Don't Drink the Punch! (9 page)

Kayla thought rapidly. The gum must have been some sort of antidote, or preventive thing, that helped Tom unfreeze after drinking the punch. Because he
had
drunk the punch. He must have been frozen for a little while, until whatever it was Matilda had administered to him in the form of that gum had kicked in.

That settled it. Matilda had warned Tom not to come tonight. She knew something bad was going to happen. Could it be that the potion she had sold to Alice was supposed to do this—supposed to freeze everyone at the party? She must also know how to reverse it. Kayla had to find her right away. But even if she could find Matilda, how would Kayla be able to get all these frozen people to chew the antidote gum? And if they couldn't take the antidote, would they be frozen forever? She thought about her mom and her little brothers at home. She put the thought out of her mind. She had to move.

Kayla gestured to herself and pointed toward the
door, indicating that she was going to leave.

“Okay,” said Tom. “But bundle up. It's snowing like crazy out there.”

Kayla's boots were not where she'd left them in the kitchen. Of course. Mrs. Grafton had told Alice to put them into the front hall closet. She hurried out of the kitchen and down the hall, avoiding looking into the rooms with frozen people, and made her way to the closet. She opened it and shone the candle into the interior, only to find a mound of boots. She'd never find hers.

Luckily, she came up with a pair of warm, lined boots that looked about her size. She set down the candle and slipped her foot into one and then the other. They were a little big, but there was no time to search for another pair. She grabbed a warm parka—not hers—from a hanger and jammed a hat on her head.

By this time Tom had managed to hobble his way down the hall to join her. He picked a scarf up off the floor and helped her wrap it around herself, then thrust a pair of men's down gloves onto each of her hands. She waggled her oversize-gloved fingers in a good-bye wave. He opened the door for her. Outside, the snow was swirling, the wind gusting.

“Good luck,” he said, his voice suddenly gentle.

She nodded grimly and was about to head out when he put his hand on her arm. She turned to him questioningly. He gave her a big hug. Then he shoved her outside.

As she stood on the front stoop, getting her bearings in the swirling snow, her mind roiled with conflicting emotions. It was so nice to be in Tom's arms, but she couldn't focus on that right now. She had to get to the shop . . . and it was not going to be easy.

There were at least ten inches of new snow on the ground already. The front steps had been clear before the party had started but were now heaped with snow. The walkway was as smooth as meringue, untouched by any footprints. It was deep, heavy snow, and it sucked at Kayla's too-large boots with every step, pulling them away from her heels as she walked. She put her head down and trudged down the front steps and down the driveway. It was a dark, howling night. She stepped as carefully as she could while still moving as quickly as possible. It wouldn't be good if she slipped and broke her arm. By the time she got to the sidewalk, the insides of the boots
were filled with snow that had fallen in through the top, and Kayla's poor toes were starting to freeze.

Clouds covered the moon, and the streetlamps were out along Alice's block. It was so dark she could barely see her own feet as she walked. She prayed she wouldn't forget the way. Right turn at the corner. Two blocks down. Right turn onto the street where Esoterica was. She kept reciting the way to herself. It felt like miles.

She slipped and slid and once actually wiped out, getting snow up her sleeve and in her hair and feeling a sharp pain in her wrist as she tried to break her fall. But in her panicky state she barely noticed.

After what felt like hours, she finally turned onto the block where Matilda's store was. It was as dark as all the others. It seemed like the entire town had lost power. She broke into a run in her haste to get to the door, her scarf flying behind her, her hair whipping into her face beneath the hat she wore.

Esoterica was dark and quiet. No flashlights or candles shone from within. A
CLOSED
sign hung in the window. No footprints marred the snow. Clearly no one had gone in or out in quite some time. Her heart sank. Despair rose inside her. She started to cry, the
wind freezing the tears on her face, silently sobbing with frustration, panic, and sheer terror. She tried not to think of her mother back in that horrible room, frozen, unseeing, not alive, not dead, but caught somewhere in between. She tried not to think about how she had felt ashamed of her mother's accent, and that maybe this whole thing was somehow her fault, a punishment for being ashamed. She vowed to herself that if she had the opportunity to feel her mother's arms around her again, she would never, ever be embarrassed by her mother's accent, or their old car, or about wearing her cousin's hand-me-downs. She was so lucky in so many ways. How could she not have realized it until now?

She tried the knob. Locked, of course. It seemed pointless to bang on the door, but she did so anyway. She waited, listening for a sound, anything. She heard nothing. She pounded again. She wiped away a circle of frost from the storefront window and tried to peer inside, but she could see nothing. No—wait. Had that been a flicker of movement?

She strained her eyes, trying to peer into the murky interior of the shop.

A pair of green eyes suddenly appeared in the swirl
of frost she'd cleared away. They stared out at her, unblinking.

She jumped back, startled, nearly stepping out of her boots. It was Jinx. He continued to stare at her, his eyes seeming to bore into her very soul.

And that was when the door flew open.

CHAPTER 14

Matilda stood in the doorway, regarding Kayla. It was impossible to read her expression in the darkness. She was motionless, her face in shadow, hands hanging limply at her sides. She was dressed in a sleeveless, shapeless cotton dress over a white ribbed turtleneck. On her feet she wore white socks shoved into an old pair of men's slippers. She didn't look like a twelve-year-old girl. Her outfit reminded Kayla of what her grandmother would wear around the house, with her hair coiled up in rollers, on a day when she planned to stay home and clean.

“What do
you
want?” Matilda finally asked.

Kayla pointed toward her own mouth and shook her head.

“Oh, I see. Were you foolish enough to take a sip of
punch? Must have spit it out, or you'd be much worse off than this.”

Kayla stood there, her eyes pleading.

“All right, fine. You might as well come in. But just for a second. Don't expect me to entertain you with tea and crumpets.”

Matilda stepped to the side, and Kayla slid past her and stepped into the shop.

It was dim inside, but Kayla was able to see much better than she'd expected. A dull red glow seemed to emanate from the walls, casting an eerie pink light on Matilda's skin. The two stood there, facing each other. Matilda crossed her arms and tilted her chin up, so that her bangs fell to the side and her owlish glasses glinted in the reddish gloom.

Kayla pulled off her snow-covered hat and shoved it into her pocket. She loosened the scarf around her neck. In the sudden heat of the shop, she felt faint and short of breath. She steadied herself on one of the counters, knocking over a small pyramid of bottles.

“So,” said Matilda. “Since you can't speak, this will be a short conversation. After I went running over to that Tom Butler's house to give him a potion for
his upset stomach, I discovered it was all a big joke. Someone had prank called me pretending to be Tom, and like an old fool, I fell for it. I've never been big on cell phones or any of that caller ID nonsense, so how was I to know it wasn't him?” She harrumphed. “Well, he was a nice enough chap, so I made him ingest a potion that would give him at least some immunity to the freeze-state, in case he was idiotic enough to go to the party after all.”

Kayla looked around, hoping to find something to write with. She spied an old, spiral-bound notebook on one of the glass displays, with a pen next to it, and pounced on it. Then she scribbled a note on the inside front cover and shoved it across to Matilda.

I'm so sorry. I was the one who prank called you. I know it was mean. I shouldn't have done it.

Matilda barely glanced at the note. Kayla wondered if she'd even read it.

“I'm not a total Luddite about technology,” she said.

Kayla had no idea what a Luddite was, but she assumed it was something like a caveman.

“When I got back home, I called the operator, who told me how to do a reverse phone lookup. I saw that it was you who had called. A pity, really. I thought you were nicer than those others you associate with. I'd actually been thinking of calling
you
and telling you not to drink the punch. But I decided against it when I realized you were the one who'd played that mean trick on me. I figured you deserved whatever you got.”

Kayla scribbled again.

Please, something went wrong with the love potion. It didn't work. It froze people instead.

“Pah!” said Matilda, after glancing at what Kayla had written. “That was no love potion. It's a paralysis elixir. I've been working on the elixir for two years now, ever since Alice and her minions started taunting me back in fifth grade.” She cackled. “Yes, I bided my time. The paralysis elixir was a complicated one. In addition to the usual difficult-to-find ingredients, I needed witchetty grubs all the way from Australia, some cytotoxin from a rattlesnake—you know it as snake venom—and some procaine hydrochloride.”

Kayla raised her eyebrows as though to say,
What's that?

“You know it as Novocain. Of course, no dentist is going to hand
that
over to a twelve-year-old, so I was forced to spray him with a perfume atomizer filled with sleeping spray at my last cleaning. Then I was able to clear out his drawer and walk out the front door, waving my new toothbrush to one and all.”

Kayla shuddered. She wondered what the dentist must have thought when he came to.

“But I was missing the last ingredient—powdered African scarab beetles—until they practically landed in my lap. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I saw them in Talbert's terrarium. It was child's play to dose the janitor, borrow his passkey, and let myself into Talbert's classroom to collect the beetles. Once I had the paralysis solution complete, I had to wait for the perfect opportunity to enact my revenge. And then you walked right into the shop that day and made it all so easy for me. It was almost like fate played a role.”

Her thin lips curled up into an evil smile as she watched Kayla pick up the pen.

Please, please can you give me back my voice
?

“Why should I?” Matilda practically spat, after she read what Kayla had written. “You're as bad as the rest of them. You—”

Jinx chose that moment to leap up onto a display case next to Kayla. He sat down and curled his tail around his front paws, and then stared from Kayla to Matilda and back again to Kayla.

Matilda glared at the cat. Then she heaved a sigh. “Oh, all right, I get it, Jinx. I suppose she did bring you back here after you got hit, although I have my suspicions. She probably helped cause the accident in the first place. She probably let that wretched dog chase you into the street.”

Kayla shook her head vigorously.

“Fine. Hold on a moment.” Matilda turned and walked back through the velvet-curtained doorway. She seemed to be gone for a long time. Kayla tried to quell the panic that kept rising in her stomach. Outside, she could see the snow falling silently, heavily, covering her tracks, blanketing the quiet world. Anything could happen to her in here. She wondered what Tom was doing in that terrible house, surrounded by all the frozen people. She shuddered at the horror.

Matilda returned, holding something in her hand. She thrust her closed fist out to Kayla. Then she turned her hand over and opened it to reveal a small pillbox. She hit a button and it sprang open. “Take this. Suck on it. Your voice will be back in a few minutes.”