How to Curse in Hieroglyphics, Page 2

  He got maybe seven whole steps before Cheryl leaped from the top of the Dumpster. Cheryl aspired to a career as a movie stunt double when she grew up, but her technique still needed a bit of work. She missed Artie on the first attempt and instead tumbled head over heels in an awkward shoulder roll. She sprang to her feet in time to tackle him to the ground in front of the gas pumps.

  “Wait!” Artie—or, in this case, Count Arthur Von Bartleburg—screeched, his eyes growing big behind his crooked specs. “This isn’t right! You vampire-hunted me last week,” he said. “This week oughta be nuthin’ but werewolves for you two. That means I’m off the hook! Go bug Gordon.”

  Gordon was the overweight watchdog down at the town junkyard. The tubby old hound had been standing in, in lieu of any real werewolves, in much the same way that Mrs. Kraveling’s laundry on the line often played the parts of Doomed Spirits wandering the Earth (alternating every third week of the month with the toads—er, Spawn of Swamp Monsters—down at the abandoned quarry pond). Artie had pulled vampire duty early on in life; ever since grade three—before he’d lost the majority of his baby teeth—he’d nurtured quite a reputation as a biter and had therefore been the obvious choice.

  “Tweed?” Cheryl called.

  Tweed got a serious look on her face, eyebrows knitting under the blunt fringe of her dark hair. “Hang on,” she muttered. “I’ll check the calendar …” She jumped up into the back of the truck to retrieve a thick, leather-bound appointment journal covered with sticky-notes and neatly scribbled reminders. After paging through the dates, she sighed.

  “Let him up, partner,” she said, disappointment heavy in her voice. “He’s right. It’s a full moon tomorrow night.”

  Which—of course—meant that if there was any monster hunting to be done, it would have to be strictly of the werewolf variety, according to the rules. And rules were rules.

  Gordon would be so pleased.

  Reluctantly, Cheryl stood up and wandered back to the truck. It proved to be good timing because, just at that moment, Pops Pendleton came bustling out of the general store laden with more shopping bags. Pops did not approve of roughhousing.

  “All righty there, girls—oh, why hello, Artie.” Pops glanced down as he walked past. “What’re ya doin’ on the ground?”

  Artie clambered to his feet. “I—”

  “Case of mistaken monstrosity, Pops,” Cheryl interjected, shooting a death-glare at Artie. “All sorted up.”

  Pops just shrugged and continued toward the truck, and Cheryl jumped into the truck’s cargo bed to join Tweed. Pops heaved the shopping bags into the truck and Cheryl plucked a four-pack of bathroom tissue out of one. She tossed the pack lightly in the air and caught it again, her stare back at Artie never wavering.

  “Tell me, Tweed,” she said. “When, exactly, are we scheduled for mummy week?”

  2

  STRANGE INVADERS

  The old blue pickup rumbled away from the gas pumps, kicking up a cloud of dust as Pops turned onto Rural Route #1, which would take them back home to the drive-in.

  Crouched in the truck bed as they rumbled down the road, the girls kept an eye on the store-bought provisions, making sure nothing blew away on the hot, dry wind, and pored over their appointment book, making plans for the coming week. Besides monster hunting, the girls could mostly be found engaged in marketing schemes for their primary business endeavour: babysitting.

  It was a competitive field; there were only so many tots available to sit in Wiggins and many a sitter to choose from. Cindy Tyson, for one. Hazel Polizzi, for another. Rivals in the babysitting trade, Cindy and Hazel had already turned thirteen.

  And, apparently, “thirteen” was some kind of magic number. As soon as the twins’ sitter competition hit that mystical age, their number of gigs skyrocketed. Even though everyone in Wiggins (silently) acknowledged the (vast) superiority of the twins’ sitting abilities over those of their (slightly) older competitors, all of a sudden, Cheryl and Tweed’s regular sitting gigs had started to dry up. It had to be the age-bias thing. The girls could think of no other reason.

  Nevertheless, they remained undaunted. Just that week past, Cheryl and Tweed had made a trip into town on their bikes and gone to Wiggins’s only copy shop, where they had printed up glossy, four-colour mailbox flyers detailing their supersitter services. They had also had business cards done up that read:

  Cheryl & Tweed’s

  Expertitious Child-minding Services

  (and Auto-vehicular Detailing)

  While - O - Wait

  It was supposed to read “While-U-Wait.” Neither of the girls knew how the typo had crept in there, but it had kind of grown on them and become a slogan of sorts. They thought about making up another series of cards for their sideline business: imaginary monster mashing. Maybe with a variety of appropriate catch-phrases:

  Vampires Staked! While-O-Wait!

  Sea Hags De-hagged! While-O-Wait!

  Bye-bye Bigfoots! While-O-Wait! (The girls had debated at length whether it should read Bigfoots or Big feet. They’d decided to go with the former.)

  And so on.

  Babysitting, car repair, monster busting—Cheryl and Tweed could multi-task with the best of them. The babysitting was self-taught. Car repair they’d learned from their grandfather, Pops, and the movies had taught them monster busting. Some of the townsfolk might have thought the girls were weird but, well, in a place like Wiggins Cross, where everything was so excruciatingly, unrelentingly, overwhelmingly ordinary, “weird” seemed to be the only thing that felt normal.

  “Weird …” Tweed muttered suddenly as the pickup rolled to a stop at one of Wiggins’s only stop signs.

  “What’s weird?” Cheryl asked, poring over the appointment pages in the calendar diary, which were chock full of monster-hunting engagements but, sadly, mostly empty of sitter bookings.

  “There seems to be a dust cloud following us.” Tweed pointed down the road behind them.

  Cheryl glanced up and, sure enough, a yellowish haze billowed up over the horizon, where the road crested a low hill. The girls had ample time to wonder what was coming as Pops looked left and right to make sure there was no oncoming traffic, even though the flat country road stretching out on both sides to the horizon was clearly deserted. Pops was a cautious driver.

  The traffic stop was long enough to allow the dust cloud—and the cause of the dust cloud—to catch up with the old blue pickup. Suddenly, a row of mailboxes bolted to a wooden rail at the side of the road started to quiver … then shudder … Before the girls knew it, the boxes were rattling crazily, the red flag arms waving wildly. The truck bed beneath Cheryl and Tweed felt as if it was trying to buck them off into space, and the air filled with the sounds of strange, tinny music …

  And then the caravan came over the rise.

  The rumble was deafening, the dust cloud choking, as a parade of vehicles went thundering past on the left, ignoring the stop sign, and leaving the two girls covering their faces in the storm of road grit it kicked up. In the lead was an old army truck draped with brightly decorated canvas banners and festooned with battered loudspeakers blaring distorted merry-go-round tunes. There were crudely painted images of all sorts of oddities and strange creatures—reptiles and zebras and something that looked like a two-headed duck, pictures of girls in feathered headdresses and men in top hats and tails. And above it all, a big, colourful banner proclaiming:

  Three long flatbed trucks followed close behind the lead truck. On the first, there was an enormous cannon, painted in shades of Day-Glo orange and yellow and red, with bursts of flame at its base and the words “THE AMAZIN’ HUMAN CANNONBALL!!” painted on its side. The second and third flatbeds were loaded with precariously tied-down carnival rides—a Ferris wheel, a Super-Swinger and a Zipper, the Polar Express, a carousel—their disassembled parts resembling the exoskeletons of giant insects from an old stop-motion creature feature.

  Following behind the ride transports came a coup
le of trucks with wooden-slat compartments that wafted livestock-stinky winds and bits of hay in their wake. There was another flatbed packed with wood-and-canvas stalls for carnival games—Whack-A-Mole and Shooting Gallery and Go Fish—and food concessions, and still another was loaded with heaps of heavy, striped canvas, probably for the carnival’s tents.

  Next came two extra-large panel trucks, with the words “MYSTERIES,” “ARCANE” and “EXOTIC” painted on the sides, along with images of shrunken heads and petrified dinosaur remains and mystical objects like crystal balls and voodoo dolls. All waiting to be discovered in the carnival’s Main Attraction, as presented by Colonel Winchester P. Q. Dudley, himself! Whoever that was …

  “What in the heck …?” Tweed’s jaw fell open, which caused her to start coughing instantly when she sucked in a cloud of road dust.

  Cheryl was just speechless. For a moment. Then …

  “‘World-O-Wonders’?” she exclaimed, outraged. “Who does this Dudley dude think he is, stealing our W-O-W slogan! That’s the kind of thing that causes brand confusion!”

  She leaped to her feet in the truck bed, sputtering and fuming over the (vague) similarity in catch-phrases. Tweed wisely let her cousin rant, not bothering to point out that there was probably no reasonable way the carnival could have had foreknowledge of the girls’ business ventures, let alone their typo-slogan. The whole carnival thing made her instantly uneasy, too—although for reasons she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Tweed was, after all, fond of things macabre and strange and spooky, in the spirit of the gothly tradition to which she aspired. But there was just something about the pictures on the truck that made her pale skin crawl.

  Especially the centre panel of the display on the last truck. It showed a garish sarcophagus, the lid of which looked to be slowly creaking open, nudged by a bandage-wrapped hand. The title under the picture read:

  “What the heck is a Za-ha … Fa-za … whatever that says?” Cheryl asked, pausing in her rant to glare at the unfamiliar words as the trucks rolled past.

  The last vehicle in the whole crazy train was a somewhat worse-for-wear old touring sedan with the top down. In the back seat sat a man in a uniform draped with all kinds of gold braid and garish medals, flanked by two bored-looking, overly made-up girls in sequined costumes. When they saw Cheryl and Tweed standing in the bed of the old blue pickup, they smiled sudden, toothy smiles and waved, tossing bright pink and yellow flyers at them. They fluttered and flapped through the air like oversized confetti.

  Tweed caught one as it drifted past.

  “Princess,” she said.

  “What’d you call me?” Cheryl stared at her narrowly.

  “Zahara-Safiya is an Egyptian princess.”

  “Why would royalty be travelling around with those bozos?” Cheryl snorted.

  “Sorry. I meant was an Egyptian princess.”

  Tweed handed her cousin the flyer. There were several cartoonish pictures of curiosities included in the exhibit, but the main graphic was devoted to a grainy photo of an Egyptian sarcophagus, surrounded by words like “BIZARRE” and “TRAGIC” and “TERRIFYING FATE.”

  “I guess now she’s just a poor old bag of bones rattling around a foreign country thousands of years after her death for the amusement of gawkers. A curiosity,” Tweed murmured, gazing off down the road in the direction the caravan had gone, the shadow of a frown on her brow. “A freak show.”

  Cheryl felt a shiver crawl up her spine, in spite of the sun beating down. The words and images on the paper in her hand seemed to shimmer like a mirage and she felt a queasy sensation wash over her. “Carnival,” she said, crumpling the paper and shoving it in her back pocket. “Pff. Those things went outta style with the invention of the mighty motion picture. It’ll never catch on around here.”

  3

  THE THING WITH TWO HEADS

  The pickup truck chugged to a stop in front of the cavernous red barn that stood beside the white farmhouse, in a field that was surrounded on one side by the double screens of the Starlight Paradise and on the other by a defunct “Putt Around The World” mini-golf course. Pops had been working hard on fixing up the ramshackle, kitschy attraction for the last few years, with an eye to reopening it to the public later that summer. Putt-putting as a pastime was about due for a return to popular culture, he was fond of saying. The twins were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, so long as it didn’t interfere with the operation of their beloved drive-in.

  As for the farm, it had been there longer than either the drive-in or the golf course, although it no longer functioned as an actual farm. Instead, Pops and the girls lived in the house, and the big old barn served as a garage, workshop and—up in the hayloft—headquarters for C+T Enterprises.

  Pops climbed out of the truck cab, whistling offkey as the girls handed him down the shopping bags. In the kitchen, putting away the groceries, talk turned—as usual—to movies, and what features the drive-in would be showing in the upcoming week.

  “Alien Abduction Extravaganza!” Cheryl and Tweed suggested in unison, when asked for their opinions on a theme. That one, of course, was a particular favourite, considering their family history … and their theories.

  “I don’t know,” Pops mused. “This week I was fixin’ to schedule a two-screen Gore ‘n’ More Horror Blowout … but you girls might be right. I haven’t done space pictures in a while now, have I? You know … it gets so darned hard for me to keep track these days.”

  The girls exchanged glances and Tweed shrugged one black-clad shoulder at her cousin. Neither of them knew what he was talking about. Pops’s schedule ran like clockwork, and he had an excellent memory. The twins were immediately suspicious that something was up.

  “Cheryl … Tumbleweed …” Pops paused, tossing a can of Niblets corn from hand to hand. “I’ve been thinking …”

  “Howzat?” Cheryl asked cautiously as she emptied another bag onto the counter, surreptitiously looking for the box of ice cream drumsticks Pops always bought as a treat.

  “Well, summer vacation started barely a week ago and you both already seem like you’re at sixes and sevens,” Pops said. “I know you got your sittin’ services but I thought, clever young ladies that you are, maybe you could handle a second line of gainful employ.”

  “A second line of what now?” Tweed blinked, not quite translating Pops’s old-timey jargon.

  “Work,” Pops explained. “Real jobs. Not just sittin’ jobs.”

  “We’re twelve,” Cheryl said, suddenly envisioning dishwashing shifts in the kitchen of the Crossroads Diner or days spent toiling as a junior mailroom clerk in Wiggins’s only office tower (only six storeys tall but, for Wiggins, that practically blotted out the sun). She wondered, for a panicky instant, if this new development would derail her future stunt-double career plans.

  Tweed, on the other hand, panicked about the possibility of having to wear a hairnet or some kind of paper server’s hat. That would have seriously compromised her gothly stylings.

  But Pops put up a hand. “I know you’re twelve,” he continued, seeming to struggle to find a delicate way to put into words what he had to say. “And I also know that you’ve been running a bit scarce in the babysitting trade lately and you think that’s because of your age. And it might well be. But … maybe it’s something more than just the age factor. Maybe it might have a little more to do with your … well, your extreme fondness for the movies. For make-believe. I blame myself, really—”

  “You think we’re freaks!” Tweed gasped, her pale complexion gone even paler.

  “Weirdos!” Cheryl blurted.

  “Of course I don’t!” Pops said. “I just think the regular Wiggins folk don’t necessarily understand your quirks. But I happen to think those quirks make you perfect candidates for a different kind of job.” Pops sighed gustily and shook his head. “Look. Cheryl, Tweed … I know your fun and games is just that. Fun and games. Although Artie might disagree with me somewhat on the ‘fun’ part,�
� he chided them gently.

  The girls exchanged a guilty glance.

  Pops sighed and plucked off his baseball cap, running a hand through his hair. Then he tugged the cap back on and continued, choosing his words carefully. “All I’m saying is … maybe it’s time to, well, grow up a little bit. Not too much, now!” He held up a hand to forestall any outrage or disappointment (or tears), but none of that seemed forthcoming. Instead the girls just stood there, side by side, staring at him.

  Pops cleared his throat. “At any rate … what I was going to suggest was—just until your sitter biz rebounds a bit—that you girls do a little part-time work around the drive-in for me, and, in return, I’ll pay you a modest but fair wage. What do you say?”

  “What kind of work?” Tweed asked.

  “Well … I thought you girls might help out with programming.”

  Their reaction was immediate, and Pops concealed a smile behind his hand at the jubilant squeals and jumping around that ensued.

  “As I said, you certainly do have the expertise. And the enthusiasm. And, you know what they say … two heads are better than one! If I can leave that responsibility with you two, it’ll free up some of my time to work on the mini-golf range. With that carnival rolling into town, we’re gonna have some competition for folks’ entertainment dollars.”

  The girls instantly scoffed at that notion, but they were too excited about the prospect of programming to argue the point with Pops.

  “Look here,” Pops offered. “Why don’t I leave this weekend’s triple-bill selection up to you two. A kind of trial run. What do you say?”