The Unseen World of Poppy Malone: A Gaggle of Goblins

by Suzanne Harper

  Before Poppy could answer, he pulled it open, revealing a dark space.

  “It must be some kind of ventilation system,” Poppy said, trying to sound calm even though her heart had started beating faster.

  Will wasn’t listening. He knelt down so that his face was next to the open door. “Helloooo,” he called out, his voice echoing hollowly.

  There was a sudden loud clatter from the kitchen as if someone had dropped a pan.

  Will turned his head and winked at Poppy. “Listen to this,” he whispered. He turned back to the opening and made a long, loud groaning noise.

  “Emerson!” They could hear their mother’s voice in the kitchen, high-pitched with excitement. “Did you hear that? We may be having another manifestation!”

  Will grinned. “What do you think I should say next? Maybe something like, ‘Beware’?” He deepened his voice and stretched the word out—“Beeeewaaare!”—so that he sounded like a ghostly special effect in a horror movie. “Or how about ‘Get ooouuut!’?”

  Poppy grabbed Will’s shoulder and pulled him away from the wall. “Talk about getting them all worked up! If you keep making those kinds of noises, we’ll be stuck in this house all summer, trying to make recordings of electronic voice phenomena and staring at electromagnetic field detectors!”

  His smile vanished. “Oh.”

  There seemed to be a sudden burst of activity downstairs. “Where’s the digital recorder?” Mr. Malone called out. “Lucille, could you catch any words?”

  “I’d better go down and tell them it was just me.” Will sighed. “I feel terrible. It’s like telling a kid there’s no tooth fairy. . . .”

  Poppy waited until she was sure that her brother had made it to the bottom of the stairs. Then she cut a small hole in the side of one of the moving boxes, set the camera trap inside, and turned the box so that the camera lens pointed at the tiny door in the wall.

  On her way downstairs, she turned back to examine her work. She nodded in satisfaction. No one, not even a goblin, would see anything except a plain, ordinary, boring cardboard box.

  ***

  The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of box unpacking and furniture arranging, thanks to Mrs. Malone’s tiresome insistence that they get the house in order before moving on to more interesting pursuits, such as going swimming at the Barton Springs Pool (Will’s suggestion), exploring the neighborhood (Franny’s), or heading to the library to research likely candidates for the Dark Presence (Mr. Malone’s).

  Despite the definite whiff of mutiny in the air, Mrs. Malone prevailed simply by fixing them all with a stern gaze and saying, “If we don’t do this now, we’ll be living out of boxes until Christmas. And I am not going to let everyone leave me to do all the unpacking . . . again.”

  “When have we ever done that?” Mr. Malone protested feebly.

  Mrs. Malone snorted and pointed to a large box marked FILES. “Those are all yours, Emerson,” she said. “Will can help you carry them to your study.”

  Will gave the box—which was almost the size of a refrigerator—a martyred look. “Why didn’t the movers put it Dad’s study in the first place?” he asked. “That thing probably weighs two thousand pounds.”

  “Don’t exaggerate, Will; it’s just a box of papers. And those movers clearly had no idea where anything should go.” She looked with displeasure at the box full of pots and pans left in the middle of the living room floor, the jewelry box placed in the empty fireplace, and the toaster perched on top of the china cabinet. “Franny, Poppy, I want you two to pick up anything that’s not in the right place and put it someplace where it belongs. Once we’ve got the smaller things sorted out, we can start figuring out where to put the couch and coffee table—”

  “Really, I think that I’ll be more useful at the library, getting started on our research—” Mr. Malone began. He stopped short at the sight of Rolly marching toward the front door carrying a small plastic bucket and spade.

  “Hold on there,” he said, so firmly that even Rolly’s purposeful step faltered. “Where are you going and what’s in that bucket?”

  “Nothing,” said Rolly. Natural prudence prevented him from adding, “. . . yet.” Instead, he held out the empty bucket for his father’s inspection.

  “You’re not going to dig for worms, are you?” asked Mr. Malone.

  “No,” Rolly said with perfect truth, since he’d given up on worms and planned to search for maggots instead.

  “I don’t think we should put restrictions on his curiosity, dear—”

  “Oh, of course not!” Mr. Malone said, his voice rising. “Far be it from me to dampen his enthusiasm for non-arthropod invertebrates! When I think of how close I came to getting a brilliant teaching job and how That Boy ruined it all—”

  “Any child might wonder whether worms can swim,” said Mrs. Malone said. “Any bright, imaginative, curious child with an innate understanding of the scientific method, that is.”

  “Swim, yes,” Mr. Malone snapped. “But swim in tomato soup? Soup that is about to be served at a dinner party for the dean of a prestigious university who I am trying to impress so that I can get a job and keep my family out of the poorhouse?” His voice had increased in volume until he was almost shouting. The Incident of the Wormy Soup had happened a year ago, but Mr. Malone’s memory had clearly not dimmed.

  “Most fathers would be delighted by the prospect of educating a child like Rolly,” said Mrs. Malone. “I keep saying that we should have him tested; he’s probably a genius. I wouldn’t be surprised if he grew up to be a Nobel Prize winner someday—”

  “Or a criminal mastermind,” Mr. Malone muttered darkly.

  “Emerson!” Mrs. Malone nodded meaningfully at Rolly. “Please. You know how sensitive he is.”

  “Sensitive! Ha!” said Mr. Malone. “That Boy is impervious to public opinion.”

  Mrs. Malone peered over her glasses, frowning, and said, “Which only proves my point! That is a common characteristic of geniuses. . . .”

  This argument could have continued for some time had Rolly not decided to make a break for the great outdoors.

  It took all three of his siblings to thwart his escape: Will to grab Rolly as he darted toward the door, Franny to help hold him down, and Poppy to coax him to stay inside.

  “We don’t have time to watch over you,” she said to him, neatly moving her foot aside before he could bite her ankle. “We have to work right now, but I promise we’ll play with you later.”

  “You always say that.” Rolly panted, unsuccessfully trying to break free from Will, who had decided to put his time to good use by practicing a wrestling hold. “And you never do.”

  “Let him go, Will, please,” said Mrs. Malone. “This isn’t a gym. Rolly, come over here and sit on the couch and I’ll get you a nice book to look at. . . .”

  After a short, spirited argument, Rolly was finally persuaded to sit on the couch with volume P–R of the encyclopedia set that Mrs. Malone had been given as a child. He quickly became absorbed in the illustrations and diagrams that accompanied an article on pyrotechnics.

  The rest of the Malones, sighing and grumbling, got to work.

  Several hours later, the furniture had finally been placed, the rugs unrolled, the curtains hung, the clothes unpacked. The only thing left was to figure out where to put all the interesting objects that had been collected by the Malones during their travels.

  Some had been picked up by Mr. and Mrs. Malone during the early days of their marriage, and they were quite sentimental about them.

  The cauldron, alleged to be an actual piece of evidence seized in the Salem witch trials, was set in its usual place of pride beside the fireplace.

  The jars of mummy powder had been given to Mr. and Mrs. Malone on their wedding trip to Egypt by a professor who had been researching local rumors that mummies had a habit of leaving their pyramids and walking about at night. Mrs. Malone decided to line them on a windowsill in the kitchen, reasoning that the ja
rs—which ranged from blue to turquoise to sea-green violet—would look very pretty in the morning light.

  The twisted and burned piece of metal, covered with strange, undecipherable writing, ended up on the fireplace mantel. Will claimed to have found this on a camping trip near Roswell, New Mexico, the town where a UFO was supposed to have crashed in 1947. This had always seemed unlikely, given that the camping trip had taken place more than fifty years later, but Will was adamant that the metal object—whatever it was—would serve as a useful conversation piece.

  The nineteenth-century photos of séances—filled with people wearing stiff, old-fashioned clothes and ghosts wearing nothing but filmy ectoplasm—were hung in the front hall. Franny carefully lined up her collection of voodoo dolls on one of the bookshelves (she had long ago stopped playing with dolls, of course, but could never quite summon up the nerve to give these away).

  The witch’s broomstick from Cornwall was tucked in a corner; the haunted Victrola was placed beside the front window; the ESP cards, previously owned by famed parapsychologist Dr. F.H.W. Richardson were reverentially displayed on a side table.

  “There,” Mrs. Malone said with a sigh of satisfaction. “It’s finally beginning to feel like home.”

  Suddenly, there was a roar from the direction of Mr. Malone’s study. “Rolly!” he yelled. The door was flung open and Mr. Malone emerged, his face scarlet. “Where is that blasted boy?”

  “Okay, now it feels like home,” Will murmured from where he was reclining on the rug. (He had rolled it out, as directed, in front of the fireplace. Minutes later, when his mother had suggested that he might want to help her carry a dresser up a flight of stairs, he had suddenly felt faint and had spent ten minutes stretched out on the floor, talking vaguely about visions of bridges and tall buildings.)

  “What in the world are you going on about, Emerson?” asked Mrs. Malone.

  “That Boy!” He shook a small wooden box pointedly in the air. “He’s been pilfering my coins again! Is it too much to expect that a man’s property remain safe and secure from theft by his own family?”

  The rest of the family was torn between sympathy for this point of view (they had all suffered their own losses, thanks to Rolly’s refusal to accept the idea of private ownership of property) and a strong feeling that, in this case, Mr. Malone was largely at fault.

  “You shouldn’t have told Rolly they were wishing coins,” Poppy pointed out.

  “I said they were found on the site of an ancient well, commonly believed to grant wishes,” Mr. Malone corrected her. “Which is perfectly true—”

  “Except you also said there was documented evidence that the wishes came true,” said Mrs. Malone. “Who could blame a poor, sweet, innocent little boy—”

  “Hello?” Will sat up, blinking owlishly. “I thought we were talking about Rolly?”

  “Who could blame him for thinking they were actually magic?” Mrs. Malone finished, ignoring him.

  “Remember when we stopped for gas in Oklahoma?” Poppy asked. “Remember when Dad had to pay twenty dollars to get someone to open up the soda machine coin box?”

  “I don’t know why Rolly didn’t simply ask me for the money,” Mr. Malone said, momentarily diverted. “It’s not as if I’m completely destitute. It’s not as if I couldn’t spare a few quarters.”

  “Rolly said he was testing the coins,” Will reminded his father. “He wished that he’d get five sodas for the price of one—”

  “And the man did give him a free can,” Franny said. “So in a way, his wish did come true.”

  “There, you see!” said Mrs. Malone. “If you would simply try to think the way Rolly does—”

  “Now there’s a recipe for madness,” Mr. Malone muttered. “We don’t have time to plumb the inner workings of his mind; we just need to find him.”

  “It’s too hot,” Franny complained, collapsing onto the windowseat. “And I’m exhausted.” She flung her head back dramatically, holding one weary hand to her brow.

  Will fell back onto the rug and closed his eyes. “I think I’m getting a transmittal,” he murmured. “It’s big . . . metallic . . . kind of pointy at one end. . . .”

  Mr. Malone gave them all a jaded look. “Those coins are going to fund your college educations,” he said. “Now fan out before Rolly spends them on a plane ticket to Rio.”

  So they fanned out, calling Rolly’s name.

  Poppy didn’t waste her breath shouting. She knew that the more frantic they sounded, the more likely it was that Rolly would stay hidden.

  Instead, she checked the kind of hiding places he usually liked: under the porch, inside the laundry hamper, behind an overgrown bush. . . .

  That was where she spotted a dull glint in the dirt. She peered closer and saw the stern profile of a Roman emperor. She picked up the coin and scanned the ground nearby. A few feet away, another coin lay half hidden in the grass. After that, it was easy to pick up Rolly’s trail, which led straight across the yard to the shed.

  As Poppy got closer, she could hear Rolly’s voice. It sounded as if he was chatting with someone.

  This was puzzling. Rolly, as Poppy well knew, didn’t particularly enjoy two-way dialogue. He preferred to make short, simple statements that did not encourage any response, argument, or further conversation.

  Maybe he’s found a friend already, she thought dubiously. Rolly didn’t really make friends, either (and when he had been forced to go on playdates, he was usually sent home early with a frosty suggestion that he would be invited back only after he’d been taught not to empty a dozen Jell-O packets into a swimming pool or rappel up the living room curtains).

  Poppy opened the shed door and found Rolly sitting next to a rusty lawn mower, spinning one of Mr. Malone’s wishing coins on the ground. He looked up at her, blinking in the shaft of sunlight that came through the open door.

  He was alone.

  “Rolly, you’ve got to quit taking Dad’s coins,” said Poppy. “How would you feel if someone took your money?”

  “I don’t have any,” he said. “That’s why I took these.”

  “Yes, I know, but that’s not the point. . . .” Faced with Rolly’s beady stare, Poppy’s voice faltered. “Oh, never mind. Come on, let’s go back to the house.”

  As she helped him to his feet, another coin fell to the ground. Poppy quickly picked it up before Rolly could and added, “If you wouldn’t fill your pockets with rocks and twigs and stolen money, you wouldn’t get so many holes in them, you know.”

  She pushed her bangs off her forehead. “So who were you talking to?”

  “When?” Rolly asked blankly.

  “Just now. I heard you talking when I was standing outside the shed.”

  A wary expression flitted across his face. “No, you didn’t.”

  “Rolly, I heard you with my own ears,” said Poppy. “Who was in here with you?”

  His expression became, if possible, even more mulish. “No one.”

  “Rolly . . .” She narrowed her eyes and stared at him.

  He stared right back.

  After a very long minute, she gave up. No one in the family had ever won a staring contest with Rolly.

  “Okay, fine.” She sighed, leading him out of the shed. “Let’s go.”

  But as Poppy and Rolly walked back to the house, she could have sworn she heard a faint snicker coming from the tangle of leaves and twigs behind the shed.

  Chapter Six

  “All right, now, let’s get organized,” Mr. Malone said briskly. “Poppy and Franny, I want you to set up the thermal-imaging cameras—let’s cover as much of the house as we can until we find out where the noise is coming from. Will, go get the electromagnetic field detectors. We’ll set those up on the first and second floors. And we need to set up our digital recorders, too, I think. The Dark Presence hasn’t spoken yet, but it’s early days yet, early days. . . .”

  Mr. Malone had spent most of the last three days at the library. Every evening, he
would return home brimming with enthusiasm about what he had discovered in the archives. As it turned out, a half-dozen people had died in their house over the years. Even better, three of them had died mysterious, tragic, sensational deaths—just the kind that were the most likely to produce a disgruntled spirit. Now he was busily trying to build excitement for his latest investigation among his family, most of whom were dubious.

  “I’m putting my money on Lucinda Greythorn,” said Mr. Malone as he positioned a tripod in the center of the living room. “She had the the right profile. Obsessive, overly emotional, clingy. Those kind always linger.”

  “Which one was Lucinda again?” Will asked, yawning. He was stretched out on a couch by the front window. “The tipsy old lady who fell down the back stairs?”

  “She wasn’t tipsy, Will; she simply tripped over her cat,” said Mrs. Malone. “No, Lucinda was only twenty when she died, poor thing.”

  “So tragic.” Franny sighed as she dreamily attached a camera to a tripod. “Lucinda got engaged to the love of her life just before he enlisted to fight in the Civil War. When they said good-bye, she promised she would always wait for him. And then”—she clasped her hands under her chin and rolled her eyes to the ceiling—“he never returned! Poor Lucinda refused all food and drink until she finally died . . . of a broken heart.”

  “Or of starvation,” said Poppy.

  “Poppy!”

  “You have to admit that’s a more likely cause of death,” Poppy said. “If you don’t fix that camera, it’s going to fall off the tripod again.”

  “Why do you have to be so practical all the time?” Franny tossed her head; a fine, disdainful gesture that was ruined when she had to lunge forward to catch the camera. “I think Lucinda is one of the most romantic people I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Well, maybe,” said Mrs. Malone. “But dying for love does seem to show a certain lack of . . . spirit, don’t you think? One needs ambition and drive to be a Dark Presence. Poor Lucinda sounds as if she was rather limp.”