by Ariel Roma
WARNING
Never Live on a Street With Skyscraper Bushes!
3
JITTERS
THEY SWARMED LIKE bees and buzzed like power-saws. The buzz rose to a steady drone. You’d have to look way, way up to see it, but the sky looked stormy high above the scene. Jet-powered ravens took turns dive bombing deeper down, then deeper again to take a closer look. Once in position, their sharp eagle-eyes armed with high-tech lenses, auto-zoomed and snapped and clicked a string of photos. By anyone’s standards, if anyone could see it, it would have been bizarre.
If the bird squall seemed threatening, it was nothing at all compared to the tempest brewing down-under in the domain. Rumours were spinning wild. In a world closer than anyone would dare to think, a kingdom was scrambling. It was Darkotika.The chief wizard of the kingdom, Lord Caldron, was glued to the oversized screen in the Darkology Center. He flicked and twisted his stiff, straw-like mustache, exhaled, and then let out an almost audible groan of disappointment. “It’s just that he looks…” he winced and struggled for just the right word, “so… well… so ordinary!”
“Maybe a little too ordinary?” someone replied weakly in a dry, low cackle. “We’ve been fooled before…” the voice whined and fell away. The two conspirators were stranded in silence. “We’ve seen ordinary before,” the scraggier one pushed some more.
“That’s the point,” Wizard Caldron growled. “We’ve seen it far too often and we’ve been burned. Not that being burned in this place is anything new.” His quick rant was buried in a mumble, “but we need at least something.”
“How do we know that he’s the one that was chosen?”
“We don’t know you fool! Of course we don’t know!” Caldron snapped and whipped his arms in the air. With the scrappiest of looks on his face he tried to go on.
He hated the taste of the name on his tongue even before he said it. Here, the name was a regular gag-trigger. Finally, he spoke slowly, pronouncing every syllable, “Mez-zi-ah,” his mouth puckered, “wants them all for himself don’t forget. He wants them all,” he repeated. “But will this one respond?” He was back to his regular rant. “Will he answer the call and become one of the chosen?” He rocked back on his heels and stared high into space.
“That’s the question….” There were more words waiting but he stalled.
He hated the squeeze of uncertainty, yet, he was dazzled by the game. He was a thrill junkie. He knew that this time the stakes would be higher; it was just the way it was going.
Finally the words slithered through his sludge-stained gritted teeth, “It’s much too soon to know yet… but we’ll wait… and we’ll watch him. It’s just part of the game… but remember, it’s our game.” An electric howl turned into an evil rubber-smile and stretched across his strained face. Whether real or forced, his confidence was back!
If the cross-examination from the sky at 50,000 feet wasn’t already enough, an enormously long-nosed telescope was now officially on snoop-duty. It tunneled through the stratosphere, snaking its way from down and under, to up and over. It slunk all the way into an unassuming back yard to snort and snap even more wishy-washy images.
As an extra measure just to be sure, the camera reared-up like a python to pan the area. Finally, it completed a rotation of the block, zoomed up Covert Street, down Clandestine Street and then back to Covert again. If one were riding on the camera lens, and someone likely was, the whole adventure would have been dizzying!
To others who knew more, lived more, or perhaps hadn’t loved them so much, the houses on Covert Street might have looked dingy. People that didn’t live around here would likely never see them anyway. The homes were well hidden from the main intersection where most folks passed by.
Up until recently it had been quite handy that these houses had such incredibly massive, colossal, cedar shrubbery to hide behind. But not anymore. The titanic hedging threatened to sink Covert Street into a sea of people. A new town councilman with a snout for sniffing out the sensational announced that the shrubs could be, and really should be, added to the list of important Wonders of the World.
To the town folks the multi-level cedars were just part of the scenery and no one except the councilman had ever even had a fleeting thought that they were anything but normal.
In fact to them, the towering skyscraper bushes were small, barely there at all, because the place everyone raved about was across the street. The giant, nonstop spinning coffee cup wobbling on an oversized cracked saucer, snorting steam every hour on the hour, was the adored landmark in the town of Target. It was the home of, “Waddlemore’s Waffle House,” right on the corner where Covert crossed Clandestine Street.
The town of Target was so dull it was actually peculiar. When the Middlings moved into a neighbourhood they almost always wanted to live on a dead end street. They believed that life on a dead end street was predictable and safe and quiet. They liked that there was very little traffic and everyone knew their neighbours. Lucas’s house was second from the end of his street and Lenny’s was the last one, right next to what appeared to be a very lovely forest.
The forest was not too wide but it stretched out along a river bed that cut through the town. In the spring time, the water in the river rose high as the snow runoff from the mountains melted and rushed down into the valley’s rivers and streams. The school was only a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the other side of it.
The shortest way to get to the school from this side of town was to cut through the woods. The forest floor was cushioned by a bed of squished leaves. Ancient oak trees with far reaching limbs stood tall with blankets of ivy surrounding their feet. Like ladies dressed up fancy with silk scarves, they looked rich and graceful with their branches draped in a delicate Spanish moss… well, most of the time they looked like that. Especially when the sun was shining and all was going well. But… they could be fickle. Sometimes they were downright moody in fact. You could even say angry and mean. It was like they were trying to be nice but sometimes couldn’t help looking cranky. And sometimes cranky led to out-and-out scary.
Through the woods there was a well-worn path that led from one side to the other and there were other paths too. Along these, roots and brambles eagerly reached from both sides to catch a straying foot or a leg. Some of these paths lured curious foot-traffic into thicker and darker areas of the woodlot where the tree branches and foliage linked together to keep the sun out. On the brightest of sunshiny days the trees in this area refused to let even a splinter of a sunbeam in.
The shortcut to school meant crossing a narrow part of the river over Hawk’s Bridge. It was a popular gathering spot anytime, but especially on the hot sultry days. The kind where your clothes stick like they’ve been glued on and just breathing the air is like inhaling steam. Some days were wild with overexcited kids testing the limits of fun in the surging water-rush or the still-pools trapped inside the rocks. But today wasn’t one of those days. It would be quiet now.
Lucas would have hated to admit it but every time he got close to Lenny’s place the auto-pilot light inside of him flicked a switch. Today, just like every other day, he rocketed past in a hurry.
It was hard to figure, but there was something weird about the house next door ever since Lenny’s aunt moved in two years earlier. A bad mood moved in with her and hung around the place like a stinky smog, and that was even before Lenny got there. Now that he was there it was almost nail-biting scary.
Lucas’s wits must have been as sharp as glass when he met Lenny’s aunt Clair a few days after she moved in. “I think she’s a witch,” he told his mother.
“Oh Lucas,” his mother laughed, “Clair Voyance isn’t a witch. Don’t be silly. You have such an imagination. Don’t you be saying such things now; you’ll get yourself into trouble, and us too!”
“Well, have you seen her?” Lucas wondered how his mother knew her name already.
“No, not yet. I tried to meet her when I took her mail over. A letter was delivered here b
y mistake. I thought she was home but no one answered the door.” She rambled on, “I think I saw the curtains move… it could have been a fan… it’s been hot out. Just never mind your name calling. That imagination of yours is gonna get you into trouble one of these days,” she warned him again.
No matter what his mom said, he knew what he saw. He wasn’t in a habit of name-calling the neighbours. If he had to pinpoint what it was about her that made her witchy, he couldn’t.
He couldn’t see why anyone would want to live in that old house anyway. After Mr. Grumble moved away the place was hauntingly quiet and empty for a long time. The drab white paint was twenty two shades of grey and peeling. The sagging shutters flapped in a panic whenever it stormed. Lucas guessed they must have scared the daylights out of the front porch boards, so bad they wobbled and shuddered whenever anyone stepped on them. Out of the blue, a moving truck pulled up one day.
“Take these biscuits to the new lady next door Lucas,” his mother had said. “They’re just fresh out of the oven. We need to be neighbourly.” She wrapped them in waxed paper and tucked a welcome note into the fold.
“Aw mom, do I have to? Why don’t you go?” He had tried get out of it but his mother won out. She would go another time. Today, the biscuits needed to be delivered before their freshness wore off.
The moment his foot hit the step up the sidewalk to the house he had the jitters. By the time the door opened he was ready to run. He couldn’t explain it and he didn’t know why, but there was a creepy feeling about the place. When he came face to face with her, it was flat-out startling!
A sharp faced woman with cold eyes, dull like pewter, stared out from between the creaking door crack. Her zebra-striped hair hung limp.
His eyes were kaleidoscoping out of control, and as much as he tried to keep it closed, his mouth dropped open wide enough to drive a monster-truck through it. He mumbled something that he still can’t remember and offered the biscuits his mother had so nicely wrapped. If it weren’t that his feet were already cemented to the porch on the ends of two lead-poles, he would have jumped to the moon when the door squeaked open further and her spidery fingers swiped the biscuits.
The door did a slow-mo bump-shut and a half-split second later he was home again. If anyone asked, he would have said he was pretty sure that his feet caught up with him a full three minutes later!
“Ribbit, ribbit.”
There it was again. It was the same big fat frog, sitting under the same big fat broken down fence log. A whopping black fly buzzing past was suddenly on the lunch menu. His long sticky tongue flipped out, unrolled like a welcome mat, and snapped it up.
The frog’s bulgy eyes shut tight and sunk like a submarine. They rolled way back into his head to push the la-crème-de-la fly-pie down into his jelly-belly. A moment later, with a blink of triumph he was wide eyed and waiting for his next victim. The crackling rumble from the stuffed amphibian marked the territory in front of the Voyance house. It was like a buzzer set off every time he passed by reminding him he was in the ugly zone. Lucas was sure it was taunting him and it made him mad. If he was the kind boy that was mean he’d want to poke it with a stick. But he wasn’t that kind of boy. And he never ever wondered if he should be.
He did wonder though why there were so many frogs living there now. They all ogled and glared. All with bronze colored eyes and perfectly round pupils.
It was strange. They had arrived in the neighbourhood around the same time Lenny’s aunt Clair did. The quirky timing made him wonder if she had brought them all with her; it’s possible, he thought.
He remembered seeing some strange stuff coming off the moving trucks and going into the house the day she moved in. He wondered if maybe one of those army green cargo trunks carried in an army of frogs. It sure seemed like an army of something came with her. She was one weird, witchy lady.
Lucas was glad that most of the frogs had decided to live at Lenny’s house and not his own. The trouble was that he could still hear a chorus of croaking and glubbing when he had his bedroom windows open.
The creepy symphony began every night around dusk. The only thing he could do to dull the sound was shut his windows. Even though the summer nights steamed and baked his room so that he was shiny-sweaty, he often did.
Having just peeled past Lenny’s place, Lucas was on his way to school. The wind rushed him like a linebacker and he had to use all of his might to push his way through it. Not only did the sky seem angry but so did the trees. The leaves overhead swished and the branches bobbed up and down fiercely.
A flock of mad ravens flying past were freaking-out. The day was already weird.
He had just crossed over Hawk’s Bridge and now he could see his good friend Sloane up ahead. He yelled hard to her. She kept going. The wind whipped his voice right back. It was no use. He was just yelling at the wind and it didn’t care at all about him. Worse than that, it was a bully, sucking the breath right out of his mouth. He was alone.
Even though he usually did anyway, he never liked walking to school alone. Ever since Lenny had moved in with his aunt last summer it had been worse. He had already tried out different tactics to avoid running into Lenny. One of them went like this: Leave for school early in a panic sweat; slip out the backdoor and sneak along the path to the train tracks; look over-shoulder twenty times a minute; hope like heck he never noticed. One day he did.
The railway tracks crossed over a trestle bridge where the river went down into a gorge. It was a riskier, tougher way to go but some days, when fear was the choke-out kind, it seemed worth it. At least for a while anyway… until Lenny caught on. Out of the blue, one day, Lenny was crouched down in the weeds under the tracks. Lucas’s heart still hammered when he thought about it. Now, he was never really sure which way to go.
There were lots of kids but their houses were spread out over several blocks so it wasn’t easy to find someone to walk with. Sometimes they would meet up along the way. Today, Sloane would have needed radar-ears to hear him calling her. Still, he was glad that he could see her up ahead.
If Lucas thought the sky and the trees seemed angry, he was right. Well, not really the sky and the trees. What he didn’t know and couldn’t know, at least not yet anyway, was that someone, or shall we say something, was angry. In fact, there was a whole world out there that was angry. It was a world that average people paid little attention to. Well at least not in any serious way. But that didn’t matter at all because it was as real-as-real could be anyway.
It’s no surprise that hardly anyone noticed it. It was a hidden world that liked being hidden. It was a secret world that sometimes appeared in the imagination of some boys and girls, but was often quickly forgotten again. It may be worth wondering if it was somehow erased from their memory. Hmmm… that’s worth considering. Anyway, it was very good at staying a secret.