A Bad Night for Bullies

by Gary Ghislain

  “Good.” She held out her hand and I shook it, like we were back to the first time we met. As we started toward school, I did my best to hide how lost I felt, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Stone. I felt like crap.

  “You’re not going to be in this horrible mood all through this friendship, right?” she asked after a while.

  “I don’t know. Cheer me up like you said you would.”

  “Okay.” She stopped. “Why won’t anyone kiss Dracula?”

  I could think of a million reasons that it was a bad idea to kiss Dracula. “I don’t know.”

  “Because he has bat breath. Bat breath! Get it? Haha! Feeling better?”

  “Marginally.”

  I wanted to ask her what she had done with the Stone, but I didn’t want her to know I was obsessing about it.

  “It’s very well hidden,” she said, reading the question in my eyes. “If you want to find it, you’ll have to learn to fly first.”

  “Story of my life,” I said.

  She smiled and we started walking again.

  “How’s Suzie?” I asked, wondering if right that minute she was looking all over the house for the Stone. I hoped she wouldn’t find it before I did. As far as I was concerned, I had dibs. The Stone should belong to me.

  “Still sick, like you. Not going to school, unlike you. And I know she and Dad started searching the house as soon as I left.”

  “Can I join them?” I said, only half joking.

  She lightly punched my arm. “In your dreams.”

  Mrs. Richer’s strong dose of dullness made my headache and nausea that much more brutal. I crossed my arms on my desk and nestled my head on top. At some point, I must have started dozing off. Ilona nudged me just as I was slipping away.

  “What!” I said, way too loudly.

  She nodded toward Mrs. Richer. Our teacher had stopped reading, and it had nothing to do with me sleeping through class. There was a huge commotion coming from the hallway—people yelling, dogs barking, doors banging open and closed, and a general uproar that didn’t belong in a normal school day. Mrs. Richer went to see what was going on.

  “Oh, my!” she said, jumping away from the door like she’d seen a monster. And in a way, she had. Jonas Hewitt, Alex’s dad, blew through the doorway, two of his dogs at his heels. He was carrying a thick plank of wood that looked ideal for beating someone to a pulp.

  “Alex! Where are you? You son of a gun!” he yelled, ignoring Mrs. Richer, who was shouting about calling the police. “Where is he, the little rat?”

  Old Hewitt was a nasty, red-haired giant with an ogre’s beard and a stomach like a barrel of meat pushing against his grimy shirt, the buttons threatening to fly off and shoot people in the eyes. He had an enormous nose, which was particularly red and blue that morning.

  “Mr. Hewitt!” Mrs. Richer screamed. “Jonas! School is the last place where you would find your son.”

  He gave her a long, nasty look, then turned and pointed the tip of the plank at the class. “Any of youse see him, you tell him he’s gonna pay for killing that dog. You hear me?” He pushed Mrs. Richer out of his way and moved on to the next classroom. Everyone but me and Ilona went to the door to see the rest of the show.

  “Did Suzie use the Stone anywhere near those dogs?” Ilona asked. “Like in the Owl House?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Oh, cheese.”

  The police arrived, and Jonas Hewitt went. Soon there were dozens of rumors about Alex and the dead dog going around school. The known facts were scarce: the night before, about the time Suzie turned the Stone, Alex had left the Hewitt grounds with a couple of dogs. He hadn’t been seen since, and his father had found one of the dogs near the old cemetery, dead. Some people said the dog had been strangled. Some said Alex had shot it and fled to escape his father’s punishment. Others said Alex had been kidnapped, and his dog killed by the kidnappers. They blamed vagrants. They blamed UFOs. They blamed some ancient man-eating monster rumored to live in the Mallow Marsh.

  “That woman I saw in the attic, the one who attacked Suzie last night, could she have killed the dog and taken Alex?” I asked as we crossed the athletic field during lunch break.

  “Yesterday, I would have said no. Today … maybe. If the Stone can really make you stand …”

  My heart lifted. She believed me!

  But then she fixed me with a stony look. “Which does not make it not evil. It just means it’s even more powerful—and more dangerous—than I thought.”

  We reached the bleachers, where we’d decided to have our lunch, far from prying eyes and ears. Ilona sat on the lowest row, and I pulled around to sit in front of her. She grabbed my ham and cheese sandwich out of my lunchbox when she saw me wince and look away from it.

  “So, thanks to you guys,” she went on, “there’s a dead lady going around killing pooches and snatching bullies.” She shook the sandwich in front of my face. “You’re sure you’re not going to eat any of this?”

  I turned away. Food was out of the question for what I believed would be the rest of my life.

  Ilona had come to school with ten dollars instead of a lunchbox because she didn’t understand how a school could have no proper cafeteria. Now she opened the sandwich and threw away all the pickles and the ham, before biting into it and making a face. “Tell your mom not to use so much mustard next time.”

  She dropped the uneaten sandwich back into the lunchbox and moved on to the slice of savory pie Mum had packed. She was chewing thoughtfully when we saw Alex’s gang of bullies coming across the field. So much for our brilliant plan to stay off their radar.

  “We’re not going to have enough pie for all of them,” Ilona said calmly. “You can give them what’s left of the sandwich. Hope they like mustard.”

  “They probably don’t. We better leave.” I looked around for an escape route.

  She shook her head. “We’re good here.”

  Most of the time I thought Ilona’s bravery was a good thing. But sometimes, like when a pack of notoriously bloodthirsty bad boys showed up, it sucked.

  The boys arrived and spread out, sizing us up.

  “This is our spot,” Peter, the supersized bully, said.

  “Times have changed.” Ilona kept eating, with no apparent intention of moving. “From now on, this is everybody’s spot. Right, guys?”

  Peter looked back at his friends. They were sizing him up now. He had to do something fast. “You’re going to have to learn your place here, freak.”

  “Now, that’s wrong, calling people names.” Ilona dropped what was left of the pie into my lunchbox. “I’m starting to dislike you. I disliked Alex. And look what happened to him.”

  “What happened to him?” Peter suddenly sounded way less confident.

  “My theory?” she said. “He’s gone to a better world, kicking and screaming.”

  “What did you do to him?” Ronny, the mini-bully, asked.

  “What I did to him isn’t the right question.” And she left it at that, turning to face me, as if Peter and the other boys were no longer there. “Is there anything sweet in that lunchbox, other than fruit?”

  Peter looked at her carefully. “What’s the right question?”

  “Oh.” She stood up and went really close to him, like a nanometer away. He couldn’t back away from her in front of his friends, but I’m sure he wanted to.

  “The right question is What came out of the night and took him?” She spoke in an over-the-top low voice, channeling a voice-over from a horror movie trailer.

  “What took him?” Ronny asked, biting into the bait.

  “Good question.” Ilona walked over to Ronny.

  I never saw those guys so tense before. On a normal day, they would have been torturing us with huge grins on their faces. But that was impossible with Ilona. She was bully-proof.

  She turned to me. “Tell him what took their friend and killed his dog.”

  “Me?”

  They hu
ngrily transferred their attention to me.

  “You know something we don’t, English boy?” Peter asked.

  I realized that actually, yes, I did know something they didn’t. I wasn’t the same boy they used to torture. Thanks to the Goolz and the Stone of the Dead, I had experienced things, seen things they couldn’t even imagine. They were still just kids, whereas I had transformed.

  “Tell them,” Ilona insisted. “Let them know why they should be afraid in the dark.” She winked at me.

  “Right.” I smiled. I was in the sweet spot where fear turns into rage and rage turns into delicious revenge.

  “The thing that took your friend and killed his dog,” I said, mimicking Ilona’s horror-movie voice. “It tasted blood … and it will come back for more.” I winked at Peter like Ilona had winked at me.

  He looked like his head was about to explode from shock. Everything was getting out of whack for him: his friend had disappeared, and the guy in the wheelchair wasn’t scared of him anymore.

  “You’re gonna get what’s coming to you, English boy,” he finally managed to say, pointing a shaky finger at me.

  Someone shouted and we all turned to see Mr. Turner, the school janitor, limping toward us at high speed. The boys looked relieved to have an excuse to leave.

  “Beware, guys!” Ilona called after them as they walked away. “This is going to be a bad night for bullies!”

  Mr. Turner shooed us off, muttering all sorts of choice words about kids in general, and especially the ones at our school as he stooped to pick up cigarette butts.

  “Harold Bell, you were abso-freaking-lutely great!” Ilona said as we went up the hill toward the school building, causing pangs of pride to shoot through my entire body. “‘It tasted blood … and it will come back for more.’ Ha! Brilliant! You scared the big cheese out of them!”

  “That was fun,” I agreed, remembering the fear in Peter’s eyes with glee. “It almost made me forget that I’m dying inside.”

  Our victory even brought back some of my appetite. I opened the lunchbox on my lap, grabbed the abandoned pickleless, hamless sandwich, and bit into it. Ilona had been dead wrong—the extra mustard was the best thing about that sandwich. “But we still don’t know what really happened to Alex and his dog. Not for sure,” I said.

  “You’re right,” she said. Her eyes shone the way they had the moment before she shoved Alex off the pier. “You’re totally right.”

  “About what?”

  “We have to find out what happened to him. And we have to do it tonight.”

  I dropped the sandwich back into the box. I should have swallowed the mouthful I was chewing while I had the chance. Now, it was going to stick in my throat.

  13

  A BAD NIGHT FOR BULLIES

  We agreed to go back to the Owl House right after school.

  “We should have brought the Stone with us,” I said for the gazillionth time since we’d left school. “Nothing weird is going to happen without it.”

  Ilona was pushing my chair, helping me across the rocky old graveyard as we approached the abandoned church.

  “Not happening. No one is ever touching the Stone again, not Dad, not Suzie, and definitely not you,” she responded for the gazillionth time. We reached the church and she came around in front of me. “Do you enjoy being sick?”

  “I’m not that sick anymore,” I lied, holding her biting, beautiful stare. “I feel way better.”

  “Do you believe me when I say the Stone would kill you? Even Dad understands that.” She nodded at the tombstones around us. “Do you want to join them?”

  I looked down at my legs rather than at the graves, my frustration mounting again. I believed her. But I still wanted the Stone.

  “Harold? Do you believe me?” she asked again.

  “I do,” I conceded.

  “Good.” She gently touched my shoulder, then turned to face the church.

  “I guess I need to go in there, then,” she said, hands on her hips.

  I nodded reluctantly. She picked up a stick and used it to clear some leaves out of the hole Suzie had dug, then threw the stick over her shoulder, dropped to her knees, and crawled into the building.

  “Scream if you see anything horrifying. Like Alex’s body. Or worse,” I said as I approached the hole. But she didn’t reply.

  “Ilona?”

  Still no answer.

  “Talk to me!”

  Silence.

  “If anything’s strangling you or eating your tongue, just knock twice on the wall.”

  She knocked twice on the wall.

  “Very funny,” I said. I went to the back door and Ilona opened it for me.

  “Is there anything in there?”

  “Yes, an answer to some of our questions.”

  “Which questions?”

  I followed her in and she pointed at what she had found: Alex’s BB gun, the one he’d been carrying when he came to feed the owls, was lying on the floor by the altar.

  She gave it a little kick. “He’s been hiding in here.”

  “Or someone dragged him in. Or something.”

  “So, I have good news and bad news,” she said, brushing dirt and spiderwebs out of her hair and off her black dress.

  “Start with the good,” I suggested.

  “We’re going to spend the evening together. And since I like you, I see it as a good thing.”

  “Since I like you too, I think that’s a brilliant idea,” I said. I was trying to sound cool, but my burning cheeks weren’t helping.

  “The bad news,” she continued, “is that we’re going to spend the evening here, with that gun, waiting for the thing that took Alex to show up.”

  The Hewitt dogs had been silent so far, but now they started to bark in the distance. We both turned at the sound.

  “Funny,” I said. “Sounds like the dogs don’t like your plan.”

  “It’s a great plan,” she objected. “Let’s go home, get ready, and prove them wrong.”

  Mum agreed with the dogs, though. She thought going out that night was a terrible plan, even after I drank a couple cups of her fart tea and did my best to pretend I felt perfectly fine.

  Of course I didn’t tell her about the cemetery or the hunt for the missing bully—I told her Ilona and I were going to the beach for a nighttime picnic.

  But Mum knew there was something I wasn’t telling her. And to make things worse, everyone in Bay Harbor was talking about Alex’s disappearance and the dead dog. Mum was completely freaked out and ready to lock me up at home.

  “I’m just going to eat a sandwich and watch the ocean, right there in front of the house,” I said, pointing out the window past the dunes. “Nothing bad is going to happen.”

  Mum started making the sandwiches, even though I told her I could do it myself. She was too nervous to stand still, and I could tell she was fighting the urge to send me to my room and barricade the door.

  “I want you home by eight o’clock sharp or I’ll come out and drag you home in front of your girlfriend.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But she’s not my girlfriend.”

  I moved closer to the counter. “Can you make a couple sandwiches without ham or pickles? And go easy on the mustard.”

  There was a knock on the door. Mum gave me a dark look and abandoned the sandwiches to go open it.

  Ilona wasn’t dressed in her trademark black dress. She had swapped it for black jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, black boots, her usual black coat, and a black beanie to finish off the look. She looked like she was dressed for a bank robbery, not a picnic on the beach.

  “You ready?” she asked, standing on her toes to look at me over Mum’s shoulder.

  “Mum? Are the sandwiches ready?” I asked.

  Mum mumbled something about how silly it was to make sandwiches without ham, pickles, and mustard, and went back into the kitchen to make butter and cucumber ones instead.

  “Why so much black?” I asked, pulling my jacket do
wn from its hook by the door.

  “To make myself one with the night.”

  Mum heard that. She sighed and slammed my lunchbox closed. “That’s it. I’m coming with you.”

  “Mum!”

  “We will be fine, Margaret,” Ilona said, punching me on the shoulder. “We just need a little fresh air and some freedom after a long, stuffy day spent not skipping school.”

  I zipped up my jacket and Mum gave me my lunchbox. “Eight o’clock! Sharp! Or I’m coming out to get you,” she reminded me.

  “Absolutely,” Ilona said.

  “She’s not buying it,” I told Ilona when we finally escaped the house. I put the lunchbox in my backpack, along with the flashlight and chocolate candies I’d already packed, and hung the bag on the handles of my wheelchair.

  Mum came out on the porch to watch us walk toward the beach.

  “Eight o’clock? Seriously?” Ilona said, once we passed the first dune and Mum couldn’t see us anymore. “There’s no way you’ll be back by eight o’clock. This could take the entire night.”

  Mum had lifted the no-phone part of my punishment in case we were attacked by a bully-snatching thug. I checked the time. It was six o’clock and the sky was already nearly dark. “I give Alex or the attic lady two hours to show up. If I break Mum’s rules one more time, she’s going to box me in my room till spring.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to have a father like mine, someone who doesn’t know up from down and never remembers your birthday or shows up to a PTA meeting. Sometimes it’s great.”

  “Did you tell him where we were going and why?”

  “I said I was going out. He mumbled something about quantum mechanics and asked me to give him back the Stone of the Dead.”

  “Did you?” I asked, too eagerly.

  “Nope,” she said. “Hint: if you’re about to ask the same thing, here’s my answer: No Stone for you!”

  I was silent, doing my best to hide my frustration as we took a turn north toward the Owl House, leaving the beach behind.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said. “What about … your father?”