Chapter 7: Io Malbonaj

It was dark. So dark she couldn't see, but she felt like she was moving, and she could feel Reggie's back pressed into hers and Bob was still at her side.

“I think I’m going to barf,” Reggie whined and Lulu knew if he did, she would too, and that could get very unpleasant. She had no idea where they were but they were suspended, so she had to assume they were flying. Maybe they'd be flying through the sky with puke spewing everywhere. It would rain puke for the people underneath them, and the weatherman would have some interesting things to talk about that night on the news. “There were light winds and clear skies today over Walla Walla, with slight puke showers during the afternoon.”

What if it got the witch puking too? If witches puke, Lulu theorized, it was probably way worse than ordinary puke. Maybe it would make weird magic things happen. That would be interesting. Bob would probably even start in if it came to that. Picturing all that puke was not helping.

As she mulled her options, pureed them, even, it occurred to Lulu that she probably shouldn’t scream, as the witch could drop them at any second and they would fall to the earth and die, if indeed they were above the earth. Most likely they'd splat on the ground like squished bugs, and it would be such a mess nobody would ever know who all that blood and guts started as. That would definitely be on the news. Maybe it would even make it on one of those TV shows about real life mysteries. That would be kind of cool, as long as she could come back as a ghost and watch it. If she and Reggie were ghosts, she realized, she could torment him all she wanted because their parents wouldn't be able to see them, which would be weird.

One reassuring thing occurred to Lulu. The witch had told them she wanted to make them taco slaves. Didn't that mean she wouldn't drop them? Lulu used to think the best part about being a witch must be the flying. She was beginning to change her mind. Then again, if she were able to fly herself, she wouldn’t be so scared of being dropped and she could probably escape and fly back to Walla Walla. What was bad was being captured and flown places under duress, or when you really don’t want to, and in the dark, she decided. And worse when it was done by a witch with red and white snakes for hair.

Lulu could hardly believe her eyes when, in the blackness, a light streaked into view and there appeared a real UFO, which came to hover beside them. It was saucer-shaped and shiny silver. Actually, it looked a bit like a giant silver sombrero, like the ones the mariachis at Taco World wore. Red and blue lights flashed along its edges. It was just hovering there in the sky, silent and strange. She wondered if all the people on the ground were seeing it too, but then reminded herself that she didn't even know if they were above any ground. Her brain felt like it was spinning in her skull.

Lulu could see the faces of the gray aliens staring through the windows at her with their big bug eyes. She could hardly believe what she was seeing. She hadn’t really believed they even existed and Jake assured her they absolutely didn’t, just as he'd done with witches. Maybe he knew about the UFOs too.[51]

“Help us. We’re being kidnapped,” she called out as loudly as she could.

“Don’t bother, my pretty, they only speak Esperanto,”[52]the witch said from someplace she couldn't see. “Ĉi tiuj estas la infanoj mi dir al vi pri.”[53]

The aliens just stared. Lulu was not convinced they spoke Esperanto any better than English. For all she knew, she reminded herself, the witch didn’t either and was just obfuscating again.

“If you know about them, why did you say there was no such thing as UFOs?” Lulu asked the witch, closing her eyes tightly to shut out the horror of the current situation.

“Because I like to lie to kids. They don’t call me 'wicked' for nothing. And besides, how will you ever learn anything if nobody lies to you?”

“How can we learn things by being lied to? It doesn’t make any sense,” Lulu replied.

“Oh, yes it does. It’s the most important principle of education.[54]You have to learn at a young age not to believe everything you’re told and to think for yourself,” the witch explained. "After you've been told enough lies and figured them out, you'll be immune to believing almost anything."

“You’re even meaner than Cybil,” Lulu told the witch. For some reason this seemed to delight her.

“Waaaaaaa, haaaaaa, haaaaa, haaaaaa,” the witch howled. “Who do you think taught Cybil everything she knows about wickidity? She’s my daughter after all.” Lulu was shocked. She hadn’t known that her cousin Cybil was the daughter of the witch, but it sure did explain a few things. She was widely known for her ill temper and haughty demeanor. But worse, if Cybil was the daughter of the witch, that meant that Caleb must be her son. Lulu could hardly comprehend how this could be. Caleb was as nice as he was normal. Well, aside from his weird red running shoe theories. Why had her cousins never mentioned their mother? It was all too confusing. Apparently, they shared the family’s penchant for secrets.

“Looks like we've arrived,” the witch's voice informed them from somewhere in the darkness. A glowing rainbow rectangle appeared before them. They floated through it and were set down. Lulu and Reggie struggled to stay upright. Their brains felt like they were still thrashing in their boney buckets. The ground, which was all she could focus on in her disoriented state, was asphalt. She tried to look around but had to take it slowly.

Lulu started to notice lots and lots of trash strewn all over the place. “What’s with all the litter?” she asked.

“That’s what we do in West Texas. No more fancy pantsy hoity toity trash cans for you. That’s what God made the ground for.”

“That isn’t true,” Lulu pointed out. “Haven’t you ever heard the slogan ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’? That’s an anti-littering campaign. I know because I read about it in a magazine.”

“Well, it used to be,” the witch explained. “When I arrived here I cursed the place so that everyone forgot that, and now they think it’s just an expression of state pride, so they went back to littering. Ironic, eh?”[55]

Lulu was in quite a dilemma. This witch was even worse than Jake said, and lately he had a lot to say on the subject, too. He’d even called her a ‘black sheep,’ which seemed odd since she was clearly not a sheep and, though wearing black, her outfit didn’t appear to be wool. The real meaning of ‘black sheep,’ as she’d later find out (by looking it up in the dictionary), was a family member nobody much wanted to discuss because of that person’s questionable actions. Now, that made sense. Lulu’s dilemma sprung from the fact that although the witch did seem horrid, Jake also had begun to seem a bit less wonderful than he’d led her to believe he was, which cast his opinions on the witch in a different light. Nevertheless, she was being kidnapped and intended to act accordingly.

“You're a nasty old gorgon,” Lulu said to her evil aunt. She would normally get in trouble for calling an adult a bad thing like that, but this was a special case.

“I am, rather, aren't I?” The witch looked pleased. She ran her fingers through her snakes and the snakes writhed in apparent pleasure at her touch. So gross.

[51]Didn't, doesn't, won't.

[52]Esperanto is a language made up by L.L. Zamenhof in the 1880s, a universal second language to foster harmony and international understanding. There are between one and two million speakers of Esperanto in the world. The 1965 movie Incubus starring William Shatner was made entirely in Esperanto.

[53]Translation: “These are the children I told you about.”

[54]Wicked portmanteau: eduvaricate- to educate by means of feeding the target lies and misinformation. Among wickidity practitioners it's considered the most effective method, particularly when the lies and misinformation are contradictory, as this creates a condition of profound ambiguity forcing the student to struggle for answers or go bonkers. It also creates a student who refuses to believe anything it is told without absolute proof, which imbues the student with absolute immunity to many forms of both nonsense and truth and eventually leads to being able to consciously holding conflicting beliefs without any ill effect.

[55]Irony is a situation that is exactly opposite of what one would expect. State pride might make some want to keep the state clean, but in the case of Texas, led to littering.