by Bryan Chick
Megan nodded again, her pigtails wagging.
“Your school . . .” Mr. Darby went on. “You have many students between . . . what? . . . the ages of five and twelve?”
“Something like that.”
“What do you suppose your teachers would be like if they were chosen by these young students? Would they be well-suited to teach math, history, and reading? Or would they give extra recesses and show movies during class?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“We know when to go directly to the people—as we did in the case of your rescue—and we know when to make decisions on behalf of others. Sadly, people sometimes don’t know what’s best for them.”
“And you do? The Secret Council?”
Mr. Darby, still petting the tiny head of the tarsier, softly nodded, saying, “I think so.”
“How?” Megan asked.
“Wisdom is something which comes with age.”
“Sometimes,” Megan said. “Sometimes not.”
“Oh?” Mr. Darby said, and Megan realized his tone was growing increasingly curt. “What else might come with age, then?”
“You don’t always get smart just by getting old. What if younger people need something different than what you think they need?”
Mr. Darby continued, “People, young and old, need the same things. Food, water, shelter. We need to laugh and love and cry. We need to be a part of something larger than ourselves—part of a family. Some needs are stronger than others. But there is one thing I am certain of. . . .”
As Mr. Darby’s voice trailed off, he leaned across the table, coming only a foot or two from Megan’s face. From so close, he looked different. Deep lines etched his pale skin, and against the bright white of his beard, his crooked teeth looked yellow and stained. Megan could even smell his breath, and though the odor wasn’t strong, it was bad. It was oddly familiar, and Megan realized she’d once experienced something like it. She wondered where, then felt her heart skip a beat when the answer came. In the cellar of Clarksville Elementary—on DeGraff’s breath.
“. . . there is no greater need than that of revenge,” Mr. Darby finished.
Megan didn’t like hearing this—not from Mr. Darby. Up until just now, he seemed too gentle a man.
She stared into his dark sunglasses and tried to see past them, but all she saw were the dim reflections of herself, one in each lens. It suddenly bothered her that none of the scouts had ever seen Mr. Darby’s eyes.
Marlo suddenly flew in and landed on Mr. Darby’s shoulder. In his beak was a tightly folded slip of paper.
“Thank you, Marlo,” Mr. Darby said as he leaned back and took the note. He opened it and read. Then he pushed out his chair and rose from his seat. “Midnight,” he announced, and everyone in their group turned to look his way. Solana and the Specters nodded. “Scouts—you should arrive at the Clarksville Zoo no later than eleven-thirty Saturday night. Do you know the employee parking lot?”
The four of them nodded.
“That’s where you need to be.”
CHAPTER 15
THE OPENING
After supper that night, Mr. and Mrs. Nowicki left for parent-teacher conferences, and dropped Megan off at Ella’s on their way. In his room, Noah sat at his desk with a novel in his lap, his thoughts less on the story and more on tomorrow’s rescues.
Shortly after eight o’clock, a loud click! came from the closet, and he looked up. He waited for more sounds. Slanted light fell into the closet, revealing little more than clothes dangling from hangers.
Click! Click!
The noise again. It seemed too loud to be coming from the furnace. Maybe the boards in the wall were creaking.
The clicks were followed by a new sound. Something like a groan, but different.
He set down his pen and pushed out his chair, careful not to make a sound. If he walked to the other side of the room, he’d have a better view. On his way across the floor, he scanned his clock: 8:19. How soon before his parents would be home?
He came to a stop when his new angle revealed piles of clothes and shoes. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He waited, leaning forward. No further sounds came. What he’d heard must have been the house settling. But still . . . all the weirdness from his closet lately . . . How could he be sure?
Intending to walk back to his desk, he instead found himself moving forward again. He could just peek in, assure himself nothing was wrong.
The floorboards creaked and popped beneath his feet. Just a few steps away from the closet, he stopped and listened. A distant car revved its engine, but nothing else.
He took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. Then he walked into the closet, where the scene that greeted him stopped him cold. In the wall where the heat vent had been, a velvet curtain the size of a beach towel dangled. A pile of crushed drywall lay beneath it in a cloud of dust. On the shelves and dangling from the racks were monkeys, five of them. Short, daggerlike teeth filled their mouths, claws curled out past their fingertips, and patches of black skin were visible in bald spots along their mangy hair. They stared at Noah with yellow eyes filled with hate.
The velvet curtain swung out as another monkey crawled through the portal, raising the total to six. Two were spider monkeys and the others were howlers, each as black as coal.
Noah took a step back. He might be able to get out and shut the closet door with the same motion, locking the monkeys inside. But he would have to be swift.
One of the monkeys let loose a bloodcurdling squeal, and above its head, its tail curled one way and then another. The other monkeys tensed and prepared to pounce.
Noah grabbed the doorknob and jumped back into his bedroom, swinging the door around with him. But before he could shut the monkeys in, one lunged off a shelf and landed on his chest, the tips of its claws piercing his flesh. Noah let go of the door and grabbed his attacker with both hands, flinging it aside as he stumbled into his room. The other monkeys rushed out of the closet and moved in on Noah, their long tails swinging in the air behind them. They spread out in a half circle, partly surrounding him.
Noah back stepped across the room. “What . . . what do you want?” he heard himself say.
The monkeys couldn’t answer, of course, but Noah didn’t need them to. What they wanted was him.
As he continued to walk backward, he noticed a wadded-up shirt by his feet. He kicked it toward the monkeys and the shirt opened in the air and fell harmlessly to the carpet—a lame attempt to defend himself.
The monkeys moved in. The howler opened its mouth and did what it was named for, its deep growl like the call of a monster. It jumped up several feet and landed in a new spot.
What could Noah do? The monkeys were blocking his way out, and he couldn’t jump from his second-story window. If he tried to fight, the monkeys would tear him to shreds. He didn’t keep a phone in his room, and even if he did—
His thoughts stopped. A phone. Though Noah didn’t have one, he had something better. A headset—a direct line to the security guards and any Descenders in the Clarksville Zoo. He kept the headset—a tiny earpiece that used bone conduction to carry his voice—in his desk drawer. If he could get to it, he could radio for help.
The monkeys moved to within three feet. They were squealing and grunting and growling, their eyes glowing yellow. The howler jumped out in front of the pack and Noah kicked at it, just missing its flat face. The startled monkey fell onto its haunches and showed its teeth.
Noah’s rear end struck something and he glanced over his shoulder to see that he’d backed into the front of the desk. If he—
His thoughts halted as pain erupted in his chest and shoulders. As he turned his head back around, he came face-to-face with a monkey. He tried to retreat, forgetting he was backed against the desk, which toppled up on two legs and then crashed down, booming against the floor. Papers fluttered around the room like wounded birds, and pens rolled across the carpet. The monkey jumped off his chest as Noah lost his balanc
e and dropped facedown to the ground beside the fallen desk.
Around him lay pens, markers, tape, coins, and index cards. Noah spotted his headset, but as he reached for it, something coiled around his wrist and pulled his arm away. What looked like black rope, Noah realized, was a tail.
As he struggled onto his back, a second monkey whipped out its tail and seized his other wrist. A third and fourth monkey grabbed his ankles. With their tails pulled tight, Noah couldn’t move. He felt as if he were tied to four trees, his arms out to his sides, his legs spread wide.
The howler prowled up alongside Noah, its shoulders rocking, its long tail dragging behind it. It opened its jaw and inched its fangs toward Noah’s neck. Noah tried in vain to pull his limbs free as the monkey’s warm breath washed over him.
He craned his head up and realized something about one of the spider monkeys holding his ankles. It had the cord of the tall lamp, which was still standing, wrapped around its leg. If Noah could pull the monkey in one direction, the cord might yank down the lamp and distract the other monkeys long enough for him to break free.
He twisted his hips and kicked out with all his strength. The monkey only budged, but it was enough—the cord went taut and the lamp fell like a tree. It crashed down, its bulb shattering in a flash of light and leaving complete darkness. Noah felt his legs and arms released as the monkeys scattered.
He had no chance to locate the headset in the new darkness. His only hope was to get out of the house. He rolled aside, jumped up, and headed across the floor, the monkeys at his feet, their howls and screams echoing off the walls. He slipped through the half-open bedroom door and slammed it shut behind him. Then he sprinted the length of the hallway and practically dove down the steps, his hands on the rails like a gymnast between parallel bars. As he hit the bottom, the bedroom door banged open and the monkeys began to pound their way down the hall. They’d had no problem working the doorknob, and Noah wondered how smart and capable they were now that DeGraff had poured his dark magic into them.
He ran through the kitchen and threw open the back door, but a spider monkey jumped onto the porch, its yellow eyes glowing in the light from the house.
Noah heard a thud and then leaves rustling somewhere in his yard. As a second monkey charged from around the corner of the house, Noah realized what was happening—the animals were jumping out of his bedroom window. He had no idea if these were part of the original six or were new.
He slammed the door shut just as the spider monkey lunged at him, then he heard a series of thuds as it tumbled down the porch steps. Through the door’s small window, Noah saw the second monkey leap across its fallen companion and grab at the doorknob, which Noah locked just in time. It squealed, and through the glass Noah saw its black tongue. On the steps, its comrade rose to its feet.
The front door was now Noah’s best hope, but as he ran back into the kitchen, so did a group of monkeys from the entrance to the dining room. Squealing and biting at the air, they spread out to surround him. One jumped to a kitchen cart, another to the table, a third to the edge of the countertop. Noah was trapped . . . again.
He backed into the sink and the rattle of the dishes gave him an idea for a weapon. He grabbed a big frying pan still coated in grease from the evening dinner. With the long handle in both hands, he waved it at each of the monkeys, and when this wasn’t enough to stop their approach, he batted it against the cabinets, the resulting toonngggg! making the monkeys jump back a few feet.
Noah lunged toward the one on the countertop and swung his arm in a wild arc. The pan struck the monkey with a clang, and it fell to the floor and hobbled off toward the back door.
Noah didn’t hesitate. He banged the pan against the spider monkey on the table, and with a second swing, he barely missed the monkey on the kitchen cart. Cans of spices flew across the room and shattered against the wall. One of the animals guarding the doorway jumped onto Noah’s back and sank its teeth into his shoulder. Noah screamed as pain shot down his arm, and charged backward. He slammed into something—the fridge—and the monkey let go and ran from the room.
He heard the window on the back door smash open, then the rattle of the doorknob as a monkey fumbled with the lock. How many were outside now? Five? Ten? More?
When he raised the pan at the final monkey in his way, it tore from the room, its tail dragging behind it. As Noah ran to the front door, it flew open and monkeys flooded into the house, crawling over the backs of one another.
Noah turned and fled up the stairs. He needed to close the portal! Moonlight had filled his room. As he ran into the closet, he slammed into something—something that had portaled from the Secret Zoo, and something that was too big to be a monkey.
Charlie Red.
CHAPTER 16
THE ATTACK
Noah swung the frying pan but missed Charlie Red, and the steel struck the closet shelves and rang like a weak bell. Charlie plucked the pan from Noah’s grasp and lobbed it into the bedroom, where it bounced once and then loudly wobbled to rest. Noah backed out of the closet and Charlie followed, his long limbs swinging from his lanky frame.
From the hallway came the howl and squeal of the monkeys. One by one, they rushed through the door, spotted Charlie, and took posts around the room—on the bed, the fallen desk, the sill of the open window. Their long tails rose above their heads like cobras poised to strike.
Charlie lunged at Noah, who managed to squirm away but tripped on the desk and fell, the side of his head hitting the floor. Around the room, the monkeys began to scream.
Noah stared out at the upended world—one wall acting as the ceiling; another, the floor. In his view lay the things which had spilled out of his desk drawer, and he happened to see his headset. A curvy piece of plastic the size of a marble, it sat beside a wadded ball of paper. As Noah turned onto his back, he swept up the headset and plugged it into his ear as casually as he could.
“Leave me alone!” he screamed, knowing his voice was being carried through the airwaves and into the ears of the Clarksville Zoo security guards. “Charlie—get out of my house!”
Had someone from the Secret Society heard? And if they had, could they possibly respond in time to save his life?
As Charlie stepped up to Noah, three monkeys fell in around him, moonlight glinting on their teeth.
“Out of my house, Red!” Noah repeated.
Charlie dropped onto his knees on Noah’s chest, and pain shot through Noah’s torso as air was pushed out of his lungs. As Charlie brought down his weight, his head moved into a stream of moonlight. His hair was more red than ever, and his freckles were large and splotchy. The edges of his teeth had begun to decay.
Noah tried to say something more into his bone mic, but without any breath, he couldn’t make a sound. He tried to push Charlie off, but it was a wasted effort—Charlie was too strong.
On the floor, the trio of monkeys huddled around to watch. Others looked down from the furniture and the windowsill, their eyes wide and anxious.
“You’re coming with me, kid,” Charlie said. “My boss wants some more company. Maybe then Darby will come and pay him a visit.” He suddenly jumped to his feet, grabbed Noah’s ankles, and started to pull him across the floor, the monkeys jumping around with delight.
Noah was too weak to resist. It was all he could do just to breathe.
A monkey on the windowsill suddenly dropped to the floor and began to jump around, swinging its long arms over its shoulders and howling in a panic. With one arm, it pitched something across the room—something that emitted a loud squeak as it hit the carpet. A tarsier—Noah had heard them before. And because hundreds of tarsiers occupied the trees throughout his neighborhood, Noah was certain that many more were coming.
The monkey danced to a new spot and stripped off another tarsier. This one flew directly over Noah, just missing Charlie but startling him enough to get him off balance. Noah drove his feet into Charlie’s knees, sending him to the ground.
Tarsi
ers began to flood through the open window, dozens at a time. They bounded off the sill like frogs and sailed through the room, landing on the bed, the nightstand, the floor. The drapes began to swing as tarsiers clung to their folds.
Charlie screamed and reached for his shoulder, where a tarsier had touched down and was now biting him. As he pulled away the animal, a second one landed on his forearm and bit into his wrist. A third tarsier attacked him—then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. For a while, Charlie was able to strip them off, but they soon practically covered his body. Charlie ran across the room and into the closet, bumping into the shelves. Noah got to his feet and stumbled after him, but Charlie was gone, and the piece of velvet over the portal was swaying.
Noah turned, and when the room began to spin, he dropped to one knee, surprised by how dazed he was. After a few seconds, he stood again, leaned a shoulder against the frame of the closet door, and tried to steady his gaze on the scene in front of him. Tarsiers were still pouring through the open window. Hundreds were on the floor and furniture. They hopped around like furry frogs, attacking the monkeys with their teeth and powerful hind legs. As the monkeys squealed and bucked and thrashed, Noah was reminded of grasshoppers trying to fend off an army of ants.
Someone stormed into the bedroom and Noah’s heart jumped in his chest. The person he felt certain was his mother or father turned out to be Solana. She had her Descender gear down—twelve-inch quills dangling from her arms and the body of her leather jacket. Without breaking her stride, she tore quills from her sleeves, jumped in behind one of the monkeys, and swung her hands down in front of her, tarsiers scattering as she buried the barbs into the creature’s neck. She turned and threw the same quills into the chest of another monkey, which staggered and fell to the floor. Solana turned left . . . right. She spotted a third monkey off to one side of the room, and she sprang on and off the bed, her long hair sweeping the ceiling before she came down and punched her barbed knuckles into its chest.
