by Jamie Gilson
It was getting dark.
Miss Ivanovitch, Miss Hutter, and Mrs. Bosco hurried into the room together. Miss Ivanovitch and Miss Hutter could tell what was going on. Mrs. Bosco couldn’t hear the silence.
“Well, Svetlana,” she bellowed, “I’m so happy for you. We’re all so very happy for you.”
Miss Ivanovitch turned red and sank to the floor with the Scotch Tape. Mrs. Bosco had changed into new very blue jeans and a sweatshirt that said Iowa State. She settled herself on the flowered sofa against the wall across from the fireplace. Miss Hutter, still in her red suit with the little striped bow at the neck, sat with her.
“Why do you suppose we’re all supposed to be so happy for Miss Ivanovitch?” Nick asked with a grin.
“Because she had no cavities at her last checkup,” I told him.
Other people were whispering the same question, but nobody asked Miss Ivanovitch. Instead, the girls, except for Molly and Lisa, all rearranged themselves on the floor until they got Miss Ivanovitch next to Mr. Star. It wasn’t all that easy to do, either, because a nature person from Camp Trotter was trying to wade through us holding a projector over his head like we were water that would ruin it. He was going to be our evening class.
“OK, you guys. Coming through. Coming through,” he growled. “Let’s see a little consideration here. Can’t you keep these kids quiet?” he called to Mr. Star, even though we weren’t making all that much noise. Mostly it was whispering. Mr. Star looked like he’d half a mind to send the guy to the principal for a good chewing out. But he stopped fuming and grinned when Miss Ivanovitch whispered something in his ear. Molly moved in closer.
We waited on the floor in the half dark while the guy with the slides got plugged in. The exit signs glowed red in front of us. Before long the nature person was telling us what the Old Greeks thought about the sky and about constellations, but out the window behind him all we could see was thick black stripes across murky gray. There were no stars.
When the slide show started, Rolf stuck his hands up to make a rabbit on the screen. Mr. Star sent him to sit on the sofa, sandwiched between Mrs. Bosco and Miss Hutter. Everybody laughed but Rolf.
The guy finished his first round of slides with a picture of an astronaut’s footsteps on the moon. He was putting another set in the projector when a blast of lightning exploded like somebody taking our picture with a giant flash cube. The thunder cracked so fast that the bolt must have grazed the window. The air smelled funny.
A lot of people yelled. Eugene, who was sitting in front of Miss Hutter’s knees, started to cry. She leaned over and talked close to his ear.
Mr. Star got up, stepped over the kids around him, and flicked on the lights. “Intermission,” he said, easy, as though nothing had happened. “Everybody stretch.”
“Now, don’t you worry, children,” Mrs. Bosco shouted as she rose from the sofa. “It never strikes twice in the same place. Never. And that’s a scientific fact.”
The lightning blinded us again.
Its blast followed before I could count one.
“Did you know there’s a restaurant on the moon?” Miss Ivanovitch asked as we were all sitting down again. I glanced at the guy with the slides, who looked annoyed.
“Why, no, Miss Ivanovitch,” Nick answered. “Tell us about the restaurant on the moon.”
“Well,” she said, waiting till everything but the night was quiet, “it has great food, but absolutely no atmosphere.” Some kids laughed, some groaned, some asked other kids next to them what it meant, but the awful, scary feeling was gone.
And that’s when the lights went out. Even the red exit lights.
Everybody screamed. The room sounded like a roller coaster halfway down its first fall.
“OK, pull it back together,” Mr. Star shouted.
Miss Ivanovitch stood up. And when the howls hit bottom, she asked, “Do you all have flashlights in your rooms?” Most of us did. They were on the Articles To Bring list.
So when the projector guy headed out to fix the plug, or whatever, Miss Hutter and Mr. Plate stuck around to shush us, and the rest of the adult types went out flashlight hunting.
They weren’t gone long. Each one had two for good measure.
“I expect this is really all we’ll need,” Miss Ivanovitch was saying as they came in. “After all, we’re not having a supermarket grand opening.”
We huddled together like it was cold, listening to the blasts outside. The sky had gone crazy.
“Actually,” Mr. Star told us, raising his voice over the sound effects, “we were going to turn the lights out anyway.”
I could hear Eugene breathing raspy in his throat. Rolf had slid off the sofa when Mrs. Bosco and Miss Hutter left. He moved in close to Nick and me.
“You know how we’ve been talking about animals of the woods in school? Well,” Mr. Star said, “most mammals—about eighty-five percent of all mammals—are awake and roving at night.”
“Geez,” Rolf whispered. “What a bore. Do we have to learn all the time?”
“How do they find each other in the dark?” Mr. Star asked.
The night outside turned day again, but this lightning was farther away than the last.
“That’s how,” a kid yelled, and everybody laughed.
“Very bright,” Mr. Star said. He stuck the flashlight under his chin so it made shadows on his face like he was the Teacher Monster.
“Lightning bugs flicker,” a girl said.
“And do it without thunder,” the Teacher Monster nodded.
“Crickets make noises,” another voice said.
“Very sound.” He flashed his beam over the group, looking for more answers.
“Dogs smell stuff out,” Michelle called.
Mr. Star aimed his light at her.
“So do sharks,” Rolf yelled, and the flash landed on him. “They smell blood in the water.”
“True,” Mr. Star said. “Even in the dark.” He snapped off his light.
The lightning had stopped, but it was still raining. There were probably no sharks in Lake Lindaloma. And the water hadn’t gotten deep enough for them to snap at the windows anyway.
The other teachers and Mrs. Bosco turned off their flashlights, and we talked about how we would find each other blind.
“There are predators out there now, animals searching for food, for their prey. Each one must be careful not to be caught. We are going to play a game in the dark called Predator-Prey.” I got goose bumps on my arms.
The adults, holding turned-on flashlights, moved through the kids, handing out stuff. Some kids got sandpaper blocks to scrape together like in rhythm bands. Some got penlights to flash. Rolf had a Kleenex soaked in perfume that smelled like roses, and Miss Ivanovitch gave me a baby food jar with some stones in it.
“OK, you guys,” Mr. Star explained, “there are four kinds of prey in this game: scrapers, lights, rattlers, and roses.”
“P.U.,” a kid called.
“That’s my perfume, sonny,” Mrs. Bosco said from the sidelines.
“As soon as one rattler finds another rattler, one rose another rose, and so forth, both are safe,” Mr. Star went on. “When you’ve found another creature like you, move close to a wall and sit down out of everybody’s way. You are the prey.” That was me—a rattler.
“OK, but four of you out there are wearing black T-shirts. You are the predators, out for your evening meal. One of you eats only the rose creatures, and so forth. When you predators meet one of your prey, tap him—or her—on the shoulder, say ‘Zap!’ in his ear—”
“Or hers,” Molly said. “And you’ve made your kill.”
“Exactly.”
Next to me, Eugene was pulling a predator shirt on over his head.
In the total dark and almost total silence, we mixed ourselves up in the room, like shuffled cards. Some kids, you could tell, were holding onto each other, cheating.
“Do you think he’ll kiss her?” I heard Jenny whisper to somebody a
s she passed. “It’s romantic in the dark.”
“It is not romantic,” Molly answered. “Besides, he’d probably miss. She’s such a Munchkin.”
“Predators, I hope you’re ready,” Mr. Star announced from over near the door. “Your prey are about to start roaming through the night woods. I’m going to give you sixty seconds in the dark.” He turned a penlight on his wristwatch. “Ready, set, go!”
We whirled around, sniffing, shaking, scraping, and blinking. I caught onto somebody who rattled at me. It was Marshall, and we collapsed near the fireplace, glad not to be eaten. When the sixty seconds was up, the teachers turned on all eight flashlights. And we saw that nine kids had been captured. Five of them were flashlights. Two were scrapers. Two were perfume. Not a single rattle had been caught. Eugene was the rattle predator. I guess they made him one to make him feel strong. But it didn’t work.
“Hey, Eugene,” Rolf yelled, “You’re a real tiger.”
We mixed up the jars and scratchers and stuff and played a few more times with different predators. “Zap!” you’d hear in the dark and “Zap!” again. Kids got smarter about not flashing lights too long and all, but anybody who’d ever had the perfumed Kleenex smelled like it the whole time.
As we dropped the stuff into cardboard boxes and sat down again, Miss Ivanovitch lit the logs in the fireplace. The twigs began to crackle. It was scary in the total dark, but lonelier when the fire was burning. I missed home again. And nobody else seemed to be jumpy but Eugene.
Mrs. Bosco stepped up next to the fireplace. Now she was wearing a huge gray sweater with big lumpy pockets over her Iowa State sweatshirt. She leaned toward us. “I am going to tell you a tale,” she said, slow and mysterious. The fire was so bright you could see almost the whole room. It was reflected in the windows, so there were two fires and two Mrs. Boscos.
“Once,” she began, “in the deep, dark past, there was a monkey’s paw.” And she told us this really bizarre story about a guy who got ground up in a machine at work because his parents wished for money with this magic monkey’s paw. First they wished for two thousand dollars or something, and the insurance money for his getting ground up was two thousand dollars, so they got their money, only then they didn’t want it. Anyway, they used the second wish from this monkey’s paw to bring him back to life, only when he came back that night he was still all ground up, so they had to use up their third wish to get him dead again because how are you going to sit down with your family for supper if you’re all ground up? Actually, it was a gross and excellent story. And even though she is Molly’s grandmother, she did a good job of telling it.
But when she announced that she was going to tell another, Miss Hutter said, “Oh, no, I think one ghost story is quite enough tonight.” She probably thought it would keep us awake and scared, but that story was nothing to the stuff on TV. It didn’t matter, anyway, because Mrs. Bosco didn’t hear a word Miss Hutter said. And when everybody started to clap for her to tell the other one, she did.
The fire threw moving shadows across us and smelled of the woods. Mrs. Bosco hunched up her shoulders and began slowly in a deep, dark voice. “It was,” she began quietly, “a deep, dark, stormy night … in a deep, dark, enchanted forest.” She waited for the rumble of faraway thunder to stop. “And in that deep, dark, enchanted forest, there was a deep, dark, haunted graveyard. And in that deep, dark, and haunted graveyard, there was a deep, dark, yawning hole. And in that deep, dark, yawning hole …” Her voice got lower and quieter and quivered a little. “… there was a deep … dark … moldy … box.” She stopped and said nothing for about fifteen seconds. “And in that deep … dark … moldy box …”
She reached into the pocket of her sweater. “… there was a monkey’s paw!” She waved a furry clawlike thing at us, and everybody screamed.
When she rubbed Michelle’s cheek with the paw, I saw what it was. It was Nick’s hairy hand, shimmering like real in the flicker of the light.
6
HONK
Nick was mad.
“She stole it,” he said, back in the room, cradling the creepy paw in his hands. “She stole it when she got my flashlight. And now I can’t use it to scare anybody because everybody knows.”
“It’s an awful hand, even when you know,” I said, watching him wobble it. “Maybe you could try making three wishes.”
He tossed it to me. “You try,” he said.
I wish I was home, I thought automatically, since that’s what I’d been wishing ever since we’d left. The paw moved in my hand. I swear. “I take that back,” I said out loud, and threw the paw to Eugene.
“I wish the lights would go on,” he said.
Three flashlights, like torches, lit our room. Rolf’s batteries had burnt out, so his was back in the suitcase. Because we couldn’t go running up to kids flapping the old hand at them, we threw pillows at each other instead and moved our beds closer together so we could lie across like bridges.
There was a pay phone in the front hall where Mr. Plate had stood to give us apples. I didn’t have any money, but I remembered what my dad had told me once about calling collect if I was desperate.
I was desperate. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep if I couldn’t call home. So I headed, with my flashlight off, straight into the dark.
“Going to the john,” I announced as I left.
Rolf said to wait up, but I moved as quickly as I could with one hand on the wall. I decided it was safer to travel with my flashlight off. If they couldn’t find me, they couldn’t stop me. I edged along toward where I thought the phone was, shuffling slowly, my bare feet cold on the boards. I ran flat into a wall where I didn’t think there was one, so I flicked on my flash until I spotted the phone. Nobody arrested me.
Kids were still yelling in their rooms, and I could see beams of light dancing around the girls’ stairs as they passed by at the top.
I stood quietly, listening for footsteps and watching for lights. I’d never made a call like this before, and for all I knew it couldn’t really be done for free. So I picked up the receiver, turned my light on the dial, and pushed the O for Operator. I told her what I wanted to do, but, since it was a long distance call, she gave me a lot of numbers and when I started to push them I couldn’t remember the right order. I hung up. What if I called Moscow by mistake?
I punched O again. A man answered this time, and I tried harder to remember. Aiming my light on the numbers, I pushed 1-312-212-2786. Somebody, not my mother, answered, “May I help you?” I explained I wanted to call home and have my parents pay and she said, “Your name?” And I told her, Hobie Hanson, their son.
The phone at the other end rang and rang and rang and rang. Fifteen times I counted, but nobody answered. My parents were always tired after work. They never went places on Monday nights. It must have been time for the ten o’clock news. They were out looking for the cat. They were chasing the guy who stole my bike. No, they had both moved away forever.
I didn’t hang up the phone. I just let the receiver swing loose, ringing. My eyes were stinging. I felt like a baby.
Nick and Rolf are going to wonder if I’ve fallen in, I thought, and I started to feel my way back to the room, the phone buzzing behind me. As I slid my hand along the wall, I suddenly got this incredibly eerie feeling all the way down to my toes. Someone else’s hand was on top of mine, sliding. We both gasped.
“Who are you?” a voice whispered. And that’s when Eugene’s wish was granted. All of the lights, all over the place, went on. It was so bright it hurt your eyes like the sun.
Miss Ivanovitch looked at me like I’d just stepped off a UFO. “What are you doing here, Hobie?” She was wearing a bathrobe of the fuzzy brown stuff they make teddy bears out of.
I swallowed hard. “Taking a walk,” I said. “How about you?”
“Me, too.” She stared at me for a minute, frowned, and then reached out and wiped a tear off my cheek. I pushed her hand away, so she stuck both of them in her pockets. One
of them came right back out with some coins in it.
“Actually, I’m going to use the telephone,” she said. “It’s not against the rules for adults.”
The phone was still ringing, and we both could hear it.
“I tried my folks but nobody was there.”
“Homesick?” she asked, gently.
“I forgot something.” Trying to explain, I said, “The cat ran away. Also, I think my folks are getting a divorce.” I shrugged. “Nobody answers. I guess they’ve both left.” And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep my eyes dry. “I want to go home,” I told her.
She bit her lip and looked at me for a while. “Hobie, I wish I could just tell you everything’s OK, but I don’t know if it is,” she said. “But, whatever, it’ll wait until Wednesday. It’s waited this long.” She walked over to a grocery sack on the floor and brought out a big bag of marshmallows.
“We were going to roast these tonight in the fire,” she said, “but we figured it wouldn’t be safe with all those sticks in the pitch dark.”
“Potentially dangerous,” I said, with a little laugh, remembering the Guinness Book of World Records. I popped a marshmallow into my mouth and chewed. The sweet, soft goo of it was wonderful. She probably wouldn’t understand if I pretended it was poisoning me.
“Why, Hobie, I had no idea you had such an impressive vocabulary. Your parents must be very proud of you.”
“I do want to go home,” I told her. “Please. Isn’t there some way?”
“Not unless you could get Mrs. Bosco to drive you, and then you’d have to have a pretty good reason.”