by Tim Greaton
again. He had one in his hand, Bret had dropped one, which meant there should have been two in the box. What was going on?
“Zachary?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought we closed your door,” Bret said. “Does it pop open on its own?” He pointed to the door that was now ajar by at least a couple of inches. Zachary’s eyes slid from the open door to Bret. “Say something else.”
“What?”
“Say a couple of sentences.”
Bret stood up. “What are talking about? Am I missing something?”
“Yeah,” Zachary said, “a stutter.”
“What do you—” Bret paused in mid-sentence, and his face broke into an infectious smile. Zachary also had a grin smeared across his own face.
“My stutter,” Bret said. “It’s gone. I’m talking without a stutter? It the first time…EVER! But I don’t understand….”
“Must have been the rings,” Zachary said. “Maybe when we swapped memories, I got the st-st-stutter.”
Bret’s eyes flew wide in obvious horror.
“No, no,” Zachary laughed. “I’m just kidding. I can talk fine…well, at least as well as I ever could. Whatever happened, I’m really glad for you.” And he was.
“I feel like I should be practicing tongue twisters,” Bret said. “How’s this: ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.’”
“That’s better than me,” Zachary told him. “I’m not even sure I could say the whole thing without messing up. Sounds like you’re cured.” Zachary moved towards his door and peered out into Madame Kloochie’s dining room. Bret was still grinning when he glanced back and put a finger to his lips.
“What?” Bret whispered.
Zachary put his finger to his lips again and pointed toward the dining room. Gently, he pushed the door open so that Bret could see, too. The entire room was peppered with donuts. There must have been three dozen jelly and frosting spots on just the two walls they could see from the doorway. As one, they crept out into the larger room and saw that both the living and dining room walls looked like they’d developed a case of the measles, and the floors looked like lunchtime in the cafeteria at Boston Junior High.
“Madame Kloochie!” Zachary called out.
“Why didn’t we hear anything?” Bret whispered. “And when did she have time to do all this?” He checked his watch. “We weren’t in your room for that long.”
“If she was up here,” Zachary said softly, “I bet she has the wand and the ring, but why?”
“Or how she did it so fast,” Bret added.
It only took a couple of minutes to determine that she wasn’t upstairs, so Zachary left Bret in his bedroom hurried down into the store. There he found Madame Kloochie sitting on her stool beside the open cash register drawer. Oddly, she had just counted out the money and slid it into her shirt pocket just as she had earlier. She must have spent all her time taking the money out and putting it back in.
“What happened upstairs?” Zachary asked her.
“Madame Kloochie, please,” she said.
“Huh?”
“You should address your elders properly.” She reached for a donut.
“Madame Kloochie, could you please tell me what happened upstairs?”
“Seems pretty obvious to me,” she said.
“So you threw ALL those donuts? But why?”
“I had my reasons and now you have some cleaning to do.”
“How’d you make such a big—” For reasons that included the filled powdered donut she held like a warning in one hand, he rephrased his question: “How did all that happen without Bret and me hearing it?”
Madame Kloochie grinned, her thick orange lips a horrific site. “You and your friend were a whole lot more fun when you were younger. Quicker, too.”
“Could you at least tell me where the wand and the ring are?”
Having already taken a huge bite out of her donut, she mumbled, “Don’t know.”
Zachary gave up. If there was anything he’d learned since arriving at Station End, it was that Madame Kloochie seldom said anything of value. As she wiped her powdered sugar-covered lips on one thick forearm, he wondered if she even knew what a napkin was.
When he got back upstairs, Bret had already started cleaning the dining room mess. Though Zachary insisted several times that he could take care of it, Bret insisted on helping. So, they worked side by side which went pretty smoothly until they got to the living room. The couch and chairs made it difficult to reach the walls, pieces of smashed and crumbled donuts were all over the end tables, the seats, and even under much of the furniture. But when they started pulling the furniture out, something they hadn’t had a chance to do when they cleaned the first time, they discovered the worst of it. There were half a dozen partially eaten, rotten donuts on the carpet, and worst of all three bowls that seemed to hold science experiments. With one hand covering his nose, Bret held one of the bowls out like hazardous waste.
Zachary reached over the couch to take it and gagged. The smell was horrendous! He could see cereal O’s covered in blue hair-like mold with milk that had transformed into hard cracked lumps. Bret was obviously having all he could do to keep from vomiting, so Zachary hurriedly shoved the entire bowl—contents, spoon, and all—into the trash bag beside him. He did the same with the other two bowls they found under the chair beside the couch. Not waiting until the bag was full, Zachary dragged it out onto the back porch. If Madame Kloochie could lose all three bowls and spoons long enough to grow clumps, she obviously wouldn’t miss them in the trash.
From the look on Bret’s face, they got rid of the stink just in time.
It took them another half hour to clean the rest of the mess, at least as clean as they could make it, then they returned to Zachary’s room. The three friendship rings still sat on the bureau in the open leather box where Zachary had left them. They hadn’t seen any sign of the wand or the last ring.
“Zachary.” Bret pointed outside.
Thinking Gerald was in trouble again, Zachary shot his gaze toward the window. Taking a couple of steps closer, and not seeing the old man next door anywhere, he shook his head.
“On the windowsill.”
Zachary’s gaze dropped, and in disbelief he stared at the green magic wand sitting on the sill—outside the screen. How had it gotten out there? Where was the missing ring? And, more importantly, who had taken them in the first place?
Zachary returned the wand and the small box of rings to his father’s box and was getting ready to close the flaps when a tiny coffin barely large enough for a chipmunk or a small bird caught his eye. A woman with wild hair adorned its lid. Glancing uncertainly at Bret, who swallowed but didn’t otherwise move, Zachary picked up the coffin and slowly lifted the tiny lid. A huge column of thick smoke immediately billowed from the box, but rather than filling Zachary’s bedroom, the blackness swirled violently towards the floor and formed a charcoal black table and chair. Next, a pair of large green butterflies shot up out of the coffin—
No, not butterflies! Hands! Two putrid green hands!
Zachary plugged his nose and stumbled backwards, dropping the coffin. One of the severed green hands having grown to full size, swooped and caught the miniature casket, which it then placed gently on the midnight black table. More smoke, this time grayish white, spewed upward like volcanic ash and soon a 3-dimensional woman’s head appeared in the fog-like cloud. By this time, Bret had slipped toward the door and was ready to turn the knob and bolt at any moment. Zachary stood next to his ficus tree and tried to imagine why his father had such an eerie item. Though fog swirled around it, he couldn’t take his eyes off from the woman’s hair, which wasn’t really hair at all, and was instead several dozen writhing snakes. The way their tiny tongues darted in and out of their fanged mouths gave Zachary the willies.
“You have five thousand, four hundred, and thirty two messages,” the woman said, her eyes were focused not on Zachary or Bret, but instead on a lower spot.
“Messages for me?” Zachary asked.
She continued to stare down at the black chair.
“M-Maybe you need t-t-to sit,” Bret said.
Zachary noted that his friend’s stutter had returned as he tried to ignore the prickles of fear coursing up and down his back. He took a deep breath and settled into the black chair. The creepy green hands floated down to hover over the dark table in front of him. Why did they have to smell so bad, worse even than moldy cereal?
“You have five thousand, four hundred, and thirty two messages,” the woman repeated, only now she was focused on Zachary. With her dark eyes and perfectly smooth olive skin, she would probably have been considered beautiful if not for the writhing creatures that covered her head.
“They must be for my dad,” Zachary said, trying to ignore the ghastly green hands that seemed to be typing on an invisible keyboard in front of him. Black liquid oozed from the severed wrists and what looked to be bones protruded through the ooze. Unfortunately, they also smelled like the leftovers from a rotting corpse, which they obviously were. He fought the urge to gag.
The sentence “They must be for my dad.” appeared below the snake woman’s head. The dead hands were typing what he said!
“All five thousand, four hundred, and thirty-two—make that thirty-three—messages are for you,” she said. Her words also appeared in typed form below her head.
“You know who I am?” Zachary asked. He tried to push his chair further back from the disgusting sight and smell of the