Whales on Stilts! (6 page)

But at night there's no one here. Picture that—people not being here. I know that's hard, because the minute I say “People,” you start to picture them. You see all their striped bathing suits and their sunglasses, and they're waving at you. Well, you have to get rid of them. Remove them. Just leave a blank space where they were standing or sitting. The motorboat you're picturing fades away, the burr of its engine softly
drifting off over the waves until it's gone. The water stills. The tide is slowly going out.

The smell of cocoa butter is replaced by the stench of night weeds.

The cooler full of brightly colored colas grows transparent.... In its place the cans of cola are left, crushed and empty, on the beach in the blue of the night.

There are no bare feet anymore. Just footprints in the mud. No bathing suits. Nothing but the tide whispering in the salt marsh grasses.

The trees hang over the dirt road, swaying in the wind.

Far out at sea, a foghorn sounds.

It is not a foggy night, but the lighthouse keeper promised her grandson he could pull the horn once if he was good at dinner.

Everything is motionless, except the gentle shorthand of the lapping wavelets.

Then suddenly the water boils. Startled seagulls flap out of the marsh, squawking. Something is rising through the depths.

You know what it is.

Inch by inch it rises out of the sea. It has barnacles over its eyebrows. It is a great dark lumbering shape. It moves clumsily toward shore. It heaves itself up, towering. And it takes its first steps onto the land, exposed, for the first time, to the glare of moonlight.

An old fisherman is asleep against a stump. He spent the evening chasing saltwater eels. He hears a tremendous
crunch—
and awakens to see something he can't even describe striding over his beached dinghy, leaving it in ruins. He starts running. He vows never to drink diet cola again.

He runs, puffing, along the shore, away from the monster.

The monster stomps up the path, toward civilization.

Toward Horror Hollow. And Katie Mulligan.

But wait.

Larry's story is a sad one. I cannot really go on to the terrifying scene that is about to occur—the breathtaking confrontation—until I stop to shed a tear for the little boy that Larry used to be.

Come over to his desk. Not his desk at work but his desk at home, crammed full of his bills, a few photos of friends who betrayed him, his checkbook, receipts, order forms, and sheets of address labels he got for free, which are now all stuck to themselves because of the water on his hands.

Go to that desk and slide out the bottom
drawer. There you will find a piece of paper folded up into thirds.

Unfold it.

It is empty except for one sentence—written in the middle of the blank page in a childish hand in blue crayon. A sentence full of the sadness of a child. It reads:

MY MOTHER IS A FISH.

At some point, the
word fish
was crossed out in pen; and over it was written, in a slightly older hand,

large aquatic mammal.

It is the correction that really breaks the heart.

You should always know your enemy.

“How was your day at work, Dad?” Lily asked, almost cowering at what the answer might be. She had just gotten home from the Aero-Bistro.

“Oh, pretty good. Pee-ritty good,” said her dad, yawning. He kept cutting chives. He was making dinner.

“Anything interesting happen?”

“No. Nope. Well, some evil photocopier repairmen invaded and tried to steal the company mule, but other than that, nope.”

They could faintly hear Lily's mom downstairs, singing along to pop songs while working out on the Thigh-er-sizer. She was singing a teen ballad out of breath. “‘Bad, stupid love! I try to
rise above!/Bad, stupid you! It's time that we're through!'” She sang it very cheerfully, not paying much attention to the words.

“Honey,” said Lily's father, “could you turn on a noisy appliance of some kind?” He flicked on the coffee grinder himself. “There. That's better.”

Lily got out plates for the dinner table and opened the silverware drawer. She asked, “Dad, have you ever seen Larry's face?”

“No. Not his face,
per se.
Not
seen,
I mean,
seen
like with the eyes. He's a funny kind of guy, Larry.”

“If I asked you, would you say that it's possible or impossible that.. . um ... Larry is a half-human, half-whale mutant who eats plankton through his baleen-filled mouth?”

Her dad thought about it for a few moments. He turned up the burner on the stove and threw chives into a frying pan. Finally he said, “Possible, I guess. That would explain the weird sighting a few months ago.”

Lily's eyes popped wide open. “What ‘weird sighting'?”

“One sec. Let me turn off the coffee grinder.” He shut it off. Immediately the kitchen was filled with a creepy, decaffeinated silence. Lily's father narrowed his eyes and told his tale.

“Well, a few months back, my coworker Ray was working late at night. He had a report to finish, so he ordered Chinese takeout and stayed at the office. As you can imagine, that office is pretty spooky when no one else is around. It's just a big empty brick building then, filled with all kinds of empty rooms and corridors where someone could hide. I don't like to think about it.

“So Ray's sitting there, and he hears this dragging sound out in the hall. It sounds like someone dragging something. He thinks,
That's funny... What would someone be dragging at this hour? Usually everything that needs to be dragged gets dragged before five forty-five.
So he goes to the door and looks out.

“Nothing in the hallway. And now the footsteps and the dragging are farther away.

“So he starts creeping down the hallway.

“He comes to one of the laboratories. They're real spooky at night, because they're filled with things someone could hide behind. So someone could be in the same room as you, easy, without you even knowing. They could just be crouching there, watching you. So when he gets to the lab, Ray calls out, ‘Hello?' There's no answer. He goes, ‘Hello?' again.

“This time a door on the other side of the room slams.

“He runs over there and through the door. And there he sees this awful... this awful half-human, half-whale
thing
dragging its tail behind it, crouched over, fighting for breath, wearing swimming trunks. And it's stumbling toward this salt bath that Larry had installed in the plant.

“Ray is absolutely terrified. He doesn't even know what to do, so he panics and asks it to
turn out the lights when it's done, and then he turns and runs back to his office. He was so frightened, he only stayed there in his office another two hours, finishing the report and copying and collating it and putting the copies into matching folders before he left in sheer terror. He hightailed it out of there like a bat out of heck.”

“That must have been Larry!” said Lily. “He must have stayed away too long from the salt water and was trying to get back to it to, you know, revive himself!”

“I don't know what you have against Larry. If he wants to be a half-human, half-whale mutant, I don't think that's anybody's business but his own.”

“But, Dad! He wants to take over the world!”

“We've already discussed this, young lady.”

“He's going to lead an invasion!”

“Honey. Honey slug. Listen. I've told you before. All our company makes is stilts for
whales, and a few accessories that go with them. There is absolutely nothing strange about it. And you'll see. Three days from now is our product launch.”

Lily felt her face go pale. “What does that mean?” she asked.

“Well, we're done with the product, the whale stilts, so in three days Larry is going to release the product. That's probably what he meant when he said, ‘Take over the world.' He meant that we're going to dominate the whale-stilt world, the whole market for whale stilts. Starting in three days.”

“Dad! That must be when he's going to unleash his whole whale army! On all of us!”

“His ‘whale army'? Now that sounds a little silly, Lily, doesn't it? Just because whales will be able to walk on stilts doesn't mean that they're going to be up in arms—if you'll, heh, pardon the expression.”

“Dad!”

“Lily, that's a
whale
of a story! Get it?”

“I've got to go to Katie's house after dinner. She and I have to talk.”

“Okay,” said Lily's father. “Just make sure you finish your homework.”

Homework!
thought Lily. How could she concentrate on homework when in three days an army of tall bloodthirsty land-borne whales could be stalking the countryside, looking for revenge?

Practically speaking, that would probably mean Lily's math test would be canceled, anyway.

Meanwhile, over in Horror Hollow, Katie's mom peeked in her room and said, “Your dad and I are going out for the evening. Will you be okay?”

“I don't know,” said Katie. “I guess so.”

“What's wrong, honey?”

Katie shrugged. “I think I'm just jumpy.”

Her mother nodded sympathetically. “I know. Because of that whole thing last week with the liver-eating scarecrow.”

“Yeah, and the psychokiller. And the singing bats. And the serpents. And the Civil War soldiers. And my evil double from the other dimension.”

Her mom came in and tousled her hair. “It all kind of wears you down after a while, doesn't it, honey?” she said. “But your dad and I have dinner plans with the Wilsons. We have a lot to talk over with them. They're on a committee to repair the sewage drains after the mind-worms.”

“You couldn't eat here?”

“No, I'm afraid that we already made reservations. But I made you some Rice Krispies Treats, and there's garlic on the door, and you have your crucifix and ankh, right?”

“Yeah,” sighed Katie.

“Alrighty,” said her mother. She kissed Katie on the forehead. “Be good. Remember: in bed by ten, with the lights out and the room completely dark except for a ghostly sliver of moon creeping across the floor toward your bed.”

After her parents left, Katie worked for a while on her homework. She had the math test coming up, and it felt good to go over some of
the problems she hadn't got before. This time she felt like she really understood them.

So often when disaster is about to strike, we don't suspect a thing.

When Katie was done with her homework, she went down to watch a little TV. She sat in the living room on the sofa. She was watching some stupid sitcom. Whenever there were commercials, she'd flip to something else. Finally she gave up on watching the sitcom completely and just left the TV on the Spanish channel. When the commercials came on, she dug between the sofa cushions to see what change she could find.

She wasn't sure what first worried her about the windows.

She looked up. The windows were completely dark. There was no sign of motion.