A Bad Day for Voodoo

CHAPTER 26

To demonstrate how much time was of the essence, I’m going to skip the part where we exchanged a few more lines of dialogue, left Esmeralda’s House of Jewelry, had a wacky misadventure where we couldn’t find the keys to the taxi, fought a bird (long story), got the cab in motion, discussed whether we should try to retrieve Mr. Click or the other doll first, decided on Mr. Click in a surprisingly unanimous decision, and drove toward the manhole where we would hopefully still find our history teacher.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked Adam.

“Tell you what?”

“That you got the voodoo doll for free because they think you’re the Chosen One! We asked if you were keeping something from us. You said no. We asked again. You said no. We knew you were lying. Do you know how embarrassing it is to hear about this from a stranger?”

“I don’t want to be the Chosen One,” said Adam. “I mean, I don’t even want to be a hall monitor, so how can I be responsible for saving humanity?”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, she’s clearly a raving lunatic.”

“I don’t know. I’ve always felt like I was meant for something important, something historic, but I thought maybe I’d become a famous singer or something. Remember that one song I wrote, where I tapped spoons on glasses? That was kind of catchy, right?”

“I don’t remember it.”

“It went ‘La, la, la, tra la la, le la...’ You really don’t remember that? Oh well. Either way, I don’t think Esmeralda is wrong about this.”

“Oh, she’s wrong.”

“Stop being so blind, Tyler,” said Kelley. “Nothing tonight can be explained by science. I tried, and I finally gave up. Obviously, Adam does impact magic in strange and unusual ways, and it’s clearly his destiny to save us from the frickin’ hobgoblins.”

“All right, I was headed in that direction too. I was mostly arguing on your behalf.”

“Do you think I should change my hair?” asked Adam.

“As the Chosen One, I’d think that you decide what is fashionable,” I said. “So wear your hair however you want.”

“I guess you’re right. I wish somebody else was chosen. We should have asked to read the prophecies.. .maybe they say if you live through tonight or not.”

“We’ll find out soon.” I was trying not to think about my potential fate. Despite living in Florida, I’d always been more of a cold weather guy, and I could never get behind the idea of eternal torment. I mean, by the fourth or fifth century of being endlessly hacked apart by rusty sabers, you’d be bored out of your mind.

Yeah, I’ll admit it: I was terrified. No shame in that, right? “Hey, there’s that pay phone that I thought was the other pay phone,” said Adam. “We’re getting close.”

I tried once again to maintain a positive attitude. Everything would be fine. Mr. Click had not been caught in a river of sewage and washed out into the ocean. His body had not been devoured by rats, forcing us to round up all of the individual rats that had him in their bellies. He had not sprouted tentacles and pulled himself miles away.

He’d be exactly where we left him. Perhaps gift-wrapped. “Do you remember which one it was?” I asked.

Adam looked panicked. “Was I supposed to?”

“No,” I said, sparing us the necessity of another madcap misadventure where we drove around in circles trying to find the right manhole cover. “It’s a couple of blocks away.”

The streets were still empty. This was good because we were about to do something that many people might find morally questionable but also bad because in our injured conditions it would’ve been nice to be able to say, “Hey, anybody wanna join us for a zombie-wrangling party?”

“There it is,” I said.

Adam parked on the side of the street right next to it and shut off the engine. “I was going to try to lighten the mood by making a joke about how you owe me a fare,” he said, “but then I thought, no, that’s weak.”

“It might have been funny.”

“Should I do it now?”

“No.”

We got out of the taxi and began the process of removing the manhole cover again, this time with a lot more urgency. At one point, we lost our grip on it, and it clanked down onto where two of my toes would have been, so in the end, everything, including bodily mutilation, happens for a reason.

“Do you see him?” I asked, peering down into the semi darkness.

“No,” said Kelley.

We all listened closely for any zombie-esque sounds but heard nothing.

“I’ll go,” said Adam. “I’ll find where he is, and then you guys can come down and help me bring him up.”

“Are you supposed to be doing things like that?”

“I’m the only one who isn’t hurt. Except for the marks on my chest, but those itch more than anything. It doesn’t make sense for anybody else to go. I may be more important to the future than you two, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you take all the risks.”

He climbed down the ladder and disappeared from sight.

Then he screamed.

Then there was silence.

“Uh, Adam?” I called down.

Nothing.

Kelley and I looked at each other.

“Adam?” Kelley called down. “Are you okay?”

Still nothing.

“Okay, well, I guess we don’t get to sit this one out,” said Kelley.

“I’ll go,” I said. “I’m more used to my foot than you are your leg.”

There was so much to be said, but I’d pretty much said it all that other time when I thought I might be headed toward certain death. I had no time to waste. I climbed down the ladder, walked forward several feet, and saw Adam’s body.

I don’t mean his dead body. I apologize for startling you if that’s what you thought. He was lying on the ground (not in raw sewage or anything like that; it smelled nasty down here, but it was more of a rock tunnel than a river of poo).

Mr. Click was on top of him, hands sort of flopping around as if he was trying to get them around Adam’s neck.

I hurried over there and shoved Mr. Click off of him. I quickly grabbed Adam’s arms and dragged him back toward the ladder as Mr. Click scooted toward us, moving with surprising haste for somebody with no working arms and only one leg.

“Get back!” I said, kicking him in the face as hard as I could.

Mr. Click rolled onto his side and pulled himself into the fetal position. Adam coughed and rubbed his throat, even though he hadn’t actually been strangled.

“How the hell did he get you?” I asked.

“I dunno. I guess I tripped over him.”

Sometimes no rude comment can suffice, so I returned my attention to Mr. Click.

He looked sad.

Scared.

Like a wounded puppy.

“Mr. Click?”

He flinched at the sound of my voice.

“Mr. Click, I’m sorry I kicked you like that, but you sort of tried to strangle Adam, right?”

Why was I talking to him? I had a tight time frame to avoid lakes of fire!

He just looked so.sad.

“Don’t go getting all sympathetic,” I told him. “You were a creep. You made my life miserable. You falsely accused me of cheating.” Mr. Click’s eyes had gone all teary.

“We never meant for this to happen. We just wanted your leg to hurt. I’m so sorry about what we did. It was an accident. Well, no, not an accident. It was on purpose, but we didn’t think it would have anywhere near that much impact.”

Mr. Click’s mouth opened, as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t. He was probably trying to assign us more homework. “He looks sad,” said Adam.

“I know he looks sad! What do you want me to do about that? I can’t help it if he looks sad!”

Maybe Mr. Click wasn’t such a bad teacher. Maybe everything he did was to encourage his students to achieve greatness. What if he’d gone home every night, sipped a cup of tea, and chuckled about how he was keeping those crazy kids on their toes? “Someday,” he’d say, a warm smile on his face, “those kids will have jobs that they love and true inner happiness, and I’ll have helped them, if only a little.”

Or maybe he was an evil jerk.

Either way, my heart broke for this sorrowful, frightened, pathetic creature squirming around on the ground, even if he had just tried to strangle Adam.

“Maybe he wasn’t such a bad teacher,” said Adam. “He sort of inspired me to do better. I didn’t do better, but there were lots of times where I thought I should. Maybe this was just his teaching style. When the gypsy lady mentioned Chef Ramsay, that made me think about all of those reality shows where the host is really mean to the contestants, but he’s really just trying to make them be the best they can possibly be. And yeah, also to boost ratings, but I don’t think Mr. Click would’ve cared about TV ratings. He was above that sort of thing.”

“Can we get him out of here now?”

“Yeah, yeah. Sorry.”

Kelley slowly came down the ladder, wincing with each step. “Ow,” she said. “Ow,” she said again. “Ow,” she said once more. But it was a brave, strong “ow,” not a whiny “ow.” My admiration for my girlfriend knew no bounds. If it weren’t for the fact that this relationship was always going to be a she-dumps-me-and- not-the-other-way-around type of deal, I would have known at that moment that I would never break up with her.

“Oh, good, he’s right there,” said Kelley. “Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s awful that his arms are broken and his leg is gone, but it does make him easy to keep track of.”

“That’s really morbid,” I said. “But accurate.”

Then Kelley looked the way she did when we went to see kittens at the humane society. “Oh, look at him. He looks so sad. I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but I never thought he was all that mean.”

“He was horrible!” I insisted.

“He was good at what he did. Maybe public speaking wasn’t really his thing, but he knew the information, and he could always answer questions, and I think he truly cared about each and every one of us.”

“He hated us!”

“He hated it when we didn’t apply ourselves. He hated it when we didn’t strive for excellence. He hated when he didn’t think we were being good citizens. But to him, there was no teacher’s pet. We were all his pets.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“I’ve never seen such sad, soulful eyes.”

“I know,” said Adam. “They’re haunting.”

“He was the best teacher we’ve ever had. No other teacher cared as much. After we get out of here, I’m going to start raising money for the Mr. Click Memorial Library. I think he’d like that.”

“Or maybe you could put a bunch of books he liked on an e-reader,” Adam suggested.

“That works too. But we have to do something to honor him.” “I miss him,” said Adam. “Even though he’s right there, I miss him. When you stop and think about it, who is the real monster: the mean history teacher or the kids who turned him into a broken zombie? It’s gonna be hard for me to face the mirror for a while.”

“Can we please get him up the ladder before I burn in hell?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” said Adam. “Sorry.”

“Well, well, well,” said a familiar voice. It was not Kelley, and it was not Adam, and it was not Mr. Click. It also wasn’t Zeke,

Mildred, Glenn, Franklin, Donna, or Donnie. (Donnie was that guy from the beginning who cheated off my test, whom I confronted at his locker but he wouldn’t admit it.)

It was Ribeye.

He was pointing a gun at me.

“Man, I’ve been walking around these tunnels forever. I didn’t expect to find you again.”

“Shouldn’t you have just gone up the ladder to the junkyard?” I asked. “That’s where I left you.”

“I would have done that, except I wandered around in a daze for a while. You busted my head up pretty good. I haven’t forgotten that.”

“Your gun’s empty,” I said.

Ribeye shook his head. “I had an extra clip in my pocket.” “Prove it—no, no, don’t prove it. What do you want?” “What do you think I want?”

“Peace for all?”

“Not quite.” He looked down at Mr. Click. “You really messed this dude up. What’d he do to you?”

“Nothing. It never should have happened.”

“Maybe I’ll put a mercy bullet in his head after I kill you,” said Ribeye. He squeezed the trigger.

And then Adam jumped in front of me.