#7 The Demon Babysitter (3 page)

At first I just didn't like Dervla because she was a bossy babysitter.

But after a while it was more than that.

I began to get a weird feeling about her.

It started when I noticed this strange smell when she was around. Kind of a strong smell of burning. Like barbecued meat.

I also noticed her itching.

She was always scratching her head under the yellow ribbon.

But then something really weird happened.

It made me think something
very
creepy was going on.

I was in the kitchen, hatching my latest plan against Dervla.

I'd decided to pop some popcorn and maybe forget to put the lid on the saucepan.

I turned on the cooker.

Just as I was getting out the popcorn, I heard Dervla growling, “What on earth are you doing?”

“Nothing, Dervla,” I said in my sweetest voice.

But she wasn't buying it. She never did. She knew me too well.

“Don't lie to me,” she snarled. “I'm keeping my eye on you, you little wretch.”

She was whispering, but her voice wasn't soft. It was hard and angry.

And then she put her hand on the hot stove.

I almost screamed aloud.

But she looked straight at me and said, “What?”

She didn't even flinch.

From then on, I started to be a little afraid of Dervla.

I watched her when she wasn't looking, and I noticed weird stuff.

Her skin looked strange in certain lights. Almost red. And her freckles seemed to have faded.

Sometimes when she spoke, her voice didn't sound like a girl's at all. It was deep and sounded like some horrible growl.

Then she'd clear her throat and her voice would be back to normal.

One horrifying night, I saw Dervla eat a spider that was crawling along the counter.

She popped it in her mouth.

JUST LIKE THAT.

From then on, I knew that Dervla was different.

Not evil in a teenage girl way,

One night when she was babysitting me, we had this big fight.

Dervla grabbed the TV remote as soon as she arrived.

When I started yelling, she dragged me upstairs and locked me in my bedroom.

I heard her laughing maniacally as she turned the key in the lock and went downstairs.

Of course, this was not a problem for me.

When you're in a war with a devil like Dervla, you have to have a few tricks up your sleeve.

I had these really powerful stink bombs.

They were small and made of glass with some kind of yellow vomit-colored liquid inside.

I shimmied down the drainpipe and came in the back door.

I crept into the TV room where she was sitting.

I had the stink bombs in my pocket.

She was on the couch, facing away from me.

I tiptoed up behind her, holding my breath so I wouldn't laugh.

Just as I was reaching for the stink bombs, I noticed something that made me stop.

Poking out of Dervla's frizzy red hair were

I looked at her hand lying on the armrest.

There was something very wrong with it. Instead of a freckly pale hand with slightly chewed nails, there was a reddish hand with long fingers and thick black nails.