Hush-a-Bye

by Jody Lee Mott

  Antonia leaped off her bed and spun about. Her face was red, and her teeth were gritted. I’d never seen her look so angry, and it scared me.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out why she was mad. I saw the limp thing she was cradling in her arms like a wounded animal.

  She’d found Hush-a-bye.

  24

  A FEW GREASE stains spotted the doll’s dress, and her hair was matted. But what really caught my attention were the two brand-new arms attached to her body. And those bright, bitter green eyes.

  I’ve got you now, they seemed to say. I’ve got you right where I want you.

  “What did you do to Hush-a-bye?” Antonia repeated.

  “Antonia, please,” I said, trying and failing to keep the shaking out of my voice. “I was going to tell you when I got home.”

  “Liar,” Antonia spat out. A violent thunderclap shook the bedroom window.

  “Listen to me,” I begged. “She’s not what you think she is. She tried to hurt someone I know at school, and I mean hurt real bad. We’ve got to get rid of her before she hurts someone else.”

  “Liar!” Antonia screamed. She hugged the doll tight to her chest. “Hush-a-bye told me everything. Everything! You tried to make her attack your friend, and then . . . then you threw her in the trash when she wouldn’t. If she hadn’t called for me, I never would have found her.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all,” I said.

  “So how did she get in the trash can? Did she walk there?” She sneered and glared at me like I was some stranger. Part of me wanted to slap her face. But the other part just crumbled to pieces.

  “Antonia, you don’t understand,” I pleaded.

  “You think I’m stupid, like Zoogie said.” Antonia’s bottom lip quivered. “I’m not stupid. I heard Hush-a-bye calling for me and I found her and she told me what you’d done.” Tears ran down her face. “You lied to me, Lucy. Why did you lie to me? Why?”

  The pained look in Antonia’s face tore me up inside. But I heard the rain lash hard against the trailer roof, and a picture flashed in my mind of the Susquehanna swelling up the bank, crashing through the winterberry bushes and rolling toward our trailer.

  The flood’s coming, I thought. We need to get out of here.

  “We haven’t got time for this,” I held out my hand. “Give me the doll, and we’ll deal with it later.”

  “No!” Antonia screamed. “You’re never going to take her from me again! Never! Never!”

  It was pointless arguing with Antonia when she was like this. I knew I’d have to take the doll away by force if I could. So I stepped toward Antonia to grab Hush-a-bye, when a movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned and gulped.

  The small lamp on the nightstand between our beds was floating in the air.

  “Antonia—”

  The lamp hovered there a second, then flew straight at me. I barely had time to duck my head. The base of it grazed my scalp before it shattered against the opposite wall.

  I stared at the deep dent in the wall where it struck. When I turned back to Antonia, she was smiling. Smiling.

  “You can’t tell us what to do anymore,” she said.

  Our bedroom door burst open. Mom stumbled in, breathing hard.

  “What is all this ruckus?” she said, holding her hand to her stomach. “I do not have time for this.”

  Her eyes darted between the broken lamp, the unpacked bag, and the strange, legless doll Antonia clutched against her chest. Mom’s mouth hung open like she couldn’t figure out what to start yelling about first.

  But I wasn’t worried about the hurricane Mom was getting ready to unleash on us. In the spot where the lamp bashed the wall, hairline cracks had spread down to the floor and up to the ceiling. The cracks were branching out like spiderwebs, and they were growing wider.

  “Make her stop, Antonia,” I pleaded.

  Antonia ignored me. She barged her way past Mom with Hush-a-bye tucked under her arm and ran out of the bedroom. Mom stood there looking stunned, trying to piece together all the weirdness swirling about in the room. But when the door slammed behind her, she whipped about with a buzz-saw fury.

  “Oh, no you don’t.” She rattled the knob and banged on the door, but it wouldn’t budge. The cracks multiplied across the ceiling.

  “Open this door right now, young lady, or you are going to be in a lifetime of trouble!” Mom yelled as she pounded on the door. “Are you listening to me?”

  Plaster dust sputtered out of the widening cracks. The small window in the top corner of our room broke in half and fell outside. Rain whipped through the open space and ran down the cracked wall while lightning and thunder chewed up the sky.

  Mom was so caught up in getting the door open she didn’t notice any of it. I grabbed her arm.

  “Mom, we’ve got to get out,” I said, and pulled at her. She turned at me and glared.

  “Don’t you tell me—” Then her eyes took in the whole mosaic of cracks crisscrossing the room, and the color drained from her face. “Oh, dear lord,” she whispered.

  The walls began to hum. The hum changed to the groan of buckling aluminum. A jagged chunk of the ceiling broke away and crashed on Antonia’s bed. Mom screamed.

  I knew what was coming. I’d seen how Hush-a-bye tried to murder Maddie. Now it was my turn, and there was no one around to stop her. Even if Mom got hurt too.

  I frantically scanned the room for an exit. The door was locked. The window was too small and covered in broken glass. We were trapped like moths in a killing jar. With no time left to find another way out. I had to do something.

  So I leaped forward and wrapped my arms around my mom, and with a strength I never knew I had, I dragged her to the floor between the beds as the walls caved in and the ceiling collapsed and the trailer crashed down on top of us.

  25

  AFTER A STUNNED moment, I blinked my eyes against the swirling dust and driving rain and saw nothing but blackness. “Mom?” I shouted into the darkness. There was no response. “Mom? Mom! Can you hear me?”

  I’d had her in my arms when we fell between the beds, but I’d lost my grip on her when the ceiling and walls came down like an avalanche. Now I didn’t know where she was.

  “Mom! Say something. Please.”

  My shoulder was pressed up against something cold and hard. I figured it must be one of the bed railings. I moved my hands around me. Pieces of what felt like waterlogged drywall and aluminum siding covered my legs. I yanked them off as best I could and pulled my feet up.

  I shifted to my hands and knees and slowly crawled forward, brushing debris out of the way. Every so often a sharp something would stab me and I’d pull back in pain. But I kept going.

  “Mom, where are you?” I pleaded.

  When I got to the end of the other bed, I felt something soft and damp in my fingers. With a shiver, I realized it was hair.

  I scrambled forward, heaving chunks of the trailer out of the way, and ran my hands over my mother’s face.

  “Wake up, Mom,” I said, patting her cheeks frantically. “Please wake up.”

  She didn’t move. I couldn’t feel any breath coming out of her nose or mouth. She was so cold, so lifeless. I moved my hands down to her chest. I couldn’t locate a heartbeat.

  Every nerve in my body wanted to scream You can’t die, you can’t die! I pressed my fingers to the side of her neck. It was slow and faint, but there was a pulse. A sob bubbled out of me, and I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Help! Antonia!” I yelled into the darkness and the storm. “Please, somebody, help!”

  I screamed myself hoarse while the rain beat the ground and my mom lay unmoving under my hands. My throat was raw, and I felt numb and cold down to my bones. My head slumped forward, and all I wanted to do was lie down next to my mother and close my eyes. />
  Then several dim flickers of light appeared in the distance, like large fireflies. They grew closer, and I could make out the hazy beams of flashlights.

  “Here!” I managed to get out in a hoarse whisper. “Over here!”

  Several shouting voices filled the air. Sounds of sloshing and debris crunching underfoot joined them. A pair of unseen hands lifted me up. I reached out to Mom and cried.

  “Don’t worry,” a man’s voice said in my ear. “They’ll take good care of her. Let’s get you to the EMT.”

  I was led to the back of an ambulance and told to sit on a large metal box. The bright interior lights stung my eyes.

  A woman in green rain gear and yellow boots examined me. She wrapped a thin foil blanket around my shoulders. It was surprisingly warm, but I couldn’t stop shivering.

  “Is that your mom?” she asked. I nodded. “She’s going to be okay. Looks like part of a wall or something hit her in the head and knocked her out. She’ll be fine, but we’ll need to take her to the hospital.”

  She held a pen flashlight to my eyes and looked at each one in turn. “Doesn’t look like you received any head injury. Just a few scratches and bruises. I’ve got to say, you’re both pretty lucky. We’ve been riding about the neighborhood, helping those too sick to evacuate on their own, when one of our crew spotted the wreckage.” She gestured over her shoulder. “What happened out there? Some kind of sinkhole, I’d guess, though I didn’t think the floodwaters had come far enough for something like that.”

  “I—I don’t know,” I said.

  “Is it just you and your mom?”

  My heart skipped a beat. “No. My sister. She ran outside before our house . . .” I swallowed and fought back new tears. “I don’t know where she is.”

  A grim look passed over the woman’s face, and then she quickly replaced it with a smile.

  “How old is she?”

  “Eleven. She has a sparkly baby-duck barrette in her hair.”

  She laid her hand on my cheek. “Don’t you worry. We’ll find her. You wait here and rest. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She jumped down from the ambulance and shut the doors behind her.

  All was still except for the constant thump of the rain against the roof. I pulled the foil blanket tight around my body. Every inch of me was either cold or hurt or both. Mostly both.

  “Why did she have to find that doll?” I muttered to myself. And then I remembered something Antonia had said—If she hadn’t called for me, I never would have found her.

  Hush-a-bye called to her. That meant she must have spoken to Antonia somehow from inside the trash can, like they had some kind of mental connection. But if that was the case, why didn’t she say anything to Antonia the night I took her from the closet? Or for that matter, why didn’t she talk to Antonia all that time after that mess with the Gypsum Man? Unless—

  “Unless that’s exactly how she planned it,” I whispered.

  The truth hit me like a two-ton truck. That weird dream that scared me so much about what Hush-a-bye might do next, and how she never fought back when I’d stolen her from the closet and hid her in the trash can—it was all a setup. That scheming doll meant for me to throw her out. She’d set the whole thing in motion after I’d threatened to tear her head off for hurting Maddie. She knew how to turn my own sister against me, and make me look like the bad guy.

  But all that didn’t answer an even bigger question knocking about my skull—did Antonia know what Hush-a-bye had just done to me and Mom?

  I knew when Antonia got mad, her brain overheated and what good sense she had boiled away. But destroying the trailer with us still inside? We might have been killed. No matter how angry she might be, she wouldn’t ever wish that on us. Would she?

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, deciding to set the question aside for the moment. “I’ve got to get her away from that doll.”

  I threw off the foil blanket. Helpful as those ambulance people were, I knew they’d never find Antonia. She didn’t want to be found, and besides, Hush-a-bye wouldn’t let it happen.

  Then again, how was I going to find them? I didn’t have the faintest idea where they’d gone. I grunted and kicked my heel against the metal box.

  A puddle of water pooled at my dripping feet, and I dragged my toe across the puddle. It made a small stream that disappeared into a drain on the vehicle floor. I stared as it flowed down.

  “Like a river,” I said.

  A flood of memories washed over me all at once. The first day I stumbled across the doll’s head. The rowboat that took us to find Hush-a-bye’s body. The old photo of Rosetta clutching the familiar doll before going missing. They all led back to the same place.

  “The island.” I banged my fist against the box. “They’re going to Hunter’s Moon Island.”

  I considered tracking down one of the adults to tell them and get a search party going, but quickly scratched the idea. I was sure no one would believe me. The story was too ridiculous. They’d think I was hallucinating after bumping my head, and they’d ship me off to the hospital for X-rays. I’d never get to the island then.

  Besides, by time I found someone, told them about the island, and a search party was organized, it might be too late for Antonia. Too late for what, I wasn’t sure—or didn’t want to think about. No, I had to go myself.

  Now.

  I managed to dig up a flashlight from an emergency pack, along with a heavy-duty rain poncho. But it was what I found under the poncho that really got my attention: safety matches and a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

  The thunderstorm, I thought. There was a detail in Rosetta’s story I hadn’t thought about too much at the time, but seeing the matches and alcohol brought it back. When the hotel caught fire, Hush-a-bye had wanted to get away from there as quick as possible. Why? Because she was afraid of fire.

  That must be it. That must be her weakness. Everyone has one. Even Superman can be knocked out if you slip some Kryptonite in his cornflakes.

  The label on the rubbing alcohol warned it was flammable and to avoid contact with an open flame. I hoped the label wasn’t lying. I remembered the red sash was still in my pocket. I pulled it out and set it on the floor of the ambulance. I poured some of the rubbing alcohol on it, struck one of the safety matches, and dropped it. The sash instantly burst into flames.

  “That’ll do nicely,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the pungent smoke rising up as I stomped out the shriveled, blackened sash.

  I scrapped my plan to throw Hush-a-bye back into the river. She was too dangerous to let some other unsuspecting girl find her and start the whole mess all over again. This had to end tonight, forever. I’d have to burn her down until she was nothing but ashes.

  26

  I CAREFULLY OPENED the back of the ambulance and peeked outside. Feet stamped back and forth and voices called out through the rain, but no one was close enough to notice me. I slipped out, shut the door, and crept down toward the winterberry bushes behind the rubble of our trailer.

  By the time I reached the path, the river was already up to my ankles. I sloshed though the frigid water and pointed the flashlight into the nest of dense undergrowth. Somewhere inside that mess was the little rowboat Antonia and I had hidden after we returned from the island. I planned to use it to get across. Unfortunately, with the rain pouring down like a waterfall, I could barely see a foot in front of me.

  Then another thought stopped me short. What if Antonia had already taken the boat? Or what if it had been caught up in the floodwaters and drifted away? How would I get across to the island without a boat?

  “I’ll swim if I have to,” I muttered to myself, but I didn’t feel as brave as I tried to sound. And after another ten minutes of searching through wet plants, all I came up with were wrinkled fingers. Finally giving up on the boat, I trudged down the path toward the riverbank.

  I wa
s already chilled to the bone from the endless rain and the floodwater sloshing against my thighs. Plunging into the Susquehanna was bound to be even colder. But I still plodded forward to the bank, or at least the place I guessed the bank used to be. I didn’t have a clue what I’d do once I reached it, but I hoped I’d think of something once I got there.

  The water was soon past my hips. It was like walking through icy slush, and my feet felt like they weighed ten pounds each. With each step, the mud grabbed hold tight and didn’t want to let go.

  I tried to remember how far it was to Hunter’s Moon Island. One hundred feet? Two hundred? Half a mile? The more I thought about it the farther away it seemed.

  My right foot caught in a thick patch of mud. I tried to pull it out, but it wouldn’t budge. I tucked the plastic bag and flashlight under one arm and tried to lift my leg out with both hands.

  “Come on, come on.” My hands strained in the icy water, my fingers numb as stones. Then my foot suddenly popped out, and I fell backward. My arms flailed wildly, and the flashlight and bag tumbled away.

  “Ouch!”

  My bottom struck something hard. I rubbed my aching rear end, but the pain there was pretty quickly forgotten once I realized something about this situation didn’t make sense. I reached out to touch the ground around me. It felt rocky and completely dry.

  How could that be? And why wasn’t I splashing about and choking on dirty river water? Where did the river go?

  I spotted the flashlight and the plastic bag on the ground nearby and scrambled over to them. I snatched up the bag, flicked on the flashlight, and circled the beam around my feet.

  The water was gone. There wasn’t even a puddle. I wondered if I’d stumbled upon some kind of ledge or sandbar. But then I trained the light off to the side and sucked in my breath. I found the river.