Fiendish Deeds (9 page)

Joy looked back at him without expression.

“Well, what do you think?” asked Phipps. “Doesn’t that sound a lot better than spending your whole life stuck in a sad old town that’s dying a slow death?”

“Spooking
isn’t
dying,” hissed Joy through her teeth.

“Oh no? Have you ever seen anyone moving in up there, for example?”

The question took Joy off guard. She’d seen a few moving vans up in Spooking; however, they were always carting stuff away, come to think of it, leaving for sale signs permanently in their wake.

“How about whenever some old resident croaks, passes away, kicks the bucket—does a light ever go on in their house again? Or does it just stay black forevermore?”

Joy stared back silently.

“Precisely,” said Phipps, smiling. “To stay healthy, a town needs living, breathing people, not a bunch of rattling ghosts. Spooking is dying. We must get ready to bury it before its foul smell gets on the wind.”

Joy ground her teeth together, furious.

“Every child loves their hometown, of course. But the place you love doesn’t really exist anymore,” said Phipps. “I’m only trying to make things better. For you, your brother, and any other poor children still up there on that hideous hill. There’s no future in Spooking. One day, you won’t see the place the way you do now, as it once was. One day, you will see it for what it is.

“And unless someone does something about it now, when that day comes, you will be very, very unhappy.”

He grabbed his case and stood up, looking into the girl’s eyes, like two burning coals under her furrowed brow. He smiled, knowing exactly what she saw up on that hill.

After all, he’d once seen it too.

He turned with his case and left, bells tinkling.

T
he bus stop wasn’t supposed to be far, according to the directions Mrs. Wells had given them. Joy and Byron first crossed the endless plain of parking lot, dodging the convoys of harried parents bearing away their shrieking, sugar-fueled children. Then the simple instruction to “head over a block” turned out to mean trudging the length of an eighteen-hole golf course.

So it wasn’t like Joy’s patience was being tested—it was like she had already failed the exam and was rewriting it with a defective ballpoint pen that had to be shaken two hundred times before scratching out a single answer. And Byron’s trailing behind with his nose in his loot bag wasn’t helping.

“Come on, I don’t want to miss the next one!” she shouted back. But it was too late. They arrived just as the Number 6 pulled away, leaving them in a cloud of diesel fumes.

“Great!” declared Joy, not knowing if it would be dark by the time the next bus came. To make things more depressing, she could see Winsome Elementary rising above the homes in the distance.

“Hey, look, there’s our school,” said Byron cheerfully.

“Hurray,” said Joy spiritlessly. But it was interesting to see the school all dark, without the familiar bluish glow of strip-lighting. It was kind of like coming across some terrible slumbering beast—it was hard to imagine the menace of its waking.

“So what’s with that little weirdo from your class, with the bowl cut and the tie?” asked Joy.

“Oh, Morris,” replied Byron wearily, chewing on a stick of licorice. “He’s
gifted
. At least that’s what Mrs. Whipple says. But it’s not fair! He never has to do any work, just because she says he knows it all already!”

“Why don’t they just skip him a few grades or something?”

“I don’t know, I guess Mrs. Whipple doesn’t want him to. Probably because she gets Morris to teach the class whenever she gets a call, which is a lot.

“And if you don’t do exactly what he says when she’s out of the room, Mrs. Whipple gives you a detention! He even made the whole class join some dumb club of his last week, making us all sign some paper before we could go out for recess.”

“That sucks.” Joy was stunned. Poor Byron! She thought she had it hard in Miss Keener’s class. At least she didn’t have any boy geniuses to deal with. Far from it.

“SPOOKY, SPOOKY, SPOOKY!”

Just then, a mass of soggy leaves landed heavily on Joy’s head as Tyler went flying past on a bike, his snickering piggy-nosed cronies peddling their stumpy legs as fast as they could to keep up.

“She’s scaring the leaves right off the trees!” he shouted. They tore off down a side street, laughing.

Byron dropped his licorice, gawping at the stagnant mess clinging to his sister’s sunny blond hair as Joy stood there, stunned and silent. “Why didn’t you do something, Joy?” he asked.

“Like what?” snapped Joy. It wasn’t like she was Melody Huxley with a pair of silver-plated pistols or Dr. Ingram with a bottle of nitroglycerin. She was Joy Wells, harmless Spooky and figure of fun. Which was exactly why she’d wanted to stay out of stupid Darlington in the first place! Every step she took down here landed her in some new indignity. Couldn’t anyone understand that?

But did it matter what anyone thought of her—or threw at her? They were losers, the Darling kids, and Tyler was Captain Ultradrip—the crowning accomplishment of his life being his ability to roof a tennis ball from the schoolyard.

But that was what was so maddening, Joy realized. They were losers under the lifelong impression they were winners! And why not? Everyone told them so. Parents, teachers, and coaches, all lining up to congratulate them on their looks, their athleticism, and their basic literacy. And they kept producing more of them. It was as if there was some factory spewing them out—a bunch of self-satisfied little robots whose only spark of creativity manifested itself in imagining new cruelties to inflict on those unlike them.

Joy looked at her reflection in the bus shelter glass. She saw a young Madame Portia staring back, hair speckled with leaves, and felt like crying. To everyone else, she was the loser, and always would be.

“Here comes another bus,” muttered Byron, standing at the edge of the curb, unable to look at Joy as she picked through her hair. He turned his face away, letting the brisk wind spirit away a tear as the bus drew up.

Phipps pulled into a parking spot outside the bus station. That was the worst job yet, he thought angrily. And thanks to an electrostatic charge lurking in his jester tights, the hairs on his legs were now standing uncomfortably on end.

What a pathetic operation. A case of chicken pox would have been a more authentic medieval experience, and arguably more fun, he thought, getting out of the car. The only thing he could imagine that could redress his humiliation at having served such an establishment was its complete and utter destruction. He made a mental note: Have the Misty Mermaid undercut Kiddy Kingdom by 50 percent on function rooms, with free sea-sponge cake to every party of fifteen or more. It was just what the plywood castle was crying out for: an extended siege.

In the meantime, he could take comfort in the fact that he wouldn’t be asked back, having flatly refused to subject himself to “Pin the Tail on the Jester” like the usual stooge. There were limits. He had signed on as a wandering minstrel and that’s exactly what they got—even if that meant wandering off. If a few fat-faced parents didn’t like the fact that he wouldn’t juggle, breathe fire, or grovel at the feet of some spoiled little brat, that was just tough.

He should sell the lute, he thought, and all the other instruments while he was at it. He could get good money for them, and without any instruments he wouldn’t be tempted to do these degrading gigs. So what if he was thrown out on the street? He could always sleep in his car—or move back in above the old shop.

Because the way things were going, he was going to wind up playing the harp at a New Age restaurant before long.

I’ll hang myself with catgut first,
he told himself.

He couldn’t sell the instruments, he knew. He would just gamble the money away. Which would break his greatest rule: Don’t touch his legacy. The legacy was everything, and his father’s old instruments were the most valuable part, for now.

No, he had to hold on to them, along with the shop and its scrubby, windswept few acres. It was his future, if indeed he had one.

Phipps went inside the station and waited on the bubblegum stained platform. A bus pulled in, making a wide turn and coming to a hissing stop between a pair of diagonal painted lines. city express, it said.

Phipps watched as passengers got their belongings down from the luggage racks and began disembarking. First off were a pair of young women with shopping bags. Then a few business men, and a mother carrying a newborn baby. Then an old couple, holding hands, careful not to fall down the steep stairs.

Finally a man got off, the shredded plaid lining of his leather jacket hanging down in strips, carrying a day bag and a guitar case plastered with stickers and gaffer tape. He rubbed his eyes and squinted up at the sun before fishing out a pair of sunglasses. Cheap plastic ones, Phipps noticed, that likely offered less UV protection than pressing a couple of beer bottles to your face. But what did it matter, when their owner had already fried every other major organ in his body.

“Vince,” said Phipps, stepping forward.

“Octo! How’s it going, man? Long time no see!” The man held out a tattooed hand.

“Too long.”

They shook hands.

“Nice watch,” said Vince. “And check out the threads,” he added, looking up and down at Phipps’s dark, pinstriped suit.

“What can I say? It comes with the territory.”

“Well, it’s quite the look you got going,” replied Vince. “You must be doing all right, huh?”

“How was your trip?” asked Phipps, ignoring the question as they left the station.

“It sucked of course—I wouldn’t exactly call that a tour bus, man. But I’m glad to get out of the big city for a bit. The chicks and the partying—it gets tiring, man.”

“Well, you should find Darlington mercifully free of partying chicks,” replied Phipps.

“So this is your hometown?” asked Vince incredulously. “I wouldn’t have pictured you coming from somewhere so…regular.”

“It’s not exactly my hometown,” replied Phipps. “I grew up nearby, somewhere not quite so regular. They’d only just begun building this city then.”

“Oh,” said Vince, who didn’t appear to be listening, but was instead looking at Phipps again. “Man, I can’t get over you.” He laughed, a little sneer creeping into his smile. “Next time you need me to play a gig, make sure to send a limousine, all right?”

Phipps was bemused. Play a gig?

Ah, that explains the guitar, thought Phipps—the clueless scumball thinks he’s here to play a show. Phipps chuckled inwardly at the idea of it. After all these years, Vince still had no clue just how unremarkable a musician he was. And in the ego-driven fraternity of electric guitarists, Vince was the ultimate bottom-feeder—a bar-chord bozo. His solos—on the rare occasions he worked up the nerve to attempt one—sounded like a yowling cat at best.

Yet here he was, mocking Phipps with a curled lip.
Look at you in your suit—you sold out
. How predictable. Because for all his ripped jeans and eat-the-rich attitude, there was no bigger snob than Vince.

Phipps recalled his own years of living in a state of perpetual disgruntlement. He imagined himself in a safety-pinned T-shirt, his head a fleshy pincushion, his spiked hair the color of an eggplant. What a waste of time. But then again, it wasn’t really his fault, growing up in such a backward community—a factory, pretty much, for spewing forth misfits and oddballs. Luckily, he had finally seen the error of his ways.

Now, thankfully, punk rock was dead—it was just a shame no one had told Vince, a middle-aged man with his jeans rolled up over his combat boots.
We only let you in the band because you had a van, dirtbag. And even that didn’t get us anywhere.
“So what’s the gig, Octo?” asked Vince. “Oh, and any possibility of getting something up front? I need cash bad.”

“Yeah, bad news, man,” said Phipps, slipping back into old manners of speech. “The show’s been canceled—the vocalist got thrown in jail.”

It sounded believable for something made up on the spot. Which reminded Phipps of another of Vince’s musical failings: He couldn’t improvise his way out of a paper bag.

“Huh? So I just spent eight hours on a bus for nothing?”

Vince sounded more like a little disappointed boy than an irritable lowlife whose leisure time was being wasted, Phipps thought contemptuously. “But wait, there’s good news.” He clapped a hand on Vince’s shoulder. “I’ve got a little job to make up for it. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not like real work or anything. And it pays a lot better.”

Vince made a face like he was chewing tinfoil. Phipps had to sweeten the deal quick or be left in the bus station huffing the fumes of a departing bus.

“With half the money up front,” Phipps added.

Vince’s face relaxed. It was his favorite tune—one of the few you could always count on him to play along to.

“So where’d the singer go?” asked Vince as they headed out of the station.

“Huh?”

“The vocalist—where’d he get locked up?”

“Oh. Anderson, I think,” answered Phipps, hoping he wouldn’t have to provide a name. The secret to lying effectively was to never give too many details.

“Anderson,” scoffed Vince. “That prison’s practically a country club! Pilton is where they send the real deal—if he was in there, I could’ve put in a good word for him.”

“I wouldn’t have bothered,” replied Phipps, adding: “He wasn’t that great anyway. Once someone like that outlives their usefulness, I couldn’t care less.”

It was another secret of lying: drawing from the truth as often as possible.

Vince nodded knowingly. “Whoa, nice muscle car, Octo!”

Phipps bowed theatrically as he opened the door for him. Vince tossed his stuff in back and climbed in as Phipps made the long journey around the hood to the driver’s side. Getting in, he glanced at the familiar tattoo on Vince’s forearm: an ace of spades with “Live Hard” in blurry scrollwork underneath.

Phipps turned the key and the engine started up with a roar.

“Killer car!” said Vince as they pulled away.