“It’s gone. Poof! Like it never happened.”
“No more black goo?”
“Not a drop. It was nothing.”
She stopped and shook her head. “Nuh-uh,” she said, mimicking the twins.
“What?”
“It didn’t look like nothing to me.”
“Well, it was.” I lifted my black track pants. “See?”
She leaned to take a closer look. “You’re right. It looks fine.”
My stomach produced a roaring growl. “Sorry,” I said. “Too many pancakes.”
She laughed, I pushed down the leg of my tracksuit, and we continued on our way to school. I was going fast, too. I was full of high-octane pancake calories and I wanted to escape the sun on the open road.
“Are you in a hurry to get somewhere?” Ilona had to trot to keep up with me.
“Yeah, I decided I love school. Can’t wait to get there.”
I darted down the boardwalk and slowed as we reached the town square. A large crowd of Bay Harborians blocked the path ahead.
“Hey, English boy!” Alex Hewitt called, waving from the edge of the crowd.
Alex used to be the most horrible person in all of Maine and probably the world. He was a skinny boy, short in size and mind, and a couple of years older than us. He used to be a bona fide bully and my worst enemy. But since the Goolz and I had saved his life, he had changed his ways, stopped harassing me, and had even maybe-kind-of-almost become a friend. He still called me “English boy,” but it didn’t sound like an insult anymore.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“People are nuts, that’s what.” He spat on the sidewalk and said some choice words about Bay Harbor and Bay Harborians in general. Changing his bully-ways was going to be a long process.
“Elaborate.” Ilona went up on her toes to try to see what was going on. “How nuts?”
“Total bonkers cuckoo crazy nuts. They say the Mallow Marsh Monster is real. Like you and me real!”
Ilona and I looked at each other. She shook her head. There was no point telling him that they were totally right about that.
“Some dudes say they saw it last night. And then Ms. Pincher’s dog goes missing. And some other dude says he saw the monster dragging it into the marsh. I never liked Ms. Pincher’s dog anyway. It always barks at me when I walk past her house.”
Mayor Carter stepped up on the bed of a pickup truck and spoke to the crowd through a megaphone, spelling out a plan to organize groups to search the marsh. “And don’t go shooting everything like it’s duck season! I’m talking to you, Glen!”
Mayor Carter was a short, stocky, middle-aged woman with tons of confidence and charisma. Her family had founded Bay Harbor two centuries ago. She also ran our public library and was the curator of the Heritage Museum, which housed a collection of fishermen’s memorabilia and old knickknacks. The museum was also Mayor Carter’s home. She was one of Mum’s favorite people in Bay Harbor. She was one of almost everybody’s favorite people.
“Madame Mayor! Are you coming with us into the marsh?” someone shouted.
She nodded and smiled uneasily. “Wouldn’t let you have all the fun for yourself, Johnson!”
She was dressed in fisher-hunter gear like the rest of them. Except her clothes looked newer and neater, like this was the first time she’d worn them.
“Everybody, be extremely careful,” she said through the megaphone. “We could be dealing with a rabid dog. Or a very dangerous boar.”
“THERE ARE NO HOGS IN MAINE!” someone shouted. “We know exactly what took that dog into the marsh. And it’s not an oinker!”
Mayor Carter put a baseball cap over her short hair and readjusted her horn-rimmed glasses. She looked nervous as she scanned the crowd for the screamer.
Someone near us said, “It’s the Mallow Marsh Monster, and we all know it!”
“Damn right it is,” someone else grumbled.
“Just be careful,” Mayor Carter continued into the megaphone, ignoring all the monster chatter. She switched off the megaphone and came down from the pickup.
“She looked scared,” Ilona said.
“Yeah, she did.” Alex snuffled disgustingly and spat on the ground. “I haven’t seen her upset like that since we put a stink bomb in her mailbox.” He laughed, enjoying the memory, and we continued on our way to school.
* * *
—
“Are you all right?” Ilona whispered later that day in Mrs. Richer’s English class.
“What?”
She picked up a pencil and scribbled a note on the bottom of a page in her textbook: You were moaning. What’s wrong with you?
“I’m fine,” I whispered.
I hadn’t noticed that I was moaning. I was watching a fly buzzing around the windows. I felt restless and ravenous, and I couldn’t wait for class to be over. I was full of energy and as hungry as a bear in spring. Watching the fly had been a way to stop focusing on the tick-tick-tick of the clock.
“I’m just bored,” I said, forgetting to whisper.
Mrs. Richer shot me a dark look.
I picked up my pencil. Hungry. Bored. Time has stopped, I wrote in my own textbook.
My stomach produced a massive roar and I burped as loud as a bomb.
“Sorry,” I told Mrs. Richer. She’d had to stop reading when the entire class started laughing.
“Good one, English boy. Respect!” Alex was laughing the loudest.
The bell rang. I took it as a blessing. I grabbed my things and zoomed out of the classroom and down the hall to my locker, not even bothering to wait for Ilona. I opened my padlock with shaking hands.
“What’s the rush?” Ilona asked, catching up with me.
“I’m just starving, that’s all.” I opened my lunchbox. It was tragically empty. I had eaten all the leftover pancakes I’d brought during first break. At lunchtime, I had devoured half my ham sandwich after giving Ilona the other half. We almost always shared my lunch since our school had no cafeteria and Frank Goolz wasn’t really the type of father to keep the kitchen stocked with lunch food.
I licked my finger and collected the crumbs at the bottom of the box, then suckled that finger like my life depended on it. Ilona stared at me, horrified. I must have looked crazy, or plain disgusting.
“It’s empty,” I said awkwardly.
It was more than empty. It was spotless. I forced myself to put it back in the locker.
“Longest day ever,” I said. We still had to go to PE before we could go home.
We headed to the sports field to join the rest of our class. It was sunny outside and the light hit me hard. I quickly put my hood up and shielded my face with my hand.
“Why is it so bright today? It’s burning my eyes,” I said.
“It’s just a nice sunny day,” Ilona told me. “And now it’s official. There’s something seriously wrong with you.” Her gaze drifted to my leg, where the monster had bit me.
I didn’t want anything to be wrong with me. And if something was wrong, I didn’t want it to have anything to do with that bite.
“I’m perfectly fine,” I insisted. “I just need to go splash some water on my face and I’ll meet you on the field.”
Ilona nodded. “Go splash that water, and you become you again.” We tried to smile at each other, but it didn’t take away her concerned look or make me feel any less worried.
I stopped right before reentering the building and turned to watch her walking toward the field. She wasn’t even dressed for sports like the rest of the class. She was just wearing her usual black dress, long black coat, and leather boots. It was her standard outfit, whether she was fighting monsters or playing soccer.
* * *
—
The bathroom smelled like its usual mix of bleach and cheap yellow soap, but it was especially sickening that day.
“Nothing is wrong with you,” I told myself in the mirror, but I knew it was a lie. There were so many things that felt differ
ent. The mad hunger, the restlessness, and this new intolerance for sunlight. I splashed water on my face, then cupped my hands to bring some to my mouth. The tip of my tongue hit something sharp as I swallowed.
My heart did a free fall in my chest. “Please, no,” I whispered. I ran my tongue over my gums, then opened my mouth wide and put a finger inside to confirm what my tongue had discovered.
Little pointy spikes were pushing on the soft skin right behind my teeth. I ran my finger over them again and again. I tried to convince myself I was imagining things, but I knew I wasn’t. There was no doubt about it. I was growing a new set of teeth. More like fangs. A tingling sense of doom crawled up my spine.
The worst thing wasn’t that there was a monster in the marsh. The worst thing was that I was turning into one.
8
SAVE ME
FROM
ME
I rushed to the sports field, holding my hood closed over my face like a vampire. Ilona was sitting on the bleachers, watching the other kids run.
“Why are you hiding your face?” she asked when I reached her.
I tightened the hood even more. “New fashion statement. You like?”
“It depends. Are you hiding a massive pimple on your nose?”
“No.” I didn’t want to tell her about my fangs. I was hoping futilely that they would just go away if I ignored them, but I couldn’t stop running my tongue over the little spikes.
“Then I like,” she said with an exaggerated French accent. “It’s very next season Invisible Man je ne sais quoi.”
“Hey, Harold!” our PE teacher, Mr. Bianco, called. “You and the new girl take a lane.”
Mr. Bianco was a really nice man. He was never awkward around me and never treated me any different than anyone else—which meant I never got to sit on the sidelines.
He looked up from his stopwatch as Ilona and I crossed the field.
“Do you realize that your clothes aren’t appropriate for exercise?” he asked Ilona.
“Says who?” she responded, taking position beside me in a lane.
“Most people in the world.”
Some of the girls sniggered. They all wore various styles of oversized hoodies, leggings, and sneakers on a PE day. As for Mr. Bianco, he was always dressed in tracksuits ready for a jog.
“Never been a trend follower.” Ilona lifted her dress with both hands to bring the hem over her knees and got ready for a good run in her leather boots.
Alex was in the lane next to ours. He looked at us and shook his head. “I really want to say something snappy about you guys, but I won’t.”
Before he renounced his bullying ways, he would spend all of PE waiting until Mr. Bianco wasn’t watching so he could kick my chair and verbally attack me. He left me alone now, but every once in a while he seemed to want credit for it. I ignored him.
My hands were shaking as I gripped my wheels. I still had my hood up and a ball of fear was rapidly expanding in my stomach. It had nothing to do with the race. I needed to tell Ilona about the teeth. We needed to leave school and do something about it. And if this was a nightmare, I needed to wake up.
“Okay, go!” Mr. Bianco said, and we went.
I could see Ilona from the corner of my eye and Alex, a little further back. He was pushing hard, determined not to let us weirdos win. The finish line wasn’t far—a hundred yards ahead. The students who had already raced were sitting on the ground beside it, pinching off grass and throwing it at each other out of boredom. A few looked over, then more, and then everyone was watching. Several of them stood up. They weren’t bored anymore.
I was going faster and faster—push, push, PUSH. All the energy that had been building up in my body throughout the day was surging through me. My heart was pumping powerfully. Fear was transforming into rage, rage into steam. My hood flew off my face. I was clenching my teeth, old and new. I couldn’t see Ilona anymore, or Alex, or any of the other students in the race.
I zoomed past the finish line and raised my arms in victory. All the students were standing now. I thought they were going to start cheering. They didn’t.
I turned around to see how much distance I’d put between myself and the others. They had all stopped halfway and were staring at me. Ilona still had the hem of her dress in her hands, like she’d forgotten she was holding it.
I looked around. All eyes were still on me. Mr. Bianco’s mouth was half open. He finally remembered to click off the stopwatch.
“What got into you, English boy?” Alex shouted, breaking the silence. “Rocket fuel?”
Ilona let go of her dress. Mr. Bianco recovered and told me to get a drink. I headed across the field, feeling every pair of eyes following me.
* * *
—
“What on earth was that, Harold?” Ilona asked as we started for home. “Did you turn into that rocket man from your comic books?”
“He’s called the Flash.”
She waved off my attempt to school her about superheroes. “Whatever. The point is that you got bitten by the Marsh Monster and now you’re all sorts of strange.”
I stopped and finally found the courage to tell her about the new teeth growing inside my mouth.
“Are you sure?”
I nodded. They felt bigger than they had in the bathroom—like they were ready to pop out and start biting.
“And the sunlight. It’s getting worse. It’s like liquid acid now.”
She nodded. Anyone else would have thought I was, in Alex’s words, “total bonkers cuckoo crazy nuts,” but Ilona had seen plenty of weird stuff, so she believed me.
“Dad will know what to do,” she said. She was doing her best to sound cool and composed, but she sped up until she was nearly running.
We stopped by my house first, so I could ask Mum if I could go next door. She made me promise about a hundred different things, including that I wouldn’t ruin her dinner for the second night in a row.
Speaking of food…I was grabbing everything that was lying around the kitchen and swallowing it as Mum talked. A piece of bread on a plate on the table. The rest of the banana she’d been eating, which she’d set on the counter as we came in. A fistful of Cocoa Puffs that I poured directly into my hand over the sink.
“Harold! There’s food at my house too,” Ilona said pointedly.
The food at Ilona’s was always awful, but I was so hungry that I didn’t mind.
“Okay,” I said, accidentally spitting some puffs on the counter and refilling my hand for another fistful on the go. I followed her out, waving vaguely at Mum over my shoulder.
* * *
—
I immediately recognized the putrid smell as we entered the Goolz’s home. It was like bad news that kept coming back.
“That was all that was left of him, floating in the marsh,” Uncle Jerry said, his gaze locked on the kitchen table.
A pair of black trousers, torn, a short-sleeved white shirt, gashed and soiled with large black spots of monster goop, and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, one lens smashed, were spread on the table, like an empty shell of Mr. Farrell.
“Dad’s going to be lost.”
“He can’t see.”
“Can’t read.”
“Can’t hardly move—”
“Without his glasses,” the twins said.
“I took the foot back from his lab,” Frank Goolz said. “Jerry needs to study it.”
There was a plate on each side of the empty outline of Mr. Farrell. One was full of Ilona’s horrible homemade cookies. The foot was lying sideways on the other one. It was even greener and more bloated than when we first saw it.
“Right on.” Uncle Jerry had a fork in one hand, and a steak knife in the other. He leaned over the foot and started to cut off a large piece. I was scared he would throw it in his mouth next.
“I hate that foot,” Suzie said. She was sitting outside on the top step of the porch, keeping her back to us and the dreaded severed limb.
�
�We also found this.” Frank Goolz picked up a leather-bound book from the counter behind him. “It’s Mr. Farrell’s notebook. His journal, so to speak.”
“He always writes in it.”
“When he’s done working in the lab.”
“He sits.”
“He writes.”
“And he moans.”
“And complains.”
They sighed as one.
“Their father knew about the monster.” Uncle Jerry pushed the morsel of rotten foot off the plate and started smashing it with the handle of the knife. “We know that for sure now,” he said in between blows. “We found a whole lot of sketches and drawings of the creature in his lab. The guy was obsessed with it.”
My eyes squinched closed each time he hammered the piece of rotten flesh. I tried to focus on Ilona’s cookies. Even if I hadn’t known her cookies were always disgusting, the putrid stink paired with Uncle Jerry’s enthusiastic foot-pounding should have killed my appetite, but somehow it had no effect on my stomach. I grabbed one and devoured it eagerly, then grabbed a second and a third before I’d even finished swallowing the first.
“I’m telling you,” Uncle Jerry hammered and hammered until the green flesh was pulp, “this is not human. This is out of this world.” He collected some of the mashed goo on the tips of his fingers and rubbed them together to test the consistency.
Ilona and I stared at him in horror, but Frank Goolz sat casually in a chair with his own foot resting on the table, only inches away from Uncle Jerry and his hammer. “We learned a lot from the journal,” he told us, opening it. “Most of the notes are about a large black slug that the Farrells collected in the marsh.”
“We found it in their lab, dead, floating in a jar of yellow syrup.” Uncle Jerry brought his fingers dangerously close to his mouth, but luckily he only smelled them. “It’s bigger than a cat and dark as night. Ugliest slug you’ll ever see.”
Frank Goolz tapped a page in the journal. “Apparently, Mrs. Farrell was bitten by that specimen while studying it.”
The Mallow Marsh Monster Page 6
