The Unseen World of Poppy Malone: A Gaggle of Goblins Page 5

  “How about Thaddeus Fuller?” suggested Mr. Malone. “He fought that duel on the front lawn—”

  “What a silly thing to do,” said Mrs. Malone. “Getting killed over an argument about a duck, of all things.”

  Will managed to gather enough energy to prop himself up on his elbows and stare out the window. “I wonder if that’s where he died,” he said, a sudden note of interest in his voice. “I wonder how much blood there was.”

  “Eww, that is so gross.” Franny flipped a blond curl over her shoulder and checked her reflection in the hall mirror. “I’d much rather have Lucinda hanging around the house than Thaddeus.”

  “You’re awfully quiet, Poppy,” said Mrs. Malone. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yes, of course.” Poppy had been distracted all day, ever since she had arisen early to check her camera traps. The camera on the lawn had a dozen photos on its memory card, but as she had expected, they were all pictures of local cats and dogs, plus several raccoons, a dozen squirrels, and one possum.

  The camera in the kitchen had revealed several shots of her father. The first one showed him entering the kitchen, the second showed him glancing furtively over his shoulder as he opened the refrigerator, and the third captured him sneaking the last piece of chocolate cake.

  She had slipped the camera’s memory card in her pocket and gone upstairs, her pulse beating faster with every step. She had saved the camera trap in the attic for last, thinking that it offered her the best chance of capturing a picture of a goblin.

  As it turned out, there were three photos on the camera’s memory card.

  The first one showed a blur as the small door in the wall swung open.

  The second one showed a slash of red. To Poppy, it looked as if the camera had just managed to catch the tip of a goblin’s hat. She was sadly aware, however, that to anyone else, it would look like a camera malfunction.

  The third photo, however . . .

  Poppy stared at it for a long time, torn between excitement and irritation.

  The photo had captured a hand. A tiny hand. It looked, in fact, like a baby’s hand.

  Or it would have, that is, if it hadn’t been making a rude gesture that no baby would know.

  Poppy glared at the photo and gritted her teeth. It was very rude gesture indeed.

  “Poppy?” Mrs. Malone asked. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Poppy blinked. She looked at her mother’s concerned face. For just a second, she considered telling her everything—

  Then the doorbell rang. Rolly came stampeding from the kitchen into the living room. He collided with Will, who had jumped up from the couch. They fell to the floor, knocking over a small table on the way and leaving the field open for Franny to step over them both and open the door. Only Poppy stayed put. She was checking one of the thermal-imaging cameras, which seemed to her to need some recalibrating.

  “Honestly, I don’t know why you children have to fight each other to answer the door,” said Mrs. Malone, righting the table. “Just because one time we happened to get a little present in the mail . . .”

  In fact, Mr. Malone had once received an unexpected gift of three thousand dollars from a former client who was convinced that his farm was overrun with zombies who took a certain glee in letting his cows loose on moonless nights. (Mr. Malone had pinned his hopes on finding real zombies and was quite dashed to discover that one of the cows—clearly marked for leadership—had learned to open the gate by nudging the latch with her nose.)

  The arrival of several thousand dollars in the mail was unprecedented, and it had made quite an impression on the Malone children. They never gave up hoping, with each mail delivery, that another windfall was about to arrive.

  On this particular day, however, it was a special delivery box—battered and stained in a most promising way—that had arrived with a thump on the front porch.

  The Malones squinted at the return label. The name and address had smeared into a large blot of blurry ink, but they could make out the last few letters of the sender’s name—UITH. The stamps showed it had been mailed from Moldovia.

  “It’s from Oliver Asquith!” Mr. Malone exclaimed. “I didn’t know he was still tracking that vampire cult through the Carpathian Mountains!”

  “Oh yes, dear, remember he wrote to us,” said Mrs. Malone. “He was about to give up but then Sam Oldham—you know, that odd young man who worked as his research assistant—well, he told Oliver he was going for a midnight stroll past an old churchyard, and the next thing Oliver knew, the police were knocking on his door and asking him to identify the body.”

  “That sort of thing always seems to happen to Oliver, doesn’t it?” Mr. Malone said with a touch of satisfaction. He always cheered up when he heard about the problems of other researchers. “I’m surprised he can still get anyone to work with him.”

  “Oh, well, you know what graduate students are like,” said Mrs. Malone. “Anything for a job. And of course Oliver does do those TV specials, and you know how young people like to be in front of the camera.”

  Mr. Malone’s smug expression disappeared. “Publicity hounds, the whole lot of them, and Oliver Asquith is the worst of the bunch. Those TV shows bring disrepute on our entire profession! I keep saying, they should be banned. We should put it to a vote with the entire membership of PSI—”

  “All of whom want desperately to host their own show someday,” said Mrs. Malone. “It would never pass, dear, and you know it.”

  Poppy carefully did not look at Will or Franny. They all knew that their father had spent years pitching his idea for a TV show to several cable networks. The show was to focus on the weekly adventures of a family of paranormal investigators (starring Mr. Malone, of course, with his wife and children in decidedly secondary roles).

  “I still don’t know why they won’t pick up my show,” said Mr. Malone, for perhaps the hundredth time. “No vision, that’s their problem! Complete and utter shortsightedness!”

  “Of course you’re right, dear,” said Mrs. Malone. “I’m sure it doesn’t help that Oliver’s show is so very popular, though. Perhaps the networks don’t feel they need two shows about paranormal investigators . . . ?”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Mr. Malone glowered at her. “My show would easily get ten times as many viewers as Oliver’s.”

  “But Professor Asquith is a lot younger than you, Dad, and really good-looking,” said Franny. “His website gets millions of hits—”

  “And how would you know that?” asked her father. “I seem to remember expressly forbidding you children from reading anything about that charlatan—”

  “You said we couldn’t read any of his books,” said Franny. (Oliver Asquith had also published two books about his travels around the world in search of the paranormal, which had, most regrettably, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.) “You didn’t say we couldn’t read his website.”

  “Before I end my days on this earth, I hope to teach my children the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law,” said Mr. Malone to no one in particular. “In the meantime, let me be perfectly clear: None of you are allowed to watch any TV shows or read any books, articles, or websites that feature the work of Oliver Asquith. His methods are completely unsound.”

  “He is rather unconventional,” said Mrs. Malone, “but his heart is in the right place, and he always sends such interesting gifts.”

  “Right,” muttered Will. “Like the Peruvian sorcerer’s powder that gave all of us that interesting rash.”

  “Maybe we should stand back while Dad opens it,” Poppy suggested, giving the box a testing nudge with her toe.

  “Maybe we should go out for ice cream and come back when it’s safe,” said Franny.

  “Faint hearts!” said Mr. Malone. He pulled off the envelope that had been taped to the box and handed it to his wife, then took out his pocketknife and got to work opening the box itself.

  Mrs. Malone put on her
reading glasses, opened the envelope, and peered at the crumpled note inside.

  “Oliver says he hopes we’re settling into our new home and will accept this housewarming gift. How sweet,” she said. “Hmm . . . it seems he’s given up on vampires . . . given up on Moldovia, too. . . . oh dear, he says he had to leave in the dead of night; I wonder what that was all about. . . . Now he’s in Slovakia, which he thinks will offer much better prospects for his next phase of research. . . .”

  For all his bravado, Mr. Malone had taken his time slitting the box open. He gingerly pulled back the top and removed a layer of packing material to reveal six long wooden sticks nestled in a mass of shredded paper.

  “Hey, maybe those are special wooden stakes he used to take out a Moldovian vampire,” Will said, getting interested in spite of himself. “Maybe they have bloodstains on them!”

  Mrs. Malone pulled one of the sticks out of the box, and they saw that it had a forked end. “A dowsing rod!” she said with delight. “How nice of Oliver to remember!”

  Poppy knew that people used dowsing rods to find underground water or buried pipes; when the end of the rod dipped toward the ground, you knew where to dig. She took a rod out of the box and pointed it experimentally at a rosebush. “Remember what?”

  “About the ley lines that converge here,” said Mr. Malone. He held the forked end of a rod in his hands and pointed the end in the direction of the front sidewalk. “Have I told you about my latest theory . . . ?”

  “Yes!” his family answered in chorus, but it was no use. Mr. Malone ignored them and launched himself once more into the lecture that they had been hearing, in various forms, ever since he and Mrs. Malone had won the foundation grant.

  Many people, it seemed, believed in ley lines—lines of magnetic force that circled the globe. Ley lines were often associated with mysteries such as Stonehenge in England or the Nazca Lines in Peru. Mr. Malone had followed these reports with keen interest for a number of years and had begun tracking the lines on his computer in his spare time.

  It was his astonishing discovery that a number of ley lines all converged beneath Austin, Texas, that had led to his theory. If one ley line was powerful, he reasoned, the spot where two lines crossed (Mr. Malone named this “the node of energy”) would be doubly so. When he discovered that no fewer than ten lines ran underneath Austin, he had been beside himself with excitement. This, he declared, meant that that paranormal forces would be stronger in Austin than anywhere in the world.

  “UFOs must be attracted to the area like moths to a flame!” he had told his family. “The place will be swarming with ghosts; we’ll have our pick of hauntings to investigate. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a whole herd of Bigfoot—”

  “Bigfeet?” Will had suggested under his breath.

  “—roaming the hills. Vampires, werewolves, mysterious lights in the night sky, they’ll all be there for the taking.”

  Poppy thought that he had sounded a bit like the American pioneers who had decided to travel west to a bountiful Promised Land. Apparently, his enthusiasm had been contagious. He had included his theory in the grant application and later learned that it was the reason Mr. and Mrs. Malone had won.

  Now he looked at the box of dowsing rods with gleaming eyes. “Six dowsing rods,” he noted. “One for each of us. We could take them on a test run right now.” He smiled and swung the dowsing rod in his hand encouragingly. “Well, what do you say? Who’s with me?”

  Disappointingly, no one was.

  One by one and murmuring vague excuses, Franny, Will, Poppy, and Rolly wandered away.

  “They’re just tired, dear,” Mrs. Malone said. “There will be plenty of time to test out the dowsing rods later.”

  As Poppy climbed the stairs, she could hear her mother reading the end of the letter.

  “Oliver says he bought the dowsing rods from a well-known Slovakian witch,” Mrs. Malone said. “Well, I do hope he offered a fair price; you know how witches like to curse things when they feel they’ve been underpaid. . . .”

  Chapter Seven

  The knocking began just after midnight.

  First it was just one rap, then two. Each one was soft, almost tentative, and they came five or ten minutes apart. It was easy for Poppy to ignore.

  Then the rapping got louder and bolder, and seemed to be coming from every corner of the house. Three brisk knocks would come under the floorboards, then five even more rapid raps would sound from inside the closet. A brief pause, then a series of bangs would come from the ceiling, as if someone were pounding the floor above her room with the end of a broom handle.

  After a particularly loud tattoo, Poppy jumped out of bed and went into the hall, where she found the rest of her family standing in their pajamas. Will was blinking sleepily, and Franny looked cross. Mr. Malone’s thin brown hair was sticking up in little tufts and there was a pillow crease on his cheek, but he looked quite bouncy and cheerful, while Mrs. Malone, wearing a pink chenille bathrobe and slippers, positively fizzed with energy.

  “Did you all hear that?” Mr. Malone asked.

  “We’d have to be deaf not to hear it,” said Franny. “It sounds like a drum and bugle corps invaded our house. Only without the bugles.”

  “Isn’t it thrilling?” cried Mrs. Malone. “Aren’t you excited?”

  “No and no,” said Will. His eyelids were drooping, and he swayed on his feet. “I’m sleepy.”

  “So what else is new?” said Franny under her breath.

  Will managed to open his eyes long enough to give her a scornful look. “I know it seems strange that I’m tired,” he said sarcastically, “especially since it’s the middle of the night.”

  “Will you children stop talking for two seconds and listen?” snapped Mr. Malone. “Here we are, face-to-face with an actual paranormal experience, and all you can do is think about going back to bed.”

  They all rolled their eyes, but they stopped talking and listened.

  The silence lasted for exactly thirty-six seconds. (Poppy, who often forgot to take off her watch before bed, was timing it.) This was long enough for all of them—except Mr. and Mrs. Malone, of course—to begin to hope that the noise was over, for the rest of the night, at least. Will even yawned and began drifting back toward his bedroom.

  Then the stillness was broken by a sudden series of bangs. Franny jumped. Will groaned and leaned heavily against the wall.

  Mr. and Mrs. Malone beamed.

  “It’s the Dark Presence,” said Mr. Malone. “Your mother spotted it immediately, and she was absolutely right.”

  “Well, it was fairly obvious to anyone with any degree of field experience,” Mrs. Malone murmured, smiling modestly at the floor.

  “Did you hear the force of those bangs, Lucille?” Mr. Malone asked. “The scale of the activity is unbelievable.”

  “It’s probably just a tree branch hitting the window,” said Poppy.

  “Or pipes banging,” said Franny.

  “Or the house settling,” Will added, yawning hugely.

  Their father gave them a disillusioned look. “I don’t know where we went wrong raising you children,” he said. “Your mother and I certainly tried our best, but—”

  He was interrupted by a sudden sharp bang.

  The Malones all jumped.

  “Aha!” Mr. Malone said triumphantly. “And what do you think that was?”

  “A loose shutter,” said Poppy.

  “There’s no wind,” said Mrs. Malone. “I’m getting the digital recorder.”

  “Wait a second,” Poppy interrupted. “Where’s Rolly?”

  “I’m sure he’s fast asleep,” her mother said with a bit too much confidence.

  “Fast asleep?” asked Franny. “With all this racket?”

  “We’d better make sure,” said Will. “It would be just like him to run around the house pounding on walls.”

  “Really, Will,” said Mrs. Malone. “Why in the world would he do that?”

  “Why
does Rolly do anything?” asked Poppy. To which no one had an answer.

  But when they checked his room, they found Rolly asleep, although his pillow was on the floor and his quilt was bunched at the foot of his bed. (Rolly tended to make messes, even in his dreams.)

  “He looks just like a little angel, doesn’t he?” Mrs. Malone whispered with a fond smile.

  This comment was greeted with silence from the rest of the family.

  “Wouldn’t you love to know what he’s dreaming about?” asked Mrs. Malone.

  “World domination, probably,” said Will under his breath, while Poppy secretly pinched Rolly’s toe to make sure he was really asleep.

  Then they trooped back into the hall and stood in a little circle, staring at one another and listening to the raps, which had slowed down and were now coming every five minutes or so. In a way, that was worse, since the silences would lull them into thinking that the bombardment was over.

  “Don’t worry,” said Poppy. “It’s probably just mice.”

  She meant this to be consoling. After all, mice were normal. Anyone could have mice.

  “Mice?” said Franny, standing on her tiptoes and peering nervously at the floorboards. “Honestly! As if ghosts weren’t bad enough . . .”

  Another series of brisk taps echoed through the hall.

  “Mice with little fists?” asked Mr. Malone. He knelt down and tried to press his ear to the baseboard. “I think I can hear something moving between the walls—”

  “That’s it,” Franny snapped. “I’m going back to bed.” With that, she flounced back into her bedroom and slammed the door.

  “I’m going to bed, too,” said Will. “I may not be able to sleep, but at least I’ll be horizontal.”

  He trudged off, yawning.

  “I don’t know how we raised two children with so little vim or vigor,” Mr. Malone commented as he watched Franny and Will stagger back to bed. “When I was their age, I stayed up all night just on the off chance that I might spot the Moth Man of New Jersey! I can still go without sleep for days without even drinking one cup of coffee!”