The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding

by Alexandra Bracken

  “—Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name?”

  I saw her then. Unfortunately, I saw the rest of the hall too. The walls and doors were decorated with axes and bloodstained swords, all pointing in the direction of the coffin and the girl standing in front of it. She was shaking her fist in the direction of the gleaming bones of a skeleton, and the thing was staring straight back from black, eyeless sockets. Its jaw was unhinged, and the bottom row of teeth hung open, as if it had been shocked into a scream.

  “I have given you my soul!” the girl continued, dropping her voice into a low, dangerous growl. “Leave me my name!”

  She flung herself onto the ground, almost bringing the skeleton down with her. Then, after a moment of silence, she sighed and stood, muttering, “No, too much…” and got herself back in front of the coffin, like she was going to go through it all over again. She flicked her hand, and it almost seemed like…

  No. I was imagining things. The skeleton’s jaw didn’t clack shut. Its hand didn’t come up under its chin, like it was contemplating her. In any case, I had no idea how she could have missed the idiot in the flaming orange shirt, tangled up to his neck in cobwebs, still holding a copper pot.

  “Uh, a little help here?” I gasped, twisting to get away from the humongous spider hanging from the ceiling.

  The girl spun around with a yelp. Her hand lashed out and it was like a hundred invisible fists flew through the air and barreled into my chest. The spider-webbing tore away and I was flying, flying, flying—and then crashing, crashing, crashing through the plastic ghosts and blackout sheets. The pot rolled away, disappearing under enormous plastic spider legs.

  “Don’t you know,” the girl fumed as she stormed over to me, “not to sneak up on a witch?”

  “A what?”

  For a second, I was sure she had said “witch.” The wind that came bursting through the open window behind her must have knocked my brain loose or something. I clutched my bandaged arm to my chest, counting the black stars floating in my eyes again. It screamed in pain as I untangled myself from the plastic pumpkins and black sheets, and I tried not to do the same. But before I could even stand up, a small streak of black zipped through the open door and came flying for my face. Claws out.

  “Toad, no!” the girl cried.

  I ducked, throwing myself onto the ground. The kitten hit the wall with a thwack!, hanging there for a moment by its razor nails. Its tiny bat wings fluttered in annoyance as it freed itself.

  Its…tiny…bat…wings.

  “Oh my God,” I said, backing up, tripping, falling. The girl was coming toward me, cooing at the furry demon, her cloud of curly dark hair threaded with a hundred little glow-in-the-dark star-shaped beads. “What is—what is that?”

  It flew—literally flew—into her open, waiting arms.

  “That’s a good Toad, who’s my good boy?” she said, bopping it on its small black nose. Ignoring me. “We talked about this. No attacking our guest, remember? Guests are friends, not fiends.”

  The kitten licked its paw indignantly.

  “What are you staring at?” she demanded. “You’re acting like you’ve never seen a cat before.”

  “That’s not a cat, that’s a monster!” I said, trying not to meet its big eyes.

  “Monster?” she shouted over Toad’s hissing. “The only monster I see around here is the Redding standing in front of me! Wait—” The girl held the small cat out in front of her, letting it extend its wings. “You can see these?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Oh.” All her anger seemed to deflate. She set the animal down and reached up to push her bejeweled rainbow glasses back up the bridge of her nose. “So you can see through glamours. I told him you probably could.”

  “Told whom?”

  “Told who,” she corrected.

  “No, it’s whom,” I insisted. The one grammar lesson I actually remembered, thank you very much.

  The girl and cat glared at me, eyes narrowed. “Come on, let’s go downstairs. Guess I’m stuck explaining things until he gets home.”

  He? The stranger?

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said, backing up. I cast a quick look around. There were windows at either end of the narrow hallway, but we had to be at least one or two stories up. I would definitely be the Redding Who Broke His Neck in a Pumpkin Shirt. The wood floor dipped at the center of the hall, buckling slightly. There were two doors—the one I’d come out of and another, blocked by her skeleton. Both were cut at a crooked angle in the bare, dark wood wall. “I don’t even know who you are!”

  “My name is Nell Bishop,” she said, hands on her hips. Her sweater had been sewn together from three different floral patterns and was big enough to droop over her jeans. “I’m your…I’m your cousin, I guess.”

  Awesome. Just what I never wanted: another cousin to hate me.

  “You guess…” I repeated. “Can you not guess? And just tell me?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’re as annoying as I thought you’d be. Fine. Stay up here for all I care, and stew in your questions. I need to start setting up for the show tonight.”

  Nell spun toward the stairs, unclipping a small chain with the sign PRIVATE, and thundered down them. The whole roof rattled with the force of it. And rather than sit there and be the Redding Who Had a Ceiling Dropped on Him, or the Redding Who Got Mauled by a Mutant Kitten, I followed.

  If I had sat down at my desk at home, opened my spiral-bound notebook, and tried to draw my perfect nightmare…it would have been adorable compared to this house.

  It turned out that I wasn’t on the second floor—I was on the fourth floor. The attic. The stairs wound down the center of the old house like a rickety spine, revealing one terror after the other.

  There were three open doors on the third landing. The one to the left was completely pitch-black, save for an amazing light show that made it seem like thousands of ghosts were fluttering around, swirling like a tornado at the center. The air it breathed out frosted my skin with flecks of snow and ice. The center room looked to be a dark forest filled with nightmares, where the trees were crawling with spiders and draped with mirrors of all sizes.

  My feet came to a crashing halt when I caught a glimpse of me—but not me, not really—in the largest one. An ancient man, a hundred years old, who had my eyes and mouth, stared back at me, screaming—banging on the glass, as if begging to be let out.

  Bam! I all but leaped over the banister to get away from the door on the right, where something was bumping around behind the gleaming wood like a frantic heartbeat.

  On the second story, all I needed to see was a room full of tombstones and the ghostly apparition of a weeping woman in old-fashioned clothes before I felt my blood turn to needles. She looked up. Her voice sounded as though she were whispering in my ear. “Are you my baby? Are you my sweet boy? Won’t you come to me, sweetling? Your mama loves you dearly—”

  Somehow, there were clouds floating above her. Somehow, those clouds opened with thunderous, bloody rain.

  I spun toward the stairs, but Nell was there, standing in my path. When I tried to get past her, she blocked me, laughing. “It’s not real, brainiac. Look.”

  She held a hand out into the room, and though it looked like—it sounded like—blood was splattering over the graves and the ghost, none of it coated her hand. It was all an illusion.

  But I could have sworn that, when I finally pushed past her and continued down the stairs, she quickly leaned forward into the room and drew a hand across her throat, and there was an annoyed “Harrumph” in response.

  Keeping one hand gripped tight to the banister, I forced my eyes to stay on my feet, not on whatever was waiting on the second floor.

  “What is this place?” I muttered when we got to the first floor. In the place of a living room set, a TV, or a kitchen, there were walls covered in smears of fake blood. The words THERE IS NO ESCAPE were scratched
into the biggest patch of it with what probably were fingernails. Propped up two feet away was a dead body—fake dead body, I thought, when the buzzing in my ears got too bad—on a stainless-steel gurney, its mouth open, its plastic intestines dangling over the ground. They looked like they were soft to the touch. Even the mannequin’s skin bristled with wiry, lifelike hair.

  My stomach squirmed uncomfortably as Nell jumped up and sat on the gurney beside him, idly twirling the fake large intestine like a lasso.

  “You’re in the prime destination for nights of fright and magical mayhem!” Nell said, throwing her arms out wide. Behind her, a zombie-nurse puppet shot out of a hidden panel in the wall with a screech that, unfortunately, didn’t drown out my own.

  “Will you chill out?” Nell said, laughing. “Wow. You really are not okay, are you? It’s alllll fake—okay, at least ninety percent is fake, and the other ten percent isn’t going to bite you. We would never put you in real danger.” Her voice dropped as she said, with what I had to admit was a pretty great dramatic flourish, “Unlike the true monsters in your life.”

  She hopped off the gurney and held out a hand toward the stairs. Toad (The cat? Bat? CatBat?) came fluttering down the steps, as light and airy as a stray feather. It caught her hand and crawled up her arm to perch on her shoulder. I backed up toward the wall, fingers touching the holes the creature had already torn in my shirt, eyeing Nell.

  I thought of the Impressionist paintings I’d seen in museums with my dad. From a distance, they looked like a typical scene of people or landscapes. But, up close, you could see the thousands of tiny strokes of paint that made up the image. Nell was like that in a way. Up close, she was like a kaleidoscope of color and motion. Her skin was a warm bronze, a shade or two lighter than her black hair, which I saw now she’d pinned into two high buns. It looked as if she’d reached up and plucked the stars out of the sky, scattering them in her hair. They twinkled as she moved, as iridescent as the many colors of her sweater.

  There was nothing stiff or cold about her. You could never paint her the way artists had done with my ancestors, all flat, pale, sickly, and glowering. Nell was about my height, and I’d guess my age, but that was where the similarities ended.

  “This is Toad,” Nell said, bringing it closer. “I think you need to meet again on better terms.”

  “You named your mutant kitten Toad?”

  The creature sniffed, adjusting its position so that its legs dangled over Nell’s shoulder and it could cross its furry little arms, the way a human would. Panic began skittering around my brain again at the unreal sight. I was hallucinating. Clearly.

  “How rude,” Nell said, pulling a small piece of carrot out of her pocket. The creature snatched it between its paws and fluttered off to devour it on the dummy corpse. “Toad is over a hundred years old. And he’s not a kitten. He’s a changeling. This is the form he’s decided on for now. I just enchanted him so any human would see him as a plain black cat—including B, so don’t tell him, you hear me? Toad has been known to turn into chain saws when angry.”

  I slid down the wall, narrowly avoiding the zombie nurse as she swung out with a handful of syringes filled with bubbling crimson syrup. Pressing my face into my hands, I tried counting backward from ten to keep from throwing up. Or worse.

  But when I opened my eyes, Nell, the CatBat, and the zombies were all still there.

  “Okay, seriously—where am I, who are we waiting for, and why is the skeleton in the corner doing the Macarena?”

  “The Macarena?” Nell spun round. “I said the Danse Macabre! Listen to my voice as I say to thee—Oh, never mind, I’ll fix it later.”

  She snapped her fingers and the fake skeleton’s shoulder seemed to slump a bit as its bones clattered back into an open, waiting coffin.

  “What is happening?” I moaned. “What is my life right now?”

  Nell cocked a dark, unimpressed eyebrow. “You’re more dramatic than I am, and that’s saying something. You’re in Salem. In the House of Seven Terrors, a haunted house show. And it’s all going to be okay.”

  Salem? Salem? Redhood was over two hours south of Salem, on Cape Cod. It might as well have been in a different country for all I knew of how I’d be able to get back.

  Nell crouched in front of me, peering at me through her strange glasses. I couldn’t help it. My cheeks flushed with embarrassment and anger. It felt like my insides were boiling, and I was sweating again despite the cold, dry air coming through the front door. I had the stupidest urge to cry.

  “Okay,” I repeated. “Okay? Of course I’m not okay! My entire extended family tried to murder me, my parents are stuck in China, and my sister—”

  A surge of energy burst through me at the thought of my family. My real one. Not the cousins, or my grandmother, or any of the other strangers I just so happened to share DNA with. Where were Mom and Dad? Where was Prue?

  Nell turned her back to me for only a second, but I took my chance. I jumped to my feet and shoved her out of the way, bolting for the hallway door. I heard the sound of a clap, and before I could take another step, something hooked around my neck and dragged me back. I went sliding through the fake dried blood on the floor, yanked right back to where she stood. Nell let out a huff and gave me an unimpressed look.

  “Yeah.” Nell rolled her eyes. “Like that was going to work.”

  I tried to sit up, but her finger flicked toward me, and I was none-too-gently shoved back down. I brought my hurt arm up against my chest, ignoring the way it burned.

  “Can’t…blame a guy for trying…?” I wheezed out.

  “You’re a bit clumsier than I expected, given your father,” said another voice. “But I see you’ve perfected the Redding cower.”

  A pair of dusty boots came steadily toward me, parking inches from my nose. My eyes traveled up the man’s stockings, to his old-fashioned trousers, to his billowing shirt—right up to his ponytail of blond hair. The stranger, even stranger now.

  “No,” I said, finally breaking free from whatever had been holding me down. I lurched away, stumbling. “Get away from me!”

  “Prosperity—”

  “I’ll take care of him—” Nell began.

  “No!” the stranger said. “No more magic, you’ve frightened him enough!”

  I tried to run again, but I didn’t make it half as far. The guy grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and held me tight against his chest. I kicked and stomped my feet, trying to aim for his toes like one of the security guards at the Cottage had taught me. But the guy might as well have been made of stone. He took all my hits like I was throwing feathers at him. I dug my feet into the carpet, trying to keep him from dragging me out to the back of the house to murder me, until, with a sigh, the stranger reached down and threw me over his shoulder. Again.

  “What did you do with Prue?” I shouted, pounding his back with my fists as we made our way back upstairs. “Hey! Hey! Let me go!”

  Nell trailed behind us, watching me with a look that said, Are you two years old?

  By the time we got back up to the attic, all of my limbs felt like they had been turned into lead. I was exhausted, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, it felt like I was burning up again. The fire started in my belly, pulsing and crackling through every single vein. To add insult to injury, Toad came prancing in behind us, just as I was dumped back on the couch. The creature flicked his tail and shut the door behind him.

  “You’re safe,” was the first thing the stranger said. The cushions dipped as he sat down next to me. “Cornelia and I got you out of there just in time.”

  “Nell,” the girl got out between gritted teeth. She was right about that—she was definitely more of a Nell than a Cornelia.

  “They—” I began. “Wait…that actually happened?”

  Instead of answering me, the stranger took my left wrist and lifted my arm. The bandage was redder than before.

  “Iron,” the man explained, setting my arm down. “A cursed blade did this t
o you. The wound may never fully heal, but we’ll work on it.”

  “Who are you?” I demanded when I finally found the words I was looking for.

  “I’m your uncle Barnabas,” the man said with a sad smile. “Though I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of me?”

  Not only had I heard of Uncle Barnabas, I had spent pretty much all twelve or so years of my life trying to figure out how he managed to get himself pruned off the family tree. Dad had only mentioned his brother once or twice that I could remember, and usually only as a slip. He didn’t have any stories like, When my brother and I were little, we used to fish in the stream behind the Cottage. There were no questions like, I wonder what your uncle would think of this? There weren’t even calls on birthdays.

  No one dared to breathe his name in front of Grandmother. Mom claimed that Dad loved his brother very, very much, but I wasn’t sure I bought that. If you really loved someone, why would you let anyone else tell you how to treat them?

  “Oh.”

  “Oh yes.” Barnabas shook his head. “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

  “No one said you had died,” I assured him. “Just that you’re a waiter in a casino in Las Vegas, trying to get an audition to be a dancer in that Beatles show, and selling self-portraits of you in elf costumes on the Strip.”

  Which, to Grandmonster, was probably a fate worse than death.

  Uncle Barnabas’s face went pink around the edges at that. “How…imaginative.”

  I got a good look at him in the silence that followed. Barnabas had a long thin nose that was at odds with the rest of the family line. Thick eyebrows. High cheekbones, a square jaw dusted with the beginning of a pale, scratchy beard. Me and Prue were in no way identical, but it was a little surprising that Uncle Barnabas was so different from Dad. Not just in the way they looked, but the way they carried themselves. Percy—Dad—had several inches on his brother, dark hair, and the same brown eyes as me. He had a natural confidence to him that, in comparison, made this guy look like he was walking around with an army of fire ants in his underwear.