The Unseen World of Poppy Malone: A Gaggle of Goblins Page 3

  “Hel-lo,” he said softly. “Who’s this, then?”

  Poppy turned her head a careful half-inch, keeping one eye on the goblin in case this was another trick.

  Rolly, dressed in nothing but underpants and a sequined sombrero, was trotting toward a ladder that was leaning against the house. He was humming tunelessly and carrying a spatula and a jar of peanut butter.

  After carefully climbing five rungs, he took a long, appraising look at the window closest to the ladder. Then he scooped an enormous glop of peanut butter from the jar and began coating the window screen with all the care of a Renaissance painter creating a masterpiece.

  Poppy heard the goblin draw in a sharp breath. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do that before,” he said.

  “Of course you haven’t,” she said sharply. “Because only Rolly would think of it.”

  “Rol-lee.” The goblin said the name slowly, as if savoring the taste of it. “And who is Rolly?”

  “My little brother.” Poppy didn’t like the goblin’s expression. She didn’t like the way his small dark eyes glittered with interest as he stared at Rolly, she didn’t like the note of curiosity in his voice, and she didn’t like the way he was bouncing on his toes as if he was holding a happy secret deep inside his heart.

  The goblin grinned.

  A goblin’s grin, Poppy discovered, was a terrible thing.

  “Brilliance,” the goblin said under his breath as he watched Rolly deliberately layer more peanut butter on the window screen. “Sheer brilliance.”

  Now Poppy was feeling really uneasy. “Look,” she said. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, you can just forget it—”

  Then she saw Rolly reach too far and begin to lose his balance. Without thinking, she ran forward and caught him, then fell backward into a small rosebush.

  She opened her mouth, but only managed a strangled moan. Rolly had landed squarely on her stomach, knocking the wind out of her.

  “Let me go,” Rolly said, squirming. He gave a sudden wild wiggle. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

  Poppy caught her breath and managed to stand up. She scanned the yard for the goblin, but she knew it was hopeless. He was long gone.

  Rolly made another lunge for freedom, and Poppy grabbed the back of his underpants just in time. “Did you see him? That little man? Where did he go?”

  Rolly twisted around in order to stare up into her face. “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “He was standing right there,” she insisted, pointing at the flowerbed. “He was about this tall, with a pointy red hat and a white beard. . . .”

  Confronted with Rolly’s unblinking gaze, Poppy trailed off. Maybe she was suffering from heatstroke, maybe she was discombobulated by the move, maybe she had, in fact, been imagining things after all. . . .

  Her sudden attack of doubt made her loosen her grip on Rolly, who instantly gave one particularly wild wiggle, broke free, and headed back to the ladder with a determined look on his face.

  “If you start peanut buttering the screen again, I’m going to tell Mom,” Poppy said absently, preoccupied with the delicate job of untangling herself from the rosebush’s thorny branches (naturally, Rolly hadn’t gotten a scratch). As she gingerly pulled a particularly prickly strand away from her shorts, Poppy glanced down at the flowerbed.

  Clearly outlined in the dirt were two tiny footprints.

  She froze, her mind racing. Where was the plaster of paris packed? If she could find it, she could make a cast of the footprints—or no, that might take too long. She should get her camera, take some photos, start an investigation file, make sketches in her logbook. . . .

  “Rolly, what are you doing?” Poppy looked up to see her mother standing on the porch, looking exasperated. “Get down from there and come inside the house this minute!”

  Rolly gave a little grunt of displeasure—the closest he would ever come to acknowledging a direct order—but he climbed down the ladder and headed slowly and reluctantly for the porch.

  “Why in the world would you decide to climb a ladder?” Mrs. Malone continued, a little calmer now that Rolly was safely on the ground. “You could fall and hurt yourself! And as for smearing peanut butter on a window screen—!” She stopped, apparently at a loss for words.

  “I wanted birds to come to the window,” said Rolly, “and they like peanut butter.”

  Mrs. Malone’s frown was replaced by a radiant smile. “There you go! That’s a wonderful example of logical thinking, Rolly.” She raised a warning eyebrow and added, “Of course, you should always ask before you put any kind of foodstuff on the house, dear.”

  Rolly shrugged.

  “Now come inside,” Mrs. Malone continued. “I have some candy for you. . . .”

  Although Rolly didn’t often show outright emotion of any kind, he broke into a run at this.

  “Wait, stop, no!” Poppy yelled, but it was too late.

  Rolly ran right through the flowerbed and up the porch steps, neatly destroying the goblin’s footsteps on his way.

  Chapter Four

  Goblin sighting

  June 12, 2:46 P.M.

  Attic at 1219 Arden Lane, Austin, Texas

  Witness: Poppy Malone

  Poppy chewed on the end of her pen and stared dubiously at the entry she had just made in her logbook. She had taken a bath, put on her pajamas, and was now sitting cross-legged on her bed. The only light in the room was the warm yellow glow of a bedside lamp, which made everything seem cozy and ordinary and real. She looked around her room, as if to impress upon herself how plain and ordinary and everyday it was. Looking at the lamp and the familiar flowery curtains and the rumpled quilt on her bed (with the ink stain in the corner from the time she fell asleep while writing in her logbook), it seemed impossible to believe that she had actually seen a goblin.

  But then she would close her eyes and try to recall every detail of what had happened in the attic, remembering the dull tomato red of the goblin’s cap and the scratchy sound of his voice and the way the lightbulbs all popped at once (and she couldn’t deny that her father had to replace a fuse; he had complained about it all during dinner). That had all seemed absolutely real, so much so that when she opened her eyes again, the outlines of her bed and dresser and window seemed as hazy and insubstantial as a dream.

  She tapped her pen against the page, frowning. Poppy didn’t like feeling unsure about what was real and what wasn’t.

  After much thought, she scratched out what she had written and added a new heading: “Alleged Goblin Sighting.”

  After a little more thought, she underlined alleged several times. Nothing was proven until she had evidence. She had learned that lesson years ago, when she was in kindergarten, and she wasn’t likely to forget it.

  It had been late in the afternoon, just when shadows begin sliding out from under trees. She had gone down to the creek that ran behind their house in Madison, Indiana. There was a weeping willow tree there, and she liked to hide under the branches and pretend she was in a little house with green, leafy walls.

  She was lying on her back, staring at the bits of sky she could see between the leaves, when suddenly something darted in front of her eyes. She waved her hand frantically, thinking it was a wasp, and almost knocked the tiny creature to the ground.

  But she didn’t, and the fairy hovered for a moment in midair, giving Poppy an incredulous look, as if she were just as astonished to see Poppy as Poppy was to see her. (Poppy had always felt sure that when the fairy had returned home, her story of seeing an actual human being—“Really, I did! I was this close to it!”—was probably laughed at, too.) Then Poppy’s mother had called to her to come in to dinner, breaking the spell, and the fairy had turned her back and flown off.

  Poppy’s parents had taken her sighting quite seriously. In fact, they had said several times how pleased and proud they were of her, and talked of setting up a special motion-sensor camera to see if they could catch the fairy on film.

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p; So when Poppy stood in front of her kindergarten class the next day for show-and-tell, she had, quite naturally, decided to talk about what she had seen.

  The reaction was not what she had expected. They had all laughed at her.

  “Pop-py sees fair-ies,” a boy named Vince had chanted until Poppy was almost in tears.

  “I did!” Poppy said. “Come over to my house and I’ll show you!”

  “You’ll probably just hang a fairy ornament on a tree and say it’s real,” a girl named Annette had said. “That’s what my daddy says your daddy does. He tricks people.”

  “He does not!” Poppy had never felt so furious in her whole life (although admittedly she was only five years old). “You’re lying.”

  “Am not.”

  “Are too.”

  The discussion went downhill from there. Finally, Miss DuMarch told everyone to be quiet and sit down. Everyone did, although Poppy and Annette glared at each other and Vince kept muttering his chant, just softly enough so that Miss DuMarch could pretend not to hear.

  Instead, she said, in a sugary voice, “Now, children, we all know how much fun it is to pretend, don’t we? We all love to make believe, isn’t that right? So if Poppy wants to pretend that she saw a fairy, it’s not really lying. She’s just using her imagination to make up a little story. And speaking of stories, why don’t we all settle down and I’ll read a few more pages of the book we started yesterday. . . .”

  ***

  Poppy felt her cheeks get hot just remembering the other children’s sidelong glances after Miss DuMarch’s betrayal. She began flipping through her logbook, stopping at random pages to read her entries. Over the years, she had recorded one ridiculous investigation after another.

  There was that UFO sighting two years ago in Kansas City, for instance. More than forty people called 911 to report a disc-shaped object moving at extremely high speed through the night sky, occasionally making dramatic reverses and turns completely unlike those attainable in an ordinary aircraft.

  That, of course, had turned out to be a radio-controlled UFO model operated by a high school prankster. He had finally confessed, but not before Mr. and Mrs. Malone had set up special equipment on the city hall roof, photographed the UFO, and shown the evidence they had collected at a triumphant news conference.

  Shortly after the hoax was uncovered, Mr. and Mrs. Malone lost their foundation grants. They weren’t suspected of fraud; the foundation investigated and concluded that they were simply unwitting dupes. Still, it wasn’t good to have unwitting dupes on the payroll, either. The Malones were politely asked to move on.

  Poppy sighed. She had liked Kansas City. The school cafeteria had chocolate pudding every Friday, there was a public swimming pool three blocks from their house, and the next-door neighbor raised golden retrievers and used to let her play with the puppies.

  She turned more pages.

  Oh yes, there was the werewolf that turned out to be an enormous (and enormously shaggy) stray dog.

  And the lake monster that ended up being a mossy, half-submerged log.

  And the mysterious cold spot in a supposedly haunted hotel that was nothing more than a bad draft.

  Poppy tossed her logbook on the floor, disgusted. How could she have fooled herself into thinking, even for a moment, that goblins really existed?

  The pattern was clear. Every single case the Malones had investigated had turned out to have a natural and logical explanation. Really, she thought, what were the odds that her goblin would be any different?

  She flopped back on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Goblins belonged in fairy tales and fantasy books and animated movies. Definitely not in real life.

  True, there had been discoveries of small, humanlike skeletons over the years. Poppy kept track; she clipped articles and put them in her files. Each new finding was greeted with cries of astonishment and delight as newspapers around the world trumpeted the news that evidence had been found that elves (or gnomes or hobbits) actually existed.

  Unfortunately, the evidence never stood up under scrutiny. Most of the time, the remains turned out to be those of lemurs, small primates whose skeletons looked enough like tiny people to fool a few scientists and most reporters.

  The odds, Poppy felt, were very much against the existence of goblins.

  And yet, she had seen something. Someone. She had talked to him and he had talked back.

  If goblins did exist . . .

  She turned over onto her stomach. If they did exist, she needed evidence. She had learned an extremely valuable lesson from Miss DuMarch, Annette, and Vince: Never talk about what you’ve seen until you have absolute proof.

  Of course, this goblin—if that, indeed, is what he was—seemed very clever, very cunning. If she were going to match wits with him, she would have to set her trap quite carefully indeed. . . .

  Poppy felt the corner of her mouth turn up and realized that she was smiling.

  Chapter Five

  Poppy stayed up past midnight plotting. When she finally dropped off to sleep, it was to dream of goblins tiptoeing around the house, hiding behind bushes and snickering as she walked by.

  The next morning, she got up early, went to the attic, and opened the box that held her parents’ camera traps. Each trap had an infrared sensor that detected movement and triggered the camera to take a photo. The cameras were usually used to snap pictures of animals in the wild, but Mr. Malone lived in hope of capturing a candid picture of Bigfoot.

  The key to setting a camera trap, Poppy knew, was knowing something about animal habits. A creek where animals might stop to drink, a clump of bushes with berries to eat, an oak tree that dropped hundreds of acorns—these were all good spots to set up a trap because animals would probably wander by and trip the motion sensor.

  But what kind of habits did a goblin have? Where did goblins like to go? Well, there was the attic, of course. That was where she’d first spotted him. She should definitely set up a camera trap in the attic.

  And there was that big oak tree on the side lawn, the one that the goblin had run past when he made his escape. He looked as if he knew where he was going. Poppy was willing to bet that he was taking a familiar route.

  Where else?

  Maybe the kitchen, Poppy thought. She had a feeling that the goblin had dumped that bag of flour on Franny’s head.

  So, good. She had three places to set up her camera traps. Poppy sat back on her heels and considered the geography of the attic. When she had first seen the goblin, he was standing near the stairs, but surely he hadn’t entered the attic that way; it was too likely that he would have been seen.

  The window was a possibility—although it was high off the ground; it seemed that that would make it difficult for a creature that was only two feet high to get in and out. And another thing . . . She went to the window and looked down. Yes, her memory was correct. There was no helpful trellis on this side of the house to serve as a ladder, no drainpipe to shimmy up and down, no ivy to offer footholds.

  A slight frown creased Poppy’s forehead. So how had he gotten in?

  She was sitting at the desk contemplating this question when the attic door swung open and Will appeared, his cheek still creased from his pillow.

  “Hey, Mom says breakfast is ready,” he said, yawning. His glance fell on the camera trap, and some of the sleepiness disappeared from his eyes. He grinned slightly. “What’s all this?”

  “Nothing,” Poppy replied, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Poppy, Poppy, Poppy.” Will sighed, shaking his head in pretended sorrow. “I thought we had an agreement. I thought we’d made a pact.” He sat on the table, his legs swinging, and grinned at her. “Never volunteer to help Mom and Dad with an investigation. It only encourages them.”

  She pushed a damp strand of hair behind her ear. “You know we’re going to get roped into investigating the Dark Presence, whether we like it or not,” she said. “I just thought I might as well get it over with, that’s all.”<
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  He raised his eyebrows at that. “Okay,” he said. “Just so long as you don’t start believing in all that spooky stuff.”

  “Will.” Poppy gave him a level look. “I’m a scientist, remember?”

  “Yeah, well, so are Mom and Dad,” he said. “Being a scientist doesn’t mean you’re not wacko.”

  “I wouldn’t call them wacko,” Poppy said weakly, feeling disloyal. “Enthusiastic, maybe . . .”

  “That’s one word for it,” said Will. “Another word is delusional. They’ve been researching the paranormal for almost twenty years and they’ve come up with nothing. And yet they won’t give up.”

  Poppy focused her attention on the camera. “It is kind of weird,” she said carefully. “I mean, I stopped thinking that ghosts were real when I was five. . . .”

  “Oh yeah?” He grinned at her. “I seem to remember you screaming pretty loudly last year when we were on that cemetery stakeout.”

  “A mouse ran over my foot,” Poppy said with great dignity. “It took me by surprise.” She hesitated, then said quickly, “You don’t ever wonder whether things like ghosts or aliens really exist, do you?”

  “Oh, sure I do,” he said.

  She glanced up at him sharply. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said, smirking. “Just like I stay up on Christmas Eve, trying to hear reindeer on the roof.”

  Poppy made herself return his grin. “Right. Or search for the end of a rainbow and that pot full of gold coins—”

  “Will! Poppy!” Their mother’s voice floated up from the kitchen. “The kitchen is about to close!”

  Will pushed himself off the table, his sneakers landing on the wooden floor with a thump. “Come on. I’m starving.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Poppy said, giving up for now on the camera trap. She’d have to come back later and see if she could figure out where to set it up.

  But as Will was heading toward the stairs, he suddenly stopped and peered more closely at the rusty birdcage. “Hey, look.” He moved the birdcage out of the way, revealing a small door by the baseboard. It was about two feet square and painted the same color as the wall. “What’s this?”