't have been more gross! (But, I hate to admit, it was funny at the sam
e time.) It smelled so bad, I had to get out of the library. I decided I was thirsty for a glass of water. So I stood, picked up the nearest lit candle and on the way out the door noticed that the fire needed another log or two. I asked Max to take care of it, and he gleefully accepted the task, which was nice because he hardly ever says yes to the things I ask him to do.

  In the kitchen, I grabbed my favorite glass from the cupboard (the one with a squirrel holding an umbrella on it, which I love for its silliness). I turned on the faucet, and the pipes hissed ominously as I filled my glass to the rim. All of a sudden, I felt like the shadows were closing in on me. I started getting scared. I really wanted to be back upstairs with Max and the safe feel of my mother's chair, so I gulped my water down as quickly as I could.

  “Minerva!” my little brother screamed from the library. My heart almost leapt out of my chest. I momentarily choked and spit water all over the place.

  “Come quick!” he screamed. “Minerva! Hurry!”

  “I'm coming, Max! Hold on!” I yelled back with a cough. I ran as fast as I could. I had to save my baby brother from goodness-only-knew-what.

  “Mini, where are you?” he cried out.

  I charged up the stairs, taking them two by two. “I'm almost there, Max. I'm coming!” I hollered, and burst through the library doors, not knowing what I'd find.

  Max was standing under our ancestor's portrait with a huge mischievous grin plastered on his face. Nothing whatsoever was wrong with him. No danger in sight. What was he playing at?

  “Max, you jerk, I was worried sick that something terrible was happening to you,” I snarled at him. “Why do you always play these stupid tricks on me? I really thought you were in trouble!”