The Shrunken Head by Lauren Oliver
DEDICATION
Lauren Oliver Wishes
to Dedicate this Book to
Extraordinary Children Everywhere.
H. C. Chester Wishes
to Dedicate this Book to
His Best Friend, Trudy.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: step right up and don’t be shy. You must not—you absolutely cannot!—put this book down.
Yes, I’m speaking to you—you, with the chewing gum and the smudgy fingers. Don’t try to pretend your fingers aren’t smudgy. They are leaving marks even now. It’s okay. Smudgy fingers are quite allowed in the museum.
What museum, you ask? But surely you’ve heard already. You see, within these pages is a museum, and within the museum is a story of wondrous weirdness, of magic and monsters . . . and of four of the most extraordinary children in the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, please don’t push! The doors will open soon enough; the page will turn. I assure you, there is room enough for everybody.
And now, for the rules:
All grown-ups must be accompanied by a child, and disbelievers will be clobbered on the head with an umbrella. Gaping and gawking are strictly encouraged, although pointing is, as always, considered rude. Coat check is on the left, popcorn on the right. Please do not litter, and do not feed the alligator boy.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages: welcome to Dumfrey’s Dime Museum of Freaks, Oddities, and Wonders.
COME IN, PLEASE. ST P OUT O THE RAIN.
It had been raining for three straight days, and even the regular customers were staying away. On Thursday, Thomas had the idea of posting a sign on the doors of the museum. By Friday, several letters had blurred away, and the others were running toward the bottom of the page as though attempting a getaway. By Saturday afternoon, the note had turned to a sodden piece of pulp and, driven by the winds into the gutter, was carted away on the underside of a busy man’s leather-soled shoe.
Thomas was bored.
It was only April 20, and he had already read all the books Mr. Dumfrey had bought him for his birthday on April 2, including The Probability of Everything, which was nearly a thousand pages long, and A Short History of Math, which was even longer. So he spent the morning in the attic, playing DeathTrap, a game of his own invention. It was like chess, except that instead of using a checkerboard, it relied on the patterns of a threadbare Persian rug, and instead of pawns, bishops, and knights, the pieces were various things pilfered from the exhibits over the years: a baby kangaroo’s foot, which could only jump spaces; a dented Roman coin that could only be spun or flipped; an old shark’s jaw that didn’t move but conquered pieces that came too close by swallowing them; a scorpion tail that paralyzed other players so they lost a turn; an armadillo toe that could be used by any player, depending on who was in possession of the armadillo shell.
As usual, Thomas had no one to play with, so he had to do both sides.
He flipped the coin and sighed when it landed faceup. That meant he had to move the Egyptian scorpion tail back three swirls in the carpet.
“You should take the armadillo toe.”
Thomas looked up. Philippa, the mentalist, was sprawled across a daybed, watching him.
“What?” he asked. He and Philippa were both twelve, but her dark, almond-shaped eyes, her straight fringe of black bangs, and her sharply pointed chin made her appear much older.
Philippa sighed. “If you move the scorpion there”—she pointed—“you can take the armadillo. Tail takes toe, right?”
Thomas saw that she was right and felt annoyed. “I didn’t know you were playing,” he said. He had grown up with Philippa, but they had never been close.
Philippa shrugged and picked up her book—Mystics, Mind Readers, and Magic, which Thomas had also read and found exceedingly stupid—then rolled onto her back. When she wasn’t looking, Thomas swiped at the armadillo toe with the scorpion’s, sending it skittering off the rug.
He had won again. It would be more exciting if he hadn’t also lost.
He stood up, feeling restless. It was uncommonly quiet, the kind of day that made him feel lazy. Sam was sitting in one of several armchairs in the common area, his hair mostly concealing his face, as it had been ever since he’d discovered his first pimple. An issue of his favorite magazine, Pet World, was open in his lap.
Monsieur Cabillaud, the children’s tutor, was snoring. Having exhausted himself earlier that day in an argument with Philippa over who was to blame for the Thirty Years’ War, he had promptly taken a nap on the sofa with a textbook covering his tiny head.