“You’re home, Charlie,” Old Joe said softly. “You’re home.”
Charlie opened his eyes slowly and threw his arms around his grandfather.
“You won’t believe where I’ve been,” Charlie said, the excitement of all that had happened washing over him. “You won’t believe what I’ve seen.”
But Old Joe stopped him before he could say any more.
“There, there, you’ve been through a lot. You can tell me all about it when you’re ready,” Old Joe said, embracing the boy. Then, after a quick glance to Ringo’s empty pie tin, he looked over his shoulder and warned, “For now, you watch what you say to these folks. There’s going to be a lot of questions.”
The small clearing was soon a hive of sheriff’s deputies and helicopters and soldiers in uniforms and still others in dark suits. Charlie was flown directly to the big hospital in the city, where he was reunited with his mother and father, who broke down in tears of joy when they saw him and then fainted. Charlie was on the news, a local celebrity, because no one could understand how a boy and a dog could survive that long, at this time of year, all alone in the mountains. But through it all, heeding Old Joe’s words, Charlie said little of his experience. He never mentioned Monsterland.
Tests showed that Charlie had suffered a minor concussion, so they kept him in the hospital for observation, which came with a barrage of tests. They examined his shoulder and had little in the way of explanation for the Ranger Ignacio Santos’s intricate horsehair stitches. The same went for the mummified crevice in Charlie’s arm, which they were forced to conclude was some unidentified fungus that the doctors tried to remove without success. As far as the boy’s disappearance, a neurologist surmised that Charlie’s head trauma had caused some sort of amnesia, which likely left him disoriented and therefore unable to find his way home. He added that in Charlie’s confused state, he had more than likely never been farther than ten miles from the pumpkin patch where he first disappeared. Though the doctor’s ten-mile theory was slightly insulting, Charlie still said nothing.
Once the tests were over, Charlie was released from the hospital, and as the days passed and Christmas approached, Charlie’s life slowly fell back into its normal routine. With his nightmares gone, Charlie was sleeping better than ever; each morning he woke without a trace of the heaviness he once felt. Back at school, his grades were already improving, and at Birdy Fargus’s suggestion, he was thinking about trying out for the cross-country running team in the spring. He had also just recently started to leave his photograph of Billy at home, tucked into the frame of the mirror above his dresser. As time went on, his journey to Monsterland seemed more and more distant, and he wondered if he would ever see the tunnel that cut through the mountain again.
Then one day, when Charlie got home from school, he found a stack of mail on the kitchen table. And there, among the bills and the magazines, he saw a familiar bundle of letters. Wrapped in rough twine, the letters were worn around the edges and tattered. Charlie pulled them apart and saw that they were addressed to his mother in his own handwriting. Charlie dusted the soot and grime off them and finally understood why Mrs. Winthrope and the Ranger had been so reluctant to guarantee their timeliness.
He thought about leaving the letters for his mother, but remembered Old Joe’s warning from the day he was found in the woods. Then again, he had to trust someone . . .
Turning the small bundle of letters in his hands, Charlie decided he would finally break his silence. He decided he would tell Old Joe everything and ran down to the barn to find him. But when he reached the big bay doors, Charlie stopped cold in his tracks. He could hear Old Joe, singing to himself. And while his singing was not unusual, the song he was singing most certainly was.
“From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties
And things that go bump in the night.
O Lord, won’t you save us from the horrors that haunt us
And give us good dreams till the light.
For we are the Rangers, the hard-riding Rangers,
And we’ll give all those nasties a fright!
Those ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties
And things that go bump in the night.
So step up your horse, and set out your course,
For we Rangers protect what is right!
And be warned, all you ghoulies, you ghosties and beasties,
All you things that go bump in the night!”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SPECIAL THANKS TO Jennifer Besser and Kate Meltzer, and to Cindy Howle, Christine Ma, Janet Robbins Rosenberg, Eileen Savage, Richard Amari, Morgan Schweitzer, Dana Li, Jennifer Dee, and everyone at G. P. Putnam’s Sons and Penguin Young Readers.
Thanks also to Josh Getzler, Danielle Burby, Jonathan Cobb, and the HSG Agency.
To my family and friends for the early reads, and with the utmost respect to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Bram Stoker, and the Brothers Grimm. And, of course, to Doc and Jude for the stories growing up, read at bedtime or told around campfires—my gratitude for the opportunity to travel to all the worlds that may or may not exist.
* Charlie would later find out that Oscar was actually what is known in the common vernacular as a sea wolf, though it should also be noted that “The Fish Boy” was the name that was used to promote Oscar’s talents when he was with the circus
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Monsterland Page 28
