The Unseen World of Poppy Malone: A Gaggle of Goblins Page 2
Then he met and married Mrs. Malone. Within months, the newsletter began appearing regularly (nicely designed and with every word spelled correctly), and she had embarked on lengthy correspondences with many of PSI’s members. She encouraged them when their investigations failed, cheered for them when they won grants or landed jobs, and offered them a place to stay when they were passing through town and had spent their last dime on a new ectoplasm detector or digital recorder.
“I must remember to put our new address in the next newsletter,” she said.
“Why don’t we just register as a bed-and-breakfast while we’re at it?” Mr. Malone said. “We’ll never get any peace. The doorbell will be ringing at all hours of the day and night—”
Just then, as if to prove his point, the doorbell rang.
“You see?” he said. “This is how it begins! The hordes of locusts are descending. And we don’t even have any furniture yet!”
Fortunately, the person ringing the bell was not a roving parapsychologist but the driver of the moving van.
“This the Malone house?” he asked. “Where do you want me to put the cauldron?”
Poppy knew, of course, that her family was easily distracted, especially when there was work to be done. Still, she had hoped that this move would be different. She had hoped that everyone would pitch in cheerfully to unpack boxes, hang curtains, make beds, buy food, and generally manage to get things organized some time before Christmas. But once again, her hopes were dashed.
No one was doing any of those useful and practical things. Instead, her mother had started digging through boxes of books, hoping to find the volume that she vaguely remembered had an interesting chapter about cursed burial grounds. Her father was furiously reading over the bill from the moving company and making angry notes about what he planned to say when he called them in the morning. Franny had retired to the bathroom to dry her hair. Rolly, who had been discouraged from tearing up the kitchen floor, had taken his fork outside to dig up flowers instead. And Will was lying on the couch, his eyes closed and his hands peacefully folded over his chest.
“Will! Wake up! You can’t take a nap while the rest of us are working,” Poppy said, overstating the case a bit since, actually, no one besides her was doing anything helpful.
“I’m not taking a nap,” he said in a dreamy, faraway voice. “I think perhaps . . . yes . . . I feel a trance coming on.”
“Really?” Mrs. Malone straightened up from her box of books and hurried over to peer down at him. “How exciting!”
“How convenient, you mean,” said Poppy. “He always happens to fall into a trance when there’s work to do.”
“I cannot control the timing,” whispered Will. “The visions just . . . appear.”
“Can you describe what you’re seeing, dear?” Mrs. Malone asked in a hushed voice. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you were receiving a mental transmission from Deodat; he promised to take part in my remote viewing experiment when he went to India.” She glanced at her watch. “Of course, it’s a little after midnight over there, but Deo always was a night owl—”
“Mom, Will’s taking a nap,” protested Poppy.
“Going into a trance,” murmured Will.
“Mom—” Poppy began, but her mother held up her hand.
“Don’t disturb your brother,” Mrs. Malone whispered. “Perhaps this time Deo will finally get through.” She leaned closer and said, “Can you describe what you see, Will?”
Will lifted one languid hand and covered his eyes. “It’s very fuzzy,” he said. “Just a shining white object . . . kind of round, I think . . . big at the bottom, pointy at the top . . .”
“The Taj Mahal!” Mrs. Malone cried, beaming.
“Or a turnip,” Poppy said. “Get up.”
She kicked the couch leg and was immediately sorry.
“Poppy, if you can’t be quiet, please unpack something,” said her mother said. “Deo will simply never break through if you keep yelling and hopping about.”
Poppy limped up two flights of stairs, feeling disgruntled and misunderstood and ill-treated. Will’s supposed talent for remote viewing had started a year ago, during a particularly rainy month. The search for Bigfoot had been put on hold, thanks to rising swamp waters, so Mr. and Mrs. Malone had subjected their children to a series of experiments that could be conducted indoors. They had spent days sitting around the living room, trying to read one another’s thoughts and move objects with their minds.
When that got boring—their minds were apparently complete mysteries to one another and the only object that ever moved was a walnut that Will surreptiously flicked with a finger—Mrs. Malone had called a PSI member who lived in San Francisco and asked him to sit in front of a city landmark for an hour and concentrate on mentally transmitting a picture of what he saw.
When Will had guessed, correctly, that the man was looking at the Golden Gate Bridge, Mrs. Malone had hugged him and Mr. Malone had beamed with pride.
“I always knew you children had Unseen Talents,” Mrs. Malone had cried. “How could you not? You have been raised in an atmosphere that is open to the unknown and the mysterious!”
“Lucky guess,” Poppy had hissed in Will’s ear.
He had smiled smugly and embarked on a series of remote viewing experiments that involved lying down at convenient moments on beds, couches, porch swings, hammocks, and even, on long road trips, the entire backseat of the car.
Poppy had to admit that Will’s strategy was clever. He could get out of washing dishes, mowing the lawn, or being used as a test subject in other experiments simply by going limp and horizontal. She, however, scorned such subterfuge.
This meant that Poppy often found herself doing tedious and unpleasant things such as (she realized as soon as she opened the attic door) unpacking boxes of equipment in the stifling heat.
The first thing she did was to throw open the small window (wishing that her father had been there to see how easily she had done this). For a few moments, Poppy gazed at the treetops, imagining that she was looking down on billowing green ocean waves with an occasional rooftop poking up like a lonely shingled island. A slight breeze brought with it the smell of fresh-cut grass and the faint sound of wind chimes. The neighborhood was so still and quiet in the golden afternoon light that it could have been an enchanted town in a fairy tale.
She took a few deep breaths, then turned back to the attic and the large cardboard boxes labeled LABORATORY in bold black letters. Poppy opened a box at random and began taking out equipment and placing it on a wooden table. First, there was the desktop computer that her mother used to run ESP programs, then the three battered laptops that her parents took into the field. Next, an infrared video camera, a thermal imager, several mini-digital recorders. There were a magnetometer to measure fluctuations in the magnetic field and a thermometer to record any sudden and inexplicable drops in temperature. There were a number of regular cameras, plus a half-dozen camera traps that could be set up to take a photo any time a motion detector was tripped.
Poppy opened another box and stared down at a snarl of electrical cords, frowning. She knew she had tied all the equipment cords into tidy bundles when they were packing to move. She clearly remembered this because Will was supposed to do it but he’d made a mess, as usual, and her mother had asked her to straighten it out, also as usual, and she had spent an irritable thirty minutes organizing the cords and wondering exactly when Will had figured out that if he did a chore very badly the first time he was asked, he would never have to do it again.
Sighing, she crouched on the floor and began trying to unknot the cords. Strands of straight brown hair fell into her face and soon beads of sweat trickled down her nose. After managing to untangle several computer cables, she ran into a particularly stubborn knot. She sat cross-legged on the floor to work on it, feeling hotter and sweatier by the minute. Finally, she lost all patience and tugged violently at the end of one of the cords.
That, of course, o
nly pulled the knot tighter.
“Aaggh!” she yelled, tossing the whole mess back into the box. And then, for good measure, she kicked the box to the wall.
That was when she heard it. A snicker, soft but clear, and obviously quite amused.
She turned her head sharply. Her eyes scanned the attic, but all she saw beside the boxes and equipment was an old wooden wardrobe, several trunks covered with dust, and a spider scuttling through a crack in the floor.
She held her breath and listened, but she could only hear an ice cream truck jingling down the street and Franny’s voice in the distance, calling out something to their mother.
Poppy shrugged, sat down under the low eaves, and opened another box. She found a half-dozen flashlights and a night-vision scope.
“Yes!” she said. She started to stand up and promptly bumped her head against the eaves.
As she clutched the top of her head in pain, she heard it again. That scratchy chuckle, laughing at her. And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of movement by the door. . . .
It’s the heat, she thought. I’m having a hallucination.
Slowly and carefully, she took one step, then another.
I’ll go downstairs and have a cold glass of water, she told herself. I’ll lie down with a wet cloth on my head. And then I’ll stop hearing things and seeing things and—
She glanced into the box of cords and stopped dead in her tracks.
Every single cable and cord, even the ones she had worked so hard to straighten out, were now twisted and knotted together, even worse than before.
This time, when she heard the mocking laugh, Poppy whirled around, scanning the room. And that’s when she saw a little man standing in the corner, his pointed white teeth gleaming in the shadows.
Chapter Three
Poppy blinked, took a deep breath, and blinked again.
The man was so small that he was half hidden behind a rusty birdcage. He was about two feet tall, with curly white hair and a beard that flowed over a round little belly. He wore a red stocking cap, a moss-green wool coat, brown pants, and boots. He looked, in fact, exactly like a garden gnome.
A wave of relief swept over her. A lawn statue, left behind by a previous owner—of course! The laughter she had heard was simply a crow cawing. That flicker of movement was caused by sweat blurring her vision. The way his little black eyes seemed to glitter in the shadows—that was just a reflection from the bare lightbulb hanging overhead.
There was always a simple, ordinary explanation for any supposedly mysterious occurrence. . . .
And then the little man sneezed. For a panic-stricken second, his eyes met hers. Then he looked away, staring fixedly over her head at the wall.
But it was too late. Once you’ve heard a lawn statue sneeze, you can’t pretend you didn’t.
Poppy put her hand on a table for support, feeling that the universe had suddenly swung topsy-turvy. She had spent most of her life arguing with her parents that it was scientifically impossible for ghosts, monsters, or UFOs to exist. Now here she was, facing clear evidence that she, Poppy Malone, was wrong.
She knelt down so that she could look into his face. “Don’t be scared,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
He quit staring at the wall and glared at her. “As if I would be,” he responded scornfully. “As if you could!”
She rocked back on her heels. “You can talk!”
“Let me guess,” he said sarcastically. “You must be the smart one.”
She stood up so suddenly that the blood rushed from her head, leaving her dizzy. She grabbed the edge of the table again and tried to figure out how to ask the question that was occupying her mind without sounding rude.
Finally, she just blurted it out. “What are you?”
A cunning look slid across his face. “Sure and I’m a leprechaun,” he said. His accent was terrible. He sounded like Mr. Martin, her principal from three schools ago, who insisted on delivering morning announcements in a fake Irish brogue on St. Patrick’s Day.
He began to sidle along the wall with an elaborately unconcerned look on his face. “And now that ye’ve caught me, I have to give ye my pot of gold. . . .”
“Yeah, right,” Poppy said. “There’s no such thing as leprechauns—”
If it hadn’t been for her brief and bruising stint as the fourth-grade soccer goalie, he would have vanished between one blink and the next. But she saw his eyes shift to one side, and she managed to get between him and the door just in time.
“Grwtchz!” he cursed. (At least it sounded very much like a curse to her.)
“I suppose next you’ll try to tell me you’re an elf,” she said, disgusted.
“An elf?” He stopped trying to slip past her. He stood with his hands on his hips and glared up at her. “An elf?! Do I look cute? Do I look cheerful? Do I look like I have a brain filled with rainbows and moonbeams?”
“I was just asking—”
“Could an elf do this?” he cried, flinging out his hand dramatically.
An instant later, she heard a series of loud pops that sounded like firecrackers going off. The attic lightbulb burst with a flash of light. The sound of Franny’s blow-dryer stopped abruptly, and a hush fell as every fan in the house wheezed to a stop.
For a long moment, there was only silence. Then it was broken by Franny’s despairing wail and her father’s voice floating up the stairs. “Must have blown a fuse . . . these old houses . . . I’ll check the basement. . . .”
“Ha!” The little man chuckled with satisfaction. “I happen to be a goblin.”
Poppy stared at him. She could hear a dog barking in the distance, a lawn mower purring next door, a bird singing in a tree outside. She focused on these everyday, ordinary sounds for the space of three breaths, then she repeated, as matter-of-factly as possible, “A goblin. Right.” Without taking her eyes off him, she reached out one hand to take a camera out of one of the boxes.
His black eyes glittered with sudden alarm. “And just what do you think you’re going to do with that?”
“Take your picture, of course,” she said calmly. She glanced down at the viewfinder and saw the goblin’s brown boots. Then the screen turned a blurry pink, and she looked up to see that the goblin had put his hand firmly in front of the camera lens, like a celebrity trying to ward off a pesky photographer.
“Who do you think you are, pointing that thing at me without even asking?” he asked.
“Fine.” She sighed. “May I take your picture?”
“What’s the magic word?”
She ground her teeth, but forced herself to say, “May I please take your picture?”
“No,” he answered briskly. “Now put that thing away.”
Annoyed, she lifted the camera and looked through the viewfinder.
“It’s just a photo,” she said. “Just for my records.”
He screwed up his face. “Oh, right,” he said. “As if we haven’t heard that one before! You know, my Great-uncle Murk once let someone take a photo of him. ‘Just as a memento,’ the man said. ‘Just to show my kids.’ Next thing you know, Uncle Murk was a sideshow attraction in a traveling circus! Took him three years to escape and he was never the same again. Twitched any time he heard calliope music, developed an allergy to cotton candy, just hearing the word elephant was enough to send him to his bed for days—”
“I’m not going to sell you to a circus,” Poppy said, exasperated. “Honestly. What kind of a person do you think I am?”
He gave her a dark look. “A human person.”
“I promise I won’t let anyone see it,” she said, pointing the camera again.
She stepped back to get a better shot. Unfortunately, she forgot about the packing box on the floor right behind her. She regained her balance just in time to see the very tip of the goblin’s red stocking cap as he escaped through the door.
“Will! Franny! Stop him!” Poppy yelled as she clattered down the stairs.
Then she heard a baby yell something that sounded like “Ack-ja!” and the goblin skidded to a stop in front of the flower garden. He flipped up his red stocking cap so that it pointed straight to the sky, and then he froze with his arms at his sides and a fixed smile on his face.
Puzzled, Poppy looked from the goblin to the sidewalk, where she saw a man pushing a stroller. He was looking straight ahead, deep in conversation on his cell phone. The baby in the stroller, however, was staring in her direction.
“Ack-jubba-ju,” the baby gabbled, pointing insistently at the goblin.
“I’ll call you back,” the baby’s father said into the phone. “Jordan’s trying to get my attention.”
He followed his baby’s pointing finger and saw Poppy. “Hey, there,” he said, smiling. “Just moved in?”
“Yes, this morning,” she said. “My name’s Poppy Malone.”
He nodded in a friendly way and said, “Nice to meet you. I’m Alan from two doors down, and this is Jordan—”
“Oh-SI!” Jordan shrieked.
“Nice gnome,” Alan-from-two-doors-down added vaguely just as his cell phone rang again. He flipped it open, nodded to Poppy, said, “See you around,” and walked on, lost in his conversation once more. His baby, on the other hand, stared at the gnome until his stroller was out of sight.
“Pox and postules!” the goblin said, flipping his stocking cap back down. “Spotted again! Twice in one day! I must be losing my touch—”
He stopped in mid-sentence and stared past her. A tiny smile curled the edge of his mouth; his eyes softened and his expression looked almost tender.