The Amphiblets Read Online Free PDF Page A

empty.
    Meanwhile, on the ground floor, the cellar door had been opened and a team of ten men were now descending the stairs.
    ‘This must be where Penny was kept a prisoner,’ said a man, wearing small round spectacles and who, with his tiny black eyes and jet-black hair closely resembled a mole. ‘At least she managed to escape.’
    ‘How did she escape?’ asked one of the team.
    ‘Apparently she was saved by a giant.’
    ‘A giant?’
    ‘He was well over seven feet tall by all accounts. Penny describes him as a gentle giant. She doesn’t believe he had any idea what the Professor was up to. He released her from the cell door and reunited her with her children briefly before she fled the island. Luckily the Professor had a visitor that day and Penny stowed away on his boat.’
    To their amazement, one of the men discovered a light switch. The cellar was obviously the only place with electric lighting. At the foot of the steps to the right were two metal doors.
    ‘They’re locked!’ said the leader of the group. ‘Best we get the expert in here.’ He called for assistance on his radio and a few minutes later a locksmith showed up; a hefty man who appeared capable of knocking the door open with a single fist. He was out of breath.
    ‘I’ve been to open another door upstairs,’ he explained.
    Within seconds he had one of the doors open. It was an anxious time, since no one knew what was inside the room. Holding the weapons at the ready, they breathed in deeply and counted to five, then burst the door open and ran inside.
    The sizeable, square room was an abandoned laboratory, filled with empty glass tanks and with an array of different posters on the wall, picturing dissected amphibians. 
    The voice of the locksmith interrupted their discovery.
    ‘The second door is open now!’
    Leaving the laboratory, the group of men entered the small corridor lined with five metal doors. A bunch of keys could be seen on the far end of the wall. With the guns aimed and ready to fire, one officer retrieved the keys, which hung on a silver metal ring. He passed three locked doors but the last two were standing wide open. Another three officers stood facing the cells armed with guns and torches. After a thorough search they found them empty.
    There was a particularly bad smell in the cellar of body odour mixed with human waste. The men covered their noses with their sleeves as they peered inside the three occupied cells and shone their torches.
    They found themselves peering at three strange and disfigured monstrosities, the like of which they had never seen before. When the chief spoke on his radio to report their find they learned that something similar had been discovered on the first floor of the mansion.
    The men upstairs had entered a room that the locksmith had opened. On both sides of the window, red velvet curtains draped to the floor. There was a cluttered wooden desk piled high with papers and a wall of wooden shelves, stacked with leather-bound books. There were two other doors in the room. The door on their right led to a bathroom, whereas the door on their left led into a plain square room. It was this room that was most interesting.
    At first, because the light was so poor, they were unable to see anything. But they discovered a closed window had been painted black preventing daylight from entering it. The only light was that which came though the open door. A particularly nasty smell forced them to open the window. A ray of light entered and shone on to a bronze cage in the far corner from which something groaned softly.
    The officers froze.
    ‘What was that?’ someone exclaimed.
    ‘Your stomach,’ mocked another.
    ‘What is it?’ they whispered.
    A great creature, the size of a gorilla, was crouching in the corner of the cage, uttering strange, garbled words. The officers stepped as close to the cage as they dared. The first thing they noticed was the warty, brown skin that covered the creature and a