“I don’t remember saying that about the chair. Mum told me,” I said to the Goolz as we walked home. “Just like she told me that she went running down the street, calling for help and carrying me in her arms.”
It felt good telling them why I used a wheelchair. I never talked about it, and people almost never asked. But Suzie, the younger sister, asked me right away.
“It’s silly,” I said. “I never even liked plums that much anyway.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Suzie said. “It was just a plum too high.”
The Goolz girls couldn’t have been more different. Ilona’s long black hair and tall, thin, almost ethereal body made Suzie’s curly blondness and boyish features seem that much more earthly. Unlike her sister, Suzie didn’t look like the dress-wearing type. She was more into jeans, mismatched socks, and old, shapeless sweaters—perfect outfits for rolling in the mud or building a tree house.
“What was that thing you said to them on the pier?” I asked her as she squatted to observe a snail on the side of the road. “It wasn’t English. It sounded like you were casting a spell.”
“Oh, that.” She picked up the snail. “That wasn’t a spell. It was Turkish for ‘you dumb cucumber.’ It’s a common curse there.”
“Dumb cucumber. That’s a good one,” I said, laughing. “You guys speak Turkish?”
“Yep,” Suzie said and ran toward home, taking the snail along for the ride.
“We spent a year in Istanbul. We move a lot,” Ilona explained. “Would you like to come over for tea?”
I didn’t like tea any more than I liked plums, but I said, “I’d love to.”
We reached their house and I struggled to roll across the sand, doing my best to look like I was totally acing it. I stopped at the front stairs, which was as far as I could go by myself.
“Do you want us to help you?” Ilona asked.
“If you want,” I said, as though there were another option. I showed them the best way to manage stairs, and they carefully pulled me up backward. As soon as we went over the last step, I grabbed the wheels and twisted around, then followed them through the door.
Suzie dropped her coat on the floor. “Don’t mind anything Dad says. He’s way cuckoo.”
Ilona picked up Suzie’s coat and took my jacket, which wasn’t such a good idea since their house was freezing. She dropped all our coats on a pile of boxes in the hall and looked up the staircase. She breathed out fog, proving it really was abnormally cold, and shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not sure you should be here right now.”
Suzie shrugged. “This is going to be interesting,” she said. “Do you want cocoa instead of tea? I’m going to make cocoa for everybody.”
I looked upstairs with Ilona. “What’s up there?”
“Dad. Doing his thing,” she said flatly.
She had no idea how amazing it was for me to imagine Frank Goolz up there “doing his thing.”
“Come on then,” Ilona said. I followed her to the kitchen. There were piles of unopened wooden crates everywhere. Suzie dug through a carton on the kitchen counter and pulled out two cups and a bowl. Mum’s cheesecake sat on the kitchen table, a single slice missing.
“Want some cake?” Ilona asked and a drawer opened all by itself right behind her. She looked down at it, took out a huge knife, and bumped the drawer closed with her hip. She smiled at me like everything was normal.
“Old house,” she said, and a cupboard opened in the same spooky fashion, nearly hitting her in the head. She sighed and closed it with the tip of the knife. I shivered, either from the cold or from the weirdness of the kitchen—probably both.
Suzie started filling a pan at the sink. “We make our cocoa with water,” she told me. “Dad’s special recipe since he always forgets to buy milk. Hope you like it.”
“Uh-huh. Sure.” Their cocoa technique was the least of my worries.
Suzie took out a fancy metal container and began pouring cocoa powder into the bowl and cups, spilling nearly as much on the counter.
Ilona frowned at her. “Could you be more careful?”
The bowl seemed to react to that: it slid gracefully off the counter and shattered on the floor with a loud crash.
“Wasn’t me!” Suzie said, as the pot on the stove made a sharp metallic noise in apparent disapproval of the bowl’s suicide.
“That’s it!” Ilona dropped the knife on the table by the cake. “DAD!” she yelled and stormed out of the kitchen. I could hear her running up the stairs. I stared at the knife, scared to see what it might do on its own.
Suzie started wiping cocoa powder off the counter onto the floor. “We didn’t make the cake,” she told me. “Someone gave it to us.”
“It was my mum. She made the cake.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the knife.
“Your mother’s nice.” Suzie’s hands were now covered in cocoa powder. She decided to deal with that by licking them thoroughly.
Suddenly, I noticed that I’d stopped shivering. I tried the fog test. It wasn’t cold anymore. “It’s warm now,” I said.
Suzie must have thought I was talking about the water. She tested it with a finger that she’d just been licking. “Not yet.” She took another bowl from the box and put it on the counter beside the cups.
“Stay!” she told the bowl, pointing at it with a menacing finger. And then she laughed.
I turned around when I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. Ilona was holding her father’s hand, guiding him as if he were blind. His thick hair stuck out at all angles.
“This is Harold,” she said as they entered the kitchen.
“Hello.” He smiled, but his eyes looked past me.
“You broke a bowl,” Suzie told him, pointing at the broken glass on the floor.
He scrutinized the pieces as he sat down at the table. “Sorry, darling,” he told Suzie.
“Actually, it fell while you were upstairs,” I said, a little too loudly. Everyone ignored me.
He scratched the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin, slid his chair closer to the broken bowl, then reached down and touched the spilled cocoa. He looked at it on his fingertip like an investigator.
“Did you notice anything unusual about the way the cocoa spread on the floor?” he asked Suzie.
“Like what?”
“Like patterns appearing all by themselves. Letters. Symbols. Shapes, maybe.”
“No. It tastes nice, that’s all.”
He sighed and slid his chair back to the table.
Suzie brought the cups and bowl to the table and poured the hot water, then found another cup and made instant coffee for her dad. She gave me the bowl. The cocoa looked particularly dark with just water and no milk. I tried it. It tasted awful.
Ilona served us all slices of cheesecake.
“You made a cake, darling?” her dad asked.
“My mother made the cake,” I said. “She gave it to you like an hour ago.”
“Oh. Really? That’s nice,” he said, looking at the cake like it was another mystery to solve.
Ilona got spoons out of the drawer that had magically opened. Only this time, she opened it the old-fashioned way. We all ate some cake. It was good. Mum is ace at baking.
After a few bites, Frank Goolz turned to me and frowned. “Who are you?”
“Dad!” Ilona said.
“I’m your neighbor. I live next door with my mum.”
“Yes, of course. The cake. The neighbor. I remember now.” He smiled and patted my shoulder.
But then he frowned again and leaned toward me. “Did you notice anything strange about the cocoa?” he asked.
“I … prefer it with milk.”
“I mean the powder,” he said impatiently. “Did you notice anything strange about the powder? On the floor? When the bowl broke, maybe?”
I shook my head.
He kept staring at me. “Are you absolutely sure? You’re not hiding something? Out of fear, maybe?”
I shook my
head again. I was feeling a little fearful, but mostly because of him.
He finally sighed and stood up from the table. “This is not working.” He picked up his coffee cup and left the room, abandoning his cake half eaten.
“No more tricks!” Ilona called after him as he wandered back upstairs.
“Yeah,” Suzie agreed, running after him. “No more tricks, Dad! We don’t have any more bowls.”
Ilona stood staring after her father and Suzie for a long moment. I wanted to ask her a ton of questions—like where their mother was. Or why they had come to live in Bay Harbor. Or the big one—what their father was doing upstairs that could break bowls downstairs.
“I don’t think I made a good impression on him,” I said instead. “He was very disappointed with my cocoa-observation skills.”
She gave me her beautiful smile. “You were fine. He’s really not always like this.” She squatted to pick up the broken glass. “I mean, he’s always weird, but not that weird. His new project is driving him nuts, or sick. Or both.”
“A new book?”
“More like an experiment he shouldn’t be doing with an artifact he shouldn’t own.”
“You mean, like a scientific experiment?” I asked.
She wet a towel in the sink and then turned and looked at me intensely, like she was making up her mind. “I’m sorry, Harold. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, and my breath came out in a puff of fog.
Ilona shivered, her breath coming out in a cloud too.
“It’s freezing,” I said. “Is your dad … doing his thing again?”
My bowl twitched in my hand like an animal trying to escape. I set it down and it slid right off the table and smashed on the floor, splattering watery cocoa all over.
“Wasn’t me!” I said, just like Suzie had.
“I know.” Ilona dropped her towel over the new mess on the floor. “Should I help you get back to your place?”
It wasn’t really a question. It was a way to tell me that she wanted me to go, and it hurt.
But as she helped me down the front stairs, she said, “I’m going to ask Dad to build a ramp for you. Since you’ll be coming over a lot.”
I liked the idea of that. And when I looked back at her as we struggled through the sand on the way to the bridge, she smiled down at me and I felt better about everything.
4
NIGHT FLASHES
Mum stopped by my room late that night. She had a cup of tea in one hand and a bunch of files in the other.
“You’re still up?” she asked.
She looked exhausted. It was one o’clock in the morning. She was working on an account for one of her clients, and she’d said it could take all night. Even from a distance, I could smell that she had been secretly smoking in our backyard. I could always tell, no matter how much soap and mint gum she used to hide it from me.
“You had a cigarette,” I said, turning away from my computer screen. She blushed and called me a silly sausage and left me alone to return to her work.
I hadn’t told her anything about what had happened to me, either at the pier or with the Goolz. I knew Mum wouldn’t like any of it, bullies or poltergeists.
I had been Googling Frank Goolz again, trying to find out more about him and his daughters. Right then I was staring at a picture of an amazingly beautiful older version of Ilona. A note on the website said that her name was Nathalie and that she had been Frank Goolz’s wife and had died many years ago. Nowhere did it say that they had two daughters. In fact, there wasn’t any mention of Ilona or Suzie anywhere, as if Frank Goolz had been hiding their existence from the public.
I closed my laptop and looked at my hand, remembering how the bowl had twitched in it right before flying off the table. It was a memory my mind refused to believe or file, like a dream you can’t quite remember after waking up.
I turned off the light, went to the window, and peered around my curtains at the Goolz house, making sure to stay well hidden. Most of the windows were dark, but lights still shone in a few. I wondered if Ilona was awake and which room was hers. I also wondered if she would go to my school. I imagined that we would go together every morning and Alex would run away screaming whenever he saw us. Somehow, in my fantasy, he was still drenched and had seaweed hanging from his shoulders and head.
I picked up the book I had left on my desk earlier—Voodooland, a Frank Goolz novel I’d already read more than once. I opened it to a random page and read a couple sentences, using my phone to light the pages. The main character, a horror writer like Frank Goolz, was trapped in a cage in a sordid basement somewhere in Haiti and didn’t know who his captor was. I thought of what Ilona had said about her father conducting weird experiments with forbidden artifacts. I tried to keep reading, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the self-moving drawers and self-destructive cocoa bowls. A very odd thought had sprung up in my mind. What if Frank Goolz’s books weren’t made up? I let my phone go dark, thinking about all the Frank Goolz novels I had read. Zombies, vampires, dark entities from other dimensions, and lots and lots of other monsters. Were they all based on something real?
“That’s impossible,” I said out loud and looked at their house again.
The light in the window right across from mine had been switched off. I felt sure that it was Ilona’s room for some reason. I heard Mum curse and call her client all sorts of names, and it made me smile. I closed the curtains and went over to my bed, wondering if I should go through the trouble of putting on my pajamas or just sleep in my clothes.
Then I came to an abrupt halt as lights started flashing into my room. It was like the paparazzi were trying to take my picture through the curtains.
“What the heck?” I went back to the window. The lights kept flashing—right into my eyes now, and I could hear loud voices outside. I pulled the curtains and squinted down at the Goolz’s yard. Ilona was there, still in her black dress and coat, yelling at her father. They were both looking up at their house from a safe distance. Ilona shouted for Suzie.
The flashing light poured from most of the windows of the Goolz house, but especially the round attic window, since it didn’t have blinds. Then something appeared between two flashes. “Crap on a stick!” I yelled.
Through the window, inside the Goolz’s attic, someone or something was staring at me in the pulse of light and darkness. It was a woman, I thought, but her skin was way too gray and her eyes were way too white. Her long, black hair hovered above her head in a huge, tight bun—a style that belonged to a time long gone. Her blouse looked filthy and wet, as if she had just crawled out of mud, and the scarf around her neck was covered in dark goo that could have been blood, once upon a time.
“She’s not real,” I said to myself. She stood so still, I thought for a second she could be a mannequin or a horror movie poster glued to the window by one of the Goolz for the purpose of scaring me to death. I leaned in and looked more carefully. Her lips moved to form an evil, cadaverous grin. She touched the window with a hand that seemed to have lost most of its flesh. Just bones and rotten nails remained. She waved at me.
This was no picture.
This was a living, grinning, waving mummified monster!
“Mum!” I screamed, shoving away from the window.
“What?!” Mum ran into my room and saw the lights and our flashing shadows on the walls and me cowering by the window. “What’s going on out there?” She looked outside.
“Do you see her?” I yelled.
“Who?”
“The woman in the attic!”
“What woman?”
“The one with the freaking rotten hands and crazy eyes!”
I came back to the window to show her. The woman was gone.
“Suzie!” Ilona yelled outside.
“What’s going on?” Mum asked again.
I cursed and went past my mother to the hallway. In no time, I was sitting on the stair lift, holding tightly to my chair.
“Where are you going?” my mother called after me.
She followed me outside, carrying her yellow raincoat and my jacket, begging me to put it on, but I was too busy trying to get to Ilona to listen to my mother. I went to the bridge and struggled to cross it. On the other side, Mum pushed me through the soft wet sand. It was unusually cold out, electric cold, and the wind and rain kissed my skin in all the wrong ways.
Ilona saw me and frowned. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. She looked particularly intense and unreal in the rapidly flashing lights. There was this determination in her eyes, exactly like when she pushed Alex off the pier. She turned back to the house.
“Oh, cheese,” she said, and ran inside, her black coat flapping behind her.
“Ilona!” Frank Goolz called and ran into the house after her.
I went up to the front stairs. “Help me!” I begged Mum.
Mum was looking at the flashing lights, hypnotized like a bug near a light bulb.
“Mum! Help me up the stairs!”
“There is no way you’re going in there.”
I was about to protest, threaten, blackmail—whatever it took to get her to help me—when the flashing stopped and Frank Goolz came back out, carrying Suzie in his arms.
“Oh, my God. Is she all right?” Mum said, running over to them.
“She’s all right,” Frank Goolz said. He sat on the stairs, his daughter on his lap, and hugged her to his chest. Mum squatted in front of them and touched Suzie’s forehead.
“She’s just in a deep sleep,” Frank Goolz said, his chin resting on the crown of Suzie’s head.
Mum took her hand away, apparently satisfied with Suzie’s temperature. “What was that?” she asked.
Frank Goolz looked back at the house over his shoulder. It was quiet and dark again. “Oh. That? Well … electrical problems.”
Ilona came out of the house and sat beside him. She closed her eyes and shook her head and looked terribly annoyed.
“This is over, Dad,” she said fiercely. “Over!”
“It’s over, Ilo,” Frank Goolz agreed. “I promise.” He put his arm over her shoulders and she leaned against him. It was like Mum and I weren’t there anymore. The Goolz were alone in their private world of strange secrets and weird events.
A Bad Night for Bullies Page 2
