Elliot and the Goblin War (Underworld Chronicles 1)

A cheer rose throughout the crowd.

So it was, on Halloween night while Elliot lay in his bed feeling bad about having lost his candy, that the Goblins declared war on the Brownies. And the Underworld would never be the same again.

There are many causes of forgetfulness, including at least 236 different diseases, most of which you probably can’t pronounce. A good way to know that you don’t have any of those forgetting diseases is if you remember that the Brownie child, Patches Willimaker, had decided to keep her eye on Elliot in case the Goblins returned again.

(If you don’t remember that, then you might have some form of amnesia. You may have forgotten that you have amnesia, because if you do remember having it, then it probably isn’t amnesia at all. Maybe you just weren’t reading carefully.)

Three years passed from the night Elliot saved Patches from the Goblins, and all that time, she watched him. Elliot lived in the very small town of Sprite’s Hollow, which is about a hundred miles away from anywhere you’d want to be. The weather there was usually just about right for the time of year, except for last July when hail the size of golf balls fell all over town and refused to melt afterward. (Or maybe it was the mini-golf tournament they held around town that day. No one really knows for sure.)

Sprite’s Hollow was normally a peaceful town, where cows and chickens outnumbered the people, so it was never hard to find Elliot. A person could run from one end of town to the other in less than twenty minutes, even faster if you were Elliot and were being chased by one of the school bullies.

By the time he was eleven years old, Elliot was so skinny that his normal-size head looked too large for his neck. He had blond hair every summer and brown hair every winter and red hair only once, when he fell into a bucket of mashed beets. His legs had grown in the last year, and his great hope was that the rest of his body would soon grow to match.

Sprite’s Hollow was also the kind of town where a kid could get into a lot of trouble with only a little effort. Some kids got into trouble by changing road signs so that travelers who thought they were leaving town actually went back the way they had come. Others snuck into barns and added chocolate syrup to the cow’s water, hoping the cow would then produce chocolate milk.

Elliot’s trouble was named Tubs Lawless, a kid from up the road who was two years older and two heads taller. He was dumber than a Popsicle and so mean that he jumped every time he looked in the mirror.

Patches had helped Elliot escape trouble with Tubs more than once. Of course, Elliot didn’t know that, but she figured over the past three years she’d saved him from at least eighteen bruises, two black eyes, and one note taped to Elliot’s back telling the rest of the school to kick him.

Today he was in a bit more trouble than usual. Patches watched Tubs chase Elliot behind Elliot’s house. She ducked behind a large elm tree as they raced across the grass on the edge of the woods that bordered Elliot’s backyard. The woods were mystery territory. No kid had ever explored them all. Even Elliot could get lost in there. It was rumored that a boy named Mavis had been lost in there for the last twenty-eight years.

No sooner had Elliot run into the woods than a rope grabbed him by the leg and yanked his body up in the air, hanging him upside down. As Tubs got closer, Elliot squirmed to get free, but the rope only tightened.

The rope trap was Elliot’s father’s idea. He figured it was a good way to catch dinner for the family. It had worked only once before, trapping a skunk that sprayed Elliot’s father in the face when he let it go. Now the trap had caught Elliot. Elliot wished he had something to spray Tubs with, like extra-strength bully repellent.

Tubs ran up so close that their noses were almost touching, except of course Elliot’s nose was upside down.

“Next time I make you do my homework, you’d better put in the right answers,” Tubs said.

“I wrote that Tubs Lawless has pudding for brains,” Elliot said, smiling. “I thought that was the right answer.”

“How should I know?” Tubs asked. “But if it was, then why did the teacher mark it wrong?” After a moment, his eyes widened and he said, “Hey! Pudding for brains—that’s an insult!”

Tubs backed up and grabbed a handful of rocks, which he began throwing. Even upside down, Elliot did a pretty good job at avoiding the rocks, but Patches knew Tubs would get in a hit soon. She rolled up her sleeves, preparing to do a little magic to get Elliot down.

“I thought we smelled manure back here,” a boy behind Elliot said. “Wait, it’s only Tubs.”

“Hey, Tubs! Look this way!” another boy said.

Patches turned to see Cole and Kyle, Elliot’s six-year-old twin brothers, standing in the yard with a long hose kinked in their hands and a naughty spark in their clear blue eyes. The twins released the kink, and a stream of water shot at Tubs, hitting him squarely in the chest. It knocked him to the ground. He crawled backward, cried for his mommy, then ran away.

“Thanks!” Elliot told his brothers. He didn’t often use their names, because he couldn’t tell them apart. He sometimes wondered if Kyle and Cole even knew who had which name.

“Our pleasure,” answered the twins.

Cole and Kyle loved anything with water. They’d been suspended from kindergarten in their first week for putting a water snake in the boys’ bathroom toilet, which got into the pipes and ended up flooding the entire nonfiction section of the school library.

“Mom and Dad are going to be home at any minute!” Elliot’s fifteen-year-old sister, Wendy, cried as she barreled into the woods. “Look at this mess. Dinner’s going to be burned now.” She had white flour in her brown ponytail. That meant bad news. She was cooking.

Elliot and his brothers looked at each other. If the family was lucky, burned was the only problem with Wendy’s food. The only reason anyone ever came to eat was because she tricked them by putting a yummy-smelling dessert in the oven to call them.

“I’ll cut you down, but I’ll be late for work,” said sixteen-year-old Reed, the oldest of the Penster children. Reed helped the family by sharing his earnings from working in a fast-food restaurant named the Quack Shack. Nobody thought duck burgers had much of a chance in becoming more popular than plain old hamburgers. They were right. Duck nuggets dipped in barbecue sauce weren’t too bad, though. Reed also tried to improve his family’s meager food supply by bringing home leftover pickle relish each weekend in case anyone wanted some. No one ever did, and Reed’s collection now fit in a jar almost as tall as he was.

Elliot was cut down and the family walked back to their home, a two-story wooden box that leaned in whatever direction the wind blew.

Patches crept out from behind her tree and cradled her head in her hands while she watched them go. It would’ve been nice to rescue Elliot from Tubs, but that wasn’t why she had come here. The Brownies weren’t doing well in the war against the Goblins. In this case, “not doing well” meant they were losing in every way possible. She knew that one day the Goblins would decide to come after Elliot too. And she was right.

But as you will see, it didn’t happen in the way Patches thought. Elliot just wasn’t that lucky.