The Big Over Easy

“Oh, dearie me again,” said Jack as he dropped another egg on the floor and backed towards the shattered kitchen door. The creature gave a snort and a growl, took three quick steps closer and raised its arm to attack. But Jack was prepared. He pulled his mother’s egg poacher from the cupboard and brandished it the way you would a crucifix to a vampire. The creature backed off for a moment, then snapped and lunged, caught the poacher and sent it flying across the room.

“Then what about this?” asked Jack, grabbing the egg timer from beside the oven. “Three minutes for the perfect egg? Egg dippy fingers, anyone? With hollandaise?”

He backed out through the door and dropped another egg. The creature, enraged and confused, followed him into the back garden and snapped, growled and lunged while Jack taunted it with an egg whisk.

“Scrambled eggs on toast!” Jack yelled. “Fried, poached, boiled… SOUFFLÉ!”

He backed across the garden and yelled eggy insults until he walked into something hard and unyielding. It was the beanstalk. Shiny dark green, with a beautifully smooth trunk, it seemed almost impossible to resist.

“Tortilla!” he yelled as he threw the egg whisk at the beast with all his strength. The creature caught it in its teeth and then crushed it angrily.

Jack stuffed the three eggs that remained in his overall pocket and started to climb. It was easier than he had thought, and the leaves offered good handholds. But if he had hoped this would offer some sort of escape, he was wrong. The creature snapped the air once or twice when Jack shouted “Eggs en cocotte!”—and then followed him.

Jack clambered up, past the ripening beans and high enough to see the road—and the Jellyman’s Daimler being driven off at high speed. He breathed a sigh of relief, something that didn’t last long, as he suddenly realized that although His Eminence was safe, Jack personally still had to deal with five hundred pounds of dangerously pissed-off Humpty-beast.

“Actually,” said Jack, “I hate eggs.”

The beast snapped angrily at him again.

“No, no,” he added hurriedly, cursing his own stupidity, “I meant that by hating eggs, I don’t eat them. Meringues—yuck.”

It had no effect whatsoever. The creature leaped nimbly to the branch below Jack and swiped angrily at his foot. Jack grabbed the branch above him and pulled himself away—just too late. He felt a stab of pain course through his foot. He looked down. The creature had taken away not only the branch he’d been standing on but also his shoe, sock and, although he didn’t yet know it, his little toe. He winced with the pain and resumed the climb, favoring the arch of his damaged foot rather than the ball. He could hear the wail of sirens as the backup units approached, but they didn’t offer him much comfort. Within a few minutes, he had reached the red aviation warning light, and he stole a quick look below. He was about a hundred feet from the ground, and his mother’s house looked very small. There was a growl from below as the creature continued its pursuit, and Jack hurriedly climbed beyond the red light only to discover a new and dramatically unforeseen problem to contend with: The creature was no less angry, and Jack had just run out of beanstalk.

He hooked a leg around one of the leaves and took the eggs from his pocket. But his hands were shaking, and he fumbled; the three remaining size-B free-range eggs fell from his grasp and dropped away into the darkness. And with them his last possible bargaining chip.

“Bollocks!” he muttered to himself. “What a day.”

The creature slavered, hissed and snapped and made another swipe. Jack tried to avoid the lunge and succeeded, but it was a short-lived escape. The beanstalk was smaller and weaker at this height, and the leaf Jack was holding came away from the main stalk. He made a wild grab for another, but this, too, came away in his hands. He overbalanced, lost his footing, and fell backwards into space.

He saw a glimpse of the Humpty-beast bathed in a red glow as he fell past, then a blur of beanstalk leaves and pods accompanied by a loud rushing noise. He just had time to experience a curious mixture of relief and renewed peril when he landed on the potting shed in an explosion of rotting wood, earwigs and perished roofing felt. He was momentarily stunned, and all he could see when he opened his eyes was a gaping hole in the collapsed shed and the beanstalk stretching away into the night sky. He picked himself up from where the remains of the roof had collapsed onto the three bags of wool, groaned and stumbled outside. He had a bad cut above his eye, and his foot and ankle were starting to throb badly. He had to think for a moment as his dazed mind tried to focus on what had just happened. It didn’t take long. He looked up and realized that it wasn’t a bad dream: The creature was beginning its descent.