Ms. Crawley wore gooey black lipstick that was as thickly applied as icing on a cake. How she managed not to get it on her teeth was a puzzle because her mouth was extremely active. She smiled constantly, even when she was speaking, which was also most of the time. As she strolled up and down the aisles exclaiming over their folklore reports, she marvelled at how clever the class was, how talented, how extraordinarily well-behaved . . . the compliments were laid on as thick as the lipstick.
Nieve for one didn’t like being called clever. Word-wise, clever was too close to cunning. Slyboots were clever, crooks and cheats were clever (sometimes), and Ms. Crawley herself might be clever. That remained to be seen. Alicia Overbury wasn’t much appreciating the compliments, either, given her sour expression, but that’s because they weren’t exclusive to her. The rest of the class seemed merely bewildered. The substitute teachers who were sent from the city were usually shy and inexperienced, easy to manipulate. Ms. Crawley, on the other hand, had spent most of the morning manipulating them.
(“I must inform you that dear Mrs. Crawford has had a most unfortunate accident,” she’d announced right off the bat, smiling hugely. “I may be here for quite some time.”)
“Simply lovely,” she said when she arrived at Nieve’s desk and snatched up her drawing of Jenny Green-Teeth for a closer inspection. A musty damp-basement smell wafted off her, and Nieve saw that her earrings, moistly black as tadpoles, were tadpoles, alive and wriggling, pinned on the fleshy lobes of her ears. “Very imaginative.” Ms. Crawley gave Nieve a shrewd look as she set the drawing down.
“I believe this calls for a special treat,” she enthused, swishing back up the aisle, her floor-length skirt rustling like dried reeds. On the teacher’s desk sat a purse big as a bowling bag and made of brown fur. Muskrat, Nieve guessed. Ms. Crawley made straight for this, unfastened its claw clasp, then plunged her hand in and began to dig around. This produced some squelching noises and even an alarmed squeak. Shortly, she pulled out a long black tin which she held up triumphantly, while repeating, “Special treats!” She gave the tin a little shake, and by the sounds of it the contents might easily have been marbles or stones. They turned out to be jawbreakers.
After prying off the lid, Ms. Crawley walked up and down the aisle again, letting everyone choose a candy. Nobody hesitated, nor was there any hemming-and-hawing about which one to take since the jawbreakers were all identical: each one was white with a large black dot in the centre. When Nieve reluctantly chose hers, she inspected it briefly – it reminded her of an eyeball – then set it down on her desk as far away as possible. Her fingers had felt funny holding it, sort of tingly, and there was no way she was going to put it in her mouth.
The other kids in the class weren’t as fussy, though, and having been told they didn’t have to wait until recess to enjoy their candies, were chewing and slurping noisily on them. In fact, Ms. Crawley insisted that they eat them immediately by urging, smoothly and smilingly, “No point in saving yours, Ben. Your friend has his eye on it. That’s it, Susan, aren’t they scrumptious? James, don’t be a slowpoke, I might want to sample it myself. They’re so irresistible.”
Nieve knew that Ms. Crawley was watching everyone carefully, so she made a show of scooping hers up and popping it in her mouth. What she actually did was let it roll down the sleeve of her hoodie. When Ms. Crawley finally turned toward the blackboard, she slipped it into her front pocket.
At recess, Nieve did something that she had occasionally been tempted to do, but never before had the nerve – or a good enough reason. This time she had both. She sauntered around to the side of the school where no one bothered to go and waited there for the recess bell to ring. When it did and everyone else was pouring back in and shouting their last shouts before being confined once again, she dashed out of the schoolyard and kept on running and running . . . until she was home. She didn’t care what her parents said, she was not going back while Ms. Crawley was there.
Nieve planned to tell them that she felt sick, which wasn’t entirely a fib. If need be, she’d bring up the subject of measles and Malcolm and how her symptoms might be similar. But as it turned out, there was no need, which was even more troubling. They didn’t seem to notice that she’d come home in the middle of the morning. Her mother gave her a quick wave as she rushed out the door, and her father wrapped his hands around his coffee cup, and smiled faintly at her, as if she were an acquaintance he’d encountered on the street. He said, “Hey, hi there En. What’s new?”
New? He didn’t want to know.
“I left school early.”
“Yeah?”
“Because our substitute teacher is one of them.”
“Fantastic. Glad to hear it.” He nodded approvingly. “Well, can’t stand here all day twiddling my thumbs. Got work to do.”
“Right.”
“You know, I envy you En. It’s great being a kid. No troubles, no responsibilities. Enjoy it while you can.”
“Sure.”
Nieve was so annoyed and baffled and upset that she spent the rest of the morning on her bed with a pillow pressed against her stomach.
On top of that, she was worried about her teacher and Malcolm and his mother and her parents and . . . she didn’t know what to do. Outside of Mr. Mustard Seed and Mayor Mary, she was the only one who seemed to be alarmed by what was happening. (Whatever it was.) She felt she had to do something, but what could one kid do? If only she could talk to Gran. Maybe she’d be back soon, maybe even tomorrow. Dad had said she’d only be gone for a few days. Nieve’s spirits lifted a little at the thought. Gran always listened to her and believed what she heard. They’d come up with a plan. In the meantime, there was her newspaper; she could put in all the suspicious happenings, keep a record of what was going on. It might even be an idea to print up copies and deliver them around town.
Nieve stretched out on her bed and gazed up at the ceiling. Holy smokes, she thought. Those crazy spiders! Above, stretching from one wall to the other, there were enough cobwebs to make a canopy for her bed. Was she going to have to do the housework now too, since her parents seemed to have forgotten about that as well? What she really felt like doing was hiding under her bed until everything became normal again. Only it wasn’t going to, she knew that. So there was no use being scared and going all wimpy. She’d have to settle for being scared and resourceful. She was determined not to give up, no matter what happened. Whatever it took she’d . . . she’d . . . what? What had she been about to . . . she couldn’t seem to remember. Her resolution had drifted right out of her head. Whatever it was . . . was . . . oh, who cares. She yawned and stretched comfortably. She was so sleepy. Her limbs felt heavy, her legs, her arms . . . how relaxed she was as wave after wave of warmth washed over her . . . and then . . . .
She sat up! As soon as she did, the sleepy sensation fell away like a fuzzy blanket sliding to the floor.
Nieve squinted warily around, searching the room. She had an eerie feeling that someone was watching her. Then she saw it. Directly across from her on her dresser sat the jawbreaker, which must have rolled out of the pocket when she tossed her hoodie there. The candy more resembled an eyeball now, complete with red veins branching through the white. With the curtains drawn and the room darkened, it appeared to glow – and glower – radiating a faintly greenish light. Nieve had suspected from the first that the thing was poisonous, but she’d underestimated just how poisonous.
She hopped off the bed, and, grabbing a ruler from her desk, used it to whisk the candy, so-called, into her garbage can – clunk. This she carried to the kitchen and tipped into the garbage under the sink. The jawbreaker tumbled to the bottom beneath a pile of wadded paper and pizza crusts and coffee grounds. Good riddance! (She’d have to remind her parents about composting, but not with that thing in there.) Even though she hadn’t touched it, Nieve washed her hands. Then, since she’d taken the trouble to wash, she thought she might as well make a peanut butter and honey sandwich for lunch. When she’d done this, she poured herself a glass of milk and took her lunch outside, where she ambled toward the picnic table that was still left out from the summer.
The table was on the edge of their property, situated on a hill that overlooked the town and the road leading into it. Nieve climbed onto the seat and sat down on the tabletop itself (without spilling a drop of milk), so that she could take in the panoramic view. She often sat here; it was one of her favourite places. Today she came for the comfort of the familiar, but also to keep an eye on things, to see if anything looked unfamiliar.
Sure enough, she saw that out in the fields those noxious weeds were spreading. Near the road where she’d encountered the Weed Inspector, there appeared to be a lake of black ooze. From where she was sitting, the plants more resembled an oil spill than a mass of growing, living vegetation. Before school, she had checked on the one that had appeared under her window and was surprised to see that it had vanished, which was odd, but a relief all the same. So they could be gotten rid of. To her even greater relief, the Weed Inspector was nowhere to be seen. But she did spot something else. Someone else . . . two someones advancing over the top of a rise in the road.
She was sorry she hadn’t brought binoculars out with her, but her eyes were sharp and what she saw clearly enough was a tall, skinny man on a creaky old claptrap bicycle, to which was attached a kind of sidecar and in which rode a small, plump man – a man with a face as round and white as the moon. The bike was creaking noisily as the tall one laboured along, pedalling hard, his long spindly legs pumping vigorously. The noise his bike made sounded to Nieve like a super-creaky hinge on the door of a haunted house. A haunted house came to mind because a cloud of bats were swirling around the heads of the men.
Bats? At midday?
Yes bats, and that wasn’t the only unnatural thing. Unnatural and terrible. Nieve stared in disbelief. The men appeared to be dragging a darkness with them. Darkness billowed out behind them like a vast black cloak that smothered the daylight as they advanced steadily, creakily toward the town.
Nieve knocked over her glass of milk as she scrambled off the picnic table. She hurled her half-eaten sandwich onto the ground and sprinted toward the house. In the kitchen, she made straight for the phone. She called Theo Bax at the police station; she called Mayor Mary at the clinic; she called Mr. Shearing, the principal of their school. But try as she might, calling number after number, no one picked up the phone at their end of the line.