A Bad Night for Bullies

by Gary Ghislain

Ilona held it out to me. “Remember the flashing lights?”

  I looked toward their attic window, remembering the horror of that night. “Uh-huh.”

  “That happened because Dad activated this Stone.” She pressed it into my hand.

  It felt hollow and much lighter than I’d expected.

  “What I’m asking you is a really big deal. This thing is pure evil and I’d totally understand if you don’t want to be anywhere near it.”

  I looked closely at her face, making sure she wasn’t joking. She looked completely serious … and seriously beautiful.

  “Do you want to see it?” she asked. “You can take off the tinfoil if you want—just not for too long.”

  “Will a dead lady pop by for a visit?”

  “Not if you don’t activate it.”

  I had no intention of activating it, whatever that meant. I gingerly peeled back the foil.

  “You don’t need to be so careful. It can’t be broken.”

  I removed the foil entirely and set it on my knees. The Stone felt like dried clay. It was all different shades of orange, with strange symbols carved into its surface and thin lines crisscrossing the circumference. It looked like it could turn in sections like some kind of prehistoric Rubik’s Cube.

  I instinctively shifted my grip. I had a sudden, pressing desire to turn and rearrange the sections.

  “Don’t turn the dials,” Ilona said, putting her hand on mine. “That’s how you activate it.”

  Her hand stayed on mine for what felt like a very long while. Then she took the Stone back from me and grabbed the foil off my knees. She tried to rewrap the stone, but the foil split in places, showing the orange stone underneath. She made a face. “Do you have any tinfoil? You need to keep it completely covered in tinfoil at all times.”

  “I have tinfoil. I’ll give you tinfoil … if you tell me why it needs to stay wrapped.”

  “To keep its evil power from radiating and calling you to it.”

  “So, not to preserve it? Like chicken?”

  “Harold. This is not like chicken at all. For goodness sake.” She extended her arm and gave the Stone back to me. “And no matter what, never, ever, ever activate it, never turn the dials. It would make everything go cuckoo-crazy, and then you’d get really sick, just like Dad.”

  I looked at the symbols through the splits in the tinfoil. Some looked like animals, others like stick-figure humans. “Why would Suzie want to get sick and make everything go cuckoo-crazy?”

  “It’s Dad’s fault. He bought this Stone because …” She stopped. “You’re going to think we’re totally insane.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’ve already come to that conclusion.”

  She nodded. Apparently, being seen as totally insane was just a side effect of the Goolz lifestyle. “The Stone of the Dead opens a bridge to the other side.”

  “The other side?” I immediately thought of the bridge between our houses, but I knew that wasn’t the type of bridge she was talking about.

  “The Stone brings back the dead. My dad and Suzie want to use it to bring back my mother. My dead mother.” She stared straight into my eyes. “You have to help me. Now that Dad has promised not to use it anymore, Suzie won’t stop looking for it. She won’t stop until our mother slides down from heaven and gives her a hug. Only, the more you use it, the sicker you get, the crazier you become, and in the end you die. The bridge goes both ways, Harold. In come the dead, out go the living.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh is right.”

  I didn’t feel like making a silly joke or doubting anything she said about the Stone. I had dreamed of having an adventurous life, and now the opportunity was shining in the palm of my hand.

  “Will you help me keep the Stone away from Suzie?”

  “I’ll keep it for you,” I said with a clarity that made me feel stronger than steel.

  We went to the kitchen to get more tinfoil. Ilona took my chair and carried it downstairs after I got into the lift. I didn’t ask her to; she just did it. I liked that about her. She was never awkward with me. And I never felt like I was special needs when she was around.

  Ilona covered the Stone in two extra layers of tinfoil. “Promise me you won’t take it out of the foil,” she said.

  “I won’t touch it,” I promised. “I’m not big on dead people and Mum will go nuts if I start poltergeisting her precious china all over the house.”

  “Where are you going to hide it?”

  “In my room?” I suggested, though I didn’t relish the idea of sleeping so close to it, with nothing but tinfoil protecting me from its dark magic.

  “Where in your room?”

  “Does it really matter? Suzie won’t come in here uninvited, anyway.”

  “Yeah, right. You saw her at the Owl House. Nothing stops Suzie, ever. And she’ll be drawn to it, like a zombie sniffing brains.”

  She handed me the Stone, apparently deciding she could trust me with it. “Will you keep it on you all the time? That’s the only way I’ll know it’s safe. It can’t hurt you if it’s wrapped up.”

  I looked at the Stone. I didn’t like the idea of carrying it around, but I couldn’t bring myself to refuse her either. She’d come to me for help. So I nodded and slipped it into the pocket of my hoodie.

  We went back up to my room, passing Mum in the hallway.

  “Still behaving?” she asked, a bunch of files and an empty coffee cup in her hands.

  “To the point of pain, Margaret,” Ilona told her.

  I instinctively put my hand over the Stone in my pocket. I hoped it was just my imagination, but it was starting to feel like a vibrating ball of ice.

  Mum stopped at the head of the stairs and watched us as we went to my room. “Harold?” she asked.

  I turned around at the threshold. “Yeah?”

  “Everything all right with you guys?”

  “Yeah, sure, why?” I must have looked all wrong, since I was fighting an urge to grab the Stone and throw it far away from me.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Wait, no …” she shook her hand in front of her face like she could erase the words, “You can’t have seen a ghost because that would be impossible. Ghosts don’t exist and neither does any other kind of monster, in attic windows or anywhere else. Right?”

  “Right! There’s no such thing as ghosts. That would be like … pffft!” I disappeared into my room before Mum could ask me to elaborate. I closed the door and turned to Ilona, who was grabbing her coat off my bed.

  “You’re leaving?” I asked, disappointed.

  “Yep,” she said, heading toward the window.

  “And you’re still not going to use the door?”

  “Perfection comes from practice.” She jumped out like a superhero and I leaned out to watch her climb down. She gave a military salute once she reached the ground, just like I had the other night, and ran back home across the bridge. I was smiling inside and out. Ilona Goolz had a way of making me happy.

  But then I looked up at the attic. “Crap!”

  Suzie was there, watching me. There was no doubt she’d seen her sister climbing out my window. She waved at me and made the same salute Ilona had, just to prove it. And the strange icy sensation from inside my pocket got two degrees colder.

  9

  RESURRECTION

  Mum called me for dinner. I checked my window one last time, making sure it was locked in case Suzie decided to take that route.

  I couldn’t stand the chilling sensation of the Stone in my pocket. I had to get it away from me and put it somewhere Suzie wouldn’t find it. I chose my underwear drawer. I wrapped the Stone in my Superman boxer shorts, then buried it under layers and layers of underpants and mismatched socks. I stirred up the mess so it would look even messier and added a few T-shirts on top, making one of them hang partway out. I backed away to appreciate the chaos I’d created. It looked like the Bermuda triangle of clothes, and I decided no human being in her right mind would get anywhere
near it.

  I closed the door on my way out. It was an old door with a keyhole, but I’d never thought about locking it. I decided to ask Mum for the key in case Suzie got into the house from downstairs.

  “You’ll never get to it,” I said to an imaginary Suzie.

  An incredible smell floated up from the kitchen. Mum had baked one of her vegetarian pies—she was ace at them. I went to the table and sat with my back to the veranda. Normally, I ate facing the view of the beach, but since I’d seen the ghost lady in the attic, I’d tried my best to avoid whatever hid out there in the dark.

  Mum brought the pie to the table and sat down. She took a sip of wine and sighed happily. “We could go to the pier after dinner if you like. Breathe some fresh air.”

  “I’d rather stay here,” I said, trying the pie. She’d decorated it beautifully, with leaves and flowers and vegetables she’d sculpted from leftover dough, and it was delicious, just like all of her cooking. “Hey, do you know where the key to my room is?”

  “You want to lock yourself in?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Actually, yes, it is a problem.”

  “Why?”

  She drank some more wine, thinking about it. “What if you fall? Or get stuck? Just close your door. I won’t disturb … whatever you’re doing in there.” She blushed.

  “That is totally not the point.”

  “Oh, Harold,” she said sadly. “You’re changing so much and so fast since you met Ilona Goolz. Though it’s a normal process, I suppose.”

  “What process?”

  “Growing up. Wanting new things. Changing who you are.”

  “I haven’t changed.”

  “Skipping school? That’s not you at all.”

  I didn’t want to talk about that. I’d already lost my computer and phone to that conversation. “Will you give me the key, then?” I snapped.

  “No,” she snapped back.

  I was getting frustrated fast. I just wanted to keep Suzie Goolz away from the Stone, but Mum insisted on having this big awkward talk about it.

  “Maybe I didn’t like who I was before I met Ilona.” We were both playing with the pie on our plates, moving it around, but not eating.

  Mum stopped fiddling with her food and let her fork drop onto her plate. “I like who you are, Harold. You’re a great kid. You always were, and you always will be.”

  “Can I go eat in my room?” I asked, pushing away from the table before she could say no. She sighed and took my plate to the sink. She noticed the roll of tinfoil we had left out, ripped off a piece, and used it to cover my slice of pie.

  “Here,” she said, handing it to me.

  I snatched it, dropped it on my lap, and went to the stairs.

  “Harold?” she said.

  I stopped. “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  “I know,” I said, shifting myself onto the lift and squashing my takeaway pie in the process. I held onto my chair and pushed the button. She kept looking at me while the lift took me upstairs.

  “I love you, too,” I said midway.

  “Well, fine, then.” Her voice was shaky. She forced a smile and went back to the sink, but I could tell she was trying to hide tears.

  I opened the door to my room, and immediately knew something Goolz-ish had happened while I was downstairs. And it wasn’t just a feeling—there were obvious clues that I had been robbed. The most obvious was my Superman boxer shorts lying in the middle of the room.

  “No way,” I said, going to check the window. The latch was open. “How the heck did she do it? These people are unbelievable.”

  I threw my squashed pie on the bed and went to the drawer even though I already knew the Stone wouldn’t be there. She’d taken it and left the tinfoil behind. I cursed. Ilona had asked me to do one simple thing and I’d failed. I went back to the window to see if Suzie was up in the attic, taunting me with the Stone. It was nighttime, and watching the Goolz’s attic window wasn’t exactly my favorite activity, even in the light of day.

  But I didn’t have to. Suzie was walking down the road toward the pier.

  “Suzie, where’re you going?” I muttered to myself.

  I rushed out of my room, then got really frustrated with the slow pace of the lift. I was losing precious seconds.

  “Do you want some more pie?” Mum asked from the sofa, where she was reading a Frank Goolz novel.

  I transferred my body back into my chair and grabbed my jacket on my way to the door. “I’m going out.”

  “To see Ilona?”

  “No! Just getting some fresh air like you said!” I shouted and slammed the door before she could slow me down with more questions.

  I went to the road at top speed, hoping to catch up with Suzie. I decided not to stop for Ilona. I wanted to fix this all by myself. I could get the Stone back, and she would never know I’d lost it. I would keep it on me at all times like she had asked. “Please, please, please!” I begged, speeding from one streetlight to the next.

  I was gaining ground on her. I could see her passing the pier and starting down the road toward Newton.

  “No!” I said to no one in particular. Because now I had a pretty good idea where she was going: back to the abandoned church. I didn’t want to follow her. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the Hewitt grounds at night, not with the dogs and Alex and his gun haunting the area. It was the stuff of nightmares. I wheeled even faster. Suzie was a little dot moving toward the full moon. My throat tightened. I thought about going back to get Ilona, but I didn’t want her to think I was weak.

  “This sucks,” I said.

  The closer I got to the church, the more I could hear the dogs barking wildly, the sound echoing all around me, as though they could sense a perfect meal on wheels coming straight to them.

  I stopped at the church. Suzie was nowhere to be seen, which meant she’d already crawled inside. I smacked the wooden wall with the side of my fist.

  “Suzie!” I yelled, knocking hard.

  “Go away!” she said from inside.

  “I won’t go away until you give me back the Stone.”

  “Tough luck.”

  I banged on the wall again. “Suzie! Can’t you hear the dogs?”

  I looked up as something fantastically large and white slid off the roof and took to the sky. My heart froze solid until I realized it was a white owl flying away from all the noise we were making. I started breathing again and banged on the wall harder.

  “Suzie!” I barked. “Just let me in and we can talk about this.”

  “You’re too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “I already turned the Stone. Lots of times.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’ll be here soon.”

  “Who?”

  “My mother. You’d better leave.”

  Honestly, I thought leaving was an excellent idea. “Can you unturn it?”

  “Can you just go?”

  As she said that, the dogs stopped barking.

  “This is not good,” I said, and suddenly the moon and all the stars switched off. I found myself in complete darkness. It was silent, too. Totally silent. Suddenly, I didn’t care about the dogs anymore. Dogs were an ordinary fear and I was rapidly entering an uncharted territory of terror.

  “Suzie?” I called. I reached for the wall of the church, but didn’t feel anything at all.

  “This is SO NOT GOOD!” I yelled.

  I put my hands over my ears as an awful sound burst out of the silence—painful, like a dental drill hitting all the wrong spots. And then someone moaned right behind me.

  “Suzie!” I shouted.

  I turned around. Suzie was on the wrong side of the wall. Whomever—whatever—she had brought into our world with the Stone wasn’t in the church. It was out there with me.

  “What’s that?” I whispered, as a tiny white dot pierced the darkness right in front of me. Its glow felt warm and hypnotic. It was steadily growin
g, as if I were moving toward it, or even worse, as if it were coming to me. I put my hands on the rims of my wheels. They weren’t turning. The dot was moving toward me—and it was definitely accelerating. It became a ball, the ball became the size of a window, and the window became a door so bright I could no longer see the darkness around it. And then it stopped.

  “Suzie, if you can hear me, I need you to say something.”

  “Say something,” my own voice repeated from out of nowhere.

  “Who’s talking?” I asked.

  “Who’s talking?” my voice repeated.

  “Stop it!”

  “Stop it!” said the echo.

  “Who’s there?” I asked.

  “Say something,” my voice responded.

  I wanted to throw something into the light. I put my hands into my jacket pockets and found my earphones. I hesitated a second, then threw them toward the light. They froze in midair then, zoof, the light sucked them in like spaghetti.

  “Crap!” I said. But somehow, even though I was still sort of scared, I wasn’t totally terrified anymore. The more I looked into the light, the more it fascinated me, and I found that the brightness no longer hurt my eyes. I searched my pockets again to see if I had anything else I could throw.

  “You don’t need to cry,” said my own voice. “It was a really old chair.”

  I stopped searching my pockets. “What did you just say?” I asked the light.

  “What did you just say?” responded the echo. Only it wasn’t just an echo, I knew now. It was something playing with my memories, searching my mind, remembering things I’d heard and things I’d said.

  “This is not funny,” I said. My wheels started turning, and I rolled toward the light. I grabbed the rims to stop myself, but the wheelchair kept sliding forward, sucked in like my earphones had been.

  “No way,” I said, twisting around to escape the light. I tried to roll away from it, but it was as if something had already grabbed the handles on my chair and was dragging it with a great force. Like the earphones, my chair froze just before reaching the light. I pushed myself off and dropped onto the dark, cold ground seconds before my wheelchair got sucked into oblivion. I looked over my shoulder. The light was right behind me, and I knew I was next. I started dragging myself away but stopped when a long-gone sensation filled my body.