"Candace, what's that you're reading?" asked Phineas.

"Only the greatest book in existence!" Candace exclaimed, a dreamy expression on her face. "It's called Early Evening, and it's about this girl who falls in love with a vampire and wants him to turn her into a vampire so that they can live together in holy matrimony."

"Doesn't sound very substantial," Ferb said. He was reading a thick book, the title of which Candace noted.

"I don't know how you have time to read War and Peace, with all the projects you guys do during the summer."

"One must be versed in Tolstoi before sixth grade," Ferb said.

"That is the most bogus thing I ever heard."

"Candace, why is there a worm on the front cover of your book?" Phineas asked. "I don't know what worms have to do with early evening."

"It represents the serpent that tries to tempt Adam and Eve with the apple in the Garden of Eden."

"Oh, I like metaphors!" Ferb said. "Is it strung throughout the book?" He reached for the volume, after placing War and Peace down.

"No. Erin Wakehouse never mentions the metaphor in the book itself. But she was asked about it in an interview."

"Do you mind if we borrow it?" Phineas asked.

"Borrow? Why use do you have for it?"

"Who knows? But it might help us in figuring out what to do today."

"I'm so sure. Hold on a sec," Candace said, for her phone was ringing. She hit "Send" and heard her boyfriend's voice. He asked her a question. "Oh, Jeremy, of course I'd love to go to the rodeo with you!...Busting my brothers? Don't be silly, I won't be doing any of that today, not if I'm with you at the rodeo, boyfriend."

She hung up presently and said, "You boys better not do anything big while I'm gone." She started to go.

"Wait, Candace," Phineas said. "Did you say we could borrow this?" He held up her book.

She lloked like she wanted to shout out a vehement no. But then she reconsidered. "Well, I have read it 117 times, so yeah, you can borrow it, as long as you promise to have it in pristine condition when I return."

"Wow, Candace, I did not know that the word 'pristine' was part of your vocabulary."

"How could it not be? Erin Wakehouse uses it over and over…Hey, is that an insult?"

"No, Candace, I didn't mean anything by it. And if this book has been improving your vocabulary, then maybe it will be worth today's experiment."

"Experiment? Give me my book this instant!" She marched toward her brothers, but her phone rang again. "Yes? Stacy? Jeremy's taking me to the rodeo in Southton. Yes, I'll resist busting my brothers, somehow…" She went into the other room.

"Well, you ready to see what this book's got to show us?" Phineas asked Ferb.

"Let's get this sucker rollin'," Ferb said.

They took the book to the backyard. Isabella showed up about a quarter-hour later, as Phineas was shining a flashlight on page 337 of Early Evening.

"Hey, Phineas! What'cha doing?"

"Figuring out if we can go inside this book Candace loaned us."

"Er…go inside, a book?" Isabella asked.

"Nobody's going inside any books without me," Buford said, having just arrived.

"It is physically improbable that people can go inside books under any circumstances, unless you mean that we will be shrunk the size of ants and be trapped within the binding. And I don't mean those giant ants you guys created last week. But if you mean going into the world of the book, that is impossible."

"That's exactly what I mean, Baljeet," Phineas said. "Once Ferb gets the machine going, he and I will go inside the book and you guys can stand guard."

"Oh no. Remember what happened last time we did that?" Isabella said.

"That awful tower that wanted to kill all of us…" Baljeet said, shivering.

"Yeah, we're going with you," Buford said.

"All right then," Phineas said. "I'd better get the Ant-o-meter and the ant repellent."

"What are those for?"

"Keeping the ants off the book while we're inside it, so that none will come in. We don't need to infect that book's world with our ants. I'm sure it has enough ants of its own."

Phineas went to the garage. Seeing his pet platypus, he said, "Hey, Perry. Want to come with us inside Candace's book? It'll be an adventure for the ages."

Perry clicked his bill.

"Guess that's a no, then. Oh well. I'm sure you'll have fun staying home." Phineas found what he was looking for. He picked up a metal, triangular thing that rattled as he removed it from its corner. He also got a bottle of spray from one of the high shelves.

He returned to the backyard, where Ferb had just put a paper clip between pages 141 and 150. "We definitely do not want to go through those pages. I gave them a cursory glance, and it is really disturbing."

"What happens?" Baljeet asked.

With a look of horror in his eyes, Ferb said, "Let us hope you never find out."

"We all set to go?" Phineas asked, when he arrived.

"As long as the Ant-o-Meter doesn't need any adjustments," said Ferb. "Let me take a look at it."

Phineas handed it over. Ferb gave it a glance, then pulled out a screwdriver. In a moment he had it screwed back up. "Now we're all set."

Ferb handed the invention back to his brother.

"Baljeet, get into your nerd carrier!" Buford barked.

Baljeet's nails were not sharp enough to repeat his last experience with this command, so he complied.

"I'm just looking out for you," Buford said. "If anything happens to the rest of us, you'll be safe in that, and you'll survive to tell the tale like Fortinbras in Shakespeare's Macbeth."

"Actually," Ferb interjected, "the gravitational pull into a book with vampires and werewolves present three things that indicate that the probability of Baljeet being safe in that mechanism to be very low indeed. And furthermore, I think you mean Horatiio at the end of Hamlet."

"Gesundheit," Buford said.

Phineas set the Ant-O-Meter before the open book, after Ferb leaned the book against a tree.

"This device will shrink us to the size of ants," Phineas said. "The point is to make us small enough to fit into the letters of words on a page in the open book."

"And then?" Isabella asked.

"And then we walk into the letters, and we'll find ourselves in the book world. That is, the world of Early Evening."

"Wait," Buford said. He walked up to the tree and reached his hand into a little hole that was there. He pulled out a red T-bone. "If we see any vampires, I'll be killing them with this steak."

"Uh, Buford, that kind of 'steak' doesn't kill vampires," Phineas said. "The kind that does is made of wood."

"This steak has been inside this tree long enough that it might as well be made of wood," Buford said.

"How long have you been keeping that steak in the tree?" Isabella asked.

"Since the beginning of summer. The backyard beach day."

Isabella scooted away from him.

"Whether that steak will be useful or not," Ferb said, "We won't be seeing vampires for quite some time. We are going into chapter one first, and Kristen doesn't meet any vampires till chapter five, and she doesn't know that they are vampires till chapter twenty-seven. "

"Will they try to suck out blood?" Baljeet asked, shivering in the nerd carrier.

"It is my impression, through a cursory glance at the work, that these vampires will not attempt to suck our blood. I do not yet know what they do obtain their substance from, but Jared Dorcan the vampire keeps saying that he finds Kristen's scent to be enticing, and yet he resists biting her somehow. I also saw the words 'VAMPIRE HUNGER STRIKE' on one page in huge, capital letters, but there wasn't time to figure out what that was about."

"Okay now, everyone set?" Phineas asked. "Because I'm ready to go in."

"Let's do it!" Isabella said.

"I'm ready," Ferb said.

"Me too," said Buford.

"I as well," said Baljeet, from his carrier.

"No, you're not," Buford said, lifting Baljeet's carrier. "But it's time to go, anyway."

Phineas sprayed the ant repellent in the area around the books, then hit a button on the Ant-O-Meter. It felt as though they were being sucked into a vacuum, or a black hole. They swirled in the air, and Isabella screamed Phineas' name. She felt a hand grab hers and squeeze it tight. "I'm right here, Isabella," a voice said in her ear.

Buford nearly let go of the nerd carrier. He held onto the steak for dear life, for he was certain that it would help against the vampires, no matter what the others said.

Ferb alone remain entirely composed. He was reading a book, which if anyone had noticed, they would have thought was odd for someone about to find out what living inside a book was like rather than reading it. But everyone else was too busy trying to survive the vortex…

Presently they found themselves on a white surface, with black shapes they couldn't make out at first, being so disoriented. But then Isabella saw a giant capital 'B.' They were standing on a page of the book, with letters towering above them.

Ferb became spellbound by an seven-letter name he saw printed before him. It hadn't appealed to him before. But now he couldn't take his eyes off of it. He didn't know what was drawing him to it. For some reason he was thinking of a flowery scent and Paris. But that had nothing to do with this name, did it?

Buford was looking at the same capital 'B' that Isabella was, and he thought how astonishing it was to see the first letter in his own name him feel like a dwarf in comparison.

"C'mon guys," Phineas said. He was still holding onto Isabella's hand as he led them all into the lower curve of the capital 'B.'

Ferb alone did not enter the 'B.' Instead he walked, trancelike, into a distant 'K.' He would end up in the same position in the book as the others, but with a different reason for wanting to be in there now.

"

Early Evening

Chapter One

I flew to my uncle's house in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My uncle was my mother's brother. And he was the person my mother expected me to live with while she went on a field trip to Mars with her first grade class. I asked her how that worked when she told me about it, since the kids would no longer be in first grade when they returned. She said that the school board had required her to take books through the seventh grade and entrusted her to teach all the grades from first through seventh well. I doubt Marie will be back before the kids would be ready to start college, but that's a field trip for you.

Speaking of kids, there are some outside the window. Some mighty strange kids they are, too. One has a triangle for a head, and there's one that looks like a Jibber Jabber. Then there's a bloke with a black shirt and skill and crossbones on it, carrying a raw steak in one hand and what looks like a cat carrier in the other. And if I'm not mistaken, there is some weird Indian puppet head in the carrier. It looks so lifelike. I wonder if he's training to be a ventriloquist. There's also a girl holding hands with the triangular-head kid. I don't notice anything odd about her.

"What'cha lookin' at?" my uncle asked. I hastily shut the curtain. Just before I shut it, I saw the girl's eye twitch.

"Just gazing at the snow," I said.

"You don't have snow in Arizona?"

"Not as much," I said.

"Must be hard, being away from home."

"Yeah," I said.

"Look kid, I know how you feel, but you've got to hang in there. You'll make new friends at school and I doubt the homework here is any more difficult than it is in Tucson."

"I guess."

"Go up to bed, and get a good night's rest."

I headed for the stairs.

"Wait, kiddo," Uncle Ted called, when I was three steps from the top. I turned around. "I may not have been much in your life, but I am very glad to have you here. More than you can know. I'm sure you will have the best of times here."

I nodded, as if agreeing. But inside, I felt torn. I would never see Holly or June or Tungsten again. Sure, there was Facebook, but it wouldn't be the same.

The next morning, I felt like I had just regained consciousness after being rolled over by an elephant. I did not feel like getting up.

And then I heard my uncle singing.

"Joy in the morning, what a beautiful day! I said, what a bee-yoo-ti-full day, where nightmares get banished to the dark re-cesses of our mind!"

I got up groggily and opened the door. I watched my uncle dance and singus to my eyes on him. I wondered vaguely why he didn't have a wife; he sounded so good and danced so well that I was certain that if I had not been related to him, I would have fallen in love on the spot.

Finishing his song, he turned around and looked at me.

"How's my charming niece this morning?" he asked.

"Do you sing like that every morning?"

"Only when I'm gloomy."

That response startled me. "But your song sounds so happy…"

"Kiddo, when I was a music major in college, I had a professor who said, "When you're happy, sing sad songs. And when you're depressed, unleash the merriest notes you can from your innermost soul.""

"That's…quite a contradiction." I wondered what he had to be upset about, but didn't feel I could ask.

"You get dressed, kid," he said. "Bus will be here any minute."

"I'm expected to ride a bus?" I couldn't believe this. I was a senior in high school. I had not ridden a bus since sixth grade. Marie had driven me to school until I got my license except for that year, because the sixth grade school building was too far for hwer to go and reach work in time.

"They're perfectly safe, no matter what Marie thinks," Uncle Ted said. "And besides, I find it just a trifle ironic that a woman who engages in a field trip to Mars is afraid of her daughter riding a school bus."

"How do you know about Mom's fear of me riding a bus?"

"Blarney, didn't I grow up with the woman under the same roof? She always spoke of school buses as 'monsters.' They were too stuffy for her liking, and she often found herself sitting next to a boy she didn't like. Would've sat next to her myself to spare her the trouble, but kids talk about you sitting on the school bus with your opposite gender sibling, you know."

I wouldn't know, as I'm an only child. And as I said, I've never been on a school bus expect for that one year, and except for the DeFarnin twins, there were no siblings sitting next to each other on it, and Alice and Lucille DeFarnin were both girls, of course.

I sighed and grabbed my backpack. When I got downstairs and arrived in the kitchen, I looked for some quick breakfast, but all I found was Toaster Strudel.

When Uncle Ted saw me pull out the blue box, he said, "Sorry that's all I have here in the way of breakfast foods. It's good stuff when you're on the run, anyway."

I cooked my breakfast in the toaster. But just as it finished heating, I saw a flash of yellow outside the window, and I grabbed my things, rushing out.

I was almost too busy to notice the pack of kids I had seen the night before, but there they were, looking restless,, as if they had not slept.

I climbed the bus steps with trepidation, taking almost a whole half-minute per tep. "Speed it up, kid," the driver said.

I did so and took my seat. Next to me was a girl with frazzled hair.

"I've never seen you before," she said.

"I'm new to the area."

"Where are you from, then?"

"Tucson."

"Oh, is it a desert there?"

"Not like the Sahara, no. I suppose without all the Wal-Marts and townhouses and fast food restaurants and suburbs, it would seem like a huge desert."

"Oh you," she said.

The bus kept hitting bumps in the road and I kept shrieking every time this happened. I probably sounded like I was afraid of getting sucked into a dark hole, for the girl sitting next to me asked, "What's up with you? You act as if you're about to go kerplunk every time we hit a bump."

"Kerplunk?" I asked.

"I'm auditioning to be a pirate in the school play. But anyway, why are you so jittery?"

"I'm used to smoother roadsz," I said. Or smoother rides on those roads, I thought.

":Oh yes, you must drive on sand in Tucson, since it is a desert."

I determined not to talk to her for the rest of the ride.. She thought our roads in Arizona were pristine, did she? They had quite a few bumps, but my mother was a careful driver, and anyway, in a car there were seat belts, but on a bus you went flying every time a bump was hit…

When we pulled up into the schoolyard and people started getting off the bus, the girl with frazzled hair said, "I'm Samantha, but you can call me Sam."

"Kristen, but you do not have permission to call me Kris."

"Ooh, feisty," Sam said. "I like you. I'm sure we'll be great friends."

I doubted it, somehow. But I took her proffered hand, nevertheless.