The Dark-Thirty

by Patricia McKissack

  “Maybe Lizzie put the plug back in, not realizing what she was doing?”

  “No, she wasn’t near the plug.”

  Laura felt her knees weaken. “Jack? Do you hear what you’re saying? An unplugged washing machine cut itself on!”

  She looked at the socket. The machine was unplugged. Jack hadn’t imagined that part. But had he just barely escaped being electrocuted?

  You and your family could be in grave danger…

  “Weird stuff,” Thomas Lester put in. “Is this place haunted?”

  Laura flinched at the sound of the word. Haunted. Were such things possible?

  “No, son,” Laura answered. “Living in old houses like this sometimes makes you think they’re haunted, but ghosts don’t exist.”

  “Mr. Feathers saved you, Daddy,” Lizzie said, cradling the little monkey doll in her arms. And she and August ran up the steps.

  Keep it with you…

  Early the next week Thomas Lester called from the YMCA, where he spent the summer mornings. He was going on a field trip to Shaw Gardens and needed his antitoxin medicine in case a bee stung him. On the way home from the Y, Laura passed the Mother Africa Shop. She decided to go in.

  “I’m Laura Bates and I bought a little figurine from you about six weeks ago. If you remember, I’d like to speak to you about it.”

  The woman nodded. “I remember you. I remember you didn’t heed my warning. You’re having trouble in your house, right?”

  “I think the power of suggestion has caused me to blow ordinary occurrences out of proportion.”

  “Believe what you will.” Mrs. Aswadi offered Laura a seat. “But hear this.

  “Long ago some of the women from the village of Dabobo tricked the mother spirit into giving them immortality. Upon discovering she had been tricked, the angry goddess punished the entire village by causing terrible plagues. The innocent suffering villagers searched for the source of the goddess’s anger. When they learned what some of the women had done, they drove them into the dark jungle. No one would help these women, for fear the mother spirit would turn her wrath on them. The women wandered endlessly without rest, getting older and older and older, yet unable to die. You see, they had forgotten to ask the mother spirit for eternal youth. These women were called the Dabobo women of darkness.”

  Mrs. Aswadi took a book from a nearby shelf. Finding the page she wanted, she pointed to a picture and said, “See. Here is an artist’s carving of a Dabobo in her last human form.”

  Laura studied the image of the wizened old woman whose features hardly resembled those of a human. She swallowed hard. “Th-this doesn’t look like the little statue I bought,” she said.

  “After centuries, the Dabobo women wasted away—and only their anger and meanness survived. They disguised themselves in many different forms to gain entry into a home.”

  “Why?”

  “To take from you what was taken from them.”

  The room felt hot and stuffy to Laura. She wiped her brow. “Tell me about the little monkey figure with the feathered headdress.”

  Mrs. Aswadi reached inside her pocket and pulled out a doll just like Mr. Feathers. “This is a gingi, also very old and very powerful. In this form it is merely a trinket. But pure love unlocks its powers. Like the Dabobo, it too can take on many different forms when it is protecting or defending its owner against harm. I pray you still have the gingi I gave you, because as sure as I live, you took a Dabobo home with you.”

  “I gave the gingi to my little girl.”

  “Good. Children can unlock the protective powers of the gingi long before an adult.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

  “Would you have believed me? Do you believe me now?”

  Mrs. Aswadi was right, and Laura left the shop not knowing what to think. Had she stumbled on to something old and dangerously wicked? And had her arrogance stopped her from admitting it? She remembered Lizzie’s words: A mean, ugly witch lives inside.

  “No,” Laura said, stopping the car but completely unaware of how she’d driven home. “I will not believe it!”

  You and your family could be in grave danger…

  “I will not fall for that nonsense,” she said. Later that evening Laura slipped into Lizzie’s room and took Mr. Feathers from under the sleeping child’s pillow. August, who slept at Lizzie’s feet, woke up, stretched, then followed Laura out of the room. “We’ll replace this creepy thing with something much healthier tomorrow.”

  With a single purpose, Laura hurried down the stairs, stopped by the curio cabinet, and took out the ebony figurine. August waited at the back door. Once outside, she poured lighter fluid on both figures and burned them in the barbecue. “So much for superstitions and hauntings,” she said as she marched back to the house.

  August lingered to chase a moving shadow. Suddenly he stiffened and hissed. “Come on, boy,” Laura called.

  “Hysteria! That’s what it was.” Laura paced back and forth as she told Jack about her talk with Mrs. Aswadi. “I just got caught up in her story, and when she showed me the picture of a Dabobo, I let the power of suggestion twist my thoughts into believing there might be one trying to hurt us and a gingi trying to protect us.”

  Laura flopped onto the bed. “Add superstition to a few odd coincidences, combine that with a child’s imagination and an old house. What do you get? A haunting! Well, I just got all that junk out of my house!”

  Jack looked concerned. “You’ve managed to explain away your fear very well. But I don’t know what to do about my own. I can’t dismiss what happened in the basement. It may not have anything to do with things that go bump in the night, but something far out of the ordinary happened down there.”

  “A freak accident. Electricity is weird anyway.”

  “But there’s more. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “Stop, Jack. We are intelligent, logical-thinking people. Please don’t change on me now.”

  “No. You need to know this,” he said. “One night Lizzie told me that a bad lady was in the figurine downstairs and wanted to hurt us.”

  “She probably saw something on television that upset her.”

  “I’m not so sure. When I asked Lizzie to tell me what she’d seen, she described a toothless hag with milky eyes. She’d never heard about the Dabobo women of darkness and neither had I until tonight.”

  “Please, Jack. No more.”

  “Why are you so afraid, Laura? You know what I’m going to say. I’ve seen the same terrible specter. And my guess is that you’ve—”

  Before he could finish, the bedroom door burst open.

  Seeing Lizzie rush in, they laughed at their own jitters. Then they noticed her expression. “Mr. Feathers says something bad has happened to Thomas Lester,” she cried, holding tight to August.

  Laura started to explain that Mr. Feathers was gone, but Jack had already bounded off the bed and was heading for his son’s room.

  “Thomas Lester,” he called at the closed door. “Son? Are you awake?”

  Laura and Lizzie stood by watching. Jack called again. No answer. The door was locked. But none of their doors had locks. Jack put his full weight against the door and crashed into the room. The boy lay on the floor beside his bed. His chest heaved as he struggled to breathe. Perspiration covered his forehead.

  Without saying a word, the parents knew what was wrong. Thomas Lester was having an allergic reaction to a bee sting, and by the swellings on his leg, he’d been stung by more than one. Laura looked around, but she didn’t see bees anywhere.

  She rushed to her bathroom to get the antitoxin medicine. It wasn’t there … or in any of the drawers … or on the dresser … or on the night-stands …Her heart was beating in her ears.

  Think! she told herself. I took a bottle to the Y. But I always keep two in the house. One upstairs and one downstairs. Maybe I put them both in the kitchen cabinet. I’ll look down there.

 
Laura clicked the switch, but the hall and stair bulbs popped out. Using the light that filtered from the bedrooms, she inched down the steps.

  Grave danger…

  “Please hurry!” Jack called.

  One bee sting wasn’t enough to kill the boy, but multiple stings might send him into convulsions.

  Suddenly something dreadfully cold pushed past Laura. Throwing her body against the railing to regain her balance, she felt another push—harder this time! Laura turned to face her attacker.

  There was the toothless hag. Its glowing silver eyes chilled Laura’s soul. “Did you really think you could get rid of me by burning that little statue?” the thing snarled. “I can’t be reasoned away.”

  Laura closed her eyes and recoiled in fear. “No. This can’t be,” she whispered.

  “Run, Mama!” Lizzie shouted from the top of the stairs. “That’s the bad woman.”

  Laura turned to go back for her daughter, but she lost her footing and tumbled head over heels down the steps. The hag laughed wildly and vanished.

  Searing pain ripped through Laura’s back like a hot iron. She dragged herself up and leaned against a nearby wall. “Thomas Lester,” she whispered. “Got to help.”

  The Dabobo leaped at her from the darkness, screaming madly, “I’ll destroy you!” The evil within it glowed.

  “Leave my mama alone!” Lizzie shouted. The child had made her way down the dark steps. Big, gray August sat beside his young mistress, his tail twitching and his ears laid back. He looked ready for battle. “Mr. Feathers won’t let you hurt us anymore,” Lizzie said confidently.

  “Lizzie, go back. I burned the gingi—Mr. Feathers.” Laura wanted to scream for Jack, but the pain in her back checked her cries.

  “No, Mama. Mr. Feathers is inside August.”

  Suddenly August sprang at the menacing creature. As he did, his little cat body changed into a life-size gingi.

  “You meddler! I’ll be rid of you soon enough.” The Dabobo woman scowled and melted into the darkness. The gingi followed in its new form. And every light in the house went out.

  Using moonlight as his only source of illumination, Jack came down the steps, carrying Thomas Lester in his arms.

  “My God, what happened?” he said, finding Laura and Lizzie huddled at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Is Thomas Lester okay?” Laura gasped.

  “I found the medicine in the cabinet where we always keep it,” Jack answered, looking around. “What went on?”

  “Get us out of here—now!”

  Jack moved without question, swiftly carrying Lizzie and Thomas Lester to the car. Then he returned for Laura. “We’re never coming back into this house again,” he said. “Where’s August?”

  Laura didn’t answer. On the way out the door she looked over Jack’s shoulder. In the pale moonlight she saw two shadows locked in combat—the Dabobo trying to free itself from the grip of the gingi.

  The Chicken-Coop Monster

  The final story in this collection is different from the rest, because it is semi-autobiographical. I was shattered when my parents divorced, but fortunately I had a loving grandmother and grandfather who helped me through that very difficult time; I’ve tried to recapture a sense of that relationship here. A West African proverb from the Benin culture—“Fear is the parent of monsters”—has been used as the story’s foundation, but there is a Jewish saying that is its capstone: “Love drives out fear.”

  The year I turned nine, my parents’ ten-year marriage ended in divorce. The grownups never talked about it around me, but I knew what was going on. Mama and Daddy didn’t love each other anymore. So where’d that leave me?

  As soon as school was out, they shipped me off to the Tennessee boonies to stay with my grandparents, Franky and James Leon Russell. I didn’t want to go, but no one was listening to me.

  A monster lived there. I knew it the minute I set foot on their farm. I was the president of the St. Louis chapter of the Monster Watchers of America, and I was an expert on spotting monsters.

  It lived in the chicken coop—the tingling in the back of my neck was strongest when I passed by there. Its hot, mean eyes watched me as I played on the back porch. Sometimes I chased my ball too close and smelled its foul breath. This wasn’t an ordinary in-the-closet fright or an under-the-bed scare. I’d come upon something really terrible.

  I needed help with this one, so I wrote to my friend Jay, who was in charge of the MWA over the summer. Jay and I had been best buddies since we’d started the MWA the year before. By enclosing fifty cents and six box tops from Crinkle cereal, we’d sent away for and received an official MWA Club starter kit, complete with six badges, six glow-in-the-dark ID cards, and a manual containing ten monster rules and everything else we needed to know about creepy stuff. We’d invited Nora, Jeff, Latisha, and Alandro to join us.

  Writing to Jay made me feel better. Meanwhile, I had to be careful not to break any monster rules, because that would make the thing stronger and bolder.

  One evening Ma Franky called me to the kitchen. “Missy, I forgot to throw the latch on the chicken coop. Go lock it for me, please.”

  The sun had set, but there was a little light left in the sky. The backyard was already engulfed by a blanket of darkness, but I could see the silhouette of the old chicken shack against the sky.

  I stood on the back porch, a statue of fear. This is what the monster had been waiting for. I heard the whisper of its tail swishing in the straw.

  “Melissa?” My own name startled me. “Why haven’t you done what I asked you to do?” Ma Franky’s voice quavered with impatience.

  She was asking me to break monster rule number five: Get in the house before dark and don’t go out by yourself.

  “There’s a monster in your chicken coop,” I blurted out. “So I’m not going out there.”

  Of course Ma Franky had other ideas. “Girl,” she said, “if you don’t stop this foolishness!” She gave me a little push. “Go on, now. Go close the door, or something will get in the coop and scare my setting hens.”

  Her hens? What about me? “I hate to tell you this, Ma Franky, but something’s in the chicken coop already That’s why I’m not going out there.”

  “Yes you are, this very minute.”

  Obviously this monster had fourth-level power, because it’d put a spell on Ma Franky. Why else would she fall for the oldest trick in the book? Monsters make helpers out of unsuspecting victims.

  “But—” I started to say.

  “No buts!” And the next thing I knew, my own grandmother had me by the hand and was pulling me toward the chicken coop. “I want to show you there’s nothing out here.”

  I looked into her eyes. “No!” I screamed. “Don’t you see? It’s made you a helper.” I jerked away from Ma Franky and ran into the house. Even though I was breaking monster rule three—Never let a monster see you crying—I couldn’t stop the tears.

  Then I felt big, strong hands wiping my face with a cool washcloth. “Oh, sweets,” Daddy James whispered softly. “There’s nothing round here to fear.” His eyes smiled. The monster spell hadn’t gotten to him. “No need to fret. I closed the door for you.”

  * * *

  Dark thoughts flee in morning light. But the old wooden coop was surrounded by permanent shadows, a sure sign that it was occupied by a hateful thing. I had to be very careful. It would do anything to lure me into its evil hole.

  “Bring me my clothespins off the porch,” Ma Franky called.

  Just as I passed the coop the door creaked open slowly. Sunlight pushed away the darkness just long enough for me to see something large and shapeless. But the monster leaped back into the shadows before I got a really good look at it. I must have screamed, ’cause Ma Franky came running.

  “What is it? What is it?”

  “I saw the monster. It pushed open the door.”

  Ma Franky said nothing but walked purposefully into the coop. I wouldn’t look, couldn’t look as she disapp
eared behind the darkness. I never expected to see her again. But within a few seconds out she came holding a tiny little chick.

  She gently transferred it from her hands to mine. “But that isn’t the monster,” I cried.

  “I know. There isn’t one. Period!”

  Poor Ma Franky. She really believed that, I’m sure. “Won’t you come in and look around?” she asked. “Come see where the chickens set on their eggs and hatch little chicks like this one.”

  It was another monster trick, and I wasn’t going for it. “No! I’ll never go inside!”

  Ma Franky sighed and shook her head. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said, and went back to hanging out her wash. My back was turned, but I could feel the creature laughing at me.

  During the week, separate letters came from Mama and Daddy. I wrote them back right away—Mama’s went to our old house, Daddy’s to a new address. Mama wanted to know all about my new friends. Daddy was happy I could swim in deep water and had caught a fish. But I still hadn’t heard from Jay, so I wrote to him again.

  First I told him about my new pet chick, Tissy, and how she followed me everywhere, answering my voice and eating the feed I threw out to her. Then I told him about the creature. “I feel it’s stronger now, because I’ve broken a couple of monster rules. It’s a tricky one, but I’m watching out for myself. Write soon. Missy.”

  Following rule nine, I didn’t go near the thing’s lair. In fact I didn’t even play in the backyard. But late one afternoon I missed Tissy. I felt she was in danger. Sure enough, the chick was out back, heading straight for the coop. And the door was open!

  Tissy belonged to me. The monster knew it. Monster rule six clearly stated: Watch out for those you love. If monsters can’t get you, they will get the ones closest to you.