Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2) (27 page)

“She’s gonna
kill you as soon as she leaves that cage,” I said, knowing it was the truth.

“Yeah? Let her try.” I stared hard at her
black-painted fingertips, now cackling with mini flames. “I never intended for
her to see you again. But when your dad took you out of the city, I knew I
couldn’t let him try to help you. I had to make sure… under my close, personal supervision…
that you weren’t going to make it out of this alive.”

I had just about had enough. But as long
as she kept talking, I kept talking. “So you’re just gonna keep us in here,
locked up, until I live out the rest of my days? Until I die?”

“That’s the plan,” Hannah said. “Yeah. I
want her to know what it feels like to lose a loved one. She cursed you.
Twice
. You gotta admit, she had this
coming.”

“It was an
accident!” I shouted.

“And not to mention, showing off at your
graduation like that, floating up in the air, for the entire world to see. That
was a big, big no-no. What I’m doing to her now should be far worse a
punishment. This, my friend, is
nothing
.”

“Stop calling me
friend
!” I spit a huge lougee up into the air and watched with glee
as the glob of gunk smashed into Hannah’s right cheek.

She blinked a few times and then wiped
the blob of snot away. She smiled and just stared at me for a moment.

Then she lifted up her right hand,
pointed her index finger at me, and started to lift me up off the crib. Here I
was, floating yet again. This would’ve been a great chance to escape, but my
hands were chained to the crib, which was itself chained to the basement floor,
and my hands weren’t about to go anywhere. The pain in my wrists became so
excruciating as my body continued to rise that I wanted to just end it then and
there.

“Stop it!”
Liesel shouted.

“Oh God… Oh my
God…” I said, the sharp pains overwhelming me.

“You want to spit on me?” Hannah asked,
her rage intensifying. “You want to spit on
me
?”

She let me go, and I landed head first,
my left cheek smashing against the side of the crib wall. I felt a cut against
the cheek, and blood started flowing from that part of my face, too.

“Cameron, I have
a question,” Hannah said.

I tried to
breathe. I tried to scream. Finally, I said: “What?”

“How old do you
think you are today?”

I just shook my
head. “You tell me.”

“I’m guessing seven. Does seven sound
about right?” She looked at Liesel for an answer, but she didn’t even
acknowledge Hannah’s presence. “This means you’ll be six tomorrow, and five the
next day, and so on, until you obliterate into nothingness on what would be…
let’s see… this coming Tuesday night.”

I didn’t want to agree with her. “That’s
almost a week from now,” I said. “That gives me plenty of time to find a
weakness in your system, to get me and Liesel away from your crazy ass.”

She nodded. “You
have a point. But…”

“But?”

“But what if I had the power to get there
quicker. Cuz you know what? I’m getting a little tired of your attitude, boy.”

“What?” Liesel
shouted. “No!”

“Oh yes,” Hannah said. “Alicia’s pretty
special. In a matter of words and big emotions, she can turn another human
being into a ticking time clock, where he or she can age a whole year of their
life with each passing day. But I… oh, how sweet it is… can take that initial
curse, and
speed it up
!”

Liesel was crying intensely, as if she
knew this horrific development had been coming all along.

“What are you
saying?” I asked.

“The world’s gonna pay for what happened
to my mother,” Hannah said. “It’s only starting with what I’m about to do to
you and Liesel. Consider this a prologue, Cameron. A prologue to the big, epic,
apocalyptic
showdown
. Consider this…
your destiny.”

I started breathing harder, and I tried
my best to reach out toward Liesel, even though it would take a miracle beyond
her extraordinary abilities to feel her soft, inviting hands ever again.

“Cameron, what if I told you I was going
to de-age you not a whole year with each day… but a whole year… with each
hour
!”

With her punctuation on that final word,
the entire room turned into a giant wind tunnel, the force of the fierce winds
as powerful as a cataclysmic tornado. Hannah floated up five feet in the air
and looked down at me with her scary eyes, both pitch-red.

“Cameron, Liesel told me you have a thing
with birthdays.” With a big, eerie smile on her face, she started to sing.
“Happy birth-
hour
to you! Happy
birth-
hour
to you. Happy birth-
hour
dear Cameron. Happy birth-
hour
… to…
you
!”

I couldn’t believe
it.

My body started
to shrink.

12.
Six

Barely ten seconds had passed. But I knew
I was a year younger. I could feel it in my bones. The large pajama clothing
already felt loose. Hannah was laughing uproariously; that marked the final
confirmation.

Liesel put her hands over her face and
started crying as Hannah slowly stepped up to my crib, her smile growing bigger
by the second.

“Six more days, Cameron? Try six more
hours.” Hannah tightened my chains and started rocking the crib. I fell back
against my side and glared at her, wanting to attack her with everything I had.
“Rock-a-bye baby… on the tree top…”

“Shut up!” I
shouted. “Just shut up!”

“With pleasure,”
she said.

I readied myself to unleash a dozen
lougees against Hannah’s once pretty but now heinous face, but she walked away
before I could do anything. I watched her sit back down on her leather couch,
slapping her hands together and softly giggling. I turned my head to the right
to see Hannah and Liesel’s dead, decaying mom lying on the stretcher. I looked
up and around the room, which was uncomfortably warm and scarily dark.

I knew I was going to die in here. And I
knew there was nothing Liesel could do to save me.

13.
Four

Two hours flew by. Hannah wasn’t joking.
I was swimming in these pajamas, and I felt like I was suffocating. Worst,
because the de-aging was happening so fast, for the first time since these
bizarre aging conditions started afflicting me, I was literally
feeling
the quick, painful morphing of
my body as I continued to shrink faster and faster.

The cruelest thing Hannah was doing on
the hour, every hour, was shoving a mirror into my young face and showing me
the results of her mad witchy ways. I was having trouble breathing already, and
seeing my now four-year-old face in the mirror was firmly depleting my
confidence that I would ever see age five or six or seven again, let alone, age
eighteen.

“Please…” I
said. “Please… stop this…”

Hannah just laughed. “You know, the
younger you get, the more your pleading sounds so…
stupid
…”

“Please!”

She took another step toward me and
started making an annoying crying face. “Waaaaah…. Waaaaaah…. You really are
turning into a whiny little baby, aren’t you, Cameron?”

Liesel had her head buried in her knees,
at this point refusing to look at me any longer. She didn’t have any more tears
to cry, so now she was screaming with anger against her legs.

I had more tears
to cry, though. And I let them fall.

“Tick tock, tick
tock, Cameron,” Hannah said. “We’re getting closer.”

She stepped out of the room, humming the
“Happy Birthday” song, as I cowered in my crib and continued to cry.

14.
Three

Hannah shoved the mirror in my face
again, laughed, then left Liesel and I down in the dirty smelly basement to rot
for another hour.

Please
God… please… I’ll do anything,
I thought.
I know it’s next to impossible
that I’m going to make it through this now, but please… please don’t let Liesel
die. Let her have a life past this dreadful night. I’ve said this to you
before, God, and I’ll say it to you again. In the end… if it’s a decision
between me and her, please, take me.

I could feel my
cheeks plumping up.

Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m saying this…
I miss being a teenager!

15.
Two

I could hear Liesel calling out for me,
but I couldn’t see her anymore. I had shrunk so much in the last ninety minutes
that I could barely see over the top of the crib. The chains were looser but
still tight against my wrists. Weirdest of all, I could see my feet, seemingly
just inches away from my face. I couldn’t have been more than three feet tall
now, less than half of what I used to be when I was getting down on one knee to
propose to Liesel last Christmas.

“Leese?” I
asked.

“Cam, I’m here.”

“Leese… it’s
going to be all right…”

“Cam… I can’t… I
can’t understand you…”

“What?”

Silence. “Cam?”

Oh my God,
I thought.
She can’t understand me. I’m talking jibberish!

“Leese, can you
understand me?”

“What are you
saying?”

I shook my head. I could hear it now.
Instead of “can you understand me,” what was coming out of my mouth was, “cower
stay me,” in a high baby voice that would be hilarious in any other
circumstance than the one I was in right now.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry it had to
end this way.” She didn’t respond. I knew she couldn’t understand me. But I
decided to say it anyway. “And I love you. I love you so much. I just want you
to know.”

“Cameron!” Liesel shouted at the top of
her lungs. “I’m going to save you! Do you understand me? I’m not going to let
you die!”

I heard an ominous whistling coming from
behind me, and I knew my time was limited. I stretched up as high as I could,
just to see something, anything.

I caught sight of Hannah. As she walked
in, hiding a box under her left arm, she picked up the poker stick with her
right hand, raced across the room, and struck Liesel in her chest. Liesel
screamed and fell back as Hannah walked around to the other side and slapped
the stick against the bottom of Liesel’s back. She screamed again, this time in
a more quiet, depressing manner. Her whole body was shaking as she slunk down
to the floor.

Even though I was only two years old, I
had the kind of rage that existed in somebody twenty times my age, somebody
with five lifetimes of experience with love and loss and jealousy and revenge.
I knew if she unlocked me from these chains I would do everything in my power
to injure or kill this evil, rotten witch of a woman. Not only was she enjoying
my withering into nothingness, but she was hurting Liesel. This chick was
messed up, and she had to be stopped.

“Oh, Cameron… Mr. Cameron…” She tiptoed
slowly toward me, and I noticed for the first time that she was out of her red
dress, and now in a simple blue sweater and long jeans, like she wanted to go
for a midnight walk. She revealed the box under her arm, which turned out to be
a wrapped birthday gift. “I have a gift for you, birthday boy. I know this
might be the last birthday present you’ll ever receive, so I was sure to make
it a good one. You want to open it up?” She lowered the gift and smiled. “Oh.
Right. You’re still in those chains. Don’t worry, I’ll open it for you.”

She got down on her knees and opened the
box, even though I couldn’t see far enough over the crib to tell what it could
be. I didn’t really want to know. Considering her malevolent ways, it couldn’t
possibly be anything good.

“Ta da!” Hannah shouted as she got back
up to her feet and revealed to me the special birthday gift.

“Oh God…” I
said.

“Oh yes,” she
said.

It was a diaper.

“I know you want to be a big boy,” she
said, bringing the diaper toward the crib, “but you’re just too much of a baby
to wear big boy’s underwear. I’m really very sorry.”

As soon as she grabbed my legs, I started
tossing and turning, trying my best to scramble as much as possible without
hurting my already pained wrists. She unhooked my legs from their chains in a
matter of seconds, and I started flailing them around her face, managing to
successfully kick the side of her right cheek, twice, before she could lock my
legs back down against the crib.

“Keep still,”
she said. “I need to change you.”

“This isn’t
happening…”

“I can’t
understand you. Move again and I’ll knock your teeth out.”

She pulled my
pants down. I started kicking at her, and she slapped me in the face.

“Stop!” I
yelled.