by Lois Metzger
I knocked. Nothing happened. I knocked longer and louder. Finally, a light switched on at the top of the stairs, and someone peered down at me. It was pretty dim in the stairwell, but I could see that it wasn’t the witch. It was the woman with wavy blond hair who had peeked out the other door at the top of the stairs. She was carrying a baseball bat. She came down the stairs. “What do you want?” she yelled through the door. She looked at me closely. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Where is she?” I asked. “Where’s the witch?”
“Gone.”
“What?”
“She’s my grandma. She has lots of grandkids. She only stops in once a year for a few days. She solves some people’s problems, teaches me a few tricks of the trade, and then she’s gone again.”
“Where’d she go?” I asked.
“To the next grandkid’s, probably. Maybe my cousin Zack—he lives in Canada.”
Canada! It might as well be the other side of the world. Everything inside me sagged. I folded slowly to the sidewalk and wrapped my arms around my knees. I started to cry. I couldn’t help it.
The door opened. “Hey,” she said. “Hey.”
I wiped my eyes and peered up at her.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twelve.”
“She turned you into a giant? Why’d she do that?”
“I just wanted to be taller.”
“Why?”
No way was I going to tell her the real reason. I turned away from her and stared up the street. I could walk around and grab streetlights, if I felt like it, reach into second-story windows. Maybe I could join a freak show and people would pay to look at me. But that would be wrong. I was the observer. I didn’t want anybody looking at me.
“How’d she do it?” asked the woman.
“She gave me a potion.”
“How much did you take?”
“Just a drop. She said I should take a drop in milk three times a day, and I’d get taller.”
“Wow. It shouldn’t have worked that fast or that well. You must have atypical magic chemistry!”
“Great.” I looked at my giant hands and feet and wondered if I could give the potion to my clothes to make them fit me.
“But listen,” she went on. “If you’ve taken only one dose, it should wear off soon. It’s not permanent until you’ve taken it five times.”
“Really? Really?” I climbed to my feet. She came up to my waist.
“Yeah. Go home. You’ll be all right.”
“Thank you,” I said. I wanted to hug her, but she was still holding the baseball bat, and I wasn’t sure of my own strength. “Thanks.”
“My name’s Larissa. Bring that potion to me, and I’ll trade you something for it. I have a feeling it might be good for my vegetables.”
“Thank you,” I said again. I couldn’t seem to stop saying it. I turned and ran all the way home, even though I lost my feet towels along the way. By the time I got to my front door, I had shrunk enough that I didn’t need to duck to enter.
I fell into bed but couldn’t get back to sleep. I imagined the witch somewhere with her head on the purple pillow, cashing in on my sleep. I reread some of my favorite manga, glancing up every once in a while to see how much farther away the end of the bed was from my toes.
When morning finally came, I took the shower of all showers. I was singing because I was my right size again! My clothes fit!
Dad told me to cut down on the morning cheer. He had a headache because a loud noise had woken him up and he hadn’t been able to get back to sleep.
“What was it?” Mom asked.
“I have no idea,” said Dad. “I came downstairs to see what it was, but I didn’t find any sign of a break-in.” He went into the living room. “Now, will you look at that? Giant footprints on the carpet!”
“What?” said Mom. She went to look at the footprints, then came back, her face pale. “We’d better change the locks.”
“Knock knock,” I said.
My parents groaned. They always did when I said that. “Who’s there?” Dad asked.
“Me.”
“Me who?” Dad said.
“Me,” I said again. “I made those footprints. Kind of a joke. Sorry. It was just me.”
It was one of those good news/bad news situations. I was myself again, but I still had my Reed problem—no one to walk home with.
I stopped on Burns Street after school to give the potion to Larissa. She gave me a green heart-shaped stone.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“Just keep it in your pocket,” she said.
The next day, I had the heart in my pocket as I headed home from school. Derek, this cool guy who’s always inventing crazy stuff out of straws and Popsicle sticks and paper clips, and actually laughs at my knock-knocks, said, “Hey, Mike.”
“Hey,” I said. I didn’t even know he knew my name.
“You going down Burns Street?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, too.”
EYES ON IMOGENE
by Richard Peck
It was the afternoon of February fourteenth, and my sister Imogene was soaking her mail.
Back in those days, you sent your Valentines from the post office, stamped. Girls counted how many they got. Imogene did. They also thought somebody might write a secret message of love under the stamp.
So they had to go to work and soak all the stamps off to see. Imogene did. When I drifted into the kitchen, she snatched up all the soaked envelopes and ripped them into confetti.
I took it there was nothing written under those stamps. She stood tapping a foot at the sink, waiting for me to go away. But I was her little brother. It was my job to pester her, and I didn’t like to shirk it.
“No message of secret passion yet?” I inquired of the big red bow on the back of her head. But there was still a small pile of envelopes unopened on the drainboard.
“Go ahead on,” I said. “Peel off them other stamps. Don’t mind me.”
“After you’re gone,” she said to the kitchen wall.
But her hand was twitching toward the last envelopes. It beat me how many Valentines she got. I used to think she sent them to herself. But I wasn’t sure now. She was at the high school, and anything can happen there. She was being too ladylike today to chase me outside and off the porch. Besides, she looked down and saw an envelope unlike the rest, asking to be opened.
The envelope wasn’t a Valentine color, and it was limp and stained, like it had been soaked already. You could barely read Imogene’s name and our address on it. The stamp was already gone, the postmark blurred. There was something kind of nasty about it. I personally thought it smelled funny. Something smelled funny. Imogene wanted to wipe her hands on her apron, but curiosity got the better of her.
She tore at the envelope. Inside, a flimsy page unfolded, reading:
ROSES ARE RED
VIOLETS ARE BLUE
I’M OUTSIDE THE WINDOW
LOOKING AT YOU
I read that around her arm, and it gave me the creeps. She couldn’t help but glance at the window. We both did. There was nothing but evening out there, and the porch.
Then at the bottom of the flimsy page, a name, very clear:
Earl? I thought, and something slithered down my spine. Imogene turned on me. The paper shook in her hand. The only Earl we knew of was Earl Youngblood. He’d dropped out of the high school better than a year ago, to join the navy.
“Did you send this?” Imogene brandished the limp sheet in my face. “Because it isn’t funny, and I’ll find out.”
Earl Youngblood had sunk on the battleship Maine when it blew up in the harbor at Havana, last year around Valentine’s Day. True, they never found his complete body. For the funeral they buried an empty sailor suit and a finger bone with his class ring on it.
“Not funny in the slightest.” Imogene’s voice wobbled all over the kitchen. But she could tell by looking, I hadn’t sent the thing. Imogene
could always see right through me.
I suspected Whip Chandler, who was more or less my best friend. Though he was only in eighth grade, I happened to know he had eyes for Imogene. I’d happened to see the hair ribbon he’d stolen from her, tied on his watch fob. But what high-school girl would look at a Valentine from an eighth grader? Though I think Whip had repeated a grade sometime earlier.
I caught up with him after school that next day. “Whip,” I inquired, “you send a verse or anything to Imogene for Valentine’s?”
“What good would that do me?” He was a big, overgrown kid. He looked like a man to me.
“You sure?”
He made a fist, so I guessed he was sure. I told him about the message signed “Earl.”
“Earl Youngblood?” We were trudging along, but Whip slowed. “He’s at the bottom of the harbor down in wherever, isn’t he? That place where the war started.”
Either that, or sending Valentine verses from the post office. I still suspected Whip of trying to get Imogene’s attention any way he could.
Snow was falling on ice. A horse was down, over at the cross street, so Whip and I had to help with that. When we were on our way again, I said, “Was Earl Youngblood sweet on Imogene?”
Whip looked down on me. “Everybody’s sweet on Imogene. You just can’t see it because she’s your sister.”
Oh.
“And you’re just a kid.” Whip shrugged me off, kind of disgusted, and we split up and headed home.
Then there was a big ruckus that same night. Mother and Dad were in the front room after supper, their feet to the stove. Imogene was up in her room. I was somewhere, hiding from chores. We had us a hired girl who cooked and washed up. Her name was Agnes, and she was real thin and nervous.
When she let out that scream, you could hear it downtown. People did. There followed the sound of breaking crockery. We all pounded into the kitchen to see Agnes bent double and blubbering.
“Well, it was not the best set,” Mother said, meaning the broken dishes. “Agnes, take the apron down from your face.”
She was white as flour and pointing to the window. “It was horrible,” she blurted, “a ghastly figure in clouds of smoke. He pointed to his heart.”
Agnes pointed to hers.
“His eyes burned like hot coals,” she moaned. “When he seen me, he vanished.”
You’d think nobody’d ever looked at Agnes before, which nobody had.
“How tall, Agnes?” I inquired, and she put her jittering hand up about Whip’s height.
I was sure it was Whip. In fact, I thought I’d given him the idea. The so-called smoke was from his steamy breath. It was zero that night. Agnes had added the burning-coal eyes.
Dad had to put on his overshoes and bundle up to take Agnes home. She said if this kind of thing kept up, she’d quit.
The next day, I caught up with Whip. “Were you out last night?” I inquired.
“No,” he said. “Where?”
“On our back porch, looking in, pointing to your heart?”
“I spent all evening at my workbench,” he said, “shaving shingles.”
“You got any witnesses?” I said.
He made a fist, so that was good enough for me.
“Well, if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, who was it?”
“Who was who?” Whip said.
“The ghastly figure on our back porch who vanished when he saw it was Agnes, not Imogene.”
“Could have been anybody from the high school. Everybody’s sweet on—”
“But who?” I said.
So we decided to stake out the back porch and nab whoever it was. Whip played along in hopes of a glimpse of Imogene. I wanted to get to the bottom of this. If Agnes kept throwing crockery, we’d run out of it. Besides, the whole thing had me worried.
I slipped out after supper and met Whip behind the barn. A pale moon played through bare branches. It was so cold, the world squeaked, and I thought I’d lose my ears. There was no place to hide where you could see the back porch. We were dancing to keep from freezing when we just gave up and went our separate ways home.
When I nagged Whip to stand guard the night after that, he made a fist, and I took that for a no.
Anyway, no ghastly figure or anybody from the high school peered into our kitchen on the nights that followed. When I asked Imogene what she’d done with the mysterious verse in the limp envelope, she said she’d stuck it in the stove.
It was a hard winter. Winters were, back then, not like now. There wasn’t a thaw till almost April, when Mother had us doing spring cleaning. My job was to clean off the back porch and see if it needed a coat of paint. Having no choice, I set to work one Saturday morning.
Then, right there on the floor under the kitchen window where I was sweeping, I spied a long curl of something frozen in the last of the ice. It looked like slimy seaweed. I looked closer. Scattered all about were seashells. Seashells, crusted with hard little grains of sparkling sand.
I thought hard about it, squatting there on the porch. Where had Whip Chandler come by something like seaweed and sandy seashells all these hundreds of miles from an ocean? In the dead of winter? Whip Chandler had never been out of town.
When I couldn’t figure out how he’d pulled that, I swept the seaweed and those shells loose from the ice and over the side of the porch.
And I did my level best never to think about them again.
THE THREE-EYED MAN
by R.L. Stine
When the three-eyed man moved into the house on the corner, we kids tried to ignore him.
I had to pass his house to go to school. But I always rode my bike on the other side of the street. I pedaled hard and stared into his front window—and hoped I didn’t find him staring back at me.
My dog, Rusty, is a Lab-shepherd mix. He’s big, but he’s the friendliest dog in the world. Rusty started to bark whenever I walked him near the three-eyed man’s house.
Once when I was walking Rusty, the man came out on the front stoop to get his mail. And I got a real good look at the third eye. It was perched at the bridge of his nose, tucked in right where his eyebrows met.
Rusty bared his teeth and started barking ferociously, the way he does when he spots a squirrel. He tugged so hard, I almost lost my grip on his leash.
“Rusty—NO!” I shouted, pulling him back with all my strength. “No! Let’s go home!”
The three-eyed man looked up from his mail and gave us a wave.
I gasped. And a chill rolled down my back.
He wasn’t trying to be friendly—was he?
I tugged Rusty home. I found Dad in his workshop, leaning over his glue gun. Dad’s hobby is making sculptures out of little pieces of wood.
Dad was wearing his denim work overalls over a blue T-shirt. He is very tall and lanky. And he’s nearsighted. So he has to bend way down to get close to his sculpture.
I told Dad about seeing the three-eyed man and how Rusty wanted to attack him.
“Rusty was acting on instinct, David,” Dad said. He didn’t look up from his glue gun. “He knows the man is different.”
I watched Dad work. He had a stack of little round pieces of wood. They looked like coins. He was using them to make some kind of bird.
“The man on the corner has the Third Sight,” Dad said. “He has powers that we don’t have. He can see things our eyes can’t see. I think you should stay away from him.”
I didn’t need to be told. I was already staying away. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that third eye on the bridge of his nose.
I wanted to ask Dad what the Third Sight is. But he doesn’t like to talk while he works. So I hurried upstairs to lunch.
Two days later, the three-eyed man came after me.
It was a sunny morning. Already very hot. The lawns sparkled under the bright sun.
My bike had a flat tire, so I had to walk to school.
“Hey, David! David—wait up!”
My friend Aaron cam
e running out of his house. He crossed the street, running, lowered his shoulder, and bumped me so hard I staggered backward.
Aaron is a short, chubby, goofy kinda guy who likes to bump people and wrestle and tackle them for no reason. He just thinks it’s funny.
So we were bumping and trying to trip each other as we walked. Aaron laughed as my backpack fell off my shoulders. And when I bent over to pick it up, he head-butted me in the back and I stumbled face-first to the ground.
“Ha-ha! Eat dirt!” Aaron cried. It’s his favorite expression.
I grabbed him and pulled him down, and we started to wrestle. With a powerful heave, I spun him onto his back and pinned his shoulders in the dirt.
“Look out—we’re in someone’s flowers!” Aaron cried.
I let out a gasp and let go of Aaron. Breathing hard, I gazed at the crushed tulips around us. And then I turned my eyes to the house at the top of the lawn.
“Oh, noooo,” I moaned.
The three-eyed man’s house. We had ruined his flowers.
Was he watching? Bright sunlight glared off his front window. I couldn’t see inside.
“Aaron—let’s go!” I cried. I pulled him to his feet. He had a yellow tulip stuck to his shirt. I plucked it off and tossed it to the ground. “Hurry!”
I started to walk fast. Aaron fixed his backpack. Then he trotted to catch up to me.
I heard a door slam. But I didn’t turn around. I just kept walking fast.
We were crossing Bridge Street when I heard soft thuds on the sidewalk behind us.
I turned and saw the three-eyed man coming after us.
His hands were balled into fists, and he swung his arms as he walked.
He was big—tall and wide and powerful-looking. He was dressed all in black. He had a baggy black sweatshirt pulled down over black sweatpants. His big belly bounced with each lumbering stride.
His face was bright red. He had straw-colored hair sticking out in all directions.
