The Beast of Blackslope

by Tracy Barrett

  Xena went to her room, leaving Xander in his. Suddenly he noticed that the room’s single lightbulb was dim and cast creepy shadows. He hurriedly dug out a nightshirt and his toothbrush. He almost wished he was sharing a room with Xena. It was so quiet and so dark out here in the country, and his parents’ room was on the other side of the house.

  He put on his headphones and listened to some music on the new MP3 player. Their mother’s job as a product tester for an electronics company came in handy sometimes. He and Xena got to try out all the latest gadgets, and he especially liked this one.

  Usually the music would help him sleep, but tonight he felt wide awake, even though he was in the kind of bed he’d always wanted. It had a puffy coverlet that settled around him like a cocoon. When he finally did go to sleep, he had strange dreams about beasts. Something huge and shaggy stretched its four-clawed paws at him and bared yellow teeth in a long, mournful howl.

  Xander popped up, his heart pounding. For a moment, he couldn’t tell if the howl had been part of a dream or was real. He got up and looked out the window. Then the sound started again. Thinking fast, he hit the Record key on his MP3 player. Almost immediately the sound died away. Had he managed to record any of it? The thought of hearing that sound again all alone in the dead of night made him shiver. Better to listen after the sun came up.

  It was really dark here, far away from the streetlights and office lights that stayed on all night in London. The tiny sliver of moon that shone through the branches of the enormous tree in the garden didn’t help much. He strained his eyes but couldn’t see a thing. And there was no way he was going outside by himself in the dark when something out there was making that weird noise.

  He went back to bed and although he managed to fall asleep, he had unsettling dreams about beasts for the rest of the night.

  When he went down to breakfast the next morning, Xena was already eating her favorite English breakfast: crumpets. There were three kinds of jam, homemade, his mother said, and hot chocolate as well as tall glasses of juice.

  “Wow!” Xander said.

  “Better hurry or Xena will eat all those crumpets,” their father teased. Xena said something but he couldn’t understand it around her big mouthful.

  “Plenty more where they came from.” It was Mrs. Roberts, and if anything, she appeared even more tired and tense than she had the night before. She was carrying a tray with two cups of coffee on it. She put them in front of the adults and started clearing away dirty dishes.

  As Xander smeared a crumpet with red jam he asked, “Did anyone hear an animal howl last night?”

  “Nope,” his father said. “You must have been dreaming.”

  “No way,” Xander protested. “I recorded it! Listen.” He pulled out his MP3 and punched the Play key, hoping that something had made it onto the recording.

  It had. The last few seconds of that unearthly wail filled the room.

  Xena swallowed a gigantic mouthful. “I bet it was that beast!” she managed to say. But before Xander could answer, they heard a soft moan. Mrs. Roberts was swaying and her face had turned ashy pale. Mrs. Holmes leaped to her feet but before she could reach her, Mrs. Roberts dropped the tray.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mrs. Holmes caught Mrs. Roberts. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Lina!” A thin man with white hair hurried in. “My dear! What happened?”

  Mrs. Roberts passed the back of her hand shakily across her forehead. “I—I don’t know, Nigel. I suddenly felt giddy.”

  “Here, let me take you up to bed.” The man half turned to the Holmes family and said, “Shan’t be a minute.” As he and Mrs. Roberts left the room he said, “Now, dear, you’re not worried about that again, are you?”

  Xena and Xander looked at each other. Worried about what again? They knelt down next to the mess, carefully picking up broken dishes and dabbing at the drops of coffee and smears of jam with a paper napkin.

  When the man returned, Mrs. Holmes asked, “How’s Mrs. Roberts?”

  “Oh, fine, fine,” he said hurriedly. “No need to worry. She hasn’t been sleeping well lately. A nap will fix her right up.”

  His words sound more cheerful than his voice, Xena thought.

  Mr. Holmes stood. “Well, we’ll be getting out from underfoot soon. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do.” He and Mrs. Holmes went to the sitting room, and Xena and Xander set out to find the local library.

  It was a beautiful day—cool, but with that edge of warmth that means the afternoon will be just right. A little breeze ruffled the grass in the park where they had been playing the Game the evening before, and a bird was singing so loudly in a tree above them it almost hurt Xena’s ears.

  They turned onto the sidewalk and saw a blond-haired young woman coming out of the shed between their B and B and the one next door. She looked to be about the same age as their cousin Kelly, who had left for college the past fall. She carried a large black case that pulled her over to the side with its weight. She was chatting with another young woman, who was shorter and had dark wavy hair. The blond one caught sight of Xena and Xander and nudged her companion, who turned to look at them.

  “Come on, Emma,” the dark-haired one said. “We’ve heaps to do today.”

  Xena automatically scanned her for a clue. Pink top, regular jeans, white running shoes. The blonde paused and swiped the hair off her face with the back of her hand, and then switched her grip on the case.

  Xander focused on the case. What could be in it? It had hard sides, like an old-fashioned suitcase, but it was the wrong shape. It was almost exactly a cube. Black, with metal caps reinforcing its corners. She’s got to be strong, he thought. I wonder if that’s a clue. Maybe she’s a bodybuilder—or a gymnast.

  Xena was thinking, Could that be a musical instrument? They’re sometimes in big black cases like that. But she couldn’t think of an instrument with that shape.

  Each knew that the other was silently playing the Game. They looked at each other with raised eyebrows, their signal for “Give up?”

  Xander nodded and broke into a trot to catch up with the older girls. He flashed his most winning smile, the one that made his dimples stand out, and cocked his head appealingly. The young women slowed down and smiled back at him. They chatted for a minute, and then gave Xander a friendly wave as he went back to where Xena was waiting.

  “The blond one is Emma and the dark-haired one is Katy,” he reported. “They’re university students from London and they’re here on fall break, like us.”

  “What was in that case?”

  Xander shrugged. “I asked them but they didn’t say. Nothing special, I guess.”

  “I don’t think it was clothes. It looked too heavy. And what a weird shape! It would be hard to fit into a car, and it’s so square it kept banging into Emma’s legs as she walked. I bet they’re hiding something.”

  “Oh, come on,” Xander scoffed. “There isn’t a mystery everyplace.”

  It was Xena’s turn to shrug. Maybe Xander was right, but such an odd container must hold something important or Emma wouldn’t be straining so hard to carry it—where?

  “Should we follow them?” Xena asked.

  “I think we should go to the library like we planned,” Xander said. “We need more information on Sherlock’s unsolved case.”

  They asked a woman for directions and soon found themselves at a small building with a sign saying BLACKSLOPE LENDING LIBRARY in front of it. The door was ajar, and as they wiped their feet on the mat, raised voices came from inside.

  “It’s back, I tell you!” a man was saying. “Or maybe it never left!”

  What was back? And why did the man sound so upset? Xander moved away from the door to allow Xena to poke her head in, not risking even a whisper for fear that the people inside would notice him.

  Somehow Xena had always been able to blend in with her surroundings. Her mother called this trick “Xena’s cloak of invisibility,” and it was a usefu
l skill in a lot of situations, especially when Xena wanted to listen in on a conversation.

  The room was filled with bookshelves made of dark wood. A desk with a green-shaded lamp had a sign saying HEAD LIBRARIAN. Xena managed to maneuver herself closer and heard a woman’s voice say, “What nonsense! How could that be?”

  “I don’t know,” the man replied. “But it’s acting just like the old stories say, howling at sundown and crashing through fences. Old Fred found this hanging off the splinters of a broken fencepost. We’re not safe in our beds, especially those of us who live south of town, like me. That’s where the disturbance is coming from.”

  Xena crept in. She could see the man, who was stocky and middle-aged, showing the librarian a tuft of what looked like stained wool.

  The man went on, “And my missing sheep hasn’t reappeared.”

  “Oh, surely it just went wandering through a gap in your fence or—” the librarian began to protest, but the man kept talking.

  “I know where to look, though—south of my farm, toward the manor. History is repeating itself, I tell you. It’s the beast!”

  At the word “beast” Xander gave an involuntary start and brushed against the bell dangling from the door. It clanged loudly and the two adults stopped talking. The man pushed past them and hurried out the door.

  Xena rolled her eyes at Xander. He shrugged to say sorry, then walked inside.

  The lady behind the desk was a slender woman with short light brown hair. “Now then,” she said to them briskly. “How may I help?”

  “We’re looking for local newspapers,” Xander said.

  “There’s today’s edition of the Blackslope Gazette,” the librarian said, pointing at a pile of papers on a round table. “And the editions for the past week are shelved behind it.”

  “No, sorry,” Xena said hastily. “We mean old ones. From, um, maybe a hundred years ago?”

  The librarian looked at her sharply, as if she was going to ask a question but didn’t. Xena and Xander had noticed that English people tried harder than most Americans not to appear nosy, and this time they were glad of it.

  “We’re here on vacation,” Xander explained. “We’re interested in local history. We thought it would be fun to get background on some of the places we’re going to visit.” He smiled up at her and her face softened.

  “Well, how lovely, dear!” She came out from behind her desk and headed toward the shelves behind the table. “Most children your age wouldn’t be—” She stopped. “Well, I wonder—” She stopped again.

  “What is it?” Xena came up behind her.

  The librarian was staring at a bare spot in the middle of stacks of yellowing newspapers. “It’s most peculiar.” The librarian put her hand in the empty area as though she couldn’t believe there was nothing there. “I know this case was full of copies of the Blackslope Gazette just last week. That’s when I straightened the shelves. I would have noticed if any were missing. And now a whole stack is gone!”

  “Gone?” Xena asked. “You mean, stolen?” The librarian didn’t answer. “Maybe someone just checked them out,” Xena said.

  The librarian shook her head. “They’re old and fragile. We don’t allow them to circulate.”

  It seemed rude to ask for the librarian’s help when she was obviously upset, but they still wanted to do their research.

  “Which ones are missing?” Xena asked. The librarian looked at the tag on the shelf. She seemed too stunned to speak, so Xena leaned over and looked for herself. Her heart sank. She silently pointed at the shelf tag, and Xander read it. The missing papers were from the last week of August, the same week Sherlock Holmes had come to investigate the sightings of the beast.

  Xena pulled Xander aside while the librarian continued to stare at the shelf. “Do you know what this means?” Xena asked.

  “There’s a newspaper thief in Blackslope?”

  “Quit kidding around!” She felt her heart thumping. “You know what I mean.”

  He nodded. “Someone else is interested in that same week. And it looks like they don’t want anyone else to find out anything about it.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Xander went back to where the librarian was still staring at the empty shelf and asked her, “Are there any copies of the newspapers? Or are they online someplace?”

  The librarian pulled her hand off the shelf, straightened, and said sharply, “Online? Of course not. Paper has served humankind for thousands of years, and I see no reason to reduce something so noble to images on a screen. Online, indeed!”

  “Can we look at some of the ones that are left?” Xander asked.

  The librarian hesitated. “I don’t know. Perhaps I should lock up the rest if they’re going missing. They’re irreplaceable.”

  “Please?” Xander asked. “We’ll be very careful with them.”

  “Well, just for a few minutes. And stay where I can see you.”

  But after leafing through the papers that were before and after the missing ones, they found nothing helpful. The language was old-fashioned and sometimes hard to understand, and they couldn’t find a single reference to a strange animal or unusual goings-on at night. Xena was ready to leave, but Xander was staring at an illustration on one of the inside pages.

  “These pictures are amazing,” he said. He pulled a tissue from his pocket and blew his nose. The papers were old and musty, making his nose run and his eyes itch.

  Xena looked over his shoulder. He was bent over an engraving of a street scene in Blackslope with a caption reading Lady Chimington’s flower show attracts visitors from across the county. Men with twirly mustaches and women in long dresses walked arm in arm down a street that was drawn with such detail that Xena and Xander recognized many of the shops they had seen that morning on their way to the library.

  Yes, the illustrations were amazing, but this wasn’t getting them any closer to solving the mystery. “Come on, Xander, let’s go,” Xena said, and they carefully returned the newspapers to their place and thanked the librarian.

  “I wonder what’s going on,” Xena said as they went down the stairs. “We thought we were just coming here for vacation, and now there are three mysteries: what the Beast of Blackslope was, and if it’s back, and what happened to those newspapers.”

  “I don’t know that missing hundred-yearold newspapers are really a mystery,” Xander objected. “Anything could have happened to them. A cleaning person might have thought they were trash, or maybe someone borrowed them and forgot to check them out.”

  Xena shook her head. “No way. This town is full of secrets.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for one thing, why did everyone disappear yesterday evening? One minute the streets were so full that we had our pick of subjects for the Game, and then—nobody. It wasn’t really dark yet and the weather was nice, so where did they go all at once? And then there were those weird howls yesterday afternoon. And those girls wouldn’t tell us what they were carrying. Those people in the library stopped talking when they saw us, and Mrs. Roberts is really jumpy. I bet she knows something.”

  “I wonder what made her drop the tray,” Xander said.

  Xena thought back. “It was right after I said that what you’d heard in the night must be the Beast. And just now the people in the library were talking about the Beast, and they sounded really upset about it. Maybe they all know something about this Beast, and they’re keeping it a secret.”

  “Why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they want people to know?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what we’d have to investigate. Maybe somebody who lives here is up to something, and everyone wants to protect him because they don’t want him to get into trouble.”

  “Or—” Xander hesitated. It sounded stupid.

  “Or what?”

  “Or what if it’s some kind of demon? Or a curse on the town and they’re ashamed?”

  Xena didn’t laugh. “I don’t think that’s it. I bet it’s the same Be
ast from a hundred years ago. That means it’s one of Sherlock’s cases that’s still open. We have a duty to solve it for him.”

  Xander nodded. Even though he wasn’t too eager to investigate a savage-sounding creature, he felt the tie to their famous ancestor as strongly as his sister did. “Let’s try to gather some clues and see what we can come up with.”

  “First,” Xena said, “if people know something and they’re not talking, we have to try to listen in on some conversations.”

  “Your department.”

  Xena nodded. “And we have to find some way to go south of town and see if we can find the broken fence that guy was talking about. Those howls came from there.” She pointed toward the forest. “That’s south, right?”

  “I think so,” Xander said. It was broad daylight and from what they’d heard, the Beast prowled only at night. It would probably be okay if they went to check it out. Or at least that’s what he told himself.

  Xena and Xander had entered the main part of the village. The stores were small white buildings with wooden beams crisscrossing the walls—“half-timbered,” their mother had called it—and identical reddish brown roofs. “They look like Snow White’s cottage,” Xena said.

  “Yes, but where is everybody?” Xander wondered aloud. It seemed almost like a ghost town, and they were the only people on the sidewalk. Some of the stores were closed, which seemed odd in the middle of the week. CLOSED INDEFINITELY read a handwritten note on one door; FAMILY EMERGENCY read another. They passed a store with a sign saying ESTATE AGENT that displayed photographs of houses for sale in the window, with descriptions that made them all sound like palaces.

  Xander stopped short. “Aha!”

  “Aha what?”

  “I know where we can do more research.”

  Xena looked around. “Where?”

  “It’s elementary, my dear Holmes.” Xander grinned at her.

  Xena rolled her eyes. “That line was old before you were born. What’s elementary?”

  In response, Xander pointed at a sign across the street. “‘Tuttle’s Antiquarian Books,’” he read. “If they have really old books, I bet we can do some research about the Beast!”