CHAPTER ONE : The Glooms

Beatrix Gloom was a small black-haired girl with spooky eyes and an extra-ordinary power of telekinesis. She could also summon evil demons against their will to have tea parties with her. Her brother was seventeen and to every effect a hobo, as he lived outside near train-tracks in a sheep pasture rather than stay at home at night, mainly because all the ghosts and ghastliness bothered him.

Iggy and Beatrix Gloom were children who everybody knew were orphaned, but nobody knew who their parents were, nor where they'd come from, because Iggy had amnesia and Beatrix was too young then to remember. Both of the Glooms had dark hair and eyes and a scary appearance, and they were adopted by the Middletons, who were as different from them as night and day. Mrs. Middleton was a round huge woman who wore brightly-colored pantsuits and enjoyed warm, sunny weather, gossiping, bingo, and watching television. Beatrix was a scrawny wraith of a child who wore Victorian dresses in drab colors and enjoyed the dead of winter, acted antisocial, and read ghost stories. It was the same with Mr. Middleton and Iggy, except worse, because Iggy was a teenager. Needless to say, the Gloom children avoided their foster parents at all cost.

The four of them lived in a tall crooked house with most buildings being of the towerly sort and despite the repeated attempts of the Middletons to keep the house looking clean, friendly, bright, and orderly, every attempt was thwarted by one bizarre circumstance after another. Redoing a bathroom floor lead to an incredible flood; replacing broken window panes with new, wider windows resulted in a pane falling out and slicing the sofa in half; painting a wall had resulted in the wall exploding; and putting an air-conditioner on the highly-pitched cone of tower roof had been a deadly mistake for both the electrician who fell from the roof and the milkman situated below. Because of their somewhat creepy demeanor, the Gloom children were blamed for almost all of these incidents, but they never had anything to do with it, and often things happened when neither of them were there.

More things happened when they were there, however, and now was one such time, because Beatrix was home without her parents and Iggy was stuck babysitting. The tall looming boy skulked into the kitchen, carrying what looked like a metal detector, a tennis racket, and a mannequin’s leg. In addition he was dressed as a French maid. Beatrix didn’t ask, partly because this sort of behavior was routine for Iggy, but also because she didn’t want to know.

"Don't you dare let anything in tonight," Iggy said.

"I won't," Beatrix said, looking innocent.

"You always say that," he said with an accusatory tone. "And keep that creepy bear away from me." The teddy-bear floating above Beatrix's head flipped Iggy off.

"Why you're the good kid I have no idea," Iggy sighed. He decided to go hide under the blue thermal covers of his so rarely used bed and wait for their foster parents to get home, and would have stayed there all night, if not for the unusual electrical disturbance of flickering lights, televisions, and radios. Beatrix had let something in.

Earlier that day, Beatrix had sent out invitations to several high-power demons, because she was having a tea party, and they were invited. She had copied them from an old Victorian invitation she had found in one of her ghost books, and it went something like this :

“Dear Grim Reaper,
I am having a party and you are invited. Come to-night at midnight, and we shall have tea and something I am baking myself. I am baking it in a cauldron—a very nice cauldron with a large dent in it. Why I bet you have never tasted anything so mortifying!

Cordially,
Beatrix.”

The something in a cauldron had been cooked up while Iggy hid under his covers, and needless to say, it consisted mostly of mud. Beatrix was ten years old, and unlike most kids her age hadn’t yet caught on that most grown-ups don’t like to eat “pretend” cooking, even if they’re already dead and can’t very well die again. This probably had something to do with all those years of watching her foster parents eat buckets of lard and corn meal out of the box with a spoon. For tea she poured extremely lemony lemonade. The Grim Reaper slammed into the front door on the hour against his will and was seated in an immensely small chair which was both pink and plastic and covered in smiling flowers. He rubbed the back of his vertebral column with a skeletal hand in pain, then cracked his neck. His head rolled off. “Oh dear . . .”

“Do let’s get this over with,” the head sighed sadly as he picked it up and reattached it. Soon he was joined by a wide evil angel with huge white wings, who was Dante, dressed to the triple-sixes in a pin-striped suit.

“So how have you been?” Beatrix asked them.

“Fine,” the Grim Reaper and Dante said in unison.

“Would you like some tea?” Beatrix asked.

“Sure,” the Grim Reaper said. He took a sip. “AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH! IT BURNS! IT BURNS!”

Dante took a sip. He was used to sulfur, however, so it wasn’t a problem for him, and in fact, he drank the entire pitcher. Iggy finally got up enough guts to go downstairs and tell them all to leave. Like a shadow he edged down the staircase, armed with an electric mixer in hand and dressed in a Batman suit.

Beatrix and Dante and Grim and Morris were just in the middle of a discussion on entropy when Iggy appeared before them, armed and ready to do damage. He whirred the eggbeater at them.

“Please leave now,” he said. The ghastly four before him stared. Then, they continued their conversation. Iggy looked around uncomfortably. He turned the mixer off and walked towards the doorway, looking back and forth with narrowed eyes. Slowly he backed himself against the wall with his arms splayed and slid around the corner, shrinking away with a look of suspiciousness. It was the strangest exit Grim and Dante had ever seen.

Iggy decided he had to get out of the house, so he paced around in the kitchen contemplating his fate and what was worse, staying petrified in his bedroom until Beatrix decided she’d had her fun, or being locked in a barrel full of nails at Mr. Middleton’s hardware store again. And that was when he decided, You know, I think I’ll just leave. Iggy packed up as much of his bizarre possessions as it was possible to cram into a backpack, slid down the banister one last time to the front door, and left. Just as he closed the door it fell off its hinges, and he spat on it and said good riddance, the life of a hobo was for him officialis.

The first thing Iggy did was go and buy a tin cup. Then he went and found the nearest group of hobos, which was anywhere.

“Hi. I’d like to apply for the homeless position,” Iggy informed the hobo who appeared to be in charge. He could tell this one was in charge because his bottle of wine was large enough to fit in a regular-sized grocery bag.

“Alright, what are your credentials?”

“I’m lazy.”

“Anything else?”

“I like to shout conspiracy theories at people in public places. Shall I?” Iggy pulled a wooden box up and stood his tall height atop it with skeleton-like grace. “I have here in my hands, ladies and gentlemen, proof, that it was in fact, Richard Nixon who ate the Lindbergh baby. Here is an analysis of the contents of Nixon’s stomach when he was caught by a poacher. A bottle of mustard, a tire-iron, two bricks, the Lindbergh baby, and a pimento olive. Today the Lindbergh baby is living under the alias of Jack Nicholson.” Iggy bowed and jumped off his box in triumph.

“A’ight, the boy’s in!” The other hobos cheered and or threw up. Two hobos began playing a fiddle and harmonica, while yet two more danced a square-dance.

“Oy wont know . . . what . . . what is the . . .” a hobo in a hat began drunkenly, barely standing up straight. “Who the hell are you?” he finished at last.

“I’m Iggy,” Iggy said.

“Who is your . . .” he motioned his hands in a circular motion. “What is the . . .” he put one hand on his hip and with the other he pointed at space. “That is, where can I find the . . .” the hobo said. He took another swig of wine. He then fell over, and did not get up.

“Let’s go paint a fence,” A hobo with a mouth full of gold teeth suggested. The other hobos cheered (except for the one who did not get up).

“Paint a fence?” Iggy asked.

“Sure.” The hobos gathered buckets of white paint, went to a fence, and began to paint it.

“Why are we painting a fence?”

“Don’t know,” one hobo said. “Just seemed like, the thing to do.”

The hobos continued to paint.

“Wouldn’t it be a better idea to, I don’t know, write graffiti on it?” Iggy volunteered.

“We are,” a hobo with a single gold tooth said.

“. . . But the fence is already white. It doesn’t show up,” Iggy said, looking skeptical. “You need some other color than white.”

“But this paint was free.” Iggy took out a can of red spray paint and wrote “DOWN WITH ROBOTS” followed by “(No privatizing social security).”

“What do robots have to do with—“

“If only I knew,” Iggy lamented, clenching a fist dramatically. “I haven’t figured that one out yet.” The hobos exchanged shifty glances, and whispered to each other that this guy was crazy.

At last, one hobo asked, “May we borrow, your paint?”

“Can I have your shoes?” another asked. Slowly a mob began to form.

“Now hold on just one minute—I found everything I own here fair and square!” Then Iggy thought up a plan. He quickly changed into a snazzy used car dealer suit. “Alright folks, step right up, that’s it, and behold the strange treasures for sale in my backpack! Here, for example, is a pillow in the shape of Paul Newman’s head, yours for only twenty, that’s right, twenty dollars! It’s an event of a lifetime! It’s a golden opportunity!”

“That’s outrageous!”

“I want my money back!”

Presently, a hobo wearing only three coats began to beat Iggy with a cardboard box.

“Now you stop that,” Iggy demanded, and set the box on fire.

“MY HOUSE!” the hobo shrieked. Quickly the hobos doused it with wine, and in the case of one confused hobo his own urine, which only made the flames bigger, so instead the hobos began to gather and warm their hands. Iggy took off in the middle of this distraction, very hastily.

Iggy decided he was tired of collective homelessness, and ventured to go be homeless by himself for a while. He also decided that it was better to be homeless in a home, and since he couldn’t go back to his own, he decided to invade someone else’s. The question was where—Iggy was banned from the houses of most of his schoolmates by their parents, who had formed an anti-Iggy coalition on the grounds that he was “crazy” and “possibly rabid.” Iggy knew he would need a large place where he could blend in easily. In an instant, Iggy knew where he wanted to go.

The Palace of Waughdeluge was the capitol of Gromit, the country where Iggy lived. It was the head of government and the home of the reigning king; it was also seated on an island which was rapidly sinking in to the ocean, and for the past ten years the palace had been half-flooded. Due to bureaucracy the king was still unaware of this. Iggy borrowed a red and yellow striped hot -air balloon and sailed westward after the sinking moon, its huge white face lighting up his own deathly pale one as the boy and the balloon, a pair of gangly dark silhouettes, passed over the strip of violent ocean that prevented any ships from reaching the island for an attack. It also prevented people from coming to file any complaint against the government, which is probably why the government believed itself to be doing such a phenomenal job. A black monolith with a thousand lit-up eyes loomed beyond the tossing waves, blue and red flags flying from its turrets with gold writing glinting propaganda from their surfaces. Iggy landed on the rooftops in the shadow of the towers as the balloon collapsed upon itself and died. Quickly Iggy snuck about to look for an entrance; most of the guards didn’t notice him because they were instructed to look straight ahead at all times and not move. One of them had gotten his head stuck inside his enormous hat. Riskily Iggy righted it. The guard did nothing at all.

Like a ghost Iggy plummeted down onto a gargoyle fountain on the ledge below, then leapt to the ledge on the next tower and peeked into a darkened window. A couple was sleeping in a canopy bed, a portly middle-aged man with a luxurious mustache and an evilish woman with her black hair in a bun. He could tell from the currency in his pocket that this was the king and his new queen, the fifth in his reign. King Henry and Queen Fever. Hurriedly Iggy ran away from that window and went to another on the other side of the building; there was nobody in it but it was locked. Somebody might see him if he didn’t hurry up. Iggy was just about to try the next tower when he spied somebody on the small balcony directly above him, so he hid in the shadows of an alcove and looked warily up.

A sad-looking woman was leaning precariously over the curling barred edge of the balcony, gazing at the moon as she sang a very depressing song in a language he could not understand. Her voice was as sweet as honey but he could tell almost instantly that she was not human. Her hair and her body were sparkling and golden, and then he noticed that her hands floated about in the air in small white gloves, unconnected to her body by any arms. Below the waist she was like a whirlwind of sand, golden sand, trailing down below the balcony tossed by a maritime wind. Brass instruments floated about her and played of their own accord the accompaniments to her song—she was a djinn, a genie, but what was she doing so far from the desert? Just then clouds moved over the moon, and a single tear coursed down her cheek.

“Can I assist you?” Iggy called up, emerging out of the shadows.

“OH!” the girl cried. “Where did you come from? What are you doing there?”

“Um . . . I’m magical,” Iggy explained.

“Oh, I see. Well, it’s . . . it’s nothing, really . . .”

“Surely you must be crying over something,” Iggy reasoned, trying to pull himself onto the balcony in vain.

“I wasn’t crying!”

“Never said you were, never did, um, can I get a hand here?” A gloved white hand came down to Iggy and pulled him up.

“But I thought you were magical?”

“Oh I am, I am, just, the kind of magic that goes down, not the kind that goes up.”

“I think that’s called falling.” She looked blankly at him. He looked blankly back.

“Well anyways, my uh, my name is Figbash, and I um, I . . . kind of am a slave really . . . It happens a lot with us genies . . . But what about you?”

“I’m Iggy and I’m a hobo.”

“I . . . see . . .”

“If I steal your lamp and free you, can I have three wishes?”

“Yes but you’ll never get that lamp, it’s under the ownership of a very powerful sorcerer. He’s very cunning and evil. His name is Carl.”

“Carl? That’s a nice name. I think I’ll tell him so when I meet him.”

“Oh please don’t . . .”

“I’m sure I can settle things with this Carl, and if not, I’ll, why, I’ll give him the ol’ one-two, how’s that?”

“He’s going to kill you,” the genie sighed. “But if you want to try, it’s not in my power to stop you . . .”

“Oh look an open window!” Iggy announced. “And it’s dark! My dear, you’ll be a freed slave yet. I’m goin’ in.”

“BE CAREFUL!” She called as Iggy fell through the window and onto—nothing. Suddenly he hit a stone staircase and tumbled down in the dark with many cries of pain and a crashing noise. Carefully Iggy pulled himself up and looked around. Everything looked much the same because he couldn’t see anything, so Iggy reasoned that he would try walking in every direction, and whichever one he didn’t run into a wall, that one he would take. After five minutes of running into the same two walls, Iggy discovered the hallway. The first door he tried was locked, as were the second and third doors, the fourth had light coming from the crack underneath it, and the fifth had nobody in it at all, it was dark, and unlocked, and Iggy decided this was the best bet.