“Relax! We work here,” Cassandra shot back, and then walked confidently past two people taking money and checking tickets. Janis and I were right behind her. The inside was just more of the outside, crowds and spooky music that was played too loudly to be scary, and costumes that were really just monster masks paired with everyday bad outfits. I turned left, away from the Mall of Terror entrance, toward some rolling barricades that were separating the haunted house chaos from the rest of the mall. No one noticed as we slipped behind them.
It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dark. Janis cleared her throat behind me. “Wow,” she said. “Now, this is truly scary.”
The old mall staples were still there, like a preserved monument of The Time Before Online Shopping: store signs, metal grates that came down when stores closed at night, and the once-cheery tile patterns that dotted the floors. Trash was all over the place, as were remnants of small bonfires and debris from where squatters had camped out. Some of the plants were still green, but when I got close enough to touch the leaf of a palm, I saw that it was plastic. Cassandra kicked a half-full-with-something soda bottle out of the way, which prompted a cascade of skittering sounds in the darkest corners.
I looked at the pin MacKenzie had sent. Now that we were in the mall, recognition clicked and I knew where we were going. “It’s the food court, right?” I said. Janis took the phone from me, zoomed in, and nodded.
We started walking, and the screams and shouts of manufactured horror grew farther and farther away behind us. The mall was dotted with skylights, and light pollution and moonshine filtered in, so we could see a little bit. Everything was dusty from disuse, and Janis sneezed right as the food court came into view. There were still visible signs for Just Wingin’ It! BuffaLow Wings, and PandaSub, a fast-food chain exclusive to Spring River that sold “Chinese food” on hoagie rolls, amongst other fusion atrocities. If anyone had ever wondered why this town had high cholesterol, they need have looked no further than PandaSub. Even their logo looked like it was about to have a coronary. There were plastic tables and chairs, some toppled onto their sides and others still set like they were just waiting for someone to sit down and dig into a plate of cheesesteak lo mein. I checked my phone again, and it looked like we were right on top of the pin MacKenzie had sent, but we hadn’t seen anyone since we’d left the Mall of Terror crowd.
From several feet away, I heard Janis gasp. “Esme,” she said, her voice soft and trembling. “What the crap is that?”
It took me a second to figure out what she was talking about, because it was all on the floor. Several of the tables had been pushed aside, and a large space had been cleared. There was a complicated circle, crosshatched with lines and symbols, etched onto the tile in what looked like pink chalk. As we got closer, I could see that the circle was dotted with objects, and with a chill, I realized how alike yet different they were from the things Cassandra and I used to cast spells. A decapitated teddy bear, with the head on one side of the circle and the body on the other; a ball of hair that could have been ripped from combs and scalps; and a half-deflated happy-face balloon that hovered just a few feet off the ground.
I was standing there, examining the shapes, trying to make sense of what they could mean, when something caught my eye over by a Dippin’ Dots cart. It was an absence more than it was anything I could actually see—a dark shape moving, absorbed in a task—but I couldn’t make out anything more than movement. Then it stepped out of the shadows into the pale cast of a skylight, and I saw what it was: Darth Vader. The black plastic frog-face helmet, and a cape that nearly swept the ground. Then it moved again, and I screamed.
MacKenzie had been hidden behind it, still in her red pajamas, sitting in a chair but looking as blank and lifeless as a cardboard cutout, clearly under some sort of spell, her arms tied together behind her. I started to run toward her, but as soon as I stepped inside the chalk circle, I felt like I’d been shocked. Everything in me burned, from my fingertips to my teeth. It was agony, and I screamed. My body twisted and jumped out of the circle, almost of its own accord, and Janis caught me by the arm as I tumbled into a table and almost hit the ground. If Vader face hadn’t been aware of our presence before, he was now.
Cassandra took a step into the circle and yelped when her foot hit the floor. She tried to stand her ground but stepped back, her face twisted in pain. Vader strode toward us, his cape billowing behind him, swishing over the chalk lines, until he was standing face to face with Cassandra. In his hand, he held a Magic 8 Ball exactly like the one Janis and I used to consult on the daily in middle school. He shook it, looked down, and then looked back up and spoke.
“Oh, goody,” he said. “An audience.” His voice sounded dead and flat, two octaves below anyone’s normal speaking voice, but there was still something familiar about it, something that struck a gong deep in my belly.
“We want the kid back,” Cassandra said.
Again, DV shook the 8 Ball and appeared to read from it before he spoke. “Go get her,” he said.
Skirting the chalk lines on the floor, I moved until I was standing next to Cassandra, and at the same time, she and I started to raise our hands. My intention was to yank his mask off and then send him sprawling onto the ground. I assumed Cassandra was going to torch his robes. But her hands sparked and fizzled, and mine barely emitted a breeze. Plus, it felt like my arm was made of lead. It took all my strength to lift it, and then it was barely up for a second before gravity pulled it back down.
“What the hell?” Cassandra said, her voice sounding like taffy, with her words all stretched out.
Vader laughed. Or, more precisely, he said, “Hahaha,” but still looked at the 8 Ball before even saying that. “I see that our Sitters have not yet learned that their magic is not the only magic around here,” he said. “How does it feel to be even weaker than your mortal counterparts? To be reduced to what you really are—just a couple of little girls?”
As odd and inhuman as his voice was, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew it. I had almost placed it when a scream burst through the silence.
Specifically, Janis burst through the silence, holding a food court chair above her head and swinging it with all her might at Darth Vader’s helmet. I’m sure the real Darth Vader had a helmet made of something even stronger than titanium, but this was just a costume from Walmart, and it splintered and cracked. He let out a howl in response, bending over and holding his head, and I saw why his voice had sounded so familiar.
“You hit me with a chair!” Dion squealed, a part of the broken mask still dangling off his ear. Instinctively I glanced down at his feet. Not Timberlands, but construction boots nonetheless. He looked at Cassandra and me, seeming like he was lost, and then something washed over his face, and his eyes turned big and black like he was in the middle of a bad trip. Wordlessly he turned and started after Janis, who threw the chair she was still holding to the ground and ran. He took two steps after her but didn’t follow any farther. “She’s not important,” he said, his voice returning to the cold gravel it had been previously.
“Dion,” Cassandra said. “What are you doing? I don’t understand this.”
He walked over to her so that he was staring into her face, and consulted the 8 Ball before he spoke. “Dion is doing what should have been done a long time ago,” he said.
“This isn’t funny,” she said. “If this is some kind of prank, you can stop now. You got me, okay? You got us.”
“Dion is tired of everything in this family always being about you,” he said.
“Why are you speaking in the third person?” she asked.
Every time I’d ever been with Dion, I’d studied his face. When I wasn’t with him, I thought about it. Now, in the dim and dusty mall moonlight, I looked at it again. Something was different, and it wasn’t just the shards of a Darth Vader mask that now hung around his neck, or the cos
tume, which looked cheap and tacky up close. I looked at him, and then down at my shoes, the toes of which had edged up to the pink chalk. A line none of us was crossing. He was staying in, and Cassandra and I were staying out.
“It’s not him,” I said, looking over at Cassandra. “Something’s using him, and that Magic 8 Ball is telling him what to say.” I reached out and caught her as she started to step back into the circle. “And whatever that is, it drains us. That’s why Janis could run through it when we got stuck.” Janis. Crap. Where was she? I screamed her name and got no answer but my own echo. I was kind of thankful, as I hoped that she was hiding far away from whatever this was that was happening.
I turned to see Dion looking at me, his eyes like black rocks. As if on cue, he shook the 8 Ball and read from it. “The unattractive one is always the smart one,” he said. Even though I knew it wasn’t Dion who’d said that, the words hit me like a slap in the face.
Shake, read. “This is a delight.” Shake, read. “Two Sitters for the price of one.” Shake, read. “Double the power, double the fun.” He walked over to me now.
“Your costume sucks,” I said.
Shake, read, smile. “You played right into my hands.” Shake, read. “Do you really think I would be…” It took forever to have a conversation with someone who had to read everything off a tiny triangle, especially because he seemed to be having trouble, and was shaking it again and again.
“Jeez,” I said. “Haven’t you ever played with one of these before? If you shake it too much, you get bubbles.”
Finally he continued. “Dumb enough to let her keep her phone?”
He reached under his robe and pulled out an iPhone. MacKenzie’s iPhone. “You douche!” I gasped. “She loves that phone.” He tossed it, and I winced as it hit the tile and shattered. At that moment, as if she had been psychically connected to the phone, MacKenzie came to, saw me, and screamed my name.
“It’s okay,” I called to her. “We know him. It’s just a prank. We’ll have you out of there in just a minute.”
“I said, it is not a prank,” Dion said, still reading off the 8 Ball but with emotion this time. “You played right into my hands, and now I have you right where I want you.” He turned and walked out of the chalk lines so that MacKenzie was the only one left inside the creepy circle, right in the middle.
There was no way this was good, and I knew I had to act now that Dion was out of the circle. Janis seemed to have had the right idea earlier, so I followed her lead and grabbed the nearest chair, but before I could smash it into his skull, a tiny flame burst forth in his hand. Nothing magic, just a match. He turned and tossed the match into the circle. It flickered, then went out as soon as it hit the ground. That was it?
I raised my hand again so that I could use my powers to grab a chair, but I didn’t have to. Something else, something unseen, blasted Dion off the ground and up into the air. He landed with a thump and didn’t move. I heard Cassandra scream.
The air around me started spinning, and within seconds, I felt like I was in a wind tunnel. Dust blew into my eyes, and a piece of trash wrapped around my leg. Cassandra was yelling and pointing at something above my head. A giant whoosh filled the air, and as I spun to follow Cassandra’s finger, MacKenzie was sucked up into the air, chair and all, and disappeared.
No one had to tell me that that was the Portal. I knew instantly, just by looking.
It was a giant, swirling pool of all the darkest colors of the rainbow, navy and purple and black and shades that I didn’t even have words for. It looked like galaxies, or oil paints floating on water, swirling dark on dark like an endless whirlpool slipping down the drain. It cast a cold glow that illuminated specks churning in the air all around it. Cassandra was by my side in an instant. “Fuuuuu…,” she said, the vortex seeming to swallow up her words.
There was something almost beautiful about it, and it was certainly hypnotic. It felt like a part of my brain switched off, and I could have stood there and watched it forever. But the Portal was essentially a door, and now it was wide open. MacKenzie had gone in, and everything else was beginning to come out.
The demon that came through looked like a rhinoceros coated in grape jelly. It seemed to fall through the Portal and just landed on the floor with a splat. It looked around, then raised what passed for its face to the ceiling and let out a blast of fiery breath that smelled like a truck stop bathroom in July. Then it turned and started to walk on its creaky, slimy legs away from the food court, right in the direction of all the Halloween revelers.
I held out my hands, focused my power, and grabbed hold of it, stopping it in its tracks. Cassandra whipped around, and in an instant, she was running toward it, her hand out as an arc of flame leapt from her fingertips and smacked the demon right in the center of the chest. It caught fire and stumbled back. Without even thinking about it, I held both hands up and used my powers to give it a sharp tug off the ground and then launched it toward the Portal. It sailed right through the middle, and with an appropriate flushing sound, it was gone.
So that was a Return.
I tried to scan the space for Dion and Janis—Janis because I wanted to make sure she was okay, Dion because I wanted to make sure he didn’t go anywhere. I thought I saw a billow of black plastic cape out of the corner of my eye, but before I could even make sure it was him, there was another demon. This one billowed like an amphibious cloud, like a sheet on a clothesline on a windy summer day. A terrifying sheet. It had no face, and the edges were blurry, as if my eyes couldn’t quite tell where it ended. I held my palms up and used my powers to reach for the demon, but the sheet evaded my grasp with ease, rising over our heads, zigzagging quickly on its way toward the flashing lights and screams that were coming from the Mall of Terror.
“I can’t grab it!” I yelled to Cassandra, panic rising in my chest. “It’s getting away.”
Cassandra ran after it, and then with one big leap jumped onto the top of a table and used that to launch herself at it. In midair, she hurled something at it, which hit it and pinned the demon to a plastic palm tree. The dagger she’d stolen from Brian’s that first afternoon. I felt a smile spread across my face.
“Nice toss!” I called out to her. Something was coursing through my body, a feeling I’d never felt before in my life. It was as if I were on autopilot, but not because I was asleep. Because I was fully awake, maybe for the first time ever. I wasn’t messing anything up. I wasn’t making mistakes. I wasn’t overthinking everything to the point of paralysis. I was doing everything the opposite of the way Esme Pearl usually did things, and yet I’d never felt more like myself.
Unpinning it from the palm, I yanked the sheet creature into the air, spinning it around and around to disorient it as I took it toward the Portal. Then, with one last swing, I let it go and sent it shooting back into the hole. Again, the flushing sound signaled a job well done.
Just as I was appreciating my Return, a smell worse than melting plastic palm hit my nose. The source of the stench looked like a mummy and smelled like a rotting can of sardines. I choked back my retching, and was wishing I had the platinum trash grabber I’d used on Kevin, when the demon burst into flames and started writhing and howling in pain.
A similar sound erupted behind me, and I turned to see Cassandra with her hand held out, palm up and spitting sparks. Twenty feet from her, a creature that looked like a scaly badger dissolved into a pile of flames. When an octopus–baby doll plopped out of the Portal and onto the floor beside me, I didn’t think twice before tying several of its legs in a knot. Everywhere I looked, there was another demon—flying, crawling, slithering, running, hopping, heading straight for the crowd that was just on the other side of the mall. Still, I didn’t care about those hundreds of people as much as I cared about one person right now: MacKenzie. My babysitting charge. My responsibility.
I screamed for Cassandra and ran
toward her at the same time that she ran toward me, using her dagger to stab something in the neck along the way. “MacKenzie,” I wailed. “She’s in the Negative. What are we going to do?” I was sweating rivers, but my teeth were chattering like my feet were in ice. MacKenzie was a tough kid. I bet she hadn’t even been scared when Dion had kidnapped her. She’d probably just looked at him and said, “Okay. Do I need my shoes?” But now she was trapped in a place more horrible than anything I could even imagine.
Cassandra looked at me, and then at the Portal. “I’m going in,” she said.
“What?” I screamed, but she had already turned and was hoisting herself up onto the Dippin’ Dots cart.
“I’m going in after her,” she yelled. “When I jump, you grab on to me and throw me in.”
Maybe I should have protested, told her that she was insane and we didn’t know what was waiting on the other side of that interdimensional toilet. But instead I just nodded. “On the count of three,” I yelled. “One!”
“Twothree!” she yelled back, and jumped.
The force of Cassandra’s jump sent the Dippin’ Dots cart crashing onto its side, and I held my palms out and caught her midair with my powers. I’d barely moved her a foot, though, when the force of the Portal grabbed her and started to suck her up. Just being close to it felt like being in the sticky undertow of a million tiny tentacles, so I couldn’t begin to imagine what it felt like to actually go through it. It swallowed Cassandra up like she was no more than a piece of popcorn. I’d never prayed before, and I didn’t even really know who I was praying to, but in that moment, I made a small ask that God—or whoever was in charge of these sorts of things—would help Cassandra find MacKenzie as quickly as possible and get them both back here fast. Like, five minutes ago would have been nice.
I braced myself for whatever was coming next. With Cassandra gone, I was on my own. I fixed my sights on the nearest demon and was preparing to grab it, when it was yanked upward like someone had grabbed the collar of its invisible shirt. I spun, and all around me, demons were zooming through the air like shooting stars, but up instead of down. The now-familiar flushing sound yanked my attention upward again, and the Portal started to swirl, the demons disappearing right into the middle. Instead of quickly returning to the same size, as it had with every Return we’d done tonight, it grew progressively smaller, and smaller, until it disappeared right before my eyes.
The Babysitters Coven Page 23
