“It was … oh, never mind. Go to sleep.”
Daisy shut the door and peeked into her son’s room. He was sound asleep. She went around the upstairs, checking doors and closets and windows. Satisfied, she headed back downstairs. On the last step, she trod upon a piece of paper, which stuck to her foot. It tore when she removed it. An envelope, dirty, empty. She tossed it in the recycling bin, then checked the doors and windows downstairs and went back to her room.
CHAPTER 7
Chance could not sleep. The open letter lay on his bedside table. He could not be alone with this. Why won’t Pauline let me in? he wondered. She would know what to do. She was just flaunting her older-sister prerogative in front of Mersey. Oh well. He turned on his light and read the letter again.
My dearest friend,
Your last letter worried me. I cannot believe the infirmary is in such imminent danger, yet I believe you; I have never had any reason to doubt you. That more than 1,800,000 patients’ and staff members’ lives are in the hands of one fool sickens me. Saint Philomene’s Infirmary for Magical Creatures is 955 years old, yes? My life has twice been saved there. I owe it at least a defense.
But I cannot travel by pipe any longer; I am too old. One of my wings has even broken off—the first sign of true feebleness, at least for my kind. I can only send this letter, which is accompanied by a powerful philter. No, there is no vial contained herein; the chemical is instead invested in the paper. Yes, the chemical is in the paper.
To release it, do this: With your hands, press this sheet into a small ball, as small as strength will allow. Place the ball in a glass, and add just enough water to cover it. Wait two hours, remove the paper, and discard it (the writing will have washed out), add twelve drops of your own blood to the water—no more, no less—wait another two hours, then boil away the water until there is but a thimbleful left. This is flerk. Flerk is a catholicon, capable of curing many infirmities. It was at one time plentiful, but Saint Philomene’s depleted all known sources decades ago. I only happen to be in possession of the little within this paper through the probated will of my grandfather, who died last month, leaving me a cabinet of medica curiosa. With the quantity of flerk you will soon possess, you will be at the yoke of a great healing force. Though it will not cure a fool of anything, you could use the flerk to relieve a Giant Cpulba of any cancer; rescue an Unman from the kenicki-quithers; banish terminal brain fulse from a wandering Tepesette; free a Werewolf of Hurlworm; or save a scuttling Brux from insanity.
Alas, there is not nearly enough to save 1,800,000 beings, my dear Simon, but in your hands, it could save the one capable of saving the all.
Your ever-faithful servant,
Fallor Medoby Dox
Werewolves! Could they be for real? And what in the world were Brux? And Giant Cpulba? Chance knew he never should have stuck his arm in the dang pipe. Why hadn’t he listened to his conscience? Some underworld realm was going to perish because of him. Wait, there weren’t any underground realms … were there? But the letter seemed so real. And so he knew he must restore it to its journey. Right now.
He quietly dressed in Wranglers, a Möbius strip T-shirt, and dirt-caked Keds.
Chance wasn’t exactly afraid of the dark, but if given a choice of climbing in a seven-and-a-half-foot hole at midday or at midnight, it was a no-brainer. All he had to do was roll up the letter and pop it back in the hole, then run back to bed. The letter would’ve lost only a few hours’ transit time; surely, no “beings” would die.
He folded the letter. Where was the envelope? Hmm. Not on the bedside table. Not under the covers. Not on the floor. Not under the bed. He must have dropped it coming up the stairs. He shut his bedroom door behind him and scanned the hallway floor.
But it wasn’t anywhere. Not under the old, faded Shiraz carpet in the hall, not on the smooth wood stairs. He searched his room again, and then searched downstairs one more time. He even looked in places the envelope couldn’t possibly be: kitchen drawers, the hall closet, the pile of mail on the sideboard by the front door.
He began to panic. He couldn’t remember the address on the envelope, or even the addressee. Patient something something. Pipe C33 something something. Slice 1401 point something something something … No! Dang it! He simply could not remember. Crud! There would be blood on his hands. What to do! Think!
And there, in the middle of the upstairs hallway, at the witching hour on the first full official day of summer vacation, Chance realized what it was that he had to do.
He folded the letter and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans, went into his room, put on his watch, then filled his pockets with a penknife, nine dollars, a magnifying glass, a compass, a small, powerful flashlight and extra AAA batteries, and a box of matches. Downstairs, he loaded an old satchel with two bottles of water, a jar of peanut butter, a package of soda crackers, Flintstones vitamins, and six of the Hershey’s Nuggets with almonds his mother kept “hidden” in a kitchen drawer. Then he went outside, careful to close the sliding glass door as silently as he could, stole across the yard in the moonlight, and climbed into the hole. He picked up the shovel and began to quietly chip away at the gap in the pipe. Choc, chup, chak, chip. When the breach was wide enough to allow his body to pass through, he slipped inside and found himself on all fours, facing south, the powerful wind whipping the backs of his legs. The walls of the pipe were Teflon-smooth. He took a deep breath, innnn … ouuut … innnn … ouuut …
And Chance began to crawl.
CHAPTER 8
Pauline and Mersey stared at the scatter of fulgurite smithereens all over the room. Mersey clapped her hand over her mouth. She began to tear up.
A noise downstairs. Mom!
“Get in your sleeping bag,” Pauline whispered as she jumped into her own bed. “Let’s pretend we’re asleep.”
Outside the door, Pauline’s mother said, “Chance? Pauline?”
The bedroom door opened.
“Girls?”
“Yes, Mom?” said Pauline, over-yawning.
“Yes, Mrs. Jeopard?” said Mersey, also yawning dramatically.
“What was that noise?”
“What noise?”
“It was … oh, never mind. Go to sleep.”
She shut the door. Pauline and Mersey listened for her to go back downstairs. Then Mersey whispered, “Pauline, I’m sooooooo sorry about your … thing…”
Pauline said nothing for a moment.
“Pauline?”
“It’s okay, Mersey. Really, it is. Just an accident. Help me put it back together?”
“Okay.”
Pauline turned on the light. They collected all the fragments they could find and began to reassemble them, as if the fulgurite were a tiny, unknown species of dinosaur whose bones were discovered in disarray.
But one piece was missing. They searched the room again. And the hallway, because a piece could have skidded under the door. Nothing.
“That’s okay,” said Pauline. “The beauty is in the flaw. That’s what Daddy would’ve said. Or something like it.”
With a tube of cyanoacrylate, the girls began to glue the pieces back together. Some of the joins were almost invisible. It would be nearly as good as new.
Pauline held one piece back, the last piece, a slightly twisted reddish-gold tube about a pinkie’s length and breadth whose smooth inside walls had the pearly translucence of green dish soap.
“Here,” she said, handing it to her friend. “This is a good piece. You have it.”
Mersey started to tear up again.
“Stop that now, Mersey Marsh,” said Pauline, leaning over to hug her friend. “Let’s get some sleep.”
The girls climbed under their respective covers.
Pauline couldn’t sleep. What exactly was so important that Chance had had to knock on her door? That was highly atypical. Lately, Chance went out of his way to avoid being around Mersey Marsh because the sight of her made him floppy and dense. That alone should
have been enough to keep him away, but he’d still wanted to come in. Maybe he’d had something genuinely important to show her.
But it could wait till morning. Pauline fell asleep, dreaming of her intrepid, innocent little brother, of chandeliers falling from invisible ceilings, of boys made of rain, of vast gray blankets embroidered with squiggles of black and green thread.
The girls didn’t wake up until eleven the next morning. Chance was nowhere around.
“Let’s go to Dairy Queen and have ice cream for breakfast,” said Mersey, who was doing her makeup in the mirror of Pauline’s little green vanity, a bit of children’s furniture that had so far survived the purges of adolescence. “And a popcorn shrimp basket.”
“Hey, can I try your fangs?”
“Sure. But they probably won’t fit.”
Pauline stuck the two ceramic fangs on her canines. Not perfect, but they stayed in place. They looked quite real.
“Wow,” said Mersey.
“Can I wear them today?”
“Sure.”
At a table outside the DQ, a peanut butter sundae and popcorn shrimp basket between them, Mersey and Pauline watched for boys. Specifically, for Josh Ringle, who occasionally dropped in for a chocolate-dipped cone and a bit of texting.
But no luck. Pauline, in a way, was relieved. Something about the existence of Josh, even though it had been the mortar of their friendship, was now beginning to throw up a barrier between herself and Mersey. At least it was summer vacation now, and all three of them weren’t in class together. Even though the classroom had seated forty-five people, in the end it had begun to feel too small for the three of them.
Mersey’s phone rang, its ringtone the somber beat of Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”
“Hello? Oh, hi, Mom. Dairy Queen. You know, ice cream. She’s fine. Aw, Mom, do I have to? Why? Uncle Dob isn’t going to be there, is he? Well, he’s not bringing his puppets, I hope. He is? Great. Okay, okay, I’ll be home in an hour.” Mersey hung up.
“What…?”
“Family barbecue,” said Mersey. “Wanna come?”
“Okay,” said Pauline, who didn’t mind puppet shows at all and liked barbecued chicken a lot.
Mersey’s phone rang again. Pauline stared at it. So did Mersey. Then she picked up.
“Hello? Yes? Um, this is she. Oh, uh, hi. Um, from Kinfiggish’s? Oh sure, I remember. Yeah, school sucks. Ha-ha-ha!”
Mersey stood up and walked over to a nearby cedar. Pauline struggled to hear, but the traffic on Loblolly Road drowned it out. Pauline watched as Mersey’s posture changed from straight to swayey to slouchy to slinky. She was blushing, obvious even under all the makeup. Finally, Mersey hung up and came back to the table.
“You won’t believe who that was,” she said.
“Who?” said Pauline, knowing all too well who it was.
“Josh Ringle.”
“No.”
“Yep, he asked me out. Tomorrow night. A date. To see Buzzard People at the Downtown Bijou. He has a car!”
“Incredible, wow.”
“He said he’d been crushing on me all year.”
“That’s great.”
“Yeah.”
“Think your mom will let you go?” Pauline said.
“No, that’s why I’m not going to tell her. I’m going to say I’m staying late at your house. Um, if that’s okay?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll have Josh drop me off at your house afterward, and I’ll throw pebbles at your window.”
“Fine.”
“Pauline, are you okay with me going on a date with him?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t believe you. You look a little upset.”
“I always look a little upset.”
“Not true.”
“Mersey, seriously, I’m cool with it. I want you to have fun on your date without worrying about me.”
Pauline looked down at the table, at its old cracks and carved initials, at the line of ants climbing the shrimp basket, at the bee skimming the chaos of a half-finished peanut butter sundae melting in the meridian Texas sun.
CHAPTER 9
Daisy woke up late to an empty house. Pauline had left a note on the kitchen counter:
DQ, bk sn, ♡ P.
Chance was not in the habit of leaving notes and often went off early to raise some kind of minor hell, always returning in the evening covered in dirt and grass stains, so his absence did not surprise her.
Pauline came in through the sliding glass door.
“Hi, sweetie. Where’s Mersey?”
“I don’t care,” said Pauline.
“Hm. Well, I just wanted to remind you I’m going to Denver tomorrow morning. I’ll be gone a few days.”
“You’re not going to have Pye babysit us again, are you?”
“No, no. If you need anything, go get Mrs. Applebaker. I let her know you two will be by yourselves. Where’s your little brother?”
“I’m sure he’s off doing something risky and simpleminded.”
“Well,” said Daisy. “You might be right. Yesterday he told me he’s sleeping over at Jiro’s tonight.”
“Yay for Chance.”
“Be sweet.”
CHAPTER 10
Dave Green, possibly the crankiest man in all of Lubbock, Texas, locked up the secret government laboratory where he labored as a biochemist developing agents of biological warfare for the US military, then climbed into his new Chevy pickup, drove to his house on the north side of town, and fell diagonally across his bed without undressing. Dave Green was very ill.
Some weeks before, he had caught a disease in his lab after accidentally sticking himself in the thumb with a hypodermic. The symptoms came quickly. It was a rare disease known to science only by the designation JENCKX30, and invulnerable to medicine. Dave had been working on a cure most of his adult life, using the same laboratory in which he developed horrifying bugs of mass destruction. That he had, at age sixty-one, caught the same disease that killed his grandmother fifty years before scared him, enraged him, and brought him down all at once. Dave’s grandmother, who had raised him since infancy after his parents were killed in a plane crash, died of the disease when he was eleven. Dave had vowed to find a cure.
In truth, Dave wasn’t sure if his grandmother had died from JENCKX30 itself; she had mysteriously disappeared from the world before the symptoms overcame her. She had never been found. Dave had made biochemistry and medicine his course of study, and his life’s work.
Dave didn’t know how much longer he had. A week or so, maybe a bit more. Toward the very end, he would develop a high fever—the classic symptom that signaled the beginning of the end, the point at which one started counting one’s remaining time in hours, not days.
But before the fever, there would come a much more troubling and disabling symptom. It would begin as simple confusion, then graduate to a kind of generic paranoia, and then progress to full-blown madness. It would start subtly and then accelerate. Thinking about it scared him.
Dave Green wanted to blame somebody. But there was no one; he could fault only himself.
* * *
When morning came, Dave drank some Sanka, then went on the internet to play chess, his only remaining pleasure.
Dave was a very skilled player. At least his mind still worked. He had a good, regular opponent, sleight_of_hand, who was a bit inferior to Dave, which was good, because Dave didn’t want to spend the rest of his days losing at chess.
He signed on as virus_master and was satisfied to see that sleight_of_hand was available. In the dialogue box at the bottom of the screen appeared a greeting from SoH.
“How are you today, VM? Any better?”
“A little worse,” typed Dave. “I don’t think I have much time.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. So. Let us begin. I take white this time, yes?”
“Sure.”
SoH advanced a pawn two ranks. Dave blocked it with a pawn of his own, and
a classic blow-parry-blow struggle for the center squares ensued, neither player wandering from textbook moves until SoH unexpectedly sacrificed a knight for two pawns at move 15, leaving Dave’s king open to attack. SoH cunningly took the opportunity to chat.
“VM, what exactly are your symptoms? If I may be so bold?”
Dave did not respond. He was sweating and shivering at the same time. He had not seen the sacrifice coming. He went into the kitchen for a handful of pine nuts and a glass of milk. When he returned, he drew a knight back in front of his king, the only reasonable defense.
“Mainly, it’s the shakes. Then there’s blurred vision, intense hand spasms, and dry mouth.”
“Hm. Really.”
“And an illusory sense that one cannot stretch out one’s legs. Most upsetting.”
“Go on.”
“But the most obvious and unique feature is the rash of greenish dots all over the skin. Small, sharply defined blemishes. They look like pencil-jab marks.”
“Greenish, you say?” typed SoH, who then slipped a bishop into the long diagonal, straight at Dave’s king.
“Yeah.”
“Terminal, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Strange,” typed SoH.
“And,” typed Dave Green, “you go nuts.”
“I see.” After a moment, SoH typed, “There is a similar disease here, where I live. But it’s called GIGI.”
“And you live where?”
Dave began a new skirmish line on the opposite side of the board, three pawns advancing on a trapped bishop.
“All in good time.”
“Fine.”
And there was no more communication until the end of the game, which Dave won with an interminable rook versus rook-and-pawn endgame.
“A fine contest, VM.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ve been thinking. Where I live, there is a cure for GIGI, which I am certain is your ailment.”
“Really.”
Dave was in no mood for false hope.
“Perhaps you should come here. For treatment.”
“Oh sure,” typed Dave, with as much bitter humor as he could impart to the keys. “There is no treatment.”
Saint Philomene's Infirmary for Magical Creatures Page 3
