The Monster Hunter's Manual

by Jessica Penot

  “OK,” I said. “So, let’s check it out.”

  I rifled around in my suitcase until I found a flashlight and turned it on. I pulled my robe on and opened the door to my room. Alex hugged my side. There was a large thud from the room above us and I dropped my flashlight. Alex grabbed my arm.

  “It’s probably a mouse or something,” I decided.

  I bent over to pick up my flashlight and there was another thud, a bang and a large clanging noise. My hand shook making the light dance on the ground in front of me. I shone the light into the empty hall. Everything was still and quiet. Moonlight shone in from the open window and spilled out onto the floor. There was another bang, but this time it was louder.

  “It’s a big rat,” I whispered.

  The banging stopped and then there were voices – whispering in tones that didn’t seem human. The voices were speaking in French, and even if it had been English, we wouldn’t have understood them. The male voices were getting louder, as if they were fighting.

  “They are big, talking rats,” I said stupidly.

  Something screamed and there was another bang. Alex ran and I froze. I stood with my feet planted on the floor clutching my flashlight like a sword. There was another bang and a wail. I dropped the flashlight again, but this time it broke as it hit the floor. The batteries scattered across the old wood and darkness swallowed the room. Alex ran towards my bed and pulled the covers up over his head. I stood rooted to the ground, unable to move.

  The thuds stopped and I closed my eyes trying to think of some explanation for the noise. Bang! The crash was so loud that the light fixture above me shook. I ran to the door, closed it, and twisted the lock. I leaned against the thick wooden door, holding it shut. There was another thud and I jumped in bed next to my brother. I pulled the covers over my head and lay perfectly still staring at him.

  “I told you. There are ghosts up there,” Alex said.

  I could still hear Aunt Perrine saying it was a very haunted attic. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  Alex kept his voice low. “Then why are you shaking?”

  “Because they might be burglars.”

  “Right. They climbed the castle walls to break into an attic? Or did they break down the drawbridge?”

  “Maybe.” I frowned.

  “You are so stupid,” Alex hissed.

  “At least I don’t believe in ghosts like a baby.”

  There was another thud and then a strange cracking noise, Alex and I both looked up. Alex grabbed my hand and despite ourselves, we huddled up under the covers together to wait for dawn.

  The light peeked in the window of my room dispelling the fear of the long night. Alex and I had fallen asleep but we hadn’t slept long. We both sat up and pulled the covers down. There were birds singing in the distance. In the bright light of morning, our fear seemed a little silly.

  We could hear Aunt Perrine singing down stairs so we followed the sound of her voice down into the kitchen. Aunt Perrine was already dressed for the day and sitting at the table with a tiny glass of coffee and a croissant. She smiled broadly, as always.

  “There’s ghosts in the attic!” Alex yelled.

  “Bien sur,” she said. “Of course. I say to you, zis attic is very ’aunted, no?”

  “It may have been burglars,” I added.

  Aunt Perrine laughed. “Zis castle stood against ze armies of ze English when zey come. It stand against ze Vikings. You zink burglars can come in? No. N’est pas possible!”

  “So they were ghosts!” Alex exclaimed.

  “Yes, I say so,” Aunt Perrine said.

  Alex shook fearfully. “What can we do?”

  “Nozing. You do nozing. Zey won’t ’urt you.”

  “But…”

  “No buts,” she said. “Would you like a croissant?”

  We both sat down and she gave us each a croissant and hot chocolate. Aunt Perrine hummed as she made it, slowly boiling the milk and pouring it over the chocolate. She smiled at us as she set the cups down. The windows were open and the sunshine poured in through the lace curtains and onto the floor. Despite everything that happened, both Alex and I were filled with a sudden urge to explore. It was a beautiful day and we were in a fascinating place. Everything else could be easily forgotten.

  We both shoved the croissant into our mouths and slurped our hot chocolate down as fast as we could.

  “Can we go outside?” I asked with a mouth full of croissant.

  Aunt Perrine laughed again. “You come to zee store wiz me and zen you go. I don’t know what boyz eat.”

  Alex’s little smile faded and he sat back down. We both shuffled back upstairs and put on our clothes. Alex took his time and hung out of his bedroom window watching the people running to and fro in the medieval village below us. It was a busy village and people were sitting outside in a café drinking coffee. Other people ran down the street with baguettes in their hands. Alex scowled as he watched the pretty scene.

  “I don’t wanna go to the store,” Alex whined.

  “Me either,” I said.

  There was another thump from upstairs and Alex jumped up angrily. He deliberately stomped across the floor and back to the winding staircase. “I don’t care about ghosts either,” he yelled. “You hear me ghosts! I’m coming up!” He ran up the stairs and I followed him. We burst into the loft and switched on the lights.

  The lamps flickered and then a pale glow spread over the loft. It was dirty and dusty, but quiet. Alex grabbed my hand and pulled me in with him. He was shaking a little. The loft looked like someone’s bedroom. There were was an old bed on one side of the room and a couple of chests. There were books spread out over the floor.

  I picked one up and read the title, “A Skeleton’s Guide to Broken Bones.”

  I dropped the book and shrugged. There were several bottles in the corner and Alex picked one up and read the label, “Diet Blood.”

  “Diet Blood?” I asked.

  “It’s Sans Sucre,” Alex read the rest of the label. “Whatever that means.” He dropped the bottle on the floor and it made an ominous clanking noise. He kicked the bottle as it hit the floor and it rolled under the bed.

  Alex opened the chest while I studied the bookshelf. It was stacked high with old books. I picked one up and looked at the pictures. It showed an army of skeletons fighting a horrible monster. I couldn’t read the text. It was all in French. I turned the page. There was another picture that showed some kind of sorceress or witch casting a spell on the monster. I slid the book in pocket of my bathrobe and looked at the rest of the things on the shelf.

  There were lots of games. Checkers, Life, and Sorry, were all stacked up haphazardly on the shelf. There was a piece of old chewing gum stuck to the bottom of one shelf.

  Alex continued rifling through the chest and pulled out a stack of old clothes. He threw them on the floor and stared at them.

  “They’re all kid’s clothes,” he said. “Do you think Aunt Perrine had kids?”

  I shrugged.

  There were posters on the walls with pictures from old monster movies. “Maybe it’s a joke,” I said.

  “Let’s see what’s in the attic.” Alex pushed open the door to the attic. A wave of hot air came out. There were no lights but we looked in. There were boxes and a coffin. “There’s a coffin!”

  “Maybe a vampire lives up here,” I said sarcastically.

  “Yeah, right,” Alex answered. “Maybe Aunt Perrine keeps her dead husband up here.”

  “She’s not that crazy.”

  Alex smiled and made a funny face and did a hand motion around his head to indicate that she was crazy. “She’s crazy.” He did a little dance.

  I laughed.

  “I save it for when I die,” Aunt Perrine said. Alex and I jumped. Aunt Perrine had appeared out of nowhere. Alex screamed like a little girl and I fell backwards.

  “I save it for when I die,” she said again.

  “What?” I asked.

  �
�Zee coffin. I buy it on sale.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I like to shop zee sales.”

  “Oh,” I said again.

  “Come on. Time to go to zee store.”

  Aunt Perrine scuffled down the stairs in her strange slippers leaving Alex and me staring after her with our mouths slightly agape. I closed the door to the attic and Alex looked at me. “She’s crazy. Isn’t she?”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I shrugged and followed her down the stairs. Alex caught up with me and tugged at my shoulder. “You don’t think she’s crazy?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know. I wish I did. I know we are stuck here, so we might as well make the best of it instead of sulking around and complaining.”

  Alex pushed me. “I’m not doing that.”

  “Yes, you are.” I pushed him back.

  “Yeah. Well maybe you should complain too. It’s like Mom and Dad didn’t even die. You don’t even care that they’re dead.”

  “Shut your stupid mouth,” I said and punched him in the shoulder.

  Alex kicked me in the shin and ran down the stairs after Aunt Perrine. My face flushed with anger. What did Alex know? Just because I didn’t mope around and cry like a baby didn’t mean I didn’t care. He ran around the kitchen table and out the front door into the fortress courtyard.

  I followed. In the sunlight, it was pretty. Wild roses crept up the walls and soft grass covered the ground. Cats sat lazily basking in the sunshine. Aunt Perrine was raising the castle gate and Alex was running towards her.

  I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking I wouldn’t hit him in front of her, but he was stupid. I tackled Alex and sat on top of him hitting him.

  “You take it back!” I wailed.

  Aunt Perrine lifted me off. She was strong for an old lady. I fell back into the dirt. The tears burned in my eyes.

  Aunt Perrine sat down in the dirt next to us and put her hand on each of ours. “Boyz,” she said softly. “It will be all right. You will see. You ’ave strong ’earts. You are fighters and zee world needs fighters.”

  Aunt Perrine embraced us both, and we leaned into her. “Bad zings ’appen,” she said. “Terrible zings, but there is always light at the end. You vill see.”

  Alex and I nodded.

  “Now you be nice.”

  We both nodded again.

  “So now we go to zee store.”

  She got up and we both followed her into her tiny car. She sang all the way to the store. The castle was located in a tiny village, called Chateau Larcher, just like the castle. There was no grocery store in the village, so we had to drive all the way back into the city. It was a long ride.

  The grocery store, or supermarche, was big and crowded. At first, it almost looked like a store at home, until you looked at the labels. Alex hung behind Aunt Perrine with a scowl and the occasional look of disgust when he saw something weird.

  Everything was different, even the soda – Orangina? The snacks were different too – Mininizza’s? I picked up the package. They were small pizza like crackers. They looked good. I put them down and chased after Aunt Perrine. I caught up with her at the meat aisle. It was just disgusting. There were whole birds with their heads and feet still attached. Every organ that could be taken out of an animal was neatly packaged and labeled.

  Alex snickered when we passed an entire section of brains. He pointed and called out to me.

  “Brains!” he yelled. “They have brains!”

  Aunt Perrine turned the cart around and smiled. “Oh zanks you, Alex,” she said. “I almost forget.”

  She pulled the cart up alongside the brain section and filled it up. Cow brains. Sheep brains. Goose brains. She took every brain there was and smiled while she did it. And then she looked at us. “So, now what do you boyz want?”

  We picked out the most familiar foods we could find, breakfast cereal, fruit and chips. They had something that looked like hotdogs. The peanut butter had some kind of oil floating on top, so we avoided that. We got what we could, and when Aunt Perrine went to pay, Alex looked at me with genuine concern.

  “She isn’t going to feed us brains every night, is she?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m not eating brains,” Alex said.

  I shrugged again.

  “You aren’t going to eat brains, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Dad said they were good. Dad used to eat them when we visited Nannan.”

  “You are just as crazy as Aunt Perrine.”

  I shrugged again. I didn’t care. I just couldn’t wait to get back to the castle and explore.

  Chapter 3

  The Ghost of the Keep

  My mom used to drag us through Paris and she never got tired. She would pull us through the underworld of the subways, where the trains never slept and had complained as she walked, “Sometimes there’s just too much to see.” She had then smiled and winked at me and leaned down and whispered in my ear, “This place is magic you know.”

  “The subway?” I had asked.

  “Yes,” she had said. “These tunnels go on forever and deep beneath the earth there are magic creatures that live forever.”

  I remember being a little scared then. “Are they bad?”

  “No,” my mother had answered. “They saved your father once.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” She had said it in the way she said lots of things. I had never been sure if she was just telling a story or if she really meant it.

  I thought about it as I started out into the castle. There was too much to see. Alex ran ahead of me. “Come on,” he shouted.

  I followed him up the first tower of the broken castle. The old wooden door whined as it opened, and Alex ran up the long, spiral stairs, to the top of the tower. From the top, you could see the entire village and the countryside beyond it.

  Alex laughed. “I bet knights used to stand guard up here and shoot people with their arrows. Don’t you think?”

  “It was probably just a watchtower,” I answered.

  “You are such a killjoy, sometimes.” He ran down the stairs and up to the top of the castle gate. There were two towers on either side of it The towers had tiny slit windows. The area just on top of the gate had slit windows too. Alex smiled. “Archers could stand here and fire out on the people who were attacking them!” He pretended to draw his bow and fire out onto the imaginary armies beneath us.

  I looked out of the hole at the village and tried to imagine what it must have been like. I tried to imagine armies of knights in shining armor moving up the hill towards us with swords drawn.

  “This is awesome!” Alex declared. He ran to the next tower. “Why didn’t we come here before?”

  “Dad and Aunt Perrine didn’t get along,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. They had some kind of fight when we were both little. Mom always wanted them to work it out, but Dad wouldn’t. Mom always tried to talk to Aunt Perrine, but Dad got so upset she just let it go.”

  “What did they fight about?”

  “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Aunt Perrine.”

  “No way! She’s crazy,” he said.

  I joined Alex and pretended to draw my bow and fire at the oncoming hoards of knights. Alex drew his sword and faced me. “You won’t take this castle.”

  “Your pitiful army won’t stop us,” I replied and we pretended to fight along the castle walls. We clashed invisible swords for a while and then we ran down the stairs and back out into the courtyard. The sun spilled over the half-broken walls and onto the sweet, summer grass, and we ran in and out of broken remains of what was once some kind of barn. We jumped on the walls fighting all the way and then ran into the remains of the castle keep. An old door led to more stairs, which in turn led to a small room by a window. The small room was all that was left of the keep. The rest of it had crumbled.

  We stood in the room and looked at the broken timbers from the
roof and the remains of moldy tapestries. Alex kicked the beams and looked around.

  I thought the room must have been beautiful once. There was an old bed with large, claw feet. There were cherubs carved on the headboard and bed curtains still hung in tattered disrepair from the canopy. There was a broken mirror and an old chest. There were elaborate chairs engraved with angels and saints. Dull light streamed in from one small, barred window, making the dust in the room seem even thicker. All of this beauty sat as if it hadn’t been touched for a thousand years.

  “I bet this is where they kept the prisoners,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “This is the prison,” he asserted.

  “Why would they have tapestries in a prison?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex said. “Why would they have bars on the windows if it wasn’t a prison?”

  “Maybe to keep people out?”

  “I think it’s a prison,” Alex said again.

  He picked up an old piece of wood and pretended it was a sword. He parried and thrust and I watched him. Something moved in the shadows, behind one of the old tapestries. The tapestry fluttered and I moved it aside. There was nothing but stone wall behind it.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “What?” Something else moved, this time by the edge of a broken bed. It moved behind the bed curtains. The bed curtains were ruined and faded. Time had decayed them, but I could see that they had once been beautiful red velvet, and had been embroidered with tiny flowers.

  “This was a bedroom,” I whispered to myself.

  “It was the room of the Lord’s daughter,” a small voice answered from the shadows.

  Both Alex and I turned. We could see someone hiding behind the remains of a tapestry, but we couldn’t see who.

  “She was a princess…” The voice was a whisper.

  Alex moved towards me and stood slightly behind me with his fake sword drawn.

  “What was that?” he whispered in my ear.