The Creakers Read online

  ALSO BY TOM FLETCHER

  The Christmasaurus

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  There’s a Monster in Your Book

  There’s a Dragon in Your Book

  FOR OLDER READERS

  Eve of Man (with Giovanna Fletcher)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover, text, and illustrations copyright © 2017 by Tom Fletcher

  Illustrations by Shane Devries

  Excerpt from The Christmasaurus copyright © 2016 Tom Fletcher

  Excerpt from The Christmasaurus illustrations by Shane Devries

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover by Penguin Random House UK, London, in 2017.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fletcher, Tom, author. | Devries, Shane, illustrator.

  Title: The Creakers / Tom Fletcher; illustrated by Shane Devries.

  Description: First American edition. | New York: Random House, [2019] | “Originally published in hardcover by Penguin Random House UK, London, in 2017.”

  Summary: Searching for answers after all the adults in her town disappear, eleven-year-old Lucy goes through a passage under her bed into an upside-down world inhabited by sticky, smelly Creakers.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018050233 | ISBN 978-1-5247-7334-2 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-5247-7335-9 (hardcover library binding) | ISBN 978-1-5247-7336-6 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Missing persons—Fiction. | Monsters—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Humorous stories.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.F6358 Cre 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781524773366

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.4

  a

  For Giovanna, because I haven’t dedicated a book to you yet and I feel bad. X

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE—The Night It All Began

  1. The Day It All Began

  2. The Goodbye Note

  3. Helpful

  4. Lucy Wasn’t Alone

  5. The First Creaker

  6. The Day After

  7. Four Creakers

  8. The Woleb

  9. The Plan

  10. The Creaker Trap

  11. Catching Creakers

  12. Grunt, Guff, Scratch, and Sniff

  13. …

  14. Human Spells

  15. Back to the Woleb!

  16. The Marshmallow of Your Dreams

  17. YOU’RE NOT HERE!

  18. The Bog Tavern

  19. Creakerland

  20. NormEllaTron

  21. Lucy in Creakerland

  22. Trapped!

  23. Lucy’s Orders

  24. Sunlight

  25. The Creaker King

  26. The Weird Work of the Woleb

  27. Going Home

  28. The Whopping Great Drilling Machine!

  29. Lucy’s Big Idea

  30. Wakey-Wakey, Whiffington!

  EPILOGUE—Tomorra

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Excerpt from The Christmasaurus

  About the Author

  What silently waits in the shadows at night?

  What’s under your bed, keeping just out of sight?

  What’s patiently waiting while you’re counting sheep?

  What never comes out unless you’re fast asleep?

  What makes all the creaks, cracks, and clangs in your house?

  It isn’t the cat, or your dog, or a mouse.

  Those noises are made by mysterious creatures.

  Read on if you dare and you might meet…

  …the Creakers.

  The sun disappeared behind the pointed silhouettes of the rooftops of Whiffington Town, like a hungry black dog swallowing a ball of flames.

  A thick, eerie darkness fell like no other night Whiffington had ever known. The moon itself barely had enough courage to peek around the clouds, as though it knew that tonight something strange was going to happen.

  Mothers and fathers throughout Whiffington tucked their children into bed, unaware that this would be the last bedtime story, the last good-night kiss, the last time they’d switch off the light.

  Midnight.

  One o’clock.

  Two o’clock.

  Three o’clock.

  CREAK…

  A strange noise broke the silence.

  It came from inside one of the houses. With the whole town fast asleep, who could possibly have made that sound?

  Or perhaps not who but WHAT?

  …CREAK!

  There it was again. This time from another house.

  The sound of creaky wooden floorboards echoed around the hallways of every home in Whiffington.

  Something was inside.

  Something was creaking about.

  Something not human.

  There were no screams. There were no nightmares. The children slept peacefully, wonderfully unaware that the world around them had changed. It had all happened silently, as if by some strange sort of dark magic, and they wouldn’t know anything about it until they woke up the next morning, on the day it all began…

  Let’s start on the day it all began.

  On the day it all began, Lucy Dungston woke up.

  Right. Well, that’s a start, but it’s not very exciting, is it? Let’s try again.

  On the day it all began, Lucy Dungston woke up to a rather unusual sound…

  OK, that’s a little better. Let’s see what happens next…

  It was the sound of the alarm clock ringing in her mom’s bedroom.

  Well, it’s got a bit boring again, hasn’t it? Let’s try that bit one more time…

  It was the sound of the alarm clock ringing in her mom’s bedroom, because Lucy’s mom wasn’t there to switch it off. You see, Lucy was about to find out that while she was asleep in the night her mom had disappeared…

  OH. MY. GOSH! Imagine waking up to find that your mom has disappeared in the night! It gives me the creepy tingles every time I tell this story. I bet you’re thinking, This is going to be the best scary story ever. I can’t wait to read it and tell all my friends that I’m really brave because I wasn’t even one bit scared.

  Even though you were totally scared all the way through.

  Well, this is only just the beginning. Wait until you read what happens later when the Creakers come out.

  Let me know if you get scared…because I am!

  Back on the day it all began, Lucy climbed out of bed, slipped on her fluffy blue bathrobe, and walked across her creaky floorboards, which were warm from the morning sunlight creeping in through the curtains.

  Would you like to know what Lucy looked like?

  Of course you would! Here’s a picture…

  As you can see, she had shorter ha
ir than most girls’, and it was as brown as mud, or chocolate, and even though Lucy liked it to be short, her mom insisted she wear bangs.

  “It stops you looking like a boy!” her mom would say (this was before she disappeared, of course). This really wound Lucy up, as her bangs always seemed to flop into her eyes, meaning she constantly had to lick her hand and slick them over to one side just so she could see.

  Her eyes, once the bangs were out of the way, were greeny-brown…or perhaps browny-green. Either way, they were a bit green and a bit brown. You could say there was nothing particularly remarkable about Lucy at all, and it’s true; she was no different from any other child in Whiffington, which is another way of saying she was quite remarkable indeed.

  Anyway, more about that later.

  “Mom?” Lucy called, padding across the landing toward her mom’s bedroom.

  But of course you already know there was no reply because her mom was gone!

  Lucy’s heart started beating faster in her chest as she gently opened the bedroom door and stuck her head inside.

  Mrs. Dungston’s book was still on the bedside table, a bookmark poking out, with her reading glasses perched on top. Her empty cocoa cup with the yellow polka-dot pattern sat beside it. Her slippers were neatly positioned on the floor. It was all as it usually was. Except for the piercing ringing of the alarm clock and the spooky empty bed.

  Lucy stopped the alarm clock and ran to check the bathroom.

  Empty bath.

  Empty shower.

  Empty toilet (although Lucy would have been very surprised to find her mom hiding there).

  She ran downstairs.

  Empty kitchen.

  Empty living room.

  Empty everywhere.

  “Mom? MOM?” she called, a note of panic rising in her voice, and her heart leaping like a frog in her chest.

  She was beginning to get an awful feeling that something terrible might have happened…and it was a feeling that Lucy already knew.

  You see, the really creepy thing was that this wasn’t the first time it had happened to Lucy Dungston.

  A few months ago her dad had vanished too!

  Unbelievable, right?

  Lucy’s mom had been devastated.

  “Must have run off with another woman,” Lucy had heard one of the other moms whispering in the school playground.

  “What a cheating, rotten man!” another had said, shaking her head.

  But Lucy didn’t think her dad was rotten at all. She couldn’t believe he would run off without saying good-bye to her, without leaving a note, without saying where he was going, without finishing the half-eaten chocolate cookie and barely sipped cup of tea she’d found on his bedside table the next morning.

  So on this morning, on the day it all began, Lucy had the strangest feeling that somehow this was all connected, that something weird was going on.

  Lucy ran down the hallway, snatched the phone from the little wobbly table, and dialed her mom’s phone number (which she knew by heart for emergencies, like every sensible eleven-year-old should). But as her mom’s phone started ringing, Lucy saw it flashing on the arm of the sofa.

  Lucy ended the call and hung her head in defeat.

  Defeat…feet…shoes…her mom’s shoes!

  She ran to the front door. A pair of cozy, flat slip-ons with flower-shaped sparkly bits was sitting on the mat, exactly where her mom kicked them off every night and where she’d slip back into them before leaving the house each day. Surely her mom wouldn’t have left the house without her shoes…would she?

  Lucy’s heart sank. This all seemed far too familiar. On the day her father disappeared, one of the strangest things was that his favorite chunky black boots with the yellow laces, which he wore every single day, were still sitting by the front door, like he’d never left. Just like her mom’s shoes!

  Lucy knew there was only one thing to do. She was going to have to call the police.

  She’d never done that before, and her heart was pounding like a drum in her chest as she dialed nine-one-one with a shaky, nervous finger.

  Now what do you suppose happened next? If you think a police officer answered the phone and said, “It’s OK, Lucy, we’ve found your mom and we’ll bring her home right away and we’ll even pick up some breakfast for you too. What would you like?” then you’d be very wrong indeed and should probably never write a book.

  What actually happened was possibly the worst thing Lucy could think of…

  Nothing.

  The phone just rang, and rang, and rang, and carried on ringing until Lucy hung up.

  “Since when do the police not answer the phone?” Lucy said to herself, her voice sounding unusually loud in the empty house.

  A little voice in her head told her the answer: When something spooky is going on…

  Lucy pulled open the front door and stepped out into the stinking morning air. Oh, it was quite normal for the air to be stinky outside the Dungston family’s house. It smelled like a mixture of farts with a hint of mature sock cheese, and had a sharp after-scent of freshly brewed cabbage. It wasn’t the house that smelled—it was the truck parked in the driveway. It was one of those chunky, clunky, nostril-stinging, rubbish-collecting trucks that trundle around town with those jolly-looking, grubby people in grimy overalls collecting everyone’s rotten garbage.

  Lucy’s dad had been one of those jolly-looking, grubby garbage-collecting people. He was the trash collector for Whiffington Town, where he lived—sorry, where he USED to live—before he disappeared. Since he vanished, his truck had been parked in the driveway, stinking up the whole street. Of course, Mrs. Dungston had tried to sell the truck, but no one wanted a stinky old thing like that. Even Whiffington Scrap Metal said that the odor was too strong for them to crush the truck! And so there it stayed, on Lucy’s driveway.

  If you ever find yourself behind one of these trucks, take a little sniff, just a little one, and you’ll know what Lucy Dungston’s house smelled like.

  Anyway, back to the day it all began!

  Out in Lucy’s street, Clutter Avenue, she noticed instantly that things weren’t right. Usually there was a long line of traffic clogging up the road as moms and dads took their kids to school and went to work and drove to the post office and the hairdresser’s and did all the boring stuff grown-ups do. But today the road wasn’t busy. It wasn’t just not-busy—it was completely deserted. Not a single car. Lucy looked left, then right, then left again, then right again, then she repeated that about twenty more times, which I won’t bother to write because that would just be silly, but when she had finished she was convinced she was right—something weird was definitely happening in Whiffington Town.

  “What the jiggins is going on?” she said to herself.

  What the jiggins indeed, Lucy.

  Where was Mr. Ratcliffe, the wrinkly old man who did yoga in his front yard in his underpants? (He claimed it was the secret to staying young.)

  Where was Molly, the milk woman, who delivered fresh bottles of milk from her electric van?

  Where was Mario, the man from the next street, who jogged past every morning in his skimpy Lycra shorts?

  Where was everyone?!

  That’s when Lucy heard a noise. Her heart leapt. Was it her mom?

  A long, slow creak came from somewhere along Clutter Avenue, followed by a sudden CLANG!

  “Hello?” Lucy called.

  “Mama?” a small voice asked from behind the fence two doors down.

  “Oh, Ella! It’s just you!”

  Lucy sighed in relief as Ella Noying appeared. First her bouncy hair peeped out into the street, followed by her round cheeks and her big deep-brown eyes that always managed to get her out of trouble. She was wearing bright pink pajamas made of shiny silk, with her initials embroidered on the pocket. In one hand was a pair of pin
k heart-shaped designer sunglasses. Lucy never saw Ella anywhere without those.

  “Lucy, I can’t find Mama or Papa and my avocado needs mashing,” Ella whined.

  Before Lucy could reply, another door opened across the street.

  “Dad?” whispered Norman Quirk, a boy from Lucy’s year at school, as he hesitantly stepped into his front yard. Norman was dressed in a pristinely ironed, meticulously clean Scout uniform, which was covered in the most achievement badges Lucy had ever seen.

  Here is a list of some of Norman’s badges:

  a tree-climbing badge

  a tent-pitching badge

  a badge for spreading-butter-on-toast-all-the-way-to-the-edges

  the indoor-challenge badge

  the outdoor-challenge badge

  the shake-it-all-about-door challenge badge

  a bed-making badge

  a cake-baking badge

  an eating-the-cake-you-bake-in-the-bed-you-make badge

  the remembering-to-wash-your-belly-button badge

  and even a badge for collecting-lots-of-badges

  …and there were a few empty spots on his uniform that he needed to fill with new badges.

  “Oh, hi…Er, I mean, good morning, civilians!” Norman said, nervously holding up three fingers in a Scout salute before fiddling with his neatly combed mousy-blond hair. With his other hand, he covered his mouth to hide his train-track braces.

  “You haven’t seen my dad, have you?” he asked, scooping a handful of mud from his front yard and sniffing it as if trying to pick up his dad’s scent. When Norman bent down, Lucy caught sight of his Transformers socks.

  Ella giggled at him, not really in a mean way, but just because she found Norman sort of funny. Everyone did. Norman was…different.