At last I reached Papadopoulos Dental Solutions, threw my bike into the bushes, rocketed through the front door, and crashed into the front desk. The receptionist flinched. I gasped for air. The smooth jazz piping from the speakers mocked my frantic state.

“Mlookinfortub.”

“Slow down, dear. What now?”

I gulped a quick lungful of air.

“I’m looking for Tub.”

“I still don’t understand—”

“Toby D.”

“I don’t know who that—”

“Tobias F. Dershowitz.”

The receptionist adjusted her glasses and consulted her ledger. Her gaze ticked down the list of names.

“Dershowitz…Dershowitz…oh!” Her smile quickly faded as she examined her notes more closely. “Oh.”

The sound of a drill sliced through the walls.

Moments later I ducked into the third, and most serious, patient room to find Tub alone and strapped into a chair with his lips stretched wide in four directions courtesy of a spiderlike metal contraption. His new braces made the old ones look debonair. Big chrome nodules were attached to every tooth, while steel wire twisted about in dizzying patterns. An acrid cloud of smoke hung above his head, the manifestation of his mood.

Tub couldn’t move his head from the grips, but he managed to raise an eyebrow.

I rushed to the side of the chair.

“It came back,” I gasped. “The thing from the parking lot.”

He raised his other eyebrow.

“They took me! The thing from the parking—I didn’t tell you, but there was a thing—when I was under—it had claws—Tub, no one’s gonna believe me! I was in this place—there was all this stuff, and I think it was from when all those kids—there were three of them, one with all these eyes—Tub, you wouldn’t believe it, all these eyes flying around all crazy—and a guy wearing all this junk and he was smaller but really scary—but the worst was the one with the claws—Tub, it was huge! Arms like a mile long! Teeth—a million teeth! Huge as, like, traffic cones—”

“Teeth that big I’d like to see!”

Dr. Papadopoulos came striding in holding a fistful of X-rays. I stepped back from the chair. Tub had always said that Papadopoulos was a hairy guy—when he wanted to gross me out, Tub would pretend to find curly pieces of Papadopoulos’s arm hair stuck in his braces. It was no exaggeration. Papadopoulos’s black mane began about an inch above his unibrow, and each of his four gigantic rings was lost in knuckle hair. He grinned at me. Perfect teeth, of course.

“What are we talking about? Some movie you saw?”

I felt myself nodding.

“Don’t get a chance to see many movies myself. What can I say? Teeth are my life. Tobias here will be with you in just a couple minutes. He just needs a wee bit of tightening.” He tossed the X-rays onto the counter, peered into Tub’s open mouth, nodded to himself, and headed out of the room again.

I swept back to Tub’s side.

“Tub. Tub. What am I gonna tell Dad? I can’t tell him, can I? He’ll go mental. He’ll lock me up with chains. We need to do something. You and me. Maybe we can set up a trap. Oh, man, Tub—they said they’d come back. Tonight. Tonight! We don’t have time—”