Dan Poblocki - The Stone Child

Wham!

The door rattled, and once again, Harris screamed.

“A rabid monkey?” said Eddie, feeling foolish even as the words came out of his mouth.

“Does this door lock?” Harris asked quietly.

Mrs. Singh flittered forward, keeping her wide eyes on the thing on the doorstep. “A monkey?” she said, her voice trembling into a weird operatic register. “That is not a monkey.” She reached around behind Harris and turned the latch. “Excuse me, please,” she said. Something inside the door clicked. It was now locked, so Harris stepped away from it.

“Thanks,” Harris said to Mrs. Singh. Turning around, he saw the creature staring at him. The thing opened its mouth and tried to bite the glass. Its tiny purple stump of a tongue flipped and flopped like a dissected worm, sliming the door with saliva. Then, from two small pockets on either side of its mouth, several thin green tendrils began to unfurl, their barbed tips tapping and scratching at the breath-fogged glass.

Holding her hand to her mouth, Mrs. Singh uttered a horrified squeak. “I’m calling the police!” she cried, running back toward her desk.

The creature smacked the door with its hand again. This time, the glass cracked a bit. The thing’s mouth-tendrils squirmed to the edge of the door, as if searching for a way inside. The three kids scrambled away.

“That is not a monkey,” Maggie repeated.

“What are we going to do?” said Eddie, glancing toward Mrs. Singh. “We’ve both read The Curse of the Gremlin’s Tongue, Harris. You know the police won’t be able to help us.”

Harris shook his head in frustration. Then his face lit up. “You’re right!” he said. “The police can’t help. But you can!”

“Me?” said Eddie. “How?”

“You know how! You were the one who picked the flower. He wants to eat you!”

Eddie felt nauseated. “So? That’s not a solution! He can’t eat me!”

“I know that. We won’t let him,” said Harris, pulling Eddie away from the door. Maggie stayed behind, fascinated by the little monster who continued to watch them from the other side of the glass. “You picked the flower. Only you can send him away. Don’t you remember how?”

Eddie racked his brain. He knew the answer to this question. He’d only just reread the book a day ago. The answer hit him. “Right!” said Eddie. “I’ve got to speak to him in his own language.”

“Exactly,” said Harris.

“Hello, Wally?” said Mrs. Singh from behind her desk, holding the phone to her ear. “Come quickly. We’ve got another problem.” She glanced at them and said, “You kids, uh… stay calm.”

Another problem? Eddie didn’t have time to think about what she meant by that. He smiled and nodded at her. “We’re calm,” he said, then quickly turned back to Harris. “I need to put the flower under my tongue,” he whispered. “That way, he’ll understand what I say.”

Maggie spun around and shouted, “What sort of craziness are you two talking about?”

Ignoring her, Harris said, “So where is the flower?”

Eddie felt his stomach drop to the floor. The flower! Had he dropped it? “I don’t know,” he whispered.

The creature whacked the glass again. The crack grew, spidering out nearly four inches.

“Hurry!” Harris cried. “Check your pockets or something!”

Eddie shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. Save a few pieces of gritty lint, they were empty. Then he searched his coat pockets. When he reached into the one on the right, he felt something small and soft crumpled at the bottom. Cautiously, Eddie pulled out his hand. In his palm, the flower lay, crushed into a little ball. He must have shoved it in there at the bottom of the stairs.

“The flower is ruined!” said Eddie.

Outside, the creature made a shrieking sound. His eyes went wild. His nostrils flared. He banged the door again. This time, the glass shattered. Pieces of it flew onto the rug. The thing’s mouth-tendrils skittered nervously across the threshold. Maggie screamed and dashed away from the door. She ran behind Mrs. Singh’s desk. The librarian shouted at the gremlin, who was now crawling through the smashed hole in the door, “Shoo! Get out of here!” Then she turned her attention to Eddie and Harris. “Boys! Get away from there!” She motioned for them to join her and Maggie behind the desk.

Eddie almost wanted to start laughing-he knew that hiding behind a desk wouldn’t stop the monster.

“Do it anyway,” said Harris, ignoring Mrs. Singh. “Put it under your tongue.”

“But-” Eddie began to protest.

“It can’t hurt!” cried Maggie. She sounded terrified and confused. Eddie knew she had no idea what was going on, yet she might be right.

Standing amid the shards of broken glass, the creature flashed its hideous teeth. Suddenly, it scrambled forward, reaching for Harris’s ankles.

Instantaneously, Eddie shoved the crumpled flower into his mouth and swished it under his tongue. It was dry and gritty and tasted like mold. Eddie wanted to throw up, but he managed to keep from gagging.

He meant to shout STOP at the creature, but when he opened his mouth, what came out was something totally different. A deep, resonant voice, completely unlike his own, burst from his throat: “ HEST-ZO-THORTH!” The sound of it shook the room, unsettling the dust from the highest bookshelves. Shocked, Eddie covered his mouth, afraid to open it again.

“It’s working,” said Harris, shaken a bit himself.

The creature froze several inches from the spot where Harris had been standing a few seconds earlier. It stared at Eddie, as if in surprise, waiting for further instructions. It retracted the tendrils back into its mouth with a loud slurp, like someone messily eating a plate of spaghetti. Eddie didn’t know what to do next. The flower seemed to squirm under his tongue, as if trying to escape his own mouth. If Eddie didn’t keep speaking, he knew the flower would somehow manage to spit itself out, and the creature would continue on its path toward its terrible meal. He tried to remember what Kate, the character from Nathaniel Olmstead’s book, had said to her own gremlin when it had attacked her and the baby during the thunderstorm.

I meant no harm. Please forgive me. Leave us in peace.

Or something like that.

Eddie tried to speak, but the strange voice inside his mouth again spoke its own words instead, “NO-KOWTH JAWETH THUN-E-ZATH! SAHWL-KA PA-TEP ZHEP-TA! OM-VHEM HEPATH!”

The little creature listened, quietly penitent, then hung its shoulders in outward defeat. It almost seemed to roll its eyes as it trudged toward Eddie, stopping a foot in front of him, holding out one hand. Eddie looked at it, unsure of what to do. The creature shook its hand at him, its palm facing up like a beggar asking for money.

“I think it wants the flower back,” whispered Harris from a few feet away.

Eddie nodded. He spit the soggy flower into his palm, then very carefully bent over and handed it to the creature at his feet. The thing snatched the flower from Eddie and grumbled something quietly under its breath. Then it turned around and angrily kicked pieces of broken glass as it slunk back toward the library’s entrance. After it crunched through the hole in the door, the gremlin spun around quickly and glared at them. Finally, it popped the flower into its own mouth, gave a brief bow, and, before any of them could comprehend what was happening, disappeared.

Silence shrouded the library-until someone behind the librarian’s desk sneezed. When Eddie turned around, he saw Maggie holding her sleeve up to her nose. Both she and Mrs. Singh stared in awe. Eddie felt as confused as they both looked, yet he still felt the need to offer some sort of explanation. From outside, the sound of a siren grew as a police car approached. “That was… uh… that was…” But he couldn’t think of anything to say that would help them understand, so he joined them in their astonishment. “That was… weird,” he choked out. “Wasn’t it?”