Bliss

  Lily set the jar on the chopping block and stared into it. “Have you ever seen anything so marvelous?”

  Rose stared through the tinted blue glass of the mason jar at the withered old face of the dwarf. He was wearing a little coat made of brown felt and tan long johns. He was about the size of a Cabbage Patch Kids doll. His eyes were squeezed shut, yielding an explosion of crow’s-feet at the corners.

  Rose held the jar while Lily slid her hands under the dwarf’s armpits and gently lifted him out. The air inside the jar was stale, and it seeped from the jar and filled the kitchen. Lily sat him on the chopping block. He continued to snore, and, in his slumber, slowly leaned too far to the right and—thwap!—bonked his head on the chopping block.

  That woke the dwarf right up.

  He shook his head out and righted himself crankily, then raised his little arms in the air and yawned, revealing a spotted tongue and toothless old gums.

  His breath was nearly impossible to describe. It was rank. It smelled like garbage and old fish and poop.

  The Bliss children all gagged and backed away as far as they could as the putrid wind from the yawning dwarf filled the room. Rose pinched her nose as hard as she could until the smell died down.

  When Rose managed to open her eyes again, she found the dwarf staring at her, arms crossed in front of his chest, one foot tapping. “I suppose you’ve woken me from my slumber because you need me to whisper a secret into some batter.”

  “Yes…,” Rose admitted. He was a quick one, this dwarf.

  “Which one?” he snarled.

  Aunt Lily said, “The secret of time?”

  The dwarf scratched his chin for a minute, thinking deeply. “The secret of time … the secret of time…” Then he snapped his head up and announced tragically, “I have forgotten the secret of time!”

  Rose’s heart sank. After all the work they’d done, to have their dreams of Blackberry Tortes dashed because of an old dwarf’s faulty memory.

  Then the dwarf snickered. “Ha! I had you! I’m kidding. Of course I know the secret of time. Puh-lease.”

  “Oh, thank you, Dwarf of Perpetual Sleep!” cried Rose. Under normal circumstances she would have hugged him, but he smelled too foul to be approached.

  “I have a name,” he said crossly. “Rude.”

  “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to be.”

  “No, my name is Rude. Rude Dingherwurst.”

  Rude spotted Aunt Lily staring lovingly at him from the corner. “I will whisper the secret of time if she,” he pointed at Lily, “will hold me over the batter.”

  Aunt Lily bowed. “Anything for you, Mr. Dingherwurst.”

  “If you drop me, you will have to marry me,” he said, snickering. “No, seriously.”

  Lily laughed. “I just may drop you, then!” And she picked up the dwarf under his arms and strolled outside.

  Rose and her brothers gathered around the steaming satellite dish, while Aunt Lily held Mr. Rude Dingherwurst over the molten chocolate.

  “Ow!” he winced. “Steam in the face! A little farther away, darlin’!”

  Aunt Lily moved him back a few inches.

  “Ready?” Aunt Lily said. Rose could tell that she was trying to be as sweet as possible.

  “Almost.” He coughed. “I’d love a foot rub first. And a shot of whiskey. Whatever you have is fine, although I’d prefer an audience with Mr. Johnny Walker.”

  That was enough. Rose was not about to let the rudeness of Mr. Rude Dingherwurst spoil their whole operation. She couldn’t flirt like Aunt Lily, but she could give him a piece of her mind.

  Rose went up to the molten chocolate bowl and put her nose just one inch from Mr. Rude Dingherwurst’s. “Pardon me, Mr. D. We are in some serious trouble right now. We’re sorry we’ve interrupted your nap, but that’s no reason at all to waste our time. If you’re not going to help us, that’s fine. Because I’d rather live in a town where everything is upside down than have to rub what I’m sure are your very, very smelly feet.” Rose had always wanted to make a dramatic speech like that but never had occasion to before. “If you don’t mind.”

  Rude didn’t say anything; he just grumbled and turned back to the batter. Then he whispered something in a language Rose didn’t understand.

  Maireann croi eadrom I bhfad.

  Then he pulled his head back and said, “There. Now may I go back to sleep, please?”

  His whisper hung in the air over the trouble boiler in a stream of bloodred mist that spilled over the chocolate and became like the two hands of a clock, seeming to stir the batter like paddles as they whirred counterclockwise. They turned and turned around within the satellite dish, whooshing and gurgling and ticking, like a clock made of goopy chocolate was being wound backward.

  Around them, the world shivered and rippled, the air warping like melting plastic. Rose realized her breath was caught in her chest, and try as she might, she couldn’t open her mouth—the moment of time seemed to stretch out and stretch out until she thought she’d suffocate if she couldn’t breathe—when with a snap! it was over, and she took in a long, raggedy wet breath.

  She gasped, “What happened?”

  Sage and Ty both coughed. “Beats me,” Ty said.

  And with that, Aunt Lily carried Mr. Rude Dingherwurst back to his jar and dunked him into the murky fluid (he winked as his head was submerged); then Rose set him on the shelf downstairs, but not before hearing the sinister voice from beneath the grate.

  If you find the Tincture of Venus unappealing, it said, just clutch the apron strings of your aunt Lily. She knows the ways to fame and fortune and glamour beyond compare.

  Rose shivered and rushed back upstairs, sensing that the thing beneath the house somehow knew more than it was saying. Maybe Rose would return later and ask it what to do. But before she could do that, there were Blackberry Tortes to bake.

  Aunt Lily ladled the batter into cake pans while Rose and Sage heated all the blackberries in the huge vat with more sugar. When the berries had boiled down into a delicious sugary mash, Rose spooned the mixture on top of the individual tortes as they came out of the oven.

  “Now all we have to do is get everyone in town to eat a slice of this,” said Aunt Lily. “But how?”

  “We’ll just tell them they have to eat it, right?” Ty ventured.

  Aunt Lily puzzled a moment. “No, that won’t work. Whatever excuse we use to get people to eat this, it has to be backward, or else no one will listen.”

  “We could tell them to put it in their butts…,” Sage ventured.

  Aunt Lily bonked him on top of the head. “That’s not polite, Sage.”

  Again Rose had the solution. She could see herself getting used to this. “I know!” she announced. “We need the family van. And some serious speakers.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Recipe the Fourth: Back-to-Before Blackberry Torte

  As soon as Rose said “speakers,” Sage bolted up to his room. A minute later, he came careening down with two computer speakers. They were about the size of fuzzy dice that you’d hang off the rearview mirror of a car.

  “Bigger,” said Rose, making a pointed look at Ty. “Come on!”

  Ty groaned. “I’m not carrying that thing. It’s heavy! Like, really heavy.” Ty rolled up one of the sleeves of his T-shirt and flexed his bicep. Then he kissed it. “I might do some serious damage to this baby.”

  “What’s the point of having muscles if you can’t carry things with them?” Rose asked. “Besides, we finally found a use for your bass amp!”

  Ty dragged himself upstairs. When he reappeared, he was sweating and panting and carrying the four-foot-tall amplifier that Purdy had bought him for his birthday. He had yet to use the amplifier because he had yet to open the electric bass that came along with it.

  Rose nodded as she looked at the speaker, which was almost as tall as she was. “That’s more like it.”

  “Care to elucidate the plan, Miss Rose?” asked Aunt Lily.

&
nbsp; “What does elucidate mean?” Sage asked, scratching his forehead.

  Aunt Lily threw up her arms. “It means to shed light on something! To explain!” At that, Lily ran around the room and threw on all of the overhead fluorescent lights, making the room as bright as a gym during a high-school basketball game. “Enlighten us, Rose!” she said. Rose couldn’t help but giggle. Aunt Lily had a way of making even the bleakest of evenings feel like a party.

  “Here’s what we do,” Rose said emphatically, swinging herself up onto the chopping-block table. “We tie the speaker up to the top of the van, and we plug a microphone in. Then we go around town and we tell everyone to stay away from the town square, that there is not a disco dance party there.”

  Aunt Lily clapped. “I see what you’re doing here.”

  “I’ll do the announcing,” said Ty. “That way I can practice my radio voice.”

  Rose nodded at her brother. “Sure, Ty. As I was saying, that will naturally make everyone rush immediately to the town square for a disco dance party. And we’ll be parked in the town square playing disco music under a sign begging people not to take our Blackberry Tortes. Which of course will compel everyone to take one.”

  Aunt Lily gave Rose a one-armed hug. “I adore any plan that involves a disco dance party. Smart thinking. Good job, Rosie!”

  Delighted, Rose slid to the floor and took a bow. Even Ty and Sage had to hand it to her: It was a solid plan.

  Aunt Lily winced as she drove the rusty old van through the dimly lit, twisted streets of Calamity Falls. “This is like a video game, only we could actually die.”

  Lily wasn’t exaggerating. She was the only person driving forward.

  Though she was an expert motorcyclist, Lily hadn’t actually driven a car in years, she told the Bliss children, and she didn’t feel comfortable winding through the narrow streets of an unfamiliar town in the middle of the night while driving in reverse. Rose gulped in the backseat along with Sage as Aunt Lily darted in between cars going the wrong way on the wrong side of the street, cars that had been parked willy-nilly into the street, and cars that had been backed into trees and fences and abandoned on the side of the road. Rose could see that even Ty was nervous—he clutched his seat belt with both hands in the front passenger seat.

  As Principal Fanner drove past, he shook his fist out his window, slammed on the horn and screamed, “GNORW YAW!”

  “What is he shouting at me?” Aunt Lily cried, stopping the van for a second to take a breath and smooth her short black hair.

  Sage, the designated translator, wrote the curious phrase on the dry-erase board he’d taken down from the fridge. “Wrong way. He’s yelling at you for going the wrong way!”

  Lily stuck her full torso out of the driver’s window and shouted defiantly, “No, buster, you’re going the wrong way!”

  Instead of shouting back, Mr. Fanner cowered nervously in the driver’s seat as he slowly rolled past.

  “Just pretend you’re in London,” Rose quipped.

  Meanwhile, in the backseat, Sage had written out a message for the confused citizens of Calamity Falls: ON OCSID YTRAP NI NWOT ERAUQS! OD TON OG OT NWOT ERAUQS!, or, in plain English, No disco party in town square! Do not go to town square!

  “How the heck do I say this?” Ty whined, clutching a microphone that he’d attached to the amp on the roof.

  “Just sound it out!” Rose said, secretly glad that Ty had insisted on doing the announcing.

  Ty rolled down his window, cleared his throat into the microphone, and began: “Umm … ummm. On ock-sid ee-trap n-ee en-wot e-rowks.” He glanced back at Rose with a bewildered, skeptical look. “This is harder than it looks!”

  “Ty! You just broadcast that!”

  He looked at the mic in his hand. “Whoops! Eeerross!” he said.

  “Good!” Rose said, trying to be encouraging. She’d never seen Ty nervous about anything before. “Keep going!”

  “There’s no way this is right,” he muttered, then began again. “O-dd ton o-gg o-tt en-wot e-rowks.” The whole sentence came out a little smoother that time, even though the whole thing still sounded sort of like Ty trying not to throw up. English was not pretty in reverse.

  “What do I do now?” he asked, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, then opening them.

  “Say it again!” said Rose. “Just say it over and over! With passion!”

  “I love passion!” Aunt Lily said as she drove.

  “This is so stupid,” Ty grumbled. “It’s not going to work.”

  “You’re doing great,” Rose whispered. She reached forward and patted his shoulder.

  “Fine,” Ty grumbled. “On ok-sid ee-trap n-ee en-wot e-rowks.”

  They drew up alongside Mrs. Havegood. She was driving backward in the left lane while Lily was driving forward in the right lane.

  Right after Ty’s announcement, Mrs. Havegood jammed on the brakes and peered over the solid yellow line into the Blissmobile. “YLLAER?!” which Rose immediately understood to mean Really?!

  “Everyone shake your heads no,” Rose said. They all dutifully waggled their heads back and forth.

  Then Mrs. Havegood parked her car in the middle of the road and hurried backward on foot in the direction of the town square.

  “It’s working!” said Rose. “Looks like Mrs. Havegood loves herself some disco music!”

  “Who doesn’t?” said Aunt Lily, keeping her eyes on the road but dancing a little in her seat. “Disco party, here we come!”

  Ty smiled, lifted the mic to his lips, and spoke again. And again. And again.

  As they passed the school playground, Ty stuck his head out the window and proclaimed, “On ok-sidee-trap n-ee en-wot e-rowks!” The teachers abandoned their swinging and sliding and sandcastle building and backpedaled in the direction of the town square.

  They pulled up in front of a construction site, and Ty actually got out of the van to announce, “On ok-sid ee-trap n-ee en-wot e-rowks!”

  The workers cheered, tossed their hard hats into the air, and stopped their work filling holes and tearing things down, then stumbled backward through the streets.

  Mailmen tossed their bags of letters into the night air and scooted backward over the terrain. Lawyers and accountants and pharmacists all looked up from the desks in their storefronts and flocked to the center of town, not bothering to lock their doors.

  Apparently everyone in Calamity Falls really liked disco. Or maybe they didn’t like disco. It hurt Rose’s head to try to figure it out.

  By the time they reached the base of Sparrow Hill, Ty was shouting out the backward English as smoothly as a DJ and as fast as a cattle auctioneer. “On ok-sid ee-trap n-ee en-wot e-rowks!” he said, in a gruff, sultry voice that would indeed be perfect for radio. He had completed the transformation by donning a pair of sunglasses and popping his collar.

  Rose’s pulse quickened as they mounted the hill past Kline’s Key shop and parked in front of their last stop: Stetson’s Donuts and Automotive Repair.

  The hodgepodge old shop at the top of the hill was so dark and quiet that it looked like no one had lived there in years.

  “O-dd ton o-gg o-tt en-wot e-rowks!” Ty called.

  Rose waited a second, breathless, sucking in the cool night air like her life depended on it, waiting for Devin to emerge.

  But no one in the repair shop came out.

  Their van was gone, but Rose hadn’t seen it parked haphazardly in any of the side streets. Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen Devin all week, though she’d been too wrapped up in all the chaos to notice. They must have gone on vacation.

  “Let’s go,” said Rose, both disappointed and relieved. “They’re not here.”

  But Sage had already gotten out of the van and run to the overlook point at the top of Sparrow Hill, so Rose ran to fetch him back into the van.

  There were no trees at the top of the hill, just the open sky, which tonight felt so vast and so black and so empty that Rose thought she migh
t just get sucked up into it. It was breathtaking.

  “Look!” Sage said, pointing to the clearing in the center of town where Reginald Calamity’s marble doppelganger stood.

  A few thousand people who looked no larger than beetles from this distance were milling around the brick plaza. The rumble of a collective whine rose from the square. They had all dropped what they were doing and rushed to a disco party with no disco music.

  “It’s time to give the people what they want!” Rose shouted. She was going to make things right. She was going to prove that she was worthy of the name Bliss.

  Aunt Lily rolled into the town square blasting the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. They couldn’t figure out a way to play the music backward, but apparently disco music sounds the same no matter which way you play it, because Mrs. Havegood, standing in a leopard-print dress that she was wearing inside out, screamed, “YAY! OCSID!”

  People swaggered backward over the brick, awkwardly planting one foot and moving their pointed hands up and down in a diagonal on the wrong beat. Mr. Fanner collided butt first with Miss Karnopolis, and the two screamed at each other. Mr. Bastable and Miss Thistle spotted each other from across the crowd and plowed backward toward one another in time with the music, knocking over entire families. Children had formed a circle around Mrs. Havegood and cheered at her as she rolled around on the ground and did a mixed-up version of the worm. The moon served as an impromptu disco ball. The whole thing was beautiful in a sort of disturbing way.

  Rose and Lily pushed all of Pierre Guillaume’s outdoor dining tables into one massive banquet table, and Sage and Ty laid out all of the Back-to-Before Blackberry Tortes in a long line. They cut the tortes into slices and plopped each onto paper plates.