by Henry Clark
He left as Fiona began sputtering about how her life would be ruined if she didn’t get her phone back.
“You’re aware that that phone has turned you into a zombie, aren’t you?” Freak asked her. “That, and your enthusiasm for Agra Nation® Home-Style Alphabet Soup? ‘The soup that puts a spell on you’?” he added, quoting the TV commercial.
“Obviously, the damage has already been done,” she snapped back at him. “If what you tell me is true and I’m singing along with everybody else in the flash mobs.”
“But maybe the damage can be reversed,” I said, pulling the sheet off the piece of furniture under which Fiona’s phone had vanished.
The sofa was there, looking smug. I flipped the cushion that should have had the bloodstain on it. The cushion was clean, and the slash along the back was gone.
“It’s no longer dressed as a pirate,” I said.
“The ghost costume is much better,” said Freak, nodding at the sheet in my hand.
“GIVE ME BACK MY CELL PHONE!” said Fiona, and she punched the sofa in the middle of its three seat cushions. Her fist sank into the cushion up to her wrist and when she drew her hand back, the cushion came with it. She looked like a cartoon character with a mallet for a fist.
“Get it off me!” she hollered. Freak and I grabbed the cushion and pulled one way while Fiona pulled the other. For a brief moment I envisioned Fiona spending the rest of her life as Pillow-Hand Girl in a circus freak show. Then the cushion let go and she fell backward on her butt.
“Definitely the same sofa,” Freak acknowledged as I returned the cushion to its place. It was impossible to tell Fiona’s fist had ever been in it.
“You put the OAF in SOFA!” Fiona spat at it. “How can I live without my cell?”
“Maybe if you don’t use it for a few days, you won’t feel like jumping up and singing show tunes when everybody else does,” I said. “We know the next flash mob is scheduled for Wednesday at twelve seventeen. That’s three days from now. Do you think you could go without using your cell for that long?”
Fiona hugged herself tightly and bit her lip. “I suppose I could try.”
“Freak and I will help you,” I assured her. “If you feel the need to talk to your friends, try talking to us.”
“Or if we’re not around you could just hold a bar of soap to the side of your head,” Freak suggested.
There was a sound like whuff! from behind us and we turned around.
The sofa was gone.
“Whoa!” said Freak.
“Told you.” I nudged Fiona. “You shouldn’t have called it an oaf. You hurt its feelings.”
“Furniture doesn’t have feelings,” she protested, surveying the empty spot like she still expected to find her cell.
“The sofa does,” I said. “It feels…”
“What?”
“Comfy.”
Over the course of the next week, Fiona got more and more sullen and argumentative. Freak and I guessed it was because she didn’t have her phone. She could have borrowed one from any of the kids at school, but she was using her willpower not to. I didn’t admit it to Freak, but I admired her for that.
On Monday, for the first time ever, Fiona sat with Freak and me at our school lunch table. She said she hadn’t used a cell in over twenty-four hours, but her resolve was weakening and she needed our support. When she started shaking too badly, Freak gave her an unopened can of sardines, which she clutched eagerly and held to the side of her head.
On Tuesday Fiona looked ashen. She sat on both her hands and spoke in single-word sentences.
Wednesday, at exactly twelve seventeen, almost everybody in the lunchroom stood up and faced east. Freak and I watched, horrified, as Fiona joined them. Maybe the mind control wasn’t reversible. Maybe we were all doomed.
The brainwashed student body patted the tops of their heads with their left hands and rubbed their stomachs with their right. Then they started to rub their heads with their right hands and pat their stomachs with their left. Fiona fell out of sync. She looked increasingly confused, until her eyes suddenly focused and she sat down abruptly.
I’m sure she would have texted “OMG!” if she’d had something to text with.
“Turkey,” said Freak, looking straight at her.
“Excuse me?”
“Cold turkey,” replied Freak. “That’s what it’s called when somebody suddenly quits something they’re addicted to. It’s not easy. My father hasn’t been able to do it. You did.” Freak’s eyes darted around, looking at everybody as they sang. “It’s something to be proud of.”
“So nobody has to be enslaved by Disin’s mind control,” I said. “The effects can be reversed.”
“Yeah,” said Freak, frowning. “All they have to do is go without their phones for three days. How likely is that?”
Fiona climbed up on the lunch table and looked around. She spotted Nails Norton, the girl who had dumped strawberry Jell-O on her, four tables away. Nails was belting out, “Anything you can do, I can do better!” at the top of her lungs.
Fiona jumped down from the table, swept everything off her lunch tray, and headed straight for Nails. Along the way, she scooped up bowls of Jell-O from other kids’ trays and emptied them onto the one she was carrying. When she reached Nails, Fiona dipped her finger in the gelatin and dabbed the letter L on Nails’s forehead as Nails continued to sing. Then Fiona replaced Nails’s chair with the tray of Jell-O. The flavor of the day was raspberry.
By the time the song ended, Fiona had already returned to her seat. As everybody sat back down, there was a loud splat! and a scream from Nails’s direction. This was followed by the loudest round of applause ever.
Nails scrambled to her feet. Her formerly white pants now had a bright red stain on the seat. Her face turned the same shade of red. She grabbed a sweater from one of her friends and tied it around her waist.
“Anything she can do, I can do better,” Fiona declared, and helped herself to one of Freak’s french fries.
At Underhill House that week, things were pretty tame—until Thursday rolled around.
On Saturday we had cleaned the ballroom’s ceiling and the chandelier. Sunday we washed all of the glass in the French doors. After school on Monday we scrubbed down the walls. Tuesday we washed the floor. We stepped outside as frequently as we could, shaking out dust rags, snapping towels, and jumping around like two-year-olds to convince anybody watching from above that the place was swarming with kids. Yesterday we saw a distant black helicopter overhead.
Finally, this afternoon we decorated the ballroom, putting tablecloths on tables and setting up eighty folding chairs facing a stage that, long ago, had held musicians. We stretched streamers from the arms of the chandelier to the four walls until the ceiling looked like the underside of a colorful tent.
“We still have the balloons to inflate,” said Alf. “But that can wait until Saturday.”
“Shouldn’t we start that now?” said Fiona. “Is there a helium tank? I’m very good at filling them without breaking them. Do we have enough to make an arch? Can we tie bunches to each chair? Are they different colors?” Fiona had been energized ever since she’d gotten over the painful withdrawal of giving up her phone. She stood straighter and worked harder. Freak and I could barely keep up.
“There are two different colors.” Alf sighed, overwhelmed by Fiona’s newfound energy. “And we’ll do it Saturday.”
“Are all these things really necessary?” demanded Freak, taping a Halloween party decoration to the wall.
“We have to convince Disin this is a real auction,” I assured him. We had managed to resist the temptation to tell Alf we knew about Indorsia and Miranda and that Edward Disin was his father. It would have made things easier, but it also would have revealed to Alf that Guernica and Miranda were working behind his back, putting us in more jeopardy than he was comfortable with.
“Yes,” confirmed Alf, tapping the Halloween decoration lightly on its pitchfork
. “The devil is in the details.”
Alf left us on our own then. He had been leaving us for longer and longer stretches as his trust in our ability to work unsupervised grew. I assumed Guernica was continuing to fake the telemetry coming from Double Six. Alf could see we were in his house. True telemetry from Double Six might have placed us halfway to Harrisburg, or wherever it was the cat had gone. Nobody had seen Mucus since he took off with the domino.
We had the run of the first floor of the house. When we weren’t in the ballroom, we were usually in the kitchen, rinsing out our mops and dust rags. When we took breaks, we took them outside.
During one of our breaks, I said, “Why don’t we make snow angels?”
“Because there’s no snow?” Freak asked reasonably.
“That wouldn’t stop a toddler,” I said, throwing myself flat on my back, staring into the clear blue sky, and thrashing my arms through the grass.
“He’s right,” said Fiona, throwing herself down next to me and doing the same. “Seen from above, this has to make us look totally preschool.”
“Great,” said Freak, joining us. “Afterward, we can build a no man. Or a no fort. Or maybe have a no ball fight. Or we could go—”
“Okay!” Fiona interrupted him, before he could say “no boarding.” “We get it.”
Later that day, as I was coming out of the kitchen with a bucket of soapy water, I stepped on a doghat.
The doghat wasn’t on the doghat’s head. The hat was off to one side of the hallway floor, like maybe it had been tucked into a back pocket and fallen out without its owner realizing. It looked like a cross between a cocker spaniel and a poodle. I raced back to the ballroom.
“There’s a cockapoo in the building!” I hissed in a loud whisper.
“It was probably left by the raccoon,” said Freak, who was up on a ladder, polishing prisms in the chandelier. “You didn’t step in it, did you?”
“No. I mean, yes! Look!” I waved the hat at him. He slid down the ladder. Fiona rushed over.
“Did we leave the door open again?” asked Freak.
“No,” said Fiona. “I’m positive we closed it.”
“Then this guy snuck in some other way. I wonder what he’s up to.”
“He’s probably hoping to steal the crayon,” suggested Fiona. “Maybe it’s Edward Disin!”
“Disin wouldn’t be wearing a cockapoo hat. He certainly wouldn’t drop it in the hall. He’s too smart for that.”
“If he’s so smart,” I said, “how come he hires such stupid henchmen?”
“Shh!” said Fiona. There had been a sound from the hall.
The ballroom’s double doors were wide open. A shadow against the hall’s opposite wall told us that someone was approaching.
“Hide!” hissed Freak.
We threw ourselves under a long tablecloth-covered table and peeked out through a gap in the cloth.
Cockapoo loomed in the doorway. He was a tall man dressed all in black and holding a water pistol. Whatever kind of liquid shot out of the pistol probably contained something you had to be vaccinated against.
He walked slowly into the room and stopped next to our table, nearly stepping on my hand. We froze as he stuck the pistol into a shoulder holster and picked up one end of the tablecloth.
We were totally exposed. He had found us.
He didn’t see us. He was using the end of the tablecloth to polish the lens of a camera he had pulled from his jacket.
After a moment he walked to the center of the room and started taking pictures. Most likely, I thought, to help Edward Disin plan his escape from the crayon auction.
Then the doghat pulled out another device and walked the length of the ballroom, holding it over his head. When a red light on it started blinking, Cockapoo fiddled with the molding around one of the room’s decorative wall panels.
After a few seconds, the panel slid aside. Cockapoo disappeared through it.
“I dusted that entire wall,” whispered Fiona. “If I had known to look for a secret passage—”
“You wouldn’t have found it,” Freak finished for her. “Come on!”
We followed Freak as he slipped out from under the table. We scurried out of the room on all fours, only standing up after we had rounded the corner. Then we leaned cautiously around the edge of the doorway and looked back into the room.
“One of us should go find Alf,” said Freak.
“That was too close,” I said.
“I’ll say,” said Fiona.
“Tch-tch,” said the lady with the ax.
We turned. She was standing right behind us. She raised the ax and lunged.
We bolted back into the ballroom.
CHAPTER
20
State Fair Omaha
It didn’t seem fair that in addition to doghats, and mind control, and Edward Disin, we also had to deal with something as unscientific as a ghost.
The old lady chased us unscientifically into the ballroom. The French doors were open, to air the place out, and we raced toward them, skating on a floor we had waxed less than an hour earlier. I slipped, fell on my back, and looked up to see the old lady’s ax rushing down at me like a guillotine blade.
Just because the ax had passed harmlessly through us the first time didn’t mean it would happen that way again. Maybe ghostly axes passed through you sometimes and maybe sometimes they didn’t. We weren’t eager to find out. Freak grabbed me by the foot, sliding me to the right, and the ax whizzed by my ear. Fiona grabbed my hand and helped me to my feet, and the three of us dove for the open doors, only to have the old lady materialize in our path. She shrieked and swung her ax maniacally at us, barely missing our necks.
We screamed, turned, and ran the other way. I collided with a stepladder, and a bucket of soapy water came crashing down from the top, splashing across the floor and making the slippery surface even slicker. We ran in place just to keep from falling, and the lady shot in like a homicidal hockey player to mow us down.
Freak got traction and pushed Fiona and me ahead of him. We skidded across the ballroom and headed for the open panel where Cockapoo had disappeared.
We collided with him as he was coming out.
He was knocked back into the secret passage, and Freak and Fiona went sprawling on the floor in front of it. Not being quite as fast as they were, I was the one who was still standing when Cockapoo popped back out. So I was the one he aimed his water pistol at.
“Looks like somebody could use a dose of Hista Mime!” he snarled.
Hista Mime! The Silent Killer! One drop of it on my skin and I would suffocate, unable to call out, convinced I was trapped in an airless glass box!
He took a step toward me, a menacing smirk on his face, and pulled the trigger just as the old lady appeared to his right and swung her ax at his outstretched hand. He let out a yelp and turned to fire at her, the liquid from his gun’s first shot still arcing through the air at me.
I dove out of the way just in time as the last of the liquid from the pistol passed right through the ghost. It spattered on the floor and sizzled, turning the polished stone a sickly shade of gray. The ghost roared at him, swinging her ax even more insanely.
Cockapoo broke away from her and ran. He headed for the French doors with Ax Lady swinging at his back, crossed the patio, and jumped the hedge at the patio’s edge. He quickly disappeared into the woods beyond. Freak and I stumbled to the French doors and watched him go.
Ax Lady had vanished the moment she got to the doors. I spun around quickly, expecting her to show up behind us. But the ballroom was empty.
“Where’s Fiona?” asked Freak, looking around wildly.
We raced back to the secret passage, where we found Fiona standing in the center of a small room, hugging herself. She was looking at a revivarium. It was one of the coffin-like cylinders that could be used to clone a new person or to put the mind of one person into the body of another. We had seen four of them in the men’s room at Rodmore Che
mical.
“Would you say that’s my size?” Fiona asked, nodding at the thing.
“I’d say anybody could fit in there,” said Freak. “Miranda made it pretty clear she’s against Alf’s idea of reviving her by putting her mind into your head. I think Alf regrets he ever thought of it in the first place.”
“Miranda could be lying,” replied Fiona. “And Alf may still be toying with the idea. It might explain why he seems to be of two minds when it comes to telling us anything.”
“Double Six says we have to decide who we can trust,” I reminded them. “I say we trust Alf.” When Freak gave me a look, I added, “And we watch one another’s backs.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Freak said, exiting the room and pulling Fiona along with him.
I held back for a moment. The revivarium was the biggest thing in the room. Tables and benches lined the walls, littered with everything from electronic gear and chemicals to floor wax and garbage bags. I put my hand on the revivarium. The palm of my hand tingled where I touched it. I was pretty sure I could hear a faint hum. I got the impression the revivarium might be running at some low level. Doing what, I had no idea.
I shivered and followed my friends back through the panel. No sooner had Freak finished sliding the panel back into place than Alf came striding into the ballroom. I pretended to polish the panel with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Freak kicked me and I stopped.
“I don’t wish to alarm you,” said Alf, oblivious to what had just happened, “but Guernica informs me we may have an intruder. There’s been a car parked on Breeland for the past twenty minutes. I want you to stay right here while I search the place.”
“Don’t bother,” Freak told him. “It was a doghat. Maybe a cockapoo.” Freak pointed to where I had dropped the doghat’s doghat. “He went running out those doors a couple of minutes ago.”
“The three of you scared him away?” Alf sounded unconvinced.
“Actually,” I said, “it was your ghost who scared him. You do know your house is haunted?”
