SUSANNAH STEWART | PUMPKIN JACK, BLOODY BONES, AND THE BAD CHILDREN, PART FIVE

The Bad Children

Are they a match for Pumpkin Jack or will another child be his downfall

Synopsis of Parts One, Two, Three, and Four

Pumpkin Jack has a plan to save himself and a reluctant Bloody Bones from life as Halloween decorations and to become fierce monsters once more. The other Halloween decorations, Agatha and Phineas Greystone, Ambrose and Oscar Swopes, Jacky O, and Dracula lecture, mock, and plead with Pumpkin Jack to accept his fate. Enraged, he threatens everyone and plans to use the children who visit the cottage in his scheme to get his power back.

If Pumpkin Jack were analytical (which he is not, being the brag first and think later sort) he would put the children who visit Penelope and Ronan’s cottage into three categories.

Muffy and Buffy Haynes and their adoring shadow, Vance Parker, would be Enjoyable/ To Be Used. Charlie and Melanie Harrison would be Boring/ To Be Used. Despite his bluster to the other Halloween decorations, Susannah Stewart would be capital Trouble and headline AVOID.

Being blonde means people decide on sight that you are much prettier and nicer than you really are… Rachel Johnson

“What beautiful children,” was inevitably the first thing out of the mouths of the town ladies when they saw Muffy and Buffy Haynes. The twins had smooth golden hair that fell in silky waves onto sculpted tanned shoulders. Their perfect coiffures framed clear blue eyes, elegant noses, and small rosebud lips held in permanent pouts.

Those blue eyes and golden blonde hair and sweet expressions fooled everyone into thinking they were as kind and pleasant as they looked.

The other children knew the truth. They saw the twins as Mean Girls sauntering to the witch’s theme from The Wizard of Oz.

The twins’ great pleasure in life was targeting other people’s weak points. They specialized in verbal cruelties, embarrassing and shaming at every opportunity. They used Vance for any physical intimidation and bullying.

Muffy and Buffy cared only for each other. A matched set like the pairs of minor villains in the animated Disney films, their treatment of everyone was a spiteful reflection of the behavior of Disney’s tormenting twosomes. The sneaky Siamese cats prancing and preening while setting up Lady in Lady and the Tramp and Ursula’s conniving, eavesdropping eels who spied on Ariel in The Little Mermaid were sisters under the skin with the Haynes twins. Malice shared was malice sweetened and doubled in the wonderful world of Muffy and Buffy.

Melanie, who was both terrified by the twins and craved their acceptance, was their latest plaything. Her little brother, Charlie, was indifferent to their torment. No one except Susannah Stewart understood him.

It was Muffy and Buffy with their cruelty and selfishness who had so energized and enraptured Pumpkin Jack. They were his people, no doubt about that.

Like the Haynes twins that he adored and obeyed, Vance bullied Melanie and Charlie Harrison. But he avoided confrontations with their cousin, Susannah Stewart. Vance had a secret. Susannah had terrified him ever since first grade when he held her hand as they sat in what their teacher, Mrs. Caldwell, called a listening circle, though none of the children listened to anything the teacher said.

He had squeezed her hand and the hand of Melanie, sitting on his other side, as hard as he could. He was mad that he was sitting between those two losers instead of the hallowed ground between Muffy and Buffy Haynes, a place unfairly occupied by Jim and Bob, another pair of losers in his opinion.

Melanie had immediately sniffed and whined, but Susannah had looked straight at him and grinned. The harder he squeezed, the more she beamed, a rapt look of concentration on her face as though she were reading a very absorbing book. Horrified, Vance thought she was reading him, learning all his secrets and fears.

He attempted to loosen his hands. Melanie’s hand fell in her lap, where she cried when she saw her bruised fingers. Still, no matter how he pulled, he could not free himself from Susannah. He realized that now she was doing the squeezing, harder and harder until Vance could no longer feel his fingers. She turned him inside out until she knew everything about him and was scornful of it all. Suddenly she released him, and he had promptly fled.

Since then, Susannah gave a knowing smirk every time she saw him, but as far as he knew, she told no one what she had learned. He thought she was like an evil squirrel sitting on a hoard of nuts. Only instead of nuts, she had the knowledge of his weaknesses tucked away to use against him at a time of her choosing.

His goddesses, Muffy and Buffy, loathed Susannah just as he did, but perhaps unwisely had no fear of her.

The child whose existence Pumpkin Jack planned to ignore, Susannah Stewart, was a different matter entirely from the other children. A total stranger, one never exposed to the firm opinions of the Hickory citizens, might say that she was pretty. If she had smiled a certain way, that same stranger might say that she had a sweet dimpled smile. However, Susannah rarely smiled, though occasionally she grinned and frequently smirked, an annoying expression of superiority that did not endear her to most adults.

Whatever her expression, the town ladies did not happily greet her. Old Mrs. Suiter referred to her as a demon child and crossed the street to avoid meeting her ever since the unfortunate incident on Susannah’s first and only day of preschool at the Cumberland Presbyterian church.

The maiden aunts, Harmony and Dissonance, and Susannah’s grandmother said that the preschool aide should never have left the children alone (supposedly for a quick restroom break) even if another aide was by the closed door and the children were napping.

Mrs. Suiter, then the preschool director, said there never been trouble “until that child darkened the church doors!”

When the aide left the room, Susannah asked the other children if they would like to hear a nice naptime story, and they said yes. It had taken less than five minutes before every child was crying and refusing to go near their blanket and mat, much less take a nap.

Susannah, who had resisted preschool as beneath her in the first place, had “entertained” them by making up a story of monsters that assembled themselves from blankets and mats and wrapped up good, obedient children to take them back to their closet caves where the children had to serve the monsters forever and ever.

Mrs. Suiter would have agreed with Pumpkin Jack that he should avoid Susannah Stewart. She would have said that Susannah was nothing but a smart-aleck meddler who liked to cause trouble. She was partly right. Susannah was a smart-aleck, meddling troublemaker. But, and this was going to be a big problem for Pumpkin Jack, she was also a lot more than that.

To Be Continued Daily Through Halloween

Here is part one.

Here is part two.

Here is part three.

Here is part four.