The Slither Sisters

SEVENTEEN





As they hurried across the dance floor, pushing past all of the vampires and zombies, Glenn explained that he and Karina had already searched outside around the school. “Mr. Price said he needed her to wait outside for latecomers, remember?” he said. “But there’s no sign of her anywhere. She’s disappeared.”

“Where’s Karina?”

“Checking the cafeteria. I want to check inside the haunted house.”

On the far side of the gym, Mr. Loomis climbed the steps to the stage and tapped the microphone a few times.

“Excuse me, everyone!” he called. “We’ll be announcing the winners of the election in just a few minutes. So please, let’s all gather in the gymnasium. Everyone come inside, please, all right?”

Robert and Glenn ignored him. There was no time to waste. As their classmates moved toward the stage, the two boys walked in the opposite direction. They pushed open the exit door of the gymnasium and returned to the entrance hall of the fake Tillinghast Mansion.

There was no sign of Mrs. Arthur—but they did find Sarah and Sylvia Price, still dressed in their princess costumes, standing beside the table of pretzels and potato chips and fake eyeballs.

“Where’s my mother?” Robert demanded.

“We gave you an extraordinary opportunity,” Sarah growled. “You could have surrendered your vessels and served with honor. Now we’re going to take them by force!”

The door to the gymnasium slammed shut, and Robert heard the lock click into place. The room was extremely cold. Somehow the tapestry depicting a vortex had transformed into a real vortex, a real gate, rimmed with frost and venting frigid air.

“We won’t go,” Robert said.

“It’s not your choice,” Sarah answered.

With extraordinary force and agility, she grabbed Robert’s arm and twisted it behind his back, shooting pain up his shoulders until he collapsed to his knees. “There, there,” she said. “Stand up, Robert. Be a good little boy and I won’t hurt you again.”

Glenn tried pushing past Sylvia to no avail. She may have looked like a thirteen-year-old girl, but her strength, speed, and reflexes were superhuman. She flipped Glenn onto his back and knelt on his chest, pinning him to the floor. “Try that again and I’ll claw your eyes out,” she warned. “We don’t need your inferior mammalian vision. Just your hair, muscle, and skin.”

Sarah shoved Robert toward the vortex.

“The spell!” Glenn exclaimed. “Use Warren’s spell!”

Of course! The words sprang to his lips: “K’yaloh f’ah Zhenz’koh.” Robert sputtered the incantation three times while the Price sisters just laughed.

“It doesn’t work twice, you idiot,” Sarah said. “You’ve already brought Zhenz’koh into your world, so you can’t summon her again.”

She shoved him forward another step. With his free hand, Robert reached for anything that might be used as a weapon. He grabbed a bowl of pretzels and flung it at Sylvia. The container clanged off her head and tumbled to the floor, spilling salty snacks everywhere.

Sylvia seemed amused. “You can’t harm us,” she explained. “We descend from an ancient race of superior life forms. Look what I can do.” She grabbed a handful of Glenn’s hair, pulling him off the floor and tossing him upside-down, like a child’s rag doll. Glenn hit the floor hard and groaned. He was helpless.

Sarah shoved Robert forward yet another step. Now he could feel the force of the vortex, drawing him into its vacuum. He was inches away from spending eternity in a ceramic jar. One more step and it would all be over.

Desperate, he grabbed a cup of Witch’s Brew from the table and tossed it in Sarah’s face, hoping it might slow her for just a moment. One last second on earth before an eternity of torment.

To his astonishment, Sarah shrieked.

She released her grip on Robert and stumbled backward, clutching her face. Her skin was venting tiny plumes of gray smoke, as if it had somehow been ignited.

“Nooo!” Sylvia bellowed.

There was no time to think about what was happening or why. Robert grabbed the bowl of Witch’s Brew and dumped it over Sylvia’s head. She ducked but wasn’t fast enough. She fell to the floor, howling with rage.

Robert spotted a few slices of lemon at the bottom of the punch bowl—and suddenly he understood what was going on. His mother had made the Witch’s Brew; she described the recipe as plain old lemonade with gummy worms.

It was, in other words, a two-gallon vat of citric acid—the same substance Warren had used to dissolve the hermit crabs and reveal the cthulhus.

Robert reached under Glenn’s shoulders, lifting him up. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” Glenn said, still groggy. “What’s happening?”

Sarah and Sylvia were writhing on the floor, their skin molting from their bodies as Robert and Glenn watched in horror. They were reacting to the acid just as the hermit crab had in Warren’s laboratory—except their decomposition was a thousand times more disgusting. Skin melted down, peeling off in pink, gooey slabs. The smell was appalling. What remained of their bodies was green, scaled, slimy, and only vaguely human. Instead of legs, each beast ended in long, slithering tails. Instead of hair, their heads were crowned with a tangle of live snakes.

Robert and Glenn bolted for the front exit—the door leading to the front of the school—but the snakesisters were faster, cracking their massive tails across the room and blocking the way. “Fai throdog ky’osiss!” they chanted together. “Fai throdog ky’osiss!”

“What are they doing?” Glenn asked. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Robert said.

“Fai throdog ky’osiss! Fai throdog ky’osiss!” As the sisters continued their chant, their hideous hair-snakes swayed to its rhythm, hissing along with every “ky’osiss.”

The gate was spinning faster; its black vortex was accelerating. One of the snakesisters lashed her tail at Robert, and it tethered around his waist like a bullwhip. “You’re coming with usssss!” she hissed. “Now that you’ve destroyed our vesssssels, Master will insisssst on replacements!”

The other serpent-beast snapped her tail around Glenn’s legs, knocking him off balance. He fell to the floor, unable to stand. The vortex spun faster and faster, creating a powerful vacuum. Everything that wasn’t bolted down—the party streamers, the pretzel bowl, the cardboard chandelier, the melted vessels, the puddles of skin and slime and ooze—all of it was slurped up into the vortex.

Robert hooked one arm around a handrail mounted to the wall. Glenn wasn’t close enough to reach it, so he grabbed Robert’s free hand instead. The snakesisters slithered toward the gate, pulling the boys with their tails, but Glenn held fast to Robert and Robert held tight to the railing.

He knew he wouldn’t last long. Their only hope was for someone in the gymnasium to unlock the door and come to their rescue.

“Help!” Robert shouted.

“Help us!” Glenn screamed. “Somebody! Please!”

They hollered and yelled, but the gymnasium was too noisy; no one could hear them over the music. Except—

“Robert Arthur? Is that you?”

A lone voice on the other side of the door.

It was Mr. Loomis!

“We’re getting ready to announce the winners,” he explained. “What are you doing in there?” The door rattled in its frame as Mr. Loomis tried to open it. “And why is this door locked?”

“We’re trapped!” Robert yelled back. “Do you have a key?”

“I don’t, but I could find a custodian,” he proposed. “Why don’t you boys sit tight for a few minutes and I’ll see what I can do.”

Robert didn’t have a few minutes. The snakesisters were pulling harder on his legs. His fingers were slipping off the railing. It was then that he realized he was going to spend eternity in a ceramic jar, after all. Unless—

Something on the wall caught his attention.

Robert had an idea.

“Grab my leg!” he told Glenn.

“Are you crazy?”

“I need my other hand! Hurry!”

Robert knew he would only have one chance. With Glenn and a snakesister pulling on his legs, the force would be overwhelming; he wouldn’t last more than a second. As soon as Glenn released his hand, Robert lunged forward, reaching for the wall.

And pulled the handle of the fire alarm.



The siren was instantaneous and deafening. Lovecraft’s state-of-the-art fire safety system immediately unlocked every door in the school, so that no student would be trapped in the blaze. The snakesisters bellowed in frustration. They released their grip and then dove into the vortex, which promptly closed and vanished, leaving just a faint ring of frost on the cardboard tapestry.

Robert and Glenn collapsed to the floor.

An instant later, the door to the gym crashed open and a group of adults led by Principal Slater came charging in.

“Where’s the fire?” she asked.

“It’s a false alarm,” Robert said.

Principal Slater punched a code into the alarm panel and the siren stopped abruptly. There was no trace of the sunny, friendly, former soap-opera actress in her expression. Now she simply looked furious.

“Which one of you did this?” she asked. “And what’s that awful stench? It smells disgusting in here!”

“I’ll explain later,” Robert said. “I need to find my mom.”

Mrs. Arthur was standing behind Principal Slater, along with Mr. Price and Mr. Loomis. “I’m right here,” she said. “I was helping in the cafeteria when this girl in a ghost costume said you were looking for me. What the heck is going on?”

Thank you, Karina, Robert thought.

“Pulling a fire alarm is a serious criminal offense,” Principal Slater said. “Now I’m going to ask my question one more time, and I want an answer. Who did this?”

Robert said, “It was—”

“Sarah and Sylvia,” Glenn interrupted.

“Impossible!” Mr. Price shouted, pushing past the other adults to look Glenn in the eyes. “You know that’s a lie! My daughters would never pull a false alarm!”

“Go ahead and ask them,” Glenn shrugged. “If you can find them.”

Mr. Price glanced around the room and his gaze settled on the faint outline of white frost where the vortex used to be. In an instant he seemed to understand that something had gone terribly wrong. “Where are they?”

“I think they went home,” Robert said.

Glenn nodded. “They had some lemonade and it made them a little jumpy. Too much sugar, I guess. I don’t think they’re coming back.”

Mr. Loomis looked exasperated. “But I need to announce the winners! Everyone’s waiting to hear the results! Sarah needs to be here!”

Mr. Price continued staring at the tapestry until the white frost vanished, and then he turned away in disgust. “I need to make an announcement of my own,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some very bad news.”