“Well, I never,” said the mother.
The floor creaked. Emily looked over her shoulder. Gorgo came limping into the kitchen, trying to catch his breath. He looked somewhat beat up. But he was holding a large burlap sack in one hand.
“I . . .” he gasped, “got them.”
He looked around, noting the tension in the room. “What happened here?”
“Your young friend was just giving us a lecture on civility,” said his mother.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Emily. “I didn’t intend to be rude, but they were being so mean.”
“I understand, dearie,” said Gorgo’s mother. “That’s very sweet of you to stick up for little Gorgo. NOW GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!!”
Emily shrieked and ducked a jet of flame.
“Is this okay?” asked iDougie.
Hilary surveyed his room. It had never been this clean.
“It’s really good,” she said, trying to control the shaking in her voice. “Great job.”
The afternoon had started out as lots of fun. But the fun had quickly faded away. Now Hilary was having one of the most disturbing, frightening days that she could remember.
Since last night’s dinner she had been thinking of ways to figure out what was going on with Emily and Dougie. This whole goody-two-shoes thing they were doing—they were up to something, she was sure of it. But what?
Then she had made a decision: if they wanted to play that game, well, let them. Let’s see how far they’ll go with it, she had thought.
So after she’d slammed the door in the face of that weird Angela girl, Hilary had turned to iDougie and iEmily and said, “You guys want to hang out or something?”
“I have to do my homework,” said iEmily flatly, and disappeared upstairs.
Perfect, thought Hilary. I’ll start with Dougie.
“Dougie, do you want to play?” said Hilary.
It sounded strange coming out of her own mouth. She couldn’t remember the last time she had asked to spend time with either of them. And she knew how the normal Dougie would respond: “Blech! No!”
But iDougie said, “Okay.”
Excellent. He wanted to keep up the act. And he’s gonna pay for it, thought Hilary.
“Great!” said Hilary. She already knew what she was going to suggest, the most absurd, ridiculous, sure-to-be-laughed-at proposal. “We’re going to play dolls.”
But iDougie didn’t laugh. He didn’t say “Blech!” He just said, “Okay.”
So they played dolls.
At first, Hilary had been laughing inside. She knew that it must have been torture for him. But iDougie kept up the act, patiently playing dolls with her.
As they played, Hilary began to get annoyed. It’s not like she particularly enjoyed playing with dolls—she was way too old for that. But she knew it must have been driving her brother crazy with boredom. Surely he’ll start complaining after a few minutes, she thought, or start throwing things. But he didn’t. And the longer they went on, the more irritated she became.
“Aren’t you bored?” she asked him.
“No,” he said.
Okay, fine, she thought. We’ll take it to the next level.
“Dougie,” she said, “this basement is a mess. Put all your toys into the toy chest.”
Without a word of complaint, he stood up and began to put the toys away. And that’s when Hilary had begun to feel the first inklings of unease.
That unease intensified as she watched her little brother work, picking up each item diligently and without whining. The unease became concern when he finished the job, turned to her, and said, “What next?”
So she said, “Now go practice the piano,” and he went and dutifully practiced the piano. The concern shifted to worry.
Then Hilary had said, “Okay, that’s enough. Go clean your room.”
“Okay.”
The worry started to edge toward alarm.
This was not some trick. This was something else. There was something deeply, deeply wrong with Dougie.
“Now what?” said iDougie now. The room was perfect. He had folded his clothes. He had made the bed.
Hilary felt her alarm tipping very decidedly toward panic.
“Just . . . just stay here and play quietly,” said Hilary.
“Okay,” said iDougie.
Hilary, blinking back tears and trying not to hyperventilate, went to Emily’s door and knocked on it.
“Yes?”
Hilary bit her fist, stifling a sob. Just “yes”? Not “I’m BUSY” or “Go AWAY”? What was going on?!
“Emily? Can I come in?”
“Yes.”
iEmily was sitting at her desk. She turned when Hilary entered and regarded her with no expression.
“I’m going to tell you something,” said Hilary, her voice quivering. “I want you to listen carefully to it.”
“Okay,” said iEmily.
“I have a friend named Alexis who likes this guy Henry, but Henry likes . . .”
Hilary continued to talk for nearly a minute, giving iEmily an extremely detailed update of her peer group’s ever-evolving social landscape. During which time her sister did not squirm, roll her eyes, sigh, drum her fingers, shake her head, jiggle her feet, space out, or do anything whatsoever to indicate boredom. All she did was listen.
Hilary burst into tears. “What is wrong with you guys?!” she said, and fled into her own room and slammed the door, still weeping.
iEmily simply turned back to the desk and did what she had been doing before: sat there.
Hilary collapsed on her bed, head in her hands, and sobbed. She couldn’t stand her brother and sister—really, not at all, not a bit. No way. Ask anyone.
But she really, really, really wanted them back. Because these people, she knew, were not the real thing.
The real Dougie was no longer having any fun either.
At first sitting on the throne and wearing the crown and overseeing the battlefield had been enjoyable. But then it became tiresome. The attacks by the Gugglins never stopped. They would pause, yes, but Dougie quickly learned that the combat was just like the fights in the games he played on the computer: if you defeated one wave of attackers, the next wave would be stronger and faster and better equipped, and the next wave yet more so, and so on and so on. And the waves looked as though they would keep coming forever.
“What now?” demanded the Ugglins. “What defense? What do?”
“Can’t we take a break?” asked Dougie. “I’m tired!”
“No break! No stop!” said the Ugglins.
From the field of battle Dougie could hear the endless sounds of struggle: the clang of weapons on armor, roars, shouts of alarm and anger.
“I’m hungry,” said Dougie.
“No eat!”
“The crown itches!”
“Keep crown!”
“I have to go to the bathroom!”
“No bathroom!”
“When can I stop?”
“Never stop! Never!”
Chapter
Seventeen
Emily stumbled out onto Gorgo’s front porch.
“Don’t forget to write, dear,” she heard Gorgo’s mother say.
“Okay, Ma, I—” said Gorgo, but that’s as far as he got before the door slammed shut violently.
Gorgo sighed and rubbed his face. “Sorry about all that in there,” he said.
“No,” said Emily, “I feel sorry for you.”
Gorgo held up the burlap sack. “At least we got the TwitCoins,” he said. He opened the sack, a faint glow emerging. Emily looked inside. The glow was coming from the coins themselves, which were the size of drink coasters and as thick as her pinkie. Despite that, there was something vaguely transparent about them, as if they couldn’t make up their mind whether to exist or not.
“They’re sort of spread around lots of dimensions at the same time,” said Gorgo, noting her quizzical expression. “Anyhow, I think we’d better hurry. Yo
u have to get the coins into the Stone.”
“Right,” said Emily. She looked at the Stone. “Um . . . how do I do—”
Before she could finish, the Stone leaped from her hand directly into the burlap sack. “Whoa!”
Then Gorgo had to struggle to hold on to the sack as some sort of battle raged within it, coins clinking loudly, the sack heaving and bulging and leaping about as though an angry cat were chasing mice inside.
Then suddenly the bag went completely limp. Gorgo opened it and peered inside, snapping his head back just in time as the Stone leaped out and into Emily’s hand. “Yikes!” she exclaimed.
Gorgo turned the bag inside out. It was completely empty.
“Well,” he said, tossing the bag away, “I think you figured it out. Hurry up—get those tickets.”
Thirty seconds of concentration and apth-ing later and she had. “There!” she said. “There’s the Spellevator!”
But the doors weren’t right in front of them. They had instead appeared farther up the narrow path Emily and Gorgo had taken to get to Gorgo’s house. “C’mon!” said Emily.
As they left Gorgo’s yard and hurried along the path toward the doors, Emily was thankful she’d had her eyes closed the first time. The path was so very narrow that in some places it was no wider than a skateboard. On both sides sheer cliffs dropped down to flowing lava or depths hidden by roiling smoke. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out how she and Gorgo had navigated the path the first time. And had it been so steep? In fact, it seemed to be getting steeper with each step she took. All the while she had a growing sense of certainty that time was running out, that Dougie would soon be beyond her reach—and that the Spellevator doors wouldn’t wait for them much longer. She looked up from the path to check their progress and gasped.
“Gorgo,” Emily said, out of breath, “it doesn’t seem like the doors are getting any closer!”
“I told you,” he said. “It’s easy to get here. It’s the leaving that’s hard.”
“We have to hurry!” She sped up her pace. She desperately wanted to run but didn’t dare do so over the broken, treacherous ground, knowing that one misstep could send her plummeting over an edge. “Gorgo! Can’t you grab me and jump there or something? Gorgo? Gorgo!”
But Gorgo didn’t answer. Emily turned and looked at him. He was still walking along the path, but he seemed as if he was in the midst of a pleasant daydream, his expression serene and happy.
“Gorgo! Gorgo, what is wrong with you! Gorgo, you—EEEEE!” Emily shrieked as a hand clamped around her right ankle, then another, and another, forearms sprouting from the very ground itself, reaching for her legs, another hand now grabbing her other ankle.
“Let me go!” she screamed. “Let me go!” She kicked her feet, tearing her ankles from the grasping hands, but there were more, and then more. “Gorgo! Help me!” she screamed.
He looked at her with a dazed, goofy expression on his face. “What?” he said. “What’s wrong?” He’s bewitched, Emily realized, and knew at that moment that it was the toxic magic of this place trying to hold them both here, and in just a few more seconds the Spellevator doors were going to close and she’d be trapped forever.
It was dinnertime at the Edelmans’.
Mr. Edelman, Mrs. Edelman, and Hilary were spending a lot of time glancing at iEmily and iDougie and then glancing at one another. Both of the younger children were once again eating with perfect manners. At no point did iDougie try to steal anything from iEmily’s plate. Nor did iEmily reject her lima beans.
“Are you guys feeling all right?” said their father. He had asked this same question about five times already.
“Yes,” they answered in unison.
More glances were exchanged.
“Okay. Well, Dougie, why don’t you take your plate in, then go upstairs and start getting ready for bed.”
Without a word, iDougie rose, took his plate to the sink, rinsed it, and placed it in the dishwasher. Then he disappeared upstairs.
Hilary leaned closer to her parents. “You see? You see what I’ve been telling you?”
She was close to tears. She and her parents now turned to look at iEmily. iEmily didn’t seem to be looking at anything. She didn’t seem to be unhappy. She just seemed to . . . be.
Her mother watched her younger daughter, her concern mounting.
“Emily,” said her mother, “why don’t you go outside and, I don’t know, jump rope or something.”
“Okay,” said iEmily. She got up, took her jump rope off the hook by the door, and went outside.
“I’m going to check on Dougie,” said Mr. Edelman, and went upstairs.
A few minutes later Mr. Edelman came downstairs with a worried expression on his face. He found his wife and Hilary standing by the front window, staring outside. They turned when he came into the room.
“What’s wrong?” said Mrs. Edelman.
“It’s Dougie.”
“What’s he doing?”
“I went up there, and he was brushing his teeth.”
Mr. Edelman paused to let this sink in. This was the second night in a row Dougie had just brushed his teeth. Dougie did not usually just brush his teeth, at least not without several minutes of bargaining and threats and eventual yelling.
“What’s that whistling noise?” asked Mr. Edelman.
“It’s Emily,” said Hilary. Then she burst into tears.
“What?” said Mr. Edelman.
Mrs. Edelman gestured to the window. Outside, iEmily was jumping rope. Very fast. Very, very fast. So fast that the jump rope was really just a blurry shell surrounding her. That’s where the whistling noise was coming from. iEmily, however, did not seem to be exerting herself in the least.
“I wonder if the pediatrician’s office has any availability tomorrow,” said Mr. Edelman.
More and more hands were bursting forth from the rocky ground and grabbing Emily’s legs, immobilizing her. “Let me go!” she screamed again, and slammed the Stone down onto the knuckles of one of the hands. It instantly released her and shriveled away into a blackened curl. She smashed at all the other hands with the Stone, each hand and forearm shriveling as she did so.
Up ahead the open doors of the Spellevator beckoned. They were only a short dash away. But even as Emily looked at them, the doors started to close.
“No!” she screamed, smashing at the final hand and starting to run. The doors were halfway closed when she reached them, and she leaped between them, holding them apart. They opened up again like elevator doors would but immediately started to close again, and this time kept closing when she pressed her hands against them.
“Gorgo!” Emily yelled. He was still about twenty yards away, his expression childlike and vacant. Emily pressed her back against one of the doors and her hands and feet against the other, struggling mightily against them, and still they were slowly inching closed. “Gorgo!” she screamed again. “Gorgo!” Nothing. “Gorgo, I command you to wake up!”
Nothing. Keeping one hand on the door, she held the Stone up, reaching out with her intention, and found and initiated an apth.
A giant hand bell materialized next to Gorgo’s head and began ringing. He didn’t notice.
“Something else!” said Emily.
The bell transformed into a gloved hand, a finger tapping him on the shoulder.
“No—more!” yelled Emily.
The hand seemed to hear her and began slapping Gorgo across the face. Nothing.
“More!”
The hand became a giant fish, also slapping him across the face.
“It’s not working!”
The fish became a big wooden bucket, which wound up and dashed its watery contents in his face.
Gorgo shook his head, blinking and sputtering.
“Gorgo!”
Emily knew that she had just moments before the doors would overpower her and she’d be crushed to death.
“Gorgo! Over here!”
; Gorgo finally seemed to come to full consciousness. Wiping his face, he looked around and saw her predicament. With one leap he sailed through the air and landed in front of the doors, grunting with effort as he spread them apart with his giant hands. Released from the doors’ deadly grip, Emily fell to the floor inside the Spellevator and Gorgo squeezed in afterward, the doors crashing shut with a boom behind him.
“Why are you playing around?” he said. “We have things to do!”
Chapter
Eighteen
Acrimina Venomüch was on a mission.
She moved with grace and elegance across the crowded ballroom, greeting old friends, smiling her dazzling smile, blowing kisses, pausing briefly to take the opportunity to slip poison into a one-time rival’s champagne. She doubted it would kill her—the rival was too wily for that. But—sigh—one did what one could.
The ball was legendary. It was an annual event (not annual in Earth years; annual in the sense that . . . never mind. It’s too hard to explain. It was annual). It was thrown by a very prominent and important family from one of the best universes. It was extravagantastical; it was grandeur-opuluxurianificent. It was fancy.
The guests were also fancy. They were from many times and places. Not all were evil, like the Venomüches. But there probably weren’t a lot of attendees that you would call good.
Acrimina fairly floated through the bejeweled and lavishly appointed crowd. She caught a glimpse of her rival cleverly passing off the champagne glass to another guest, the rival’s rival, and Acrimina sighed again. Who knew who would end up with it. But the guests at this event didn’t get where they were by being easily duped into drinking poisoned champagne.
No matter. The attempt on her rival’s life was a minor diversion, just something extra thrown in while Acrimina was here. She had another, far more important target this evening. And there he was. She put on her most charming smile.
“Ah, Baron von Varonbon!” she said.
“Archduchess!”
Cheeks were kissed. Chatting commenced. The elderly baron was portly and cheerful, his military uniform nearly invisible under the layers of medals he wore. They jiggled as he guffawed at Acrimina’s lively wit. Her eyes sparkled. Occasionally she would reach out and brush his arm as they talked, the baron enchanted by the attention paid to him by such a beautiful, alluring specimen.
Emily and the Spellstone Page 13