Maisie grinned at him. His fur was coarse and black, but his stomach was pink and the hair on his back was tipped with silver.
Felix noticed these things, too. He noticed that the gorilla’s face looked like a rubber gorilla mask and that his black eyes looked like a person’s eyes peering out through a Halloween mask. Then he remembered one more gorilla fact: Silverback gorillas acted like teenagers. Big and playful and, Felix thought as he sized up this silverback gorilla, probably weighing seven or eight hundred pounds. He could crush them. Easily. He could knock them out or knock them down or just about anything.
Go away! Felix thought, trying mental telepathy again. Go away!
But the gorilla did just the opposite. He took several bounding steps forward, and came to a stop just three feet from Maisie and Felix.
“Cool,” Maisie said as soft as an exhalation of breath.
The gorilla reached forward and touched Maisie’s hair with one long, gray finger.
Felix wondered if he might actually faint for the first time in his life.
The gorilla wrapped a wavy strand of Maisie’s hair in his finger. He paused. Then he pulled it, hard.
“Ouch!” Maisie said and, without thinking, she slapped his hand away.
He stepped back, startled.
For an instant, Felix thought the gorilla might walk away. The silverback shook his head and started off in the direction of the jungle.
“I can’t believe a gorilla pulled your hair,” Felix whispered, his voice full of fear.
“I can’t believe a gorilla pulled my hair, either,” Maisie said, her voice full of wonder.
Felix looked out of the corner of his eyes. Relieved, he did not see the gorilla.
“That was awesome,” Maisie said. “Wait until I tell Hadley.”
Hadley! That was what was needling at Felix’s brain. The Ziff twins!
Maisie and Felix seemed to remember them at the same time. They looked at each other.
“Uh-oh,” Maisie said.
The sound of footsteps pounding toward them from behind echoed through the air.
Felix started to turn to see what it was, but before he could make sense of the blur that was the silverback, the gorilla was right at Maisie’s back. He made a fist and punched Maisie right between the shoulder blades, hard.
Felix heard himself yell his sister’s name as she flew through the air and landed face-first on the jungle floor.
Felix ran toward her, but the gorilla ran faster. Felix watched as the silverback picked up Maisie in his mighty, hairy arms, held her tight, and ran.
CHAPTER 5
LAME DEMON
Foolishly, futilely, Felix shouted at the gorilla’s hairy back: “Put her down!”
There was nothing to do except run after them. Slipping and sliding down the embankment, Felix made his awkward way in the direction the silverback ran. Hanging on to vines and branches, Felix took slow steps, glancing up every now and then to be sure he still had the gorilla—and Maisie—in his sights.
Eventually, the ground flattened out enough for him to move faster. But then he found himself in large muddy puddles, and he began to slip and slide in the muck. The puddles were strange shapes, flat and wide with funny scraped marks at the top. Staring down as he lifted one foot after the other through the deep mud, Felix paused.
These weren’t puddles.
He bent and studied the shape.
They were footprints.
Hippo footprints.
Maisie knew she should be scared. A gorilla had punched her in the back, sent her flying through the air, then picked her up from the jungle floor and was at this very minute running away with her. Even one of these things should be enough to scare the heck out of her. But somehow, Maisie felt calm.
The gorilla stunk. Worse than the monkey house at the zoo. Worse than almost anything she’d smelled. Like a million skunks spraying, plus a million gym socks, plus a million classrooms of sweaty kids. Her father always told her to breathe through her mouth when something around her smelled bad, so Maisie did that, opening her mouth and breathing in and out, in and out. The gorilla had slowed down. But he did not loosen his grip on Maisie.
“Where are you taking me?” Maisie asked him.
He glanced down at her, gave her a smug look, then just kept walking.
As he made his way along the hippo tracks, Felix kept the gorilla in his sights. It seemed like he had been walking forever. His legs ached from gripping the slippery ground so hard for so long. He was sweatier than he’d ever been in his whole life. And he wanted nothing more than a big glass of cold water back in the kitchen at Elm Medona.
Ahead on the path, Felix saw a big branch blocking his way.
Great, he thought miserably. Just great.
Now he was going to have to lug that thing into the brush, and maybe lose Maisie and the silverback.
With a sigh, he bent to try and pick it up. And just as he did, the branch moved.
Felix gaped at the thing.
It wasn’t moving really. It was . . . slithering.