“What are you looking for?” Melina asked from the bed.
“Anything!” the girl replied. “Anything that might tell me more about my life, about what really goes on here.”
It was right after her burnt up compass had begun to spin that Tink had seen it, in her mind’s eye: The image of a black boy releasing a fleet of doves from his hands. And for some reason the thought of this stranger had made her terribly angry, and so very sad.
Melina curled around the bed’s post closest to Tink and her long tail tapped the lid of the steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. “What about this?” she asked. “You haven’t looked in here yet.”
Tink waved the idea away with her hand. “That trunk’s always been empty—it’s just for decoration.” Still the girl crawled over books and shoes and dresses until she reached the trunk. She snapped its clasps open and found that it wasn’t empty at all. Inside she found a glowing, nearly transparent crown of cornflowers that remained as fresh as the day they were picked. There was also a similarly see-through gold medal that hung on a long red ribbon.
And lastly, Tink found one object that was much more solid than the others—it looked nearly real: A bobby pin that had been twisted into a long, squiggly stem.
For courage Tink put the crown of cornflowers on her head and the medal around her neck so it hung beside her two compasses. Next she put the pin in the leather satchel around her waist and stood.
“What are you thinking, love?” Melina asked.
“That I’ve found a way out of here.”
From there everything was simple. Tink went to the Mess Hall, where Rosie and Grover agreed to help her get Mazkin out of his office in the wee hours of the morning, as she knew they would. Once she knew the office was empty, the girl’s fingers knew just how to pick the lock on the door.
And when she arrived at the top of the spiral stairs in the corner of the office, Tink knew she should have been terrified of the dark, freezing room she found above and the mournful screeches of the gargoyles outside the rotting walls. But instead the girl felt an ethereal sort of calm, as though she and Melina had already been through all this before. They made their way to the North Wing and soon the girl stepped into a darkened room. Her hand didn’t have to search long over the papered wall for a velvet drape that she then pulled aside.
Her jaws hurt when her face bent into the first real smile she’d smiled in what felt like months. She’d forgotten how beautiful the real world was—the rays that shot through the puffy white clouds, the couples who walked arm-in-arm down the street, and the man and woman who each carried a young boy on their shoulders. It looked like summer outside, which made the girl remember it had been late spring when she’d first arrived at Moorhouse.
“I probably haven’t even been gone that long,” she told Melina, whom she could barely feel around her shoulders in the North Wing.
The room was completely bare of furniture—just scratched hardwood floors and a spiral staircase in the corner. Tink drifted toward the stairs: stairs that would lead back to the world outside. She took hold of the banister and was about to descend when she heard a voice.
“Stop!” the voice called.
Tink turned to find Dotted-Line Jack floating in the doorway. She knew she should apologize for being in the North Wing; it was for faculty only. But instead she asked rather defiantly, “Why?”
“Because if you go down those steps, you’ll turn into a monster like me.”
• • •
Tink and Dotted-Line Jack sat beside each other on the steps—the ones that led up to the third floor. The girl looked upward in wonder. “So if these steps lead down to the front hall, where do they lead up to?”
“Mazkin and Fironella’s quarters,” the ghost monster answered. “They get the big apartments while the rest of us are crammed down here on the second floor.” Dotted-Line Jack looked out the window at the pretty church in the distance. “The view’s still pretty nice down here too, though.”
“So that’s how you became a monster—trying to go down the steps?”
Dotted-Line Jack nodded.
“And what were you like before?”
“I was a kid just like you,” he replied. “I came to Moorhouse to get away from my family and my life—but once I spent long enough here, I wanted to get away from Moorhouse even more. So I tried to escape down the steps and next thing I knew I was in Drozlin, and I looked like this.”
She turned to look at him. Since he’d opened all the drapes and filled the room with sunlight, he barely even looked like a monster—just a pale, blue-eyed boy with lines on his face. Her mind swam with questions but it was hard to pluck any out now that a monster was finally giving her some answers. “Was your name Jack?” she asked.
He shook his head. “It was something like Jack. But no—I lost my name a long time ago. Do you still remember yours?”
“Tink,” she replied, but it had the cadence of a question.
Dotted-Line Jack grabbed her hand with his icy one. “No, no. That’s a nickname Rosie-Rose gave you—she’s good with nicknames, but not so good with names. It’s short for Tinker Bell, like in Peter Pan. Remember?”
An image of a boy dressed all in green flying through the night with three children trailing behind him entered her mind. Peter Pan, of course. It was a play she’d loved since she’d learned how to read.
Dotted-Line Jack kept a firm grip on her hand and locked his eyes on hers; eyes that didn’t seem so cool in the North Wing. “You name is Vita. Vita. Do whatever you can to hold onto that.”
“Vita,” she repeated to herself. “How do you remember?”
“I was always good with names,” he replied. “Except my own. I remember you, Rosie-Rose, and Grover.”
She blinked. “Grover … you mean Pres?” Even as she asked she realized that “Grover” felt right in a way that “Pres” never had. “That’s another nickname of Rosie’s, I guess?” He nodded. “Why didn’t I forget her name?”
He gave a small smile. “Every monster always remembers Rosie-Rose—you’ve probably heard her name too often to forget it.” He smile slipped away. “…There was another boy, one whose name I can’t remember any better than mine. And it’s funny, because he was my best friend.” Dotted-Line Jack looked down into his lap. “Now I can’t even remember what he looked like.”
“What do you remember?”
“That we used to sneak over here together sometimes, to look out at the human world and try to guess how long we’d been at Moorhouse.”
Vita stared at him with wide eyes, touching her burnt-up compass. “Are you sure it was a boy?”
The monster shook his head. “We were never classmates, V. I don’t know who gave you that compass, but it wasn’t me. As soon as I turned into a monster my compass was gone.” His long fingers lingered around his neck where his compass would’ve hung.
The girl looked down at the rickety steps below them. “So are all the monsters kids who tried to escape?”
“I don’t know, Vita. I don’t think so. I think there’s another way for a kid to turn into a monster … but I’m not sure what that is.” He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. “There’s so much I remember, but so much I forget, too.”
Vita reached over to pat the monster’s back. “Don’t worry, Jack. You’ve already told me so much more than I knew before. You remember plenty.”
Dotted-Line Jack turned and gave her a cold hug. She could dimly feel Melina’s purr around her shoulders. “Remember, Vita, hold onto your name,” he said in the girl’s ear.
“I will,” she told him.
“All right, well, you’d better go. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re due for another integrity test soon.”
Vita felt a chill at the mention of an integrity test. “But we just had one … didn’t we?”
“You’ll find time works a little differently in the South Wing. Now go on, before someone catches you. A lot of monsters wouldn’t take too kindly to
finding a human here.”
“You didn’t seem to mind,” she said. “But then I don’t think you’re a monster. Not really.”
He gave her a wide smile. “Thank you, Vita. Now run along.”
In the hallway of faculty apartments she could hear music. It sounded like an old, dusty recording and the record screeched every so often, but the song was still lovely. A man and woman with smooth, buttery voices sang over a tinkling piano. Against all reason and fear of getting caught in the North Wing, she followed the sound of the music to a door labeled 7C and knocked. Soon she was face-to-face with Crane, the new teacher.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he told her with a sneer as soon as he opened the door.
But she leaned around his body in the doorway so she could see the room beyond it. It was a small, white-walled room without windows and very sparsely furnished. There appeared only to be an old, worn-out mattress leaking stuffing, but then she saw the old gramophone tucked into the corner. Its needle spun unsteadily over a record, and soon the piano tune she’d heard from outside started over for the second time.
The girl shouldered her way past Crane into the closet of a bedroom and stared at the gramophone in awe. “You took the gramophone? But why?”
Crane closed the door behind her and sat down on the mattress, resigned to her sudden presence in his room. “I didn’t take it—Fironella gave it to me. She said the thing hadn’t worked in years, and I was welcome to it.”
“But it did work,” Vita insisted. “It used to play all kinds of music, like jazz, and the blues, and the sort of music you hear in movies—”
In a moment Crane had leapt from the bed and peered at her suspiciously. “You’re saying there are more records? Tell me! Tell me where they are, or I’ll—”
“I don’t know about any other records!” the girl cried. At this uncomfortable distance it was obvious how razor sharp the monster’s teeth were, how blood red his eyes. “I always thought Fidoreekio was in charge of changing them.”
The monster met her wide blue eyes for a moment then moved away from her. “Fidoreekio doesn’t do anything but serve food. He doesn’t care about music.” He sat back down on the mattress with a sigh. “None of the other monsters do. Maybe the gramophone used to work, but it didn’t when I got it. I had to tinker with it for hours, and then all I had to play was this scratched up old record.”
“The song’s nice, though,” she commented quietly.
“Yeah, well, it’s not so nice after you’ve heard it for the fiftieth time.”
As it often did when Vita was nervous, her body made a decision before her mind had a chance to catch up. She sat down next to Crane on the mattress—this monster that had seemed ready to eat her face off only moments before. She expected Melina to chastise her, but the caterpillar had fallen oddly silent on this trip to the North Wing. Had it not been for the flash of yellow-green eyes Vita could see when she looked out of the corner of her right eye, she would have wondered if Melina was there at all.
“Well,” Vita told Crane, “how about you try singing the songs you know to yourself?”
“I don’t know any. Do you?”
She thought hard and landed upon an old Frank Sinatra tune her father used to sing while he did the dishes. She hummed a few bars, then sang whichever words she could remember. She felt anxious singing in front of the monster—it was a well-established fact that her parents’ musical talents had not been passed down to any of their offspring.
“What’s that?” Crane asked when she reached the end of the song.
“I can’t remember the name of it; my dad used to sing it all the time.”
“My dad never sang,” the monster said so quietly Vita could barely be sure what he’d said. “But I was asking, what’s that in your hand?”
She looked down and found she’d pulled her unbent bobby pin from her pocket and started fiddling with it while she’d sung. She suddenly remembered Crane was a teacher and looked down at the linoleum floor.
“It’s a bobby pin—uh, for my hair.”
“Do you mind if I see it?” he asked.
She handed it over and he inspected the bobby pin. It was more transparent here in the North Wing, though it had more weight and substance to it than the caterpillar around Vita’s shoulders.
Brown seemed to leak into the monster’s red eyes like ink as he studied the pin in his hands. “I used to use these to break into doors,” he told her.
Vita stared at Crane’s brown-red eyes for a long moment, then shifted back and forth between him and the gramophone in the corner. She put a hand to her mouth as a flurry of memories came rushing back.
“W-Wile?” she asked the monster. “Is that you?”
Suddenly the monster’s eyes were red again and he rose from the mattress. “My name is Crane. Now you’d better go. I don’t think you want to know what would happen if a monster less forgiving than me caught you in the North Wing.”
“But Wile—” Vita began.
“Stop calling me that!” The monster opened the door and waited for her to step through it. “Now get out of here.”
She begrudgingly rose from the mattress and walked toward the door. On her way out she met Crane’s red eyes without an ounce of fear in her heart. “I think a lot of you monsters are much nicer than you think you are.”
And with that she and Melina made their way back to the South Wing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE WINNER
Out in the hallway Vita found Peebles hopping toward the Mess Hall. “Hey there, Peebs,” the girl greeted the tiny monster.
The monster hopped closer and looked up at her. “Hello Miss Vita Lawrence!”
Thinking of the way Dotted-Line Jack had reminded her of her name, she cocked her head to the side. “You always call me by my first name and my last name, and the other kids’ too,” she observed. “Why?”
“I always be hoping you’ll remember,” Peebles said quietly. “But it gets hard to keep reminding you, especially when I forget things, too.”
With melancholy eyes the little monster jumped across the hall’s scarlet carpeting to the Mess Hall door. Dotted-Line Jack suddenly appeared to open the door for him, and threw a smile Vita’s way. She wondered where exactly he had come from and whether, like a ghost, he had appeared out of thin air. Still she smiled back and gave the monster a wave.
With Peebles’ words in mind she pulled a notebook and pen from the drawer of the desk she never used. She was surprised to find some scrawls she didn’t remember writing on the first page, but ignored it and moved to write something in all capital letters at the bottom.
As Vita ripped half the page out of her notebook, a bell rang through the hall. Over the loudspeaker Faylonique announced, “All students please report to the Mess Hall. I repeat, all students please report to the Mess Hall.”
• • •
Vita knew she’d taken an integrity test before, but nothing of what it entailed. Every red and black eye of the monsters that filled the room turned Vita’s way when she entered the cafeteria. Rosie and Grover were already lined up near the order window. Ruckles, Skrillus, and Fironella were at their usual places at the front table. Ruckles ate steak and bacon sandwiches and tossed hamburgers into Skrillus’ wide-open mouth while Fironella munched on doughnuts with more frosting than dough.
Mazkin stood in front of the children and gestured toward them. “Please join the line, Vita.”
Vita took her place between Grover and the narrow wall. It felt wrong, it just being the three of them. Now that she remembered Wile she felt his absence like a hangnail.
Mazkin turned to Rosie. He frowned at the sight of the little girl’s map. “Oh, Rosie,” he said softly. “I thought we had gotten rid of these. And there are some new ones as well, I see.”
Vita looked over at Rosie and the young girl wrung her hands and looked down at the cement floor.
Fironella stood, her cronies following closely behind, and snatched the m
ap from Mazkin’s hand. “Oh, this looks positively delicious. Shall we?”
Trembling, Rosie led the three students, their imaginary friends, two headmonsters, and two metal monsters to her Dream Chamber door. Vita glanced at Rosie’s desk of colorful paintings and sketches, and was dismayed to see Rosie hadn’t done any new art in a while. Her paintings of Jasmine and the abstract rose swirls gathered dust, as did her other sketches.
Inside Vita expected to see the fairies that usually lit up the flower maze in Rosie’s Dream Chamber like fireflies. Instead it was pitch-black night with not a flower or fairy to be seen. Vita looked to the golden lanterns on either side of Rosie’s Dream Chamber doors and found their bulbs had gone very dim.
“You know where we’re headed,” Fironella told Rosie.
The little girl created a lantern to carry and led the group through the maze in the darkness. Vita expected her to take them eastward to the Wood so they could ride the winged horses to their destination. But they continued on foot toward the very center of the maze.
Vita felt a prick in her arm on the way and found a fairy floating near her. This was not a creature of goodness and light—her body was as ink black as the night around them and she had bright red eyes. Her black wings were sharp, and Vita felt pricks and stings as more of the formerly lit-up fairies flew out of the hedges and tried to block their path. Several of them ran into Skrillus’ windshield and his dry wipers wiped them back and forth. Ruckles snapped at them with his hedge-clipper arms.
Rosie cried out when she saw what Skrillus and Ruckles were doing. “Stop it! You’re killing them!” The pansy and saffron walls around them wilted at the sound of her cries.
Vita wasn’t sure these stinging fairies deserved to survive, but she tried to remember how beautifully they had once lit Rosie’s floral labyrinth. There was something wrong with them right now, surely, but that didn’t mean things couldn’t get better.
Finally the group emerged into the village at the center of the labyrinth. Streetlights lit the cobblestone streets but did so dimly, just like the lanterns by the entrance. Rosie led the others down the street to the soda fountain Vita had visited with her and Wile. The windows were shattered and Vita noticed the sound of repeating sirens running over and over the air. The soda fountain’s red awning now read “Pete’s” instead of “Leroy’s”.
Vita and the Monsters of Moorhouse Page 21
