The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding

  This shadow wasn’t even negative space, and its image didn’t render the room around it into space either. It was a black hole in the form of a creature that looked like a pruned and shriveled human corpse. It floated silently in the middle of the attic, the shredded ends of its black cloak drawing patterns in the dust on the floor.

  Being beside it was like that second just as you crest up onto a roller coaster, when you begin to fall. Everything was suspended, even my heartbeat. The mask remained up, and there was nothing else around me except the rows and rows of teeth. It inhaled sharply, a high, wheezing sound that had no beginning and no end. Every hair on my body stood as straight and sharp as pins.

  Then I felt the tug. It started at my center as a spark, and erupted into fire beneath my skin. My vision blurred and I’m sure I was shouting something, because I felt the words leave my throat. I just couldn’t hear them. When I looked at my outstretched hand, it looked like it was dissolving.

  Flee! Alastor roared. Go now, Maggot!

  It was too late. My legs folded under me like paper. A thin black tongue slithered out, whipping against my forehead, smearing black, stinking goop down the bridge of my nose.

  Thou dares—Alastor’s voice rang in my ears, crisp as morning air—thou dares to steal from me? From me?

  The weight on my chest doubled as the creature leaned forward. Its gaping mouth hovered over my face, slobbering spit and ooze on my skin. The red mask split into two, then three, then four. I blinked, trying to focus. Black crept in at the corner of my vision. I went boneless. Weak, like it would take a year to lift a finger.

  “Prosper? Pros—!” Was that Nell? Or Prue?

  Foul, thieving miscreant! Alastor thundered. His voice rose with each word until I felt them forming on my own lips. If thou think I will forgive this, thou are gravely mistaken! I will come for thee, and I will take back every ounce of power thou stole! I will crush thee, smash thee until thou—

  “Slip from the shadows into sight,” Nell yelled, “reveal yourself in the light!”

  The light from the nearby lamps streamed out, swirling together until a white-hot orb floated above us like a full moon. The creature shrieked like metal scratching glass as it flung itself toward the ceiling. But Nell wasn’t finished. She gripped a bucket in two hands and launched its contents up. The spray of white exploded into the air with a loud whoosh, clinging to the shadow like frost. I squeezed my eyes shut as the remnants of the white stuff—salt—pattered down around me. I didn’t open them again until the shrieking returned.

  The shadow flailed about the room, narrowly missing Toad on the back of the couch when the CatBat tried to claw at it. Before, its robes had moved as if the shadow were underwater, silently, gracefully. Now each part of it hardened, crackling and squeaking as its limbs and cloak turned to gleaming obsidian glass.

  Nell dove over my legs for the bucket and swung it straight up with a grunt. The plastic bucket smashed through the creature’s center, exploding it into a thousand—a million—shards that hovered above us, spinning and dancing. The empty red mask crashed down on my knee, a second before the rest of the shadow came raining down.

  But the glowing orb from her spell burned through the shards of glass, turning them into nothing more than black sand.

  “Are you okay?” Nell asked, shaking the sand out of her hair casually, like she hadn’t just destroyed a creature of darkness.

  “Fine,” I managed to groan, still unable to move my legs.

  “I was talking to Toad. I can see you’re fine.” She swept down, grabbing the red mask and holding it up for Uncle Barnabas to see.

  “Cripes,” he said. “A hag.”

  “What?” My lips felt numb, but they were finally working. I inched my way up onto my elbows.

  A leech, Alastor groused. Filthy, despicable creature. I had thought their numbers largely vanquished—a necessity, given their need to feed upon superior fiends. It would seem we did not stamp them out entirely. I will have to rectify this.

  “Some call them psychic vampires,” Uncle Barnabas explained, hauling me forward so I was sitting upright. He tried in vain to brush the salt out of my hair. “They feed off the energy of fiends and…gifted humans. The malefactor must have opened a portal when he tricked you into looking into the mirror.”

  “I don’t know,” I began, trying to shake feeling back into my hands. “Alastor sounded just as angry and freaked-out to see it as I was. I don’t think the hag was his invited guest.”

  What is this…“freaked-out”? I will have an answer, Maggot!

  I ignored him. “I just mean that if it was feeding on anything, it wasn’t me.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Barnabas said. “Perhaps he’s done us a favor and robbed the fiend of some power he’s managed to regain. But we’ll have to take the utmost care from now on. Nell, I need you to destroy any mirrors that we have in the house.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Isn’t that bad luck? Seven years or whatever for each one?”

  “You are bad luck,” Nell shot back. “If you think you can fight the Redding vanity and keep from admiring yourself, I’d try to avoid looking into any reflective surfaces for the time being.”

  I was getting very tired of being told what a Redding was by a cousin who clearly had spent no time with us. And, no, she wasn’t wrong that some of our family was like that, but plenty weren’t.

  “You seem to forget you’re a Redding too,” I said.

  Nell inhaled sharply through her nose, her lips parting. Uncle Barnabas cleared his throat, cutting her off.

  He handed Nell the crimson mask and jerked his chin toward the window. “Go hang it up and put a line of salt on the sill. That’ll keep them at bay for a while. Prosper is exhausted enough with the malefactor draining him. He certainly doesn’t need any other creatures coming for a visit.”

  “Wait,” I said, holding out a hand to stop her. I needed both of them in the room to get answers. “What’s the plan, here? So there’s a malefactor inside me—do I trap him in a mirror to get him out? Feed him to a hag to keep him from feeding on me?”

  Ye assume incorrectly, hedge-born applejohn. Alastor sounded offended at the suggestion. I do not feed off the filthy souls of humans. They taste of sunlight and peppermint. Blech.

  Uncle Barnabas glanced up at the ceiling, scratching at his head. “We are, uh, entertaining a few options for solving your predicament at the moment.”

  “You don’t have a clue, do you?” I asked flatly.

  “No, no, no,” Uncle Barnabas said, waving his hands. “We are looking into other options, yes, but we believe our best bet is to finish what Goody Prufrock began. We’ll transfer him out of you and into another living host—a spider, a frog, and—” He smashed his hands together. “The trouble is, of course, we’ve been trying to track down the necessary ingredients for the spell.”

  “Which are what?” I asked. “Can you just order them off the Internet?”

  “Some,” Nell said. “But the spell calls for three toes of a man hanged for his crime—”

  “Wow,” I said, “that’s specific.”

  Nell shot me an irritated look, continuing, “Three toes of a man hanged for his crimes, a newborn eel’s freely given slime, wings of a black beetle plucked midflight, two eggs of a viper stolen at night, a gleaming stone cast down from the moon, all boiled in a cauldron at high noon—with the right incantation, of course.”

  A dead man’s toes, viper eggs, a moon rock…really?

  “And that’s going to work?” I asked, my voice pitching higher and higher. “What can I do to help? What’s my job?”

  Nell looked at me like I’d asked if I could grow six more legs. “You want to actually do something?”

  “You think I’m just going to sit and twiddle my thumbs and wait for this…this thing to come and destroy my family?”

  My parents had worked too hard to build their foundation to see it all possibly turn to ash. I couldn’t get Prue out of the Cottage
, but I could do this. The truth was, my family could stand to lose some money. But why did I get the feeling “vengeance” entailed more than just lost income—that it might involve lost lives?

  Hmm…you are giving me rather intriguing ideas, Maggot.

  “Your job is to stay put and stay out of trouble,” Uncle Barnabas said. “The dead man’s toes are proving to be, uh, a challenge. But I have a lead. Someone in Australia willing to dig up an old convict, and, well, snip snip.”

  I tried not to shudder. “How long is that going to take? Why can’t we buy a ticket and fly over there to pick them up?”

  But even as the words left my mouth, I wished I could take them back. A plane ticket to Australia was expensive—just because it was something my family could do, it didn’t mean Uncle Barnabas could. And, sure enough, I was right.

  “With what money?” Nell scoffed. “Yours?”

  “My parents asked you to help, didn’t they?” I tried again. “Maybe they can pay…?”

  “No, Prosper,” Uncle Barnabas said sharply, only to soften his voice as he explained, “we cannot have any contact with them whatsoever. Your grandmother is watching them so closely now, and I have to imagine she somehow has access to view their bank accounts. We don’t have your passport, and we also don’t have the time to figure out how to go about finding another way to get you out of the country.”

  Logic really sucked sometimes.

  “I could just make a quick call,” I begged. “I could leave them a message from a pay phone or send an e-mail—”

  “No!” Nell said, sharply enough to send Toad jumping into the air. Behind Uncle Barnabas, the CatBat hovered, its enormous eyes alert and unblinking as it looked for trouble. When Uncle Barnabas turned to glance back, it promptly crashed back down into the black dirt and herbs. “You can’t have contact with anybody. I put a glamour spell on you the second we left Redhood. It prevents anyone who is actively searching for you from being able to see you, but it only holds if you don’t reveal your location.”

  “What about everyone else?” I asked. Most people were shameless about snapping photos of my family and sending them to magazines. All it would take was one person posting a picture online….

  “Everyone else sees the glamour I put into place, not your real face,” she said, eyes glinting behind her glasses. “It’s like a magic mask. Don’t worry, I gave you a huge nose and beady little eyes.”

  I sighed. “Well, it can only improve my looks, right? Everyone always says I’m a dead ringer for my great-great-uncle Ichabod, and he basically had the face of a rabid squirrel.”

  Nell let out a sharp laugh, then caught her lip between her teeth, forcing herself to stop. She sat down again, this time on the far edge of the couch, keeping her distance.

  “Please,” I said. “I have to do something. Assign me anything.” Anything to keep my mind off the fact I had an evil creature inside me.

  “Well…all right. I suppose you could look for an appropriate vessel to contain him?” Uncle Barnabas said.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “What about the plucked beetle wings? I could try to do that. What do I need—a pair of tweezers?”

  “We already bought those,” Nell said. “All’s well that ends well, so chill out.”

  My voice came out embarrassingly high. “Okay…but what happens if the fiend regains its full strength and escapes before my thirteenth birthday?”

  “Well, that’s a worry for then, I suppose,” Uncle Barnabas said. “For now, I need you to believe in this plan and not contact your family, no matter what.”

  After a second I nodded, wiping a trickle of blood off my cheek. My face and hands stung from where a few pieces of glass had cut me.

  “I believe I asked you to refill the salt,” Uncle Barnabas said, turning to Nell. She had faded into the background with Toad, watching me from behind her glasses. “Grab the healing tincture off the shelf before you go, will you? We can’t have our guest wandering around with cuts and bruises.”

  “But—”

  “Now, Cornelia. And don’t forget the mirrors.”

  With a noise of frustration, Nell jumped to her feet, clearly aware of the fact she was being dismissed. She plucked a small silver jar off the armoire shelf and all but shoved it at my chest. The top popped open on its own, and the smell of aloe and peppermint rose from it, curling pleasantly in my nose. I touched the pale pink cream and began to pat it on my face, hands, and arms. Within seconds, the aches disappeared, and my skin was pulling itself back together. My insides squirmed again at the sight.

  Unreal. All of this was just…unreal.

  Nell crossed the room and snatched the bucket up off the floor. For the first time, I noticed the stars had fallen out of her hair and had scattered onto the floor, forgotten.

  “You’re welcome,” she hissed, clutching the blue plastic to her chest.

  Oh man—what brand of jerk was I that I hadn’t even thought to thank her for saving my life? Right after, the only thing I’d thought of was the fact she’d had to save me while I curled up on the floor like a shrimp. I have some pride, you know? Not a whole lot, thankfully.

  Before I could try, she disappeared out the door with a fuming “Come on, Toad.”

  The CatBat started to fly after her, only to remember he had an audience. His flight turned into an abnormally large leap that Uncle Barnabas was completely oblivious to. But even after the two had disappeared downstairs, Nell’s anger stayed behind, hanging like a thundercloud in the doorway.

  I waited until the stairs stopped creaking before asking, “What will hanging up the mask do?”

  “It’ll ward off any other hags who might take an interest in you and the malefactor’s power,” Uncle Barnabas said.

  “Do you really think we might have gained a little time? That the hag drained enough power from him to make a difference?”

  “Hopefully. We should know more soon, I think,” Uncle Barnabas said. “I know…I know I might not have any right to say so, given that we have only just become reacquainted, but…I’m proud of you for how well you’re handling this.”

  I’m proud of you. When was the last time I’d heard those words?

  Years. It had been years. When Prue had gone into shock at home, and I’d called all the right people, in the right order, and the 911 dispatcher taught me how to do CPR.

  “Thanks,” I said, meaning it. “I’m trying. It’s just…a lot. And I’m worried. I don’t really get how I can be both a host and a prison for the malefactor.”

  I wonder that myself.

  “Shut up,” I grumbled.

  “Excuse me?” Uncle Barnabas blinked. “Oh. Is he…speaking with you, then?”

  Like a flame which has already burned itself out, so is this man’s wit. Were he any more loggerheaded—

  “Guess what?” I said, cutting him off. “No one likes your fancy English.”

  “What is he saying?” Uncle Barnabas pressed. “Is he talking about the curse?”

  Foul-tongued wretch! Alastor spat. Thou will not speak to me in such an informal manner. I am thy lord and master! I am prince of the—

  “Well, thee is being a huge jerk,” I said, then turned toward my uncle. “Seriously. Is there a way to force him to go to sleep?”

  “None that I know of,” Uncle Barnabas said, rubbing his finger down the bridge of his nose in thought. “But there is one trick that always seems to work.”

  “And it is…?”

  “It’s like with any bully,” he said, reaching down to haul me up off the floor. “You just ignore them and they’ll go away eventually.”

  Yeah. Because that trick had worked so well for me over the past twelve years.

  About three hours later, I was wide-awake, staring up at the ceiling. All kinds of horrible screams and shrieks were drifting up through the cracks in the floorboards. I had the timing of the fright house’s different animatronics down by the third tour group, though. The zombie nurse’s cackling, the thumping from
whatever was chained up in the room downstairs, the fake bats’ shrieking, and, less than two minutes later—Nell jumping out at them from a hidden compartment at the top of the stairs with a deafening, “Gimme brainsssss!”

  One of the guests screamed so sharply I thought the glass windows would crack. Even Toad winced from where he was perched on the edge of the couch, watching me with such hawk-like intensity, for a moment I saw his button-like nose shift into a beak. His bulbous eyes were slits, unblinking as his tail swished back and forth, back and forth, like the arm of an old grandfather clock.

  All that was almost loud enough to drown out the singing fiend in my head. He had composed a very special song for me, set to the tune of what sounded like “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”

  Pull off their fingers and toes, he crooned, bury them where no one knows—or roast them alive!

  The whole room was dark and freezing. When Nell and Uncle Barnabas had gone downstairs to finish setting up for the night’s tourists and suckers, they’d left the window open. Apparently I needed “fresh air.”

  Here was a list of things I actually needed:

  1. My hypoallergenic pillow.

  2. A tall glass of skim milk.

  3. Something sharp to jab into my ears.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come down and watch?” Nell had asked. She was part of the show, but no one bothered to tell me that until she popped out from behind the couch in her skeleton costume. When I cringed, it wasn’t because I was scared—it was because her makeup was just that bad. It looked like she had drawn a moon on her face and squiggled some black lines through it.

  “I could help you with that…” I began. So far I hadn’t done anything other than give Nell and Uncle Barnabas a headache and force them to smash the rest of the mirrors in the house. My fingers went numb at the thought of them laughing, or Nell mocking me again.

  And, sure enough, her face screwed up at the suggestion, like I’d thrown up at her feet.

  “It was just an offer, take it or leave it,” I muttered, crossing my arms and looking away. What was her problem, anyway? Maybe if she had grown up within the family, she would have seen that my little corner of it wasn’t nearly as awful as the rest. In fact, Mom, Dad, and Prue were the best of them.