by Dan Poblocki
For Amanda
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
{ABOUT A WEEK AGO}: URSULA & THE HOUSE
CASSIDY’S BOOK OF BAD THINGS, ENTRY #52: PARASITES
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CASSIDY’S BOOK OF BAD THINGS, ENTRY #56: ZOMBIES
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CASSIDY’S BOOK OF BAD THINGS, ENTRY #15: DEATH
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CASSIDY’S BOOK OF BAD THINGS, ENTRY #30: SLEEPWALKING
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
{THAT NIGHT}: MILLIE & THE MIRROR
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CASSIDY’S BOOK OF BAD THINGS, ENTRY #20: GETTING LOST
CHAPTER NINETEEN
{THAT EVENING}: OWEN & THE ANIMALS
CASSIDY’S BOOK OF BAD THINGS, ENTRY #22: HAUNTINGS
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
{ACROSS TOWN}: HAL & THE MANNEQUIN
CASSIDY’S BOOK OF BAD THINGS, ENTRY #9: NIGHTMARES
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CASSIDY’S BOOK OF BAD THINGS, ENTRY #25: CURSES
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CASSIDY’S BOOK OF BAD THINGS, ENTRY #2: PANIC ATTACKS
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
THE GINGERWICH CURSE
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
{THREE MONTHS LATER}: CASSIDY & THE FAMILY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
WHERE IS IT?
Ursula pawed carefully through the looming stacks of cardboard boxes.
Where did it go?
Her mind raced, but she forced herself to move slowly, as if that might quiet the voice screaming in her head. Inside every carton, she discovered only disappointment and dust and the useless junk she’d been unable to toss out for years. A painful pressure was building behind her eyes. It felt as though her ears were stuffed with marshmallows.
I’m sure I saw it only a few months ago!
The old woman clamped her lips upon a small box of matches. If she didn’t locate the lighter fluid now, tonight, she knew she may never have another chance. Something was wrong deep inside her chest. A painful rattle. For the past few days, she’d struggled for breath, wheezing, as if her lungs had shrunk to the size of raisins. Ursula was no fool. She hadn’t been to a doctor in maybe a decade, but she knew what was growing inside of her.
Darkness was coming. It was a shadow she’d felt wavering at the edges of her vision for years.
But it wasn’t her own death that frightened her.
Ursula stood in her living room, or what had once been a living room, and blinked away tears. Every inch of the place was a mess: bundles of newspapers and magazines and junk mail, bags of garbage and soiled clothes, and dried things that had once been food. From the floor to the ceiling, she’d stacked boxes she’d labeled with black marker again and again as the clutter had accumulated and changed and had tried to change her too. Ursula had fought it for as long she could, but by the time she’d discerned the depth of her predicament, she understood that there was no solution but the most drastic thing.
Her plan.
The first step was to remain calm. Stay quiet. Don’t speak. Don’t even think.
Where did I leave it?!
The first step was more difficult than she’d thought it would be.
The floor trembled. It knew. It heard her. A sudden pain split her forehead. Shadowy tendrils reached out to her, searching for a way into her skull. She was running out of time.
Hurry, you old fool!
The second step was to wet the room with the flammable liquid. Slowly. Gently. As if watering a garden. An everyday occurrence. A chore.
The house lurched, and the stacked boxes teetered toward her. She raised her arms to steady the closest ones, but something was mashing the inside of her chest, and she crumpled to her knees. The matchbox slipped from her mouth and matches spilled onto the floor.
Cartons tumbled, the weight of them smashing into Ursula’s back. She fell over. Gasping for breath, she slapped the piles of junk away from her.
The ceiling was blurry. She was too weak now to stand, but she glanced around, hoping that by some miracle the tin had fallen nearby. No such luck. The lighter fluid was still hiding. The limited light that filtered through the shaded windows during the day disappeared with the setting of the sun, and evening shadows lapped at her like waves.
She pursed her lips and set her brow.
Forget step two. She still had step three and a seed of hope. Strike a match. Burn it all.
If tonight was the night that life was to abandon her, Ursula had to know that none of her possessions, the things she’d collected for years, would leave this house. It all must burn with her. She thought of that old saying, the one about how all of our worldly belongings remain behind when we die: You can’t take it with you. If her plan succeeded, no one else would take it either.
The matchbox lay several inches from her face. A single match was beside it. With shaking hands, she took up the box and then clawed at the match, and for a moment, she remembered playing pick-up sticks with her brother and sister across an ocean. Unsteadily, she held the stick to the flint, suddenly overcome with the weight of what she was doing. This house had been her life. The things that surrounded her, The Collection, had become her reason for living. But she’d never imagined it would end her life. She cursed her uncle Aidan for leading her here, for leaving her this house, this burden.
She struck the match. A spark. A flame. In her surprise that it had worked, that the air had allowed the fire to bloom, the breath she’d been seeking all night long slipped from her lips and huffed out the light.
The floor trembled. The walls creaked. She knew that the something was laughing at her, but she had no voice to shout back. To tell it to shut up. And even if she had, her mind had begun to erase the words she might have used.
The shadows danced closer along the edges of her vision. She stared at the ceiling as it shrunk, smaller and smaller, into a dusty oval shape, an
echo of the old woman’s blue lips, silent, still, unable to take in even one last gasp before the mantle of darkness engulfed her entirely.
Parasites are creatures that keep themselves alive by invading or infecting the body of another living thing. This other living thing is called the host. The parasite feeds off the host, drinking its blood or eating it from the inside. Sometimes, the host dies. Then the parasite or the parasite’s little parasite babies move on to find another host to torture and kill.
Although plenty of parasites are bad, I think one of the most horrible parasites is the tongue-eating louse. Even the name is enough to make you want to gag.
Every kid has heard of lice, at least at my school. A single lice is called a louse. They’re the tiny bugs that sometimes live in your hair. My friend Janet caught them when she was really little. She says they bite and they’re itchy, but you can wash them away with a special shampoo, so it isn’t a big deal.
But there is a kind of louse that lives in the ocean that can grow quite large and disgusting. It swims inside the mouth of a fish and attaches itself to the fish’s tongue. Then, it slowly eats the tongue until there’s nothing left but a little stub inside the fish’s mouth. And worse, after that, it latches onto the stub and stays there, permanently, pretending to be the fish’s new tongue. And it survives by living off whatever the fish eats, nibbling any food that passes by on the way to the fish’s stomach. And there’s nothing the fish can do about it.
I am glad that I am not a fish. OR a louse!!!
CASSIDY BEAN CLOSED her notebook and glanced out the bus window. The world outside was a blur of green. She blinked several times, trying to capture mental snapshots of the scenery. A field of young corn. A tilted barn. Unending hills, lush with summer growth.
Having traveled nearly an hour from New York City already, Cassidy knew she was close to Whitechapel. The landscape was a good gauge. Fifteen minutes out: the yellow grasses of the Meadowlands and the yellow air above Elizabeth, New Jersey. Twenty minutes out: the broken sidewalks and graffiti-covered concrete walls of Newark’s side streets. Thirty minutes out: the ramshackle Victorian houses of Maplewood, Milburn, and Summit, surrounded by the first real vision of green and leaves and flowers and trees. Forty: the suburban sprawl of the towns and the malls just off Route 78. Fifty: the ridge and the sky and the purple distance of a western eternity … and beyond.
Here, at an hour out, the bus had begun its lazy descent toward the Delaware River, where another of New Jersey’s great ridges met the state of Pennsylvania.
Cassidy wouldn’t get that far. The hamlet where the Tremonts lived was nestled in a warrenlike grouping of peaks and valleys a couple miles north of the highway. Soon, the bus would stop at a small shopping center a few miles before the first visible twist of the upcoming river. That parking lot was where Mrs. Tremont had promised she’d be waiting with Joey to bring her the rest of the way to their home, a house where Cassidy had spent the past two summers as part of a program that brought city kids out to the countryside.
This summer was to be her third with the Tremonts. It was also to be her last. Next year, Cassidy would turn thirteen. Too old for the program. And so this was it: Whitechapel — The Final Chapter.
She drummed her fingers nervously on the cover of the notebook in her lap — a cheap journal with a black-and-white marbled cardboard cover that her next-door neighbor had given to her a few years back. The Tremonts had not finalized their decision to accommodate Cassidy until the previous week. The past couple of months had delivered a nerve-wracking series of almost-nots and wait-and-sees. What hurt was feeling that the Tremonts didn’t want her back again. But now she knew that wasn’t true. They’d said yes. Finally. Yes.
Dennis and Rose were like the dad and mom she’d always dreamed of. They treated her like one of their own children. One night, a couple years ago, after Rose had scolded her for leaving a bowl of melted ice cream on the coffee table in the living room, Cassidy had gone to sleep wearing a smile, pleased that Rose had spoken to her the same way she’d speak to Tony or Deb or Joey.
Tony, the oldest of the Tremonts’ three, was in college in Virginia where he spent summers working internships. Cassidy stayed in his bedroom, and whenever he’d visited while she was there, he’d slept on the pull-out couch in the den. Deb was in high school and spent most of her time with her older friends. But Cassidy and Joey were the same age, ten that first summer, and had become fast friends. They’d ridden bikes to the town pool, hiked the trails through the nearby state parks, trekked to the Dairy Queen for Blizzards, plopped exhausted onto the patio furniture out back, swatting at mosquitos, telling each other ghost stories late into the night.
The house in Whitechapel felt more like home than the apartment she shared with her mom, in the supposed center-of-everything, ever could.
When her social worker had called and told her that “the placement” had gone through, she’d run upstairs to tell Janet and Benji, her best friends in the apartment building. They were disappointed she was leaving them, but she promised to send postcards and they pretended to cheer up. That night, her mother had been as unexcited as she’d been the first two summers, but Cassidy was used to her mother’s eye rolls, her tight lips, her silences. Later, wrapped up in the afghan quilt on the couch in the small living room, Cassidy couldn’t sleep. The social worker’s words ran through her head, two in particular: host family. Something about the term had bothered Cassidy, and it had continued to bother her for the next few days. The words echoed even as she climbed onto the bus at the Port Authority that morning.
Now, she drummed her fingers on the notebook cover again and shivered. The air-conditioning that had felt so nice an hour ago was suddenly overwhelming. She pulled a sweatshirt from the backpack on the seat beside her and slipped it over her shoulders, the sleeves extending over her chest like a pair of extra arms. She pressed her lips together and glanced down at the notebook — her journal, her Book of Bad Things. Five minutes ago, it came to her, the meaning of the words host family. She’d yanked the book from her bag, flipping through pages, desperate to find the relevant entry. It had been number fifty-two. Parasites. Parasites need hosts to live.
Cassidy squeezed her eyes shut. Why did the Tremonts wait so long to say yes? she wondered. Why didn’t they write to me this past year? Did I do something wrong?
Yes, the previous summer had ended badly, but what had happened with Joey’s dog, Lucky … That hadn’t been her fault. Had it?
The driver eased toward the highway exit. They were almost there. Cassidy breathed deeply, counted to ten. She wanted this summer to be perfect. She wished to write lovely poems about it, maybe in a new journal for happy memories instead of in the book on her lap, the one she clung to like a weapon.
When the bus halted in front of the supermarket, she stood up, grabbed her backpack, and raced up the aisle. Outside, she glanced around quickly, but didn’t see Rose’s white hatchback. The driver handed over her bulky luggage, which she promptly dropped onto the pavement. She heard a crunching sound and her stomach squelched. There went the gifts she’d packed.
She dragged her belongings to the curb and watched as the driver sealed up the luggage compartment, climbed aboard, and shut the door. The bus shifted into reverse. She was thinking, as the bus pulled back like a curtain at a magic show, that Joey would be standing on the other side, waving excitedly at her, his mom beside him, a watchful hand on his shoulder. But when the bus moved out of its parking space and chugged forward, back toward the highway, Cassidy realized that she was alone.
The Tremonts hadn’t shown up.
THE NOONDAY SUN glared from above, baking the sidewalk underneath her. The longer Cassidy sat, the damper she became. She barely had two inches of sleeve at her shoulder upon which to wipe her brow, and that had already been soaked through several times. She imagined that she looked like a drowned ferret — a great way to greet Joey after a year. She tucked the sweatshirt into her backpack.
&nbs
p; After another twenty minutes, however, Cassidy understood that her damp hair, shiny skin, and itchy red eyes should be the least of her worries. Every vehicle that approached from the street made her sit up straight, but the hazy glare off the asphalt was blinding, and Cassidy could only gauge that they weren’t coming for her when they continued on down the road. They’re just running late, she told herself.
Unless the social worker had gotten it wrong.
The host family has decided to cleanse themselves of the parasite.
Cassidy shuddered and then stood, trying to think about what she and Joey would be doing later that day. A swim perhaps? Ice cream? A game of H-O-R-S-E in his driveway? What kinds of stories would he have to share? She wracked her mind for every interesting thing that had happened to her since she’d last been to Whitechapel, trying to cement the thoughts in place so there would be no awkward pauses in their conversation when he arrived.
After a while, she noticed that the sun had moved significantly across the sky. It had been more than an hour since the bus had gone. Maybe it was time to call someone. But what if, when she reached out to the Tremonts, they hung up on her, told her off … laughed?
Cassidy sat, removing her notebook and pen from her bag again. Turning to a fresh page, she swallowed down what felt like a large pebble creeping up her esophagus and then scribbled: Entry #117 — Abandonment … Too many examples to note and not enough pages left.
She scanned her words several times, felt her heartbeat slowing slightly and then smacked her tongue against her upper palate as moisture returned to her mouth. A momentary relief.
She knew that most of the kids who lived out here had cell phones and smart phones and the latest portable communication devices, but Cassidy had never owned one of her own. The city still had quite a few pay phones available if she needed to reach her mother. But the country is not the city. Glancing around the lot, she saw no phones.
Gathering herself together, she dragged her bags across the blistering sidewalk to the supermarket. The sensor flashed and the glass door slid open with a whoosh. Cold air blasted Cassidy’s warm face. The store was almost entirely empty. A Beatles song played softly from hidden speakers. Of the twelve check-out lanes, only one was open, manned by a tall, thin teenage boy dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans, and a red-vest uniform that sat wide on his bony shoulders. The boy was flipping through a comic book. He barely glanced up as Cassidy approached.