The Misses Foo & Cockerill

Dumb as a Fern and Evil as an Earwig

Over in Williwaw, way down on Balagan Street where the grass turned brown and the sidewalk cracked, sprawled a spectral muddle of a building: Foo Manor.

No one, not one person, had even been inside Foo Manor. Or the dark forest behind it.

Whispers, too horrible to speak aloud, coursed through the town, rumors about creeping vines and rattling skeletons. But worst of all were the whispers about what the people of Williwaw knew all too well, what they wished were only rumor, the horrors lurking inside the Manor: the Misses Foo and Cockerill.

Before the catfish splatted into Eli's atlas, he was tracing his finger along the Chindwin River, looking for the last place anyone had seen his parents.

He glanced up from where he lay on the library floor in a puddle of sunshine to check on his little sister. Julie had buried herself in a pile of stuffed animals and was giggling quietly, so Eli returned to the map. His parents had been researching a rare plant but hadn't sent a letter in--Eli quickly did the math--fifty-seven days.

Fifty-seven days, Eli thought, and each day Julie's condition only got worse.

Eli was thinking about deep, dark jungles when, with a wet splat and gasping for air, the catfish landed in the middle of the Pagan Kingdom.

He snatched the catfish and ran to the nearest sink, turned on the water, and plugged the drain. He turned to call out, "Whose catfish is this?" but when he did he noticed that the library had erupted into a marine chaos. Catfish burped on tabletops, pike snapped at anything that approached, sunfish flopped hopelessly around the bookshelves. It was if an entire aquarium had been upturned in the library.

Women screamed.

Old men shook their fists and stammered, "Wh-wh-what, wh-wh-who-hooligans!"

Librarians pounded their desks and shouted, "Order!"

And the fish flopped everywhere, gasping for air.

Eli checked to make sure his sister was ok then lowered his goggles and sprang into action. He dodged the screaming women and old men shaking their fists and ran to gather the fish.

By the time he had rounded up the last one (a sunfish flopping pathetically under the biography section), the library had more or less calmed down. Eli breathed deeply and raised his goggles just in time to see two figures–one short and fat, the other tall and skinny–disappear out the front door. He could have sworn they were laughing.

"Rotten old spinsters!" somebody yelled as the door swung closed.

"Who were they?" Eli asked Miss Wendy.

Miss Wendy held up a dripping copy of Who's Who in Whoville and shook her head.

"A bane on this town."

Eli picked up the atlas he had been reading. A large, wet stain spread out over most of Champa. He handed it back to Miss Wendy.

"Sorry," he said.

"It's not your fault, dear. Oh! The book you ordered came in." She lifted a heavy green volume off a shelf behind her desk and then frowned at it. The book was positively soaked with water.

Eli bit his lip. "I think I'd like it anyway," he said, reaching for it. "But Miss Wendy..."

"Yes, dear?"

"Who were they?"

"You mean you don't know? They are the two most evil, diabolical, villainous, nefarious, despicable, vile, iniquitous," (Miss Wendy had a rather large vocabulary. She was a librarian after all), "excuses for human beings in the whole of Williwaw County. And environs."

"Yes, but who?" Eli insisted.

"The Misses Foo and Cockerill."

***

Miss Vaingloria Beatrice Cockerill was a reasonably attractive woman, excessively skinny and rosy-cheeked. She had a long, thin neck and a small, thin mouth and wore dresses with a big sash tied around the middle in a bow to accentuate her figure. Her hair poked out from the sides of her head like carrots. She never left home without a parasol so her skin was creamy as butter. Some people might have considered her lovely except for one thing: her eyes. Her eyes were as vacant as a fallow field. Those vacant eyes expressed an indisputable truth: Miss Cockerill was dumb. She was a box full of broken Crayolas. She was a few flapjacks short of a breakfast. Dumb as a sack of potatoes. Dumb as a fern, and that's not saying a lot for the fern. She was also nasty and selfish and hated when anyone touched her things. But she had one burning desire: Miss Cockerill wanted to get married. Unfortunately for her, but fortunately for the men of Williwaw, she was deathly afraid of husbands. Despite this, and because she was reasonably attractive, some men might have overlooked her shortcomings, if it weren't for the company she kept.

All the nasty that Miss Cockerill was on the inside, Miss Dorothy Lumpkin Foo was on the outside. She was shaped like a bush and was about as tall, with a horrid, twisted face and mismatched eyes. One gaped at you in a wide, disconcerting stare, as though its lids were pulled apart by clothespins. It stared straight through you, at your lungs, your heart, your spine. The other squinted, shrewd and scrutinizing as though it could see your thoughts, your fears, your soul.

Miss Foo had wiry hair, which she piled high on top of her head to make herself taller. And although it wasn't Christmas she wore a horrid old Christmas sweater. She wore it so often that many of the sequins and mistletoe had fallen off, leaving the sweater riddled with holes. In fact, the only time she ever took it off was at Christmas, which she claimed to be, "A holiday for buffoons and buffoonery." Miss Foo never went out without her walking stick, which she claimed she needed because she had bad knees, but which she really used to hit small children and puppies. Overall she looked like your Aunt Harris, if your Aunt Harris shrunk a foot, grew hair from her ears, and smelt like putrid milk.

But that wasn't even the worst part of Miss Foo. Oh, no. You see Miss Foo also had a shrewd and cruel mind, evil as an earwig. Miss Foo was the vilest thing to ever crawl out of a hole, sletch out of the mud, or lumber from the sea. She was the town boogeyman, an all-too-real terror from a children's tale. And when naughty sons or daughters refused to go to bed, their mothers would say simply, "Miss Foo will get you," and their eyes closed immediately, even if they weren't tired.

What Miss Foo wanted, more than anything, even more than a moat around Foo Manor, was chaos. You see Miss Foo wasn't like most people when they get old. When most people get old they want peace and quiet. They'll tell you that too, if you don't believe me. Go ahead, go ask your mom right now, ask her what she wants. She'll tell you, "Peace and quiet." But Miss Foo wasn't most people and she didn't want peace and quiet. She wanted chaos. Disturbance. Hullaballoo. Racket, uproar, ruckus, commotion. She liked to make a big stink and liked that stink to be as fetid as possible. She despised order and peace and always ruined any she found.

Whenever Miss Foo stumbled upon peace and quiet that one gaping eye would twinkle with mischief while the squinty one schemed. The left side of her mouth would twist up in an evil Foo-ish grin. That's why if you ever saw Miss Foo grinning her nasty Foo-ish grin, you knew something really terrible was about to happen somewhere nearby and to run as fast as you could.

***

And had Eli known any better, as soon as he saw the Misses walk into the library, he would have run as fast as he could. But Eli didn't know any better. And he hadn't run. And Williwaw would never be the same again.