“Pull me out!” Ilona cried.
“Are you all right in there?” I asked.
“It stinks! And he’s heavier than a sleeping tiger!”
She came backward out of the gap, two hands gripped in hers. One was perfectly human, the other still monstrous, and both belonged to Ed Farrell. “Come on, Suzie! Pull!!!”
They pulled hard. Ed Farrell’s shoulders and head came out of the tree. His face was still covered with large patches of green scales, but he had lost his insect eyes. The rest of Mr. Farrell’s body slid out and dropped onto the dead, dry ground.
“Gross! He’s naked!” Suzie yelped, letting go of Ilona.
“Help me, Suzie, let’s bring him closer to Harold.” Ilona grabbed his monster hand; Suzie grabbed his human hand; and they dragged him over to me.
“Harold, blow the horn,” Suzie said.
The glade was almost entirely dark. Safe from the sun, the slugs were coming faster. Suzie stomped on the head of the first one to reach us. “Do it, Harold!”
I brought the horn to my mouth and gave it all I had.
“Are you doing it right?” Suzie kicked another slug. “I can’t hear a thing.”
“Everybody hold hands,” Ilona said. She was still holding Mr. Farrell’s monster hand in her right and she grabbed my wrist with her left. Suzie lifted Mr. Farrell’s hand, which she’d let drop heavily onto his body, and reached out for my other wrist. We were a perfect circle of desperate beings, trying to escape an ocean of slugs by playing an antique horn. Our lives were weird.
I took a deep breath and blew with all my might.
“Do you hear that?” Ilona asked.
“I still don’t hear anything!” Suzie answered.
“I don’t mean the horn. I mean the water.”
I lowered the horn and listened. “I hear it. It sounds like waves.”
The slugs stopped moving too. They looked transfixed, like they were listening, too.
“It’s a river,” Suzie said. “Where did a river come from?”
“Look!” Ilona pointed to the edge of the glade. Water was rushing in from all sides, climbing up the hill and beginning to flood the flat ground around us.
I looked down and saw that my wheels were already half sunk in dark water.
“We’re sinking!” Suzie tightened her grip on me.
More water rushed in, and we screamed as the glade seemed to zoom down like a free-falling elevator.
Ilona squatted to keep Ed Farrell’s head above the water. The slugs were moving in circles, carried by the current. They struggled toward us, but began to fade out of existence. The dead trees disappeared, replaced by high grass. The cursed island was rapidly morphing back into the Mallow Marsh.
“Help me, he’s going to drown!” Ilona yelled. Suzie helped her support Mr. Farrell’s upper body.
“I’m in trouble here, too!” I yelled as the water kept rising dangerously fast.
But the current stopped and the freezing water stilled. I was submerged chest-high, but drowning was off the list.
I looked around. Insects were buzzing. Birds were chirping. The broken dock was right behind us.
“We’re back,” I said. We had defeated the monster and rescued Suzie. We were the A-team.
“Oh, banana bun! Something made the trip back with us.” Ilona pointed at something moving in the water. It was the slimy body of a gigantic slug, swimming gracefully toward us. It must have been touching one of us when I played the horn.
“Enough with them!” I cried.
“Go back to where you came from!” Suzie added, splashing it with the flat of her hand.
It lifted its head high above the surface and opened its horrible mouth.
I reached for the mirror in my pocket. It was still there and I took it out, brandishing it above water. I held it by my shoulder like a baseball bat, preparing to smack the slug as far away as possible.
The slug leapt into the air, coming straight at us. I screamed—we all screamed—and I swung the mirror at the slug.
POOF!
It vanished midflight, leaving behind an eye-stinging, acrid cloud of smoke. I looked at the mirror. A bright white light shone from the glass.
“It worked!” I told the Goolz girls.
“You kids all right?” someone yelled. “We heard you scream.”
I swiveled my head. Frank Goolz was standing on the broken dock behind us, catching his breath. He must have run at top speed when he heard us.
“We’re fine! We’ve got Suzie!” Ilona was still struggling to keep Ed Farrell afloat. “But we’ve been busy. We could use some help here.”
Frank Goolz jumped into the water.
Uncle Jerry arrived next, part running, part staggering, part dying from the effort. He bent over, hands on his thighs, gasping for breath. “Chasing…monsters…is…exhausting!” he said between huffs and puffs.
Suzie let go of me, sloshed over to her dad, and jumped into his arms. He held her tight with one arm and used the other to help Ilona with Mr. Farrell.
“Kids,” he said to us. “Once more, you’re the real heroes of that story.”
“We’re the coolest,” Ilona agreed, winking at me and making me the happiest boy in all of Maine.
“Darn straight!” Suzie said, resting her head on her dad’s shoulder.
“There’s no more Mallow Marsh Monster,” I said. “It didn’t know who it was messing with.” I looked at Ilona. Her teeth were chattering from the freezing water. Her lips were blue. But she smiled back at me.
And I felt awesome.
17
BACK
FROM
BEYOND
Frank Goolz took the Hand of Chaos, the magic mirror, and the live slug from the jar from the Farrells’ lab, and stored them in his library of paranormal artifacts. Uncle Jerry left us to go back to hunting hairier, not-so-slimy creatures in the cold wilderness up north. He was bitterly disappointed that Frank Goolz wouldn’t give him either the slug or the horn so he could engineer more monsters.
“I guess you earned the Mallow Marsh Monster,” he said sadly, getting into his beat-up station wagon. “If you ever want to create a new monster and get richer than the Queen, call me!” He mimed a telephone with his hand, waved, and winked at us as he drove away.
Thanks to the Sleep-o-Stick and our increasing ability to conceal our adventures, Mum stayed unaware of the grave danger I had been through to save the Farrells. Now that she believed we all played according to her rules, she stopped using so many expletives when she talked about the Goolz. I often caught her standing by our kitchen window smiling when she saw Frank Goolz come out of his house to sit on his porch swing with a cup of coffee in his hand. Sometimes, she would join him with her cup of tea, and they would talk about parenthood in general and us, their wonderful kids, in particular. At least that’s what I assumed they talked about.
* * *
—
I was by my window, looking at the Goolz’s home and waiting for Ilona to join me for a homework session when someone knocked on the front door. I dropped my tablet on the bed and rushed to the hallway as Mum answered the door. I slowed when I saw that it wasn’t Ilona.
It was the Farrell twins and the woman I had known as the Mallow Marsh Monster—the very creature that I had stabbed with a syringe in the marsh.
Mrs. Farrell looked better than ever. She wore a long, white linen shirt with jeans and pounds of jade and turquoise necklaces. She was smiling warmly and looked much younger than I remembered her from before her monster days. She looked like an angel—but maybe it was just the contrast with her greener self that made me think so.
“Oh, Harold,” Mum said when she saw me at the top of the stairs. “Your new friends wanted to see you. Won’t you come down and say hi?”
“Won’t I, indeed!” I said, mimicking Mum’s British accent, which got stronger when she was nervous.
I slid into the stair lift, held tight to my wheelchair, and pressed the button t
o go down. The Farrell twins were fascinated by the process, staring at me like I had just reinvented fire.
“Is it fun?”
“It looks fun—”
“Going down like that.”
“Ha!”
“Well, hello, Harold,” Mrs. Farrell said when I joined them by the door.
“Hello.” I stopped at a safe distance. I still felt a tinge of fear, despite her smile and kind voice.
She came to me and shook my hand. “I wanted to thank you personally, Harold. You’re a very brave boy.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Mum said awkwardly. “But…thank him for what, exactly?”
I shook my head, hoping none of the Farrells would tell our story.
“Why are you shaking your head, Harold?” Mum asked, picking up on the strange vibe. “Is there something I should know?”
Mrs. Farrell smiled at her. “Nothing special,” she said, catching on. “I just wanted to thank him for being such a good friend to my daughters. They didn’t know anybody in town and Harold has been…exceptional.”
“I see.” Mum beamed at the compliment. “He’s a lovely boy,” she agreed and invited everybody in for tea and cookies.
“That would be wonderful,” Mrs. Farrell said and we all went to sit at the kitchen table. Mum brought the twins and me tall glasses of milk and made tea for herself and Mrs. Farrell. She put a plate of her homemade cookies in the middle of the table. Mrs. Farrell immediately grabbed one and put it in her mouth whole. I looked at her suspiciously.
She swallowed the cookie with a gulp of tea. “I’m sorry. I have been just ravenous lately.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” Mum said brightly, though she looked surprised by Mrs. Farrell’s unusual table manners. “There are plenty more cookies.”
I took one. The twins took one each. Mrs. Farrell took a second and a third and the plate was empty.
“I’m afraid I’m a little confused,” Mum said, rising to get the cookie tin from the counter. “I didn’t know Harold and your daughters had become friends.”
“We see each other around.” I shrugged. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“We met at the Goolz’s.”
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“All the strange things.”
“Unusual.”
“Bizarre—”
“That happened—”
“There!” They pointed at the Goolz’s home.
Mum looked at me strangely, but thankfully her phone buzzed from the kitchen counter before she could ask any questions. She answered and went out to the porch to talk to one of her clients.
“She doesn’t know anything about the monster,” I whispered to the Farrells. “Not a thing. So zip it about that.” I looked pointedly at the twins and they nodded as one.
“I gathered that,” Mrs. Farrell said. “Don’t worry. We won’t say a word. Right, girls?”
Both twins shrugged and drank up their milk, gulping it at the exact same speed.
“You saved our mom,” they said, wiping their milk mustaches with the back of their hands.
“She says that if it weren’t for you—”
“We would all be monsters.”
“She says you’re like a superhero.”
“She talks about you.”
“All. The. Time!”
“Okay,” I agreed hesitantly. I didn’t see myself as a superhero, but it felt great to hear it.
I wiped off my own milk mustache. “When I was transforming, were you…inside my head?”
“Yes. I could feel, hear, sense everything that you did. There were quite a lot of amazing perks being a monster.”
“Really? Like, you enjoyed it? Being a monster?” I asked Mrs. Farrell. “I was dead scared when I was changing into one.”
She chewed her third cookie thoughtfully. “Well, I was scared too, Harold. In the beginning. But once you’ve fully turned, you feel…” she searched for the right word, “wonderful.”
We drank our tea and milk silently, ruminating on the perks of being a monster.
“There’s another thing I really need to ask you,” I said. “What did you do to Ms. Pincher’s dog?”
“Well.” Mrs. Farrell blushed. “I’m afraid I devoured it. It was delicious. At the time, that is.” She washed down the last of her cookie with the rest of her tea while the twins giggled.
Mum came back, and the twins and I left them alone and went to see the Goolz.
“There’s your girlfriend,” the twins said, pointing.
Ilona came across the little bridge. She didn’t seem surprised to see that the twins were with me. It seemed they’d gained membership to our little club of misfits.
“Where’s your sister?”
“She’s nice.”
“And fun.”
“And she likes us.”
“She’s inside,” Ilona told them. “Playing with Dad’s new toy.”
“New toy?” I repeated.
“It’s awesome. You want to come see it?”
The twins were as excited as I was, but they didn’t know that a toy for Frank Goolz meant something like a demonic Rubik’s Cube or booby trap for a ghost.
“You’re going to love this, Harold!” Suzie shouted when we went inside. She wore a semitransparent beanie that smelled like old rubber and was connected to a network of electrical cables.
“Hello,” the twins said, waving at Suzie.
“Oh. You,” Suzie said, losing a bit of her enthusiasm. “You didn’t bring another body part, did you?”
“No,” they said, touching the cables connected to Suzie’s hat.
“What is that?” I asked, approaching her.
Frank Goolz bounded into the room. “That, Harold, is a dream machine, obviously!” He knelt and started screwing the ends of the cables to a metal box. I maneuvered around the cords to get a closer look.
“That’s the new toy?” I asked.
“This is anything but a toy.” Frank Goolz stood up, dropping his screwdriver, which bounced off the box with a loud bang.
“It looks old,” I said, noticing the patches of rust on the sides.
Frank Goolz carelessly kicked it with his bare foot. “It is old. And it’s the only one of its kind.” Frank Goolz flicked a switch on the box and the machine started to hum loudly.
“Can we try the funny hat?”
“Do you have two?”
“We need to do it at the same time.”
“Together.”
“As one.”
“Always!”
“No!” Suzie took a step away. “There’s only one hat. And it’s mine!”
“It isn’t yours,” Ilona said. “You have to share.”
“Of course.” Frank Goolz turned the last switch. “Everyone will try it. It’s harmless.”
“What does it do?” I asked. The humming had gotten even louder and I had to raise my voice.
“It controls dreams by interacting electrically with the brain.” Frank Goolz touched a large red button in the middle of the box. “If I press this button and adjust these levels,” he tapped a series of dials along the side of the box, “I could force Suzie to dream whatever I want.”
“A dream machine,” I mused. “That sounds like fun.”
“Press the button, Dad!” Suzie said, holding the beanie tight against her head.
“Well, I don’t see why not.” Frank Goolz hovered his hand over the red button. The machine seemed to anticipate his touch and began humming at a painfully high pitch.
“Here goes,” Frank Goolz said. He pressed the red button, and POP!
All hell broke loose.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Dulce and Ruben Gerson for their loving and steady support, to Maria Ahlund for being my partner in crime, to Jacques and Sylvie Flatin for their friendship, to Isabelle Perrin for being such an amazing creative force behind the Goolz series, to Bernard Cros for enduring all of our silliness, and to Valentin and Tim Cros for being our devoted test read
ers.
Thanks to Morgane Dupay for taking care of the essential.
Thanks to Thomas Leclere for all his work and for being an indefatigable champion for everything Goolz, and to his team at Le Seuil Jeunesse—Olivia Godat, Aude Marin, and everyone else—you know who you are!
Thanks to Trish and Franco for being my very good friends, and to Franco for being the real-life inspiration for the amazing Uncle Jerry in this installment of the Goolz’s adventures.
Thanks to my agent extraordinaire, Alexa Stark at Trident Media Group, for all her work and support for this project.
And special thanks to my editor Mary Colgan—and all her colleagues who helped us greatly improve this novel with their own talent and commitment—Liz Van Doren, Brittany Ryan, Suzy Krogulski, and Toni Willis. Mary, this is our ten-year anniversary working together on funny/scary novels. We are definitely due for a cake and a few candles.
Born in Paris to an international family (one part French, two parts Spanish, one part strange), Gary Ghislain grew up between Paris and the French Riviera. He now lives in Antibes with his two daughters, Ilo and Sisko. He is also the author of Harold and the Goolz’s first adventure, A Bad Night for Bullies. Visit him at garyghislain.blogspot.com.
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