And walked into a big old door-a.”
The twins ran off, giggling and yanking each other’s ears. But Penelope never looked up. Instead, she finished her book, closing it with the same mix of satisfaction and melancholy that comes with ending any good story. When she finally did look up, she was surprised to find herself on a school playground, alone on a seesaw, her feet on the ground, as there was nobody across from her to balance her weight.
If you were to walk into Glacier Cove Academy’s sixth-grade classroom an hour later, you would see twenty-three kids goofing around. You would see one purple-faced teacher standing on his head and attempting to drink a glass of water upside down. And, if you looked closely, you would see a girl sitting at her desk in the back row, staring out the window, her eyes searching for something. Something big. Something different.
—
Dinner that night: turnip casserole, a glass of turnip juice, and a turnip.
All three Marches ate in silence until Miles cleared his throat. “Last chance for today’s riddle. What word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it? Come on, people.”
Penelope, whose brain was still somewhere in the fjords of Provincia with Nicola Torland, didn’t hear him. She imagined herself on a mountain, bow and arrow in hand. I want to be the plucky heroine….If only she could have her memory wiped so that she could read the book again for the first time.
When she looked up from her plate, she saw Miles and her father staring at her curiously.
“What did you say?” Miles asked.
Penelope didn’t realize she’d said anything.
“You want to be lucky like Marilyn?”
“Miles, let it go.”
“A ducky named Carolyn?”
“Please stop.”
“Come on, you know me. I never stop.”
Penelope blushed. “I said, I want to be the plucky heroine. The courageous girl who solves the mystery. Saves the day, beats the bad guy. Using nothing more than her wits and cunning.”
Miles stifled a laugh.
“Is it really that funny?” Penelope asked.
“It’s not funny at all.” A giggle escaped between the fingers over his mouth.
“Thanks a lot.”
“Come on, Pen. You’re a space case. You have no cunning.”
“I have cunning. I’m full of cunning!”
“Under the right circumstances, I could totally see you saving a library. A bookstore, maybe.”
Penelope felt an angry warmth seep into her cheeks. She pushed the turnip around on her plate and pretended her feelings were not hurt.
“Short,” she blurted out.
“What’s short?”
“The riddle,” Penelope answered. “What word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it? The answer is short. By the way, you’ve got turnip juice on your chin.”
Miles wiped his chin and grinned. “Okay. You’re a little plucky.”
The next day, it all began.
After school on Wednesdays, Miles had Escapology Club. Escapology Club had one other member, an asthmatic kid who showed up only to avoid his mother and read comic books in peace while Miles practiced straitjacket escapes and lock-picking relatively unbothered. That was how Penelope came to be walking home alone.
Engulfed in a new book, she let her feet do all the work. They knew the way: left on Gusty Hallow Road, right on Boulder Gulch, cut across the alley behind Oceanic, come out on Watermill Boulevard. After passing Edinburgh’s Discount Footwear (“Buy one boot, get the other free!”), she absentmindedly peered through the window of Wanamaker’s Fortune-Telling Emporium.
Between the blinds, she spied her classmate Coral Wanamaker, who had been absent from school the past two days. A tiny thing with raven-black hair and a black coat and eyes that would be piercing if she could look at anyone directly, Coral swept the floor like a dancing ghost. She was so frail, so pale—even by Glacier Cove’s standards—that Penelope thought she could almost see through her.
Coral Wanamaker was a mystery. She gave the world only four facts to go on:
1. She always wore black.
2. She hadn’t voluntarily spoken in class since first grade.
3. She had cut the fingertips off her black gloves, apparently so she could bite her nails and spit the slivers everywhere.
4. Her grandmother was Stella Wanamaker, the kooky lady who ran Wanamaker’s Fortune-Telling Emporium.
That was enough for her classmates. Coral did not poke fun at Penelope for the simple reason that she was too busy getting teased herself. Kids constantly shoved ice cubes down the back of Coral’s snow pants or thumped her brittle ears. They gave her wet willies and dry willies and every other kind of willy imaginable. Compared to the nasty insults she heard, the taunts directed at Penelope qualified as gentle ribbing.
One might think that two victims, as Penelope and Coral obviously were, would gravitate toward one another. Band together, take solace in their common misery, that sort of thing.
But Coral seemed to believe that joining forces was not a good strategy. In fact, it was the worst strategy, for it would only double the attention, and the last thing Coral wanted was more attention. She made herself absent even when she was right there. So she ignored Penelope, and they suffered alone.
Any child who has been bullied knows there are usually only three ways to endure the agony: One is to wait it out and pray it goes away. Another is to tell an adult. The third is to fight back. Penelope had chosen the first option, and she was patient enough to see it through. But no one could tell what course of action Coral Wanamaker had chosen. For all Penelope knew, the strange girl was plotting her revenge.
“Your fortune, child?”
Penelope nearly jumped. Blocking the doorway of Wanamaker’s Fortune-Telling Emporium was Stella Wanamaker. The old lady’s jet-black eyebrows resembled two tarantulas, and she had sharpened her fingernails to points that could slice glass. Her white hair was pulled back so tight Penelope could see the scalp underneath, pink and splotchy.
But the weirdest thing was Stella’s eyes. One dreamy, unfocused, and gray as ash, fixed on something far in the distance. The other, a crystal-clear blue, locked in, fierce and unblinking.
“Have you had your fortune told, child?” the old woman slurred, her meaty breath producing temporary clouds.
Penelope had not, and she certainly didn’t want this to be her first time. “I don’t have any money.”
“Inside, come.” Stella gestured into her shop, making clear this was not a request. “Now.”
The parlor, a dusty space full of candles and billowy sheets, looked exactly as Penelope had always imagined it. A flickering light revealed ancient tapestries on the walls and a wobbly table; a sickly bird squawked in a cage in the corner. The air smelled of melted wax. Farther back, a stove and a purple bead curtain led to what Penelope assumed was Coral and her grandmother’s apartment.
In the middle of it all, cheeks pink and warm, broom still in hand, was Coral. She looked to her grandmother—equal parts confusion and embarrassment—for some hint as to why her classmate was here. But Stella had already drifted behind the counter to grab two candles and a brass bowl.
“Half a brain,” said Stella through a thick accent and a tongue so heavy it barely moved. “Visions, predictions, dangers—all there to see, for any fool with half a brain. Grab a child’s palm! Stare into a crystal ball! But the future?” She clucked her tongue, making a noise that sounded like a rusty key scraping in the wrong lock. “There are more precise ways of seeing into the forever.” She handed Penelope a red candle and a black candle. “Place them in the bowl.”
With shaking hands, Penelope laid the candles carefully next to each other.
Stella rolled her blue eye and grunted in disgust.
“Stand them up,” Coral said.
Penelope—startled by the fact that Coral had broken her silence and that her voice sounded fairly ordinary—stood the candles on end.
> Stella slid the bowl onto an oven burner. The candles began to shrink and melt together, until they were nothing more than a thick, dark liquid bubbling in the bowl. Stella poured the liquid into a container of ice water, and the wax hardened into intricate patterns.
“Bored,” Stella said in a flat voice. “You are bored. Hungry. And lonely. Very, very lonely. Afraid to take chances.”
Penelope said nothing. She could feel Coral looking at her.
“Here,” Stella said, pointing to what looked like the outline of a small shoe. “A stranger has entered your life? A new acquaintance?”
“No.”
“It will happen.” The old woman’s expression changed slightly before returning to normal, or as normal as her expression could be. “Do not trust this stranger.”
“Why?”
“This section? You see? A lion. Means an unpleasant situation developing. Right here: umbrella image, symbolizes trouble to come. And here— Oh…”
“What is it?”
Stella’s face darkened. Horror oozed from her body in foul waves. She backed away from the bowl. “We are finished.”
Penelope’s chest tightened. “What do you see?”
“Finished. Go.”
Penelope looked into the bowl. “I don’t see anything.”
“I think you’d better leave,” Coral interjected.
Penelope studied the old lady. So confident a moment earlier, she could not look at Penelope now. Not even with her good eye.
“No,” Penelope said. “Not until she tells me what she saw.”
“You go!” the old lady shrieked. “Now!”
Penelope couldn’t move until her feet, the only part of her body not paralyzed with fear, goaded the rest of her toward the door. Her fingers came to life just enough to push it open so she could slide through.
Stella locked the door behind Penelope and watched through a crack in the blinds until the girl had disappeared down the street.
Coral turned to her grandmother. “What was that?”
“Never…” Stella lifted the blind once more to make sure the girl was really gone. “Never in all my years have I seen this.”
The wax in the bowl had changed considerably. It now resembled an endless puff of clouds surrounding the unmistakable face of a ghostly, hungry figure, gnarled and menacing.
“What does it mean?” Coral asked.
“Some…thing…is threatening the girl. A dark image from the past—a creature very powerful—seeks her. This being will not stop until the girl has been found. And dealt with.”
Coral stared into her grandmother’s good eye, which was closed for once and shielded by a baggy, pocked layer of skin. When the eye finally opened, it locked on Coral. Not a word passed between Stella and Coral, but each knew what the other was thinking. It didn’t surprise the girl when Stella cleared her throat and uttered the three words she knew were coming, but they still chilled her as deeply as any three words possibly could.
“It is time.”
Thoughts exploded in Penelope’s head as she tottered home.
That crazy old lady!
She has no right to scare kids like that!
Who in their right mind believes in this nonsense?
What did she see?
When she turned onto Cloudburst Avenue, Penelope didn’t give much thought to the faint whisper that faded into the wind. It was less a whisper than the idea of a whisper, and she hardly noticed it over her boots squeaking in the snow.
Then she heard it again. Yes, definitely a whisper.
A dark shiver plummeted from her neck to her tailbone. Penelope glanced in all directions. She was alone. “Who’s there?”
She had picked up her pace, moving as fast as she could without actually running, when she heard a voice that seemed to originate from nowhere and everywhere.
“COME.”
Now she began to jog, then run, then sprint as fast as she could, her feet tingling. But the ice in Glacier Cove did not forgive reckless movements, and Penelope’s feet slipped out from under her. Next thing she knew—wham!—she was facedown on the sidewalk.
She staggered to her feet, and that was when she saw the furry white dog blocking her path.
Penelope tried to go one way and it blocked her.
She tried the other way. Again the dog would not let her pass.
The two of them studied each other for what seemed like a long time. The dog’s gigantic head and animated eyes mesmerized Penelope in a way she could not explain. When he started toward the street—with a sense of purpose, unlike normal pooches with their dumb sniffing or thoughtless loping—Penelope thought he seemed almost…dignified. The dog stopped in the middle of Cloudburst Avenue and dug his claws into the ice.
Approaching from the east was a small gray car, careening and sliding on the ice. From the west, an even smaller and grayer car, also lurching out of control. They sped toward each other—and toward the dog—as if pulled by a magnetic force. Nothing could stop them.
“Look out!” Penelope hollered, and started to run toward the dog. But the slippery ice made her sprint a sort of half run, half tumble.
As the cars hurtled toward each other, the dog caught Penelope’s eye, and…Did he wink? Penelope dove onto the road headfirst, her belly scraping the ground as she shoved the yelping dog out of danger. And put herself directly into danger.
Both drivers, surprised to find a girl lying facedown in the street, blared their horns. They swerved. They braked.
HOOOOOOONNNK—
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH—
Penelope covered her head, bracing for impact.
But it never came. When she looked up, one car had plowed into the snowbank on her left. The other had embedded itself in the bank on her right. They had missed her. And somehow, they had missed each other.
Both drivers jumped from their cars, fists clenched, smiling phony smiles. “So sorry, neighbor! My car slid right into your lane.”
“No, no. I’m such a numb-noggin! I slid into yours.”
“Nonsense! I’m the numb-noggin. Please, let me pay for the damages.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! If anyone’s the numb-noggin, it’s me.”
Once the drivers finally agreed they had both been numb-noggins, they made sure Penelope was okay and proceeded to dig their cars from the snow. Eventually, they shook hands, exchanged turnips, and drove off swearing under their breath.
Penelope was left sitting on the curb, wondering what had just happened. And how she had survived.
The dog, amused by the course of events, licked Penelope’s face. Then he shook the snow from his fur, trotted back out into the street, and planted himself in the same spot as before.
Penelope laughed. “Get out of the road, you dumb mutt!”
The dog yawned and licked himself.
Penelope opened her bag. “Do you like turnips?”
The dog bared his teeth. No turnips.
She hooked a finger under the dog’s collar and dragged him to the edge of the snowy lawn, looking for an identification tag. Nothing.
“Where do you live?”
The dog nodded and trotted off.
Penelope followed him down one block and then another, through an alley and across a lawn to another lawn, struggling to keep up and wondering if she was supposed to. She was relieved when the dog finally stopped. “You live here?” she asked.
The dog barked and wagged his fluffy tail, and Penelope realized she was standing, once again, in front of the Ice House. The familiar dread seeped into her bones.
From this close, the house looked even more ominous, and Penelope didn’t want to get closer. But what if the dog—who must be the mighty Wolfknuckle—wandered back into the street? Then what? Another senseless rescue?
Fine. She took a deep breath and walked to the porch steps.
“That’s as far as I’ll go,” she whispered. But Wolfknuckle whimpered until she nudged him onto the porch, the ice floorboards creaking with eve
ry step. When she stopped, Penelope could hear only two things: the TICK-TICK-TICK of the white clock over the door and the KA-THUMP, KA-THUMP of her heart through layers of clothes.
A line of sweat ran down her face as she inched toward the door and reached for the knocker, a dirty old thing hanging with icicles. Just as she was about to lift it, Wolfknuckle emitted a sound that startled Penelope. To the average person, the noise may have sounded like a bark. But what Penelope heard was:
“LOOK.”
Wolfknuckle pointed his wet nose at a square opening near the bottom of the door, one of those little plastic doggy entrances that swing in and out so a pet can come and go as he pleases.
“So go in,” Penelope whispered.
Wolfknuckle didn’t move.
Penelope looked over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching, then stuffed the big dog through the little door. Despite his girth and his protests, she managed to get him inside, the poor dog’s claws click-clacking on some unknown surface on the other side.
But as Penelope went to pull her arm out, something stopped her. The harder she pulled, the tighter it clung to her exposed wrist.
Maybe it was the terror of the moment, but Penelope felt certain that on the other side of the door, wrapped around her wrist with the strength of a thousand teeth-gnashing lions, was someone’s—or something’s—hand, cold and rough. She could not break free.
All at once, the hand jerked her through the doggy door, backpack and all, leaving nothing but Penelope’s screams echoing up and down the silent block.
The first thing Penelope saw inside the house was not a hand but a foot, kicking the door shut behind her.
The foot belonged to a stooped old man, no taller than Penelope, wearing a lab coat and goggles and clutching…good Lord, was that a chain saw? His hair looked like an ancient dollar bill, greenish gray and crinkled, and when he opened his mouth, what Penelope saw scared her more than the chain saw did.
He did not have sharp teeth, nor did he have black teeth.
He had no teeth at all.
“You’le tlespassing on plivate ploperty!” this gnome of a man hissed, his cracked lips smacking against his gums.
Penelope March Is Melting Page 2