by Jason Segel
Charlie and his parents canvassed the entire mansion. Charlie volunteered to check the tower, charging up the stairs before his dad could have a look. When he arrived, the portal was sealed and the room was empty.
Downstairs, there wasn’t a single window unlocked or door left open. Nobody was hiding under any of the beds or inside any of the closets. By the time they reached the kitchen, every inch of the house had been searched.
“Well,” Andrew Laird said at last. “I think it’s safe to go back to bed.”
“My nerves are still a bit rattled, honey,” Charlotte said. “I think I’ll stay down here and have some warm milk.”
“Me too,” said Charlie, though there was nothing he found more revolting than the idea of warm milk.
“Suit yourselves,” said Charlie’s dad. “I’m going to get some sleep.”
As soon as they heard Andrew Laird’s footsteps on the second floor, Charlotte leaned in and whispered, “They were here! ICK and INK!”
“I got a message from them too,” Charlie said. “Right before you got yours.”
“Where did they leave it?” Charlotte asked. “In your room?”
“No, in the Netherworld.” Then Charlie realized what that meant. ICK and INK had left a message for him in the Netherworld just minutes before they’d left one for Charlotte in the Waking World. There was only one way to get from one place to the other so quickly.
Charlotte gasped. “They came through our portal.”
“But that’s not possible!” Charlie insisted. “I thought the only ones who could go through our portal were me and Jack.” Then Charlie remembered that Bruce had found the portal open—and neither Charlie nor Jack had opened it.
“If ICK and INK’s lighthouse has a portal,” Charlotte said, “maybe they’re able to pass through our portal too.”
Charlie looked up at the ceiling. “We should lock the door to the tower. That will keep them out of the rest of our house.”
“You really think that’s going to do much good?” Charlotte asked.
Charlie sighed. Charlotte was right. If ICK and INK had made a tonic that turned people into Walkers, it seemed unlikely that they’d let a single locked door stand in their way.
“Charlie!” Jack was shaking him. Charlie was hoping the little boy would go away. He’d been up with Charlotte half the night. “Charlie. Charlie!”
“What?” Charlie finally shouted, sitting up so suddenly that his brother nearly fell on his butt with surprise. “It’s seven-thirty in the morning!”
“I know, but you gotta get up. Dad made pancakes, and he wants to have a family meeting before he goes to work. Plus, Alfie’s on the phone.” Jack tossed the phone onto Charlie’s sheets and hightailed it out of the room.
Charlie picked up the device. “Alfie? Have you looked at your clock? It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”
“Get up and get over here!” Alfie shrieked, and Charlie held the phone away from his ear. “It’s terrible! We’ve got to do something right away!”
“Calm down,” Charlie ordered, heart thumping. “What happened?”
“It’s Stormy! They got to her!”
“Stormy Skies?” Charlie asked. “The weather lady? The one you have a crush on?” He was out of bed in an instant and flying down the stairs toward the television in the purple mansion’s drawing room.
“She’s a meteorologist,” Alfie corrected him for the two hundredth time. “Or she used to be. Now she’s just a Walker.” Alfie’s voice broke on the last word.
In the drawing room, Charlie found the remote control wedged between two couch cushions. He pressed the on button and turned the TV to channel four, where an ad for mattresses was playing.
“I checked the news this morning—strictly to see what was going on with world politics, of course—and there she was, pointing at complex weather systems and grunting like a gorilla,” Alfie wailed. “We have to do something, Charlie. We have to save her!”
“Take it easy, Alfie,” Charlie said. “I know you love Stormy, but—”
“I do not love Stormy!” Alfie cut him off. “It’s just, if something happens to Stormy, how will anyone know what the weather will be?”
“It’s summer, Alfie,” Charlie said. “The weather is hot. Every day. Hot.”
The commercial playing on the television ended, and channel four returned to the news. Suddenly Charlie’s eyes were glued to the television, where Stormy Skies was supposed to be giving a morning weather update. The makeup people at the television station had done their best, but they couldn’t disguise the fact that there was something very, very wrong with the station’s meteorologist. Charlie watched Stormy’s face grow larger as she moved off her mark and shuffled toward the camera. Then an enormous bloodshot eyeball appeared as the weatherwoman tried to look through the lens.
Andrew Laird poked his head into the drawing room. “Charlie? We’re going to have a family meeting in a couple of minutes. It’s time to get off the phone.”
Charlie knew what the meeting would be about. His father and stepmother were announcing that the Laird family would lose their home at the end of the month. But Charlie hadn’t given up yet, and he refused to listen. Fortunately, he had the perfect excuse on the other end of the phone line.
“Sorry, Dad,” Charlie said. “There’s an emergency I need to take care of right away.”
“Another emergency?” Andrew Laird asked. “How does a twelve-year-old kid have an emergency at seven-thirty on a Wednesday morning in July?”
Charlie heard the slapping of Charlotte’s slippers on the floorboards. She arrived at her husband’s side, looking utterly exhausted. Her eyes landed on the television, where Stormy Skies was now sniffing at the camera lens. Charlotte took the remote control from Charlie and switched the TV off. “We need to let Charlie go,” she told Andrew.
Before his dad had a chance to argue, Charlie had put the phone back up to his ear.
“Hang tight, Alfie,” he said. “I just gotta throw on some jeans and I’ll be over right away.”
—
Of course Alfie’s emergency was nothing more than an excuse to get out of the house. There wasn’t much Charlie could do for Stormy Skies. But he figured he should console his friend in person. So he hopped onto his bike and headed east. Charlie had barely ridden two blocks before he saw the first evidence of the tonic at work. Mr. Sturgill, who taught eighth-grade math during the school year, was out in front of his house. He was dressed in sopping wet Star Wars pajamas and attempting to drink from one of the sprinklers on his front lawn. A few doors down, Charlie saw an elderly woman in a wedding gown washing her car.
It wasn’t until he passed a big brick house with a sweeping green lawn bordered by hedges that Charlie Laird felt compelled to stop his bike. It was Ollie Tobias’s house. He noticed something large and white moving among the plants in one of the flower beds near the porch. He parked his bike and walked across the lawn to investigate. As he drew closer, he could see that it was Mrs. Tobias in her croquet costume, digging a hole in the dirt with her hands.
“Are you okay, Mrs. Tobias?” Charlie asked hesitantly.
The woman’s head snapped around. She bared her teeth and snarled until Charlie backed away.
Charlie bounded up the Tobiases’ porch steps and rang the doorbell. He could hear a clamor coming from inside. He rang the bell a second time, and the housekeeper opened the door. He could see that she too had sampled the tonic. Someone had given her a pirate hat, along with a black mustache and goatee. She stared at Charlie with a vacant expression.
“May I speak to Ollie, please?” Charlie asked.
The woman stood speechless in the doorway, so Charlie took matters into his own hands. “Ollie!” he shouted.
There was more noise. Then Ollie appeared, wearing pink dishwashing gloves, a plastic shower cap, safety goggles that he must have stolen from school, and an apron that read HOT STUFF. In one hand he held a large wooden paintbrush that was dripping with
glue and covered in feathers.
“Hey, Charlie,” Ollie welcomed him happily. “How’s it going?”
“What are you doing?” Charlie asked.
Ollie looked down at his own rather unusual outfit and grinned. “Mom’s a little bit out of it today. So I figured I’d do some redecorating.”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Charlie couldn’t resist. “Can I see?” he asked Ollie.
“Sure,” the boy said, leading him toward what had probably once been the house’s formal living room.
The decorative pillows were all unzipped, and the feathers inside had been dumped into a pile in the center of the room. Ollie was painting the walls with carpet glue and then covering the glue with pillow feathers. The result was weird and wonderful, Charlie thought. The room felt just like a warm, cozy nest. The kid had talent as a decorator, though it seemed extremely unlikely that his mother would agree.
“I’m gonna work on the dining room next,” Ollie announced. “I told my mom that I wanted to change a few things, and for the first time, she didn’t even try to stop me.”
“Your mom drank the tonic, didn’t she?” Charlie asked. “And so did the housekeeper. Why didn’t you?”
“I did,” Ollie told him. “As a matter of fact, my mom gave me a double dose.”
“And?” Charlie asked.
“And nothing,” Ollie said with a sigh. “Still had the same bad dream.”
He was immune to the tonic, Charlie realized, just like Poppy, the girl in Orville Falls.
“I need you to come with me. You got a few minutes?” Charlie asked him.
Ollie stuck his head out an open window. His mother was standing on the porch, covered in dirt. “Hey, Mom, is it okay if I hang out with Charlie for a while?” His mother just stared at him with a blank expression. A thin stream of drool trickled out of the corner of her mouth. Ollie grinned. “Great! Looks like I got all day.”
—
Alfie must have been watching for help to arrive. He ran outside to meet Charlie and Ollie the second they turned the corner onto his street.
“Stormy just climbed up onto the anchor desk! We’ve got to stop this madness before she gets fired!” he shrieked. When it quickly dawned on him that Charlie wasn’t alone, Alfie pulled himself together. “Hi, Ollie,” he said. He shot Charlie a quizzical look that seemed to ask, “What’s he doing here?”
Charlie put a hand on Ollie’s shoulder. “Allow me to introduce you to our secret weapon,” he said.
“I’m a secret weapon?” Ollie asked, as if his greatest dream had just come true. “Awesome! What do I get to do?”
Alfie looked concerned. “I don’t think you want to use the words Ollie and weapon in the same sentence,” he said.
“In this case, it’s just a figure of speech,” Charlie assured him. “Ollie took a double dose of the tonic last night. His mom had some too. She’s a Walker now—but Ollie spent the morning redecorating the living room.”
“Hey!” Ollie said. “That’s my mom you’re talking about! I’m the only one who gets to call her a— What did you just call her?”
“Never mind. I’m sorry,” Charlie replied sincerely. Ollie’s mom may have been a Walker, but she was still his mom.
Alfie had started examining the subject. He lifted Ollie’s hand and took the boy’s pulse. “You say you had a double dose of Tranquility Tonic? And you feel just fine?” he asked skeptically. “No confusion? No drooling? No shuffling?”
“Nope,” Ollie replied, doing a little jig to prove how much control he had over his feet.
“And he dreamed last night too,” Charlie said.
“Then it’s true!” Alfie hopped up and down with glee. “He really is immune!”
“What does that mean?” Ollie asked.
“It means that something inside your body is protecting you from the tonic! Come in, come in.” Alfie grabbed Ollie’s arm and practically dragged him into his house.
—
Alfie’s room looked like a cross between a mad scientist’s laboratory, a doctor’s office, and a robotics factory. Charlie watched Ollie’s eyes light up as he took it all in, and Charlie knew they wouldn’t be able to leave Ollie alone for a second. There was no telling what the kid might do with Alfie’s experiments and machinery. After steering his guest clear of anything fragile, toxic, or flammable, Alfie cleared a spot on the bed and told Ollie to have a seat. Then he grabbed a pen and slipped a fresh sheet of paper into a clipboard.
“I need to ask you a few questions in order to determine the source of your immunity,” he told Ollie. “Some of them might feel a little personal.”
“Cool!” said Ollie.
Charlie grinned while Alfie frowned. “Okay. Are you currently on any medications?”
“Yep,” Ollie said.
“Great. Which ones?”
“I get purple pills in the morning, orange pills at night, and blue pills before bed.”
Alfie looked up from his clipboard. “Do you know the names?”
“Nope,” Ollie said.
Alfie seemed a bit daunted, but he persevered. “Okay, then. Have you ever been hospitalized?”
“Yep,” Ollie said.
“What for?”
“Which time?” Ollie asked.
“You’ve been hospitalized more than once?” Alfie asked.
“Sure,” Ollie said. “Haven’t you?”
“No,” Alfie told him. “Can you tell me what you were hospitalized for?”
Ollie looked thrilled that someone had asked. “Well, when I was two, I used to hide in the clothes dryer. One day the housekeeper accidentally turned on the dryer while I was inside it, and I broke my arm.”
“Okay,” Alfie said, scribbling a quick note.
“Then, when I was three, I swallowed a bunch of miniature My Little Ponies, and when they wouldn’t come out the regular way, they had to be removed.”
Charlie winced. He didn’t dare ask how they had been removed.
“Is that it?” Alfie said.
“Nope,” Ollie said. “When I was three and a half, I ate some poisonous mushrooms that I found in the yard. When I was four, a giant dog attacked me after I tried to ride it. When I was six, I parachuted off the roof of my house, but the chute didn’t open. When I was seven, I wanted a pet jellyfish, so I tried to catch one at the beach. When I was nine, I tried welding. And last year, I had to go to the emergency room after I ate my mom’s bath beads.”
Charlie noticed that Alfie had stopped taking notes. “You’re how old?” Alfie asked.
“I’ll be twelve in September,” Ollie replied.
“And you seem like a pretty smart kid.”
Ollie smiled sheepishly. Charlie had heard from several reliable sources that Ollie got straight As every year. That was one of the reasons he’d never been expelled.
“So why would a smart eleven-year-old eat a bunch of bath beads?” Alfie asked, mystified.
Ollie shrugged. “They just smelled really amazing, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. My doctor says I have poor impulse control. That’s what the blue pills are for, I think.”
Alfie looked over at Charlie. “This is hopeless,” he said. “There’s no way to figure out what might be giving Ollie immunity. It could be anything—the pills, the poisonous mushrooms, the jellyfish venom, the bath beads.”
“Whatever is helping Ollie, he’s not the only one who’s got it,” Charlie said. “That girl Poppy was immune too. And she didn’t seem like the type who’d go around jumping off roofs or eating bath beads.”
“We’re going to have to talk to her,” Alfie said. “We need to figure out what the two of them have in common.”
Charlie thought of the girl who’d risked everything to stay in Orville Falls to take care of her family. Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine Poppy having anything in common with the dog-riding delinquent on Alfie’s bed.
When the three boys arrived at the purple mansion, Charlie set off in search of hi
s stepmother. He found her in the kitchen, where four pots of bizarre-smelling goop were bubbling on the stove. Charlotte was moving from one to the next, smelling and stirring and sipping.
“Where’s Dad?” Charlie asked. He needed to make sure they could talk in private.
“He took Jack to the supermarket,” Charlotte told him in a cheerful tone. “I asked them to pick up a few extra supplies.”
Charlie stared at her. She was far from the defeated person Charlie had left behind an hour earlier. Something had happened in the time he’d been gone. He was just about to ask, when his friends interrupted.
“Hi, Mrs. Laird. Whatcha making?” Ollie asked. He dipped a finger into a bowl of a white, creamy substance and stuck his finger into his mouth.
“Hi, Oliver,” Charlotte said, looking a little confused to see him. “I’m trying to find a way to unclog people’s brains. By the way, that stuff you just licked off your finger is foot cream. And you’re very lucky it’s edible.”
“It’s delicious! I bet feet wouldn’t get such a bad rap if more of them tasted like this,” Ollie said. “This foot cream is almost as tasty as that poison ivy stuff you made.”
Charlotte grimaced but didn’t comment. “Hi, Alfie,” she said instead. “How’s the Channel Four meteorology department?”
Alfie turned bright red and shot a withering glance at Charlie.
“What?” Charlie responded defensively. “I had to tell her why I was going over to your house at the crack of dawn!”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Charlotte assured Alfie. “When I was your age, I had a crush on the guy who read out the lottery numbers. His name was Bob Gruber.” She sighed dreamily. “I still remember him fondly.”
Alfie’s face turned even redder. “I assure you, Mrs. Laird, my interest in Stormy Skies is purely scientific.”
“Yeah, it’s a little bit chemistry and a whole lotta biology,” Charlie said. Ollie giggled, and Charlotte bit her lip to keep from laughing. Alfie did not look amused. “But Stormy’s not the reason we’re here. Alfie and I think we may have a key to the antidote.”