“Yes, and they’re still in their sockets.” Ilona removed one of the large jars. The eyes weren’t floating around in formalin. The twins were hiding inside the wall, looking at us through a large gap in the partition behind the shelves.
“What are you doing in there?” Suzie helped her sister move several more jars from the shelf to the floor.
“The monster was chasing us.”
“We hid inside the walls.”
“We’re good at hiding.”
“We hide in the walls.”
“All. The. Time!”
“It’s exactly like in your vision,” Ilona told me.
“These girls are cool.” Suzie set a particularly large jar on the floor. “I like them.”
“The monster looked for us—”
“For a really long time.”
“But it couldn’t find us in the wall.”
“Then it gave up.”
“And ran down to the lab.”
They both put their hands through the gap and pointed at the basement.
“Can you get out of there?” I asked.
The two hands and all the eyes disappeared behind the partition. We heard rumbling and cracking and shuffling and followed the sounds to the living room. A board shifted at the base of the wall and the twins slid out of the tiniest gap, scraping their arms and legs in the process.
They stood up in front of us. They had collected a few more layers of dirt and spiderwebs on top of their already ruined outfits. They were so caked with dirt, you’d think we were talking to a couple of creepy mannequins in a tacky haunted house.
Suzie took a good look at them and clicked her tongue. “You two really need a clean-up.”
They tried to brush spiderwebs out of each other’s hair.
“Have you seen my father and his friend?” Ilona asked. “We think they’ve been attacked by the monster—or monsters, maybe. There might be two of them.”
She looked at me and I nodded. So far, my monster visions had been one hundred percent accurate.
“Did you see two monsters?” I asked them.
“We saw only one.”
“It was huge.”
“And very scary.”
“We tried to talk to it.”
“And we called it Mom!”
“But it was too scary.”
“Too nasty.”
“Ha!”
“So we ran away.”
“And it ran after us.”
“And when it couldn’t find us—”
“It went down there.”
We all turned toward the basement. It was dead silent down there.
Suzie took the Sleep-o-Stick and the chopsticks out of her white handbag. “Hope black magic works on Marsh Monsters.” She dropped the glowing green pellet into the blowgun as we carefully approached the basement stairs.
We leaned forward as one body with four worried heads. It reminded me of the time a huge hornet got into the house, and Mum and I, glued side to side, crept from room to room with a rolled-up magazine. We found the curled-up dead bug inside a shoe months later.
“Sounds like it’s gone.” I brought my chair to the very edge of the first wooden step. All I could hear was the plink-plonk of water dripping on metal.
“What’s down there?” Ilona asked.
“It’s our parents’ lab.”
“That’s where they do all their experiments.”
“They cut snakes.”
“Mostly.”
I couldn’t see much from upstairs, but I thought I saw an opening in the floor. “What’s that? A trapdoor?”
“Uh-huh!” the twins confirmed.
“Where does it go?”
“Far away.”
“Into the marsh.”
“Through mud.”
“And water.”
“Maybe the monster left through there,” Suzie said, keeping the blowgun close to her mouth.
Squinting, I identified something else by the trapdoor: a metal cage, large enough to imprison a grown man.
“Must be for really big snakes.” Suzie went down the stairs carefully, the twins at her heels.
“They never use the cage.”
“It’s never locked.”
“Never closed.”
“Always open.”
“Always.”
“I’m going to need some help,” I said.
“I got it.” Ilona held on to the handles of my chair and carefully helped me down, stair by stair.
“Awesome. It’s like a medieval dungeon.” Suzie whistled admiringly.
Ilona brought me over the last step and we stopped there to look around.
“Cheese,” Ilona muttered. “What are your parents working on down here anyway?”
“The next Universal Studios classic monster?” I suggested.
The Farrells’ lab was Dr. Frankenstein’s dream come true. There were chains hanging from the ceiling and along the damp stone walls. An old dissection table covered with test tubes, scalpels, knives, saws, and dozens of dead snakes in jars stood in the middle of the room. Jumbles of old bottles and gas burners and what looked like an alchemy kit were scattered on a table by the stairs. All the tools looked ancient. At the far end of the basement, chemical formulas and mathematical equations were scrawled on a rickety blackboard.
“I vote for closing the trapdoor.” I went to give it a push. It slammed shut with a deafening BANG!, making everyone yelp. “Sorry.”
I turned to Ilona and saw that she was inspecting a row of sketches of the monster hanging on a wall above an old wooden desk. Some were more accurate than others, but one—the only one in color—was a perfect rendering of the creature that had attacked us.
Ilona touched it with her index finger. “Uncle Jerry was right. That’s definitely our monster.”
We all joined her. The desk was covered with more drawings: faces, limbs, torsos, hands, claws. Those horrible eyes. Drawing the Mallow Marsh Monster was apparently the Farrells’ number one hobby. I picked up one of the head-to-toe sketches. It showed the monster midleap, its arms and claws extended.
“I don’t want to be the one to pop your bubble,” Suzie nudged one of the twins and nodded at the prodigious pile of monster art, “but your parents are bonkers.”
I picked up another drawing. It showed a giant, eyeless slug with a wide-open mouth full of spiky teeth. It looked more like a leech than a snake.
“That’s the slug Uncle Jerry talked about,” Ilona said. “The one Mr. Farrell wrote about in his journal. The one that bit his wife.”
“Uh-huh,” the twins said, pointing at a large jar on the dissection table.
“Hell, yeah!” Suzie approached it. “That’s so interestingly disgusting.”
It contained a creature just like the one on the drawing in my hand—a repulsive, thick, black, eyeless slug at least three feet long, floating motionless in fluorescent yellow liquid.
Uncle Jerry had been right about it too: it was the most disgusting creature I had ever seen.
I dropped the drawing onto the desk like it was poisonous.
Suzie put the Sleep-o-Stick down on the dissection table and examined the mess of medical tools around the slug jar. She picked up a syringe and a medicine bottle. They were both filled with the same yellow liquid that was in the jar. “What’s this?”
“I wish Dad were here,” Ilona said. “He would have the answers to all our questions.”
BONG! We all yelped as someone or something knocked against the trapdoor.
“I think your parents are back for a kiss-kiss good night,” Suzie told the twins, putting down the syringe and the medicine bottle and re-arming herself with the Sleep-o-Stick. “I’m warning you!” she screamed at the trapdoor. “It’s lights out for anything that comes through that door!”
“Don’t Sleep-o-Stick me, darling,” someone answered from inside the trapdoor, laughing.
“Dad?!” the Goolz girls said at the same time.
The trapdoor ope
ned, revealing two dark, slimy creatures. One carried a leather satchel. The other carried the Zaporino. It was Frank Goolz and Uncle Jerry, covered head to toe with syrupy black goo. They crawled into the basement and wiped handfuls of it off their faces.
“Oh, everyone’s here!” Frank Goolz shook the goo off his hands, leaving large splats on the floor. “What did we miss?”
11
MONSTER
TRAP
Uncle Jerry sniffed the jar containing the giant black slug. “Told you. Uglier than Aunt Amy.”
He moved to the desk, leaving behind a trail of dried mud flakes.
Frank Goolz was inspecting the syringe and the yellow liquid in the medicine bottle. “This makes a lot of sense. The Farrells spend their lives trying to find that mythical snake. They find it in the form of a giant slug. It bites Mrs. Farrell. She turns. She attacks Mr. Farrell. He turns. Now they’re coming back to get their daughters so they can all live together in the marsh.” He smiled at us. “It’s actually a beautiful story.”
“What’s in the syringe, Dad?” Ilona asked.
Frank Goolz looked up at the chemical formulas and equations on the blackboard. He squinted like he was trying to decipher them. “Farrell’s journal says he was working on an antidote to cure his wife.” He showed us the syringe and the medicine bottle. “This might be it.”
The twins were sitting on stools at the dissection table, the Sleep-o-Stick and the open leather pouch in front of them. A soft green glow illuminated their faces.
“An antidote is good,” I said.
“An antidote is very good!” Ilona agreed.
“Maybe it’s an antidote. Maybe it’s poison to kill the monster.” Uncle Jerry was sifting through the drawings on the desk. “We better figure out which one it is before shooting it into your friend, darling.”
“Good point.” Frank Goolz put the syringe and the bottle down and returned to the formulas on the blackboard.
“What’s this?” Uncle Jerry said suddenly. He picked up something that looked like a small, chalky, black bugle, which had been hidden under a pile of paper. He sniffed it. “I think it’s one of those slugs. But dried and turned into a freaking trumpet!” He tried to blow through it.
“Wait, I’ve seen that before. Lots of times,” I said, moving closer. “It’s called the Hand of Chaos—I don’t know why.”
“You’ve seen it where, buddy?” Frank Goolz asked.
“The Heritage Museum, at Mayor Carter’s house. Mum and I have been there lots of times.”
Suzie held up a piece of paper she’d unearthed from the pile on the desk. “Harold’s right.”
She gave the document to her dad, and we gathered around him. It was a printout of an article about the opening of the Heritage Museum. A photo showed a younger Mayor Carter standing proudly in the middle of the museum. And there, right behind her, the Hand of Chaos was hanging on the wall, where I had seen it thousands of times before.
“What’s it doing here?” Ilona asked, looking from the Hand of Chaos in the photo to the real thing in Uncle Jerry’s meaty hand.
Frank Goolz took it away from him and turned to the twins. They stopped playing with the Sleep-o-Stick and shook their heads as one, answering his unasked question. They had no idea why an old horn from the Heritage Museum was in their parents’ lab.
Ilona took it from her father to examine it, then shrugged and passed it to me. “Any ideas?”
I looked at it closely. It was ancient, black, made of rotten-smelling dried skin, and shaped like a pretzel. I shook my head. “Not a clue.” I put it back on the desk on top of a pile of sketches.
The twins had turned their attention back to the Sleep-o-Stick and pellet. Their index fingers were dangerously deep inside the pouch.
“So if we touch it.”
“We go to sleep?”
“We always sleep—”
“Together.”
“And wake up—”
“At the same time.”
Ilona took the Sleep-o-Stick and pouch away from the twins and handed them to Suzie. “What about Harold?” she asked. “What are we going to do to stop his transformation?”
Frank Goolz looked at me. “I don’t know yet. Jerry?”
“Working on it.” Uncle Jerry went back to the jar with the floating slug, leaving another trail of gray flakes on the floor behind him. He lifted the lid to take a good look at it.
“Be careful.”
“It bites.”
“It bit our mom.”
“Real bad.”
“I’m sure it did. But now it’s dead,” Uncle Jerry said absently. He dipped his hand in the syrupy liquid and sloshed around, trying to grab the floating slug.
“Nuh-uh!” the twins said and the slug suddenly twitched in the jar. Uncle Jerry jerked his hand out, slammed the lid back on the jar, and backed away from the table, wiping his fingers on his dirty clothes. “I’m fine,” he said awkwardly.
“Whatever we’re doing…” I held out my hand and moved my fingers. The joints cracked and clicked unnaturally. “We have to do it fast.”
My body felt too small. My skin was starting to stretch. My monster teeth were taking up more space in my mouth and I felt something pushing against the back of my eyes. I was one click from turning into the thing we were fighting.
“Dad?” Ilona pleaded.
He sat at the desk and picked up the horn, looking at it so closely that I wondered if he expected it to talk.
“If you become a monster,” Suzie put her hand on my shoulder, “I’ll still consider you my friend. I hope you’ll remember that before you start biting.”
I turned to Ilona. She was absorbed in her thoughts, her gaze lost on something no one else could see. She landed back in the lab with us and focused her eyes on me. “I’ve got a plan.” She picked up the syringe from the dissection table. “And it’s going to work.”
We were all looking at the syringe in her hand.
“Now, there’s a slight problem with it.” She turned to the cage in the corner of the lab. “We need to get real close to one of the monsters. Close enough to inject it with whatever is in this syringe, but without the creature shredding us to pieces.”
“Well, that’s doable.” Frank Goolz followed her gaze and turned to the cage.
“Oh! Of course. Just like how Dad handled the Carcassonne Creature,” Suzie said.
“I remember that! It would have dismembered Frank if it wasn’t for that shark cage. Happy days!” Uncle Jerry reminisced.
“Oh, boy,” I said.
* * *
—
The trapdoor was the gateway to a deep well that led to a network of muddy caves. Uncle Jerry and Frank Goolz had discovered one of the caves when they were trying to escape the monster. They had crawled through gooey black mud until they found the old rusted ladder and heard the muffled sound of our voices, which guided them to the Farrells’ lab.
“The monsters will probably use this as a way to get in.” Ilona tapped the trapdoor with the heel of her boot. “We’re going to leave it open for them.” She pointed at the cage in the corner of the lab. “I’ll be inside the cage with the twins and a few syringes of the antidote, waiting for one or both of the monsters to show up.”
“That’s exactly how Dad destroyed the Carcassonne Creature,” Suzie explained as she filled all the available syringes with the yellow liquid from the medical bottle. “He went into a shark cage and immersed himself in a lake with tons of dead fish around him to attract it. When the creature showed up and attacked him”— she stabbed an imaginary creature with the syringe in her hand —“he injected it. Only, his syringe was filled with a black ancestral poison instead of a yellow antidote.”
And we have the twins instead of dead fish, I thought, but decided not to say out loud.
Uncle Jerry bit off a piece of napkin and chewed it nervously. “I should be the one in the cage with the twins this time. After all, I’m the monster expert.”
�
��No way,” the twins said.
“You’re too fat.”
“Big.”
“Huge!”
“You’ll squash us!”
“Ha!”
“Fat?!” Uncle Jerry pinched an inch of fat on his gigantic stomach. “This is all muscle.” He stretched the skin out a bit further. “I just need to lay off the candies.”
“We don’t have time for you to diet your way into that cage,” Ilona said. “You’ll be upstairs with Dad, Harold, and Suzie. You’ll take half the syringes with you in case the monsters attack from up there.”
Suzie finished filling the last one and put the plastic cap over the needle. She carefully set it on a metallic tray next to the seven other syringes she had already prepared.
“I’ll keep the rest of them with me in the cage,” Ilona explained. “When one of the monsters shows up and tries to get to the twins”— She stabbed her own imaginary creature with the syringe in her hand, just like her sister had done before —“I’ll inject it with this. If it’s the antidote and if it works, we’ll inject Harold next.”
“What if this is not an antidote and it’s…” I looked at the twins and then at Frank Goolz. “It’s…the same sort of stuff you used on the Carcass-thing.”
“Poison!” the twins said.
“That’s not poison.” Frank Goolz took the syringe from Ilona’s hand and turned to the twins. “Your father would never hurt your mother. This is the antidote he was working on, as he wrote in his journal. I believe he wanted to inject the monster with it, but it attacked him and took him away, not giving him a chance to do it.” He put the syringe in his coat pocket and took his daughter’s hands. “Your plan is brilliant, darling. We need to try the antidote on the monsters, and if it makes them human again, we will use it on Harold and stop his transformation. But once again, I’ll be the one in the cage when they attack. You’ll be upstairs, where you can keep each other safe. That’s just the way it’s gonna be.”
They looked at each other silently while Ilona processed what he’d said. Finally she nodded, and he landed a kiss on top of her head.
“Worst-case scenario…” Uncle Jerry dropped four syringes in his breast pocket. “The cure doesn’t work and we have two dead monsters and one live one to show the world.”
The Mallow Marsh Monster Page 9
