The Knick Knack Nightmare Read online

  “Your mom’s gotten a lot better.” Ms. Pewter swallowed an imminent giggle. “Especially after we labeled the salt, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda.”

  “Good thing we don’t keep arsenic in the kitchen.”

  Mom slammed the dense ball of dough down onto the counter, rattling the salt and pepper shakers. “There’s something therapeutic about breaking eggs and kneading dough with your hands.” Mom punched her fist into the ball of dough, nearly severing it in two.

  What did the poor dough ball ever do to you?

  Ms. Pewter pulled us aside. “A ‘certain someone’ hasn’t returned Debbie’s messages yet. And since Tim’s stuck in a conference all week, we decided on a girls’ night in.” Ms. Pewter turned to see Mom abusing the dough ball. Mom’s nostrils flared with every strike. “Tomorrow night, too.”

  I peered around Ms. Pewter, salivating at the prospect of gorging on pound cakes and buttered baguettes until I exploded. “What about dinner? Do we get to eat all this?” Arvin was inching towards a tower of dripping cinnamon rolls when Ms. Pewter grabbed the back of his neck and led us out of the kitchen.

  “You two will have to study and eat dinner upstairs tonight. I took the liberty of buying you each a Mega Deluxe Bacon Cheeseburger and curly fries on the way. Now, run along, boys. Debbie needs to pound on a few more dough balls.” Ms. Pewter returned to their little bakery. The door swung shut behind her, wafting the smell of warm bread into the air.

  I looked over to Arvin. “Mega-Bacon-Cheese and curlies?”

  He jetted up the stairs, taking two at a time and beat me to the top.

  We tore through those burgers and fries like we hadn’t eaten in days. Golden mustard and brown grease dripped down our chins and onto our white polo shirts. Arvin and I debated releasing the knight from his prison or keeping him wrapped and zipped in my bag for eternity. Or perhaps slip the figurine under Mom’s dough ball and walk away. Why are things never so simple?

  Arvin wiped blotches of ketchup and mustard from the corners of his mouth. “Let me see that figurine.”

  I took my Twins cap out of my bag and unrolled the little bronze knight from its prison. I pushed a slew of lavender-scented socks off my bedside table and stood the knight in their place. Sean’s blood had dried in tiny lines and splatters on the knight’s bent sword and intricate armor.

  Arvin stretched out a finger and poked the knight in the belly. It fell backwards, making a high-pitched DING when it hit the table. Arvin stood the knight on its feet and poked it in the head. It fell backwards again, making another high-pitched DING. “It’s not doing anything.”

  “I can see that.” I got down on one knee and looked - as close as I could - straight into the knight’s slotted visor. Tiny jade eyes stared back at me, opaque and lifeless. “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither.” Arvin got down eye-to-eye with the little knight. “Mr. Knight, we just want to thank you for helping us out. I figure you were trying to save us from a bully.”

  “Don’t be silly. It was stabbing Sean. Not saving us.”

  “Could’ve been. Or we’re seeing things. Oh. My. God. I bet it was the cake.”

  “Now you’re being stupid. Mom didn’t poison you.”

  “How do you know? You didn’t eat any.” Arvin paused. “Oh. Yeah. Never mind.”

  “Yeah. So there goes your theory, Professor Pewter.”

  I stood and bumped my knee into the table. “Ouch.” The little bronze knight fell on its face. A tiny coin rolled out from under the knight’s chest plate and spun to a halt on the table. As I raised it into the light, the tiny coin grew in my hand. A silver coin, a gold band, two holes in the center. “My magic coin.” I stood the knight back up and shoved my coin into its face. “You stole it. You little thief!”

  The knight sprung to life and grabbed hold of the coin’s raised edge. It pulled with its free hand, and with the other, swung the little sword at my thumbnail, slicing off a chunk. Despite his size, the little knight was too strong for me. Arvin stood wide-eyed and dumbstruck in the corner.

  “Help me!”

  Arvin ran up behind me and grabbed hold of my jeans. He grunted and yanked on my belt loops, ripping them off. He tumbled backwards into my open closet, pulling down the entire clothes rack, burying himself in a pile of shirts and dress slacks.

  I almost had the coin when the knight swung his sword. It missed my thumb but sliced into the coin. The coin let out a piercing metallic scream as the sword passed through it, shearing off a piece. A bright flash of light separated us from the coin. The knight shot through my window and landed on the sidewalk below. I stumbled backwards into the closet and fell on top of Arvin. The knight’s armor clinked and clanked as little footsteps echoed into the distance and faded away.

  I laid on the pile of clothes and Arvin.

  “Perry?” Arvin’s voice was calm but muffled under my worst clothes.

  “Yeah, Buddy?”

  “I just lost a bajillion bucks, didn’t I?”

  “Yep.” I nodded.

  A minute later, Mom and Ms. Pewter burst into my room, tracking in a cloud of flour and cinnamon behind them. Mom scratched her nose, smearing a blob of white frosting across her face. “What happened? Where’s Arvin?”

  “I’m here, Ms. Dobbs.”

  “Arvin!” Ms. Pewter’s voice dropped an octave. “Get out of there. You’ll ruin Perry’s nice clothes.”

  I got up and grabbed Arvin’s outstretched arm, helping him out of a pile of Sunday services and a funeral. “It’s okay, Ms. Pewter. They’re old clothes.”

  Mom gasped. “The window! Perry, how many times I have I told you never to throw a ball in the house? And look!” Mom pointed at two blue jean belt loops lying on the floor. “You’ve ruined your best jeans, too.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  “Sorry, Ms. Dobbs.” Arvin sat on my bed and hung his feet over the edge, hiding the charred coin from view.

  Mom put her hands on her hips and tapped her belt under the kitchen apron. “Well, you did it. You can fix it. Tape a piece of plastic over the hole and keep it there until I can order a new glass pane. We’ll have to go back to the mall for new jeans, too. Patty,” Mom turned back to Ms. Pewter, “we have more dough to knead.” Mom backed out of my room and lumbered down the stairs. “Patty?”

  Ms. Pewter shook her head and cracked her knuckles. “Arvin, help Perry with his clothes and do your homework.” She went out the door and down the stairs. The kitchen door squeaked as it swung shut behind them.

  Arvin moved his feet aside and glared at the coin. “What should we do with it?”

  “Not sure. Do you know how fix a magical shape-shifting teleportation coin from an alternative universe?”

  Arvin scowled and crossed his arms. “That was next on my to-do list.”

  The sheared coin popped and sparked, scaring Arvin off the bed. We jumped into the closet. A heavy cardboard box, full of little league trophies and a souvenir baseball bat, fell off a narrow shelf above the clothes rack and crashed with a loud THUNK onto the floor at our feet.

  “Perry?” Mom called from the living room.

  “It’s nothing. We’re cleaning.”

  Tiny arcs of blue electricity shot out of the coin’s severed edge, burning the carpet. Arvin and I spent most of the evening trying to hide the coin - a painful task due to the veins of lightning crisscrossing its surface. We counted a repeating forty-two second delay between zaps and, using leftover chopsticks from last week’s Chinese takeout, stuffed the coin in the toe of a rubber rain boot and hid it in the back of my closet. I looked out the broken window. The knight had escaped with a piece of the coin, and I had no idea how to get it back.

  Ms. Pewter called Arvin. “Get your stuff. It’s time to go.”

  “Be right there.” Arvin stuffed what little algebra homework he finished into his backpack and gave me a worried look. “Bury it.”

  “Bury my coin? It’s magic. What good will burying it do?”
/>   “At least the lightning can’t burn down your house if it’s underground.” He had a good point.

  “I’ll do it tonight.”

  I snuck out of the house after midnight and buried the coin between protruding roots of Mom’s favorite oak. I looked at the bright, full moon and hoped winter would come soon. I hoped the soft ground would freeze, sealing the coin away for months, giving me enough time to come up with a better plan. I hoped never to see the thieving bronze knight again. I hoped Emilia would go to the Harvest Dance with me. And I hoped everything would go back to normal. My high hopes were as fragile as Ms. Pewter’s crystal kangaroos. Even the slightest nudge and…

  “Perry!” Mom’s screams woke me. “Perry, come quick!”

  I pushed aside the quilt and swung my feet over the bedside. 5:17 AM I rubbed my eyes and yawned. “Mom?”

  I had never woken up this early. The morning dew had turned to frost, and the moonlight painted the world pale blue. Everything was quiet and cold. “Too early, Mom.”

  “Perry! Get down here!”

  I should have been battling demons in dreams, not the blonde dragon downstairs.

  “I’m coming!”

  Mom grabbed my arm as I stepped off the bottom stair. She had no makeup on, and her bed-head hair would’ve been fashionable on any old cat lady. She wore a pink cotton nightgown and novelty duck slippers. Their plastic googly eyes wobbled with every step. “They’re gone! They’re gone!”

  “What’s gone?”

  Mom huffed and pulled me over to her new curio cabinet. Top shelf - empty. Second shelf - empty. Third self - empty. “My knick-knacks, Perry. All my knick-knacks are gone.”

  The cabinets were bare, the mantel was bare, and the tables were bare. “How? Where’d they go? You had over a thousand.”

  “The thieves came back, Perry. It had to be them.”

  “Thieves? I thought it was one.”

  “It’s all over the news.” Mom hauled me over to the TV, squeezing my arm like she thought I’d float away.

  I hated watching the local news. Channel 11’s talking heads were as stiff and unconvincing as those mechanical babies Nelson forced on us in Civics and Life class. They belched local sob stories and feel-goods with all the emotion of plastic people.

  Channel 11’s morning news anchor, a skeletal woman with fish tank glasses and permanent pursed lips, sat behind a news desk. She fumbled through a stack of papers, arranging them across the desk in three neat piles. Her glasses reflected the teleprompter script as she read it into the camera.

  “For those of you just tuning in, authorities have confirmed a high number of break-ins throughout Shelbyville last night. Sometime after midnight, hundreds of calls flooded into Shelbyville 911 services. Reports suggest thieves made off with a large, although yet unspecified, number of knick-knacks. Police have yet to name any suspects or motive. But they asked us to remind you, if you see something, say something. This has been Cynthia Stitch - heading home to check my collection. Now to Tanya Nesbit - live outside Hoffman Psychiatric Hospital.”

  Ms. Stitch looked past the camera for an awkward second before the video switched to a dark-haired woman in a windbreaker - a large, up-lit building behind her.

  “Thank you, Cynthia. Early this morning, veteran Nelson High School math teachers Helen and Mildred Thomas were taken to Hoffman Psychiatric Hospital. The beloved educators both claim a gang of porcelain garden gnomes attacked and beat them as they tried to lock them in a curio cabinet. Although police have confirmed the teachers are victims of last night’s robberies, hospital psychiatrists suspect emotional trauma from the event as the source of their delusions. More on these stories as they develop. I’m Tanya Nesbit reporting live for WCRN Channel 11 News.”

  IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFT —

  Mom silenced her phone’s ringtone. “Yes, we watched it. Yes. Me, too. Were you—? Oh, Patty. I’m so sorry. Golly geez. Every single one?”

  I couldn’t stand hearing less than half a conversation. “Mom, what?”

  “No. I couldn’t. Do you think—?”

  “Mom, what is it?”

  Mom shooed me away. “Have you heard from Tim? Me neither. Tell me if you—. Yes, sure. I’ll do the same. Sure. If he wants. But what about school? That’s understandable. He’ll be ecstatic to hear it. Okay. Soon.” She hung up the phone.

  “What was that about?”

  “The Pewters got robbed, too. Arvin’s upset, so he’s going to come over while Patricia sorts out receipts for the insurance company.”

  “What about school?”

  “Canceled.” It must have been the happy part she mentioned. She was right. “We should stay indoors until police catch the perps.”

  Perps? She’s been watching too many cop shows. “How many knick-knacks did they take?”

  “All of them.” Mom took a deep breath. “All one-hundred thirty-seven thousand two-hundred and forty-two.”

  “Yikes!”

  “And there’s more.”

  “Geez. Something worse?”

  “It’s Martin and Tim. They’re both missing.”

  I was gulping the last of my O.J. when Ms. Pewter arrived with Arvin in tow. He wore tennis shoes without socks, brown plaid pajamas like mine, and his curly hair pressed flat against one side of his head. Ms. Pewter wore blue jeans and a black sweater with red writing and an arrow pointing up. It read, Don’t Make This Ginger Snap.

  Mom took Ms. Pewter into the kitchen for coffee, and Arvin crawled onto Dad’s old leather recliner. It creaked as he slumped against one arm.

  “So I heard you’re freaking out,” I said.

  “I’m angry. Mom’s freaking out.”

  “I heard that, Mister,” Ms. Pewter hollered from the kitchen. “And I’m certainly not freaking out.”

  “Tim hasn’t returned her messages since the party and now this crazy knick-knack thing. If I tell her about Sean Davis,” Arvin whispered, “her head may explode.”

  “Mine’s about to. What the hell is going on?”

  “Perry!” Mom shouted. “Language!”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  “What about Kaila and Emilia?” asked Arvin.

  “It’s almost dawn. We’ll call them in a couple hours.”

  Ms. Pewter returned to her house to take inventory. Arvin stayed behind, choosing to nap in the recliner while I flipped between news updates and the history channel. An hour later, the sky brightened as the sun rose over the horizon, its warm rays melting the morning frost. Dozens of alarms and sirens echoed from every direction, and old people peaked out of high octagonal windows with phones pressed to their ears.

  We tried to call the police and every number in our phones - her coworkers, my friends, Ms. Pewter, Tim, and Martin. She dialed over and over again, growing more frustrated each time she pressed SEND, listening to a computer repeat, “All circuits are busy. Please try your call again,” until our phones lost their signals.

  A sudden CRACK came from the front door.

  CRACK-CRACK

  Arvin jumped at the loud sound. He pushed back into the recliner, releasing the footrest. BOINGGG It sprung up.

  Arvin pushed in the footrest and jumped out of the recliner. “Mom must be back.” He skipped to the door.

  “Mom, Ms. Pewter’s here.”

  “Oh, good.” Mom was on her fifth cup of coffee in the kitchen. “Let her in.”

  Arvin opened the door. I stood next to him and looked left - nobody. I looked right - nobody. Brown leaves blanketed the yard and street.

  “Hello? Is anybody there?” Something cracked under my feet. I looked down. “Why is there glass?”

  Arvin scanned the trees. His eyes widened. “Perry, duck!” He jumped behind the door.

  CRACK

  A blue crystal sparrow smashed into the doorframe by my head. A thousand glass shards sprayed into the air, cutting across my neck and cheek. I fell onto the hardwood foyer and scrambled backwards as Arvin slammed the door shut and locked it.

/>   CRACK - CRACK Two more shattered against the door.

  Mom ran out of the kitchen. Black coffee had spilled on the front of her nightgown. “What was that?”

  I couldn’t breathe. “It was a -. It was a -.”

  “Sweetie, you’re bleeding.” Mom grabbed a box of tissues off the coffee table. She dabbed a wad of tissue against my face and pulled it away. A dozen little dots soaked into the tissue.

  “It’s nothing. A few little cuts. I’m fine.” I turned to Arvin. He was pushing against the door. “You okay?”

  CRACK

  “Fantastic. You?” Arvin wet his lips. “What do you want me to say? This is your fault. You should’ve gotten rid of that stupid coin a year ago.”

  “Perry,” Mom looked between us, “what is Arvin talking about?”

  “Nothing, Mom.”

  “Tell her, Perry. Ms. Dobbs, Perr—”

  “Arvin!”

  CRACK Another.

  Arvin rolled his eyes. “Before he died, Perry’s dad gave him a magic coin. It can transform people or things, teleport you to other dimensions, or create new ones for you. It all started when Perry and I met at the pool over a year ago. The coin transported us to a sinking island, into a volcano, to a—”

  Mom’s eyes widened and her eyebrows scrunched together as Arvin told the story of the gewgaws. He told her about the albinos and his insane doppelgänger, the kingdom and the ice cave, the undersea dome and the cloud city, about starving in the mud flat, reviving a dead king, the fights we had, why we became closer, and how our fears and desires made everything happen - with a lot of help from Dad’s magic coin and a mischievous snake named Levi Bram.

  “And then his mom gave us another magic coin so we could get home.” Arvin finished the story and nodded. “That’s everything.”

  “Oh, my poor dear.” Mom pulled Arvin in for a big hug. “We’ll get you help. They have doctors at Hoffman for this sort of thing.”

  “I’m not crazy, Ms. Dobbs. It happened. Perry, tell her.”

  “Mom,” I stood up and picked a few shards of glass off my shirt, “Arvin’s telling the truth.”