A Bad Night for Bullies

by Gary Ghislain

  Ilona sat beside me, then did something I didn’t expect. She took my hand, right in front of her dad and sister. I looked at her. She smiled. Frank Goolz didn’t seem to notice or care. He just wanted to tell his story. “Killing Madame Valentin was sort of an accident, just like he told us,” he said.

  She had come to talk to Old Hewitt’s parents because he and Donahue had beaten up a kid at school that day. But his parents weren’t at home, and the boys unchained the dogs when they saw Madame Valentin walking down the road from the cemetery. They only wanted to scare her off. The dogs saw it differently and … well, you know what happened next. Then the boys got really scared and carried her body in a trolley to an abandoned mine in the marsh. They hid her body in a box deep in the mine and hoped they would get away with it.

  “And they did,” Frank Goolz said, “until we started using the Stone of the Dead, opening doors between this world and the next.”

  I was about to drink some of my bad cocoa when someone knocked on the open door. I turned around and saw two girls about Suzie’s age standing on the porch. It was the Farrell twins, the daughters of a family that lived on the far edge of Bay Harbor. You could see their parents’ farm from the road, right beside the Mallow Marsh. The Farrells were strange people. They homeschooled their daughters and were members of some kind of cult. The girls were dressed like they had just escaped a Gothic novel set in a time before hot water and electricity. One of them was carrying a shoebox.

  “Can I help you?” Frank Goolz asked, standing up and walking to the door.

  “We heard you found the missing boys,” one of the sisters said.

  “Our mother is missing. She’s been missing a week,” the other one continued.

  Suzie, Ilona, and I joined them at the door.

  “Missing? Is that right?” He frowned, but his eyes lit up.

  “Isn’t this something your dad should report to the police?” Ilona asked.

  “Dad doesn’t want to go to the police,” one of them said.

  “And we found this in the high grass by the marsh,” said the other one, opening the box so we could all see what was in it. Inside the shoebox was a human foot severed at the ankle.

  “Cheese! It stinks!” Ilona covered her nose.

  “I don’t like the sight of blood,” Suzie said, turning pale.

  “I just promised Mum we’re not going on any more dangerous adventures!”

  “Well, girls,” Frank Goolz said, “let me get my satchel.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Ruben and Dulce Gerson for their unlimited love and support; to Maria Ahlund for her kindness and her Guns N’ Roses brand of patience; to Jacques and Sylvie Flatin for their caring attention and counsel; to Melissa Bengorine for her camaraderie and all the fun she always delivers; to Thomas Leclere for his friendship and his enthusiasm for everything Goolz; to Franco and Trish Cook for all the inspirational talks and for being my very own Goolz Next Door; to Isabelle Perrin for her awesome work on this project and her strange taste for heart emojis; to Julia Morot and Manon Barbry for being my awesome friends; to Jola Kudela for taking the right picture at the right time; to Daphnée Colleau for always uplifting me; to Anaelle and Maena Rabaneda for their undivided attention to my silly jokes and being such efficient recipients of my love.

  Thanks to my amazing agents, Ellen Levine and Alexa Stark, as well as Meredith Miller, at Trident Media Group, for their commitment and their wonderful work to support this project from the get-go.

  And a very special thanks to Mary Colgan, and her team at Boyds Mills Press, for being the instrumental force, and one of the true talents behind The Goolz Next Door.

  A Conversation with Gary Ghislain

  Q: What was the inspiration for The Goolz Next Door series?

  A: The Goolz Next Door started as scary stories that my daughters, Ilo and Sisko, and I told each other. Nothing was written down. Everything was narrated spontaneously, depending on the mood of the narrator, the weather outside (a rainy day is a good Goolz day), and our favorite monsters du jour. We were projecting ourselves—a single father and writer of strange fiction, with his two kids exploring the world—into improbable adventures of ghosts, ghouls, and wicked witches. We were ace at scaring each other.

  A few years later, Mary Colgan, my editor, contacted me asking if I had any good ideas for a series. I thought it would be amazing to write down all those stories that existed only in our imaginations—and The Goolz Next Door series was born.

  Q: Who is Harold, and why did you choose him to be the narrator of the series?

  A: Though the Goolz family is based on my own, my daughters and I always told the stories from the perspective of an outside narrator. I didn’t tell the stories as Frank Goolz; Sisko wasn’t playing Suzie; Ilo wasn’t limited to Ilona. By using a narrator, we could put the characters in the most bizarre situations without being limited by their points of view. We could spend a lot more time with the monsters when they were out of sight, hiding in the darkness. When I started writing the Goolz stories, I wanted to keep that original flow. I needed to create a narrator.

  The title “The Goolz Next Door” popped up spontaneously during my first discussion with my editor. And with the title came the idea that Frank Goolz and his daughters would be the odd new neighbors of our narrator—Harold Bell, a young boy living a simple, ordinary life in the house next door.

  Q: Why did you decide that Harold, your narrator, would be disabled?

  A: I never decided consciously that Harold would be a wheelchair-user. This happened all by itself, spontaneously, while telling the story. Harold loves reading, and he adores his new neighbor’s novels. In the opening scene, Harold is Googling Frank Goolz on his computer for the gazillionth time. He’s extremely eager to meet him. His mother calls him. She baked a cheesecake to welcome Frank Goolz. They don’t know yet that he comes attached to two daughters. And then, out of the blue, like it was always meant to be, Harold says, “I pushed away from my desk and made a cool spin on my back wheels before going to the stairs.” The character instantly came alive. He was so in charge, so in command of his feelings and his words, that I could just take a back seat and enjoy the ride.

  Q: Why is Frank Goolz so fascinated with the paranormal?

  A: Frank Goolz is like an explorer, only instead of trying to discover drying mummies deep inside a hidden chamber at the bottom of a pyramid (though he would love to do that, too), he ventures to the frontier between the physical and spiritual worlds. He is a detective who is convinced that something bigger, truer, and way more exciting exists beyond the “see it, touch it, feel it” world. He lives to investigate it and to write about his experiences in his books. He sells his work as horror and fiction, while in reality, the books are accurate documentations of his everyday life with his daughters.

  Very often, I picture him as a nutty professor, too busy being fascinated by ghost and monsters to be frightened by them. He has so much knowledge about supernatural phenomena that it is hard for him to relate to “normal” people. Most people see him as a total loony—because for him, the monster under the bed is real, and it’s silly not to grab a flashlight and a notepad and start asking it questions.

  Q: What will be the next Goolz adventure?

  A: In A Bad Night for Bullies, Harold mentions a local legend about a creature living in the Mallow Marsh near their town of Bay Harbor. My next story will be about that ancient monster awakening and bringing terror back to town.

  I love old-fashioned monster stories, and I can’t wait to see Frank Goolz, Harold, Ilona, and Suzie go mano a mano with the Mallow Marsh Monster.

  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 on the French Riviera with his two daughters, Ilo and Sisko, enjoying the sun and the sea while working on his novels. He is also the author of How I Stole Johnny Depp’s Alien Girlfriend. Visit garyghislain
.blogspot.com.

  boydsmillspress.com

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