Mazkin reached a hand into the barrel and scooped out a handful of the stuff. It should have stuck to his hands and made a mess but it didn’t. The monster’s maroon hands and black claws remained spotless as he rolled the Base into a ball.
Then he held it out to Vita. “Are you ready for your very first world-building lesson?”
She nodded and reached to take the Base from him. She was surprised by the solidness of it—it was very much like the clay she’d molded during her brief affair with pottery at age seven.
“Now hold the Base in your hands,” Mazkin instructed, “and close your eyes.”
Vita did, noting the Base was a bit cold.
“Now I’d like you to imagine a red ball. Just a simple red ball, nothing fancy. I want you to think of how that ball would feel in your hands, the weight of it, the smell of the rubber. Do you have it in your mind?” She nodded. “All right. Now I want you to push the image as hard as you can at your hands. Just imagine the force of it flying right out of your head and into your hands, like a wave of energy.”
She wasn’t entirely sure what Mazkin meant, but tried her best to do as he asked. She clenched her eyes shut and saw dots behind her eyelids. Each dot became a red bouncing ball she tried to imagine dropping out of her forehead and into her hands, replacing the ball of Base there.
“Peebles does have the eye, doesn’t he?” Mazkin said after a few moments with a smile in his voice.
She opened her eyes and looked down. She held a red ball in her hands, precisely like the one she’d imagined. Her hands ran over and over it, still not quite believing. She threw it to the ground, expecting it to smoosh flat the way clay would. But it bounced right back up into her hand.
Out of everything Vita had seen, a red bouncy ball should not have been the thing to completely undo her. But everything else she had seen had been the work of someone else. This was Vita’s first contribution to the magic of Moorhouse, her first bit of evidence that she would be able to do the miraculous things Peebles had brought her here to do. She looked at the endless rows of barrels and thought how someday, their contents wouldn’t be an ocean of grayish mud.
They would be Whirlyton.
“Vita,” Melina whispered in her ear, and the one word conveyed all the wonder and joy the girl felt in that moment.
Mazkin met Vita’s awed smile with a knowing one. He picked up the piece of yellowing paper from the shelf and held it out to Vita. She took it and shook it open with her free hand. It was blank on both sides.
“I know it may not look like one now, but this is a map,” he explained. “It will fill as you build and let you know how much ground you have left to cover.” He chuckled a little at Vita’s furrowed brow. “It’ll make more sense once you start building, I promise. Let’s see, what else … the doors across the hall will lead you back to the Mess Hall when you get hungry, and there’s a washroom beyond that.”
Mazkin clapped his hands together with a sense of resolution. “And that’s everything! Now I’ll leave you to get acquainted.” He pointed a clawed finger at her. “Just remember, that ball only felt like nothing because it was. The more detailed the build, the more energy it will take. So pace yourself.” He winked one hazel eye at her, as though he knew she wouldn’t heed his warning and was amused by it. “Have fun, Vita.”
He turned to go but Vita reached out to catch his furry wrist. “What about the other children?” she asked. “When will I meet them?”
“Oh, you’ll meet them soon enough,” was all he said. He gave her one last grin and turned around again. He nodded at Harper on his way out and Harper narrowed his eyes like he was still making up his mind about Mazkin.
It was only after Mazkin had been gone a few minutes, and Vita had bounced the ball a dozen more times, that it occurred to her to ask Melina about her time in the office. “What were you two talking about in there before?” she asked, still bouncing the ball with one hand and holding her blank map in the other.
Melina blinked her lashes a few times, her frown from earlier returning. “Not much, really,” she replied. “He just told me to help you hold onto your name.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
NEW FRIENDS
Vita started when she heard a loud noise like an engine revving and the red ball dropped out of her hand. It bounced a few times before landing on a shelf and sliding between two barrels. She followed Harper out the Supply Closet’s doorway, using one hand to keep Melina from falling off her shoulders as she ran while the other still held the blankest map the girl had ever seen.
At first all she could see in the distance on the Dream Chamber’s floor was a trail of white smoke making a line straight for them. Then she could pick out a blur of a large, single wheel rolling. The rainbow snake’s features quickly came into view and Vita swallowed when Spiral showed no sign of slowing. With a screech his wheel form banked to the side and spun around in circles a few times, close enough to Vita, Melina, and Harper to send a sharp breeze and a whiff of smoke past them.
Spiral’s breath was short and his long tongue hung out of the side of his mouth as he panted. “This … room … is … completely … absurd,” he gasped. He sounded more impressed than exasperated. He came to a stop beside Harper and leaned against the bear’s side. Harper reached down to pat the snake’s head at the center of the wheel.
“Hey Spiral,” Vita greeted him. “Did you find any walls? There aren’t supposed to be any for miles.”
Spiral nodded and cocked his head to their left in the direction from which he’d come. “Yep, one made of that dark wood way over that way.”
Vita faced the direction he indicated. She opened the compass around her neck and watched its needle spin. It was behaving more like a regular compass now, albeit an oddly marked one. “So that’s … west. The west wall. Which would make this,” she turned toward the nearby entrance, “the north wall.” She frowned, her city girl’s sense of direction rebelling at the wrongness of it all. If they were in the building’s South Wing, then the wall to her left should have been the south wall, not the west, and the north wall the east.
Her compass hadn’t worked outside the Dream Chamber. Did this room adhere to some alternate sense of direction? Drozlin’s, perhaps?
Melina looked down at the compass over Vita’s shoulder. “You can turn clay into whatever you want here, love. Monsters teach the classes. I don’t know why you keep expecting anything about this place to make sense.”
“It’s not a bad point,” Harper contributed.
Vita agreed, though she couldn’t help but grin at the fact that a sixteen-legged cat and a gray bear the size of a food truck were lecturing her on what did and didn’t make sense.
“Speaking of which,” Melina said. “Would you mind using that clay trick of yours to give me something to climb? It’s only because your shoulders seem to be getting a little tired, and…” The caterpillar trailed off with a glance toward the checkered floor. This day had already included far more floor-walking than the caterpillar was used to.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Pish called from the closet doorway. He awkwardly carried a barrel of Base between his wings, tottering back and forth on his tiny feet. Pish stumbled, dropped the barrel, and spilled it right in front of Vita. And also all over her.
“I’m so sorry, V!” Pish exclaimed. “It’s just, I was thinking you could make a tree for M’lina.”
The girl wiped the cool, muddy substance off her face and clothes. It came clean off and beneath it her lavender gown was even lovelier than before with a silver, braided trim to match her shoes. She took a few steps back and surveyed the small mound of Base before her. “No, that’s a good idea, Pish,” she said. “I think I’m going to need more Base, though.”
Once Pish had heaped the contents of four more barrels onto the ground, the Base spread disappointingly out rather than up. Harper wordlessly gestured for the green jay to move aside then began molding the Base with his great, strong arms. He was able to crea
te a column of Base the size of a streetlight in just a few minutes.
“Oh, thank you, Harper!” Vita said. It would have taken her ages to do that herself, if she would have been able to do the job at all without a ladder.
“Don’t even think of it, kiddo. Is this good enough?” he asked.
Vita cocked her head to the side. There still weren’t any branches. The column looked more like a faceless totem pole than a tree at this point. But Mazkin had said that her creations wouldn’t be made out of Base … it was just there to help things along. Or something like that. So hopefully Vita and her friends wouldn’t have to mold every tiny detail into the Base ahead of time.
“There’s only one way to find out,” she replied.
She faced the column of Base and closed her eyes. She imagined a tall tree—taller than the column in front of her, a tree that would reach nearly to the high, high ceiling. The branches were thick and plentiful and much easier to climb than any Vita had ever found on the trees in any of Brooklyn’s many parks.
At first she imagined simply green leaves and brown bark, but soon her mind added splashes of pink, yellow, orange, and purple to the leaves working up from bottom to top. She mentally added coats of orange and rusty red to the bark as well.
This time Vita felt it when she pushed the image out of her mind. It took her breath away and completely winded her for a moment. She inhaled and exhaled deeply a few times and waited for the pounding behind her eyes to cease before she opened them.
She laughed and put her hand to her mouth in wonder as she looked up. There it was—the tree had hopped from Vita’s mind onto the floor of her Dream Chamber. The roots dug into the floor, ripping through the tile and wood to grip the dirt beneath it.
Melina gave an extra-rumbly purr and licked Vita’s face before jumping from the girl’s shoulders to the immense tree’s nearest branch. Her long body twisted around the tree’s thick trunk as she made her way up.
Harper walked closer and put his paw on Vita’s shoulder. “Nice one, Vita.” He looked down at her. “Are you all right? You look all flushed.”
“It’s probably just my sunburn,” she said dismissively. She looked across the seemingly endless checkered plains of her Dream Chamber, rubbing her hands together in anticipation. “Okay, that’s one tree down. Now there’s just a jungle’s worth more to go.”
• • •
Later Vita awoke to a roiling stomach. It felt as though she’d gone at least a day without food. It hadn’t been that long since she’d eaten that strawberry soup with Mazkin in the Mess Hall … had it? She opened her eyes and blinked several times in the bright sunlight. See, the sun was even still up, as it had been when she’d fallen asleep world-building after Mazkin had left her Chamber.
She sat up and sent several loose lavender flowers and a sleeping Melina flying. The caterpillar had been lying on Vita’s back while the girl slept on her stomach and now Melina angrily shook lavender from her fur in the tall grass of the meadow. “Was that really necessary?” she growled.
“Sorry,” Vita apologized. She stood up and stretched. “I just…” She looked up at the sky again. A sky that was somewhere between a watercolor painting and real, and hadn’t existed until recently. “Do you think the sun will behave like a regular sun? Like go up and down at the right times and everything?”
As she spoke, the sun above them began to shine a deeper shade of gold. The sky around it turned golden orange, rosy pink, and dusky purple. The sun dove diagonally to the right, the sky darkening into crimson and charcoal. The sky burnt to the blue-black of night when the sun reached the tips of Nayera Jungle’s trees at the edge of the horizon. The stars blinked on like Christmas lights, but they were snow white and ten times brighter without a cloud in sight.
When a white sliver of a moon appeared where the sun had so recently been, Vita didn’t even feel it when she fell back to the ground.
Immediately Melina was at her side, nosing at Vita’s cheek. “You’re white as a sheet, love!” the caterpillar exclaimed. She picked up some of the Base that was spread pancake thin over the ground a few feet to their right with the end of her long tail and held it out to Vita.
But the girl could barely lift her head. She closed her eyes and listened to Melina rustle through the grass over to where Pish still slept under a weeping willow at the edge of Nayera Jungle. Pish chirped in dismay when Melina woke him. “It’s night already?” he asked. “I guess we slept longer than I thought.”
Had they, though? Or had the sun set because Vita had thought perhaps it should?
She frowned and her heart began to go a little faster. She didn’t like the idea that this room-world might depend on her and her alone to keep time. She had always been terrible with punctuality and needed to use a timer whenever she made spaghetti. Five minutes could have been two or ten to her.
“Vita?” Melina said.
The girl opened her eyes and saw the caterpillar and green jay standing above her. “Since you can’t make yourself any food, I reckon we should go out to that Mess Hall,” the caterpillar said gently. “Mazkin said you should go there when you get hungry.”
She nodded and Melina helped her get up and onto Pish’s back before curling protectively around Vita’s entire body rather than just her neck for once. The ride back to the Dream Chamber’s entrance went quickly—Vita was pretty sure she fell asleep for the few minutes the journey took.
Pish landed at the northern edge of the jungle. The bit of extra sleep had given Vita a second wind and she crossed the small strip of checkered floor still remaining near the northern wall to the gray arched entrance without difficulty. She opened the door and Melina wordlessly followed her out on foot while Pish settled on the edge of the jungle nearest to the arched doorway, sat down, and fell back asleep instantly.
In the hallway Vita looked down to find sneakers on her feet once again, though they were soggy no longer. Her shorts and collared shirt had returned as well and her hair was back to its usual staticky frizz. However there was Melina at her feet—little more than a ghost but there all the same.
In the Mess Hall, Vita made a beeline for the order window and peered beyond the glass. She yelped when her eyes met Fidoreekio’s black ones. The monster leaned on the counter with two dark blue tentacles bent like arms and elbows. The ends of both tentacles coiled around silver ladles and two matching silver pots stood on the counter between them.
“You want white or brown?” Fidoreekio hissed at her.
“I, uh…” she stammered. “I was kind of hoping for some macaroni and cheese, but with, like, twelve different kinds of cheese, and—”
“WHITE or BROWN,” Fidoreekio demanded again through sharp, bared teeth.
She looked down at Melina and the caterpillar looked as stumped by the monster’s response as she was.
“Just think whether you like grits or oatmeal better,” a woman’s voice said behind her. “And keep in mind there won’t be butter or spices to make them taste like much of anything.”
“Would you lay off Fiddler, Jasmine?” a much younger female voice said. “You know he does the best he can.”
Vita turned around to find the girl who’d waved at her from behind the order window. Rosie. Her curly black hair was still woven into two short braids. Up close Vita could see her eyes weren’t really copper—they were dark brown with copper flecks. The little girl barely cleared Vita’s shoulders. She wore an orange and pink plaid wool coat with brown trim and the brown buttons buttoned. The coat was frayed at the cuffs and the material was faded as though it had been laundered many times.
The owner of the woman’s voice—Jasmine—sat on Rosie’s shoulder with her tiny legs crossed. Even in slightly transparent form, Vita was still delighted to see the fairy from Rosie’s painting in the flesh. Her skin was paler than Rosie’s chocolate complexion, more like coffee with a lot of cream. She wore a dress with a pink satin halter top and a long burnt orange skirt. Her gold-spun wings fluttered every so
often as though they itched to fly. The fairy winked one green eye at Vita.
“Thank you, Rosie,” Fidoreekio said. His black eyes and the twist of his mouth softened so quickly at the sight of the little girl that Vita could hardly believe she’d been frightened of the monster just a moment before. “I’ll get you a bowl of white, hon.” The monster began spooning what did look very much like grits or Cream of Wheat into a blue bowl on an orange tray.
“Thanks,” Rosie replied, but her eyes were on Vita. She beamed and reached forward to take the older girl’s hand. “I’m so glad you’re here!” she exclaimed. Her smile made her eyes shine even brighter. “It’s just been me and all these boys for so long.”
Boys? Vita thought. So the fourth contestant was another boy. She couldn’t help but smile back at Rosie—the girl’s energy was infectious. “Thanks. Mazkin told me about you. I’m Vita.” She looked down at the fairy on Rosie’s shoulder. “And you’re … Jasmine?”
The fairy nodded. She wrapped both arms around Rosie’s braid like it was a pole and her hands barely met on the other side. Vita half-expected Jasmine’s fiery hair to set Rosie’s braid aflame. “I like your name,” Jasmine said.
“I’m Melina,” the caterpillar called from the ground. She looked wistfully up at the fairy—the ground-averse caterpillar was probably jealous of Jasmine’s wings.
“I like your name too,” Jasmine said with a grin almost as feline as Melina’s.
“You gonna make up your mind?” Fidoreekio asked Vita. He looked much more severe than he had when his attention had been focused on Rosie.
“Uh, I’ll have white too,” she decided on the spot.
Once both girls had their trays of porridge and glasses of water, Rosie walked straight down the center aisle toward the back of the Mess Hall. Vita paused for a moment, unsure if Rosie meant for her to follow. After a few steps, Rosie stopped and looked back at her. “What are you waiting for? Come on!”
Vita and the Monsters of Moorhouse Page 6
