Maddy West and the Tongue Taker Read online

  “I don’t even know you,” Maddy said.

  “Come on, or we’re going to be late,” Spotty said. She grabbed Maddy’s arm and pulled her up off the seat, picking up Maddy’s backpack in her other hand.

  “But . . . but . . .”

  “Mother is going to be really angry,” the big girl said, seizing Maddy’s other arm.

  Maddy looked around for the professor and the inspector, but they seemed to have disappeared. They weren’t in the line by the ticket window anymore.

  “Why do you always have to run away?” Spotty said in the same loud voice.

  “Yeah, you always run away,” the big girl said.

  That was when Maddy figured out why the girls were talking so loudly. They wanted the other passengers and staff at the train station to hear. They wanted everyone to think that Maddy was just a naughty little girl who had run away from her family. But that wasn’t true.

  It could only mean one thing — she was being kidnapped! Maddy gasped with fright and then found her voice. “Help, help!” she cried.

  “Oh, stop it, Maddy,” Spotty said. “Don’t play those silly games again.”

  “Don’t play your silly games, Maddy,” the big girl said.

  These girls knew her name!

  Maddy tried to sit down and make the girl drag her across the floor, but that didn’t work. The big girl just picked her up and put her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carried her toward the escalators that led up to the street.

  “Help, I’m being kidnapped!” Maddy shouted. A woman on the escalator going down next to them frowned at her as she descended toward them.

  “Help me!” Maddy said, staring right at the woman.

  “Stop it, Maddy,” Spotty said loudly. “You know what trouble you got into last time you said silly stuff like that.”

  The woman on the down escalator looked away as she passed.

  “Help me!” Maddy yelled, but nobody listened.

  “Help, Professor Coateloch!” she called out, but she couldn’t see the professor or the inspector anywhere.

  The next thing she knew, she was being shoved out of the train station, through the rain, toward a black car that was idling at the curbside with dark smoke drifting from its exhaust pipe.

  The spotty girl opened the back door, which strangely opened backward instead of forward. She put Maddy’s backpack on the seat and waited. But just as the big girl, with Maddy on her shoulder, reached the car, she tripped, and they both went sprawling across the pavement.

  Maddy landed on her bottom but was up on her feet in an instant. She scrambled away from clutching hands and ran back toward the railway station as fast as she could, yelling and screaming at the top of her lungs.

  People were starting to stare.

  “Help! I’m being kidnapped!” she shouted.

  Everybody was looking at her now. A man who was wearing a baseball cap stepped toward her.

  “Help!” she yelled, but even as she said it, a strong hand clamped over her mouth and an arm picked her up off the ground. It was the big girl. She was very strong, and Maddy could do nothing as she was carried back to the car.

  She saw the man in the cap begin to run after them. He was almost there in time. Almost. He reached the car just as it took off, the tires spinning on the road. Maddy heard and felt the man’s hands bang on the side of the car, but they were already speeding away down the street.

  “Help!” Maddy cried out, but she knew it was no use.

  Still, she had to try.

  “Help! Help me!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE HOUSE

  “LET ME GO!” Maddy shouted, but her words were muffled by the dusty old carpet on the floor of the car. Her shock and fear were giving way to anger. “Let me up!”

  It was a strange old car. The seats were up on metal legs, like chairs, and the front seat was a single long bench, not two individual seats like in modern cars. She could see right under the seat to where the pimply girl’s feet were pressing on pedals as the car drove off through the town. There were three pedals, not two like in Maddy’s dad’s car. She thought about crawling under the seat and grabbing the girl’s feet, but that might have caused an accident and in any case, the big girl wasn’t letting her go anywhere.

  “Don’t let her go until we get out of the city. We don’t want anybody to see her,” Spotty said.

  She was speaking a strange language that Maddy had never heard before. It was full of odd hissing sounds that made her spine crawl.

  “Let me go!” Maddy screamed.

  “Be quiet!” the big girl said — in English this time.

  “I won’t!” Maddy screamed, thrashing about on the floor of the car. The girl was strong, but it was all she could do to keep Maddy down.

  “Keep her mouth shut,” Spotty said in the strange language. “I’m trying to concentrate on the road.”

  “I’m trying,” the big girl said.

  “If you hadn’t let her go, then we wouldn’t have this problem now, would we, Pavla?” Spotty said.

  “I was tripped,” Pavla said.

  “You’re such a klutz,” the spotty girl said. “Wait till I tell Mother she almost got away.”

  There was an awkward silence. “I’m sorry, Anka,” Pavla said. “Please don’t say anything to Mother.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Anka said.

  They drove into the mountains. Maddy knew that because they kept going uphill, and quite steeply in some places. After a while, Pavla let her sit up.

  There were no other cars around, nor were there any houses. There was nobody to see her. She could scream all she wanted, but there was nobody around to hear her.

  “Check her backpack,” Anka said.

  Pavla picked up Maddy’s backpack. “Why?” she asked.

  “Leave that alone. It’s mine!” Maddy cried.

  “Maybe she’s hiding something,” Anka said.

  “Leave it alone,” Maddy said again, grabbing the bag and pulling it. Pavla pulled back and pushed Maddy away while she unzipped the top of the backpack.

  “Yuck, it stinks in here,” Pavla said.

  Maddy was sure Mr. Chester was about to be discovered, but there was nothing. No cries of surprise or astonishment. No screeches from the little monkey.

  “Just clothes,” Pavla said, poking around in the backpack but clearly not wanting to probe too deeply.

  Mr. Chester must have burrowed to the very bottom.

  Pavla screwed up her nose and pushed the bag back over to Maddy, who quickly zipped it shut.

  The road was deserted. A narrow, gravel lane. The trees grew so tall on either side of the road that they blocked out the light. They drove in cold shadows. This part of Bulgaria was not bright and cheerful like the other places she had seen. It was stark, dark, and frightening.

  They emerged onto an even narrower road that skirted around the mountainside, dropping away on the other side into a deep ravine. Anka took the corners carefully, and Maddy could see why. The cliff was steep, and the guardrails on the side of the road looked flimsy. It would be a long way to fall.

  A set of keys hung from the dashboard on a key chain in the shape of a skull. It was made from shiny metal and jangled against the dashboard.

  Eventually, they arrived at imposing black metal gates, which Anka opened by pressing a button on a remote control attached to the key chain.

  To Maddy, some houses seemed to be happy, with fresh paint and bright windows like smiling eyes and lace curtains puffing out gently in the breeze. Other houses seemed dour and sullen, watching you go by with a sour expression. This house looked mean. It looked angry, Maddy thought, as they bounced up a long, winding, and bumpy driveway through shady and overgrown gardens that had gone to ruin. They passed a graveyard with crumbling headstones, some
of them cracked and others broken, lying in pieces on the ground.

  The house was old, made of stone and black-painted wood, with a narrow porch that looked like the muzzle of a dog. Wooden spikes hung from the front of the roof over the porch. They looked like fangs. The house had two turrets like the ones you see in a castle: tall, round stone towers with narrow slits for windows. Black, creeping vines twisted up around the turrets and windows of the house. In front of the house, the driveway made a circle around a dead tree that reached desperate, spindly branches up to the sky.

  Just looking at the house, Maddy was scared. But as the two girls hustled her out of the car and hauled her in through the gaping jaws of the house, a strange thing happened. The house shivered. It was no more than a sudden rattling sound from the sides of the house as if the wind had caught some shutters, but still, Maddy couldn’t help feeling that as afraid as she was of this creepy old house, it was afraid of her, too.

  Maddy pulled her backpack to her as she was marched into the house, feeling the tiny movements of Mr. Chester inside, which gave her a small feeling of hope. A sense that she was not totally alone.

  Inside, the house smelled of must and decay. Anka and Pavla pushed and prodded Maddy along a narrow hallway lined with dark wood. Thick cobwebs hung from every corner. A grandfather clock sat at the end of the hallway. As she was marched down the passage, the hands on the clock ticked over to ten o’clock and it began to chime the hours, filling the hallway with noise.

  Maddy was taken into a kitchen that looked as though it hadn’t been used in years. Spiderwebs covered pots, pans, and long kitchen utensils that were hanging from racks. Something green and gray was growing out of a pot on the stovetop and crawling across the kitchen counter. The clock continued its ominous chime. The sound reverberated around the kitchen, and Maddy was glad when it sounded for the tenth time and finally stopped.

  Pavla held Maddy tightly while Anka picked up the handset of an old black phone on a small table by the kitchen door. She dialed a number, and when someone answered, she said simply, “She’s here.” She hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

  A narrow door at the back of the kitchen led to a cellar, down rotten wooden steps that creaked and cracked even under Maddy’s light weight. Anka shoved her at the top of the stairs and Maddy stumbled down a few steps, getting a face full of old cobwebs as she did so, before catching her balance with one arm on the old stone wall.

  “What are you doing?” she cried out.

  “Wait,” said Anka.

  “Wait for what?” Maddy asked.

  “For Mother,” Anka said.

  “For Mother,” Pavla repeated.

  The door slammed shut. The only light in the cellar came from a tiny bulb at the end of a cable hanging from the ceiling. It was old and cast only a dim light, just enough to push the darkness back into the corners of the cellar.

  She opened her backpack, and Mr. Chester scampered out, climbing up her arm onto her shoulder and rubbing her head with his tiny hands.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Maddy whispered.

  She sat on the second step from the bottom and looked around the confines of the cellar. It was only the size of a small bedroom and was empty except for the rotten remains of two barrels over against the far wall. Outside she heard the black car start up and drive off.

  Mr. Chester clung tightly to her neck, and they sat together in the dim light of the cellar.

  People would be looking for her. She was sure of that. Professor Coateloch would be frantic. The police would be involved — people had seen her being kidnapped. Perhaps the man in the baseball cap had seen the license plate.

  She had no watch, but every hour the old grandfather clock at the end of the hallway chimed. It was after midday when she heard the car returning. That sound was followed by the banging of a door and the clomping of heavy shoes on the floorboards above her head.

  That had to be Mother. Surely.

  She didn’t know whether to be relieved or afraid. At least she could now get out of this dank cellar, but she was terrified of what Mother wanted to do with her. Maddy started to shiver, and before she knew it, tears were welling up in her eyes and she was crying. She kept crying until it hurt her to breathe. Salty tears found their way into her nose and her mouth, and snot dripped down over her lips until she wiped it away with the back of her arm.

  She felt a small hand on the back of hers, and Mr. Chester began to chirp softly. Maddy smiled through the tears and Mr. Chester hopped down to the next step.

  He chirped again and again, creating a little rhythm with the sounds. Then, like he had at the airport, he began to dance. This time he danced alone, but Maddy’s crying stopped as she watched him. After a minute, she started to sing a popular song that was often played on the radio. She sang, and he danced, and Maddy felt that somehow everything was going to turn out all right. Then Mr. Chester climbed up on her shoulder and put his arms back around her neck.

  They sat in the cellar.

  They waited.

  For Mother.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE WITCH

  MADDY SAT AT A TABLE in the kitchen. Grime on the windows turned the light from outside into a motley patchwork of gray shades. There was a nasty smell in the air, as if something had gone bad long ago, and the smell still lingered.

  Outside, the wind moaned and sighed. And every now and then, in some far-off place, the house would rattle as it had when Maddy arrived.

  Maddy sat alone at one end of the table and stared at the witch. She didn’t want to stare, but it was hard to take her eyes off the strange tall woman who leaned back in her chair with her hands loosely clasped on her lap.

  There was no doubt that she was a witch. Or at least that she looked like one. The real kind of witch, like in the old stories — not the funny ones with big noses and cone-shaped hats that rode broomsticks in movies and fairy tales.

  The witch had skin so light that it seemed to shine from under the hood of her cape. Her lips were the color of dried blood and stood out against her pale skin like a piece of coal in a snowy field. They were pursed in a pleasant but rather narrow smile.

  Her eyes were small and different colors: one was almost black, the other a vivid green. From her head to her toes, a brown cape fell on top of a brown dress made from a heavy velvet material that flowed like molasses down her body. She wore dark brown nail polish, and she smelled of chocolate: the dark, bitter kind that you use in baking.

  She reached up and pulled back the hood of her cape, and Maddy was surprised to see that she had almost no hair. She was completely bald except for one clump on the top of her head at the back that grew long, thick, and black, like the tail of a pony.

  “Hello, Maddy,” said the witch.

  Maddy didn’t reply. She didn’t want to show the witch how scared she was, and she was sure that if she said anything, her voice would be just a quiet little thing trembling in the still air of the kitchen.

  The witch’s daughters circled around behind Maddy, making her uncomfortable. They had removed their black wigs and goth makeup and changed their clothes. Out of their disguises, they no longer looked like sisters. In most ways, they seemed opposites. Pavla was wearing cutoff jeans and a T-shirt and looked like any other ordinary teenager, while Anka wore a dark dress with strange designs on it. Pavla was quite pretty with light, almost blond hair. Anka’s hair was black, short, and spiky with a dyed red patch at the front.

  Pavla wore earrings that glinted like diamonds, even in the meager light from the window, and she wore a light perfume. Anka had a nose piercing — a silver ring — and another through her right eyebrow. She smelled as though she didn’t shower very often.

  But the biggest difference between them was their attitudes. Pavla looked uncomfortable. Anka strutted around the room as if she owned it.

  “My dear Maddy, you
look terrified,” the witch said. “But there’s no reason to be. You’re safe now.”

  What does she mean “now”? Maddy wondered. She felt very far from safe and wished she were back home in England — or anywhere else in the world, in fact, other than in this strange and creepy old house talking to a witch.

  But she was confused as well as afraid, so she found her voice. When it emerged, it was confident and clear, but she still didn’t really feel that way. “You had no right to kidnap me,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest. “I demand to go home immediately.”

  “Of course, of course,” said the witch, unclasping her hands and leaning forward. “We’ll have you safely back home with your mother and father as quickly as we can. But first we had to get you away from that evil professor, and we have to get you home without her finding you.”

  “Professor Coateloch?” Maddy gasped. “Evil?”

  The witch looked at her two daughters. Anka nodded in agreement, as if it was sad but true. Pavla did nothing.

  “You have no idea of the danger you were in,” the witch said.

  “The professor was just pretending to be your friend,” Anka said.

  “Just pretending,” Pavla said.

  “You were lucky that you never made it out to the island,” the witch said. “If you had, well . . . let’s just say it would not have been a fairy-tale ending.”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Maddy said. “At least she didn’t kidnap me.”

  “We didn’t kidnap you,” Anka said. “We rescued you.”

  “Yes, we rescued you,” Pavla said.

  “I don’t think you would have come with us any other way,” the witch said.

  “I might have if . . .” Maddy started, but then stopped. It was probably true. If strangers had approached her at the train station with such an outrageous story, she wouldn’t have taken their word for it.

  “If what?” the witch asked.

  Maddy shook her head. “Who are you?” she asked.