The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding

by Alexandra Bracken

  Cheered by that last thought, he used the boy’s teeth to gnaw on the remainder of the pumpkin before turning to the next, smaller one. Soon enough, the human’s belly was distended, and Alastor himself was finally full. He belched, interrupting the twittering of small creatures in the trees overhead, impatient for morning.

  He leaned back against the wet wood bench and considered them. Downstairs, in his own land, he might have looked up and seen those pernicious little faeries chirping in the branches. Or brainless golems taking their halting steps down the crooked cobblestone streets running errands for their masters. The animals of this world were…cuddlier.

  For one brief, terrible moment, Alastor allowed himself to wonder if his own realm had been as altered by time as the human realm had. Even fiends were not immune to changing tastes and improvements. Would the buildings still be made of shining black stones? Would they still lean, like hunched shoulders, over the already crowded streets? Were the souls he had already collected still there, serving his father, the king?

  Other questions came flooding in. Had one of his five brothers taken the throne that was rightfully his? He was the first son, but his younger brother Bune, the one born only a few years after Alastor, had always eyed their father’s throne with eyes that gleamed like fire. Surely he was behind this, but how had he learned Alastor’s true, secret name, and why had he betrayed his own kin to the humans?

  “Thou knowest why,” he muttered. It was no different from what Alastor himself would do, were he second in line to the throne of Downstairs. Kill the heir, so he was no longer the spare.

  “I will crack thy toes,” he swore, “and make boots of thy intestines.”

  Was his precious young sister still Downstairs, or had they sent her up to begin her own Collection? He sighed, unable to picture it. Bune and his three other brothers had tormented her, sliced at her every nerve, clawed at her honor, and haunted her courage. All because she could not manifest an animal form, and therefore could not travel into the human realm. His own, the fox, was said to represent cleverness, as much as Bune’s great, snarling cat was strength.

  It was the greatest of all disappointments to have a malefactor without an animal form in one’s bloodline, because it spoke of a flaw. It was so dishonorable, so shameful, Pyra, and all malefactors like her, were locked away to save the families from disgrace.

  But Alastor knew Pyra’s situation was like an eclipse. Soon the darkness that shadowed her life in the tower would pass, and she would find that small glowing part of her shade that could transform, that could show to all realms her gifts. Perhaps it already had, and she walked among humans now, forming contracts, collecting human shades.

  The idea of Pyra dealing with the ruckus and danger of the human world made him feel as hollow as the boy’s limp, useless arm.

  Finished with his meal, Alastor made the boy stand and flung his makeshift cape out behind him. Before he could take another step, something bright—something strikingly orange—caught his eye.

  Near the edge of the silver, chalky path was the finest hat he’d ever laid his eyes upon. Its base was square, but from it rose a beautiful, dirt-splattered cone, rising to a magnificent point. Left, for anyone to find.

  Left for him, as if by fate!

  He was surprised to find that its coating felt so very…waxy, like a dead man’s skin. The weight of it too was surprising, as was the rather large hole at its base. The boy had a tiny head to match his tiny brain, it seemed. As long as the boy’s puny neck was strong enough to bear its magnificence, he would wear it with pride.

  Alastor easily balanced it as he carried Longsharp to the other side of the street, crossing into a narrow brick lane—some sort of promenade? There were few like this Downstairs, strips of shops where one might buy wares and goods. That, at least, held true here. The moon was high and bright enough that he could even catch a hint of his reflection in the nearest window.

  “Mortal fools,” he scoffed, admiring himself in his new cap and cape.

  Then, before he could accidentally summon another fiend, the way he had the hag, he moved on to the next shop, which displayed crates of hideously bright sweets.

  It was something of a strange coincidence that he smelled it then. The boy’s nose was inferior to his own, but the wind was fierce that night, prowling up and down the streets, stirring up memories and old dust. The fallen leaves suddenly swirled around him, rising toward the moon. It picked up traces of the hob’s delightful vinegar smell and swirled them straight to Alastor.

  He tucked his vampyre friend beneath his working arm once more, and began to sniff.

  After nearly a quarter hour of searching, Alastor found the hob behind an alley of several glass storefronts. The boy’s weak eyes skimmed right over it, but there was no mistaking that sweet, sweet stench of rotten fruit.

  Hobgoblins were prized servants Downstairs, a race trained to clean and care for their superiors. At the Black Palace, Alastor had his own army of them to tend to his clothing, carry his messages, and spy on his brothers.

  Human shades were the true workers of the realm, cursed for all eternity to perform duties like scrubbing sewers, or picking fruit from the fields of razor-sharp ganglebushes. Hobs were cherished, trusted to perform their tasks without complaint. Hob families stayed with the families of fiends, including Alastor’s own, for centuries. His own nannyhob had been the daughter of his father’s nannyhob, who had been the daughter of his grandfather’s nannyhob.

  Hobs stood about the height of a human infant, their skin a delightful shade of ash gray. Alastor was particularly fond of their bright yellow eyes, which bulged out from above a handsome nose as red and round as a radish. The true mark of a hob, however, was the snarfing, snorting, wheezing breaths they took as they tried to sniff out filth to clean.

  And so Alastor was quite surprised to find this one wearing a half-rotten pumpkin dangling from his long, curved red horns. There were no gold hoops in his ears to mark his years of service. Instead of the pristine white spider silk the hobs Downstairs preferred, this one wore a dress of sorts made out of newspaper and something silver. It crinkled as the hob swung a twig at a hissing feral cat. The hob, it appeared, was guarding a tower of tidied rubbish—boxes, bright containers, and cartons stacked to look like a castle.

  “BEGONE!” The boy’s voice squeaked, but it was enough to spook the kitten. It bolted farther into the alley and disappeared into the night.

  Alastor stood, waiting to be formally addressed, but the hob only sighed and moved back toward his creation. With careful certainty, he placed his sword stick over the opening of a box that read HEINZ KETCHUP and crawled inside on bony hands and knees.

  Surely this was all in jest….Alastor cleared his throat. When the hob still didn’t reappear, he coughed. Loudly.

  Finally, just as he began to detect the faint wheezy snores of the blasted creature, he called out, “Servant, I require thy attention. Be present and willing, and, in exchange, I offer thee—erm.” Alastor paused, glancing around. Longsharp was beginning to feel heavy in his arm, so he set him down and picked up a sickly-looking apple. “I offer you this rare fruit.”

  All he could see were the hob’s eyes, glowing in the darkness of his home.

  “Do you accept these terms?”

  It was a long while before the hob answered. “I do not. I do not serve humans. Blegh!”

  “Come out into the night,” Alastor commanded. “For I am no human.”

  “No.” The creature took a deep breath and, with a sound like a cannon explosion, plugged up one side of his nose and blew a wad of blue snot on the boy’s bare feet.

  “Hob!” Alastor cried. “Zounds! Would a mere mortal be able to hear thee? Speak to thee?”

  The hob seemed to consider this. “I think not.”

  “Then it stands to reason I am no human, yes?” Alastor began to unwrap the bandages on the boy’s arm. The cut itself was still a furious red, blood oozing past black scabs. The air bloome
d with the metallic smell of it. He could hear the hob take one rattling deep breath, then another.

  “M-milord?” came the small voice from inside the box. “You are…”

  Fiends could tell everything they needed to know about another fiend by their smell. Though his own scent was dampened by the boy’s disgustingly flowery one, it revealed Alastor for what he was: a malefactor, and a prince.

  The hob shot out of its home and fell upon the boy’s feet, weeping. “Forgive me, milord! I am but a stupid creature, I have shamed myself—you must take a horn, please! You must!”

  When a hob displeased his or her master, the most common punishment was to remove one of the curved horns. For the first time, Alastor noticed this hob was already missing one.

  “It would not please me to punish thee now, servant. Thou may, however, clean me.”

  The hob went to work immediately, licking his snot off the boy’s toes, licking away the dirt there, working his way straight up until he reached the knee. Alastor stood with his hands clasped behind his back, enjoying the warm slime of the fiend’s spit coating his skin. The smell of rot it left behind lifted his spirits somewhat.

  “Now, pray tell, what is thy name?”

  The hob kept his eyes on the ground. “It be Nightlock.”

  “Nightlock,” Alastor repeated. “A fine name. Thou may refer to me as my lord and master, or My Eternal Prince of Nightmares that Lurk in Every Dark Sleep.”

  “My—my lord and master, I do not mean to be—to be rude, and yet this hob wonders,” Nightlock began, his one ear twitching in fear, “how is it that you appear in the form of a human? Your magic is great, yes, but why, oh why, must you shame yourself this way?”

  “I am in hiding,” Alastor said. “None of my kind may know I am here. That is your first command.”

  He could see by the look in the fiend’s eyes that Nightlock was attempting to figure out who he was—which one of the six siblings Alastor would claim to be.

  “Tell me,” he asked, “are there many of our kind left in this village?”

  “Oh, milord!” the hob said, his eyes shining with dark blue tears. “A few, oh yes, a few, but this place is cursed. I and the others, we are hiding too.”

  “What news from Downstairs?” Alastor asked. “How do our kind fare?”

  A look of deep sadness passed over the hob’s face like a cloud over the moon. “I could not speak of it, even if I wished to. Not even under milord’s command.”

  Alastor felt something icy pierce his chest. The boy’s chest, rather.

  “They have locked the gates and allow no one to enter,” Nightlock explained. “And those who are cast out are banished, and shall never be allowed to return.”

  “That is—” Alastor swallowed hard, fighting against the tension of the boy’s body. “That is preposterous. Who issued such a command? Who reigns on the black throne?”

  The rotting pumpkin slid down over the hob’s face as he bowed his head in shame.

  “One,” he said, “who has taken care to charm their name so that it may not be spoken in this world.”

  Of all the fiends, only a malefactor could have the kind of power needed for such a curse.

  “Milord, milord,” the hob wailed. “I be so very sorry. Ask this hob for anything else, to do anything, and he is your servant until the realms collapse!”

  “Nonsense,” Alastor said, turning to pick up Longsharp. His mind spun with possibilities. His father? No—why would he need a curse? Fiends feared him already. One of his brothers, then, or perhaps a family rival? It sounded like a witch’s curse, but there was no way that could be true. When a witch traveled Downstairs, her power quickly waned to nothing.

  When he turned back around, Nightlock was no longer crying or snarfing, and the adorable glob of snot dribbling from his nose had slowed to one long strand. Nightlock was no longer afraid to lift his gaze from the ground. He stared at Longsharp, his bright yellow eyes bulging out of his perfectly round skull.

  “If milord requires a doll, I can craft a magnificent one,” he said, practically trembling in anticipation of it. “My last mistress loved toys. It is one of my many skills.”

  A toy? Alastor looked down on the face of the vampyre again. The eyes, which had seemed so red and glossy and perfect before, now looked like nothing more than glass. He licked one to be sure.

  “I see,” Alastor said in a prim voice, letting the doll fall to the ground by his feet. The hob quickly and carefully set it aside, finding a new place for it.

  “Are you hungry, Master?” the hob asked, filling the silence between them. He reached for a bag, labeled with the words KITTY LITTER, and offered Alastor a handful of shimmering, coarse sand. The malefactor licked it out of the boy’s palm, humming thoughtfully.

  “Now, servant, we must begin to plot a course of action. The boy whose body I reside in must agree to a contract within twelve nights. As it stands, he has refused.”

  The hob made a startled sound, his spittle flying through the air. “He has refused your offering? He has a will so strong? Your persuasion is legendary, milord—”

  “Yes, yes,” Alastor said, flicking a hand dismissively. “The urchin has not given in to fear, nor has he bowed to threats. Perhaps if I were to keep at it…make the threats all the more terrifying…”

  “What does he desire, milord?” the hob asked, handing him another scoop of the crunchy kitty litter.

  “One thing too pitiful to name,” Alastor responded. Acceptance. Little did the boy know that the pursuit of such a thing would mean he’d remain forever unhappy.

  “Then…maybe…does this urchin know what else you can give him?” Nightlock asked. “Is it not the case with these humans that they must be shown they desire something before they know they desire it?”

  Alastor looked to the moon, thumping the boy’s fist against his chest. He was a genius of the first order, a true prince. “The solution has just come to me, Nightlock. Dost thou—do you know that humans often do not know they wish for a worldly good until they see it?”

  “No, milord,” the hob said quickly, “this hob knew no such thing.”

  Alastor gripped his cap and set his cape to twirling as he spun back toward the little witch’s house, a new plan spinning and swirling like a poison inside him. “Come, servant. The moon sets, and this fiend rises.”

  I woke up the next morning feeling like I hadn’t slept at all.

  For a few minutes I just lay there on the couch under a mountain of blankets, watching the sun reluctantly come out and brighten the attic. I closed my eyes, waiting to hear Mom’s voice call up to me that it was time to get ready. The only sounds in the room were Toad’s trumpet-like snores and Nell tossing around in her bed.

  “Come on, get up,” I muttered, thinking of what Dad always said. “The sooner you start, the sooner you finish.”

  Another first day of school. My stomach lurched at the realization as I stumbled toward the bathroom. I felt heavy at my center, like dread had planted itself inside me and was taking root with its crawling, dark limbs.

  That’s it, Maggot, the fiend said cheerfully. Your sadness is all I require. Revel in it, drown in it…

  I locked the bathroom door and turned the shower on, icy water spraying my bare arm. It hurt, deep in my heart. The clash of frustration and sadness slamming together left a ringing sound in my ears. I pressed my fists to my forehead, filling my lungs with the moist, warming air rising from the claw-foot tub.

  If I couldn’t think of my family without feeding Alastor more of my power, then I would do everything to avoid bringing them to mind for as long as I could. And, really, any day that didn’t start with a malefactor singing about all the ways he could pickle my brain was bound to be a good one, right?

  I jumped into the water, quickly washing my hair and scrubbing my skin with an alarmingly black bar of soap peppered with tiny flowers and herbs. The tincture that they’d given me hadn’t taken care of all of the thin, angry scratches on my h
ands and arms—unless Toad had clawed me at some point in the night, which didn’t seem too farfetched. Dirt and grime swirled off my feet, dancing down the drain. I squinted down at it through the misty condensation, wondering how it was possible for the attic floors to have been that filthy.

  By the time I finished and dressed in the jeans, T-shirt, and hoodie I’d found folded at the foot of the couch, I wondered where and how I’d get a school uniform, only to realize there probably wasn’t one.

  No uniform. For the first time ever—no uniform.

  Toad was the first to wake, yawning. Rather than stay under the covers, he flew over to the window and nudged it open, slipping outside and flying away. To do…his business? Find food?

  The floor was freezing under my wet toes. I hopped from foot to foot in front of the heater, trying to wake the thing up to its usual warm grumbles. When it became clear Nell probably had to use some magic to get it working, I gave up and headed for the fridge, shivering.

  Mom taught me and Prue a lot about cooking, so I did think I could whip something up. It was just…there wasn’t a whole lot to whip. Three eggs and one yogurt that smelled like it had enticed a rat to crawl inside of it and die.

  Most of the house’s pots and pans were in use, either to grow some little plant or catch rain from holes in the roof. The ones that weren’t were covered in a mysterious, sticky gunk. I picked up a few from the desk and sniffed them. They smelled like old, wilted vegetables. I ended up cracking the eggs, dividing them between three chipped mugs, and zapping them to maximum fluffiness in the microwave.

  It was the machine’s beeping and the smell of food that finally got the mole creatures out of their nest of bedding. I took a step back as they came stumbling toward me, their hands blindly reaching for the hot mugs like a matching set of zombies.

  They collapsed down around the small coffee table in front of my bed-couch, shoveling egg into their mouths, glaring at anything and everything that moved, including the window curtains. They didn’t start looking like humans again until after they finished eating.