The Sea of Monsters

name—Beltbuster, Tammany, Lockhart, etc.
    When the last sheep had waddled out, Polyphemus rolled a boulder in front of the doorway as easily as I would close a refrigerator door, shutting off the sound of Clarisse and Grover screaming inside.
    “Mangos,” Polyphemus grumbled to himself. “What are mangos?”
    He strolled off down the mountain in his baby-blue groom’s outfit, leaving us alone with a pot of boiling water and a six-ton boulder.
    We tried for what seemed like hours, but it was no good. The boulder wouldn’t move. We yelled into the cracks, tapped on the rock, did everything we could think of to get a signal to Grover, but if he heard us, we couldn’t tell.
    Even if by some miracle we managed to kill Polyphemus, it wouldn’t do us any good. Grover and Clarisse would die inside that sealed cave. The only way to move the rock was to have the Cyclops do it.
    In total frustration, I stabbed Riptide against the boulder. Sparks flew, but nothing else happened. A large rock is not the kind of enemy you can fight with a magic sword.
    Annabeth and I sat on the ridge in despair and watched the distant baby-blue shape of the Cyclops as he moved among his flocks. He had wisely divided his regular animals from his man-eating sheep, putting each group on either side of the huge crevice that divided the island. The only way across was the rope bridge, and the planks were much too far apart for sheep hooves.
    We watched as Polyphemus visited his carnivorous flock on the far side. Unfortunately, they didn’t eat him. In fact, they didn’t seem to bother him at all. He fed them chunks of mystery meat from a great wicker basket, which only reinforced the feelings I’d been having since Circe turned me into a guinea pig—that maybe it was time I joined Grover and became a vegetarian.
    “Trickery,” Annabeth decided. “We can’t beat him by force, so we’ll have to use trickery.”
    “Okay,” I said. “What trick?’
    “I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
    “Great.”
    “Polyphemus will have to move the rock to let the sheep inside.”
    “At sunset,” I said. “Which is when he’ll marry Clarisse and have Grover for dinner. I’m not sure which is grosser.”
    “I could get inside,” she said, “invisibly.”
    “What about me?”
    “The sheep,” Annabeth mused. She gave me one of those sly looks that always made me wary. “How much do you like sheep?”
    “Just don’t let go!” Annabeth said, standing invisibly somewhere off to my right. That was easy for her to say. She wasn’t hanging upside down from the belly of a sheep.
    Now, I’ll admit it wasn’t as hard as I’d thought. I’d crawled under a car before to change my mom’s oil, and this wasn’t too different. The sheep didn’t care. Even the Cyclops’s smallest sheep were big enough to support my weight, and they had thick wool. I just twirled the stuff into handles for my hands, hooked my feet against the sheep’s thigh bones, and presto—I felt like a baby wallaby, riding around against the sheep’s chest, trying to keep the wool out of my mouth and my nose.
    In case you’re wondering, the underside of a sheep doesn’t smell that great. Imagine a winter sweater that’s been dragged through the mud and left in the laundry hamper for a week. Something like that.
    The sun was going down.
    No sooner was I in position than the Cyclops roared, “Oy! Goaties! Sheepies!”
    The flock dutifully began trudging back up the slopes toward the cave.
    “This is it!” Annabeth whispered. “I’ll be close by. Don’t worry.”
    I made a silent promise to the gods that if we survived this, I’d tell Annabeth she was a genius. The frightening thing was, I knew the gods would hold me to it.
    My sheep taxi started plodding up the hill. After a hundred yards, my hands and feet started to hurt from holding on. I gripped the sheep’s wool more tightly, and the animal made a grumbling sound. I didn’t blame it. I wouldn’t want anybody rock climbing in my hair either. But if I didn’t hold on, I was sure I’d fall off right there in front of the monster.
    “Hasenpfeffer!” the Cyclops said, patting one of the sheep in front of me. “Einstein! Widget—eh there, Widget!”
    Polyphemus patted my sheep and nearly knocked me to the ground. “Putting on some extra mutton there?”
    Uh-oh , I thought. Here it comes.
    But Polyphemus just laughed and swatted the sheep’s rear end, propelling us forward. “Go on, fatty! Soon