Kindle Edition
Amazon
Amazon
Category:
Fantasy
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
ISBN-10: 1950627209
Type: Fiction
Pages: 265
Copyright: August 14, 2019
ISBN-13: 9781950627202
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
Why is the black van still following Will and Sandra? Something is wrong in Normal.
The perfect summer of being eight years old continues in a way that even two precocious kids with vivid imaginations could never have envisioned. The day before the first game of the Little League season Will’s papaw reveals a family secret that not only explains the odd things that Will has been experiencing but also changes his immediate plans.
While poking around in the abandoned old house down the street, looking for a half-fairy/half-human named Homer Underby, Will and Sandra are surprised by an old lady who appears to live there. As they try to help her out, it becomes clear that she’s troubled. But when they attempt to assist her, they uncover an unsolved mystery that happened twenty years before.
As the amateur sleuths investigate, strange men grab Sandra. While trying to get away, Will falls backward and through a hole in the floor landing in what he believes is the basement. With a badly sprained ankle, Will limps toward what he hopes will be the way out of the darkness, only to learn he is no longer anywhere near Normal.
Somehow Will has wound up in the distant future on a subtropical island off the coast of Antarctica where Brent, the last man on Earth, lives. While the most important thing for Will is getting back home to help Sandra escape from her captors, he must trust the reluctant hermit who knows a lot more about Sandra’s abduction than Will is comfortable with.
Homer Underby continues The Thuperman Trilogy as two budding superheroes must depend on each other to find answers.
Excerpt
Starting out, Thursday didn’t feel like the best day of my life. Looking back, though, maybe it was better than the next few days to come. Is it possible for a week to last for a month? Mine did. But that’s getting ahead of the story. Back to Thursday: over the course of that one day I confirmed a lot of things that I’d suspected, and it was tough for me to believe some of it was real. I needed to talk to Sandra, more than I could say over the phone. You know how some things are just best said in person? Also, I had a strong feeling that maybe we shouldn’t talk over the phone at all about some of our recent discoveries, like the amazing things Sandra could do. But Sandra was grounded. Even though I wasn’t, it was almost as bad as if I was too. All I could do was look forward to seeing her that evening at baseball practice. I couldn’t wait. The book I’d just finished, the one about the girl and the horse, was still fresh in mind. I liked it so much that I was almost willing to revise my feelings about the summer reading thing. There were some good stories. For sure, reading helped solve my boredom. The next book on my reading list, one I’d borrowed at the library, was about a boy and a hunting dog. The last time I spoke to Sandra she said she’d already finished it and that it was good, even if the main character was a boy. She preferred reading about girls. I told her I enjoyed the first book. She said it’s a good thing for me to read about girls. I laughed and said it wouldn’t hurt her to read more about boys. But then she pointed out that nearly every book on the reading list had a boy as a main character and even if there was a girl in the book it was usually a sister or someone the boy liked.
Homer Underby
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Then she asked me about that—boys liking girls but being too shy to tell them. It wasn’t like that between us, but I guess that happens a lot with other kids, especially if people write about it. When I started to read the new book, it drew me right in. Good stories are like that. And that’s why other people, teachers and such, decided to put those kinds of books on the summer reading list. As much as I had always wanted to do anything else but read, while Sandra was grounded I figured out why lots of people like books. There’s magic between the covers and when you open a book, you enter a different world, one that opens-up inside of you as the world outside disappears. And for a little while you can forget about anything else. In fact, I was into the book so much that I didn’t hear Mom call me for lunch. She had to come to my room and knock on the door jamb. Later, when it was time to go to baseball practice, I didn’t hear her calling me for that either. I was somewhere else, a place where I was seeing things through the main character’s eyes. I hadn’t learned the truth behind that yet, but before the week was out I would. At baseball practice we divided into two teams. As usual Sandra was on one side and I was on the other. So, we didn’t get much of a chance to talk except for right before and just after practice. Even so, all we talked about was baseball, especially pitching. She wondered which one of us the coach was going to pick to start the game on Saturday. “You of course,” I told her, because, no matter how much she said otherwise, she was clearly the best. She punched me in the arm but then laughed and kissed me on the cheek. That night, before bed, I called her. She explained how she was dealing with being grounded by practicing guitar. As part of her punishment she wasn’t allowed to watch any TV! So, her mom told her she could read or practice music. But, as she’d told me long ago, she preferred reading just before going to bed. So, during the day, she played things on guitar that Shred had taught her. We talked a little about the book with the girl and the horse and how it was almost like the girl knew what the horse thought and how smart the horse was. She promised not to tell me what happened in the story I was reading about the boy and the dog, except she said it was sad and it made her cry. From that I kind of knew what was coming. Whenever I got to the ending I’d try not to cry because boys aren’t supposed to do that. I’m not sure who came up with that rule, but I also knew that I’d better be alone when I made it to the actual end of the book, unless I wanted someone to know how badly I was going to break that silly rule. Friday morning, I got up early and made my own breakfast, just cereal and juice because it was too hot for anything from the toaster. After breakfast, I cleaned my room. Mom wanted to wash my sheets and pillow cases. She said it was summer
Elgon Williams
3
and it was already hot well into the night. In fact, I slept under a sheet at night and most of the time I kicked that off. Mom said Dad was thinking about getting air conditioners for each of our bedrooms, and maybe a big one for downstairs, but he decided it was too expensive just to be used for a couple of months out of the year. I was okay with that, because whenever I was in some place that was air conditioned, like Bud’s store, it made me sneeze. Sandra said that maybe I was allergic to air conditioning or something. I laughed and told her that was silly. She was serious about the possibility, though. I asked Mom about that and she said Mamaw complained about how cold it was in stores and that she sneezed, too. Maybe it runs in the family. Anyway, in my opinion, Dad was right about not buying air conditioners because, in the Midwest, for most of the year it would be unnecessary. During the winter, it’s extremely cold. In the Spring and Fall, even if it’s warm during the day, at night it can be cold. In fact, it’s just been during the past couple of weeks that it’s been warm at night. Usually it isn’t quite so hot this early. Some people say the weather is changing because we’re polluting the world. I don’t know. Dad and Mom says that’s possible. Papaw says the weather goes in cycles—like it’s hot for a while and then it’s not as hot. But then I asked him about all the pollution and he said it was sad what we’ve done to the world, like we’re living in our own garbage. Getting back to air conditioning, it doesn’t matter much one way or the other. When it’s hot at night Mom lets me use an oscillating fan to sit on my nightstand. When it gets too hot, like in late July and August, there’s a box fan that’s stored on the floor of my closet. The ogre who lives there likes hiding behind it. When necessary, Mom puts that in my window to bring cooler air in from outside. After I stripped the sheets and pillowcases, Mom came to my room with fresh ones and helped me make my bed. Then she asked if I had anything planned with Sandra. Had she already forgot that Betty grounded her? “Well, that’s easier, then.” “Not for me,” I said. “I meant…well, I was asking because Papaw is coming over in a little bit to pick you up.” “He is? For what?” It wasn’t like I never went places with him, just that usually, when he came over, it was because he needed me to help him out on the farm. I’m not sure how much help I was but sometimes what I did was sort of fun. And I liked being around all the animals.
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