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- Herausgeber: Little Tiger Press
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
He's back! Join Stitch Head, a mad professor's forgotten creation, as he steps out of the shadows into the adventure of an almost-lifetime… The orphans at Castle Grotteskew are running riot ... and getting hungry. With no food in the castle, Stitch Head and Arabella head down to Grubbers Nubbin to see what they can pilfer, but there they encounter a terrifying, savage beast. Could one of Professor Erasmus's creations be on the loose...?
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Seitenzahl: 89
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CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Ah, Grubbers Nubbin in the winter! Though the air was crisp and the fog was thick, the welcome was as warm as a log fire. Such gracious townsfolk! Such deep-filled pies! Such crooked smiles! Perhaps you’d have tickled your innards with a swift chug of neck oil down the Dog ’n’ Trumpet, or supped a warming brew in Mrs Winkleberry’s Olde Shoppe of Unspecific Teas. Why, you were as welcome as a belly-filling bowl of boiled broxy brains on Guzzlin’ Day, the warmin’ winter feastival!
Unless, of course you were a monster. For the fine folk of Grubbers Nubbin knew what it was to live in fear of monsters, creatures and mad things. For as long as the town has been a town, so loomed Castle Grotteskew. High upon a hill stood the castle, casting its ominous shadow upon the town. Grotteskew was home to the maddest professor of all, Mad Professor Erasmus. Day after day, the professor toiled in his sinister laboratory, creating one unnatural horror after another, until the castle brimmed with monsters – and monsters were not welcome in Grubbers Nubbin.
But little did the troubled townsfolk know there were more than monsters in Castle Grotteskew… Hidden within its walls were creatures even more unpredictable, more unusual, more terrifying.
And they were all hungry.
THE FIRST CHAPTER
“You hear that? The Little Terrors are coming,” whispered Arabella. She was a scruffy girl of ten, with hair like a bird’s nest and a fascination for all things mad and monstrous. Arabella stared at the old wooden door. “Say your prayers, Stitch Head.”
“Maybe we could hide. Maybe there’s still time…” came a whimpered reply. Stitch Head cocked his bald, ash-grey head, tracing his fingers across the patchwork of sewn-together features that made up his face. A distant, thundering rumble filled the air.
“There ain’t no time for running and hiding,” Arabella replied, the sound of the Little Terrors growing louder. She looked at the large brass bell clutched in Stitch Head’s tiny hand. “You summoned them. There ain’t no escape … not for any of us.”
“But … but I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if—” began Stitch Head, cradling the bell as the floor began to shake.
“Too late for that! Here they come!” Arabella cried.
BOOOM!
The door burst open and a tidal wave of human children flooded into the room. Their matching uniforms, once spotless and pressed, were already worn and threadbare from their first week at the castle. Their hair, once combed and neat, was now wild and unkempt.
“Ahh!” Stitch Head squealed, dropping the bell with a KLAANG! and scaling a tattered curtain to avoid the stampede.
In fact, despite his odd appearance, the children barely noticed him – but then Professor Erasmus’s first creation had spent most of his life hiding in the shadows, only coming out to cure his master’s more unpredictable creations of their ferocity. He had a knack for not being noticed.
But Stitch Head could not hide from his responsibilities. the days of hiding were over. The Little Terrors were his problem – and he had to deal with them head-on.
“So many of them,” he muttered. He watched the hundred orphans jostle for places around a long makeshift table, put together from seven smaller tables, and carefully laid with a hundred bowls and spoons.
“Well, if this ain’t a sorry state of affairs, I don’t know what is. Castle Grotteskew ain’t no place for humans,” sighed Arabella. She picked up the bell from the floor as the children squabbled for seats. “It’s s’posed to be full of monsters.”
“I’m sorry, Arabella … but what else could I have done?” replied Stitch Head, dangling from the curtain. “I mean, their orphanage was run by an evil spider-lady who fed on their souls…”
“Yeah, and thanks to you, she’s deader than doorknobs at the bottom of a lake,” huffed Arabella, ruffling her already untidy hair. “I don’t see why we ’ad to drag this lot back with us.”
“We couldn’t just leave them there,” Stitch Head replied. “They had no one to look after them. They had no—”
“Yeah, yeah, poor little urchins,” Arabella sneered. “The point is, I ain’t hardly seen a single unspeakable horror all week! Even Pox refuses to come down from the ceiling…”
Stitch Head looked up to see Arabella’s pet monkey-bat (half-monkey, half-bat) pacing along the hall’s crisscrossing ceiling beams, yapping nervously.
“YaBBiT YaBBit! SWaaRTiKi!”
“See?” added Arabella. “I’ve seen him bite off his own toe, but even he ain’t nutty enough to hang around with the Little Terrors. Every monster in the castle is in hiding since the Little Terrors arrived.”
Stitch Head understood exactly why the creations had secreted themselves in the darker corners of the castle. The children were like a force of nature – a whirlwind of energy, noisy and unpredictable. Stitch Head felt so overwhelmed in the orphans’ company that it was all he could do to stay in the room with them.
“I didn’t think they’d be so … spirited,” he said, climbing gingerly down the curtain and hopping on to the floor next to Arabella. “A week ago, they were so quiet, but now—”
“Now they’re noisier than a trump in a trumpet!” growled Arabella, slamming the bell on the table.
“At least we’re not doing this alone,” added Stitch Head, huddling behind Arabella’s leg. “At least we have—”
BOOOM!
The door at the other end of the room flew open and a monstrous creature strode in. It was a ludicrously large combination of elements, with a long tail, a third arm and a single eye in the middle of its face. Atop its head it wore a tall white chef’s hat, and in its two biggest arms it carried a cooking pot large enough to hold at least three sheep.
“AWFULS of Castle Grotteskew!” the Creature boomed, holding the pot aloft. “DINNER is SERVED!”
THE SECOND CHAPTER
“It’s food!” cried one of the children, as the Creature wielded the enormous pot. Excited murmurs began to ripple through the room.
“Real grub!” said another child.
“Mercy on me belly guts!” added a third.
“I’ve been licking the mud off my shoes for a week!” cried a fourth.
“The Creature did it… It actually made food,” Stitch Head whispered in awe.
The Creature was one of Professor Erasmus’s more recent creations – and its friendliness and positivity had been enough to convince even the most nervous orphan that there was nothing remotely monstrous about the monsters of Grotteskew. It was also one of the few creations that did not run and hide in the face of the Little Terrors’ rampant youthfulness.
“Who’s HUNGRY?” it hollered. The hundred children cheered in deafening unison. “NO more eating ROTTEN fruit, BEETLES and those six dead CROWS I found in the chimney. TODAY you eat like QUINGS and KEENS!”
“The Creature’s really building it up,” Stitch Head whispered to Arabella. “That food must be delicious.” Arabella raised an eyebrow suspiciously.
“PRESENTING the GREATEST culinary extravaganza since SLICED eggs!” the Creature continued. “The most TASTEFUL taste you’ll ever taste! The FOOD that does you GOOD! I give you … STUFF!”
The Creature slammed the pot down upon the table, sending all one hundred bowls jumping into the air. The children cheered again.
“RIGHT, let’s make sure you’re all FED UP!” the Creature boomed. “SERVICE!”
“Yes, chef! Whatever you are saying, chef!” came a cry. In an instant, the tiny figure of Ivo came running through the door. Ivo was the castle’s oldest creation. He was no bigger than a doll, with an egg-shaped head, a cloak of rags, and a single rusty metal arm, in which, at this moment, he carried an oversized ladle. He hurried to the cooking pot but was far too small to reach the table, never mind the bubbling Stuff.
“Ivo?” said Stitch Head. “Since when is he the Creature’s assistant?”
“Let’s GO!” shouted the Creature. “The CHIEF has SPOKEN! I mean, SHOUTED!”
“It’s ‘chef’, not ‘chief’, you dog-brain dope,” Arabella shouted back. “And who d’you think you are, barking orders? Ivo ain’t your slave!”
“I do not mind!” added Ivo, struggling to climb a table leg. “I spent ninety-eight years alone in very small dark room. I like to be shouted at! It means someone is paying me attention.”
“There’s so MUCH to CHIEFING,” continued the Creature. “There’s SHOUTING, HOLLERING, SCREAMING… I think I was MADE to be a chief. I’ve finally found my CALLING.”
“I just can’t believe you actually made food, Creature!” said Stitch Head. “None of the creations even need to eat – how did you know where to start?”
“CHIEFING is EASY when you have RAW talent like me – although I ALSO have BOILED, FRIED and GRILLED talent,” the Creature replied.
“Yeurgh! What a stench!” howled Arabella, as she approached the pot.
“Stench?” repeated Stitch Head. “I can’t smell anything…”
“I also have no smells,” confessed Ivo, trying to catch a scent on the air.
“That’s ’cause you two ain’t hardly got noses,” Arabella groaned, recoiling. “Trust me, that Stuff stinks worse than my nan did before her yearly scrub-down! I ain’t going nowhere near it.”
Stitch Head gave the Creature an encouraging smile, before clambering on to the table and peering anxiously into the pot. His eyes grew wide.
“Oh…” he muttered. “No.”
THE THIRD CHAPTER
The pot was brimming with a mould grey stew. It bubbled and popped like molten lava, belching clouds of mucus-yellow dust into the air. Stitch Head had tried food before, even though he didn’t need to eat, but he’d never even seen
