by Jason Segel
“Nope,” Charlie admitted. “She delivered the gargoyle and left without saying hello.”
Jack looked back and forth between his brother and stepmother. “So she was the one who captured the creature?”
“Yep,” Charlotte said. “And Charlie says she brought it here. Which means you might be right about INK being a good guy.”
“It’s possible,” Charlie said. “But I’m not ready to give her a medal. She hasn’t explained why she made the Tranquility Tonic yet.”
“Still! This is great news!” Jack said merrily, tucking into his breakfast. “Where’s Dad?” he asked with his mouth full of food. It was a good question. As long as Charlie had known his father, Andrew Laird had never missed a breakfast.
Charlotte shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “He had to get to work early,” she told the boys.
They must have argued again when Charlotte got home, Charlie thought. Even if ICK didn’t manage to destroy any worlds, she was definitely doing terrible things to his family. It had to end. And it had to end now.
—
At school, Charlie set out in search of his friends, and the first one he found was Paige. In fact, she was standing so close to his locker that Charlie almost wondered if she’d been hanging out there, waiting for him to arrive. After he told her the news, Paige joined the hunt for Alfie and Rocco. But they’d only made it a few steps down the hall when Paige threw out an arm, catching Charlie in the stomach and bringing him to a halt. Just ahead of them, a girl carrying a large cardboard box was walking into Ms. Abbot’s classroom. She looked familiar, but Charlie couldn’t figure out who she was. The girl was wearing a pair of acid-washed blue jeans, neon pink sneakers, and a bejeweled T-shirt with a fluffy black kitten on the front.
“Hold up, is that INK?” Paige gasped. “OMG, what is that poor girl wearing?”
Charlie shook his head in amazement. INK looked like she’d traveled back in time to the 1980s and raided a third grader’s closet. No wonder no one else in the hall seemed to recognize her. Charlie and Paige rushed toward Ms. Abbot’s class and peeked inside. They watched INK pull pieces of chemistry equipment out of the box and arrange them carefully on a table at the front of the room.
“Do you need any help with the assembly, India?” Charlie couldn’t see Ms. Abbot, but he recognized her voice at once. She was back on the job. Charlie and Paige traded an astonished look.
“Oh, I think I can manage,” INK said. “I’m just waiting for Jancy to arrive with the other box.”
“Move it or lose it, Laird,” said a gruff but friendly female voice behind Charlie and Paige. It was Jancy Dare, carting an enormous box of beakers, flasks, and tubes. Not only was she the picture of health, she was sporting the same wide, toothy smile she usually wore after knocking a quarterback unconscious. “Hey, guys, looks like we have a couple of visitors,” she announced, bodychecking Charlie as she entered the room. Jancy’s boyfriend (or servant) followed in her wake, carrying a tiny box of pipettes. As soon as Lester saw Charlie, he tackled him with a fierce hug.
Just as Charlie managed to free himself from Lester’s unexpected embrace, INK spun around to face her guests. She didn’t say a word. It wasn’t just her clothes that had changed, Charlie realized. INK didn’t look like a doll anymore. She seemed far more human than she had before.
“Charlie! Paige! Welcome!” Ms. Abbot stepped into view. She was still dressed in black, but her dark wig was gone and her naturally blond hair was pulled back in a chic ponytail. She laughed out loud at the shock on their faces. “Looks like we’ve left you completely speechless. Come in and we’ll explain what’s going on.”
Paige glanced around the room. Darwin the snake was in his cage, and Ms. Abbot’s collection of animal brains was back on the shelf. “Does this mean you’re staying in Cypress Creek?” Paige asked the teacher.
“I’ll be staying in town for now,” said the teacher. “And even if I do decide to leave, I promise, there won’t be any more running.”
“What about India?” Charlie asked, gesturing toward INK. “What’s her story? Is she staying too?”
“I think I’ll let her tell you,” Ms. Abbot said. “She has a much nicer accent than I do.”
India stepped toward them. “I’m staying in Cypress Creek because I want to go to school,” she said politely.
“And I’m gonna make sure nobody bothers my friend while she gets an education,” Jancy added with a menacing air as she pummeled her left palm with her right fist. Lester tittered.
India set her equipment down on the table and turned her attention to the football player. “You sounded quite aggressive just then, Jancy. Are you sure you’re feeling well?” she asked with concern.
“Everything’s peachy,” Jancy said with a sinister laugh. “Messing with Laird always makes me feel awesome.”
India offered Charlie an apologetic smile. “I suspect that Jancy has been suffering from pesticide poisoning for quite some time now,” she explained. “It may have been responsible for some of her more unpleasant behavior over the past few months.”
“Yeah, I’m not so sure about that,” Charlie remarked. “Jancy’s been the same way for as long as I’ve known her.”
“Watch it, Laird!” Jancy barked.
“Don’t make her angry,” Lester warned ominously. “You know what happens when she gets angry.”
“I think unpleasant may be part of Jancy’s personality,” Paige added.
“That is another possible explanation,” India conceded.
“Hey!” Jancy shouted. “I’m serious! Stop talking about me like I’m not here!”
“Sorry,” Charlie said. He hadn’t come to start a fight. “Do you mind if we ask INK—I mean, India—about your miraculous recovery?”
Jancy fumed for a moment and then grunted her permission. “Lester and me are gonna go get the rest of the stuff out of your trunk, Ms. A,” she told the teacher. “Laird and his girlfriend can talk about my health all they want, but my personality’s off-limits.”
“Of course,” said Ms. Abbot. “There will be no gossiping while you’re gone.”
Paige turned to India, wasting no time once the linebacker and her boyfriend (or servant) were gone. “So how did you figure out that Jancy had been poisoned?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “And how did you know what the treatment should be?”
A cloud passed over India’s face. “My father, George Kessog, was a chemist…,” she started to say.
“And a hero,” Ms. Abbot chimed in.
“Yes,” India agreed, her sadness transforming into a proud smile. “He was a hero too. When he was a very young man, he was sent to the front lines in World War One. Britain’s enemies were using poison gas on our troops. My father told Izzie and me about the horrifying symptoms of gas poisoning. And I remember he said that they usually began with very heavy perspiration.”
“And Jancy was sweating a lot the day the two of you met,” Charlie recalled.
“Yes. That’s why I asked her if she’d been near a war,” India said. “It was silly of me, I realize now. I hadn’t left the lighthouse for quite some time, and I didn’t know what was going on in the world. But as it turns out, I was on the right track. Pesticides and poison gas do similar things to the human body. Their symptoms and treatment are often the same. I knew how to treat Jancy because one hundred years ago, my father developed the treatment for gas poisoning.”
“He saved thousands of lives,” Ms. Abbot said.
“You will too,” India told the teacher. “And you’ll do it just as my father did, by using a chemical that came from one of the deadliest plants on earth.”
“A plant that I just happened to have growing in my greenhouse,” Ms. Abbot added, picking up the story where India had left off. It was almost as if they’d known each other for years.
“I stole Ms. Abbot’s belladonna to make my father’s formula,” India explained. “I slept in her garden shed the first night I arrived
in Cypress Creek, and I noticed she had some rather unusual plants growing around her house. After I met Jancy, I went back to see if there were any I could use to extract atropine. I was hiding in the woods when the three of you arrived that day to plant the poison garden. It was such good luck that belladonna was part of it!”
Paige crossed her arms and seemed to be letting it all sink in. “So you’re telling us you took the belladonna to save Jancy. You never wanted to hurt anyone?” she asked suspiciously.
“Certainly not!” India was aghast.
“Then how do you explain the Tranquility Tonic that you and your sister sold this summer?” Charlie blurted out, finally asking the question he’d been dying to have answered. If India couldn’t explain the tonic, it would prove that her do-gooder disguise was nothing more than an act. “Your little potion turned everyone in Orville Falls into sleepwalking zombies, and you almost destroyed three worlds!”
Ms. Abbot’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them as if she were watching a Ping-Pong game. “I don’t understand,” she said.
India sighed. “Unfortunately, I do,” she said. “I invented a potion I called Tranquility Tonic. It was meant to help people by preventing bad dreams. In fact, I made the first batch for my sister. She suffers from terrible nightmares.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Charlie said with a snort. “I’ve been stuck in your sister’s bad dream for the last week.”
“What?” Paige yelped. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
Charlie shrugged. “I was embarrassed. I don’t know what it means.”
India looked puzzled as well. “You’ve seen Izzie’s nightmare? She never invited me to visit, and I’m her twin sister.”
“Well, she didn’t exactly invite me,” Charlie said. “I just showed up unexpectedly. But you’re right about one thing. Your sister’s nightmare is pretty darn terrible.”
“I don’t doubt that it is,” said India. “We’d been living in the lighthouse for less than a month when Izzie’s fear opened a portal to the Netherworld. She passed over to the other side, and I followed. After that, she spent most of her time inside her nightmare while I waited for her in the Netherworld lighthouse. I suppose that’s when time stopped for both of us. From that point on, we never got older, we never slept, and we no longer needed to eat.
“My sister and I lived like that for decades, and the entire time, I never gave up trying to save her. Tranquility Tonic was my last resort. I thought if I could find a way to destroy Izzie’s nightmare, I might be able to set us both free. And for a while, Izzie let me believe that I’d finally succeeded. After I gave her the tonic, she said it worked so well that she wanted everyone in the Waking World to be able to buy it. So I wrote down the formula for her and she began to make more of it.
“But the truth was, Isabel never drank my tonic. She took my formula and added something awful to it instead.”
“She added despair,” said Charlie. That had been the tonic’s secret ingredient—the one that turned people into Walkers. Its only antidote, Charlie had discovered, was hope.
India nodded solemnly. “That’s correct. I had no idea that she was poisoning people in Orville Falls with it—or that she was planning to destroy the Netherworld—until the goblins arrived at the door of the Netherworld lighthouse. There were thousands upon thousands of them, and they were demanding I let them through the portal. My sister had promised them they could take over the Waking World as payment for helping her. I wasn’t going to let that happen, so I did the only thing I could think of.”
“You burned down the Waking World lighthouse,” said Paige.
India nodded again. “Yes, I came back to this world and destroyed our portal,” she said. “I knew there was another one in Cypress Creek, so I traveled all the way from Maine. I was hoping I could convince Izzie to come back to this side for good when I got here. But by the time I was able to talk to her, she was too mad at me to listen.”
“That may have been my fault,” Charlie admitted. “I made a real mess of things when I told her you started the fire in the lighthouse, didn’t I?” He’d known he had made a mistake when he saw the look on ICK’s face after he’d given her the news.
“It must have come as a shock to her. But don’t worry,” India tried to reassure him. “My sister may be angry at me, but she’ll come around. We’ve been together for almost a century, and we’ve never been apart until now. It’s been a month since I left the lighthouse. The second I set foot outside, it felt like a switch had flipped and I started getting older. I always wanted to grow up, but I don’t want to leave Izzie—and she won’t want to be left behind.”
Charlie opened his mouth, but it took him a moment to find the guts to speak. He was about to take an enormous risk. But everything he’d heard so far made him think INK could be trusted. “There’s something I need to tell you,” Charlie blurted out at last. “You and your sister might not be apart much longer. ICK is planning a trip to the Waking World. Actually, it’s more like an invasion.”
India didn’t seem terribly concerned. “Is Izzie talking about her so-called army again?” she asked. “You needn’t worry. That’s nothing but an empty threat. Isabel has been trying to build an army for years, but the Nightmares in the Netherworld never wanted anything to do with her plans. I suppose that’s why she had to turn to the goblins for help with the tonic. But there’s nothing those horrible little beasts can do for her now.”
Charlie shook his head. “Maybe that’s how things used to be, but something has changed,” he said. “I saw your sister in the Netherworld two nights ago. She had a crowd of Nightmares around her, and they seemed willing to do whatever she asked. And yesterday, she tried to break out of the purple mansion’s tower. I don’t know how many Nightmares she brought with her. There was definitely at least one Cyclops up there—not to mention the gargoyle she sent to find you.”
“I don’t know what could have changed,” INK told Charlie.
“I do,” Paige told the girl. “Don’t you see? Everything’s changed because ICK doesn’t have you anymore.”
There was a chance it would work, Charlie thought. A slim chance, but it was worth a shot. If India Kessog could bury the hatchet with Isabel and convince her sister to come to the Waking World for good, everyone’s problems would be solved. The sisters would have each other, and Charlie might not need to destroy the tower and its portal. So that afternoon after school, he and Jack took India home with them to the purple mansion.
Charlotte was at the stove, mixing a batch of breath deodorizer. She was so absorbed in her work that she didn’t hear the kids enter the kitchen. Charlie cleared his throat and his stepmother glanced over her shoulder.
“Hey there,” she said. Then she dropped her spoon and did a double take.
“Charlotte, I’d like you to meet India Kessog,” said Jack, performing the introductions. “Indy, this is my stepmother, Charlotte.”
Charlotte wiped her hands on her apron and cautiously offered one of them to the girl. “Hello, India,” she said. “I don’t know if you remember me. You and your sister used to leave notes for me in the Netherworld.”
India didn’t even blink. “Yes, I remember you well,” she said. “You grew up.”
Charlotte looked down, as if surprised to find herself in an adult body. “I did,” she said.
India smiled. “I’m looking forward to growing up too,” she said. “Where is the other girl you used to bring to the Netherworld? Is she here?”
Charlotte cast a look at Charlie and Jack.
“That was our mom,” Charlie explained. “She died a few years ago.”
“My mother is dead too,” India told him. “I’m terribly sorry to hear about yours. She always seemed quite nice. I would have liked very much to have known her.” She turned to Charlotte. “I tried to introduce you and your friend to my sister, but I believe I may have scared you away instead.”
“So the notes weren’t a…” Charlotte p
aused, as if searching for the right word. “A trick?”
“A trick? Oh no,” India answered. “My sister and I always thought we were the only humans who could enter the Netherworld. I was thrilled to discover there were two more girls like us. I thought Izzie might feel better if she had someone to talk to other than me.”
“But I never accepted your invitations. Veronica and I hid from you instead.” Charlotte was clearly aghast. “I’m so sorry.”
India shook her head. “You shouldn’t be. You were right to be cautious. The Netherworld is a very frightening place. When you’re there in the flesh, you have to be very careful. It’s a miracle none of us ever got eaten or trampled.”
“That’s true,” Charlotte said. “I can’t believe you survived all alone on the other side for so long.”
“We were there for eighty years,” India said, “but I don’t recall ever feeling alone. I had Izzie to look after. As much as I despised that terrible place, I couldn’t leave my sister, and she wouldn’t come back to the Waking World.”
“So you stayed to keep your sister company?” Jack asked.
“Of course,” India answered. “Wouldn’t you do the same for your brother?”
Jack shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so,” he admitted.
“Jack loves the Netherworld,” Charlie explained. “He’d go all the time if he could.”
“It’s fun to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there,” Jack said. “Still, I definitely would if you needed me to.”
Charlie didn’t know how to respond, so he mussed his little brother’s hair. “Why did your sister want to stay?” he asked India.
“I think this world scared her much more than the Netherworld,” India said. “The things we saw here were worse than anything we saw there.”
“What happened to you guys?” Jack asked.
India shook her head sadly. “That’s a story for another time,” she said. “You brought me here to talk to my sister. Perhaps we should find her?”
“Yes, of course,” Charlotte said. “We’re sorry for grilling you. Let’s go ahead and get up to the tower.”