Authors: Betsy Byars
“They won’t.”
“But my ‘I owe my success to God and to my country’ they can’t remember because I didn’t get to say it. One good thing about not winning that pageant was I was going with Howard Eck then, and I would have had to say, ‘I owe my success to God and to my country and to my boyfriend Howard Eck.’ That was one reason I broke up with him. I didn’t want to be Mrs. Eck.”
Valvoline and Mozie were halfway to the greenhouse when she reached out and began to fumble with the dashboard of the car.
“Is anything the matter?” Mozie asked, tightening his seatbelt.
“I’m trying to find the headlights,” she explained. She pulled out the cigarette lighter. “Well, that’s not them.”
“No.”
“Everybody else has their lights on so there’s probably a storm somewhere even if we can’t see it. Wonder where the headlights are.”
Mozie pointed to a knob and she pulled it.
“Oh, thanks.”
She pushed it back in. “Now I’m ready in case it does storm. I hope it doesn’t rain for the pageant.”
“Me too,” Mozie said, just to be pleasant. All he cared about was getting into the greenhouse, turning on the sprinkler system, and getting back out without taking that long, unwilling, dreamlike walk to the end of the greenhouse.
“I wonder where the windshield wipers are. This isn’t my car, in case you’re wondering. It’s Bucky’s. I’m just driving it.”
Mozie pointed. “There.”
“Thanks.”
She flicked them on and off.
Mozie wiped his hands on the side of his pants. His palms were getting sweaty.
“Now, what’s this thing you were talking about in the greenhouse?” Valvoline asked.
“A m-mummy pod.”
“McMummy?”
“No, just mummy.”
“I’ve never even heard of such a thing.”
“Me either.”
“What won’t they think of next?”
Mozie’s tension was growing. It was hard to keep up a normal conversation.
He dreaded the moment when he unlocked the greenhouse door, pushed it open, and heard that faint creak of the door’s hinge—like something out of a horror movie. The memory of that creak caused him to shudder.
“You all right?”
“Yes.”
“You aren’t cold, are you? I could turn down the air-conditioning if I knew where it was.”
“I’m fine. It’s nice of you to do this.”
“I don’t mind. I like to drive.”
“Usually I just take the shortcut through the woods.”
“I hate the woods. I have been scared of woods since kindergarten when Miss Penny—she loved fairy tales—and she gave a lot of feeling to the words when she read. I can still hear her saying, ‘The deep, dark woods.’ I was third runner-up for Miss Dogwood last year and I believe the reason I didn’t get it was because it came across that I just can’t stand trees.”
Mozie nodded sympathetically.
“Oh, here’s the road. I was about to pass it. It’s so overgrown it doesn’t even look like a road.”
She turned the car into the boarded-up Esso station, pulled on the hand brake, and the car skidded to a stop beside the rusty gas pumps. The two of them fell silent.
Mozie was holding his cap against his chest as if for protection. He and Batty had gotten these hats free at the opening of Ace Hardware. They were white with yellow bills, and when Batty’s sister first saw them, she said, “Well, if it isn’t the Quack-Quacks.”
He looked out the car window at the deserted gas station. Beyond, the overgrown road was like a secret lane to nowhere.
The pause continued until Mozie said, “I guess I better get out.”
“I’ll be right here. I’m going to keep the engine running, and when you get through, we’ll scratch off.”
“Right.”
“How long you think it’s going to take you?”
“Ten minutes to get to the greenhouse, one minute to turn on the sprinkler, and thirty seconds to get back.”
Valvoline looked blank for a minute and then smiled. “I get it. You’re going to be running back.”
“Yes,” Mozie said emphatically.
“Let’s see. How many minutes was that?”
“Eleven and a half.”
“I’ll give you fifteen.”
Mozie nodded. “But don’t leave!” he added, turning to her.
“I won’t. There’s a pay phone right over there, and first thing, I’ll call your mom. I want to ask her something about my dress anyway. I think it needs more sequins.”
Mozie didn’t want to get out of the car. He knew how their dog Flexie used to feel when they arrived at the vet’s. Flexie would jump in the backseat. They’d open the back door and she’d jump in the front seat. As a last resort, she would crouch down on the floor and tremble.
Valvoline reached over and opened the door for him. There was nothing to do now but get out.
He put on his cap. Remembering Batty’s sister’s rude remark about the caps, he turned the bill to the back. He wished earnestly that the other Quack-Quack was at his side.
“Here I go,” he said.
He got out of the car and started across the hot tarmac toward the old road.
The air was still and heavy. Nothing seemed to be moving in the entire universe except his slow feet. He might as well have had on fins, he thought, he was walking so awkwardly.
He glanced back over his shoulder. Valvoline was locking all the doors of the car.
He faced forward. Manfully, but slowly, Mozie headed up the road. The sign ahead read
DEAD END.
M
OZIE PAUSED OUTSIDE THE
greenhouse.
It was a huge old building constructed twenty years ago by the town’s only millionaire, Mr. Downs. Hobart Downs had had a love of exotic tropical plants, and he raised them in the greenhouse and brought them up to the big house on trucks.
After Mr. Downs’s death, the mansion and the greenhouse fell into disuse. The house burned to the ground during an electrical storm, and the greenhouse and gardener’s cottage had been bought two years ago by Professor Orloff.
Mozie pushed open the door. The faint creak of the hinges brought goose bumps to his arms. He wished for Batty. He knew Valvoline was waiting at the old Esso station, but that wasn’t like having Batty right behind him. He longed to hear Batty say, “I’m right behind you, pal, and I won’t push.”
Mozie took a deep, purposeful breath because he didn’t want to risk having that heady, peculiar air of the greenhouse in his lungs. He took one step inside the greenhouse, one more step to the sprinkler system.
His hand reached for valve X. He turned the valve and reached for a bottle of Vita Grow—a strange-looking liquid, brownish in color with a distasteful smell. Mozie poured the foul liquid into the valve and closed it.
Mozie was still holding his breath though his face was turning red. He was reaching for the sprinkler system when suddenly, he paused.
He stood for a moment without moving. Then, slowly, he let out his breath and inhaled the thick, scented air of the greenhouse. He turned and faced the rear where THE plant grew.
Everything seemed to have grown since he was here yesterday. The plants’ limbs reached out over the aisle, forming a sort of arch that led him forward. Some of the trumpetlike flowers had fallen to the ground, and in their place vegetables were already beginning to form.
Slowly Mozie began to move down the aisle, the arch of branches closing over his head. Huge leaves brushed his cheeks. He stepped over a squash that had fallen and now blocked his way.
He felt as if he had shrunk, like in a science-fiction movie where normal blades of grass were like skyscrapers.
To ease his fears, he began a conversation with the absent Batty, taking both sides himself.
“Well, Batty, I’m inside. You wait outside, like you always do, all right?”
“Okey-doke!”
“Make sure I come out?”
“Okey-doke.”
“If I don’t, get the police. They’ll know what to do.”
“Okey-doke.”
The “okey-dokes,” spoken in what really sounded to him like Batty’s voice, helped lift Mozie’s spirits. He went deeper into the greenhouse. He could not explain why he continued. He didn’t want to go in. He wanted to be running for the Esso station and Valvoline’s car.
He paused at the end of the greenhouse where he had stopped yesterday. This time he did not reach out and push the leaves aside. He knew what was behind them.
“I’m not going to look, Batty,” he said.
“Okey-doke,” he answered for Batty.
And yet even as he spoke his hand reached toward the leaves. Carefully, trying to disturb as little as possible, Mozie shifted the leaves aside.
There was the pod.
It was bigger than it had been yesterday, so heavy now that it seemed impossible the stem could hold it. The bottom of the pod rested on the rich black soil.
“It’s either the dirt or that stinking Vita Grow stuff,” Batty had said yesterday when Mozie told him about the mummy pod. “Remember? I never did trust that dirt.”
“The dirt?”
“Yeah, that dirt. Remember? That’s one reason I didn’t want to go in there because I didn’t like the smell of that dirt. It’s like one million
B.C.
dirt. Smelling it could be bad for you. It could cause something.” Batty was afraid of inhaling anything that didn’t smell right.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the dirt,” Mozie had said.
To add credit to his theory, Batty had said, “I bet it came from Egypt.”
“Egypt?”
“Well, it would explain the mummy pod,” Batty had answered defensively. “If it is a mummy pod, you know what’s got to be in it, don’t you? A mummy! And you know what mummies do to you, don’t you?”
Mozie said, “What?” He knew what werewolves did to you, and vampires, but he wasn’t sure about mummies.
“They—they put an ancient curse on you. That’s what they do!”
The soil did give off a scent richer, more exotic, than local fields. It did smell, Mozie thought now, as he stood deep in the greenhouse, sort of like the Nile. Mozie had never been to the Nile, but he had seen pictures of it, and this was the way it looked like it would smell.
Mozie didn’t know where it came from, but he was sure he would never, ever forget the smell of the greenhouse. For the rest of his life—assuming he got out of here—whenever he saw a picture of the Nile, this rich, exotic scent would fill his nostrils.
Mozie shifted, but the pod did not move. Perhaps, Mozie thought, it did lean a little forward toward him, straining on its stem, but it didn’t turn.
He suddenly felt that there was something inside the pod—an actual presence, a being. It scared him, and yet there was a strange feeling he had not felt before—a feeling he could not put a name to. It wasn’t kinship, of course, it wasn’t compassion, but it was something like those feelings. Mutual loneliness, perhaps.
He caught his breath. He and the pod were mutually alone. He sat down.
“If you’re in there,” Mozie said, speaking in a low voice, “I’m just, you know, a kid that’s turning on the sprinkler system. Professor Orloff will be back soon. He’s supposed to already be back, though he paid me until next Saturday.
“The professor’s the one who can help you. You just need to hang in there until next week.
“I sort of know how you feel because my dad’s gone, and when someone goes out of your life—someone you really need—well, it does make you lonely. But the professor will be coming back, and my dad won’t. That’s the difference, so you don’t—”
There was the distant sound of thunder, and Mozie lifted his head and looked up through the dusty panes of glass overhead.
A broad line of thunderstorms had been stalled over the mountains for days, never coming closer, just gaining strength. Every afternoon the tops of the cumulonimbus clouds ballooned, and lightning could be seen in the rounded domes.
At the sound of thunder, the pod seemed to quiver. It was such a quick movement—over almost as soon as it began—that Mozie wasn’t sure it had happened.
“It’s just thunder,” he said.
He looked up at the pod. The pod almost seemed to float above the rich soil, though the end of the pod was now pressed into the earth. It was like a prehistoric plant rising from mist, a low silhouette, green and ominous in its strangeness.
Yet, there was a grace about the pod, a beauty that held Mozie in place, that kept him here, breathing this rich, perhaps unhealthy air until—
A sound broke into Mozie’s world.
Honk! HONK! HonkHonkHonk!
“Valvoline,” he said. He lifted his head. “Valvoline!”
And as if a spell had been broken, he got up and ran for the door.
V
ALVOLINE LEANED OUT OF
the phone booth as Mozie ran around the corner of the gas station.
“I was worried about you, Mozie. I was calling for help. I already dialed the nine.”
“I—I—”
He was too winded to speak.
Valvoline hung up the phone and stepped outside of the booth.
“What happened? I waited and waited, and ten minutes went by, and twenty, and finally I said, ‘Well, I have to call Mrs. Mozer,’ and I got in the phone booth and guess what? Somebody had torn the Mozer page right out of the phone book, and I don’t know your number. So then I just said, ‘Well, shoot, I’m calling 911,’ and I put in a dime and dialed a nine when you came running out of nowhere. You all right?”
“Yes.”
“That pod didn’t try to get you or anything?”
“No.”
“Because I remember a little plant I got for my seventh birthday and it opened and caught flies. You could see the fly’s little legs sticking out for the longest time.”
“This isn’t that kind of pod.”
“What kind is it?”
“For one thing, it’s shut.”
“That doesn’t mean it couldn’t open.”
“True.”
They started for the car. “Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t finish the 911 with you being all right. This friend of mine dialed 911 because her cat got his paws stuck in the VCR. And she called 911 and she didn’t say it was a cat. She just said, ‘It’s stuck in the VCR. I can’t get it out of the VCR!’ And when they came and saw Bosco—”
Mozie stopped abruptly.
“What’s wrong, Mozie?”
“I forgot to turn on the sprinklers.”
“You mean you got to go back?”