Wax (36 page)

Dud gestured at the hole in the roof. “Beauty before age.”

Jill sat down and dangled her feet through the hole. “What about her?” she asked, nodding at Poppy.

Dud let out the loudest, coldest Madame Grosholtz laugh yet, kicking the Tackety Wax tube in her direction.

“Leave her.”

With that, Jill disappeared into the hole, her feet clanging as she landed on the catwalk. Dud hopped in behind her, never glancing back.

∗ ∗ ∗

Poppy stood alone on the roof, stunned. A wind whipped across the roof, chilling her right down to her devastated bones.

How had it all gone so wrong?

No​—​she knew exactly how it had all gone wrong.

Jill wasn't Jill.

Dud wasn't Dud.

And Poppy had failed.

Again.

∗ ∗ ∗

She was back on the stage of Radio City Music Hall. The shiny, slick floor felt cold on her cheek. Her ankle throbbed where she had twisted it. Her head rang.

Time had stopped; every person in the theater held their breath, the air itself billowing with anticipation, peppered with the staccato shouts of worried audience members and production assistants.

She felt a drop of blood trickle down her face.

She closed her eyes.

Her career, her future, her life​—​

It was all over.

∗ ∗ ∗

But . . .

But they'd done everything right. The Plan had gone off without a hitch. Every member of the Giddy Committee had played their part. All the animate Hollows had been destroyed. With the exception of Jill,
everything had gone exactly right.

Poppy let out a small gasp.

Wait.

Everything
had
gone right.

All the animate Hollows had been destroyed.

No one was left to relight the Chandlers' flames.

Dud had led Jill into the tank. But why take the dangerous catwalk route instead of going down the staircase, the same way they'd come up?

Dud had kicked the Tackety Wax toward her. But why? Madame Grosholtz wouldn't have noticed it lying there, wouldn't have had any reason to kick it.

The voice coming out of Dud hadn't been Madame Grosholtz's at all.

∗ ∗ ∗

Get up.

Still lying on the stage, she didn't know where the voice had come from. The shouts were growing louder now. Someone had called for a medic. No one had cut the music, which kept playing, mocking her.

Yet there it was, a voice cutting clear through the static, booming through her head.

GET. UP.

Maybe her career had ended before it began. Maybe her future had been cut adrift like a balloon, floating wildly up and away into unknown territory. And her life​—​well, it would take a lot of work to put it back together, but she could do it. She'd have to.

With a burst of unstoppable energy, she got to her feet.

The show must go on.

∗ ∗ ∗

Poppy did not give herself time to think. She couldn't. She had a job to do: cross off the last item of The Plan. Wrenching herself from the spot she'd been rooted to, she grabbed the Tackety Wax, tiptoed back to the hole, laid out the plastic tarp, and carefully glued it down along the edges, creating an airtight seal.

She pounded down the metal stairs of the tank to the large red button that stuck out of its wall. Her hand wavered over it, her brain screaming at her to push it, but her heart screaming louder not to.

Because she knew what was on the other side of that wall.

Dud. Not Madame Grosholtz. The real Dud. Her Dud.

Who had heard enough Madame Grosholtz in his memories to know how she spoke.

Who had picked up a lot more acting skills from the Giddy Committee than they ever could have realized.

Dud, among his waxy brethren.

Urging her to push the button.

Telling her it would be okay.

And probably waving.

8:20 a.m.: Melt all Hollows in the reinsulated tank

25

THE FIRST THING POPPY HEARD WAS SCREECHES OF TERROR.

Not from Tank #2​—​the second she pushed the button, she fled down the hill, past the ruins of Madame Grosholtz's studio, all the way to the front of the candle factory store.

She must have looked a fright, all wild-eyed and blotchy from crying, but hardly any of the tourists threw a glance her way; they were streaming out of the main entrance in droves, fleeing to the parking lot. Old people held fluttering hands to their chests. Mothers pushed their screaming children's faces to their thighs to shield them from the horrors inside.

Poppy, fighting against the traffic, pushed her way in.

Chaos now ruled the Grosholtz Candle Factory. The floor was littered with broken glass and abandoned fudge. The massive surge required to turn on the storage tank's heat must have knocked the store's power out, because the lights were off. Store maps had been tossed hither and yon with a lack of ceremony that must have made Barbara furious. Vermonty lay on the ground, helpless, flailing, unable to get up because of the bulky suit.

Poppy took pity on the poor state and helped him to his feet. He muttered a thank-you and tottered directly into a wall, then fell back into the streaming masses and was carried via collective momentum out the exit.

Poppy kept on pushing through the hordes until finally she could see what it was they were running from.

The diorama.

The air-conditioned display, now robbed of its climate control, had quickly grown too warm for its citizenry to survive. The farmers' waxy flesh melted away from the metal armature that served as their bones, glass eyes drooping in their sockets, plinking to the ground and rolling around like marbles.

But the melting wax figures, as scary as they looked, weren't what the tourists were screaming at.

They were screaming at the corpses.

Some of the figures' waxy outer shells did not reveal metal frames beneath. Some of the figures' shells​—​eight, to be exact​—​melted away to reveal:

Rotting flesh.

Human bones.

And plenty of blood.

Poppy gaped in horror, identifying features that were recognizable even in death​—​a strong chin, a ski-slope nose, a garden gnome paunch​—​

Poppy kept frantically scanning the kidnapped victims until an eerie, creaking noise sounded from above. She looked up. For a split second she saw it happen​—​the plastic repair patch of Tank #1 ripping down the middle, then finally detaching altogether.

She ran from the glass-domed roof just seconds before it imploded.

A deafening, splintering noise shook the store as the glass shattered and thousands of gallons of Potion poured through the now-open dome. Poppy grabbed the leg of a café table and held tight as it surged through the store, shattering the diorama's glass. When it stopped a minute or so later and she staggered to her feet, the liquid came up to her knees.

The drenched storegoers thrashed about like panicked fish, groping for help, while the diorama figures floated in the fetid liquid, corpses mixing with sculptures mixing with tourists, all taking on the same pale, waxy look in the milky Potion. The shoppers rose up in a chorus of agony, moaning, one of them grabbing Poppy's ankle and crawling up her leg.

“Fudge,” the thing rasped. “Fuuudge . . .”

Poppy scooped a glob of wax off the groper's face​—​and gasped.

“Jill?”

26

“
IF THERE IS ONE THING THAT TREADING POTION FOR TWENTY-FOUR
hours with nothing to sustain me but my own will to survive has taught me to appreciate, it's the humble appetizer,” said Jill. “So beautiful in its simplicity. A fry . . . a ring . . . a stick . . . a finger . . .”

Poppy gazed out upon the Friendly's appetizer landscape that had overtaken their table. “Nothing simple about this.”

“Oh, shut up, traitor.”

“Would you stop calling me that?”

“Sorry, but I still can't believe you thought it was me,” Jill said, inserting a waffle fry into her mouth. “I'd like to think that my best friend​—​my
best friend
in the
entire world
—​would have at least gotten tipped off that something was amiss. That her best friend had been replaced by a
wad of inanimate material.
”

“I think we've firmly established that there was nothing inanimate about any of this,” Poppy said, reaching over to Jill's Munchie Mania basket to steal a mozzarella stick.

“No!” Jill stabbed a fork at her, defending her mountain of fried food. “The doctor said I need to fatten up!”

“And she prescribed a deep-fried diet, did she?”

“Not exclusively. Frozen dairy treats are encouraged as well.”

Greg danced over to the table to deliver the extra bottle of ketchup Jill had requested. “Anything else I can get for you two?” he asked in an almost awestruck voice. The level of local celebrity to which all members of the Giddy Committee had risen over the past week was rivaling Poppy's in her
Triple Threat
days. Connor had been offered his own public-access television show. Banks was doing cabaret shows on Friday nights at the bowling alley lounge. “Another round of chicken fingers?”

“Greg,” Jill said seriously, looking him dead in the eye, “another
three
rounds.”

“Right-io!”

“I can't believe you suspected him,” Jill said, dumping half the ketchup bottle onto her platter. “The man is one of a kind. Inimitable. Kind of like
me,
or so I thought.”

“
I know.
Geez. Are you going to lord this over me forever?”

“Nah.” Jill smirked and pointed at the
NO LONGER TRAUMATIZED
T-shirt Poppy had given her. “I'm over it. Mr. Crawford, on the other hand . . . I don't think he'll
ever
forgive you.”

“Drat. I was so close to sealing the deal.”

“I'm telling you, Poppy​—​over the course of a full day of panicking and screaming for help and making peace with our God, he still made time to curse your name. On an hourly basis. Like clockwork. Even
I
thought it was excessive.”

Poppy let out a small puff of laughter​—​but it lasted only a second, dissolving into the morose funk that had infused the town over the past week. “Someone's got to pick up where Blake left off,” she said darkly.

Mr. Crawford and Jill had escaped relatively unscathed, since they had been the most recent kidnapped victims​—​but no one else had been as lucky. Mrs. Goodwin, Smitty, Colt Lamberty, Principal Lincoln, Big Bob, Miss Bea, and Blake Bursaw​—​all dead and gone, with nothing for anyone to remember them by but the limited-edition candles that bore their scents.

It was a tragedy of epic proportions.

Which made it all the more infuriating that it was being swept under the rug.

Of course the town council wanted to keep it secret. If the Grosholtz Candle Factory went under, half the people in town would lose their jobs​—​and the other half would lose so many profitable tourist dollars that Paraffin's economy would all but collapse. So the interim mayor had gathered everyone together for a meeting​—​everyone who had been touched by the recent events at the Grosholtz Scandal Factory, as he called it, and not a soul more​—​to swear a vow of secrecy and to discuss strategies for how they should spin this story. After all, they were in a very lucky position​—​other than the Giddy Committee and those who had been kidnapped, there were no other witnesses. Townspeople may have noticed odd goings-on here and there and wondered why their loved ones were acting so strangely, but no one had
seen
evidence of the immortal wax demons. Nobody had proof. And as long as the legend of the Hollow Ones remained just that​—​a legend​—​Paraffin could continue selling the wholesome small-town Vermont image to visitors far and wide.

And so the strategy was fairly straightforward: Tell no one. Leak nothing to the media. Hush everything up; keep it all local. “It'll be our little secret,” the interim mayor said with a wink.

As for the dead folk? They'd fallen ill and died after an outbreak of salmonella traced back to the yeast in improperly cooked bagels, just as Dr. Steve had warned. Smitty certainly wouldn't be able to defend himself. In making the café the scapegoat, the town council successfully diverted blame from the Grosholtz Candle Factory as best they could . . . but there was still the problem of what the tourists had seen that day in the store.

It was Poppy who had come up with the horror-movie alibi. That ghastly scene with the diorama, with all the decomposing corpses? The Chandlers were filming a movie; signs were posted on the doors as you walked into the store​—​you probably just don't remember seeing them. That contaminated-candle exposé that Banks and Louisa released? Part of the movie. Where were the Chandlers now? Certainly not trapped in liquid form in the storage tank up on the hill. They'd moved on to bigger and better things . . . in Hollywood!

And so once again Poppy had done what she did best: direct.

“To your masterpiece,” Jill said, toasting with her milk shake. “Tell me: How does it end? I love spoilers.”

“I don't know,” Poppy said with a bitter edge to her voice, swirling her soup around the bowl. “Something super cheesy.
And they all lived waxily ever after.
”

“That blows. I'd demand a refund.”

Poppy snickered. Who knew what sort of future she would direct for herself? She couldn't fathom it. The craziest fantasy she could think up held just as much possibility as anything else.