Maddy West and the Tongue Taker Read online

  For Annie, with love

  Congratulations to the taste-test winners: Darcy Holdem, Kamo High School, Whangarei, New Zealand Jacquie Yee, St. Cuthbert’s College, Auckland, New Zealand Stephanie Day, The Alexander Dawson School, Las Vegas, USA Maddy West, Hatton Vale High School, Queensland, Australia

  And a special congratulations to: Gabby Head, Wenona School, Sydney, Australia

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One: The Doctor

  Chapter Two: An Invisible Friend

  Chapter Three: The Man from Channel Four

  Chapter Four: Tsuji

  Chapter Five: Smart Talk

  Chapter Six: The Old Man on the Train

  Chapter Seven: Professor Coateloch

  Chapter Eight: Packing

  Chapter Nine: Mr. Slavinski and His Funny Monkey

  Chapter Ten: Two Surprise Visitors

  Chapter Eleven: Sofia

  Chapter Twelve: Sozopol

  Chapter Thirteen: Going Home

  Chapter Fourteen: The House

  Chapter Fifteen: The Witch

  Chapter Sixteen: The Spells

  Chapter Seventeen: Kazuki

  Chapter Eighteen: Dimitar the Giant

  Chapter Nineteen: Tap, Tap, Tap

  Chapter Twenty: The Lair

  Chapter Twenty-One: Escape

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Dragon's Tongue

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Recipe for a Thunderstorm

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Stroke of Midnight

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Helicopter

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE DOCTOR

  WHEN MADDY STARTED SPEAKING JAPANESE, her mom took her to the doctor.

  The doctor was a gentle, gray-haired man with gold-rimmed glasses that made him look intelligent. Maddy liked the doctor immediately.

  “So what is the problem today?” the doctor asked, smiling kindly at Maddy.

  “She’s speaking in foreign tongues,” Maddy’s mom said, but the word “foreign” had a strange ring to it, as if it brought a bad taste to her mouth when she said it.

  The doctor frowned and, for some reason, began to examine Maddy’s ear.

  “What kind of foreign tongues?” he asked. There was no bad taste to the way he said it.

  “Japanese,” Maddy’s mom said. “At least, I think it was Japanese. It might have been Korean, or Taiwanese, or even Chinese.”

  It had been Japanese, but this conversation seemed to be between her mom and the doctor, so Maddy didn’t butt in to tell them so.

  “So you’ve been speaking a foreign language?” The doctor raised an eyebrow at Maddy then turned back to her mom. “I don’t quite understand. What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to . . .” Maddy’s mom stopped. It was quite clear that she wasn’t sure what she wanted the doctor to do. “I want you to . . . to . . . to fix her.”

  The doctor looked from Maddy to her mom, then back again.

  “I don’t think she’s broken,” he said. Maddy could have hugged him on the spot.

  “Well, I want you to do something,” Maddy’s mom said.

  “All right,” the doctor said. “I suppose we could run some tests.”

  “Tests, good. Yes, tests,” Maddy’s mom said.

  “Would it be all right if I spoke to Maddy alone for a moment first?” the doctor asked.

  “Alone? Why?” Maddy’s mom narrowed her eyes. It made her look like a cat.

  “I think it will help,” the doctor said.

  “Oh.” Maddy’s mom looked sideways at Maddy but stood up. “How long will it take?”

  “As long as it takes,” the doctor said.

  Maddy’s mom narrowed her eyes even further at the doctor.

  Maddy was starting to like him more and more.

  Maddy’s mom walked over to the door, opened it, and left.

  The doctor stood and closed the door softly.

  “What kind of tests?” Maddy asked.

  “Oh, there are no tests,” the doctor said. “I just said that so your mother would wait outside. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I thought so,” Maddy said with a smile. “And no, I don’t mind.”

  “Now.” The doctor sat on the corner of his desk and looked at her over the top of his spectacles. “How old are you, Maddy?”

  “I’m nine,” Maddy said, “and a half.”

  “And a very important half it is,” the doctor said. “And you speak Japanese? Do you speak any other languages?”

  “I don’t know,” Maddy said. “How many other languages are there?”

  “There are hundreds of them,” the doctor said. “Too many for any one person to know. I myself learned French at school, and have a little smattering of Polish from my grandmother. I once knew a person who could speak five languages.”

  Maddy wasn’t really listening. She was visualizing a smattering of Polish, which sounded like something that had once happened when she was helping her mom clean the dining table.

  “Would you like to hear some French?” the doctor asked. “It’s a beautiful language.”

  “Yes, I honestly would,” Maddy replied.

  He chuckled. “That’s quite extraordinary,” he said.

  “What is?” Maddy asked, convinced she was about to learn some great secret that only doctors knew.

  “You are,” the doctor said.

  Maddy considered that. She wasn’t sure if he was being nice or rude.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Well, when I asked you if you would like to hear some French,” the doctor said, “I asked it in French.”

  Maddy quickly thought back. Yes, the doctor had said, “Est-ce que tu aimerais entendre un peu de Français?” So that was French!

  “In fact, everything I said from then on was also in French.” The doctor smiled.

  “Wow,” said Maddy.

  “And you answered in French also,” he said, and went back to his chair, which puffed and wheezed as he sat down. Maddy thought that the doctor should lose some weight, but she also thought that a doctor would know that without having to be told by a nine-year-old girl. So she said nothing.

  “Do you also speak Polish?” the doctor asked, and from the sound of the words, Maddy guessed this time he was speaking Polish.

  She answered using the same kind of words. “I guess so, if this is it.”

  “Well, I never,” the doctor said.

  He pushed a button on a small metal box on his desk. It answered with his nurse’s voice, although it sounded distant and tinny.

  “Gabby, would you come in here for a moment please?” he said.

  “Certainly, doctor,” the voice said.

  The door opened and the nurse entered.

  “Yes, doctor,” she said.

  “Maddy, this is Mrs. Head,” the doctor said. “Mrs. Head, I seem to remember you telling me that you spoke Spanish.”

  “I learned it at school, and I practiced a little last year when we went on vacation to Majorca,” she said.

  “Would you mind practicing a little on Maddy?” the doctor asked.

  “I’d be happy to,” Mrs. Head said. “Does she speak Spanish?”

  “I think we’re about to find out,” the doctor said.

  Mrs. Head sat down on the chair next to Maddy, where her mom had been sitting.

  Maddy thought Mrs. Head was pretty, with happy eyes, but used too much makeup.

  “I am asking if speaking Spanish you thank you please,” Mrs. Head said.

  Maddy l
aughed.

  “Did you understand her?” the doctor asked.

  “A little,” Maddy said.

  “Interesting,” the doctor said. “Mrs. Head, would you please try again?”

  “Speaking the Spanish difficulty without language motor car,” Mrs. Head said confidently.

  “How about that time?” the doctor asked Maddy.

  “No, sorry, I couldn’t understand her,” Maddy said.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Head,” the doctor said.

  She rose and went back to her office.

  “Japanese, French, Polish, but not Spanish,” he muttered, making some notes in Maddy’s file. “Now that is very interesting.”

  “Actually, I think I do speak Spanish,” Maddy said after the door to the office had shut.

  “You do? I thought you said you didn’t.”

  “What I said was I couldn’t understand Mrs. Head,” Maddy said. “I think I speak Spanish, but I don’t really think that she does.”

  The doctor chuckled and made some changes to his notes in the file.

  “What are we going to do with you?” he asked.

  Maddy didn’t know the answer to that question.

  Just then, the door opened, and Maddy’s mom stood in the doorway. She did not look pleased.

  “How are these tests going?” she asked.

  “Very well,” the doctor said. “You have a very charming and talented daughter.”

  “Humph,” Maddy’s mom said, which wasn’t a word in any language that Maddy could understand, but her mom always seemed to say it when she was annoyed and didn’t know what else to say.

  “But it’s not only Japanese that she speaks,” the doctor said.

  “She speaks another language?”

  “A lot. In fact, so far I haven’t managed to find a language that she doesn’t speak.”

  “That’s not right, is it?” Maddy’s mom said. “Can you do something about it?”

  “To be honest, I don’t think there’s a problem to solve,” the doctor said. “A talent like this could be very valuable.”

  “No. It’s not natural. It’s not . . .” She seemed to catch her breath. “Valuable?”

  “I mean, in a useful kind of way,” the doctor said, but Maddy’s mom didn’t seem to have heard him.

  “Valuable?” she said again.

  “No, I simply meant . . .” the doctor began, but Maddy’s mom walked over and took Maddy’s hand, pulling her up out of the chair.

  “Thank you, doctor,” she said. “How much for today?”

  “Uh . . . please see Mrs. Head on the way out,” the doctor said. He was frowning.

  Maddy caught his eye and winked at him to let him know that everything would be all right. He broke into a grin and shook his head.

  “What an extraordinary young lady,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AN INVISIBLE FRIEND

  IF NOT FOR MADDY'S MOM, that might have been the end of that, and Maddy might never have gone on a dark and dangerous adventure.

  Maddy’s mom was a tall, thin lady with high, sharp cheekbones and bouffant red hair that took hours of blowing and brushing and huffing and puffing in the morning to keep that way. Her name was Gertrude. It was a rather old-fashioned name that had been handed down for generations in her family, but it had somehow skipped Maddy (for which she was grateful).

  Maddy hadn’t skipped the red hair, however. Unlike her mom’s, though, Maddy’s was a jungle of thick red springlike curls — and no amount of huffing and puffing or brushing seemed to make any difference. She had also inherited her mother’s rather fierce temper, although Maddy tried to keep that under control. Sometimes Maddy felt like there was a wild animal caged inside her, and she had to be careful not to let it escape.

  When they got home from the doctor’s, her mom disappeared into her bedroom and shut the door. Maddy could hear her talking on the phone, but she knew that when her mom shut the door, it meant she didn’t want to be disturbed.

  “Not unless there’s a fire!” her mom had once said, quite abruptly, when Maddy had interrupted her to ask her something.

  What that really meant, Maddy knew, was: Not unless it’s super important! And there was nothing important, so she knew she should leave her mom alone for a while.

  Instead, she climbed up onto the desk in her bedroom, opened the window, and crawled out onto the fire escape.

  It was metal and cold and always left a crisscross pattern on the palms of Maddy’s hands and her knees, which Kazuki called “alien skin.”

  She ran along the fire escape, being careful not to look down. You could see through the metal grille all the way to the ground below, and it was a very long way down. When Kazuki came to visit her, he never used the fire escape because he was afraid of heights. He always took the elevator down to her floor and knocked on the front door instead. But Maddy liked using the fire escape.

  She tapped on the window of Kazuki’s bedroom, where he was sitting, reading a book.

  Kazuki, like Maddy, enjoyed reading books. Kazuki’s books were written in a Japanese alphabet that went from the top to the bottom of the page and across from right to left, instead of left to right. Maddy found them hard to read because she kept going the wrong way.

  Today she could see that he was reading an English vocabulary book. It was one of his books from school.

  Kazuki’s English was very poor, even though his family had moved to England over a year ago. His older brother Tsuji spoke good English, and Kazuki’s teachers couldn’t understand why Kazuki hadn’t picked it up as well.

  Maddy thought she knew. Tsuji was confident and outgoing and had made a lot of friends at school, so he was always speaking English. But Kazuki was quiet and shy and hadn’t made any friends at all, so he didn’t get to practice English that often.

  Maddy tried to speak English to him, but it made for difficult and slow conversations so, as often as not, they would speak in Japanese.

  “Hi, Maddy,” Kazuki said (in Japanese).

  “Open the window,” she said (also in Japanese), and when he did, she climbed inside.

  Kazuki was ten, and his room was covered with posters of things that made no sense to Maddy, like scary-looking Japanese men called samurai, with bald heads and long swords, and other men wearing black pajamas and black hoods that covered everything except their eyes. Those men had swords too and were called ninjas. When Kazuki grew up, he wanted to be a ninja warrior.

  “Where did you go today?” Kazuki asked.

  “To the doctor’s,” Maddy answered.

  “Oh,” Kazuki said. “Did he give you any medicine?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “I hate medicine.”

  “Me too,” said Maddy.

  “My birthday present from Uncle Kiyoshi arrived today,” he said.

  It had been Kazuki’s birthday the day before. Maddy had made him a colorful birthday card, and his parents had given him a new catcher’s mitt and a baseball.

  “What did your uncle give you?” Maddy asked.

  “A ninja suit!” Kazuki said. “It’s really cool. It’s black and it has lots of secret pockets.”

  “Cool!” said Maddy.

  “And it can make me go invisible,” Kazuki said.

  “That’s exciting,” Maddy said. “Invisible! Really?”

  “Yes!” Kazuki said. “And no one can see me, and I can do anything I want.”

  “That’s amazing,” Maddy said, trying not to sound too skeptical.

  “Yes, and when I am invisible, Mom can’t see me at all. Today I sneaked a cookie out of the jar while she was in the kitchen, and she never saw anything.”

  Maddy thought that Kazuki’s mom’s cookies were terrible and tasted like seaweed, but she was too polite to say so, either to Kazuki
or to his mom.

  “You have to show me,” Maddy said.

  The ninja suit was all black. Black pants, a black tunic, and a black belt. Attached to the back of the tunic was a black hood that could be pulled down over his face like a mask. Only Kazuki’s eyes and hands were visible when he put it all on. Then he put on some black gloves and that just left his eyes.

  “Okay, now I’m going to go invisible,” he said. Behind the face mask, Kazuki’s eyes closed, and his brow furrowed in concentration.

  He opened his eyes with a look of anticipation. “There!” he said. “Can you tell where my voice is coming from?”

  “From your mouth, silly,” Maddy said. “I can still see you as plain as flour.”

  “Oh.” Kazuki looked disappointed. “Perhaps I did it wrong.”

  He shut his eyes and concentrated even harder, then opened his eyes and said, “Where am I now?”

  “Right there,” Maddy said, pointing at him.

  “It’s not working,” Kazuki said. He looked like he was about to cry.

  “Wait,” she said. “Let me turn around, and you go invisible when I’m not watching.”

  “Yeah!” Kazuki said. “That’s got to be it.”

  Maddy turned around and counted to three, then turned back.

  Kazuki was gone.

  “I can’t see you,” she gasped.

  “I told you!” Kazuki said.

  He was standing in the corner of the room. He had moved so quietly that Maddy hadn’t heard him. He was standing so still in a shadow that at first she hadn’t been able to see him until she had looked right at him. It wasn’t really invisibility, she thought, but it was quite extraordinary all the same.

  “That’s fantastic,” she said.

  “Now I can be a real ninja,” Kazuki said, pulling his hood back.

  Maddy looked around at the ninjas on the posters on Kazuki’s wall. Maddy thought that to be a ninja warrior you would have to be strong and fierce and brave, but Kazuki was more quiet and gentle. Maddy couldn’t imagine Kazuki as a fierce ninja warrior.

  “And I’ll be able to sneak right into Tsuji’s room and play tricks on him,” Kazuki was saying.