Jeff Strand - A Bad Day for Voodoo

Glenn chuckled. “Whoa! Did you see him bristle? It was like we had a porcupine in the house.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry. My boy was only kidding.”

“If he touches me, I’m going to claw his eyes out,” said Kelley. “Just throwing that out there.”

“That was uncalled for,” said Mildred. “You’re a guest in our home, and you’ll abide by our rules. In this household, we do not threaten to claw each other’s eyes out. If you want to do that, go someplace else where that kind of rudeness is tolerated.”

“Actually, I’d very much like to go someplace else,” said Kelley, standing up. “Adam! Get back out here!”

“Sit back down, young lady,” said Mildred.

WHAT DO YOU THiNK MILDRED SAiD NEXT?

A. "Ha ha! Just kidding, you little rapscallions! here's a free cell phone and a DiY book on how to undo voodoo curses.”

B. "i wish i had a free monkey for every time somebody ate a crouton.”

C. "i'm sorry, but you're not going anywhere.”

D. None of the above.

The answer is C.

CHAPTER 18

“You can’t keep us here against our will,” I said. Because in a hostage situation, the best thing you can do is inform your captors that they aren’t allowed to be doing this.

“We didn’t ask for you to disturb us,” said Mildred. “We were enjoying a peaceful evening of family time when you came pounding on our door.”

Alert readers will remember that we didn’t pound on the door. We rang the doorbell. Astute readers will guess that I didn’t correct her. I mean, why behave like an Internet troll?

Adam had not yet responded to Kelley’s demand that he get back out here. This was a source of concern.

“All we wanted was to borrow your phone,” I said. “I was even worried about bleeding in your living room.”

The logical way to handle this situation seemed to be to rush for the front door and get the hell out of this house of madness before we could be killed and served as stew. But what about Adam? Was it too late for him? Was his body already in the form of small cubes of meat?

“Just so you know,” I said, “all three of us are diseased.” (I considered being specific, but the only disease I could think of at that very moment was mad cow, so I decided that the vague approach would be better.) “If you eat us, you’ll catch it too.”

Mildred laughed. “Why does everybody always assume that we’re cannibals?” Then her face fell. “Is it my butt? Does it look big in this dress? Do I look like I’ve been eating too much?”

“No, your butt looks, uh, charming,” I said.

My heart was pounding. I’d had a bunch of guns pointed at me earlier, but that was somehow much less frightening than this creepy, smiley family. I looked at Kelley to see if she was thinking about the same RUN!!! plan that I was.

Adam let out a scream.

It wasn’t the good kind of scream. It wasn’t a scream that sent the message This is awesome! or That really tickles, but I love it! This was a scream of terror.

That said, I don’t want to give the impression that it was a terrified scream that echoed through my brain and would haunt my dreams until the end of my days. There wasn’t soul-deep terror in that scream. He just sounded scared. He definitely didn’t sound like he was having any fun.

“I love that noise,” said Glenn. “Worth every penny of the soundproofing we had to install to avoid alerting the neighbors.”

Kelley and I jumped to our feet. My plan was to shove Glenn out of the way, race down the hallway, throw open the door, let Kelley beat up Donna, drag Adam to safety, then let Kelley beat up Mildred while I beat up Franklin. Then we’d try another house.

Much of this plan was designed with the idea that Mildred would not pull out a gun from underneath her apron, so I was very disappointed when she did.

It was only a little gun, but still...

“Sit down,” she said.

Adam screamed again.

“I never get tired of that sound,” said Glenn.

Mildred probably wouldn’t have time to shoot both of us before we rushed her, but a 50 percent survival rate simply wasn’t acceptable.

“Our parents will be looking for us,” said Kelley.

“I know that, you silly duck,” said Mildred. “They usually do.”

“They know we’re here.”

“Yes, I’m sure that before you left the house, you told your mom and dad that you were headed out to go knock on strangers’ doors, asking to use their phone.”

“They at least know the general area.”

“I spy, with my little eye, somebody who is telling a lie. Can anybody guess who that is?”

Nobody answered the question, but we all knew it was Kelley. A couple of small patches of blood had started to seep through the towel.

“I’m gonna start bleeding on your floor,” I said, hoping this would provide enough distraction for our daring escape.

“I’m pointing a gun at you,” said Mildred. “Believe me, brain matter is a lot harder to get out of the upholstery than blood.”

I nodded. Her effort to intimidate me had been successful.

Or had it?

On those crime scene investigation shows, they were always talking about how you could never truly get rid of blood traces, no matter how hard you tried. Many a criminal had been apprehended because of their false assumptions about the cleaning power of household detergents. But I’d never heard of the lab guys saying, “Oh my, look at this...she forgot to sweep up this chunk of the victim’s brain.”

So Mildred was bluffing.

She wasn’t really going to shoot me.

I was pretty sure she wasn’t really going to shoot me.

But she could be lying about her familiarity with brain matter and still be telling the truth about her intent to shoot me.

Obviously, she was trying to sound more threatening than she actually was. Yet if a mob enforcer said, “I’ve killed thirty-eight people,” when he’d only killed twenty-six, you’d still be worried if he took you out on a boat and asked you to hold your feet in a box of cement until it dried.

If she had the gun and the gun was pointed at me, why would she need to say something about brain matter? Why did she need to be scarier? I was a sixteen-year-old kid. Was she so worried that I was going to try to rush her and knock the gun away that she made a sinister comment to make sure I stayed in my seat?

Well, to be fair, I had considered the idea that she was bluffing, and her comment about the brain matter had encouraged me to devote more thought to whether or not that was a good idea, so technically, her comment had been successful.

Was the gun even loaded?

Franklin seemed kind of irresponsible. Would a good parent keep a loaded gun in a house with somebody like him around? What if he accidentally shot out his eye?

Did Mildred have a secret pocket in her apron where she stored the gun? Did she hurriedly put on the apron when she heard the doorbell.. .or did she keep the apron on at all times just in case she needed to shoot somebody?

Oh my God, I was being held at gunpoint by a woman who carried a gun in her apron at all times just in case somebody needed to be shot.

No way was I standing up.

Adam screamed again. At least I knew he wasn’t dead.

Unless he was a zombie.

No, Mr. Click was a zombie, and he couldn’t scream.

Unless Adam was a different kind of zombie. One that could scream.

All of these thoughts went through my head in about 0.00039 seconds, at which point I made my final decision to respect Mildred’s gun and not try to knock it out of her hand.

“So which base should we cover tonight?” asked Mildred.

Glenn shrugged. “What are you more in the mood for? The kindness and serenity of Buddhism or the human sacrifice of the Aztecs?”