Mum told them to come to our place until someone could look into their “electrical problem.” Frank Goolz said they were fine, but Ilona told him to accept Mum’s invitation. She said that everybody would be better off at our place until daylight, when the electrical problem would surely be completely fixed.
Mum and Frank Goolz went up to our guest room to put Suzie to bed, leaving me and Ilona in the living room. I wanted to tell Ilona about the mummified woman in their attic, but I didn’t know how to bring her up without sounding spooked and weird.
“Your mom is really nice,” she said. “She’s really beautiful, too.”
I shrugged. I thought Ilona was the beautiful one right then. She was still wearing her black coat and hugging herself like she couldn’t get warm as she gazed out at the moonlit beach.
I was trying not to look outside. I was too scared that the attic woman would come grinning out of the darkness. My memory of her was getting bigger and scarier in the silence between us.
“I saw something in your house,” I blurted. “I saw something really strange.”
She turned to me, suddenly looking awfully serious. “What did you see?”
“A woman. In your attic. She grinned at me.”
Shrub branches knocked against the glass in a gust of wind and I jumped.
“It’s just the wind,” Ilona said. She came to sit beside me. “What did she look like?” I realized she was taking me seriously.
“She looked horrible. Her eyes. Her skin. Her hands!” I made my hands into claws to show her, then shook my head. “I can’t even describe it and not sound crazy. Are you … are you hiding a dead lady in your attic?”
It sounded ridiculous, but she didn’t laugh.
“There’s only the three of us,” she replied.
“Who is she, then?”
She thought for a while, looking at me with an intensity that told me she really did believe me.
“Do you know who she is?” I asked again.
“I think I do.”
“Who, then?”
She stared at me silently, then put her hand on mine. It felt great, even though we were talking about a grinning cadaver popping up in their window in the middle of the night.
“She’s someone who should have been left undisturbed,” she said finally.
Her answer triggered a serious chill all the way down my back, plus another million questions, but Mum and Frank Goolz came down the stairs and Ilona took her hand away.
“Don’t say anything. It would drive Dad nuts,” she whispered.
“Let’s get you guys to bed,” Mum said. “Thank God it’s not a school night.” She took a better look at me. “Are you all right?”
I must have looked like a fish that had come face-to-face with a shark.
“I’m fine,” I said, and took a quick look at Ilona.
She nodded and muttered, “Thank you,” which felt great, too.
“Ilona can have my room. I’ll sleep down here,” I said. I didn’t want her to see me sitting on the stair lift.
Mum handed out clean towels and gave one of my Universal Classic Monsters T-shirts to Ilona to use as pajamas. Mum was excellent at creating order out of chaos. She’d been doing exactly that since the day I fell out of the plum tree.
“Good night,” Ilona said, holding my T-shirt tight against her as she climbed the stairs with her father. I did a silly military salute that I thought would look cool. And it might have worked, since it made her smile.
“She’s a very nice girl,” Mum said once the Goolz had disappeared upstairs. She turned her gaze on me. “And she’s very pretty.”
I shrugged, trying to look like I hadn’t noticed. Mum opened the sofa bed and I transferred my body onto it.
She sat beside me. “I’m going to sleep down here with you.”
“If you want,” I said, but secretly I was relieved. I turned my back to the glass doors, my eyes wide open.
Mum covered me with a blanket and said she would phone her handyman tomorrow and ask him to look into the Goolz’s electrical problem. She said Frank Goolz was a very interesting man—though, she confirmed, he really was as weird as a blue carrot. She said it was funny that they ended up sleeping at our place on the very first night they arrived in Bay Harbor.
“Mum,” I said finally. “Let’s go to sleep.”
“Oh. Yes. Sure, pumpkin.” She kissed me on the shoulder and stretched out beside me. I had my back to her, but I knew that her eyes were wide open, too. I was pretty sure she kept babbling silently inside her head, probably secretly happy that the Goolz had electrical problems. I knew she was imagining all sorts of scenarios where we became inseparable best friends with the Goolz, because I was running the exact same scenarios in my own head.
But my scenarios were peppered with the flashing image of the lady in the attic, grinning her dead grin.
I woke up with a weird feeling. Mum was snoring gently beside me. She had turned off all the lights while I was sleeping. Cinders were still glowing in the fireplace, projecting warm red shadows on the white walls. It smelled of burning wood and comfort. It took me a while to find the nerve to rise onto my elbow and look over my shoulder at the veranda. It was nearly dawn and the sky over the ocean was slowly lightening, erasing last night’s nightmare. I heard the sisters talking upstairs and pushed Mum over so I could get off the sofa.
“Gotta save those rabbits,” she said in her sleep, and started snoring again.
The lift made a deafening mechanical noise, squealing through the silence of the house. I could see Mum twisting and turning on the sofa, fighting hard not to let the noise fully wake her. She finally grabbed a pillow and put it over her head, still muttering about rabbits. I thought the girls must have heard me coming, too. The lift was noisy enough to wake the dead, especially when it reached the top. By the time I got back in my chair, they’d dropped their voices to whispers.
Ilona had left the door to my room wide open. The wooden floorboards creaked under my weight and the whispering stopped altogether. I approached at extra-slow speed with the feeling that I was disturbing something.
“Oh, hello,” I said.
Ilona was sitting up in bed, her back against the wall, dressed in my absolute favorite T-shirt: Frankenstein’s monster holding his bride’s hand. Suzie was sitting beside her, wearing my long-sleeved Creature from the Black Lagoon shirt.
“Ilona said you saw her,” Suzie barked at me.
Ilona hushed her. “You’re going to wake everybody,” she said.
I went into my room and shut the door.
“Did you, then?” Suzie whispered.
“I saw something. Or someone. I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” she snapped. “You saw her, right?”
“Stop shouting,” Ilona said.
Suzie switched back to whispering. “It was my mom you saw.”
“Isn’t your mum …”
“She’s dead all right,” she said. “But she’s coming back for us.”
I turned to Ilona.
“It wasn’t our mother,” she said, more to Suzie than to me. “It was nobody. A trick of the mind. An illusion.”
“Why would you say that?” Suzie gave her a nasty push and pointed at me. “He saw her. He’s paralyzed, not blind.”
“Suzie, that’s enough,” Ilona said, grabbing her by the arm.
We looked at each other silently for a while. My room was getting bright fast. The heavy curtains could never stop the tsunami of sunlight coming over the ocean first thing in the morning.
“I’m sorry,” Suzie said to me and Ilona let go of her arm. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“It’s all right. You didn’t,” I lied.
She stood up and walked past me to the door, then stopped. “What was she like?” she asked. “I mean, what did she look like? Was she pretty?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was very fast. I’m not even sure I saw her for real. Maybe it was just an illusion, like Ilona said.”
I was lying about that, too. I knew I saw her and I knew she was real. And she wasn’t anywhere close to pretty.
“My mother was really pretty,” Suzie snapped, like I was silly for not having noticed. She walked into the hallway, muttering something in a foreign language, probably calling me all sorts of cucumbers.
We heard the boards creak under her feet all the way to the guest room.
“I shouldn’t have told her,” Ilona said. “Now she’s going to tell Dad, and they’re both going to go nuts about it.”
I nodded and moved closer to her. It felt oddly familiar seeing her in my room, sitting on my bed, wearing my T-shirt.
“It’s Dad’s fault. He puts all those crazy ideas in her head. He doesn’t realize how much it affects her.”
The sun kept pouring in, projecting the deep blue color of the curtains all over the walls.
“I like your room,” she said, looking around. “I haven’t had a real room in forever. I mean, a room filled with my own things instead of just a mattress on the floor and a bunch of boxes.”
I looked around my room, rediscovering it through her eyes. I had plenty of my own things. All my books and comics were piled on my desk and shelves. An old space-age black-and-white TV from the 70s stood in the corner. It even sort of worked if you punched it on the left side the right way. On top of the TV, my collection of DC comics and Marvel figurines faced each other, a Star Wars stormtrooper clock standing guard between them. A ray of sunshine hit my vintage poster of the Hulk, lighting up his snarling face.
Suzie came running back from the guest room, making enough noise to wake up the entire house. “Dad’s really sick!” she yelled.
She grabbed Ilona by the sleeve and pulled her out of bed, knocking the blanket to the floor. I had to lean down and move it out of the way to follow them.
“What’s going on? Why aren’t you guys sleeping?” Mum asked when I came into the hall. Her hair was all messed up, and her bathrobe was loosely tied and twisted all around her.
“Something about their dad,” I said, and we followed Ilona and Suzie into the guest room.
“I’m all right,” Frank Goolz said as we entered.
He didn’t look all right at all. Mum had found a shirt for him to change into, but he was so drenched in sweat, it looked like someone had thrown a bucket of water at him. His eyes were wandering and unfocused, and he could hardly lift himself up on his arms.
Mum sat on the edge of the bed and touched his forehead with the back of her hand. “You’re burning up.”
“Yes, that’s quite normal,” he said.
Mum stood up and readjusted her bathrobe. “I’m driving you to the emergency room.”
“No, you’re not,” he said, pulling on Ilona’s arm to help him sit up. “I need to get back to my house. Fast. Ilona?”
She nodded and helped him stand. He wobbled on his legs, leaning against her.
“He’ll be all right,” she said.
I backed up, and Mum moved out of their way.
Suzie picked up her dad’s shoes and came to help Ilona support him. Mum and I looked at each other. I shrugged and she shook her head.
“Mr. Goolz,” she said. “Frank. You look extremely ill.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, wobbling toward the stairs between his daughters.
“Ilona, I don’t think your father is in a good state to decide what’s right for him,” Mum said.
We followed them to the stairs.
“He never really is,” Ilona answered. “I’ll come by later to pick up our things.”
We watched them go down the stairs and walk to the front door.
“Bye-bye, then,” Frank Goolz mumbled. He made a failed attempt at waving.
“Thank you for having us,” Ilona said, struggling to open the door.
“What about your electrical problem?” Mum asked.
“It’s fixed,” Ilona said. She slammed the door behind them.
Mum and I stayed at the top of the stairs, staring at our front door for a while.
“Strange people,” Mum said. “Right?”
I thought about what Suzie had said about her mother and remembered the vision of the dead lady in the attic. I thought of Ilona, too. Mostly I thought of Ilona, sitting on my bed, wearing my Bride of Frankenstein T-shirt and admiring my Hulk poster.
“Interesting people,” I said. We went down to start breakfast.