When your friends are in peril, and you yourself are in peril, and even the villain you have to conquer is in peril, what do you do? You show peril that you mean business.

Bells set her teeth.

I need to get out of here, she thought. I need to end this ridiculous charade that I have started in the first place. I'll need to go alone, because looking for Rusty in this mess is useless, and looking for Grand and Peacock is out of the question.

She surveyed the plaza for a way to the dirt wall.

It failed to present itself. Instead, an ear-splitting crack assaulted her ears. Pieces of pages rained down, some as big as birds. The Monkey City swarmed with badlings, characters, and ghosts. They were falling from above, no, they were pouring, blotting out the light and shaking the sky with their cries.

"Hinbad!" called Bells. He stopped pecking at the Queen, his attention diverted by the mayhem. "I need you to fly me to the duck pond. Can you do that?" She marched up to him and knocked on his leg.

"Huh? Fly where?" He hopped to the side, just in time to dodge a windmill that crashed with a tremendous rumble.

A spray of dust hit Bells in the face. She coughed, groping around. "We need to go now! Please!"

"Help! Help!" screamed the monkeys, clinging to Hinbad. He shook them off. 

"Haroun! Hossain! Where are you?" His screech drowned in the mournful wail of ghosts. "It's killing us...stop it...stop it..." 

Their cloudy shapes drifted to and fro, desperate, helpless. The Snow Queen's horses panicked and broke off from the sleigh. The Queen herself was nowhere to be seen. And above it all Mad Tome raved and raged and writhed, its cries of woe a terrible solo against the background of anguished screaming.

"Ohhh, they hurt me so," it moaned. "Ohhh, why do they hurt me..." It hacked and slashed blindly, grabbing at anything and everything that moved. One of its claws got stuck in a tangle of lianas. It jerked, and the page tilted sharply, tossing everyone into a jumble.

Bells felt her feet detach from the ground when a reckless idea struck her. It was the best she could come up with, considering the unfortunate circumstances. She leapt for the claw, and as it freed itself, she snatched it.

Mad Tome peered at her with bleary tear-stained eyes. "Alice, is that you?"

Bells dug her nails into the hard leathery surface, afraid to say anything and give herself away. Her heart hammered. Her ears rang. She swooned, almost falling off.

I won't faint, I won't faint. I won't faint!

"Alice, it's as you said," wailed Mad Tome. "They have betrayed me. After everything I've done for them, after I've risked my life to hunt for new badlings—as they asked me to, mind you—they turned against me. They have brought a terrible menace on me, Alice. You and Don Quixote are all I have left. Find him. Have him skewer them on his lance!"

Bells didn't dare to breathe.

"They torment me, Alice. Ohhh, they torment me so! Alice?" Mad Tome waited. "Why aren't you saying anything? Alice? Alice!"

Bells coughed to clear her throat, hoping she sounded Alicey enough. "I'm here, Mad Tome, I'm here. I came to...to see how you're doing. Are you doing okay?" It was obvious that it wasn't doing okay in the slightest, but Bells' scrambled mind failed to come up with anything better.

"You must help me chase them off!" cried Mad Tome.

"Chase whom off?"

"The ducks!"

Stunned, Bells nearly released her hold. "The ducks?"

"They're ripping me, Alice! They're ripping me apart!" There was pain in Mad Tome's voice, an age-old misery, as if it was no longer a malevolent villain but simply a book, a big tome of unread pages, sad and disillusioned and dying.

Bells buzzed with too many feelings at once: surprise, relief, astonishment, dread, and—strangely—giddiness. Giddiness at the absurdity of it all.

"The ducks are ripping you apart?" she repeated. "The ducks at the duck pond?"

"Well, where else?"

"Are you kidding?" Bells giggled. "I can't believe it!"

"You're not Alice," rustled Mad Tome, squinting. "Who are you? Answer me, before I slash you to bits and chuck you into oblivion!"

Its face hung so close Bells could reach out and touch it. It was crumpled and torn like a discarded piece of paper: two rips for the eyes, two holes for the nose, and a huge gash for one toothless mouth, a puffy tongue lolling out of it like a strip of damp cardboard. It seemed to hold itself together by the threads, stubbornly refusing to disintegrate.

"New badling," it sneered in recognition. "You came to me yourself, how convenient. Let me show you what happens to naughty children like you, you careless foolish girl."

The insult left Bells winded. She sucked in air and let it out in a hiss. "Come on, ducks. Come on. Show this pile of stupid pages—"

"What's that you're saying?"

Forgetting danger, Bells pulled herself up, propped hands on her hips, and proclaimed, "I'm saying, you're just a pile of stupid pages."

"Stupid pages, am I?" said Mad Tome, amused by this display of audacity.

"No, I'm sorry. I got it wrong." Bells flipped her ponytail and stood even taller. Her worries left her. Her fears retreated under the pressure of hurt, hurt from the old stinging wound. Never in her life did she feel so offended by being dismissed as a foolish girl, and she was going to prove Mad Tome wrong. There was an odd clarity in her mind: she knew exactly what to say next, and nothing was going to stop her.

"You're a nasty cancerous wart on the face of literature," she delivered sharply. "You're not even a book, you're a helter-skelter mindlessly-put-together heap of misplaced pages that is shamelessly boasting and bragging about its grandiose importance of making children read more books by kidnapping those of us who for some reason abandoned one book or another and forcing us to suffer through bits of stories, when in fact it accomplishes nothing."

Mad Tome stared.

"I'm sorry to inform you, but what you're doing has a negative effect. Instead of compelling us to read those books, you scared us out of our minds, and we'll now avoid them like the plague." She paused. "Well, maybe not all of them. I kind of liked the 'Red Death' story, actually."

"I'll punish you for this," hissed Mad Tome. "I'll pick the worst, the scariest, the most horrific page of all, and I'll put you there for an eternity, to make you wish you were dead. Only there will be no death for you, I'll see to that personally."

"Oh, really?" Bells crossed her arms. "And what page would that be?"

"A page from a horror book."

"A classic then," nodded Bells. "My favorite."

"It'll be filled with torture!" bellowed Mad Tome. "With blood! With anguish you daren't imagine! Aren't you scared?"

"Scared of whom? You? Pfft," Bells scoffed. "You're just a book, a tome of random pages torn out of other books. You don't even have your own story, only bits and pieces of others. That's why you're mad. You wish you were a real book, but you aren't."

"What do you know about who I am?" asked Mad Tome bitterly. "How dare you presume?"

"Look, I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, but you kind of hurt mine," said Bells. "I admit, I don't really know who you are or how you came to existence, but does it matter? You're dying. Why won't you let us out?"

Mad Tome slumped. The bottoms of its frayed eyeholes sagged, getting wet. "I used to be a real book," it said softly, "a long, long time ago."

"You did? Which one?" asked Bells.

"Aesop's Fables. Children read me so often, my pages started falling out, and then one day I found myself an empty cover. I was surprised at how it made me feel. I thought I'd be angry, but I wasn't. I was happy of my misfortune; it told me that children loved me. So I set out to look for my pages, to collect them and rebind myself anew. Unfortunately, I didn't find them. They were lost, gone forever." Mad Tome paused, reminiscing.

"That's terrible," muttered Bells. "I'm sorry I said you're not a real book."

It didn't hear her, gripped by the presence of memories. "But I found other pages," it said grimly, "pages that children left unread, that fell out from sorrow and were dying. I started gathering them, first a handful, then more and more. It was hard to stop, hard to feel empty again. And there were so many, so many! How could I not do it? The sheer amount of them baffled me, then angered me, then enraged me. I swore I'd find every child who did this and deliver a punishment, a punishment they deserved." Mad Tome smiled cruelly. "I decided to make them read until they were sick, until they begged for forgiveness, and I called them badlings, for the atrocious, horrible things they did to books." It leered at Bells.

The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. "But you weren't satisfied with that, were you? It wasn't enough. You wanted to hurt them more. So you made them replace the real characters, but that wasn't enough either. You started killing them, turning them into ghosts, and snatching more pages and more badlings, until you became so bloated, you nearly burst, and that's when you went mad. It's you who deserves to die, not us. Let us go!"

Mad Tome cackled. "Just like that? Let you go?"

"Yes! Because if you won't..." Bells frantically groped for an appropriate threat.

"Because if I won't...?" nudged Mad Tome.

"The ducks will kill you anyway!"

A peal of hysterical laughter racked the book, and Bells lost her footing, falling to hands and knees.

"The ducks!" shrieked Mad Tome. "The ducks have found worms and waddled off. No one will stop me from ending you, you negligent brat. You're all the same. You grab a book, flip through it, and toss it like it's an ugly toy. You upset its characters. When another child picks it up, they can't perform. They make mistakes and stumble, and guess what happens? The child sets the book aside and becomes a badling." Rage twisted Mad Tome's mouth. "Be gone, all of you. Be gone!" It raised its claw to obliterate Bells.

Alas, it was wrong about the ducks. They didn't waddle off, they were merely contemplating.

Mad Tome's face suddenly twitched, then cracked, and then, with a final tug, tore in half.

The ducks tilted their heads, disappointed. The thick leathery thing that lay at their feet sure smelled like doughnuts but for some reason didn't have any doughnuts in it.

They had pulled it out of dirt not too long ago, lured by the sweet smell of crumbs that Grand left behind. At first they pecked at the paper until it turned to mush, then they went for the binding. Ducks are not particularly intelligent, but they're stubborn, and this wiggling brown thing kept their interest, promising edible delight. What if it was a huge flattened worm?

Two ducks clamped their beaks on opposite ends of the thing and gave it a hearty shove. When it attempted to crawl away, they dragged it to the pond and dunked it into water. If ducks ever feel proud of themselves, this was the moment. They puffed out their chests.

The thing squirmed, making itself look highly appetizing. All it took was another pull. Mad Tome's ancient casing, already filthy from sitting in the dirt and now completely soaked, couldn't withstand the abuse. It gave and fell apart.

The ducks blinked at it, confused.

At first nothing happened, then the water started rippling. Where the scraps of Mad Tome floated, children emerged. First a couple, then a dozen, then the entire surface of the pond bubbled like a boiling stew, birthing forth coughing, dripping badlings.

The ducks quacked in alarm and rushed to the shore where they huddled into a frightened flock on yellow maple leaves, next to a pile of four bikes carelessly tossed one on top of another.