For Those Who Came In Late: Billy and Marisa are hunting The Story Plagues unleashed upon Alliance by a mystery villain. Their latest success was returning Alice, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse to the magic book that Marisa carries.
***
The arrow almost parted my hair before striking the telephone pole beside me.
I jumped off my bicycle and ran to the pole. Marisa, who was riding close behind, nearly ran over me.
“Marisa,” I said, staring at the arrow as it quivered in its target, “I think we’ve found our next Story Plague.”
Another arrow whizzed past my ear and split the first shaft down the middle. I pulled Marisa off her bike and behind a nearby shrub.
“We’re not in any danger, if that’s who I think it is,” Marisa said. “Where do you think he’s shooting from?”
“Over there,” I answered, pointing toward Memorial Park. The treetops made a solid ring of green, and I guessed that our mystery archer was hiding in one of them. “Let’s circle around and ride up Liberty Avenue. We can surprise him there.”
Marisa and I hopped back on our bikes and rode west to the crosswalk. Another arrow sailed past Marisa’s ear. From somewhere across the street, we heard a man laugh.
The traffic light turned green, and we crossed State Street. A semi-truck traveling west temporarily blocked us from view. About half a block further north, we cut through an opening in the trees and headed down into the park.
Marisa started to speak, but I held my finger across my lips. Quiet! I pointed straight up. About twenty feet above us, a man dressed in green was perched between two branches. His back was toward us. Across it, he carried a quiver full of arrows.
The man was wearing a green hat. He held a large bow in his left hand, while his right hand held the string and a nocked arrow. Nocked was a word I learned from my dad, who liked to shoot a crossbow. It meant that the notch in the end of the arrow had been put into the bowstring and was ready to be shot.
Traffic on State Street began to move again, and the semi-truck’s air brakes hissed as the driver put his rig into gear and moved forward.
We didn’t have much time before the archer looked down and saw us. I grabbed a rock from the ground and pitched it like a baseball toward our attacker. It hit him in the ankle and threw him off balance. With a cry of surprise, he fell from the tree, crashing and thrashing through branches on his way down.
He landed on his side with an “Oomph!” and looked at us. “Hark ye,” he said, “not many a man lives who can take me by surprise, or my name be not ...”
“Robin Hood!” we both answered.
Robin sat up and ran his fingers through his short beard. Beneath him lay his bow, snapped in half from the fall. “Verily,” he said, “although I don’t remember meeting you two children here in Sherwood afore, which is why I attempted to scare you with some well-placed arrows.”
“You haven’t met us before,” replied Marisa. “And I’m afraid that this isn’t Sherwood Forest, sir.”
“In truth!” he exclaimed. I started to laugh – he talked like one of those actors in Masterpiece Theater.
“Really,” Marisa replied. “But we know you are Robin Hood, or Robin of Locksley, because we’ve read stories about you and your Merry Men.” She looked at me. “Well, I’ve read them, anyhow.”
“Hey, I know who Robin Hood is!” I exclaimed. “I’ve seen movies, you know!”
Robin looked puzzled again. “Thou speakest in a strange tongue, lad and lass,” he said. “Today is a fair and glorious day, and one that I can ill afford to waste in idleness. See, look who approaches!”
A tall stranger was walking across the park’s baseball diamond, making his way to the small stream that ran nearby.
“Come, my young friends!” Robin said, leaping up. “Watch Robin make sport of this tall villain!”
Marisa and I followed Robin as he jogged through the trees. Even his shoes were green! As we ran to keep up, Marisa went into teacher-mode again, explaining all about Robin Hood as if I were a big dummy.
“Robin’s the hero of a bunch of English legends,” she droned. “Ballads, poems, stories – and they’re all just a little bit different from one another, so it’s hard to say if anybody named Robin Hood really existed.”
“Thanks, Professor,” I said. “Let’s skip the history lesson and see what our living legend is up to, huh?”
Robin had reached the stream, which was a lot wider than I remembered it. Maybe some of the scenery from these stories is being brought to life too, I thought.
An old tree had fallen across the stream, and the tall stranger started to walk across it. Robin started to cross from our side.
The two met in the middle.
Robin smiled. “Stand back, and let the better man pass first!”
“Indeed,” said the tall stranger, “take thine own advice and step aside, as I am the better man!”
Robin pulled an arrow from his quiver. “Stand aside, sir, or I shall run you through with this good, straight arrow!”
“And shoot it with what, good sir?” asked the stranger.
Robin realized that he had no bow. His face turned red. “Then I shall teach you a lesson with a stout quarter staff, you knave!” he shouted, jumping down off the fallen log. “Wait you there!”
“I wouldn’t move for all the gold in King Henry’s castle, good man!” said the stranger. He folded his arms and waited while Robin ran to a nearby tree. There, Robin cut two branches and trimmed them with the knife he wore around his waist. When he was finished, he had two staffs, each about six feet long. He threw one to the stranger as he stepped back onto the fallen log.
“Now, we shall take your full measure with these trusty quarter staffs,” Robin shouted. I remembered the Warner Brothers cartoon where Daffy Duck, as Robin Hood, says that he has a “buck-and-a-quarter quarter staff.” I chuckled.
The two men began to fight with the staffs, swinging and blocking each other’s blows. The staffs clicked together again and again, but neither man could manage to hit the other.
“This is silly,” Marisa complained.
“Uh-uh, this is cool!” I answered. It was like a low-tech Jedi duel in Star Wars. Robin tried his best to knock the stranger off the log and into the water, but the stranger was too good.
“Go get ‘im, Robin!” I yelled.
Distracted, the stranger glanced at me. Robin saw his chance and swung his staff at the stranger, knocking him off balance. The stranger swayed back and forth, almost falling into the water.
“No, it’s not supposed to end like that!” Marisa said, and she dived into the water. Marisa is from out of town, so she had no idea that the stream in Memorial Park isn’t normally deep enough for her to do that!
I watched her swim toward the log. The stranger had regained his balance, but Robin pressed his advantage and was driving him back toward the opposite bank.
Suddenly, Marisa shot out of the water and grabbed Robin’s ankle, the sore one that I’d hit with the rock. Robin stumbled, and that was all the stranger needed. His staff connected with Robin’s chest and knocked the green archer off the log. Robin hit the water with a splash.
Marisa swam back to me as Robin headed for the other bank. The stranger still stood on the log, laughing.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked Marisa, angrily. “Robin was going to win!”
“That’s the problem,” she said, wringing the water out of her shirt. “He wasn’t supposed to win. Watch!”
On the opposite bank, the stranger was helping Robin out of the water. “My name is John Little,” he said.
“And mine is Robin Hood,” replied the wet archer.
“The Robin Hood?” said John Little, amazed. “Why, it was you I was hoping to meet! Good Robin, might I join your band of Merry Men here in Sherwood?”
“See,” said Marisa, “John Little was supposed to knock Robin off that log, to gain his respect. That’s why Robin let him join the Merry Men, and changed his name to Little John! If Robin had won, that wouldn’t have happened!”
Across the stream, we saw Robin raise a bugle to his lips and blow on it three times. Figures in green leaped from the trees all around Memorial Park. Robin’s Merry Men!
The scene began to grow hazy. By now, Marisa and I knew what that meant. By the time we walked back to our bikes, the roaring river was a tiny stream once again, and Robin, Little John and the rest of the Merry Men had vanished.
On the next blank page of Marisa’s book, we read The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle. Marisa said it was just one of many books written about Robin’s adventures. Next to the title, our next clue: Spin Control.
Marisa shook her head. She didn’t know what to make of the clue, either. We hopped on our bikes, knowing that we’d come across the next Story Plague soon enough.
What we didn’t know was how frightening it would be!
To Be Continued
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