Free Night of the Giant Everything by R. L. Stine

said.
    He opened a cage door. Then he pushed me inside and clamped the door shut.

30
    “Let me out of here!” I screamed. “You can’t DO this to me!”
    Dr. Marcum shook his head and frowned at me. “We can’t let you out,” he said. “We need to keep you top secret.”
    I grabbed the cage bars with both hands. “But—but—but —” I sputtered. A wave of panic swept down my body. I struggled to breathe.
    “We don’t want anyone to know about our secret experiments,” he said. “It might scare people.”
    “But I’m not one of your experiments!” I cried.
    He brought his face close to the cage. “You are now,” he said. “Don’t worry, Steven. We’ll feed you and take care of you. Till we figure out what to do with you.”
    “Do
with me?” I cried. “You mean … you don’t know how to make me big again?”
    “Not really,” he said.
    Down the long rows of cages, the birds squawked and flapped. A big yellow bird in the cage beside mine chewed at its cage bars.
    “We can try some experiments,” Dr. Marcum said. “But we can’t let you out.”
    “But Mr. Pinker knows what you did. And my parents know who you are,” I said. “My parents saw you and —”
    “Your parents never saw us,” Dr. Marcum said. “They weren’t home. We broke into your house and took the bird. We saw your clothes on the floor. And the missing doll clothes.”
    “Then we saw tiny footprints in the soapy water on the floor,” Dr. Beach said. “Those little shoes left prints all over the living room. It didn’t take us long to figure out somebody had been shrunk. So we waited on the stoop to see who would show up.”
    I shook the cage bars. “Let me out!” I screamed. “You can’t keep me here. Let me out!”
    My shouts scared the big bird next to me. He stopped biting his cage bars and began flapping his huge wings hard.
    Dr. Marcum turned away and walked down the row of cages.
    I shouted after him, but he didn’t turn back.
    I squeezed the metal cage bars till my hands hurt. My voice was hoarse from shouting. I knewno one could hear me over the caws and chirps and honks of the birds.
    I held my hands over my ears. The sound was deafening.
    I had to think. But how? I sat down on the cage floor and rested my back against the bars.
    How could this happen to me? Here I was a real person, but so small. Sitting in a birdcage. In a lab hidden in the woods on the edge of town.
    Did I know a magic trick that would make me disappear from this cage?
    No. My tricks were only
tricks.
They weren’t going to help me with anything real.
    I stood up and started to pace back and forth on the metal cage floor. I stared at the door, which was tightly latched.
    This is a birdcage, I thought. It’s made to hold birds inside.
    But I’m not a bird. I’m a person. I know how to work that latch.
    All I have to do is push it hard, undo the latch, and the cage door will slide open.
    Dr. Beach and Dr. Marcum weren’t even good at keeping birds prisoner, I decided. After all, they let Bugsy escape.
    So, it will be even easier for me to get out of here.
    This idea gave me some hope and new energy. I raced to the door and studied the latch. It wasjust above my head. I had to stand on tiptoe to reach it.
    But it was a simple latch, like a hook that caught over a cage bar.
    “No problem,” I said out loud.
    The big bird in the next cage had stopped flapping its yellow wings. It was watching me now. I suddenly realized the bird looked like a canary. But it was huge, as big as a turkey.
    I leaned forward and climbed on tiptoe. I reached up and grabbed the latch with my right hand. I pushed.
    No. It didn’t move.
    I pushed harder. No.
    I slumped down and took a deep breath. Then I raised myself back up and grabbed the latch with
both
hands.
    I pushed. Pushed. Pushed harder, straining every muscle.
    No. I couldn’t loosen it. I couldn’t budge it.
    With a sigh I stumbled back from the door. I wiped sweat off my face with the sleeve