Double the Danger and Zero Zucchini

by Betsy Uhrig

  “There sure is,” I said.

  62

  “THE GHOST IS BORED,” MARTA ANNOUNCED a few days later at lunch.

  I had just finished describing my trip to the doctor, the result of my mother seeing all the red poke marks on my arms and legs and assuming I’d been rolling around in poison ivy. The doctor was mystified, but I was caked with calamine lotion anyway.

  “What are you talking about?” said Javier to Marta. “What ghost?”

  “What do you mean, what ghost?” said Marta. “There’s only one ghost I know of. The Ghost of the Old Weintraub Place.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re calling it that now too,” said Javier. “It’s just someone’s house. There are no capital letters.”

  “How do you know I was using capital letters?”

  “I can tell.”

  “No, you can’t. Anyway, everybody calls it that.”

  Javier groaned into his olive-free Greek salad.

  “How do you know the ghost is bored?” I asked Marta.

  “Oh, I go over there a couple times a week,” she said, popping one of Javier’s rejected olives into her mouth.

  “What? You can’t do that! You don’t even have a key. Do you?” I asked. It occurred to me that I hadn’t been keeping very good track of the Weintraub key.

  “No,” she said. “But the lock on the back door doesn’t work properly, so I can get in anytime I want. You just have to push a little. Apply some pressure.”

  All I could say at this point was “Why?”

  “I think of it as ghost sitting,” said Marta. “You know, like pet sitting?”

  “Except ghosts don’t need sitting,” I said. “Ghosts are pretty independent.”

  “I figure it might like company,” said Marta. “Also, I left my Spanish homework once, to see if it would take the bait.”

  “Did it?” asked Javier, his fork paused on the way to his mouth.

  “Nope. Maybe it doesn’t know Spanish. But it left me a note yesterday.”

  Javier put his fork down. Maybe he was afraid that whatever came next might make him choke.

  Which left me to ask, “What did the note say?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “Yes, we would,” I said, even though Javier was looking more nauseated than curious.

  Marta sat back in her chair and raised her eyebrows at Javier and me. She was reveling in her moment, and we let her.

  “It said, ‘How’s the book coming along?’ ”

  63

  “THE GHOST IS WONDERING HOW THE book is coming along?” I asked.

  “Yup,” said Marta. “Maybe it finished all the books in the basement and needs something new to read.”

  “Did you answer it?” asked Javier.

  “How was I going to do that?” said Marta. “Stand there in the kitchen and yell, ‘It’s coming along well, thanks’?”

  “You could have left a note.”

  “I want to leave the whole book,” said Marta.

  “So do it,” I said.

  “My dad won’t let me print out something that long unless it’s for school,” said Marta. “Can I have your copy, Alex? I’ll leave it for a few days—like a library book, you know? And then get it back.”

  I agreed to lend Marta my copy of the book on the condition that I go with her to the Old Weintraub Place. I didn’t like the idea of her hanging around there by herself. And just to be clear—it wasn’t because I was worried about anything happening to her. I hadn’t forgotten her plan to “scare the ghost.” Could a ghost die a second time of a heart attack if a crazed girl came at it with a TV antenna? Would it become a double ghost then? A ghost squared? I didn’t want to have to worry about that.

  Plus, the more reasonable part of my brain recognized that giving a fantasy-reading cleaning person a heart attack was way worse than scaring a ghost to its second death.

  So Marta and I met at the Old Weintraub Place that afternoon while Javier was at film club.

  First she had to make the rounds of the house, upstairs and down, with her stupid antenna, “checking for vibrations.” She was sure she detected something in the upstairs linen closet when her antenna jerked, but I’m equally sure it was because the thing got caught in one of those big sticky cobwebs and she had to yank it out.

  Marta insisted on writing a note at the end of the book before we left it on the kitchen table.

  It said: “How do you like it so far? Does it need more action? Love, Marta.”

  64

  THE BOOK DID NEED MORE ACTION, it turned out. We learned that when we went back two days later.

  “You have Earth, Fire, and Water in your trials so far,” said the note in the ghost’s neat handwriting. “Which seems to leave out Air. Perhaps Gerald could use a flying potion to get over the Sliding Sands and end up being attacked in midair by Diving Doves.”

  Good idea, right? Though, side note, if I’d known we could fly over the Sliding Sands, I wouldn’t have accidentally touched dried-up cat poo in Alvin’s abandoned sandbox during filming the afternoon before. The addition of Diving Doves meant, of course, that some sensory detail about whizzing through the air being dive-bombed by birds was required.

  Marta was dying to do this stunt. She was the one who came up with the idea to raise the two swings on Irene and Emilia’s swing set as high as we could and use them as a harness. She planned to lie across the swings and sort of swim around up there while I pointed a leaf blower at her face to simulate wind resistance and the girls threw stuffed animals at her to simulate the dove attack.

  Fine with me. But on the morning of the stunt that Saturday, Marta showed up with her arm in a cast.

  “Sorry,” she said, holding it up higher than she probably should have. “The doctor says the elbow is never going to heal unless it’s immobilized. She says it’s this or she puts me in the hospital in traction. I’d like to see her try,” she added menacingly. “I can hold the leaf blower with one hand, though, if I brace it in the garden cart.”

  Which meant I was the one hoisted up on the swings. Which was way more uncomfortable than I’d imagined when it was Marta who was going to do it. Let’s just say there was chafing involved, and I ended up wishing I’d worn long pants.

  The next problem came when Javier emerged from the house with his sisters and a laundry basket full of their stuffed animals.

  “They’re good with throwing things at you,” he said to me, “but they’re worried about the animals getting dirty. So Emilia’s going to throw them, and Irene’s going to catch them as they rebound off you.”

  This went about as well as you would expect. Emilia failed to hit me with even one bunny, and Irene failed to catch any of the first half dozen or so that Emilia threw. Then Fluffy or whoever got some dirt on his tail, and all heck broke loose.

  “Keep throwing,” Javier yelled at his sisters, panning the camera around the swing set while I dangled there, hair blowing in the smelly wind from the leaf blower and legs turning numb. I’d already given up on the swimming motions with my arms—it was too tiring. They were just dangling.

  But the girls didn’t want to sacrifice any more of their precious animals, so they started grabbing handfuls of damp leaves from the garden bed and chucking those at me instead. Almost all of their clumps flew apart in midair and missed me, except the one that had a rock inside it—that one hit me square on the shoulder. Then Irene threw an old tennis ball that a dog had no doubt drooled all over, and that hit me in the neck.

  Meanwhile, the loose leaves were getting sprayed in my face by the blower, and a fleck of leaf wound up in my eye.

  I was the one who yelled “cut” this time.

  65

  “WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING?” ALVIN ASKED as he came up silently behind me that evening. “With your remaining eye, I mean.”

  I’d spent the afternoon in the emergency room, having my eye examined. The leaf speck had gotten embedded and had to be removed with special eyeball tweezers. It was
gross, and I was glad I couldn’t see it while it was happening.

  The doctor with the tweezers distracted me by asking about Alvin. “I haven’t seen him in here for a while,” he said. “Not since the time he made his own contact lenses.”

  “He still says they made him see better.”

  “They were made of plastic wrap, so I don’t know how that would be possible.”

  What with the eye patch and the scabby remains of the spear pokes, I might as well have been wearing a T-shirt that said I’M WEAKENED: PLEASE BEAT ME UP. I dreaded going to school on Monday.

  I was watching Javier’s footage of the day’s flying simulation on my laptop, and it was too late to slam it shut by the time Alvin appeared behind me.

  After all that effort on the swings, I still had no idea what it felt like to fly—only how it felt to hang uncomfortably. We ended up using some of that sensory detail toward the end of the book, when Gerald breaks into the warlock’s tower by dangling on a rope from a hole in the roof. Caroline really appreciated the stuff about the chafing.

  “Is that you?” said Alvin, hovering over my shoulder and breathing onto my neck. “What are you doing on those swings? Is that how you hurt your eye? You told Mom you were raking leaves.”

  I did not need Alvin telling Mom what had really happened to my eye. That would lead to a lot of questions about my activities and my judgment that I didn’t want to be bothered with right now.

  I decided to appeal to the scientist in Alvin.

  “It was kind of an experiment,” I said. “To see how it feels to fly.”

  Alvin nodded. “A third harness would have been more effective,” he said. “It would have equalized your weight. Also, not having Javier’s sisters throwing dirt balls at you would have helped.”

  “I’ll remember that next time,” I said.

  “What was the experiment for?” Alvin asked.

  “Just, um, curiosity,” I tried.

  Alvin treated me to his wide-eyed stare of disbelief. Which is incredibly effective, especially from behind the little glasses. He doesn’t give up—doesn’t even blink—until he gets the truth. My own eyes (patched and unpatched) started to water almost immediately, and I broke.

  “Okay,” I said, “but you can’t tell Mom or Dad. Or Caroline or Lulu. Or anyone, really.”

  Alvin turned off the high beams and waited for the truth to come out.

  66

  WHEN I SENT THE DIVING DOVES idea to Caroline, explaining that she needed Air to balance out Earth, Water, and Fire, she sent me an e-mail full of exclamation points about what a genius I was.

  This was worrying, because at some point she was bound to find out that I was not a genius and had no idea why air—I mean, Air—was the balance to the other three elements. (I looked it up recently, and the articles got weird and woo-woo pretty fast, so I gave up. Which is why I’m not even going to try to explain it here.)

  Caroline did have an objection, though. She said doves were “symbols of peace” and she didn’t want them to attack Gerald. Which is why you don’t remember a trial involving doves in Gerald in the Warlock’s Weir. She changed the Diving Doves to Pelting Pigeons, which maybe you do remember. She rejected my suggested tweak, which was Pooping Pigeons. But come to think of it, I’m glad I never had to try out being splattered with bird poop while dangling from a swing set.

  So the book was going well, and my stab wounds and chafing and eye injury cleared up, and summer was visible on the horizon, and things were looking good. Except for one small detail. And its name was Alvin.

  Now that he’d gotten a full confession out of me about my stunts for Caroline’s book, he wanted to be involved. He kept asking me what the next stunt was and how he could “help.”

  I was forced to sneak out of the house through the basement to film Gerald’s fight with the Mime of the Mines, the last of the official trials. It ended up being pretty silly. Mostly Marta combining her version of mime stuff with her version of karate kicks. One of which connected dangerously close to my groin area. Needless to say, that particular detail never made it to Caroline. Gerald had been through enough by then.

  The result was yet another video gem that Javier could blackmail me with for the rest of our lives if he chose. I’d just have to hope he got rich and I didn’t.

  With that, the trials were done. Gerald located the vortex, and with the help of Snarko and the Daredevil, he began making plans to enter the weir and rescue Grampa.

  There was only one major obstacle left before the rescue, an obvious one if you are not a reluctant reader and are familiar with fantasy books. Even I, having read one fantasy and listened to three more, knew enough to realize what was next.

  A battle. A big, final battle.

  I went into training, lifting my mom’s lighter hand weights and even doing a push-up every now and then to prepare myself. But when the latest version of the book arrived in my in-box, I was completely unprepared.

  The previous chapter title had been “Battle Beckons,” and it had ended with the ominous sentence “Even as the friends spoke, the goblin legions were massing on the Pathless Plains.” Good stuff. But the next chapter, the new one, which would have been “The Battle of the Pathless Plains” in a world that made sense, was instead entitled “The Peace of the Pathless Plains.”

  What? Now was no time for peace to break out! Where was the battle?

  67

  CAROLINE HAD WIMPED OUT. INSTEAD OF an epic battle, she had the goblin army get lost in a Formless Fog, stumble through the Static Swamp, and end up on the Pathless Plains a sad remnant of its former glory. It was pathetic. The goblins were so demoralized, they surrendered to Gerald immediately and everyone went their separate ways. They might as well have been hugging it out and singing campfire songs by the time the chapter was over.

  The goblin army wasn’t nearly as demoralized as I was, though. I had bulked up for nothing.

  Javier and Marta couldn’t believe it when I sent my outraged text. Both of them had been looking forward to this as much as I had.

  She can’t just skip a battle, Marta said.

  She owes us! Javier added.

  She owes the reading public too, I put in, although I didn’t care about the reading public. They’d get over it. I wouldn’t.

  The new chapter was as boring as the original Gerald Visits Grampa. Even if what came after it was a thrill a minute, the sheer lead weight of “The Peace of the Pathless Plains” was going to pull the rest of the book under. The reading public would be fast asleep before they made it to the dramatic rescue. It was only my hope for at least a fistfight or two that had gotten me through it.

  This isn’t happening, Marta texted.

  Not on our watch, said Javier.

  We know what we have to do! Marta went on.

  This was all sounding so brave and exciting, I felt like the three of us were marching into battle ourselves. I was energized, ready to act, ready to make this right.

  I’ll send her an e-mail and tell her she HAS to have a battle! I texted triumphantly.

  Six different dud emojis came blasting back at me—and those were from Javier.

  Marta went with a simple face-palm.

  We film the battle anyway, Javier texted. And we show her how awesome it is. And then she has to put it in.

  THAT’S HOW IT’S DONE! Marta text-shouted.

  68

  OUR PLAN WAS TO IGNORE THE peace chapter and work with the information Caroline had provided before her epic cop-out.

  It became clear right away that the Battle of the Pathless Plains wasn’t something we were going to be able to stage in Javier’s yard, with Irene and Emilia standing in for the goblin army, though they were hostile enough. It wasn’t some small band of goblins we were dealing with—there were legions of goblins. That’s what Caroline had written in the “Battle Beckons” chapter.

  I looked up “legions” in the dictionary, and it meant a gigantic number. Plus, the goblins had smoke-snorting li
zard things that they rode and other equally strange creatures to back them up. And they were “massing,” which wasn’t a word you would use to describe Mom’s book club gathering in the living room. Massing was serious stuff that only legions could do.

  Also, by this time Gerald had gathered an army of his own, though there weren’t legions of imps, nightwalkers, and swamp dwellers—maybe a couple hundred (plus the one Daredevil). He had to be outnumbered, or what was heroic about the final battle?

  “There’s no way we can film a live-action epic battle,” said Javier at lunch. “Even if we got the whole school to help, we don’t have enough people.”

  What he didn’t have to add was that the whole school would not help.

  “Can’t you CGI the battle scenes?” asked Marta.

  “We’re not making a Hollywood blockbuster here,” Javier reminded her. “We’re trying to see what the battle would really be like.”

  “I’m guessing it would be bad,” said Marta. “Wouldn’t it?” She looked at Javier and me in case one of us was going to disagree.

  Which we didn’t, because she was right. It would be bad. The whole point of battles is hurting lots of people, which meant that I was unlikely to get through even a very scaled-down version of the Battle of the Pathless Plains without lasting injuries, despite my intensive training.

  “So if we can’t film it with real people,” said Javier, “we need to try something else. But first we need to figure out how the battle happens. Do either of you know anything about battles?”

  He knew we didn’t.

  “It’s obvious what we have to do,” said Marta after we’d sat there for a while, eating our turkey wraps and wishing as usual that there were chips instead of melon chunks to go with them. “We need to ask the ghostwriter.”

  “How would the ghostwriter know anything about battles?” I asked Marta. I turned to Javier for backup. “Right? The ghostwriter is a reader, not a warrior.”