“What’s wrong?!”
“Yeah! Tell me!”
I hoped there was still some Aunt Mina left in that hairy disaster.
“Leaving toys on the floor,” she said, “MAKES ME SICK!”
Just what I hoped she’d say. But was that now part of the story?
She pointed her claws at me. The nails were flecked with white paint from when she had smashed the wall. Soon they’d be covered with my blood.
But as she was stepping toward me, I knocked a box of Timmy’s Legos onto the floor.
She stepped on them. She hopped on one foot. She let out not a roar but a huge, angry yelp.
And then she stopped.
She frowned.
Her bulging eyes rolled.
“I feel,” she grumbled, “funny.”
She clutched at her stomach. Her claws poked into her scaly body. From deep within, we heard a kind of squishy gurgling sound.
Had it worked? She said the toys on the floor would make her sick. Did that count as a story? Had the story made her sick?
“Maybe you should sit down,” I said.
The monster opened her mouth. All the fire in her throat had gone out. I pulled Timmy off the bed. The monster lurched forward. A jet of green goo shot from her mouth and splashed all over Timmy’s bed. It oozed off his blankets to the floor.
It sure smelled like she was sick.
“I feel terrible,” the monster mumbled. She rocked backward and slammed down on her enormous rear end.
“I still want to— Ohhhh!” She couldn’t even roar anymore.
Timmy was crouching in a corner. “What’s wrong with the monster?”
“We made her sick,” I explained.
“Do something!” she yelped. She couldn’t even roar now.
“Poor Mommy Monster,” said Timmy. “But you’re still gross.”
“I can help you,” I said, “but you have to do exactly as I say.”
Her huge bushy head started wobbling. “I’m gonna throw up again.”
“Not on me!” yelled Timmy.
“I can help,” I said.
“Do it,” the monster grumbled. “Or I’ll kill you.” She tried to push herself off the floor with her claws. She snorted, and sparks fell from her nose. Could she gather strength for one more jet of flame?
I knelt right by her head. Her wet eyes looked yellow now. I could smell her puke-breath.
“Repeat after me,” I said.
“Why?”
“It’s the only thing that will make you feel better,” I said. “Say ‘Once upon a time.’”
“Once upon a time.” She moaned. “My stomach!”
“The monster turned back into Aunt Mina,” I said.
“The monster turned back into Aunt Mina,” she repeated.
“And never bothered anybody again.”
“And never bothered anybody again.”
“The end,” I finished.
“The end.”
“And,” I added quickly, “my father came back.”
“And your father came back. Huh?”
Nothing happened. “Timmy,” I said. “You better leave.”
He didn’t move. I didn’t know if he was too scared or too confused.
The monster moaned again. What else could I do?
I snapped my fingers.
Things started to change.
Her body shortened and became slimmer. Her claws shrunk back into hands. Her huge bush of twiggy hair flattened out over her head, until it was Aunt Mina’s hair again. It needed to be combed, and it smelled like puke, but it was hers. Now she looked like Aunt Mina all over, but much paler.
“What happened?” she mumbled. “What’s that smell?”
“You yakked, Mommy,” Timmy said. “Big-time.”
“I think,” Aunt Mina said, “I better go to bed. You boys have a nice sleep or whatever.”
She stumbled off, past the ruined door and the smashed bathroom wall. The crystal dangling from her neck swung back and forth. She shut the door.
“I’ll clean up in here,” I said. “You can sleep in the living room tonight.”
I found Timmy a clean blanket from the closet and tucked him in on the couch.
I had changed the story. I had saved him, and me, and Aunt Mina too. I had saved everyone—well, except my dad. And now my reward was I had to clean up the monster puke.
I wrapped the puke up in Timmy’s blankets as well as I could. I rolled them up tight and shoved them down into a trash bag. The smell from the bag almost made me gag. I used paper towels to mop up the slime that spattered the floor and walls. I didn’t mind the work so much, or even the smell.
What really bothered me was that I waited until after I said “The end” to add the part about saving my father. That was my chance, and I had blown it.
Now I had a decision to make. Should I ask Aunt Mina to tell another story tomorrow night? A story that would save my father? But maybe she’d wouldn’t want to tell any more stories. Maybe she’d decide to chuck the necklace in the river. Or maybe she wouldn’t remember what happened or wouldn’t believe in the necklace’s power. She’d tell another story without thinking of the consequences, and we’d have another disaster. Maybe a worse one. Could I take the chance? It wasn’t just my own life at risk. It was Aunt Mina’s and Timmy’s.
There was a knock at the door.
I stood up.
Another knock.
A new monster?
I ran to the door and peered through the peephole.
It was my father. I opened the door.
“They let me go,” he said. “I don’t know why. But I’m free.”
He hugged me. My body was warm all over. I could feel his heartbeat. I could have stayed in that hug forever.
From the living room I could hear Timmy mumbling, already half asleep. “Tell another story, Mommy. But not a scary one.”
The Only Child
by Joseph S. Walker
JAKE SCREAMED, GRIPPING THE SHOULDER restraint so hard that his knuckles turned white as his car crested the second big hill and plunged seemingly straight down and impossibly fast.
He’d managed to keep it together on the first hill, but now all thoughts of staying cool and being grown-up vanished as the car shook wildly and the wind roared past his ears. He was sure something had gone wrong and he was going to die, his mangled body pulled from the coaster’s wreckage, but then they reached the bottom of the drop and shot back up, twisting into a loop that made him stop worrying about dying and start worrying about throwing up.
That second hot dog at the concession stand had been a big mistake.
He had told his parents that since he was finally old enough and tall enough to ride the Golden Eagle roller coaster, he wanted to do it alone. Dad couldn’t go anyway because it would set off his vertigo, making him throw up for sure, and Jake didn’t want to be the kid who had to have his mommy with him. All morning and into lunch, as the three of them had walked around the amusement park in the sweltering heat, he had pleaded and begged, promising a hundred times that he could handle it. He was no baby.
He was almost a teenager!
“Fine,” his mother had finally snapped at him across the picnic table. She wiped her sweaty forehead with a napkin. “It’s too hot to put up with your whining anymore. You go right ahead, mister, but I don’t want to hear a word of complaint if it makes you sick.”
Jake had sprung up from the table before she could change her mind, dashing for the line and waving over his shoulder at her shouts that they would meet him at the ride’s exit. He felt a little guilty about how pushy he’d gotten, but how many chances would he get to do this? He decided that the long, boring wait in the winding Golden Eagle line would be punishment enough, which meant he was free to enjoy the ride. And when he finally got to the front and was put into a car with a cute girl about his age, with her parents in the car behind them, it had even seemed like he was being rewarded.
But now the ride
was rocketing toward another loop, and it didn’t feel much like a reward. He gripped the harness still more tightly. He wanted to look at the girl, to see if she was scared too, but he was afraid she’d be laughing at him, and anyway, trying to turn his head would just make him dizzier. Maybe he had inherited Dad’s vertigo, something he had never worried about before.
They hit the loop, and he screamed again as he went upside down and felt his weight lifting from the seat, only the seat belt and the harness keeping him from breaking away on his own path to the hard ground.
There were two more giant hills, a third loop, and a lot of very sharp turns before the cars finally, mercifully, glided back to a stop at the station. Jake still clutched the harness so firmly that his hands ached. Park workers came scuttling down both sides of the rails, popping up the restraints and unlocking the seat belts, directing people to exit to the right.
Jake got to his feet, feeling unsteady and woozy. He didn’t look at the girl as she and her parents raced off to another ride, chattering happily like the rest of the riders.
That was fun, Jake told himself firmly. I want to do it again. Sometime. He was only half convinced this was true, but he was completely convinced that his parents, and especially Mom, would be unbearably smug if he showed them how scared he’d been. He took a moment to gather himself and began walking slowly down the curving exit path. The rest of the riders were well ahead of him, and he was alone by the time he came to the park’s main concourse where Mom had said they would meet.
There was nobody there. It wasn’t just that his parents weren’t around; through some fluke of the park’s ebb and flow, there was nobody in sight in any direction as he came to a confused stop with the toes of his sneakers on the concourse bricks. He could still hear the noise of people, shouts, and laughter and music from every direction, but the sounds might as well have been coming from ghosts. He couldn’t even see the people in the gondolas of the aerial tram that went from one side of the park to the other since he was standing directly under the lines.
He seemed completely alone.
The panic he’d felt on the ride started to surface again, but just as he felt it rising, a group of little kids came tearing around a corner, chased by a frantic mother, and the spell was broken. In a few seconds the concourse went from deserted to mobbed as people emerged from every direction, everyone moving fast, chattering, looking at maps of the park and guzzling sodas. But where were Mom and Dad?
There was a small playground across the concourse. Jake hustled across and climbed to the top of the slide, hanging on with one hand as he turned to scan the crowd from his higher vantage point.
There! He saw his dad’s distinctive, dorky plaid baseball cap off to his left, bobbing above the crowd and moving away from where he and Mom should be waiting. Weird. Jake jumped to the ground, stumbling a bit as he broke into a run, weaving around people and craning his neck. Dad was entering the big central plaza of the park. Jake dodged around one last group of confused tourists pointing in different directions, and now he was only a few feet away. He could see Mom now, walking to Dad’s right, and between them—
Between them was Jake.
Jake skidded to a stop. Although he was behind them, he knew these were his parents, clearly and unmistakably, and the kid walking between them was, just as clearly, himself, with the same blue T-shirt, the same khaki shorts, the same white sneakers with his initials in red marker on their backs. The only difference between them was that this other Jake had a balloon. The string was tied to his right wrist, and the balloon itself, way up above even Dad’s head, was huge and round and dark reddish purple, the color of a bruise several days old.
Jake’s jaw went slack. For a moment the ground seemed unsteady under his feet, and he felt a prickle at the back of his neck. How could he be both here and there?
He couldn’t, obviously. This had to be some other kid who happened to be dressed like him, and his parents just weren’t paying attention. As usual. He ran forward, going past and swinging around to face them.
“Hey!” he shouted. “It’s me!”
Without even breaking stride, the three of them walked right past him, his father brushing him aside slightly as they passed. Jake felt cold, rigid with fear. He’d seen the face of the other kid now, but it wasn’t some other kid. It was him, the him he saw in the mirror every morning—the same face, eyes, hair, everything—the very essence of Jakeness, grinning stupidly up at Mom and holding his big dumb balloon.
Jake shook himself. He couldn’t just stand here and let them walk off. He turned and saw the ugly balloon moving away and ran after it. This time Jake grabbed Dad’s arm with both hands, yelling at the same time, but Dad just shook him off, not even seeming to look down or notice that he was doing it, and kept walking forward. Jake ran around them and stood directly in front of his mother, holding up his hands to make her stop. His parents both had dazed, sleepy expressions on their faces, and as they reached him, his mom simply pushed Jake aside without even looking at him, shoving him so hard that he almost fell to the concrete of the plaza.
Jake’s heart was thudding, his breath shallow. Mom and Dad hadn’t looked at him, but the other Jake had, and not with the smile he’d been giving Jake’s parents. His eyes had been cold and rimmed with red, his mouth sneering. In the split second that they’d been looking at each other, the other Jake had parted his lips, and the teeth inside were not like Jake’s teeth—there were too many of them, and they were too sharp. Jake froze in terror at the sight, and when Mom had shoved him, he was sure he’d heard the other Jake snort with laughter.
This wasn’t just some other kid trying to steal his parents. That thing had done something to Mom and Dad. Drugged them or hypnotized them. What could he do? He wanted to cry—just curl up on the ground and bawl—but that wouldn’t do anything. He needed help.
There was a security guard nearby, leaning against a lamppost. Jake darted up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, and the guard looked down at him lazily.
“Sir, my parents,” Jake said. “They’ve got some other kid with them. He looks like me but he isn’t; we’ve got to stop them.”
The guard nodded, yawned, and looked up at the gondolas floating by overhead. He didn’t move from the post.
Jake grabbed at his hand. “Sir, please!”
The guard lifted one foot from the ground, planted it on Jake’s chest, and shoved. Jake stumbled backward several feet, landing on his butt. There were swarms of people around, but none of them paid any attention, and the guard just kept looking around, seeming to watch everything except Jake.
“Don’t bother,” said a quiet voice behind him. “They can’t really see you.”
Jake jumped back to his feet and spun around. A girl a couple of years younger than him stood there, wearing a simple pink dress and big sunglasses with plastic blue frames. She looked odd, out of place. She looks . . . faded, Jake thought, as though everyone and everything around her was in a high-def video while she was in an old photo, dug out of a shoebox in the back of a closet. Her hands were folded primly in front of her, and her head was cocked a little to the side. She seemed to be looking right at him, though with the sunglasses it was hard to tell.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “Who can’t see me?”
“Him,” she said, pointing at the guard. “Or your parents. Or anyone else.”
Jake looked at his hand, which seemed perfectly normal. “I’m invisible?”
“No,” she said. Her voice was quiet and somehow dry like sheets of paper rustling against one another. “You’re just . . . not important enough to notice anymore. You’re like a buzzing fly that gets waved away without really thinking about it. You’ve been replaced.”
He stepped closer to her. “It’s that other boy,” he said. “The one with my folks. What did he do?”
Her lips tightened. “It’s not a boy,” she said. “We call it the Only Child.”
“‘We’? Who’s ‘we’?”
/> “The rest of us,” she said, gesturing around the park. “You’re not the first. Look, there goes Paul now. He’s been here since before me.”
Jake looked to where she was pointing and caught a glimpse of a boy, his back to them, slipping through the crowd, his clothes faded and out of focus like the girl’s. Jake knew that if she hadn’t pointed, he never would have noticed the boy at all.
When he looked back she was starting to wander away, moving slowly toward the Golden Eagle. “Wait,” he cried, grabbing her shoulder. She was solid enough, though touching her immediately made his hand feel like it had gone to sleep, all pins and needles. He pulled her around to face him. “You have to help me. Please!”
She shrugged. “Help you? How? If I knew, would I be here? Any of us?”
“But what is it? What can I do?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s the Only Child. Call it a demon or a monster or a ghost, it doesn’t matter. Your family belongs to it now.”
“No,” Jake moaned. He shook his head. There had to be something. He looked around wildly and saw the balloon, the hideous balloon, way over at the far side of the plaza. He started to trot after it.
To his surprise the girl followed him, keeping pace with him easily as he moved through the crowd. He was almost knocked over a dozen times by people who paid no attention to him, though she glided around them easily.
“It happened to all of us,” she said. She sounded like she was patiently trying to make a stupid child understand the alphabet. “The Only Child will leave with your parents, and you’ll be stuck here. And then in a few months it will be back and choose someone else.”
“I’ll stop them from leaving,” Jake said. He was breathing hard from trying to talk and follow the balloon at the same time. The girl didn’t seem bothered by it.
“You can’t,” she said.
“I’ll follow them. I’ll take the bus to our house and call the cops, and they’ll come and arrest it.”
“The police won’t listen to you any more than the guard did,” she said. “But anyway, you can’t leave. If you try to leave the park, you’ll just find yourself back inside. I’ve tried it hundreds of times.”