He runs, puffing, along the shore, away from the monster.
The monster stomps up the path, toward civilization.
Toward Horror Hollow. And Katie Mulligan.
But wait.
Larry’s story is a sad one. I cannot really go on to the terrifying scene that is about to occur—the breathtaking confrontation—until I stop to shed a tear for the little boy that Larry used to be.
Come over to his desk. Not his desk at work but his desk at home, crammed full of his bills, a few photos of friends who betrayed him, his checkbook, receipts, order forms, and sheets of address labels he got for free, which are now all stuck to themselves because of the water on his hands.
Go to that desk and slide out the bottom drawer. There you will find a piece of paper folded up into thirds.
Unfold it.
It is empty except for one sentence—written in the middle of the blank page in a childish hand in blue crayon. A sentence full of the sadness of a child. It reads:
MY MOTHER IS A FISH.
At some point, the word fish was crossed out in pen; and over it was written, in a slightly older hand,
large aquatic mammal.
It is the correction that really breaks the heart.
You should always know your enemy.
“How was your day at work, Dad?” Lily asked, almost cowering at what the answer might be. She had just gotten home from the Aero-Bistro.
“Oh, pretty good. Pee-ritty good,” said her dad, yawning. He kept cutting chives. He was making dinner.
“Anything interesting happen?”
“No. Nope. Well, some evil photocopier repairmen invaded and tried to steal the company mule, but other than that, nope.”
They could faintly hear Lily’s mom downstairs, singing along to pop songs while working out on the Thigh-er-sizer. She was singing a teen ballad out of breath. “‘Bad, stupid love! I try to rise above!/Bad, stupid you! It’s time that we’re through!’” She sang it very cheerfully, not paying much attention to the words.
“Honey,” said Lily’s father, “could you turn on a noisy appliance of some kind?” He flicked on the coffee grinder himself. “There. That’s better.”
Lily got out plates for the dinner table and opened the silverware drawer. She asked, “Dad, have you ever seen Larry’s face?”
“No. Not his face, per se. Not seen, I mean, seen like with the eyes. He’s a funny kind of guy, Larry.”
“If I asked you, would you say that it’s possible or impossible that.. . um ... Larry is a half-human, half-whale mutant who eats plankton through his baleen-filled mouth?”
Her dad thought about it for a few moments. He turned up the burner on the stove and threw chives into a frying pan. Finally he said, “Possible, I guess. That would explain the weird sighting a few months ago.”
Lily’s eyes popped wide open. “What ‘weird sighting’?”
“One sec. Let me turn off the coffee grinder.” He shut it off. Immediately the kitchen was filled with a creepy, decaffeinated silence. Lily’s father narrowed his eyes and told his tale.
“Well, a few months back, my coworker Ray was working late at night. He had a report to finish, so he ordered Chinese takeout and stayed at the office. As you can imagine, that office is pretty spooky when no one else is around. It’s just a big empty brick building then, filled with all kinds of empty rooms and corridors where someone could hide. I don’t like to think about it.
“So Ray’s sitting there, and he hears this dragging sound out in the hall. It sounds like someone dragging something. He thinks, That’s funny... What would someone be dragging at this hour? Usually everything that needs to be dragged gets dragged before five forty-five. So he goes to the door and looks out.
“Nothing in the hallway. And now the footsteps and the dragging are farther away.
“So he starts creeping down the hallway.
“He comes to one of the laboratories. They’re real spooky at night, because they’re filled with things someone could hide behind. So someone could be in the same room as you, easy, without you even knowing. They could just be crouching there, watching you. So when he gets to the lab, Ray calls out, ‘Hello?’ There’s no answer. He goes, ‘Hello?’ again.
“This time a door on the other side of the room slams.
“He runs over there and through the door. And there he sees this awful... this awful half-human, half-whale thing dragging its tail behind it, crouched over, fighting for breath, wearing swimming trunks. And it’s stumbling toward this salt bath that Larry had installed in the plant.
“Ray is absolutely terrified. He doesn’t even know what to do, so he panics and asks it to turn out the lights when it’s done, and then he turns and runs back to his office. He was so frightened, he only stayed there in his office another two hours, finishing the report and copying and collating it and putting the copies into matching folders before he left in sheer terror. He hightailed it out of there like a bat out of heck.”
“That must have been Larry!” said Lily. “He must have stayed away too long from the salt water and was trying to get back to it to, you know, revive himself!”
“I don’t know what you have against Larry. If he wants to be a half-human, half-whale mutant, I don’t think that’s anybody’s business but his own.”
“But, Dad! He wants to take over the world!”
“We’ve already discussed this, young lady.”
“He’s going to lead an invasion!”
“Honey. Honey slug. Listen. I’ve told you before. All our company makes is stilts for whales, and a few accessories that go with them. There is absolutely nothing strange about it. And you’ll see. Three days from now is our product launch.”
Lily felt her face go pale. “What does that mean?” she asked.
“Well, we’re done with the product, the whale stilts, so in three days Larry is going to release the product. That’s probably what he meant when he said, ‘Take over the world.’ He meant that we’re going to dominate the whale-stilt world, the whole market for whale stilts. Starting in three days.”
“Dad! That must be when he’s going to unleash his whole whale army! On all of us!”
“His ‘whale army’? Now that sounds a little silly, Lily, doesn’t it? Just because whales will be able to walk on stilts doesn’t mean that they’re going to be up in arms—if you’ll, heh, pardon the expression.”
“Dad!”
“Lily, that’s a whale of a story! Get it?”
“I’ve got to go to Katie’s house after dinner. She and I have to talk.”
“Okay,” said Lily’s father. “Just make sure you finish your homework.”
Homework! thought Lily. How could she concentrate on homework when in three days an army of tall bloodthirsty land-borne whales could be stalking the countryside, looking for revenge?
Practically speaking, that would probably mean Lily’s math test would be canceled, anyway.
Meanwhile, over in Horror Hollow, Katie’s mom peeked in her room and said, “Your dad and I are going out for the evening. Will you be okay?”
“I don’t know,” said Katie. “I guess so.”
“What’s wrong, honey?”
Katie shrugged. “I think I’m just jumpy.”
Her mother nodded sympathetically. “I know. Because of that whole thing last week with the liver-eating scarecrow.”
“Yeah, and the psychokiller. And the singing bats. And the serpents. And the Civil War soldiers. And my evil double from the other dimension.”
Her mom came in and tousled her hair. “It all kind of wears you down after a while, doesn’t it, honey?” she said. “But your dad and I have dinner plans with the Wilsons. We have a lot to talk over with them. They’re on a committee to repair the sewage drains after the mind-worms.”
“You couldn’t eat here?”
“No, I’m afraid that we already made reservations. But I made you some Rice Krispies Treats, and there’s garlic on the door, and you hav
e your crucifix and ankh, right?”
“Yeah,” sighed Katie.
“Alrighty,” said her mother. She kissed Katie on the forehead. “Be good. Remember: in bed by ten, with the lights out and the room completely dark except for a ghostly sliver of moon creeping across the floor toward your bed.”
After her parents left, Katie worked for a while on her homework. She had the math test coming up, and it felt good to go over some of the problems she hadn’t got before. This time she felt like she really understood them.
So often when disaster is about to strike, we don’t suspect a thing.
When Katie was done with her homework, she went down to watch a little TV. She sat in the living room on the sofa. She was watching some stupid sitcom. Whenever there were commercials, she’d flip to something else. Finally she gave up on watching the sitcom completely and just left the TV on the Spanish channel. When the commercials came on, she dug between the sofa cushions to see what change she could find.
She wasn’t sure what first worried her about the windows.
She looked up. The windows were completely dark. There was no sign of motion.
She got up and walked over to a window. She touched her fingers to the glass. She peered through.
Nothing.
There were windows all around the living room. She looked through all of them. She couldn’t see anything but the front and side yards.
She felt a prickling at the back of her neck.
Slowly she turned.
Nothing.
But in the next room, in the dining room-there were windows there, too. If someone was standing outside, in the bushes, in the dark, Katie would be visible. Very visible. Well lit. Inside. She would be seen through the window, down the hall, and through the open doorway, standing stock-still, looking out blindly into the darkness.
There could be someone there.
Katie walked carefully into the dining room. Nothing to fear but windows.
They were black with the suburban night of Horror Hollow.
She rested her knuckles against the glass and looked through. There were the bushes, where she had pictured someone standing. There was no one standing there. In the neighbors’ yard, there was a turtle sandbox.
The eyes were behind her.
She swiveled. Something flickered past the living room windows.
She started lowering the shades in the dining room. She would shut all the shades in the house. At least that way, no one would be able to see her. She could fight them more effectively if they didn’t know where to find her.
She looked up. There was motion in the room with her—
No—only a mirror. It was just her own reflection in the mirror over the sideboard. Katie backed toward the wall. Her back was pressed against it.
She heard a ratcheting.
The front door.
She realized, It might not be locked.
She galloped across the room and saw the knob slowly turning. Breathing in gasps, she grabbed the lock and twisted it. She pulled the chains across.
Now there was no sound from the outside. Nothing. Whoever it was, was biding his or her time. Waiting for Katie to open the door and look to see who was there.
Someone or something was trying to get in. Seriously trying to get in. Other doors. She thought about other doors.
Katie ran into the living room. Yanked the drapes shut. The kitchen door. Was it locked?
She headed back.
No, no—she knew it was locked. She had locked it earlier, when she took out the garbage. Time to call the police. She started up the stairs toward the phone.
As she reached the top of the stairs and was about to turn the corner to go to her room to phone, she realized that there was a huge window at the end of the upstairs hallway. Someone in the backyard would be able to see her, frightened, running for the phone. Someone would know just where she was.
Nothing else for it. She had to get to the phone.
She peeked around the corner.
There was the window. Nothing. Just a dark, midnight blue.
Then the blue moved.
And revealed a red glaring floating eye.
The eye was looking for her, looking at her, a huge eye, a single eye.
Katie screamed and leaped backward and flattened herself against the wall of the stairwell.
A second later the window exploded. A blast of red light filled the hallway. She heard her sister’s graduation photograph blow up as well as the pictures of Uncle Luke getting Kool-Aid dumped on his head by that nurse.
A whale. It was a whale, a walking whale on stilts, with deadly laser-beam eyes. Her grandpa had always said this time would come.
What to do? She started running down the stairs—but then thought again and scrambled back up.
She peeked around the corner.
There was the eye—VLAM!— blasting away at her again. Chunks of plaster and wood flew through the air. She stumbled backward and slid down several steps. She crouched there. She didn’t know which way to go.
Suddenly she heard an ominous crunching.
The shrubs. The whale was pacing along on its stilts through the shrubs, trying to find a different window to shoot through.
He was heading for the back. Katie darted down the stairs and headed for the front door. It was time to make a break.
She reached the bottom of the steps and heard the whale thrashing around in the backyard. She was almost to the door—
—when someone started pounding on it.
Someone was trying to get in.
“Katie!” Lily yelled. “Katie! Open up! There’s a giant whale on stilts outside your house!”
“Oh, thanks,” said Katie with some sarcasm, unlocking the door and opening it. “I thought it was just squirrels going after the hummingbird feeder.”
Lily rushed in. “I called the police from your neighbor’s house.”
“They’re on their way?”
Lily looked troubled. “They didn’t seem too...uh... when I said...”
“They didn’t believe you, did they?”
“Well—”
Suddenly there was a loud laserlike noise* from upstairs, and plaster shot down the stairway.
“He’s getting in!” shouted Katie.
“I have a plan!” Lily shouted back.
“Okay! Whatever you say!” shouted Katie.
Lily ran into the dining room and threw open the drapes. She pushed the window up and shouted, “Over here! Over here!”
“What are you doing?” Katie exclaimed. “Don’t open the drapes!”
“Help me with that!” said Lily, running to the other side of the dining room.
“What? My mom’s collectible Streetcar Named Desire plates?”
There was a stomping noise from outside. Bushes crushed beneath huge iron cuffs. The whale was getting closer.
“No! The mirror!”
They ran to the mirror above the side table and lifted it down. Katie was starting to catch on. She and Lily knelt behind the mirror, facing the windows, and yelled through the open window, “Here! Over here, you stupid whale!”
Suddenly the whale’s huge face dipped down into view: his red glowing eyes, his blue-gray hide, his big snarling baleen mouth. On his head was a kind of metal cap with an antenna.
The red eyes started to sparkle.
“He’s going to shoot!” said Katie.
The girls ducked.
The whale fired his laser-beam eyes. The girls felt the jolt as the laser beam bounced off the mirror.
Of course the girls didn’t feel the jolt as the laser bounced off the mirror, because lasers are just light. This story is highly scientific, and I would never mislead you. I want to depict whale eye-laser technology as accurately as possible.
Instantaneously the laser doubled back on itself, a continuous stream of light—using all the standard oculo-incendiary prohulsifiers and megegolisms that you’d expect—and it flashed through the air, searing the whale i
tself!
The girls heard him screech in pain, in that way whales do. He had been badly burned.
He fired again. Once again the girls didn’t feel the impact of the lasers on the mirror. Once again the laser beams ricocheted—one hit the whale full in the snout, and the other one flew off and smashed a wall-mounted soup tureen depicting Marlon Brando as Stanley.
The whale bellowed in pain and anger.
Lily and Katie dared now to look over the top of the mirror.
The whale was staggering. They could see his tall metal stilts, big hydraulic things, stumbling around the lawn.
“We got him!” shouted Katie.
The whale was headed back down the driveway. He was in retreat.
The girls ran to the front door. They opened it. The whale was jogging down the road away from the house, lightly on fire. Cars swerved to avoid his huge sticklike electrical legs. A driver rolled down a window and screamed, “Stupid whale! Whadaya think this is, the Bering Strait?”
The girls breathed a sigh of relief.
For the moment they were safe.
It is a general rule that things on stilts never strike the same place twice. Except some clowns, when you don’t pay them back for some stupid vintage hot rod they bought you.
But that’s another story.
* You know what I mean. I’m talking about vooooeeeeep—KPCHKWOW!!!
It wasn’t long before the authorities arrived. Even though the police didn’t believe in things like giant walking laser whales, the Horror Hollow Neighborhood Association was very used to vampires, madmen, flying saucers, and Bigfeet— so a walking whale really wasn’t much of a stretch. Some of the people from the Neighborhood Association came over, with blankets and hot cocoa, to see if Katie was all right and to help clean up some of the mess. The house was scorched and many of the windows had shattered. A wall upstairs lay strewn across the bedroom.
Katie and Lily sat in their blankets in the jumbled living room, talking.
Lily said, “I came over to tell you that in three days, Larry is going to release his whale army.” “Oh no ...,” said Katie. “What’ll we do?”