by Iva Viddal
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Iva Viddal
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
First paperback edition May 2021
First Kindle edition June 2021
Cover design by Iva Viddal
“I've got the key to my castle in the air,
but whether I can unlock the door
remains to be seen.”
Louisa May Alcott
To my children, who possess the key
and the ability
Table of Contents
Prologue
1. Harmony Hill
2. The Gap in the Fence
3. Wishers Warsh
4. Shadows and Lights
5. Doctors Leech & Mapple, M.D.Min.
6. Gold and Good Fortune
7. The Climber
8. The Meeting
9. A Fly in a Trap
10. A Bad Apple and a Good Worm
11. The Midnight Masqueraders
12. Freak Show
13. The Oracle
14. The Menagerie
15. Family Traditions
16. The Artists
17. The First Chase
18. Just a Normal Night In
19. The 767th Annual Gala of the Ghouls
20. Of Monsters and Men
21. The Second Chase
22. Spilled Stew
23. A Business Venture
24. The Wardrobe
25. Ichora’s Love Note
26. Trouble with a Capital Tea
27. No Way Out
28. The Final Chase
29. Angels and Demons
30. The Girl with a Purpose
31. New Neighbors
Acknowledgments
About the Author
In the small hours of the night,
Winged dreams take flight
That in the light of day
Prefer to hide away.
To those who hear their call:
Courage, one and all.
Prologue
The sun slips into shadow, and the gargoyle opens its eyes. Slowly, its head swivels, and the crunch of granite trickles across the rooftop.
Stone nostrils sniff at the air. Something smells . . . wrong.
Something is coming.
The gargoyle sniffs again. The furry scent of rotting leaves is in the air, just as it should be. And there are the aromas of early evening: the sour tang of the Midwife’s simmering brew, the sun’s last rays on the sluggish mist, the fragrant moonflowers that await the darkness.
But there is also something new in the air, something . . . fresh.
There is a movement on the forest path. A young girl bounces into view, skipping on two legs. Two arms swing at her sides.
She is coming from the wrong direction.
Something is not right.
Something is missing.
The Doctors will not be pleased.
1
Harmony Hill
In all his twenty-seven years as the Official Front Lawn Inspector of Harmony Hill, Gerald Green had never once measured a single blade of grass longer than the rules allowed. Likewise, he had never found any lawn to be less than the perfect shade of Kelly green, and he had certainly never encountered the obnoxious yellow of a dandelion head.
Which means, of course, that Mr. Gerald Green had never before pulled his Official Harmony Hill Citation pad from his back pocket.
Until Today.
Mr. Green stood at the tip-top of Harmony Hill, shiny ruler clenched in his hand. He frowned, bent to check his measurements again, and then straightened, scratching his head.
“Two and seven-eighths of an inch,” he grumbled. “Too long, far too long!”
He yanked his citation pad from his back pocket, uncapped his pen, and began to scribble. But before he could complete the word OUTRAGE, a strange noise drew his attention. It was a sort of clunk-a-lunking gurgle unlike anything he had ever heard before, and it seemed to be coming in his direction.
To his eternal consternation (as he would remind his wife Belinda every Sunday for the rest of his long life), an indecently dusty minivan rounded the bend and clunked its way into the driveway of Number 77 Splendid Street. From the back window glowered a girl with hair like a raven’s nest.
“Newcomers,” Mr. Green grumbled. He capped his pen, shoved his citation pad back into his pocket, and folded his arms in precise right angles over his chest. His sneaker tapped furiously upon the pavement.
A boy who was far too old for springing out of minivans sprang from the minivan with a whoop and began galumphing across the almost-perfect lawn like an escaped giraffe.
“Young man, this is not a circus!” Mr. Green cried. “This is Harmony Hill, and on Harmony Hill everything is orderly and—NO! Out of the tree! Out! Get out! On Harmony Hill no one climbs trees!”
“Hello!” A man with thick glasses and hairy legs stepped from the minivan and held out his hand.
Mr. Green ignored it and retrieved his citation pad from his pocket with a growl. In thick black ink he scrawled:
VIOLATIONS:
1. INDECENTLY LONG GRASS!
2. RUNNING ON LAWN!!
3. TREE CLIMBING! NO TREE CLIMBING!!!
He ripped the sheet from the pad and thrust it into the man’s waiting hand. “Welcome to Harmony Hill!” he barked. Then Mr. Gerald Green turned on his heels and stomped off down the road.
Not ten minutes earlier, Nerma Lee had pressed her nose against the minivan’s rear window, eyes squinted against the bright sun. At the bottom of the hill was a sign painted in pink:
WELCOME TO HARMONY HILL!
Where every street is tidy,
The homes are all the same,
You’ll never see a spidey,
And there’s never any rain!
She frowned. “But I like the rain. And spiders.”
“Nerma, don’t start again. Please,” Mr. Lee begged as he turned onto Splendid Street. The van climbed upward. “You’ll love the suburbs. I promise.”
Nerma’s mom repeated the list of wonders they were sure to behold on Harmony Hill: “Backyard barbeques, water balloon fights, late-night baseball games, new friends. You’ll see, Nerma. It’s going to be perfect.”
“And our house is at the very top!” Mr. Lee repeated for the twentieth time since they’d left the city. He drummed his hands on the steering wheel. “Number Seventy-Seven Splendid Street! The realtor said we’ll have an incredible view.”
“Of what?” Nerma sulked. As the van spiraled its way up Splendid Street, it seemed that every house they passed was the same as the last. They all looked like little pink boxes with square windows and perfect little lawns. It was almost impossible to tell them apart.
“Actually . . .” Nerma muttered to herself. She craned her neck, and her frown deepened.
The houses were impossible to tell apart. She looked from Number 9 to Number 11, from Number 12 to Number 14. Upward and onward the minivan climbed, and back and forth Nerma’s eyes moved. Every house was exactly alike. Exactly, from its pastel pink siding to its white picket fence and perfectly angled, perfectly shiny mailbox. From the very center of every yard grew a tree so perfectly round and smooth that Splendid Street seemed to be lined with giant green lollipops. Even the
robins were impossible to tell apart. In every yard, a matching pair hopped from one pruned shrub to another, moving to-and-fro in perfect unison like little feathered robots.
“It’s too perfect,” she mumbled. “Everything is the same.”
But it wasn’t until she noticed the girls that Nerma’s forehead furrowed into its deepest frown yet. In every other driveway, one by one, the girls jumped rope, and upon each girl she saw the same bouncing ponytail, the same pearly tennis shoes, and the same dreamy smile. But that wasn’t the most unsettling thing about it.
“Julian.” She reached across the back seat to tap her brother’s shoulder. “Julian, do you see this?”
He followed her finger as she pointed from one girl to the next. “They’re all jumping at the same time!” he shouted. “And they’re not even looking at each other! That’s so cool!”
Nerma’s eyebrows shot up. “Cool? Julian, it’s creepy.”
“Nerma,” Mrs. Lee said from the front seat. “There is nothing creepy about Harmony Hill. Just look around.”
But that was the problem: Nerma was looking around, and before the minivan was even halfway up Harmony Hill, she knew she would never fit in here. The city had been nothing like this. The city had been . . . messy. Strange. Unpredictable. But this place was bizarre. This was—
“Picture perfect!” her dad proclaimed. “The realtor said that Harmony Hill is rated the most perfect community in the state, and she wasn’t lying. Just look at these lawns!”
“Dad, we’ll never fit in here,” Nerma groaned. “Everything’s exactly the same here. We’re too weird.”
“Ay, Nerma!” Mrs. Lee cried. “We haven’t even arrived yet! And we are not weird!”
Nerma shrugged to herself and reached over the edge of the car seat for her little brother Benny’s hand. His big brown eyes watched the pink houses as they slipped past the window like boxes on a conveyer belt.
“What do you think of Harmony Hill so far, Ben-Ben?” she whispered to him.
“Ne-Ne!” he answered.
It always made her smile when he said her name, but now, as the minivan slowed to a crawl at the end of the lane, she once again pressed her face to the window with a scowl.
“Great,” she muttered. “It’s pink. Who would have guessed?”
Like every other house on Harmony Hill, Number 77 Splendid Street was the color of sun-bleached taffy and had its own matching set of perfectly cubed shrubs. The only thing different about Number 77 was that there was no girl jumping rope in its driveway. Instead, a man with hair like plastic glowered at them from the front walk.
“Number Seventy-Seven!” Julian whooped. “We made it!” He leapt from the van and nearly careened into the man, who began to howl about circuses and trees.
Nerma ignored them both and instead leaned over to touch noses with Benny.
“It will be okay, Ben-Ben,” she said. “Right?”
“Ne-Ne!” he answered, lifting his arms so she could unbuckle him.
“School will be different. I’m sure it will,” Nerma said, lifting him from his seat. “Everything on Harmony Hill can’t all be exactly the same. Can it?”
Outside, two robins hopped from shrub to shrub. One-and-two and one-and-two, like a set of matching wind-up toys.
2
The Gap in the Fence
School, it turned out, wasn’t any different.
If anything, Harmony Hill Elementary was even more perfect than the houses on Splendid Street. Its pink was twice as rosy, its grass ten times as lush, and its halls as spotless and square as a new ream of paper.
On Monday morning, Nerma walked through its double doors and into a dizzying sea of sensibility. Boys loped through the halls in pressed khaki, every hair combed neatly to the right, and girls clustered in such tight little cliques that their identical ponytails and baby blue blouses seemed to blend into one.
Nerma tugged at her limp black dress—her favorite one with the neon T-Rexes on it—and pushed her purple socks down below her knobby ankles. She shoved her polka-dot headband deep into her backpack before anybody could see it. But there was no way to hide her checkered backpack.
She just wasn’t going to fit in on Harmony Hill.
The bell rang, and all around her, students dashed this way and that, like perfectly wrapped packages out for delivery. Nerma felt like a mote of dust that had drifted into a perfectly oiled machine, so it was no surprise to her when a janitor in a clean white jumpsuit approached.
“Ahem,” he mumbled, nodding at her feet.
She looked down. There was mud on the floor, mud on her new shoes, mud everywhere she had stepped. Her face burned as a giggling group of girls bounced past.
Nerma stepped aside, and the janitor began to mop furiously.
“Oh me, oh my,” tutted a prim woman. She licked her peach lips and glanced nervously at Nerma’s socks. “I am Principal Linchpin. And you must be the new girl. You see, everyone tries to fit in here, so it’s obvious. You see?” She tugged at the corners of her beige cardigan, studied Nerma’s hair for a moment, and then clicked away in her sensible pumps.
The hallways veered off in identical right angles, each as colorless as the last, and by the time Nerma found her way to Miss Pleasing’s room, she just had time to scurry into an empty seat before the class was asked to stand.
“Rise, class!” called a woman with yellow curls from the front of the room. She was dressed in cotton candy pink from head to toe. “It’s time to sing the Harmony Hill Hymn!”
Nerma did her best to follow along as the rest of the class sang together:
Harmony Hill,
So high on a hill,
So pleasant and order-ly,
With never a thrill
Or even a chill,
Where things are done proper-ly,
The skies are pure blue,
And all know it’s true:
There’s nothing like Harmony!
Everyone else sat, and Nerma crept to the front of the room. She tapped the woman on the shoulder.
“Ah, yes, the new student! Wonderful to meet you, Norma. I am Miss Pleasing.” Even her eyeshadow was pink.
“It’s Nerma, ma’am,” Nerma said.
“Class! Please welcome Norma to our classroom!” Miss Pleasing’s voice was rosy and sweet.
“Welcome, Norma!” the students echoed.
“Nerma,” she corrected. But everyone had already turned to page 82 in their Harmony Hill Handbooks.
All morning, she sneaked looks at her classmates from her desk. Their skin glowed like butter. Their hair shined like spun gold. In their matching outfits, they all looked alike, and she found it impossible to tell them apart.
When she looked in the bathroom mirror during morning break, she saw a girl with hair much too short and far too dull for Harmony Hill. Throughout the day, she became more and more certain that her voice was too high, her nose too blunt, and her arms too scrawny. And try as she might, she couldn’t seem to fit in during class. Her classmates gave her funny looks when she raised her hand eagerly for math questions, and they snickered when she failed the history quiz. (But how could she have possibly known that Harmony Hill’s greatest hero was the sixteenth-century explorer Sir Humfordly Plimbot?)
At recess, she proved to be far too terrible at jumping rope to join the girls by the water fountain, far too good at catching grasshoppers to avoid taunts and stares, and far too new to play Harmony Hill Hunters without losing the game for her team and earning the wrath of half the girls in her class.
“Everybody knows you don’t run till the Spotter counts to seventeen!” A girl shrieked, her ponytail quivering with every word. The other students laughed, and Nerma slinked away to hide in the equipment closet. How was she supposed to know what a Spotter was if she’d never even heard of Harmony Hill Hunters before?
At lunch, a group of boys gagged and held their noses until she threw away the special lunch her mom had packed for her big first day. Nerma hid behind
her bangs.
Back in the classroom, Miss Pleasing announced that they would be working on an autobiographical project for the next few weeks.
She turned to Nerma, her eyes wide. “Norma, why don’t you tell us about your family? Does your father work at Harmony Bank or at Harmony Insurance?”
Nerma’s face flushed. “My name is Nerma, and my dad doesn’t work, not really. He’s a sculptor, but my mom teaches Spanish to college students.”
Miss Pleasing’s face was as blank as the whiteboard at the front of the room. “I’m not sure what that means, Norma. Which does your father work at, dear? Every father works at either the bank or the insurance company. It must be one of the two.” The classroom rustled with hushed laughter. “Norma?” Miss Pleasant’s eyes were as big as dessert plates now.
“Neither,” Nerma muttered, looking down at her desk.
“My, what an imagination we have. Better tuck that away, dear!” When Miss Pleasing laughed, she sounded like a bird. “I suppose your father works at the bank, doesn’t he? But never mind, Norma.” She tidied her perfect curls and cleared her throat. “Class, we will begin our projects by drawing our families.” She passed out clean white paper and crayons in yellow, blue, and brown.
Nerma’s nerves calmed to a quiet hum. She loved to draw. At her old school, she had been recognized with the Wild Imagination Award for Young Artists, and now she picked up her pencil with a sense of relief. Finally—something she could do well at Harmony Hill Elementary.
So focused was she on her drawing that it took her a moment to notice the tapping of Miss Pleasing’s pink shoe upon the tiles.
“What is this?” Miss Pleasing asked, a petal-colored nail poking at Nerma’s drawing.
“My family,” Nerma answered, looking up.
“This isn’t meant to be a creative project, Norma!” Miss Pleasant tittered. “You need to draw your real family. Real families don’t have—” She waved her hand in the air and smiled.