Vita and the Monsters of Moorhouse

by Jillian Karger

  Harper reached a paw down to pat Vita and Melina’s heads. “Well, I was hoping we could do something about how dark it is in here,” he said. “There’s not much of a moon.”

  “I was just sayin’ the same,” Peebles said. “Then Jack ‘n I’ll be able to see better what the young miss has been up to in here so far.”

  “How about it, Vita?” Dotted-Line Jack asked her. She could see little more than his glowing blue eyes and the outline of his head, cap, and shoulders against the trees.

  “Are you sure you’re feeling up to more building?” Melina whispered in Vita’s ear. “You weren’t looking so good before, love.”

  Vita gave her friend a few reassuring pats. She felt much better now that her stomach was full. “Sure,” she said in answer to both of them.

  After Harper formed the Base into columns on either side of the entrance just like he had with each of the trees, the girl closed her eyes and thought of the front yard of an older man who lived in a brownstone near her school. Sometimes Vita saw the man walking his St. Bernard or taking out his recycling through her classroom window. There was nothing immediately intriguing about the gray-haired fellow. But in the center of the lawn beside his stoop, rather than a bench or a garden or something sensible, stood an old fashioned streetlamp.

  Vita had never walked by the man’s house at night so she didn’t know if the streetlamp really worked or if it was just for decoration. She hoped it worked, though. She hoped the man who lived in the brownstone had grown up in some small town where the streetlights were all wooden posts and fluorescent bulbs and had no romance about them whatsoever. She hoped the man had looked out his window each night as a boy and had wished with all his might to one day see a black streetlamp with all the intrigue of a Dickens novel shining back at him.

  Vita knew she lived in a world that dealt out girls like Erica Simmons who would put gum in Vita’s hair and call her names like Q-Tip or Ice Queen or Velveeta the Imposter Cheese or simply Freak, and bosses who would add a dozen worry lines to her father’s usually jovial face, and kids like her older brother and sister who would repay their parents’ trust in them by staying out all night and skipping school and telling lies they didn’t need to tell. But Vita liked to think she also lived in a world that occasionally granted old-fashioned, fully-functional streetlamps to the mad, wonderful people who dreamt of them.

  When she opened her eyes, two streetlamps exactly like the one outside the old man’s brownstone stood on either side of the arched doorway. Pish squawked in fright at the monsters now that he could see them and nearly tripped over his unsteady little bird feet. Harper’s eyes only widened slightly, but that registered as shock from the generally unflappable bear. Vita couldn’t much blame them for being frightened. Mostly she enjoyed the effect of the streetlamps, but she had to admit Peebles’ enormous black eyes and Dotted-Line-Jack’s ghostly visage were even more haunting in the golden lamplight.

  Peebles and Dotted-Line Jack didn’t seem to notice Vita’s friends’ distress at the sight of them both. Or perhaps they were just used to it. “That’s right clever, that is,” the tiny green monster said of the streetlamps. “Lots of newcomers woulda just made the sun rise again. But that throws everything off, really. Soon enough you got ten days where you shoulda had two and it’s all out of sorts.”

  Dotted-Line Jack gave the streetlamps an appreciative nod before he turned to the jungle. “Beautiful trees,” he said. “Do you mind if I take a closer look?”

  Vita wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but he was a teacher, so she just gave him a bemused nod. The ghost boy flew up into the air toward the tips of the jungle’s tallest trees. He stopped beside a tall, skinny tree at the eastern edge of the jungle.

  Vita left Peebles with Harper while she and Melina flew after Dotted-Line Jack on Pish’s back. Vita let Melina down at the foot of the tall tree so she could get some climbing in and then she and Pish flew to the top. Up here the stars were almost too bright. There were more of them than Vita had ever seen. They crowded the night sky, each fighting for room to shine.

  “May I see your map please, Vita?” Dotted-Line Jack asked. He reached in her direction and she tried not to stare at his too-long fingers. She pulled the folded map out of her satchel and handed it to him. Only now did she notice she wore a different gown than on her first visit to the Dream Chamber, one of luxurious emerald velvet.

  She leaned over Dotted-Line Jack’s shoulder to catch a peek at her “map.” Vita hadn’t even looked at it since she had started building. She didn’t know how a blank sheet of paper was supposed to help her.

  Then she saw the paper was no longer blank.

  Dotted-Line Jack held the map with its shorter side on top as though it were a letter. At the bottom of the paper near the center was a patch of green. Beside it was more green, but dotted with the lavender and daisy white of the flowers in Vita’s meadow. Nayera Jungle was written in black, curling script over the purely green patch while Gossamer Fields adorned the green, white, and lavender patch. Vita had once read a book of fairy tales in which a fairy had been described as having “gossamer wings.” She had asked her mother what “gossamer” meant, as was her practice when she ran into unfamiliar words. (Her mother tended to be closer by than the dictionary, after all, and just as informative.) Vita didn’t remember her mother’s answer, but the feather-light sound and feel of the word had stuck with her.

  Now Mazkin’s words about Vita’s map filling as she built made much more sense to her, just as he had said it would. Perhaps there was something to Peebles’ whole “learn-as-you-go” theory of world-building.

  Vita frowned as she took in how little of the map her jungle and meadow covered. She could have covered them both with just the pad of her thumb. “I’ve barely made a dent,” she observed, disappointed.

  Dotted-Line Jack was about to pat her shoulder with one of his ice-cold hands but caught himself just in time. “It’s a big job, to be sure. But you shouldn’t rush things. You’ve made a wonderful start here, Vita.”

  As the monster continued to study Vita’s map, Vita pulled her compass back and forth on its chain. On an impulse she opened it and she found that, like her map, the white background was beginning to fill with color. Right around the “N” was a tiny splotch of green, with another bit of green spotted with little lavender and white dots beside it.

  She felt eyes on her and looked up to see that Dotted-Line Jack’s gaze had moved from her map to her compass. “It’s pretty nifty how the compass fills up too, huh?”

  She nodded. “Would you like to see?” She started to pull the compass off her neck so she could hand it to him.

  “NO!” he said with surprising force, and laid an ice cold hand on her arm to stop her. “You can never take off your compass, you hear me?”

  She blinked, trying to ignore how freezing his hand was. “But why?”

  He stared at her a few moments with eyes as icy as his touch. Then he took his hand from her arm and looked away. “I don’t know … I—I don’t remember.” Then his eyes met hers again. “But please, just promise me you’ll never take off your compass; you can’t risk losing it.”

  She shivered even though he’d removed his hand. Then she nodded. “I promise.”

  “Good,” he said with a relieved smile. “Let’s get back to the lesson then, shall we?”

  Vita tried to put his odd behavior out of her mind as he whipped around to face the north wall, and Pish did the same. The green jay succeeded in only slightly bumping Vita’s teacher as he turned, a gold-star achievement for him. The starlit sky stopped just where the domed cement ceiling met the Dream Chamber’s wooden wall. The ink-black night made the wall’s dark wood seem pale by comparison.

  “We should do something about this northern boundary of yours,” Dotted-Line Jack said. “Your Dream Chamber entrance is your home base—it’s where you go when you’re hungry, dirty, or just plain need a break.” His glowing eyes returned to her map. He pointed one
of his swizzle-stick fingers at the edge of the paper farthest from Nayera Jungle and Gossamer Fields. “Your building will take you miles and miles away from here. So you’ll need to be able to spot your Dream Chamber’s entrance even from a long distance. Those lampposts are nice but I don’t think they’re quite gonna cut it.” The ghost boy paused and looked over at her. This close to the stars he didn’t look anywhere near as creepy as he had in the streetlamps’ light. If he hadn’t been floating on a cloud of black mist below his torso, Vita might have thought he was a human just like her, albeit a very pale one. “Got anything in mind?” he asked her, a tone of playful challenge in his voice.

  Vita met his icicle eyes for a moment longer before tipping her head back to look at the stars. “I think I might,” she replied. She considered the small handful of Base in her satchel and her weak arm’s slim chances of getting it to stick to the wall. “We’re going to need some help from Pish’s brother, Posh, though.”

  Just then they saw a light even brighter than the surrounding stars to their left coming from the other end of the jungle. Vita caught the flapping of wings in the light of the stars and saw that the source of the foreign light was an orange hardhat on top of Posh’s head. He held another in his wing and it flapped to and fro as he flew to meet them.

  Pish accepted the hardhat his brother slapped onto his head with relief. “Oooh, where’d you find these, brother?” he asked.

  “If you had spent more than five seconds in the Supply Closet, you might have noticed there are actual supplies in there,” Posh replied. He turned to Dotted-Line Jack and introduced himself. “I apologize for any injuries you may have incurred or property that has been destroyed in my absence because of my birdbrained brother.”

  Dotted-Line Jack chuckled. “No apologies necessary, Posh.” He noticed the special compartment Vita had made for Posh’s canon on the brown pack that secured a barrel of Base to the green jay’s back. “That’s a nice canon you’ve got there. You mind hosing over the north wall around the entrance?”

  Posh looked at Vita for approval and only unholstered his Base canon after she nodded. Once she could see nothing but gray where dark wood had once been, Vita closed her eyes and focused on the idea of a starry sky as hard as she could. When she opened her eyes the black sky extended down around the gray stone archway, all the way to the patch of checkered floor that remained between the entrance and the edges of Vita’s jungle and meadow. But there was something wrong with the stars. Where the stars above where white and shining, these were yellow, flat, and cartoonish.

  “You were thinking too much of how you might attempt to draw a star, instead of how stars really look,” Dotted-Line Jack said at her side. He turned to Posh. “You think you can splash another coat of Base on there?”

  Again Posh waited for Vita’s affirmation and got to work. “I get do-overs?” she asked her teacher as Posh covered her shoddy sky with more Base.

  “Of course,” said Dotted-Line Jack. “We’d have to be insane to expect you kids to get it right the first time around. Now I think I might have a solution for your little star problem.”

  At Dotted-Line Jack’s instruction, Vita transformed a handful of Base into a white, flour-like substance. Then Vita built the wall into a tar-black sky with no stars whatsoever. Once that was done, Dotted-Line Jack held a hand out to her. “If I may?” he asked.

  The girl dropped the flour into his long-fingered hand and he cocked his arm backward, his elbow bent. Then he threw the wad of flour at the black wall. The powder stuck in tiny white spots that began to shine star-bright as soon as they hit the wall.

  Vita beamed in delight at the effect. She pulled another hunk of Base out of the open barrel on Posh’s back and made more white powder. She took her own shot at the wall and giggled when it clung to the wall in the shapes of stars that matched the ones above perfectly. She and Dotted-Line Jack threw handful after handful of white powder at the wall until a starry sky completely surrounded the Dream Chamber’s entrance. They threw quite a few handfuls at each other as well, covering Pish’s green feathers and Dotted-Line Jack and Vita’s clothing in a layer of white dust.

  Melina poked her head out of the branches of the tree beside them once they were finished. “How beautiful,” she sighed. “I must say, I did always miss Whirlyton’s stars when I came to visit you in Brooklyn.”

  Vita wanted to say, “me too,” but she’d never lived anywhere but Brooklyn so she didn’t really have any stars to miss.

  Melina returned to Vita’s shoulders and the group made their way back to the entrance. Spiral had returned and he and Peebles appeared to be playing some sort of game that involved rolling/hopping in circles on the jungle floor as quickly as possible and jumping up to ricochet off the trunks of nearby trees in between.

  “Gorgeous stars, V!” Spiral called to her as his lollipop form bounced off the trunk of a weeping willow. “They remind me of fireflies and I’d eat them up if I could, every last one of them!”

  Peebles paused his game with Spiral and hopped over to where the jungle floor shifted into checkered floor. Now there was just a three or four-foot path of floor that spread like a moat between the jungle and meadow and the starry sky. “Lovely work, Miss Vita Lawrence!” he complimented.

  “Told you I’m the better teacher,” Dotted-Line Jack boasted with a smile.

  “I wouldn’t go bragging yet,” Peebles replied. He peered down at the patch of checkered floor with his big black eyes. “This sticks out quite a bit, don’t it?”

  “We were getting to that,” Dotted-Line Jack said with a groan. “Impatient little old man, expects us to get everything done in one fell swoop. Didn’t anyone ever tell you Rome wasn’t built in a day, Peebs?”

  “If they did I don’t remember it,” Peebles said dismissively. “Miss Vita Lawrence is building something much more important than your Rome, and we’ve no time to waste!”

  Vita worked with Posh to create a continuation of the jungle’s grassy floor and the tall, lush grass of the meadow beside it. When she finished, there was a grassy clearing outside the entrance that was shaded by the trees of the jungle. The door to the Supply Closet peeked out of a narrow, adjacent wall of stars and the stars continued on beyond it. With the help of her compass she saw how to the west, Nayera Jungle melded into Gossamer Fields and the meadow spread as far westward as Vita could see. But just a few yards to the east of the entrance, Nayera Jungle ended and there was only an endless black-and-white checkered plane.

  Vita pulled out her map and saw it looked practically the same as before, only now the patches of green reached the bottom edge of the paper. The girl swallowed at the sight. She’d thought she’d done so much building already. How would she ever fill all this space?

  Melina curled tighter around Vita’s shoulders and licked her cheek. The caterpillar followed Vita’s gaze past the eastern edge of Nayera Jungle. “I think that would be the perfect spot for Brickingham Manor, don’t you?” Melina asked.

  Brickingham! How had Vita forgotten the old brick castle where she and Jen had spent so many happy hours swinging from vines and racing up crumbling staircases? Her dread began to disappear at the thought of the castle, though a little of it came back when she considered actually building it. In her mind the castle had always been gigantic and imposing. Would she be able to handle it?

  Vita turned around and her stars winked back at her. She had nothing to lose by trying, she thought. If the castle turned out badly, she could always cover it in Base and start all over.

  • • •

  Peebles stood beside Vita and they both looked up at the huge gray-brown rectangle before her. The sun was just beginning to climb up over the jungle’s trees. “A castle be a real big build for a student as new as you, Miss Vita Lawrence,” he warned. “You might want to try something smaller.”

  Dotted-Line Jack broke away from where he had been smoothing down a wall with one of the silver scrapers Posh had found in the Supply Closet. “Don’t
listen to him, Vita!” he said when he reached them. “Peebs has always been a worrywart. It’s good to think big.”

  “I don’t know why I take so much abuse from you, Jackie, I really don’t,” Peebles said.

  “Maybe because then you wouldn’t have anyone to tie your shoes. Number Four came undone again, by the way.” Dotted-Line Jack flew down so his black-mist half touched the ground and he tied the purple shoe on Peebles’ rightmost foot. Vita smiled at the tenderness in Peebles’ eyes as he looked at his apprentice.

  “Clear out, guys!” she called to her friends who were putting finishing touches on the mound of Base. “I’m gonna give it a go!”

  She took a deep breath and this time she tried keeping her eyes open. She also raised her hands in the air as she had seen Grover do. She mustered the image of Brickingham Manor in her mind as clearly as she could, then pushed her hands toward the mound of Base as if to push the image out her mind. At first, nothing happened. Then the nearest wall of Base cracked open like the shell of an egg. The rest of Base broke away in an avalanche of ash, and when the dust cleared, Brickingham Manor emerged from the cloud fully formed.

  Vita got a brief, pounding headache, just as she had when she’d created Nayera Jungle’s first tree. It subsided after a few moments and the girl scurried to the castle’s front wall. She ran her fingers over the ivy that grew in patches over the windows and the one rusty door that still stood.

  Dotted-Line Jack swooped over to her and punched her in the arm with an icy hand too quickly for her to comment. “See, I knew you had it in you!” he said.

  Peebles hopped along after him. “It looks good,” he agreed. “But we’ll need to see the inside as well.” He peered into the doorway beyond the fallen door. The sun had nearly risen in the west but the castle’s front hall remained dark. Peebles turned toward Vita’s friends standing nearby. “Pish, Posh, d’you think you could lead us inside?”

  With their hardhats switched on, the green jays led the others into the castle. They stepped over the bits of jagged stone on the floor and Dotted-Line Jack pulled on a few vines as if to test their integrity as he flew through them.