Oh, crap…Pip’s cooking. This can’t mean anything good… Never mind the fact that she went full Harry Potter just now with the sparks. Pip and cooking never mix very well.
Her cooking—if that’s what you could even call it—was legendary, and not for good reasons. She tended to…experiment in the kitchen, and her concoctions were vile most of the time. She knew it too, but it never stopped her from forcing me to try each and every one of them, hoping for the best. I looked back down at the little bat, suddenly very suspicious and slightly horrified. I cringed when she went to pick it off the floor, but it leapt closer to us and right out of her grip.
“Drat! The little bugger just won’t accept its fate. Come here, you little…” she grumbled, but we all watched in fascination as the bat made a beeline for Norman.
I saw the little guy’s beady eyes lock onto him, and Norman stared back with the strangest expression on his pale face, as if in a trance. The bat flew at his chest, and Norman stumbled backwards, grasping it around its little body. The thing slumped in his palms and burrowed its snout into his hard chest. Norman was staring down at it in bewilderment before he looked up and met my eyes in horror.
“What the fuck?” he deadpanned, clutching the bat like he didn’t know what to do. I was trying to contain a hysterical laugh. Let them make fun of Jessica again…
“Sorry about that, dear,” Pip said, waving her spoon at the snuggling bat. “This one’s a bit wiley.”
“Auntie, what’s going on? Why are you acting so strange? Why do you have a bat in the house? I don’t understand any of this, and I’m seconds away from pulling my hair out. Is this some kind of a Halloween prank or something?”
“I told you to keep a vigilant eye out before you left this morning, did I not?” She gave me a pressing look that said, I told you so.
She was right… I did remember her saying something like that as I rushed out the door for our trip.
“I think the virus has gone to her head, Toby,” said Maddie, finally coming out from behind Freddy. She skirted around Norman, who was still holding the bat. He seemed to be…stroking its tiny head as Freddy stared at him like he didn’t even recognize his twin. “We need to find the nearest hospital, because everyone’s lost their minds.”
“Pish posh, there’s no virus here in Midnight Hollow.” She waved a hand at Maddie. “Come now, everyone, let's have that tea. Perhaps you’d like to sample some of my famous vampire bat chowder?”
My face drained of blood, but the second she said it, Norman moved forward, faster than I’d ever seen anyone move before, crouching and hissing at Auntie Pip. He hissed, really hissed, like a fucking cat or something. I stared for a second at the sharp, elongated incisors that grew in his mouth, before Norman shook off the feral look in his eyes and straightened back up again.
Norman stumbled back, holding out the bat like he was disgusted, and dropped it on the floor with a wet splat.
“What the fuck?” His green eyes were darker than I’d ever seen them, almost black, and his face was now utterly translucent white. He was so pale, he could have been a corpse. The bat on the floor hopped back onto his shoulder with a flutter of wings and nuzzled Norman’s neck in obvious affection.
Freddy rushed to Norman’s side, shaking his shoulder and whispering hoarsely, “What the hell, man?” But Norman didn’t acknowledge his twin in the slightest as he stared at his new fuzzy friend.
“Well, this is an interesting turn of events.” Auntie clicked her tongue again. “No matter, I suppose tea shall suffice for now.” She turned on her heel and headed into the kitchen in a dramatic flourish, her skirts swirling around her ankles.
We gaped after her. The nonchalance, the lack of alarm in her voice… This whole situation was terribly wrong. Something was happening to all of us that scared the hell out of me. Flashes of green lightning, orange fog, and dead bodies nearly made me stagger.
“Auntie, wait!” I called after her. The others were right on my heels as we followed her to the next room.
I stopped dead when we got to the kitchen, my mouth falling open yet again. The kitchen looked like a scene out of an old school fairy-tale cottage. Wooden cupboards with criss crossed glass fronts lined the walls, filled with those same powder filled bottles of every size, color, and shape I’d seen in the hallway. Instead of the stainless steel oven I was used to, there now sat a massive brick pizza oven with a cast iron grate, and next to it was an open stove with an actual fucking cast iron cauldron simmering on the flame.
We watched in silence as Auntie Pip clapped once and the flame snuffed out, just as the screaming of a teapot filled the silence. “Don’t be strangers, dears, take a seat.” She gestured to the massive round table just off the side of the kitchen.
There was hesitation from all of us as we decided what to do. At this point, I knew we needed to follow along and pretend like it was normal to see magic, giant spiders, two moons in the sky, and creepy clowns on street corners. Just your average Saturday night bus crash, memory loss, and missing fifty plus classmates. Yep. Normal.
Auntie would have the answers we needed, I was sure of it. She had to know
