Poison Read online

  That was when I heard it, a whisper, as soft as spring rain, coming from somewhere in the darkness behind me.

  “Help me,” it said.

  A shiver ran down my spine. I listened. There was no sound. No traffic outside, no furnace noises. Just the faraway ticktock of an old grandfather clock that had stopped telling the right time years ago, and the whoosh of my own breath going in and out.

  I don’t know how long I stayed that way, immobile and listening.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Then: “Kay-tee.”

  I leaped up, my heart pounding in my chest.

  “Okay, I know you’re there,” I called. As if that meant anything. If it was a burglar, he was probably armed. What was I going to fight him with, a porcelain figurine?

  I gulped. I knew it wasn’t a burglar. The voice that had spoken my name hadn’t sounded human.

  A ghost, then. A ghost who knew my name. No big deal, I told myself. You didn’t hang out in Whitfield for long without encountering a few ectoplasmic entities. But this felt somehow different. Not ghostly, really. More like trapped. That was what it sounded like, as if someone were calling me from inside a box. A box, or a . . . I didn’t even want to think the word “coffin,” but that was what came to mind. The voice was so constrained, it was as if whoever was calling for help could barely move their lips.

  Immediately I started rummaging through the inventory that was piled willy-nilly behind the curtain. I wished I could turn on the lights, but there’d be no way I could explain to the police—or the school—or Morgan, for that matter—what I was doing there at four in the morning.

  With only the light from my cell phone to see by, I had to do most of my exploring by feel. A lot of the merchandise was old, and most of it was dirty. There were books, photographs, an old TV, a bamboo end table shaped like a monkey. Also a jack-in-the-box that almost gave me a heart attack when it boinged into my face. I tripped over a casserole dish that looked like a pumpkin, and I ended up on the floor facing a gizmo made of iron with a lot of evil-looking prongs sticking out of it.

  The hardest part for me was maintaining a psychic distance from these things. I’d called myself the Mistress of Real Things, but the truth was that I still hadn’t fully mastered my ability to feel their history. Most of the time I was all right. I only “read” objects when I concentrated on them. But sometimes I got taken by surprise, like when I’d held those broken pieces of plastic and gotten a preview of life behind the verplinko, or whatever it was called. In this place, surrounded by very old things with thousands of stories among them, I felt my control loosening.

  There was a cup that an opera singer had drunk from before every performance. I could hear her singing in a corner of my mind. An oil lamp still stained with the blood of the man who’d shot himself in the circle of its light. A silver rattle that had been found lodged in the throat of a dead infant.

  With a swift intake of air, I lifted my hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but this is too much for me.” If a ghost were taking up residence in the Emporium of Remarkable Goods, it was going to have to stay there.

  “Kay-tee . . . ”

  “Listen, I’ll come back,” I said, relenting, wiping my hand over my face. “In the morning. I’ll bring real witches with me, Hattie or . . . ”

  My voice dried up in my throat. In the far corner of the room, I noticed two small yellowish lights. They glowed once, then dimmed to blackness again.

  I pointed my cell phone toward where they had been. The jack-in-the-box I’d inadvertently opened was lying nearby, its long neck hanging limply like a dead turkey’s, its painted clown face shining in the dim bluish light from my phone. Beside it was an antique teddy bear with no arms, a wooden wagon, a Victorian doll house, and an array of porcelain-headed dolls dressed in old lace.

  “Here . . . I . . . am . . . ” The voice sounded miserable, the despair in it so thick that it must have taken every iota of energy to speak those words.

  Suddenly I was no longer afraid. Whoever, whatever was speaking to me wasn’t going to hurt me. It was crying out for help. “Where?” I whispered. “Tell me how to find you.”

  And then I saw it. From the corner, among the dolls, the yellow eyes glowed once more.

  Toys, I thought wildly. I remembered hearing something about . . . I closed my eyes and tried to remember. Toys. Souls. Summer.

  Summer’s soul.

  I remembered. Verity had said the girls’ souls had been placed among toys.

  My thoughts were all jumbled inside my head as I scrambled over the pile to reach the dolls stacked against the far wall. Why would they be here?

  “Summer?” I ventured.

  The eyes blazed, almost bringing one of the doll’s faces to life. Beside it, three other dolls glowed with dim light from their tortured eyes.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Oh, God.” I cast around wildly, trying to figure out what I should do. Briefly I touched the Summer doll, then pulled my hands away. This . . . this thing held Summer’s living soul, and I didn’t want some ham-handed action of mine to destroy it forever.

  I swallowed, though my mouth was dry. “I don’t know what to do, Summer,” I whispered. “Maybe if we wait till morning—”

  A chorus of tiny muffled shrieks rose up around me.

  “Right,” I agreed. Morning would probably be too late for all of us. “Did Morgan do this to you?”

  All four pairs of eyes seemed to tremble in terror.

  Of course it had been Morgan. I had no idea what she would want with four Muffies, but at this point I wouldn’t put anything past her.

  While I was frantically trying to figure out how best to help them, my cell phone made the blooping sound that told me a text was coming through. It was from Peter.

  Where RU?

  I wrote back: Emporium of Curious Gds. That way, if I didn’t come back, at least the witches would know where to look.

  “Please help,” Summer whimpered.

  I wanted to, more than anything. “Are you all right in there?” I asked.

  There was a lot of muffled grunting. I didn’t know if she just had difficulty talking through the doll, or if something was really wrong.

  “I think I know some people who might be able to get you out, but I don’t know if I should move you—er, I mean this thing you’re in. This doll.”

  There was a long silence, followed by the unmistakable sound of someone crying.

  I sighed. The last, and I mean the very last thing I wanted to do just then was take another trip through an object. But there were some things I had to find out before turning the dolls over to the Whitfield witches, like whether or not Summer was really inside, and what condition she was in.

  “All right,” I said, wishing with all my heart that I’d stayed in my dorm room studying chemistry. Under the circumstances, there was only one thing I could do. “It’s now or never, I guess.”

  With that I hurled myself into the doll.

  CHAPTER

  •

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I landed with a thud on a bare white floor surrounded by four bare white walls. Summer was pressed against one of them, her face a mask of astonishment.

  “Summer?” I ventured.

  She hesitated for a moment, her eyes darting around wildly. “How’d you get in here?”

  I shook my head. It was going to be very hard to explain to a Muffy. Fortunately, I didn’t have to, because the next second she ran sobbing into my arms. “Oh, Katy, I’m sorry for all the mean things I did to you!” she whispered into my ear while gripping my neck in a desperate hammerlock.

  “That’s okay—,” I began, but she was apparently in confessional mode.

  “Like turning your lunch into slugs, and telling Miss P that you put the voodoo doll in Verity’s locker.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, struggling to pull her arms off me. “But how did you—”

  “And for telling Peter that you
hooked up with the track team.”

  “What?” I pushed her away. “You told him what?”

  “I don’t think he believed me, anyway.”

  “The whole team?” I was shouting.

  “I know, crazy. Like they’d ever even consider—I mean . . . ”

  “Forget it,” I said. I looked around at the sterile cube where we stood. “What is this place?” I asked.

  “How should I know?” She tossed her hair, which was now unkempt and tangled, showing dark roots. “Backstabber,” she said bitterly. “She said she’d give us power.”

  “Who? Morgan?”

  “She said we could have whatever we wanted.”

  I made a face. “And what you wanted most was to turn my burger into slugs?”

  “That was supposed to just be for practice. Besides, I was pissed. You did some kind of weird thing to me and my friends, and I wanted to pay you back. But I didn’t think she’d do this.”

  “But why would she? With you? How—”

  “Hey, do I look like Dick Tracy to you?” she snapped. “Anyway, I know she’s not your buddy, not really. I thought so at first, though. I mean, how else would you be able to do that stuff to A.J. and Suzy and Tiff?”

  She paused, waiting for an answer.

  I cleared my throat. I couldn’t very well tell Summer that I’d come up with a stink spell on my own. “That was, er, the um . . . ” I thought hard. “The power of suggestion,” I said in a flash of inspiration.

  That seemed to do it for her. “Whatever,” she said with a dismissive wave. Maybe she let it go so easily because, like most people confronting the impossible, she preferred not to think about it. Or it could have been that Summer just didn’t think much about anything.

  “Anyway, after a while I figured out that you were clueless.” She gave me a beauty pageant smile. “I mean that in a good way. Now get me out of here.”

  “First you need to tell me how you got in here in the first place.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, all right,” she said. “Some girls were saying that you and Verity and some of the other geeks—I mean local students—” She gave me a guilty look.

  “Go ahead,” I said wearily.

  “That you were pretending to have this magic mojo, so we put the doll in Verity’s locker.” She shrugged. “It was a joke, that’s all.”

  “What about the Ouija board?” I asked. “Did anything happen when you used it?”

  “Anything?” she asked pointedly. “How about everything?” She paced away from me. “Okay, after you did that stink thing or whatever it was—”

  “A suggestion,” I repeated.

  She huffed with impatience at my interruption. “Anyway, A.J. and I went to Fred’s Bargain Mart that night and picked up this funky old Ouija board so that we could get even with you.”

  “Ouijas don’t do that.”

  “Who’s talking here?” she said irritably, flashing me the mean-girl stare. When she was convinced that I was sufficiently cowed, she went on: “Only this Ouija didn’t have the arrow thing.”

  “The arrow thing?”

  “The thing that points to the letters. A.J. wanted to take it back, but Fred’s was closed for the night. Anyway, I remembered I had this arrowhead thingy—”

  “You used an arrowhead?”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly an arrowhead. It was plastic. But it was kind of a triangle shape. You know, with a pointy end?”

  I nodded inanely, trying to get into the spirit of this inane conversation.

  “Actually, Tiff picked it up off the sidewalk right after Halloween. I remember we were out toilet-papering trees, and she found this thing, and I was like, ‘Ewww. What migrant worker peed on that?’ But she—”

  “Huh?” I wondered if I’d begun to drift off. “Migrant whats?”

  “You know. It’s the reason why you should wash fruit before you eat it. Because you never know what migrant workers peed on it. So I always wash my fruit, even if it comes in a can.”

  I blinked. Summer’s thought processes were too bizarre for me to follow.

  “Maybe you didn’t know that, being poor and everything,” she went on breezily. “But anyway, I said, ‘That’s too gross, picking that thing up like that,’ but Tiff said it looked like there was a lady inside, so—”

  “A lady?” Something in the back of my mind was stirring back to consciousness.

  “Swear to God. It looked exactly like Snow White Barbie, except for the puff sleeves on her dress. I mean, that would have just been too retro—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “What happened next?”

  “Well, we all gathered around the Ouija board, you know, asking for power and stuff, and the arrowhead was whizzing around the board like crazy—”

  “What did it spell out?”

  “Huh?”

  “The message on the Ouija board. What was it?”

  “There was a message?”

  “There usually is,” I said.

  She held up her hands. “Hey, I can’t keep track of everything, you know? Anyway, the thing was zipping around so fast, I could barely hold on to it. But then it . . . it sort of exploded, like boom, you know? Like a supersonic jet or something. The hall proctor even knocked on the door, but we said we were moving furniture.”

  “What was the explosion?”

  “It was her.” She gestured around the area.

  “Morgan?”

  “Snow White Barbie. So anyway, one minute she’s part of the plastic arrowhead, and the next minute she’s standing, as big as life, in the middle of the room. I swear.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Well, okay, ’cause this is where it gets kind of weird. Because she says, like, ‘I’m here to do your bidding’ or whatever, like she’s some genie or something, and she’s going to grant our wishes, you know? Except she didn’t say there was a limit on the wishes, so we think there’s, like, unlimited wishes—”

  “And you wished that my lunch would turn into slugs.”

  “But don’t you see? I thought there’d be multiple wishes. I didn’t think I’d be wasting my only wish on your stupid lunch! I mean A.J. and Tiff and Suzy Dusset didn’t even get to make a wish at all, because as soon as I said I wanted to turn your french fries into fingers because you’d made us stink, Snow White Barbie says ‘Okay, done. It’ll happen at lunch tomorrow,’ and then she walks out the door! Like without even asking what A.J. and Tiff want. I didn’t care if Suzy Dusset got any wishes or not, but still, it was rude.

  “So we all ran after her, but she was gone, like poof, and there was nothing in the hall except for this gigantic moth. So of course we ran back in and closed the door.”

  “And you never saw, er, Snow White Barbie again?”

  Summer shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest. “Supertramp is more like it, the lying skank. We tried to bring her back—that’s what we were doing the night you came into my dorm room. I mean, the lunch thing happened, but what about our other wishes? She owed us.”

  Something was gnawing at the corners of my mind. “What happened to the planchette?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The plastic triangle thing that used to hold tiny Barbie?”

  “I told you, it blew apart that first night. So we didn’t use anything. I mean, there we are, invoking her and everything, really respectfully, and then splat, I’m in here. If I knew that was the price I’d have to pay for one stupid wish, believe me, I would’ve wished for diamonds or something. Or to be Lady Gaga.”

  “So it was still in your room?” The thought wouldn’t leave me. “The planchette.”

  “What difference does it make where the thing was? She wasn’t in it anymore. That’s what matters. And the fact that I’m in here. Now get me out.”

  I scratched my head. “I guess I could try to take you out with me,” I said. “Is that where the doll’s eyes are?” I walked over to one wall that seemed to have some vague markings on it. Up close, I
could see the interior of the store. More precisely, I saw myself lying on the floor amid a jumble of old toys. “I guess we’ve left our bodies,” I said, remembering my experience with the tankard.

  “Really?” she asked, peering over my shoulder. “So where’s mine? I only see you out there.”

  I hated to tell her. “It’s in a hospital in Michigan, I think.”

  Her face crumpled. “Will I . . . you know, get back all right?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “That’s why I’d rather ask someone who knows about these things.”

  “No!” Summer stamped her foot. “I’m not going to stay in here one second longer. Now do something!”

  I gulped. “Okay,” I said. “Take my hand.”

  “Hurry up!” Summer ordered as I walked through the doll’s eyes.

  • • •

  “Summer?” I hauled myself up onto all fours. My head felt like it was splitting apart. The kind of magic I’d been doing was taking its toll on me. I could barely move without sending shooting pains into my head. “Summer, did you make it?”

  But of course she wouldn’t answer, I realized. If I’d managed to get Summer’s soul—or whatever part of her I’d visited—out of the doll, it would have returned to her body back in Michigan.

  Maybe the others went with her, I thought hopefully. The prospect of doing this three more times wasn’t something I was looking forward to at all.

  “A.J.? Suzy?” I whispered as I crawled toward the heap of antique dolls. “Tiffany?”

  Then I saw it. The Summer doll, with its human eyes glaring at me.

  “I guess it didn’t work,” I said, picking up the doll as if I could give it some comfort in my arms. “I’m sorry.”

  At first the eyes looked as if Summer wanted to strangle me, but within a few seconds her bravado abandoned her. The doll’s expression softened until I thought the eyes were about to cry. I wondered if somewhere in a hospital far away, Summer’s impassive face was covered with tears. “I’ll find a way to get you out,” I whispered, cradling her in my arms as I picked up the other three dolls. “I promise you.”