Jillybean's First Adventure

by Peter Meredith

  It had dawned on her that no expedition was complete without a map. “We need a map,” she told Ipes before he could ask. She wrote the word “Map” on the top of the paper, then curled her lip at the way the three-letter word gave the impression that it was sliding towards the bottom of the page. She was the first to acknowledge that her penmanship had degraded since she had missed so much school, which she assumed had been going on for everyone else this entire time. Now her blocky letters would sometimes come out backwards and they had an annoying habit of “slipping away” just like this one annoying word.

  With much more care, she drew a map of her neighborhood as seen from her window. She even drew little blocks to represent houses, marking those she knew: Bily, Becca, Paw-la, Mister… “S-m-i-t-h? Is that right?”

  Yes, except Paula is spelled with a U. Remember she gave you that note, and her name had a U right in the middle. It’s probably like a foreign name.

  “Oh sure,” she replied, without wondering how he knew about the note. He never went to her school except once for Show-n-Tell.

  She made a mess of things as she fixed the mistake and had no room to write Miss Colter’s name in the next box. The box after that was Mrs. Bennett’s house and Jillybean only put an X through it.

  Mrs. Bennett used to be this mean ole lady before she turned into a mean ole monster. Ipes said it was because there wasn’t all that much to change with her. For months now she had wandered back and forth in front of her old house, stopping every once in a while to glare for no reason at all, or to eat leaves from a tree.

  “Now what?” Jillybean asked, after slipping the marker and notebook into the backpack. “A knife?” By this she meant something more than a butter knife.

  Bringing along a real knife, one with a sharp edge and pokey point would break a very significant rule that her parents had set down in stone back when Jillybean was a baby.

  It was significant that Ipes, who was always such a ‘fraidy cat’ that Jillybean wondered if he was part chicken, said, I think so.

  From the “forbidden” kitchen drawer, she chose a carving knife that was as long as her forearm. She wanted to pull it from its cardboard sleeve and brandish it, but Ipes reminded her just how easily eyes could be popped and made her put it in her pack.

  “I guess that’s it,” she said, feeling the fear swirl around in her stomach which was otherwise empty. She hadn’t eaten in two days and it would have been much longer if her mommy hadn’t stopped eating all those weeks before.

  Go slow, Ipes warned as Jillybean went to the front door. Be Jilly-rabbit. Eyes up, ears alert, muscles ready to run. He coached her in that deeper, daddy-like voice until she reached out a shaking hand and opened a door that hadn’t been cracked in two months.

  What struck her first was the silence. There were no kid noises or car noises or plane noises. There were no barking dogs or radios blaring from two blocks over. It was a heavy, heavy silence, almost as if the air had thickened up and that in time it would gradually solidify until it couldn’t be walked through at all.

  A stray breeze ruined that mental image and yet the tiny breath of wind only made the silence feel that much greater. It knocked an old curled-in leaf from a tree and its whispering impact as it struck the street seemed to be magnified. Jillybean hunched at the click, ready to dart back inside, certain it would bring the monsters running from all over.

  But there were no monsters as far as she could see. After a few seconds, when she hadn’t yet got eaten, she edged further out the door, going all the way to the sidewalk in front of her house—and it was okay.

  There on the sidewalk was the remains of her bike. A long winter had speckled it with rust and the tires sagged so badly they were about to drip off the rims; otherwise it was fine…or perhaps “normal” was the better word. Rust was to be expected she was sure, and the tires always had been a bit holey, bleeding air over time.

  The bike wasn’t the only wonderfully normal thing she saw. There in the edge of the brown grass was her beanbag!

  Hurrying to it, she brushed away the dirt. It was the marker she used when she and her bestest friend ever, Becca Risbon, played hopscotch. Jillybean used to draw hopscotch courts halfway down the block, designing them with such convoluted trickery that she would twist Becca’s skinny legs into pretzels.

  You know you can’t eat that, Ipes said, as she slipped the beanbag into her backpack. This is a foraging expedition, not a walk down memory lane.

  “I know this isn’t Memory Lane, duh. This is Peakview Drive. I lived here longer than you, you know. I lived here since I was a kid. And you know what else, Mister Smartypants? It’s a bean bag. A person can eat beans.” Not that she liked beans. Oh no. They were all sorts of grotey, but the point had to be made.

  I suppose. This was Ipes way of admitting he was completely wrong and was secretly dying of embarrassment.

  Having gained a great win over the insufferable zebra, Jillybean had been grinning, however the grin died away when she heard a branch snap behind her. In this newly silent world, it sounded as if the branch had snapped only paces away when in truth it was most of the way down the block.

  Jillybean spun, her heart caught up in her throat, her hands blaring in a strange electric numbness as adrenaline shot through her system. Seventy yards away was a monster, the first one she had ever seen without at least a pane of glass between her and it. Seventy yards of sidewalk and empty air—her vulnerability was so great that she felt less than naked, almost as if she didn’t have skin.

  She froze in terror, her muscles locked and rigid, her huge eyes stretched and unblinking, as the beast lurched right at her. Five seconds went by—an eternity in a situation like that—and still Jillybean could not move. She didn’t even think to move. Her brain, awash in terror, was as stricken as her body as she stared and stared at the grey-skinned creature with its oozing sores, its long, outstretched clawed hands, and its many, many teeth.

  Run!!! someone, her daddy maybe, screamed from behind.

  She spun, expecting to blunder into whoever had screamed, only the sidewalk was impossibly empty. Her head wobbled in confusion for a few more wasted seconds until her fear, which was both tremendous and powerful, swallowed the confusion whole, blotted out rational thought and overrode her new insanity.

  With her stick-like legs turning in big circles, she fled down the block and straight across the next street, for once in her life not looking in any direction except straight ahead. Everything around became a blur of sad, abandoned porches, dusty, dead cars, and endless sidewalk cracks.

  These breaks in the sidewalk, like little hurdles, came one after another at perfect intervals, passing under her flying feet with every other step. If it were possible those cracks only added to her fear and she began making a little leap over each. Obviously, if she tripped over one, the monster would be on her in a flash and eat her. There was a second reason for her panicked little leaps—Step on a crack, you’ll break your mommy’s back—began to run through her head in a jarring loop.

  Even as her lungs began to burn, and a stitch lanced into her side, and even as the monster drew steadily closer, its harsh, ragged panting growing in her ears, that awful chant kept playing over and over. It grew louder in her head, eclipsing things that were best not thought about, such as how the fetid, disgusting smell of the beast was growing in her nostrils, and how its shadow had already caught up to her and was beginning to merge with her own.

  A new sound, the blubbering whine of a terrified child, was the chant’s only competition.

  Somehow Jillybean’s legs felt like they were both rubbery and weighted with anchors. She threw everything, every last drop of energy she had into running, but she ran in vain. The monster’s scabby, diseased hand reached out and caught her hair, yanking her head back, turning the blubbering whine into a soul-tearing shriek.

  Turn! Turn! Ipes or her daddy, she couldn’t tell which, screamed into her head with such force it finally obliterated the chant
.

  She turned sharply, feeling a vague searing pain along her scalp as behind her, the monster, with a handful of her hair in one of its hands, went stumbling face first across the sidewalk. It left a smear of black blood and what looked like a sheaf of grey snakeskin on the cement as it scrambled to its feet.

  Jillybean was already out of sight.

  Her abrupt turn had led to a driveway. On her right was an immense leafless, overgrown shrubbery which formed a veritable wall. In front of her was a run of open concrete that led to a detached garage; its wide door dangled from a single metal spring and hung cockeyed.

  To her left were the remains of a picket fence, drunkenly guarding the front yard of a two-story brick house. The yard had not been cared for even before the monsters had come. It had gone to jungle and would never again be the civilized close-cropped square of perfection it had once been. The old summer weeds were likely the only thing keeping the fence upright and although they were a dead shade of brown, they were still so tall they could easily hide a girl if she were small enough.

  Jillybean threw herself over the low fence and lay as still as she could, trying to breathe as quietly as humanly possible. She failed at both. Her exhausted body was wracked by tremors and her breath ran in and out as if she were still running madly for her life.

  It was her good luck that the beast was even louder. With Jillybean’s apparent disappearance, it screamed in rage and began tearing at the wall of shrubbery, sending sticks and old leaves flying in all directions.

  Don’t just sit there, Ipes hissed from his pouch. Find a better place to hide than this.

  There really was only one choice, and that was the brick house looming above her. As the front door might be locked and she couldn’t chance being caught out on the stoop in plain sight of the monster, she crept and crawled through the weeds towards the back of the house where a porch sat, looking like a hunched and unhappy addition.

  It had once been screened in. Now, the screen hung in ghostly tatters that swayed in the light wind, and it certainly didn’t help Jillybean’s fragile state of mind that the edge of the porch wore a thin beard of hoary ivy, or that beyond the screen was a door that opened onto what appeared to be a pit of pure blackness. If ever there was a haunted house this was it.

  Supposedly there was no such thing. Her mommy had always said ghosts and haunted houses weren’t real; then again, she had said the same thing about monsters and she had been wrong about that in a big way.

  If Jillybean had any other choice she would have taken it. Without one, she crept up the porch and went cowering inside, certain she would feel the cold breath of a spook on her neck at any moment. She shook and trembled, looking and feeling smaller as she crumbled in on herself.

  It was Jilly-mouse who crouched against a wall, afraid to move any further than was needed into the haunted house. For twenty minutes, she crouched as her body gradually ceased shaking and she finally got her breathing under control.

  The ghost must be asleep, Ipes opined. It probably sleeps in the day and only comes out to haunt people at night.

  This made such perfect sense that she recovered almost immediately and was able to raise herself up until her eyes crested the plane of the windowsill. “Ugh, it’s that’s mean old Mrs. Bennett,” she whispered, glaring at the monster that had chased her. “I shoulda knowed it was her. She hates me. Boy howdy, if I was a grode-up…”

  You’d do exactly this, nothing, Ipes tsked. You know there are more of them around. There always are. That’s why we have to be smart and patient. Do you know the meaning of the word patience?

  “I can read, can’t I? I probably know all sortsa words more than you.” This wasn’t really an answer and Ipes only cocked a nonexistent eyebrow. “Fine. It’s what means waiting without fidgeting or fussing. Everyone knows that.” She wanted to stick her tongue out at him, only she was sure that such an action would fall under either the fidgeting or fussing categories and she didn’t want to hear a lecture just then.

  To kill time, she watched Mrs. Bennett who was no longer filled with that awful rage. She stood, swaying and blank eyed, surrounded by broken sticks. All the hate seemed to have seeped out of her and Jillybean grew bored.

  You could always look for food here, Ipes suggested. Maybe the ghost has kept any other people from scavenging this place. Maybe there’s like real food here. Maybe they have cookies. Ipes was mad for cookies and Jillybean liked them enough that she was able to throw off most of what remained of her fear—not all of it of course, the house was most certainly haunted, after all.

  She crept down a long, dark hall, shrinking back from the darker shadows and twitching away from doorways. She found the kitchen, easily enough. The place was a complete mess: scattered pots and pans, broken dishes, cupboards flung wide. Underfoot was a crunchy spray of what she at first mistook for dried maggots.

  It’s white rice, silly, Ipes explained. It was the only food in the place and amounted to just a bit more than a handful. By the time she had scraped it up and had poked about as much as her constant fear of ghosts would allow, Mrs. Bennett was gone, lurching back to her home. Jillybean went the opposite way, deciding to put a few more blocks between her and the neighborhood monster.

  After ten minutes of slinking from car to tree, to bush, to another car, and so on, she came to her fifth or sixth cross street and saw an amazing sight down one of the side streets—her elementary school!

  Above, the sky was uniformly lead in color and the breeze, barely strong enough to budge the stagnant air and yet the vision of her old school lifted the weight of what had been a dreary and frightening day. She was so excited that Ipes had to scold her twice for going too fast.

  Once she got to the school her enthusiasm disappeared in a blink. The building was no longer bright and airy, filled with the laughter of children. It was very dark, very empty, and somehow even more frightening than the haunted house she had left behind. Still she didn’t leave right away. She slunk around the edges of the grounds hoping against hope that she would see her old teacher Miss April, or any of her old friends. She would’ve even settled for seeing ‘ol Donny Serov who had stuck gum in her bushy hair and who had laughed at her because she hadn’t noticed for three days.

  The dark, still, and eerily quiet building did not just frighten her, it disappointed her as well. Unless there were ghosts in there, too, something she hadn’t ruled out, the place was deserted. The outer grounds were not, however. Halfway around the building and just after the designated parent pickup spot, she came to the playground and there, standing against the backstop of the baseball diamond was Becca Risbon!

  Jillybean knew that long brilliantly red hair from a mile away.

  Stop! Stop! wailed Ipes, but she would not listen. She had been dreadfully alone for months and she craved human contact, especially with the dearest bestest friend she’d ever had in her whole life. Jillybean leapt from the bushes and raced across the field that was used for both soccer and baseball.

  She was quite out of her head with joy, and wanted to yell Becca’s name but, although she was ignoring most of Ipes’ survival rules, she did remember that she was supposed to be quiet so as not to attract the attention of any monsters who might be lurking nearby. She didn’t utter a word as she came up to her best friend. Becca was turned away and didn’t see her friend coming until, “Becca!” Jillybean finally gushed when she was close enough.

  Now her friend turned. Jillybean was fully expecting the same green eyes and freckles, the same beaming smile, but instead she found herself looking into a face that looked like month-old porridge. Set in that ugly churned up mush of a face, Becca’s eyes were sadly grey in color and devoid of that beautiful spark that made Becca, Becca.

  “No,” Jillybean whispered, her heart torn in two and her muscles no more than loose string hanging from her bones. With Ipes screaming in her mind, Jillybean tried to back away only she tripped, falling on her tiny, bony bottom. She was sure Becca would attack her,
however Becca’s right arm was stuck through the fence and trapped somehow.

  Although the little Becca-monster had the will, she lacked the strength to tear her own arm off to get at Jillybean. All she could do was growl and moan in hungry agony.

  “No, Becca, please,” Jillybean said, tears dripping down her face. “You don’t have to be a monster if you don’t wanna. Just try to be good, okay. Just don’t eat people and…”

  Jillybean, Ipes said

  “Maybe if you had a bath. I could take you home with me and…”

  Jillybean! Now he sounded like her daddy and she quieted except for the occasional sniffle and the hitch in her unhappy chest. That’s no longer Becca Risbon. Becca is in heaven, now. That’s just a monster that looks like her. We should leave her alone and get going.

  “No. Becca was my friend and I know that’s her. And I can’t leave her.” Jillybean picked herself up and went closer to the snarling creature. “Whoa, Becca. I just wanna see where you’re caught.” The problem was not only that Becca’s jean jacket sleeve was caught on a spur of metal, it was also her own famously long hair that had somehow snaked within the links forming a tangle that even Jillybean couldn’t have reproduced.

  “I’ll just cut you free. Just, just be good, okay? Don’t try to get me.” She wasn’t so deluded that she cut Becca free without climbing over the fence. Once on the other side she drew the big knife. “Now, try to hold still. No, Becca! Be good!”

  Becca was not good. She wailed and snarled and did everything she could to get at Jillybean and kill her. Even when she was finally free, she didn’t revert to being good, which was disappointing to a girl who had read a story once about a mouse and a lion with a thorn in its paw.

  “That’s how you’re oposed to be. You know, grateful.” Becca was not grateful at all. She threw herself at the fence and tried to tear it to pieces. She even tried to bite the links, breaking her front teeth. It was so awful Jillybean began to cry again and allowed Ipes to lead her away.