A Small Zombie Problem Read online

  His nose and mouth were, by comparison, quite small. Someone observing him might be reminded of a baby owl.

  But perhaps most astounding of all, and the thing that had provoked such astonishment in his small audience, was the cloud of twenty-odd butterflies that were fluttering in contented circles around August’s owlish head.

  August was, in short, petrified.

  He had never spoken to a person other than his aunt Hydrangea, never mind been thrust face to face with three strangers. He remained frozen for a millisecond, then turned to flee.

  “Wait!” called a young voice, not unkindly. “We won’t hurt you. Promise!”

  August’s instinct would have propelled him on, but something powerful and important stopped him in his tracks. Hands clammy with fear, he slowly turned to face his spectators.

  “I told you it would work!” exclaimed the ginger-haired delivery boy. “I told you there was a ghost at Locust Hole. I told you he’d come out to fetch that box. No one who eats that many Mudd Pies is going to just leave them sitting in a puddle!”

  “Well, you finally flushed him out,” admitted the lanky youth who brought up the rear. Heavy-lidded eyes and an unsmiling mouth lent his long face a sleepy yet solemn expression. “It took long enough; this is our third attempt. I was beginning to think you were plain crazy.”

  “I said I’d seen him up at that roof window,” said the redhead, grinning triumphantly, “lurking in the attic, like ghosts do. Everyone in town says there’s a ghost boy at Locust Hole. And I got him!”

  “Gaston! Langley!” said the third stranger forcefully. This boy had far-apart eyes of brown, very dark, but translucent like breakfast tea. In striking contrast, he had light hair, the color of honey. A curious fitted garment that buttoned to one side covered his entire torso. It looked like it might be padded and designed for some sort of sporting activity.

  “How many ghosts,” he asked, “do you know that eat Mudd Pies?” The delivery boy folded his arms and pouted a bit. The tall boy bobbed his head from side to side, acknowledging the reasonableness of the question.

  “Are you a ghost,” said the blond boy directly to August, “or not?” He gave a devilish yet good-natured smile.

  Throughout their exchange, the three strangers had not taken their eyes off August, and still they stared, waiting eagerly to hear him speak.

  “I’m just a human being,” said August in a small, hoarse voice he hardly recognized, “like you.”

  “Then how,” asked the tall one accusingly, pushing back his dapper brimmed hat with one finger and waving another generally in August’s direction, “do you explain the bugs?”

  August shifted uncomfortably, scratched his upper arm, and swatted a butterfly away from his face.

  “Um…so I have this rare condition. I guess,” he said.

  “Speak up!” said the delivery boy, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Can’t hear you.”

  Remember that August had spent his whole life until now in the dusty quiet of his aunt’s company. He had never been required to raise his voice in order to be heard.

  “Rare condition,” repeated August, his voice catching as he consciously turned up the volume. “My skin emits this scent that attracts butterflies. I mean, you and I can’t smell it. No one can. Except butterflies. It’s supposed to be kind of like flower nectar. The butterflies really like it. They don’t bother me, though; it seems to make them sort of sleepy.”

  This announcement met with a stunned silence. The boys at the gate had clearly little experience with such unexpected conversations. Still no one spoke, and August sensed that things had gotten a little awkward, so he plunged in again.

  “My case,” he explained, “is particularly unfortunate. My aunt Hydrangea, she’s who takes care of me, she suffers mightily from a phobia of butterflies. Can’t abide them. She won’t even venture outside because she fears them so. She doesn’t let me go outside either because, well…” He waved his hand vaguely at the throng of insects around him and shrugged.

  The honey-haired boy, the one with some air of authority, was the first to gather his senses after August’s extraordinary revelation.

  “What’s your name?” he said to August gently.

  August smiled shyly and opened his mouth to speak, but he didn’t have to.

  “August!” shrilled a hysterical voice from inside the house. “AUGUST! There is an intruder within. Oh, save me, August! SAVE ME!”

  August rifled through his old desk’s many cubbies and drawers, all stuffed with the kind of household junk that accumulates, gathering dust for decades: yellowing bills and invoices, tarnished sports medals, rusted hatpins, and solitary playing cards.

  “I’m certain I saw…,” he mumbled. “Aha! Here it is.” August withdrew a plastic net bag containing a collection of random marbles and, opening it, withdrew the largest.

  It was a beauty, the size of an apricot. The vivid amber glass with a swirl of jet-black at its center reminded August of an alligator’s eye. Marbles this enormous, he knew, were sometimes referred to as “toe breakers,” for the damage they might cause if carelessly dropped on one’s foot.

  Before him, August placed a rigid, vertical wire, with a large coil at bottom to serve as a stand. Using mounting glue, he adhered the huge marble to a smaller loop at the top of the wire.

  The wire stand was twisted and painted brown to resemble a string. In reality, it supported the heavy glass marble, but it appeared to dangle from it, the end trailing on the ground.

  To support the illusion of weightlessness and flight, August had added a boy-sized skeleton with unusually large, round eyes. A tiny paper butterfly perched upon its head. The skeleton boy’s fist tightly gripped the “string,” and his feet were inches above the tabletop. The model was clearly designed to suggest the boy was being carried off by an orange balloon, to some unknown place and adventure—a party perhaps.

  August sat back to admire his creation and the light refracting through the amber marble. It was his best model to date, surpassing even the clown Kevin in detail and beauty. Lately, you see, he had had plenty of spare time to work on it.

  One solitary butterfly, the “intruder within,” had revealed to Hydrangea that the front door had been opened, and worse, that her nephew was…outside! She had discovered him bounding up the porch steps, trailed by a flurry of airborne monsters.

  The woman had promptly declared herself “unraveled as a porcupine’s sweater!” and withdrawn (with the front-door key) to her bedroom, where she had spent two days weeping and torturing lace handkerchiefs. All homeschooling had been suspended, and other than frequently preparing trays of fortified tea, August had been left to his own devices.

  Given the fragility of Hydrangea’s condition, August had decided it best to keep the encounter with the boys at the gate to himself. It would be easier on his aunt’s nerves, he thought, to process one out-of-the-ordinary occurrence at a time.

  But Hydrangea’s recuperation was about to be roughly terminated.

  A sudden, jarring, metallic jingle resounded throughout the hollow spaces of Locust Hole, causing August to jump violently. He rushed to the staircase landing, from where he could see the hallway below. Hydrangea stumbled from her room, disheveled, wild-eyed, and ashen.

  “What is that sound?” hissed August.

  “Why…I,” stammered Hydrangea, flustered and confused, “I believe it’s the doorbell!”

  The planks were removed. The key was turned. The door was opened, just a crack. Hydrangea stooped to regard Locust Hole’s first visitor in August’s memory.

  “Mr. LaPoste?” Hydrangea’s voice contained more surprise than alarm, which, in turn, thoroughly surprised August. The door opened fully.

  “Miz Hydrangea?” said a man’s voice, and August saw a face peering in through the waist-high opening.

  With
entirely unexpected force, Hydrangea grabbed the man’s bag strap, yanking it and him through the opening, and slammed the door behind him. The thin fellow in a blue uniform stumbled forward, then straightened, and August recognized him as the mailman he had occasionally studied from his garret lookout.

  If a wicked fairy were ever to turn a rabbit into a person, the result would certainly resemble Mr. LaPoste. He had pale, staring eyes, an itchy-looking pink nose, and an overbite of very large, very white teeth.

  His expression revealed that he was startled by his sudden arrival in the foyer…but not shocked. In fact, on regarding Hydrangea, he broke into an immense, enthusiastic, toothy grin.

  “Why, don’t you fret, Miz Hydrangea,” he assured the lady fervently, “I do not travel—nor have I ever traveled—in the company of butterflies!” He turned in a circle, still smiling broadly, to prove it. “I arrive here entirely insect-free!”

  Hydrangea blinked rapidly, momentarily speechless. But August detected some small change in her demeanor; she appeared to recover her senses and, straightening her tiara, sank into a theatrical curtsy.

  “Mr. LaPoste, what a delight!” she declared in elegant tones. “Your call is unexpected, but most welcome.”

  The mailman returned the greeting with a deep bow and flowery hand gesture.

  “Miz Hydrangea,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “You haven’t changed one little bit since the old days. Why, you’re still as fresh and pretty as a swamp rose in July.”

  “Oh, come now, sir,” said Hydrangea in a silly, giggly voice that August had never heard and found jarring coming from his aunt. “You play fast and loose with the truth.” She flapped her handkerchief at nothing in particular, and swished her skirts from side to side. “But I did have my moments, I suppose. Do you recall the glorious summer I won the county Chili Pepper Princess pageant?”

  LaPoste nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said, a little vaguely.

  August wondered if he really did remember. Perhaps he was just being kind. The victory, after all, was probably less memorable to anyone other than Hydrangea.

  “I do beg your pardon,” blurted LaPoste, abruptly changing the subject, “for this unheralded intrusion. I would have left the mail on the front porch as usual”—he rummaged in his bag—“but could not permit such a genteel person to imperil herself in attempting to retrieve it.”

  Hydrangea was quite unused to having her anxieties so bluntly validated. With eyes bulging, she clutched at her heart.

  “Imperil, Mr. LaPoste?” she cried with anguish. “Whatever can you mean?”

  “There have been sightings, Miz Hydrangea,” said LaPoste in hushed tones, “in these parts, of an alligator.”

  “Well, that is not so peculiar.” Hydrangea had unconsciously lowered her own voice. “Alligators often find their way into Black River from Lost Souls’ Swamp, is it not so?”

  “But this, Miz Hydrangea, is a mighty uncommon beast. Witnesses claim that the thing is pure white. Yes, a white alligator! Who’d have thunk of such a thing? And its size, they say, is monstrous, upward possibly of forty feet.”

  “Forty feet!” exclaimed August, remembering the gargantuan footprint he’d discovered in the front yard.

  LaPoste jumped, clearly unaware that there had been a third party listening nearby. When he caught sight of August peering from the lower staircase, his eyes widened and his pink nose twitched.

  “So, it’s true,” he said in quiet wonder. “There is a boy!”

  Hydrangea turned and ushered August forward.

  “Come, sugar,” she said to her nephew, but smiling at their guest. “Where are your manners?” August stepped cautiously into the light.

  “You must excuse him, sir,” simpered Hydrangea. “We receive so few callers at Locust Hole these days; our manners are a little rusty.” She waved her handkerchief at the man, then the boy. “Mr. LaPoste, meet my nephew August, last of the DuPonts.”

  The mailman reprised his operatic bow.

  “It’s a pleasure, sir.”

  August nodded with a half smile.

  “Well then,” said LaPoste, withdrawing an envelope from the bag, “this delivery suddenly makes a bushel more sense.”

  Aunt Hydrangea reached for the letter. The mailman’s grin stiffened awkwardly.

  “Um…the letter is not for you, Miz Hydrangea.” He turned and held the envelope toward the staircase. “It’s addressed to Mr. August DuPont.”

  As Hydrangea gushed her farewells and thanks to the departing mailman, August perched on the parlor fainting couch, oblivious to an old spring poking his rear end. He turned the envelope in his hands. The stationery was thick and creamy, like parchment. It seemed expensive.

  “I can hardly comprehend it,” exclaimed Aunt Hydrangea, entering the room. “No one has ever laid eyes upon you. How could they possibly be aware of your existence? How could they know your name? You’ve never spoken to another soul in the world.”

  “Well,” said August, wincing, “actually…”

  With flushing cheeks, he reluctantly shared the history of his meeting at the gate.

  Swaying, Hydrangea grabbed at the back of the fainting couch and lowered herself to the seat.

  “To be sure, we are undone,” she whispered, handkerchief pressed to her cheek. “For so many years, I have endeavored to keep the world out of Locust Hole.” She glanced at August reproachfully. “And in one foolish instant, you have let it in.”

  They both automatically looked at the envelope.

  The innocuous thing practically buzzed with significance. Whatever lay inside, they both understood, was an invasion from the outside world. It was a knife that was about to slice open their carefully woven cocoon.

  Heart thumping, August slid his finger beneath the flap and withdrew the contents, a thick sheet of notepaper. He unfolded it to reveal a family crest, embossed in metallic gold, the sight of which elicited an audible gasp from his aunt. The crest depicted a shield, emblazoned with the image of a chili pepper impaled on a fancy-handled dagger. Fluttering banners proclaimed the words “Malveau. In Riches Unrivaled.”

  Below all this, a note had been handwritten, in what August guessed was ink from a fountain pen. The penmanship was simultaneously elegant, confident, and intriguing. August was immediately anxious to meet its maker. He read the note aloud.

  Dear Mr. DuPont,

  You are cordially invited to join me for afternoon tea, here at Château Malveau, tomorrow at four o’clock.

  It would be my pleasure to know you.

  With warm regards,

  Orchid Malveau

  “I declare!” breathed Hydrangea in a hoarse gasp. “Oh my!”

  August studied his aunt, baffled. “Do you know who this Orchid Malveau person is?”

  Hydrangea grimaced and, working her handkerchief, shot August a nervous glance. She nodded. Was that embarrassment in her expression?

  “I do. Orchid Malveau…is my sister.”

  August wrinkled his nose, puzzled. “But you don’t have a sister,” he said plainly. “We have no other kinfolk in the world. Just you and me. Remember?”

  Hydrangea stood and, skirts rustling, moved toward the mantel.

  “We don’t have any other family,” repeated August less certainly, “do we?”

  Hydrangea’s head turned. Her eyes met her nephew’s. August could see something unfamiliar in her red-rimmed eyes. Could it be guilt?

  “You said,” growled August in a dangerous, unfamiliar voice, “we were the last of the DuPonts.”

  “And so we are,” responded Hydrangea, with slight defiance. “My sister Orchid forfeited any claim to the DuPont name when she married a Malveau.”

  “You said we have no other kinfolk in the world.”

  “Well, I,” shrilled Hydrangea, defensively, “am th
e only kin that loves you!”

  “How”—August’s voice grew loud with outrage—“could this sister—my aunt—love me, if she’s never even met me?”

  Hydrangea plucked at her handkerchief as if removing the petals from a daisy. “The Malveaus love nothing,” she muttered sulkily, “except money and prestige.” She paused. “They imagine their great wealth elevates them, to some superior status.”

  “Great wealth?” repeated August, intrigued.

  “Great wealth,” snapped Hydrangea, looking up sharply, “built on treachery and betrayal! The Malveau family is the source of all our misfortunes.”

  She paused. August raised his eyebrows, with an “okay, go on” expression. Hydrangea considered the boy for a moment, clearly weighing her next words. She launched in.

  “It all began more than a hundred years ago, before Locust Hole was even built. Two men—cousins, best friends—left their faraway home to seek their fortunes in this country.”

  As she spoke, Hydrangea clutched her handkerchief with both hands and strode about the room, absently avoiding the hole in the floor.

  “One cousin, Maxim Malveau, was idle and arrogant. The other, Pierre DuPont, was industrious and smart.

  “Pierre had arrived with a pepper plant from his mother’s garden, which he planted, cared for, and propagated. Hot sauce had yet to reach these shores, so using his mother’s recipe, Pierre created the nation’s very first! And oh my, August, it was a huge success: DuPont’s Peppy Pepper Sauce became a household name, and Pierre found himself a rich man.

  “Pierre was a generous fellow and happy to share his success with Maxim. Despite his cousin’s lazy indifference, Pierre instated him as factory manager with a handsome salary. Maxim should have been forever grateful for his cousin’s loyalty. But no!”