The Stone Child (11 page)

“Great. Well, next time, it might be more fun for
me
if you look where you’re going,” she said.

“Are you kids okay?” The librarian, Mrs. Singh, came out from behind her desk. “Why are you standing like that?” she said, looking at Harris.

“We’re fine,” said Harris, pressing his back against the door. Just then, something slammed against the glass. Harris screamed, then quickly composed himself, bracing the door even harder. His sneakers slid a bit on the rug. He squeezed his eyes shut and said, “Just fine.”

“What the heck is that?” shouted Maggie. She pointed at the door, just beyond Harris’s feet. Through the glass, Eddie saw what Maggie was looking at. He clutched at his mouth to hold back a scream.

On the library’s top step stood a creature unlike anything he’d ever seen. It was about a foot tall. Its skin was bruise-purple. Twists of vine and clumps of dirt and dead leaves littered its greasy green hair, which hung from its head almost all the way down to the ground. Other than this strange cape of thick hair, the creature was naked. The gremlin watched
them for several seconds with its yellow catlike eyes, then smiled viciously with its wide greenish lips. It raised its little hand, as if to wave, then brought it down hard against the glass.

Wham!

The door rattled, and once again, Harris screamed.

“A rabid monkey?” said Eddie, feeling foolish even as the words came out of his mouth.

“Does this door lock?” Harris asked quietly.

Mrs. Singh flittered forward, keeping her wide eyes on the thing on the doorstep. “A monkey?” she said, her voice trembling into a weird operatic register. “That is
not
a monkey.” She reached around behind Harris and turned the latch. “Excuse me, please,” she said. Something inside the door clicked. It was now locked, so Harris stepped away from it.

“Thanks,” Harris said to Mrs. Singh. Turning around, he saw the creature staring at him. The thing opened its mouth and tried to bite the glass. Its tiny purple stump of a tongue flipped and flopped like a dissected worm, sliming the door with saliva. Then, from two small pockets on either side of its mouth, several thin green tendrils began to unfurl, their barbed tips tapping and scratching at the breath-fogged glass.

Holding her hand to her mouth, Mrs. Singh uttered a horrified squeak. “I’m calling the police!” she cried, running back toward her desk.

The creature smacked the door with its hand again. This
time, the glass cracked a bit. The thing’s mouth-tendrils squirmed to the edge of the door, as if searching for a way inside. The three kids scrambled away.

“That is
not
a monkey,” Maggie repeated.

“What are we going to do?” said Eddie, glancing toward Mrs. Singh. “We’ve both read
The Curse of the Gremlin’s Tongue
, Harris. You know the police won’t be able to help us.”

Harris shook his head in frustration. Then his face lit up. “You’re right!” he said. “The police can’t help. But you can!”

“Me?” said Eddie. “How?”

“You know how! You were the one who picked the flower. He wants to eat
you!
”

Eddie felt nauseated. “So? That’s not a solution! He
can’t
eat me!”

“I know that. We won’t let him,” said Harris, pulling Eddie away from the door. Maggie stayed behind, fascinated by the little monster who continued to watch them from the other side of the glass. “You picked the flower. Only you can send him away. Don’t you remember how?”

Eddie racked his brain. He knew the answer to this question. He’d only just reread the book a day ago. The answer hit him. “Right!” said Eddie. “I’ve got to speak to him in his own language.”

“Exactly,” said Harris.

“Hello, Wally?” said Mrs. Singh from behind her desk, holding the phone to her ear. “Come quickly. We’ve got
another problem.” She glanced at them and said, “You kids, uh … stay calm.”

Another
problem? Eddie didn’t have time to think about what she meant by that. He smiled and nodded at her. “We’re calm,” he said, then quickly turned back to Harris. “I need to put the flower under my tongue,” he whispered. “That way, he’ll understand what I say.”

Maggie spun around and shouted, “What sort of craziness are you two talking about?”

Ignoring her, Harris said, “So where is the flower?”

Eddie felt his stomach drop to the floor. The flower! Had he dropped it? “I don’t know,” he whispered.

The creature whacked the glass again. The crack grew, spidering out nearly four inches.

“Hurry!” Harris cried. “Check your pockets or something!”

Eddie shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. Save a few pieces of gritty lint, they were empty. Then he searched his coat pockets. When he reached into the one on the right, he felt something small and soft crumpled at the bottom. Cautiously, Eddie pulled out his hand. In his palm, the flower lay, crushed into a little ball. He must have shoved it in there at the bottom of the stairs.

“The flower is ruined!” said Eddie.

Outside, the creature made a shrieking sound. His eyes went wild. His nostrils flared. He banged the door again. This
time, the glass shattered. Pieces of it flew onto the rug. The thing’s mouth-tendrils skittered nervously across the threshold. Maggie screamed and dashed away from the door. She ran behind Mrs. Singh’s desk. The librarian shouted at the gremlin, who was now crawling through the smashed hole in the door, “Shoo! Get out of here!” Then she turned her attention to Eddie and Harris. “Boys! Get away from there!” She motioned for them to join her and Maggie behind the desk.

Eddie almost wanted to start laughing—he knew that hiding behind a desk wouldn’t stop the monster.

“Do it anyway,” said Harris, ignoring Mrs. Singh. “Put it under your tongue.”

“But—” Eddie began to protest.

“It can’t hurt!” cried Maggie. She sounded terrified and confused. Eddie knew she had no idea what was going on, yet she might be right.

Standing amid the shards of broken glass, the creature flashed its hideous teeth. Suddenly, it scrambled forward, reaching for Harris’s ankles.

Instantaneously, Eddie shoved the crumpled flower into his mouth and swished it under his tongue. It was dry and gritty and tasted like mold. Eddie wanted to throw up, but he managed to keep from gagging.

He meant to shout
STOP
at the creature, but when he opened his mouth, what came out was something totally
different. A deep, resonant voice, completely unlike his own, burst from his throat: “
HEST-ZO-THORTH!”
The sound of it shook the room, unsettling the dust from the highest bookshelves. Shocked, Eddie covered his mouth, afraid to open it again.

“It’s working,” said Harris, shaken a bit himself.

The creature froze several inches from the spot where Harris had been standing a few seconds earlier. It stared at Eddie, as if in surprise, waiting for further instructions. It retracted the tendrils back into its mouth with a loud slurp, like someone messily eating a plate of spaghetti. Eddie didn’t know what to do next. The flower seemed to squirm under his tongue, as if trying to escape his own mouth. If Eddie didn’t keep speaking, he knew the flower would somehow manage to spit itself out, and the creature would continue on its path toward its terrible meal. He tried to remember what Kate, the character from Nathaniel Olmstead’s book, had said to her own gremlin when it had attacked her and the baby during the thunderstorm.

I meant no harm. Please forgive me. Leave us in peace
.

Or something like that.

Eddie tried to speak, but the strange voice inside his mouth again spoke its own words instead, “
NO-KOWTH JAWETH THUN-E-ZATH! SAHWL-KA PA-TEP ZHEP-TA! OM-VHEM HEPATH!”

The little creature listened, quietly penitent, then hung its shoulders in outward defeat. It almost seemed to roll its eyes as it trudged toward Eddie, stopping a foot in front of him, holding out one hand. Eddie looked at it, unsure of what to do. The creature shook its hand at him, its palm facing up like a beggar asking for money.

“I think it wants the flower back,” whispered Harris from a few feet away.

Eddie nodded. He spit the soggy flower into his palm, then very carefully bent over and handed it to the creature at his feet. The thing snatched the flower from Eddie and grumbled something quietly under its breath. Then it turned around and angrily kicked pieces of broken glass as it slunk back toward the library’s entrance. After it crunched through the hole in the door, the gremlin spun around quickly and glared at them. Finally, it popped the flower into its own mouth, gave a brief bow, and, before any of them could comprehend what was happening, disappeared.

Silence shrouded the library—until someone behind the librarian’s desk sneezed. When Eddie turned around, he saw Maggie holding her sleeve up to her nose. Both she and Mrs. Singh stared in awe. Eddie felt as confused as they both looked, yet he still felt the need to offer some sort of explanation. From outside, the sound of a siren grew as a police car approached. “That was … uh … that was …” But he
couldn’t think of anything to say that would help them understand, so he joined them in their astonishment. “That was … weird,” he choked out. “Wasn’t it?”

When Wally showed up and saw the damage at the library’s entrance, he shook his head and began to write notes onto a small pad. In a low, accusing tone, he asked the boys what had happened. Still hanging back, Maggie stared at the two of them curiously. Harris and Eddie explained that they were about to ride their bikes around the park when the creature attacked them in front of the library. The cop listened patiently, and when Harris finished his statement, he took Mrs. Singh aside and spoke with her privately behind the circulation desk.

After Wally finished taking Maggie’s statement, the boys walked their bikes back across the park toward the bookstore. Every dead leaf that skittered across the path made Eddie’s skin crawl. The bust of Dexter August stared at him with hollow eyes.

“I’m surprised Wally didn’t take us into the station for questioning,” said Eddie.

“Mrs. Singh looked pretty freaked out,” said Harris. “He’ll probably stay with her until she closes up.”

“How nice of him,” Eddie said with a smirk.

As they crossed the southern hemisphere of Center Street, they agreed that their trip to Nathaniel Olmstead’s
place was more important now than ever. But they decided to wait until tomorrow, when they could be more prepared, when the afternoon light would provide a better sense of security … and when they weren’t jumping at every stray sound.

They stopped on the sidewalk in front of The Enigmatic Manuscript. Eddie watched Frances’s silhouette float past the lighted windows upstairs.

“Are you gonna be okay going home by yourself?” said Harris. “Do you want me to ask my mom to drive you and your bike home?”

“No. It’s a short ride. I think I’ll be fine,” said Eddie, hitching his book bag up onto his shoulders. “That is, if I don’t stop to smell the flowers this time.”

Harris laughed and shuddered as he said, “Yeah, right. The ugly purple ones anyway.”

When Eddie arrived home, he found his parents in the living room. His father was nestled on the sofa, reading
Antiques Magazine
. Eddie’s mom sat next to her husband, scribbling furiously in her notebook. She glanced up when Eddie came through the door.

“Hey, there!” said Dad. “We were wondering where you were! You had us worried.”

Eddie turned red, wondering how to respond. Detention after school … monsters at the library … followed by police questioning? There was no way his parents would understand.
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” said Eddie, sighing and dropping his book bag on the floor. “It’s been a crazy day. I promise, next time I’ll call.”

“You’d better.” Mom smiled. “Glad to see you made it home in one piece.”

Eddie nodded and said, “Me too.”

In school the next day, Eddie heard his classmates whispering to each other. He wondered how the rumor had spread so quickly that he’d held a flower under his tongue and spoken a strange language to a monster in the library. How many of his classmates had seen something similar in Gatesweed? Eddie tried to ignore the kids who looked at him funny. He had more important things to worry about than a few people who thought he was a freak.

As the clock ticked toward the final bell, Eddie felt his hands start to go numb. Part of him was excited to see Nathaniel Olmstead’s house from the inside, but another part of him was terrified. As the past few weeks had proven, Gatesweed was a weird place, and the possibilities for encountering danger were much greater than they’d been in Heaverhill. Having now seen a gremlin, the dogs, and the
creepy Watching Woman graffiti, Eddie worried more than ever about Nathaniel Olmstead’s fate … and his own.

Eddie and Harris met at the bike rack after school. In his book bag, Eddie had brought a flashlight in case the house was dark, a hammer in case they needed protection from any strange creatures, and, of course,
The Enigmatic Manuscript
.

Before they unlocked their bikes, Harris reached into his bag and showed Eddie everything he’d brought too—a flashlight, a notebook, a pen—but when Harris revealed the final item that he’d tucked into his backpack that morning, Eddie couldn’t keep from laughing. In his hands, Harris sheepishly held a small bent piece of wood that had a smiling white kangaroo painted on it. “My mother got it as a gift from a customer,” he explained.

“That’s nice, Harris, but what are we going to do with a boomerang?” said Eddie.

“Hit something,” said Harris sharply. “It’s better than a stupid hammer. At least I can throw a boomerang.”

“Right. But let’s hope you don’t need to,” said Eddie.

Twenty minutes later, they’d made it to Nathaniel Olmstead’s estate. They laid their bikes near the road, climbed through the hole in the fence, and hiked up the long driveway. The sun sat low in the sky, painting the long cirrus clouds pink.

Once the boys reached the top of the hill, they walked
around the corner to the back door of the house. It was nailed shut with a few horizontal planks of wood. “On the count of three,” said Harris, clasping the middle board in his hands.