I switched on the flashlight and it shone straight into Old Hewitt’s face. He covered his eyes and roared like a bear.
“Sorry!” I yelled, turning the beam to the notepad.
Frank Goolz flipped through the monster sketches, searching for the attic lady. “There!” he said happily. He didn’t seem to notice that Old Hewitt’s already wretched mood was deteriorating fast. He held one in front of my face. “Is this a good one?”
It did look like the rotting woman, drawn standing behind a rough stick figure who was supposed to represent Peter. I nodded, and Frank Goolz turned to Old Hewitt. “Have you seen anything like this creature walking around your grounds?”
“Creature? What kind of creature?” he said, his whole body tensing toward the little orange notepad.
“This is just a rough sketch, I’m afraid.” Frank Goolz took the flashlight and lit up the notepad right in front of Old Hewitt’s face. “But there might be details that ring a bell. Like the bloodied scarf. Or her hair, maybe? She wears it in an unusually huge bun on top of her head. See the dead eyes, too. And the throat, it looks like it’s been torn away. Quite gruesome, really.”
Hewitt stared so intently at the drawing, I thought he would fall into it. Frank Goolz watched him carefully. “Would you like to see more sketches of her?” He turned the pages slowly. “Does she look familiar, then?”
Old Hewitt looked up from the notepad, his mouth half open, his eyes full of questions and terror. He grunted and shook his head like a boxer recovering from a hard punch. He slapped the notepad out of Frank Goolz’s hand and stepped back, pointing the plank at us.
“You get away from my grounds, you nutjob. You get away now.” He turned and walked down the hill, nearly running away from us.
“Well,” Frank Goolz said, bending to pick up the notepad. “Did you see the look on his face?”
“He looked scared,” I said. “But they’re scary drawings.”
“They were more than just drawings to him,” he said, switching off the flashlight and dropping it and the notepad into his satchel. “That man knows something we don’t.” He retrieved the goggles, put them on, and turned a dial. The blue light turned on, the goggles hissing and buzzing as he looked down the hill.
“See anything?” I asked.
“No, they’re absolute rubbish. Damn you, eBay, right?” But he kept them on, watching Old Hewitt disappear behind the trees.
16
MONSTER DOT COM
The next afternoon, Suzie was waiting for me and Ilona by the pier, throwing rocks into the ocean. She had recovered from her fever and spent her first full day at school. The only fun part of the day, she said, was when the police came to her class to ask questions.
“Two kids disappearing in two days. I bet this town has never been so happening.” She threw another rock and this one skipped across the water. “Did they come to your class, too?”
“They did,” I said.
“Did you tell them about the zombie ghost?” Suzie asked.
“Nope,” I said. “No one would believe it anyway. Except your dad, obviously.”
Suzie threw the rest of her rocks all at once, and dusted off her hands on her jeans. “I’ll find it, you know,” she told Ilona. I knew immediately that she was talking about the Stone and tried not to look too interested. “I’m good at finding things.”
“Dad told you. It’s bad for you,” Ilona told her. “Do you want to get sick again?”
Suzie shrugged. “Dad’s just like me, no matter what he said. He can’t wait to activate the Stone again. And neither can your boyfriend.”
Suzie was right. Getting my hands back on the Stone of the Dead was at the top of my to-do list. Even if it meant opening the gates of hell and letting out all the zombie ghosts in the entire universe. Even if it made me really sick or turned me totally cuckoo. Even if it might kill me. The pull of the Stone was that strong.
Ilona looked back and forth between us and sighed. “Let’s go home.”
We walked silently to their house. When we got there, Suzie dropped her schoolbag on the porch and flung open the door, yelling, “I hate school! Never send me again!”
She ran inside, leaving the door open behind her.
“She’ll find it,” Ilona said, as we went down the sandy path through their yard.
“Where did you hide it?” I asked.
“Told you already. You’ll have to learn to fly to get it.” I turned my chair around so she could help me up the stairs to the porch.
Across the bridge, Mum emerged from our house. “Harold?” she called, “Are you ever coming back home?”
“Hello, Margaret!” Ilona said, waving a little too cheerfully. “He’ll come home in a little while.”
“I’ll come home in a little while,” I repeated, shrugging like I didn’t have a choice. Ilona and I went inside, and I pulled the door shut behind us. I knew Mum was still out there, steam shooting out of her ears, arms folded so tight, she was probably close to breaking a rib.
“My mum didn’t look too happy with us.”
“My boyfriends’ mothers are never happy when I steal their sons away.”
“What do you mean? You’ve had boyfriends?”
She ignored me. “Dad?” she called.
“How many?” I asked.
She looked into my eyes and gave me the same fake smile she normally reserved for Mum. “Many.”
“Many?”
“What can I say? I’ve traveled the world. A boy in every port.”
I blushed. It hurt to imagine she had a flock of boyfriends scattered all around the globe, awaiting her return.
“Haven’t you had girlfriends?”
“Of course.”
“How many?”
I shrugged. “Plenty. Same as you.”
“Names?”
“A girl called Sarah,” I said hesitantly. I had known a Sarah when I was in kindergarten in England. She was a cuddly old woman who cooked our meals. She liked to pinch my cheeks and call me her boyfriend, so it wasn’t a total lie.
“You’re such a bad liar.”
“I’m not lying.”
She stared at me.
“Not entirely,” I admitted.
“Well, I was, and I’m a much better liar.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never had a boyfriend, you silly sausage. Never had the time nor the taste for it.”
I blushed even harder, but this news hurt way less.
“Silly sausage? Really?” I asked. “You sound just like my mother when you call me that.”
“I know. I’ve heard her call you that. And she’s so right, sometimes you really are a silly sausage.”
Frank Goolz came to the top of the stairs. “Oh, Harold!” he said. “Good, you’re here. I have things I need to show you.”
He came down the stairs barefoot, waving some papers at us.
We went into the living room, which was still a chaos of crates and boxes. Suzie followed with cups of her horrible cocoa, and Ilona added her disgusting cookies. We were home.
“Gather around, kids,” Frank Goolz said, sitting on a box and dropping the papers on top of the crate in front of him. “You’re going to love this.”
We leaned forward and saw that the papers were printouts of old photos.
“Oh, cheese!” Ilona said, perfectly summing up our general reaction. “That’s our monster.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. Last night’s chill returned, sliding up my spine as I stared at a black-and-white image of her. “It’s her. It’s the zombie ghost. Just not so zombified.”
Frank Goolz leaned back, a big smile on his face. There was no doubt about it. The photograph showed “our monster,” as Ilona had put it, but before she became a grinning, bully-hunting, decomposing body. Her clothing was the same, except it wasn’t dirty, bloody, or torn. She had the scarf around her neck, the strange hairstyle, and the same intense eyes, though not yet bleached by death and decomposition.
<
br /> “Who is she?” I asked.
“Everyone, meet Madame Judith Valentin. She’s French, if you were wondering.” He laughed for some reason.
“French? Why French?” Suzie said, chewing one of Ilona’s cookies and apparently enjoying them as much as the rest of the Goolz clan did. “I don’t like the French. They’re so weird all the time. It’s no surprise she attacked me.”
“She was a teacher here,” Frank Goolz said.
He picked up the papers and searched through them, then selected one and dropped it in front of us. It showed Madame Valentin standing beside a group of students about our age who were dressed in flashy blue, neon green, and vivid pink. Some of the boys were wearing red bandanas, and the girls’ hair looked like curly nuclear explosions. You could see the school building behind them. The picture had been taken at the same bleachers where we’d confronted Peter and his gang. There was a caption underneath.
“Bay Harbor School, nineteen eighty-two,” Ilona read.
Frank Goolz dropped another photo on top of that one. It was another class picture, dated 1983. Our zombie ghost, Madame Valentin, still had her trademark scarf and hairstyle.
“Where did you find these?” I asked.
“Oh, I went to see your mother,” he said casually. “And she helped me navigate the Internet and print them out. Lovely woman, your mother. And a true computer savant. She makes lovely cookies, too. And a deadly cup of joe. Boy, she likes her coffee strong!”
I stared at him, trying to imagine Frank Goolz spending time with Mum, drinking her lethal coffee, eating her amazing cookies, and stealing time from her client accounts to go online searching for pictures of our zombie ghost.
“What did you tell her? If you told Mum we were investigating Peter and Alex getting snatched by a ghost, she would never have let me come here again.”
“I told her I was researching a long-lost relative of mine. Don’t worry, I’m a good liar—I’m a writer!” He laughed. “But mostly, we talked about other things.”
“What things?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine what Mum and Frank Goolz could possibly discuss and immediately thought it must be me.
“Like most grown-ups chatting over a cup of coffee, we dwelled on the past and licked our wounds.” He laughed again.
I couldn’t imagine Mum opening up to this strange man, and I couldn’t imagine Frank Goolz discussing anything more personal than wanting to see a vampire.
“What past?” I demanded.
“Harold.” He gave me a gentle smile. “The present is where the good stuff is, always. Now focus.” He tapped the printed picture.
“What did you search for?” Ilona asked. “‘Dead woman with strange hair now a zombie’?” She picked up one of the black-and-white prints and examined it intently as she devoured a cookie.
“Close. A giant man lost it when I showed him these drawings last night. It was obvious he knew her. So I did some sketches of her without the blood and rotting flesh, but with the scarf and the curious hairstyle, and I went around Bay Harbor showing them to more people until I got her name. Then your mother helped me research her tragic story.”
“What’s so tragic about her, beside this horrible hairdo?” Suzie asked.
“She disappeared some thirty years ago. It was a well-publicized affair. They looked for her everywhere. Never found her. Never found her body either. And you know what else is funny about her?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She came back from the dead, and now she looks like a walking nightmare. That’s pretty funny.”
“Yes, there’s that. But she also used to own our house. We live where she lived!” He started laughing again. He dropped another print on top of the last one—yet another picture of Madame Valentin standing beside her students in front of our school.
“Oh, cheese!” I shouted, borrowing Ilona’s favorite expression. Not because I was currently inside the former home of a terrifying ghost but because of what—or who—was next to her in the picture.
“It’s Alex!” I shouted. “Alex is in the picture!”
The caption read, Bay Harbor School, 1984, and yet there was Alex standing right beside Madame Valentin, looking extremely creeped out.
“He’s right,” Suzie said, pointing at him in the picture. “That’s him. That’s the boy who disappeared. Only dressed funny.”
“And that’s the other boy, Peter,” Ilona added, pointing at the kid on Alex’s other side. She was right. Peter was there, too, looking just as uncomfortable as Alex.
“This is impossible,” I said, turning to Frank Goolz. “You can’t just drag people into old pictures. Can you?”
“Well, that’s not entirely impossible. Time is an elastic thing. But that’s not what’s happening here. What you’re looking at is the genius of genetics at work. Those boys are not your missing friends.”
“They are not my friends,” I said automatically. “But that’s definitely them.”
Frank Goolz smiled. “That would make a great story, Harold. But these are not the missing boys. These are their fathers.” He pointed at Alex’s look-alike. “That’s the man with the plank. That’s why he reacted like he did when we showed him the drawings of Madame Valentin’s undead self. She was his teacher. Read the names.”
I read the names in the photo caption. Sure enough, Jonas Hewitt and Helmut Donahue were on the list.
“They look terrified,” I said.
“Maybe they didn’t like school,” Suzie suggested. “I always look all sourpuss in school pictures.”
“Sourpuss! You’re funny!” Ilona gave her sister a gentle punch on the shoulder.
“Or they didn’t like Madame Valentin all that much,” I said, remembering how Old Hewitt had reacted to the sketches.
“Maybe we should go and ask them why they looked so terrified all those years ago,” Frank Goolz said, picking up the papers. He stood up and practically jogged to the hall, invigorated by his new plan.
“You met Old Hewitt,” I said, turning around. “He’s not the talkative type.”
“True,” he said, zipping up his fancy boots, sockless as usual. “What about the other one?”
“Mr. Donahue?” I said. “Most people stay away from him. Especially when he’s drunk.”
He picked up his satchel, then folded the printed pictures and tucked them inside it. I was pretty sure the old revolver and the rest of his equipment from last night were still in there. “Let’s go meet him. And hope we find him sober.”
17
GHOST SHIP
If you were looking for Helmut Donahue, you could always find him at Gilmore’s Tavern, or on his boat, recovering from Gilmore’s Tavern.
Frank Goolz decided to try the boat first, so we followed him to the docks.
“If he’s drunk, he’ll be violent. He’ll be almost as bad if he’s not,” I said. “From what I’ve heard.”
“What else have you heard?” Ilona asked.
I talked loudly, making sure Frank Goolz would hear me even as he pulled ahead of us on the boardwalk. “I heard to never engage in conversations that could turn into arguments that could turn into him cracking your skull!”
“People like to spread rumors,” Frank Goolz said over his shoulder.
“He’s been arrested and sent to jail a couple of times,” I said. “Peter brags about it. Like he’s proud that his dad is a criminal.”
“Dad, can you slow down?” Ilona called. He was going twice as fast as we were.
“Do you know which one is his boat?” he asked me, ignoring her request.
“Sort of,” I said. I had seen Peter hanging around the docks before, helping his dad unload fish crates from the boat. “It’s one of those over there.” I pointed at the cluster of fishing boats at the very end of the docks. I had never gone anywhere near them—running into Peter or his father wasn’t my idea of a fun afternoon, and the docks were entirely the wrong terrain for me, with steep steps, and ropes and fishing nets and bits and pieces of things all over th
e ground between the boats and the barracks. I had to be careful maneuvering through this obstacle course. Besides that, the whole area stank of dead fish.
“When your father wants something, he’s unstoppable,” I said as we reached the docks. Frank Goolz was already by the boats.
“He’s always like this when he thinks there’s a book in it,” Ilona said, moving a thick rope aside for me.
“You mean he’s going to write a book about this?”
“Why do you think he’s so excited?”
I looked at Frank Goolz taking notes on his orange notepad and realized Ilona was right. He was gathering information to write a book about our missing bullies and the ghost that took them.
“Will we be in it?” I asked. The thought of it made my heart do a happy backflip.
“Dad doesn’t write about us, but you might be in it,” she said. “Especially if something really horrible happens to you.”
“That’s great!” I said, ignoring the “really horrible” part. I turned to Ilona. “Can you imagine that? I could be a character in one of your dad’s books.”
“Totally. You’d make a great character in a horror novel.”
“Why?” I said, losing my smile. “Because I use a wheelchair?”
She shot me a dark look. “Because you’re interesting, you silly sausage.”
“Can you stop calling me that?”
“Can you stop being one?”
Suzie sighed. “Lovers!” she said, rolling her eyes. She ran ahead to join her father.
“We’re not lovers!” we yelled after her at the same time. But Suzie was either too far away to hear or pretending not to care.
“She’s a pest,” Ilona said, but we were both bright red by then.
“That’s the one, I guess,” Frank Goolz said when we caught up. He was standing on the dock in front of an old, floating green wreck called The Donahues’ Pride. He took the folded printouts out of his satchel.
“Mr. Donahue!” he called.
The sun was slowly disappearing behind the hills around Bay Harbor. Black clouds were coming in on a strong wind from the ocean, promising rain and darkness. The boat started to rock gently, creating a melody of slapping ropes and jangling bells.
A Bad Night for Bullies Page 10
