The Book of Bad Things (26 page)

“J
OEY
,
H
AL, DON’T TAKE
your eyes off these guys,” Cassidy said, stepping away from her dead neighbors and toward the place where the beast had shifted down into the debris. “Ping, hold up the flashlight for me. I have an idea.”

The others listened, trusting her, even if they didn’t understand. Joey swatted at the air between himself and the dead with his stick. Beside him, Hal dug up a wooden table leg from the junk heap. He jabbed it at the skinny brown thing that had once been Aidan Chambers. The corpse grabbed at the leg with such ferocity, Hal yelped, nearly falling backward. He jabbed at Aidan again, this time pounding him directly in the chest. Old bones snapped, echoing like felled branches breaking during a hike through the woods.

Cassidy led Ping several feet away to a safer distance. “What are you doing?” Ping whispered, reluctant, panicked. Cassidy took the notebook from under her arm and opened to the first page. “Hold up the light,” she whispered. “Please.”

Ping glanced at the book, an understanding sparking in her eyes. Quickly, she pointed the flashlight, keeping her hand steady, the beam making the bone-white pages glow like a flare. Cassidy began to read the words she’d written, her voice steady, strong. “Cassidy’s Book of Bad Things, Entry Number One: Intruders.”

The flashlight flickered. The air in the cavern pulsed. Cassidy felt a pressure in her skull, and her vision was squeezed into a point. “I was home alone, tossing and turning on the couch, when I heard someone at the door.” The world was tiny and Cassidy was enormous, like Alice in Wonderland, drinking the tonic, eating the cakes. The beast had invaded her head. It did not like what she was doing. Cassidy clung to the thought that she must continue, no matter what it tried to make her see or hear or feel. She shook away the disconcerting sensation of shrinking, of growing, of her skin squeezing at her like sausage casing, instead focusing on her words, finding her voice again, calling out, louder this time. “He rattled the knob, testing to see if it was unlocked. And I knew right then that I was in trouble.”

The beast called back —
NO! NO! NO!
— its hum and growl nearly drowning out Cassidy’s recitation. But she kept her eyes on the page, feeling a tiny bit of comfort that Ping stood beside her. Behind her, the boys were shouting at the dead to stay away. She kept on reading the first entry, her words telling the tale of Lou and Naomi, and meeting Mr. Stanton. The story didn’t feel like a story as it escaped her lips, but instead like a prayer.

The bowl-like floor of the cavern trembled, the garbage shifting like sand. A coil of wide black spine erupted out from the debris several steps ahead of her. Cassidy gasped for breath, squashing the impulse to shout out, to turn and run. The thing was rising, filled with shuddering rage, whipping its body through the space, flinging its treasures every which way. A brown leather boot flew toward the girls, smashing Ping’s shoulder. The flashlight flew from her grasp, landing with a crunch a few feet from where Joey was tussling with Mrs. Moriarty. Both girls whirled toward the lost light.

Ping and Joey both went for the flashlight. He grabbed it first, holding it up to Ping, not noticing that Mrs. Moriarty had dragged herself to within biting distance of his ankle. Ping leapt over Joey and landed on the dead woman, grinding her knees into the corpse’s back. “Go!” she shouted at him. “I’ve got this.”

Scrambling to his feet, Joey grunted and then shouted out to Cassidy, “Keep reading!” He panted as he sidled up beside her, taking Ping’s place, shining the light at the notebook.

Cassidy refused to lose focus. She turned the page and started on the second entry.

STOP! STOP NOW!

Since Joey’s flashlight was directed at the notebook, the group could not see very far outside of its reach. Still, from her peripheral vision, Cassidy knew that the black snake-thing had fully risen from its hiding place. It had no beginning and no end, no head, no tail, but instead was an endless loop of iridescently dark flesh. Its body was pulled in on itself like a spring, ready to explode outward to careen into all of them with the force of a racing train. Cassidy read faster, faster. She turned another page, began the next entry.

Then, something strange happened — something even stranger than everything that had already happened. The coils of snake, roiling with fury, slowly rose out of the crater, fully hovering in the space above the garbage. Its mass was the size of a whale. Cassidy didn’t allow herself to look at it directly.

NOOO!!
its voice called out, echoing with an unbelieving fury that, somehow, by some strange magic, it had been separated from its beloved cache of trash and treasure. A few bits of junk rose up with the beast, as if the thing were trying to pull close whatever it could.

“Keep reading!” Joey shouted.

Cassidy blinked and found the page again. She shouted her words over the thing’s raucous din, the shaking of the pit, the objects lifting and falling to the ground, smashing and crashing, breaking against one another.

The beast ascended, its body compressing, its coils tightening so that it took the shape of a small planet. A moon. An orb. Soon, the thing seemed unable to move at all but only screamed wordlessly at the girl who had come to destroy it.

Cassidy could feel its pain, its rage, its terror. She felt exhausted, the words blurring on the page, but she read on.

Around the black beast, a blue fire appeared. Quickly, the orb was engulfed. The beast’s skin puckered, searing in the flame. It seemed to shrink, pressing into a smaller shape as if by a garbage truck’s trash compactor. Or a black hole. Panicked, the dying thing released a new sound, a new voice, different from its approximation of human language. Something that Cassidy would not have been able to describe if someone were to ask later. All she knew was that the beast was speaking its own language, a counter spell. The flame began to diminish, and the beast emitted a wail, a growl, a belch, a shriek, all combining into a deafening din that Cassidy understood to be a hoot of triumph.

The orb began to grow again.

P
ING AND
H
AL HOWLED
, and Cassidy and Joey turned to find that the dead neighbors, though bloodied and battered, had managed to advance on the two, knocking them to the ground, disarming them. Joey’s sharp stick and Hal’s table leg lay nearby. Owen Chase scrambled toward Ping, his mouth open, leaking a dark liquid. Old Aidan had fallen farther back, seemingly unable to move. But Millie Moriarty and Ursula walked, hunched over, in the direction of Hal, reaching for him like a pair of hungry elderly friends out to lunch at a Chinese buffet.

Joey shoved the flashlight into Cassidy’s hand, then dashed toward the fray. Cassidy started to follow, but Joey called over his shoulder, “Stay! Finish this!”

The blue light behind her illuminated much of the dark space now. Cassidy watched Joey kick Owen Chase to the ground, stomping on his grasping fingers. He handed Ping the stick, helped her stand, and together they beat back Millie and Ursula.

But as the beast continued to whisper its ancient words, its own eldritch prayer, the blue light began to fade. Cassidy turned back to the black orb, the blue flame now a thin coat of color, quickly dimming. The work she had done, the reading, her words, was being neutralized by the beast. She stepped closer, struggling to shine the flashlight on her page. She called out more of what she’d written, the collection of memories and beliefs. Words poured from her mouth, making her throat raw. Her energy fed the fire like oxygen and it began to consume the monster once more. But the beast countered, yowling its own selfish thoughts, radiating its pitiful sensations of loneliness, obsession, anger.

How was one girl, not yet thirteen years old, supposed to defeat something of such incredible power?

For a moment, Cassidy felt as though she almost understood why the beast needed what it needed, why it did what it had done, what it continued to do. She had experienced similar wild desires. But she’d controlled the desires, channeled the thoughts into the words she’d written in the book. She clutched the cardboard cover, which had grown slick and damp with her sweat.

She felt the beast rummaging around in her head, picking through her memories, searching for weakness, for fear. What it didn’t seem to understand was that the notebook and her pen had protected her from the darkness that lived inside her. For this reason, the book had always been the most important thing. Or had it?

Cassidy briefly wondered if she’d treated the book like the beast had treated its hoard.

Bring it back to me….

“I have to let it go,” Cassidy whispered to herself.

She stepped forward. The black orb was almost directly over her now. The blue flame was like ice. Its freezing energy billowed out, blowing her hair back from her forehead. She shivered as cold penetrated her core. The beast’s voice was an anguished cry now, begging her to stay away. Cassidy tucked the flashlight under her arm. Staring up into the blinding blue, she gripped her notebook between her fingers. Her seal of protection.

“Here,” Cassidy called out. “Another present. You’re gonna love it.” For a moment, the beast quieted, then, as if understanding what kind of gift this small girl was presenting, it screeched, the noise of it nearly knocking Cassidy off her feet. She dug her sneakers into the shifting pit, steadied her arm, then drew the book back behind her head. Ripping her hand forward, she felt the object slip from her fingers, and for a moment, she wondered if she’d made a mistake, letting go of the thing that had kept her safe for so long. But as it careened across the short distance and connected with the blue blaze and the dark entity trapped within, Cassidy felt a sudden freedom. A lightness.

Peace.

The flames flashed white. Cassidy was lifted into the air and thrown backward. She landed on her spine, on something sharp; a burst of pain briefly detonated in her tailbone. She barely registered the feeling.

From her spot in the hollow, she had the perfect view for what came next.

The black orb telescoped inward, the blue flame grew outward, and with a small pop and a sigh, the space over the pit of garbage went blank. The air grew still, and other than the ringing in her ears, the world was uncannily, eerily silent.

T
HIS PEACE LASTED ONLY
a moment. The sound that Cassidy had expected earlier, when she’d tossed the star-shaped pendant at the beast, finally came. A great cracking sound rang out, as though the unseen stone over their heads had split, and the ground shook.

The flashlight now lay several feet from Cassidy. The blur of the explosion hung in the center of her vision, but she managed to reach out for the light. Joey and Hal and Ping struggled to stand. The dead lay all around them, finally unmoving, lifeless. Cassidy rolled over onto her hands and knees, and as another quake shook the cavern, she called out, “You guys okay?”

“I think so,” said Joey. He waved his weapon — the stick he’d snatched up from the driveway — at the corpses at his feet. “They all just dropped.”

“Yeah, right when you threw the book at the creature,” said Ping. “You broke the curse, Cassidy!”

Another trembling rattled the cave. Far off, something large crashed to the floor, causing the debris beneath their feet to move.

“How about we congratulate one another later,” said Hal, “
after
we get the heck out of this place?”

Cassidy ran to the group, throwing her arms wide, encompassing all of them. She didn’t care what Hal thought. They had to celebrate this moment, if only for a moment. To her surprise, each of them hugged her back. Together they stood, a circle of warmth in this place of chill darkness.

She glanced down at the faces of her fallen neighbors, who now looked even paler than before. Ursula lay in her velvet burgundy funeral gown, her eyes finally closed. “We can’t just leave them here.”

“We can’t carry them,” Hal said.

Another rumble. Another crash.

“He’s right,” Ping said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“But how do we get back out?” Joey asked, glancing up the slope toward the spot where they’d come in. The trash had shifted, covering up the tunnel entrance.

“It’s up there somewhere,” said Cassidy.

The group moved purposefully up the hill, but slid several feet down when tremors rocked the room and trash loosened beneath them. The quakes were coming more and more frequently. If the vortex had created this space, now that it was shuttered, the ceiling might not hold much longer. Around the spot where they thought they’d entered, they tossed away the garbage — bags, clothes, buckets of dried paint, board games, a smashed television set. But every time they picked up an object to move it out of the way, something else moved into its place.

A colossal crash shook the ground at the bottom of the hill. Cassidy swung the flashlight to find a massive chunk of earth had dropped, and a cloud of dust and dirt was swirling their way. “What are we going to do?” she asked, having lost all the power that her voice had contained only minutes earlier.

No one answered.

And then, of course, the flashlight blinked out.