Don't Drink the Punch! (8 page)

She hurried past the frozen people in the dining room, taking great care not to touch them, and into the large living room.

More frozen grown-ups. At least a dozen. She recognized both Pria's and Jess's mothers. They were sitting on the sofa together. Mrs. Patel's mouth was open, as though she was chatting, but she didn't move. Several others stood in clumps, looking like someone had taken a still photograph of a lively conversation. There was Mr. Grafton, Alice's father, standing in a corner, frozen in mid-tap over his smartphone. He looked like a mannequin in a men's store. There was Mrs. Grafton, standing with a woman Kayla didn't know, gesturing to a fancy Chinese-looking vase on a side table. Kayla tried to wail with horror, but her throat had closed up, as though she was being partially strangled.

She had to find her mother or be absolutely certain she wasn't here. If she hadn't been so desperate to find her, Kayla would have been more focused on trying to figure out what could possibly be going on. After all, people didn't just freeze like statues. For now, though, she just wanted to find—or actually not find—her mother.

She made her way through the room and then across the hall in front of the central staircase. She walked into the study, where they'd piled all the coats. No one seemed to be in there. She turned and looked back across the hall into the living room, at the horrible, frozen figures. She took a tiny step back, stumbled, and fell, coming very close to bashing her head on the coffee table. As she lay sprawled on the floor, she looked up.

Her mother was sitting on the couch, almost buried by mounds of coats. She had her coat on and was leaning down, as though in the middle of fastening her boot. And like all the others, she was frozen.

Kayla tried to shout, moan, cry, anything, but once again no sound came out of her mouth. She scrambled to her hands and knees and stood up shakily. She reached out a hand to touch her mother. Her mother's cheek was warm, her eyes bright but unseeing. She wasn't dead.
A
dead person wouldn't feel warm. Right?
she reasoned to herself desperately.

Her phone. She would dial 911. She pulled it out to make the call and then remembered. She couldn't speak. Should she dial it anyway? She'd seen a movie once where a person who was tied up and gagged managed to dial 911. Even without hearing anyone speak, the operator had sent help based on the location of the call. But what could they possibly do when they got here? People didn't just freeze. They wouldn't know what to do or how this had happened.

How
did
this happen?
Kayla wondered. Her mind was rapidly calculating, and then it stopped. She knew the answer. It had to have been the punch—it had frozen everyone who drank it. That was why she couldn't speak. She'd taken a sip and spat it out. So she wasn't frozen, but the punch had somehow paralyzed her throat and voice.

Kayla tried to remain calm. Had she swallowed any of it? If even a tiny drop had found its way down her throat and was now coursing through her system, she could be moments away from becoming frozen herself.

In a sudden flashback, she remembered how just a
few days ago she'd wished her mother would lose her voice, so that Kayla wouldn't be embarrassed by her mother's accent. She closed her eyes, trying to blot out the guilt.

She hurried into the kitchen and back toward the door leading down to the basement, filled with dread. If people upstairs were frozen, what would she find when she went downstairs? What if she was the only person in the house who could still move? She had to go down there and find out.

She put a hand on the basement door. Then she heard a movement behind her in the kitchen. She whirled around.

CHAPTER 12

Bulbous black eyes. A smushed-in face. Flopped-over ears. A ridiculous curled tail.

Buttercup.

Kayla let out her breath and realized she'd been holding it for quite some time. The dog stared up at her questioningly. He was probably as freaked out as she was. Even though she'd noticed that his saggy face always seemed to have a worried expression on it, the worry was more pronounced than usual now. While he'd never shown much interest in her before, he was wagging his tail ever so slightly, as though seeking reassurance from her, the only other being who seemed to be mobile in that terrible house. Grimly she leaned down and patted his head, and then she opened the door and headed down to the basement.

The stairs creaked as she inched down each one. She couldn't yet see any kids—frozen or otherwise—but she could hear the music from the karaoke machine blaring and nothing more. That same eerie almost-silence she had experienced upstairs.

She was halfway down the stairs when the lights went out.

If she'd been able to, Kayla would have begun to whimper. But no sounds came from her mouth. The music stopped. The basement was suddenly plunged into darkness. There was no sound. No talking. No movement.

At least it wasn't pitch black. Alice had put several candles around the room, red for Valentine's Day, and they cast an eerie, flickering light on the people standing around the room. As Kayla had suspected, everyone was frozen.

She picked up a candle from the table and moved through the room, the flickering flame dimly illuminating one frozen person after another.

There was Alice, her elbows raised above her head, her hands frozen mid-fluff; she'd been running her hands through her hair at the moment she froze. She was standing in the middle of a group of boys, all
frozen—she recognized Patrick Morley, Eric Ishak, Andrew Trevenen, Jason Yan. They stared down at her with their unblinking eyes.

There were Jess and Pria, standing close to each other, Jess with her hand cupped next to Pria's ear, as though stopped in mid-whisper.

There was Nick, standing with Scott and Anthony. Nick was half turned toward the mirrored wall of shelves over the bar area, and Kayla noticed he was flexing his bicep, as though he'd been frozen just as he was checking himself out.

Where was Tom? Was he one of these still, shadowy figures? He'd definitely sipped the punch. She hadn't gotten to him in time. And no doubt Alice had refilled his punch cup after Kayla had gone upstairs. Kayla moved through the eerie room with its motionless figures, its flickering candles, and went into the next room, where the movie had been running—Alice had carefully picked out goopy love stories, although from the looks of the several frozen kids sitting in the audience, people had been chatting over, rather than watching, the movie. She made her way carefully into the game room. Several kids—all boys, it seemed—were frozen in various
positions, holding pool cues, video game controllers, or twirling foosball handles. But no Tom. Where was he?

A sob rose in her throat and stayed there. She felt like it might strangle her. She had to think, think, think.

She had to find Matilda.

She had to find Matilda and make her do something, give Kayla something, to undo this terrible curse, or whatever it was. But how would she find her? She had no idea where Matilda lived, and she remembered how many Warners there had been in the directory. Kayla couldn't call her anyway—not without a voice.

She'd go to the shop. She could walk there. Maybe, just maybe, she'd find Matilda there. Or the owner of the shop, who might know what to do, or at least how to find Matilda. Then a worried thought popped into her head: What were the chances of someone being at the shop at nine p.m. on a Saturday night, in the middle of a terrible snowstorm? She dismissed the thought. Going to the store and looking for Matilda was her only hope.

She made her way toward the foot of the basement steps, groping her way around frozen people, trying not to touch anyone.

Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

CHAPTER 13

She screamed soundlessly, almost dropping the candle, and whirled around.

“Kayla!”

It was Tom. Even in the light of the flickering candle, she could see his pale face, his wild eyes filled with horror.

“What's happening?” he croaked. “The last thing I remember is you going up those stairs, and people talking and Alice bugging out about the stain on the carpet and how her mom was going to be so mad. She poured me more punch, and I chugged down the whole cup because I was so thirsty, and then I can't remember anything. It was like when the cable goes out for a second and the TV screen goes black. And then”—he was breathing heavily,
on the verge of hyperventilating—“and then I guess I sort of came to, and the lights were out and everyone was, well, like this.” He gestured toward the frozen kids. “Why aren't you that way? Why am I not that way? Is it a gas leak or something?”

Kayla put a hand on his arm, and then pointed to her mouth and shook her head.

“You can't talk? Why can't you talk?” His voice was climbing in pitch.

She took his arm and indicated that they should go upstairs to the kitchen where there was at least a little light coming in through the window.

He nodded and gripped his crutch, then climbed the stairs, leaning heavily on the banister as he limped on his bad ankle.

As they emerged into the dim, gloomy kitchen, Buttercup charged toward them, barking his head off. Then he stopped barking abruptly, as though he'd suddenly remembered who they were. He plopped down on his belly, his little legs splayed out in front and behind. He put his head down on his front paws and began whimpering.

Kayla took out her phone, opened her notepad app, and began typing furiously:

CAN'T TALK. WE NEED TO FIND HELP. CAN YOU CALL 911?

Tom read the note. He nodded and picked up the cordless phone on the counter. He put it back down in the cradle. “It's dead, duh. There's no power. I left my cell down in the basement somewhere. Give me yours.”

She handed it over to him. He stared down at the screen, then looked at her. “No service. Since when is there no service in this neighborhood?”

Kayla shrugged, as if to say she had no idea.

“Must be the storm,” he muttered. “We could go outside and knock on the neighbors' doors, but how could they help? They're out of power too, so their phones won't work either. Kayla, what do we do?”

Kayla took her phone back and began typing again.
I'LL GO FOR HELP. YOU STAY HERE AND SEE IF THERE'S ANYTHING YOU CAN DO TO HELP THESE PEOPLE. MAYBE THEY'LL WAKE UP SOON?

Tom read it and said, “I'll go. Let me.”

Kayla shook her head and pointed at his ankle.

“Stupid ankle. Okay, you'll have to go.”

She typed again and shoved the phone toward him.
DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT MATILDA WARNER?

“Matilda?” His eyes widened. “Yeah, that's weird that
you should mention her, because she came to my house tonight. Knocked on the door, and when I answered, she said something bizarre about being sorry I was sick. I told her I wasn't sick. I guess someone had prank called her and pretended to be me.”

Kayla typed again.
WHAT HAPPENED? IT'S IMPORTANT! TELL ME!

“I invited her in. My parents were upstairs getting ready to go out to dinner, and they were planning to drop me off here at the party. Matilda is definitely odd, but I kind of like odd people. We had a nice chat about World War II, which I'm writing a paper about, and she seemed to know a ton about it. She must read a lot of history. And she uses all these old expressions, like ‘swell' and ‘jeepers.' I thought that was sort of, well, charming. Then I told her I was going to the party and invited her along. She told me no thanks, and that I shouldn't go either. Almost as though . . .”

He trailed off, puzzled.

Kayla nodded impatiently, indicating that he should go on with the story.

“So when I told her I was just going to drop in for a little while, she gave me a stick of gum and insisted I
chew it right then and there. It was the oddest thing. The gum was bright purple, but it didn't taste like grape or anything. It tasted pretty awful, frankly, but she watched while I chewed it a few times and then she let me go spit it out. Then she left. Bizarre, huh?”