The Stone Child by Dan Poblocki Page B

question. He’d only just reread the book a day ago. The answer hit him. “Right!” said Eddie. “I’ve got to speak to him in his own language.”
    “Exactly,” said Harris.
    “Hello, Wally?” said Mrs. Singh from behind her desk, holding the phone to her ear. “Come quickly. We’ve gotanother problem.” She glanced at them and said, “You kids, uh … stay calm.”
    Another
problem? Eddie didn’t have time to think about what she meant by that. He smiled and nodded at her. “We’re calm,” he said, then quickly turned back to Harris. “I need to put the flower under my tongue,” he whispered. “That way, he’ll understand what I say.”
    Maggie spun around and shouted, “What sort of craziness are you two talking about?”
    Ignoring her, Harris said, “So where is the flower?”
    Eddie felt his stomach drop to the floor. The flower! Had he dropped it? “I don’t know,” he whispered.
    The creature whacked the glass again. The crack grew, spidering out nearly four inches.
    “Hurry!” Harris cried. “Check your pockets or something!”
    Eddie shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. Save a few pieces of gritty lint, they were empty. Then he searched his coat pockets. When he reached into the one on the right, he felt something small and soft crumpled at the bottom. Cautiously, Eddie pulled out his hand. In his palm, the flower lay, crushed into a little ball. He must have shoved it in there at the bottom of the stairs.
    “The flower is ruined!” said Eddie.
    Outside, the creature made a shrieking sound. His eyes went wild. His nostrils flared. He banged the door again. Thistime, the glass shattered. Pieces of it flew onto the rug. The thing’s mouth-tendrils skittered nervously across the threshold. Maggie screamed and dashed away from the door. She ran behind Mrs. Singh’s desk. The librarian shouted at the gremlin, who was now crawling through the smashed hole in the door, “Shoo! Get out of here!” Then she turned her attention to Eddie and Harris. “Boys! Get away from there!” She motioned for them to join her and Maggie behind the desk.
    Eddie almost wanted to start laughing—he knew that hiding behind a desk wouldn’t stop the monster.
    “Do it anyway,” said Harris, ignoring Mrs. Singh. “Put it under your tongue.”
    “But—” Eddie began to protest.
    “It can’t hurt!” cried Maggie. She sounded terrified and confused. Eddie knew she had no idea what was going on, yet she might be right.
    Standing amid the shards of broken glass, the creature flashed its hideous teeth. Suddenly, it scrambled forward, reaching for Harris’s ankles.
    Instantaneously, Eddie shoved the crumpled flower into his mouth and swished it under his tongue. It was dry and gritty and tasted like mold. Eddie wanted to throw up, but he managed to keep from gagging.
    He meant to shout
STOP
at the creature, but when he opened his mouth, what came out was something totallydifferent. A deep, resonant voice, completely unlike his own, burst from his throat: “
HEST-ZO-THORTH!”
The sound of it shook the room, unsettling the dust from the highest bookshelves. Shocked, Eddie covered his mouth, afraid to open it again.
    “It’s working,” said Harris, shaken a bit himself.
    The creature froze several inches from the spot where Harris had been standing a few seconds earlier. It stared at Eddie, as if in surprise, waiting for further instructions. It retracted the tendrils back into its mouth with a loud slurp, like someone messily eating a plate of spaghetti. Eddie didn’t know what to do next. The flower seemed to squirm under his tongue, as if trying to escape his own mouth. If Eddie didn’t keep speaking, he knew the flower would somehow manage to spit itself out, and the creature would continue on its path toward its terrible meal. He tried to remember what Kate, the character from Nathaniel Olmstead’s book, had said to her own gremlin when it had attacked her and the baby during the