Miraculous: Tales of the Unknown (2 page)

Her only response was a
thumb up. I took that as an okay sign.

Back downstairs I was
happy to see that Malcolm still had the TV at a decent volume, but
Priscilla was down there with him and both were covered with gooey
sticky licorice. There was read sticky residue from their hands
smeared on the couch, and after stuffing a particularly long piece
into his mouth, Malcolm had thrown up red stained vomit on the
floor… and hadn’t bothered to clean it up.

“That’s disgusting,” I
told him.

“Oh well,” he told
me.

I could have strangled
him. Instead I grabbed the carpet cleaner and the scrub brush where
they were lying by the first red stain, which I now assessed, was
probably more licorice induced vomit, and handed them to
Malcolm.

“What am I supposed to do
with this?” He asked.

“Clean up your mess,” I
told him, “or you can skip dinner.”

He cried, he complained,
and he told me his stomach hurt too much to clean. I stuck to my
threat and eventually he got down on his knees and started to
scrub. That was when my cell phone rang again. It was my
mom.

“I can’t believe you
signed me up for this,” I told her in way of a greeting.

She started laughing, “It
can’t be that bad.”

So I told her everything
that had happened so far. “Wow, I guess it has been a little more
than I expected.”

I groaned. I was going
through the cabinets and there was nothing to eat. “I guess you’re
lucky because you only had me to deal with. I couldn’t imagine
having three awful children.”

“You weren’t always so
easy,” she told me again laughing. “When you were about four I
hired a specialist to work with you. It was amazing. Literally
overnight you were a different child.”

For some reason her
statement gave me goose bumps. “I don’t remember that.”

“Well you were still young
honey.”

I strained my brain, but
nothing was there. No memory of working with someone at all.
“Still, I have absolutely no memory of that.” Then I brushed it
off, “maybe I should give Mrs. Anderson that same
advice.”

“I think I still have the
company’s name that I used. I’ll text it to you and you can pass on
the information. Be polite though Shaina, some people don’t like to
be told they have awful kids.”

“I know mom,” I told her
before hanging up.

A few seconds later and my
phone lit up with her text message.

CHANGED –
555-784-6589

I smiled and decided that
this was just what poor Mrs. Anderson needed. Then I jumped when
there was a knock on the kitchen window. With my heart racing, I
peered out through the blinds and… nothing. There was nothing
there. Frowning, I started rummaging through the cabinets again
until there was another knock, this time louder than the
first.

There was a door leading
out to their back porch from the kitchen and I hurried over to it
before I could chicken out. My heart was pounding, adrenaline was
pumping through my veins, and I held my breath in fear. I pulled
the blinds to the side and pressed my face against the cool glass.
It was too dark to be sure, but I was almost positive that there
was nothing out there, but again as soon as I turned away, the
knock came again.

Several options ran
through my mind then. Did I call the police? Did I grab the kids
and make them stay with me in case there was an intruder? Did I
call the Andersons? Then I shook my head and laughed at myself. If
there was an intruder, they wouldn’t be knocking, and it wasn’t
like I believed in things that went bump in the night… so pretty
much I was just freaking myself out over nothing.

Strengthening my resolve,
I flipped the switch for the back porch light and unlocked the
door. Then, still trying to be brave, I opened the door and stepped
out onto the porch. It was cold without my jacket on and I hugged
my arms around myself to try and warm up.

“Hello?” I called
tentatively. “Is anyone out here?”

Then a thought occurred to
me. “Malcolm? This isn’t funny. If you’re trying to scare me, it’s
not working!”

Arms circled around me
from behind and a hand came across my mouth to stifle my scream.
“Who’s Malcolm?”

I elbowed him in the
stomach and spun around to face him when the force of my attack
loosened his arms. “Ugh! That wasn’t funny Ben!”

He was laughing even
though he was doubled over from the impact of my elbow. “If you saw
your face you’d think it was hilarious!”

There were two pizza boxes
and a six pack of soda balancing on one of the deck rails.
“Jerk.”

He pulled me toward him
and tried to kiss me but I turned my face away. “Aw come on Shaina,
you know you love me.”

I started laughing despite
myself, “I love that you brought pizza, that’s about
it.”

He moved forward for a
quick kiss and then we hurried inside when I started shivering. “So
where are the kids?”

He hopped up onto the
counter while I pulled plates out of the cabinets and started
filling them with pizza. “Malcolm and Priscilla were watching TV
and Tessa was in her room.” Without even asking me first, he opened
the kitchen door and screamed for them to come and eat. “Why did
you do that?” I hissed. “You aren’t supposed to be
here.”

He smiled, “kids love me.
They won’t say anything.”

I rolled my eyes. Yeah
right, I thought.

A few seconds later, three
kids slammed through the kitchen door. “Who is that?” Priscilla
asked. “He’s cute,” Tessa whispered. “You aren’t supposed to have
boys over,” Malcolm told me.

“Told you,” I said to
Ben.

He held out a plate of
pizza to Malcolm, “come on bro, I brought you some
pizza.”

Malcolm took the pizza
from him, but gave him a dirty look, “you aren’t supposed to be
here though.”

A few minutes later and
the kitchen was destroyed. Priscilla thought it would be funny to
throw her pizza at her brother who then threw his back at her. The
end result was one crying child, one laughing child, and walls
covered with red pasta sauce and strings of mozzarella cheese. I
looked at the clock. It was almost nine.
I
can do this… I can do this… I can do this… I can do anything for
four hours.

After screaming at the
kids to get out of the kitchen, I sunk into a chair and rested my
head on my hands while my eyes surveyed the damage. I had only been
there for two hours and I had cleaned more here than I usually had
to all month at my own house.

“Wow, you weren’t kidding,
those kids are awful.”

I sighed, “I know. I feel
so bad for their parents. My mom gave me some information about a
company that works with bad children, but I almost feel guilty
telling their parents about it. I don’t want to offend
them.”

“That’s weird. What’s the
name of the company?”

I pulled out my cell phone
and looked at the text again, “Changed.”

There was a computer
sitting on the counter and he walked over to it. “Let’s Google
it.”

He typed, Changed located
in Denver Colorado into the search bar and we waited while it
loaded the results. There were about twenty different
possibilities, but after reading the summary description of each
one on the search page, we decided to try one about halfway down
the second page.

“Wow, this is awesome!” He
exclaimed when the pictures came up, “they all look like wax copies
of themselves.”

There were a series of
before and after photos on the main page. In each one of the before
photos, there was a messy and emotional child, and all of the after
ones showed a well behaved, well dressed, smiling version of
themselves. It was actually almost creepy.

“Look there’s a place to
put your information so that someone will contact you. Why don’t we
fill this out for the Anderson’s? That way they won’t know that it
was you who referred them to the company.”

An uncomfortable tingling
sensation had begun to buzz in my head, but I pushed the feeling
aside and took control of the keyboard. Almost as if my hands were
more excited than the rest of me, they began flying over the keys
and filling in the information. When I was done, I almost felt
guilty, but then I looked around the kitchen and that guilt just
dissolved right out of me. Then the doorbell rang.

Ben and I both looked at
each other and then the computer screen. He started laughing first.
“That’s weird.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ll be
right back.”

Despite the fact that
there was no possible way that it could be the Changed people at
the door, I couldn’t stop my heartbeat from accelerating as I
walked to the door. There was something tickling the back of my
brain, some unrecalled memory just begging to be remembered, but
every time I tried to grasp on to it, it slipped away
again.

Tessa and Malcolm were
fighting by the door when I got there; both of them screaming and
taking swings at each other. Tessa was older and stronger, but
Malcolm was smaller and faster so the fight wasn’t really going
anywhere, but the screaming was becoming loud enough to wake the
neighbors.

“What the heck is going on
out here?”

Immediately they both
turned toward me and began yelling.

“Malcolm isn’t supposed to
be answering the door,” Tessa screamed.

“Tessa is a big fat meanie
head!” Malcolm screamed back.

I pointed to the stairs.
“Both of you go to your rooms right now!”

After they both stomped up
the stairs, I turned back to the door and opened it. Standing on
the stoop with a smile on her face was the shortest and strangest
woman I had ever seen. Her hair was brown but there was a strange
texture to it that sort of reminded me of tree bark. Her eyes were
moss green and she smelled sort of like fertilizer. I had to stop
breathing through my nose to ensure I didn’t gag.

She held out her hand for
me to shake and I had to bend down to reach it. “Hello dear. My
name is Acadia Brown. I am here on behalf of the Changed group. Is
now a good time to talk?”

This had to be a joke.
There was no way that this could possibly be happening. I looked
past her, half expecting my mom or Ben to be standing off to the
side laughing at the stunned expression that I was sure was on my
face… only they weren’t.

“I’m sorry; who did you
say sent you again?” Maybe I wasn’t the only one who had referred
this company to the Andersons.

“Why you did, dear. We
always respond quickly when it’s for one of our own.”

That tingling sensation
started working its way back up my back. “I think you have the
wrong person.”

Just then, Priscilla came
running up from behind me and kicked me so hard in the back of the
leg that it buckled and I fell against the door.

“You can’t tell us what to
do! You’re just the babysitter!”

The lady, Acadia Brown,
smiled even bigger. “Oh no dear, I am exactly where I need to be.
If I can just come in for a moment, we can get this all sorted
out.”

“No, really, thank you but
there must be some mistake.”

I closed the door and then
backed away from it shaking. This was beyond strange. Something
wasn’t right and I was beginning to feel sick to my stomach from
the stress of what I had set into motion. Who were these people and
what had I done by giving them the Anderson’s information? How
could my mom have possibly used a service like this on me? It had
to be a different company.

We always respond quickly
when it’s for one of our own…

No. No way. I pulled my
cell phone out of my pocket and dialed my mom’s number.
“Hello?”

“Mom, do you remember
anything else about the company you told me about? I just want to
make sure I give Mrs. Anderson the right information,” I
lied.

“Shaina? Is it really that
big of a deal?”

“Yes!!!” I practically
shouted at her.

“Wow, calm down. It can’t
be that bad.” I heard her sigh “I don’t remember a lot, just that
the lady I worked with had a strange name.”

A strange name. I tried
not to panic. There were lots of strange names in the world.
“Anything else?”

“I remember that she was
tall and I think she had blond hair.”

I let out the breath I had
been holding and started walking back toward the kitchen where I
had left Ben. “Thanks mom. I just wanted to make sure that I had
the right place.”

“Okay honey, just calm
down. It’s almost over.”

“Okay, I guess that I’ll
talk to you later.”

“Oh wait, Shaina? I think
her name was Acadia. Acadia Brown. Call me if you need anything
else.”

The phone went dead at the
exact time that the lights went out.

“Ben? Tessa? Malcolm?
Priscilla?” I called. No one answered.

There was a flashlight
application on my phone and I tried to access it with my hands
shaking. I ended up fumbling a few times and almost dropped my
phone in the process. Then I remembered that it was dead. I headed
toward the kitchen in the dark. If there was something going on,
something strange and creepy, I wanted Ben beside me.