3
His mouth reading silently the words he was seeing, Herman was reading the newspaper as Lily crocheted another blanket out of the fine gossamer threads of spider's webs she collected. She listened to Herman chuckle a bit at Little Orphan Annie or another comic strip struck his funny bone then looked up and grinned as Marilyn appeared and showed them the outfit she was wearing on her date. Her blouse was virgin white and her black pleated skirt hung down to the calves of her legs. Her button down baby blue sweater had wide pockets for her to put her hands in to keep warm. Glancing up warmly, Lily looked it over realizing it was something she wouldn't be caught dead wearing.
"How do you like it, Aunt Lily?" Marilyn was proud of her new blouse and skirt. "Think it makes me look too conservative?"
"Oh, well," Lily looked to Herman nervously. How do you compliment someone who looked so… ordinary? "It goes so well with your... blonde hair."
"I really think this boy likes me." Marilyn continued as her aunt and uncle shared more secret gazes. "We've been friends for years, but we've never really dated. He's taking me to the movies, and I'm hoping for a small bite afterward."
"A small bite?" Herman grinned. "Sounds like he takes after Grandpa..." He chuckled a bit.
"I don't know about that." Marilyn added as she swung her shoes. "But I do know the shoes I wanted to wear are broken." She held up one black sling-back shoe with a broken off heel. "Do you think Grandpa will fix it for me?" She remained optimistically cheerful for this date.
"Of course, honey, he's in the lab with Eddie." Lily gestured briefly to the open trap door in the far corner of the dimly lit room. Behind her, Marilyn turned past her Uncle Herman on the sofa and briefly braced herself on the trapdoor to the laboratory in the basement of the house. Stepping through the mist coming up from the cold damp air under the house, she descended down into her grandfather's lab by way of a winding subterranean passageway left over from a previous structure on the property.
"I hope this young man is better behaved than that Coleman boy." Lily mentioned knowingly.
"I agree." Herman looked up and smirked in disapproval. "Imagine, showing off by jumping through a closed glass window... He could have waited for me to open it first!"
"Grandpa," Down below, Marilyn descended the twisting brick staircase down into the lab. It was a dark and cavernous room fifteen feet under the mansion over their heads. Dark, dank and slightly cloudy, it reminded her of the witch's scene from "Macbeth." The only lights were from the electrical transformers, flames of Bunsen burners and a large black cauldron on a burning fire illuminating shelves of chemicals and powders, some with luminescent properties. Over all of it, a flapping shadow in the form of Grandpa's pet bat, Igor, circled the room in a perfect circle as if he was searching for the way out of this cellar. Down below, her little cousin, Eddie, sat on the large wooden table that served as her grandpa's workspace, now crowded with old electronics, the debris of devices stripped for parts and the empty cases of incomplete inventions.
"Grandpa," Marilyn looked with pride to her grandfather. "Could you fix my heel for me?" She held it forward hoping for a small miracle.
"Of course," Grandpa stood going through his inventory took her small favor and fit the heel briefly into its proper place. "Anything for my favorite grand-daughter."
"She's your only grand-daughter." Eddie responded and looked over the table of parts, electrical detritus and forgotten parts. He noticed the glass chamber of a ray gun he had only seen a few years before and started pulling it closer to get a better look at it. Freeing it from the fracas of parts around it, he pulled and changed the settings on the gun as Grandpa took the shoe and heel and gestured widely with them in two parts and toss them into the air. Within one poof of smoke and some psychokinetic glue, the two pieces were united once more as one and landed as a single shoe once more.
"Voila," Grandpa grinned exuberantly. "Let Houdini top that."
"Thanks, Grandpa." She kissed the often-eccentric old man and heard the nonsensical noise of a male cousin pretending to fire a fake laser at her, but it wasn't a fake laser. It was one of her Grandpa's old forgotten inventions. Eddie aimed the gun for her and shot her with it with vocal sound effect noises. Marilyn returned a look of juvenile wonder at him.
"Don't worry, sweetheart." Grandpa beamed to her. "That's my old invisible ray gun. It doesn't even work anymore. I can still see you, can't I?"
"I guess." Marilyn braced on the table and started pulling her shoes onto her feet. "I'm just a little nervous going out tonight. I haven't seen anyone since Russell ran away."
"I remember him." The elderly vampire thought back. "The second he saw Herman, he ran screaming from the house... Must have been late for a bus or something..." Grandpa watched her struggling with her shoe. Marilyn stood perplexed as she twisted and turned the shoe to her foot, but it looked a size or two too small. It just resisted covering both sides of her foot at the same time.
"That's funny," Marilyn remarked. "I wore these shoes just a few days ago. They can't be too small already." She checked it. "Grandpa," She grinned thinking he was playing a joke on her. "Did you shrink my shoe a little or something?"
"Shrink your shoe?" Grandpa perplexingly looked upon her size seven shoe curiously and then had a thought as he turned and investigated the gun Eddie had been playing with. "Oh no! This isn't my invisible ray gun; it's my matter-enlarger!"
"You mean the one you used to turn me into a little person." Eddie recalled that incident, and Grandpa looked back to Marilyn. She was now as tall as he was! Slowly realizing what was happening, she looked down upon her clothes very slowly becoming taut on her body and noticed her sleeve very gradually pulling down her arm, receding past her wrist and tightening around her arm. It felt like it was for a smaller person. Wondering if her clothing was shrinking, she felt the ribbon in her hair pop off her head and flitter to the floor. After all these years, she had seen her uncle, her cousin and even her grandfather turned into various things, but now, it was different. It was happening to her!
"Grandpa!" Her eyes widened in stunned surprise. "Not this! Not now!" She felt seams popping and exploding. The room was gradually decreasing in size around her. She was as tall as her Uncle Herman and getting taller!
"I don't get it." Eddie asked. "What's going on?"
"Eddie," Grandpa pulled him down from the work table and prodded the lad forward to the stairs, refusing to look back as he heard fabric ripping then his grand-daughter pleading terrified under breath as her own body turned against her. "Upstairs, quick, it's going to get crowded!'
"Crowded?"
"Oh-boy, crowded!" Grandpa tried to think of a worse word while Marilyn forced herself to accept what was happening.
"Grandpa! Stop it!" Marilyn tried keeping her sweater on as it came off in two pieces, leaving her covered for now in a depleting white blouse and a skirt now falling to the floor from her waist. "Please not now!" She looked over as her grandfather pushed Eddie up the stairs to the living room. "Grandpa, don't leave me!" Her long arm was as big as a telephone pole as she reached to him pushing Eddie up to the parlor. She paused seeing how long it now appeared in the room decreasing in size around her. Her head hit the ceiling of the cellar followed by her shoulder then her upper back. Igor had stopped flying and had come to his perch, hanging upside down and watching in stunned silence.
"Grandpa..." Upstairs, Lily stood looking down the hole as Eddie emerged. "What's going on? Why's Marilyn screaming?"
"Well," The old man pushed Eddie out of the way. "Let me put it like this: how would you like a big family?"
"What do you mean by that?" Herman glanced over as the floor under the sofa lifted it up almost a foot. He looked around as Grandpa yelled down the steps.
"Marilyn, slump!" He called to her. "You're going to come through the floor!"
"Oh, I get it," Eddie realized what was happening. "Marilyn got bigger than pop! That's so cool! All Googie's sister could do is have a baby. Wait'll I tell him about this!"
Lily shot her father a dirty look.
"Grandpa," Herman stood up as the sofa lowered to the floor. "You've got too far. Experimenting on Eddie is one thing, but experimenting on..."
"Somebody help me!" Marilyn's voice boomed louder than Herman's from the lab. She was possibly loud enough that the Carradines and the Fischers over on Piedmont two blocks over could hear her. Forced to "Alice In Wonderland" proportions, she was slightly twisted on to her side in an uncomfortable posture, one arm pinned under her chest, the other extended along the wall of transformers with her hand filling Grandpa's storage room. She thought she'd be safe trying to stay on the end of the lab, but as she started filling the room even further, her legs started pushing her unwittingly into Grandpa's work space, and when she tried shifted her weight a little, the foundation of the house cracked under her. She felt she was trapped in the floorboards of the house or nailed up inside a dollhouse or entombed under her bed as she slowly realized there wasn't a stitch of anything covering her anymore. She began silently weeping… Now she knew how Allison Hayes felt like in that movie….
"It was an accident." Grandpa looked from daughter to son-in-law and back again before kicking the trap door closed to keep Eddie from looking down there. "I guess there was still one last charge left in the gun." He scratched his head abashedly then turned to his daughter "Lily, quick, run to the attic and get fat grandma's wedding dress. It just may fit her."
"Why?" Lily asked fearful of the truth and hesitant to hear it. "Why does Marilyn need Grandma's dress?"
"Wait a minute," Herman looked down on his doddering father-in-law as he heard Marilyn weeping through the floor. "You mean, she's down there... and she's... as well?"
"Of course," Grandpa was dead serious. "What did you think? They grew with her?!" Lily shrieked at the sound of the news and turned away gracefully upset to retrieve her mother's wedding dress.
"Grandpa!" She muttered on her way to the attic. "This is the worst thing you've ever done... "
"Rotten mad scientist!" Herman yelled at his father-in-law as the former vampire rolled his eyes to the ceiling.
"Rotten mad scientist?" Grandpa stared his son-in-law down. "I may be the ONLY one who can change her back!"
"And how are you going to do it?"
"I haven't got the foggiest idea, so there!" Grandpa scoffed back at Herman out of ego, crossed his arms and listened to his grand-daughter crying from through the floor. What was wrong with this family?
