Xander and the Lost Island of Monsters

by Margaret Dilloway

  She smiles up at him, pats his shoulder. “Good boy.” She looks at me. “Your father wants to talk to you. He’s in his office.” Obāchan disappears into the kitchen.

  Great. If anybody’s seen an e-mail from Mr. Stedman, it’s Dad, since he’s been sitting in front of his computer. We go upstairs. Peyton walks ahead to my room. “Good luck,” he says.

  “I need it.” I don’t even know what I should say. Yeah, I was mad at Lovey. Yeah, I did laugh. But I honestly don’t remember making the drawing. Maybe I need a brain scan. Maybe I’m losing my mind.

  This isn’t going to go over well with Dad. I’d overheard him talking about me to Obāchan just last night. “I’m worried about Xander,” Dad had said in a low voice, in the kitchen, where they think I can’t hear them. “He’s not working up to his potential.”

  “It’s because his mother left,” Obāchan said in an even lower voice. “You were never like that.”

  “She couldn’t help what she did,” Dad said sharply. “You know that.”

  Obāchan changed the subject. She and Dad always did when someone brought up my mother. She sputtered out a long breath. “Xander is just a daydreamer. He’s young. He’s not you. Give him time.”

  Dad had sighed. “That might not be an option.”

  After that I didn’t want to listen anymore.

  Now Dad sits behind his beat-up metal desk, tapping away on his laptop. Books are bursting out of the shelves. His office is cluttered, but Dad claims to know where everything is.

  Near Dad’s feet, our dog, Inu, sees me first and thumps his baseball-bat-size tail. Inu means dog in Japanese, so yes, we have a dog named Dog. He’s a big goldendoodle with maybe some Great Dane mixed in, because he’s pretty huge. One hundred-and-forty pounds. Weighs about sixty pounds more than I do. He’s got soft, curly golden hair all over, and I can’t remember ever not having him around. Woof, he says in his deep voice. A doggie hello. He lumbers over, his black lips seeming to smile. Some slobber drips off his beard onto my shoe. “Eww, Inu!” I say, but I don’t mind. That’s just him. He whines softly, wanting attention. His head comes up to my hip. I rub him between the eyes, the way he likes. He wags his tail madly, wiggling his entire body and sending a few of Dad’s papers flying. Inu always greets me like I’ve been away for a hundred years, even if I’ve just gone to the bathroom.

  I flop into the ancient leather easy chair and brace myself. I really hate the expression Dad has when I do something wrong. Sad, like that one football kicker who lost the Super Bowl because he missed. Dad looks like that every time he sees my report card.

  His blue eyes focus on me from behind thick glasses. With his long silver-gray ponytail, he looks like a Japanese hippie. But his body is wiry and as strong as iron from hours of hiking and rock-climbing. “Xander-chan, how was school?” He folds his sinewy brown hands—like tree roots—in front of him.

  “Fine.” I’m not going to give him any extra information. I pick up a thick leather-bound journal and flip through it. It’s filled with Japanese handwriting I can’t read, and some rough illustrations of fairy-tale monsters. I’m used to finding stuff like this in his office. He’s the professor of folklore at a local college. It’s hard to believe somebody can make a living by talking about made-up things. Maybe I can get his job when I grow up. “We’re on break now.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. Well, now that you have some extra time”—he opens his desk drawer and takes out a comic book—“maybe you’d like to read this. Do you know the Momotaro story?”

  “Yeah. The peach boy.” He hands me the comic, and I check it out. It looks kind of familiar. Maybe I saw this when I was little. It’s an old fairy tale about a little boy some old people find in, well, a peach. He grows up and goes to fight some demons. “Isn’t that for little kids?”

  “Not this one.” Dad stares at me, the way he does when he asks me a math question he expects me to know the answer to. I don’t know what he’s trying to see.

  Feeling uncomfortable under his gaze, I fiddle with the framed photo of my mom that he keeps on his desk. In it she’s holding me, baby Xander. My mom’s red-blond hair poofs around her freckled milk-white face. I remember yanking on her hair when she carried me, because I liked the color. She would grab my hand and say, “Be gentle, Xander,” in a soft voice. I don’t think she was ever mad at me, come to think of it.

  Then why did she leave?

  Dad gently removes the frame from my grasp. “You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to,” he says softly.

  I shrug. “Maybe I’ll read it.” I say it just to make him happy. I probably won’t have time.

  Inu stands up and barks at the window like crazy. There must be a rabbit or something outside.

  “Inu, shush,” Dad says, and he waves me off.

  I roll up the comic and stick it into my back pocket. It’s spring break. I’m going to play some video games.

  I go into my room and throw the comic book on the bed next to Peyton. He’s lying there looking at the drawings I stuck all over my walls. So many drawings that you can’t see the actual wall anymore. They flap in the wind coming through my open window. He picks up the comic. “What’s this?”

  I shrug. “Momotaro. A Japanese fairy tale.” I pick up his laptop, which is already open to CraftWorlds. I settle down on my stomach. “May I?”

  Peyton nods, opens the comic.

  I’m in Challenge Mode. That means the computer sends things to attack you at night, and you have to fight them. Werewolves and zombies and feral pigs, oh my.

  I’ve made a farmhouse and have blocky-looking pigs and horses and chickens. I need to feed them their pixelly food. But I don’t see my humanoid character, Bob. “Did you change my game?”

  “I never log in to your game.” Peyton flips open the comic book. “Mukashi mukashi.”

  I squint at him. “You know Japanese?”

  “It’s written out.” He shows me. It’s true—it isn’t printed with the symbols of the kanji alphabet, which I can’t decipher. Huh.

  “Mukashi mukashi. It means Once upon a time,” I say without thinking. I don’t know how I know that. My grandma used to read me stories in Japanese. I’m sure she must have told me at one point.

  Anyway, I have more important things to worry about. In my game, I still can’t find Bob, so I start creating a new figure.

  Peyton props the comic on his chest and reads it aloud.

  Once upon a time, long ago, Japan was in turmoil. The oni demons had taken over the northern island. Along with them came earthquakes and drought and tsunamis. Much of the land was destroyed. Desperate, the people sent army after army to fight the demons, but no one ever returned from the Lost Island of Monsters.

  An old man and woman lived poor and hungry on a farm. Their sons had all perished fighting the oni, and there was no one else to help them maintain the animals and the crops. “If only I could have another son,” the old woman said. “A big, strong son to assist us. But it is impossible.”

  One afternoon, the old woman was trying to wash clothes in a stream that was more like a trickle. Dead trees lined the banks. A huge earthquake struck, the ground rolled, and the old woman fell down. Water flooded into the stream, turning it into a river, which swelled until it became as big as an ocean. Then she saw a peach—a huge peach, a peach as big as a house—bobbing down the current toward her. Her mouth watered. She had not tasted a peach in five years, for all the fruit trees were gone. “Look at that,” she said to herself. “How delicious! It must have washed down from the mountains.”

  The peach caught on a branch and stopped moving. The old woman called to her husband, “Hurry! We have a feast here!” Both hobbled over to the peach.

  The old woman sliced off a piece. It was the most delicious peach she had ever tasted, like liquid honey. She closed her eyes.

  The fruit was so big that they could eat and eat and keep eating long past when they were full. They couldn’t help themselves. Finally, the
ir sticky hands reached into the last bit of peach, and they felt the pit.

  It didn’t feel like the usual prickly peach pit. No, this was smooth under their fingertips.

  The old man scraped away the last of the peach flesh.

  The pit gleamed gold.

  The old man tapped on it. “This is worth a fortune,” he said.

  “But there are no wealthy people left to buy it,” the old woman said.

  Suddenly, the pit trembled. The old couple gasped and stepped back, sure that it was going to explode and they were going to be punished for their greed.

  The pit split open with a sound like cracking thunder.

  A little boy, naked as a newborn, leaped out and landed on the earth in front of them.

  “I am Momotaro,” the boy said. “I am your son.”

  The old woman wept and hugged him. Her prayers had been answered!

  Inside the peach pit, a samurai sword glittered. The old man pulled it out. Inscribed on the blade was

  The Sword of Yumenushi

  It was too big for the boy, so the old man carried it home to keep for him.

  Momotaro helped the old people on the farm, and they loved him like a son. They forgot how they had found him, there in the peach with the sword, and they thought of him as any ordinary boy.

  Through the years, the land continued to suffer. Earthquakes happened daily. The rains were still sparse. Yet the old couple was happier now than they had ever been, because they had Momotaro to keep them company.

  Though the crops barely grew, Momotaro did. He became known throughout the land as the fiercest and strongest boy anyone had ever seen. He could uproot full-grown trees before he was five. When he was eight, he could hold his breath underwater for ten minutes. At age ten, he could shoot an arrow through a knot of wood from half a mile away. The old man burst with pride whenever he spoke of his son.

  Momotaro wasn’t just the best warrior in the land. When he wasn’t preparing his body for battle, he liked to dream. For every tactic he practiced, Momotaro made a painting, until the home of the old people was filled with dozens and dozens of pictures. He had the secret dreaming mind of a poet.

  “What good is art in a time of war?” his adopted father complained one day, after Momotaro neglected his chores to make a painting for his adopted mother. “Do not let him waste his talent on such frivolous matters!”

  Momotaro bowed his head. He snapped his paintbrushes in half. “I am sorry, honorable Father,” Momotaro replied. “I do not know why I dream as much as I do. I will try to be a better son.”

  Momotaro went outside to do all the chores that the old man found tiresome. The old woman tsked at her husband. “Don’t you know,” she asked, “that wisdom hides in his heart?” She jabbed at the painting with a bent finger.

  The old man looked closely at it for the first time.

  It was a picture of Momotaro fighting the oni. He threw the monsters off a craggy cliff. He slashed at their evil with his trusted sword.

  Then the old man examined all of Momotaro’s art. Picture after picture of the boy fighting. It was as if he was planning his whole battle strategy.

  That was when the old man remembered. Momotaro was not his. Their answered prayer had come at a price they had yet to pay.

  The old man made his son new paintbrushes and presented them to him with a bow. “Forgive me.”

  The old man now knew that Momotaro had been sent to Japan for one purpose: to grow up and rid the land of the terrible demons that plagued the North.

  One morning, Momotaro awoke early from a dream. In the dream he had traveled through a dark and barren land, alone and lonely and cold. His body shook with dread as his eyes opened. Yet he found himself staring out the window to the northern mountains, where the oni lorded over his countrymen, and he felt nothing but a determination to go.

  It would be easier to stay. To keep living this easy, pleasant life with his elderly parents. But he knew deep inside that this wasn’t the right answer. “It is time,” he told his parents with a heavy heart.

  “You are not ready!” his father shouted. “You are too young.”

  It was true that Momotaro had not yet grown a whisker on his face. But he bowed his head. “Please forgive me, honorable Father, but I am called.”

  “Are you not afraid?” his mother cried, for she was.

  “I have never been more afraid,” Momotaro said, “but I must begin. Or I will never finish.”

  The old man told the boy how to get to the coast and where he could find a ship to hire. The old woman made him a basket of food to take, and her tears salted the rice balls.

  Peyton stops reading and sits up. “Yumenushi. What does that mean?”

  I look over at the word and shrug. “Dunno. Don’t really care.” The laptop fan starts whirring like it’s a helicopter about to take off. “Uh-oh. I hope CraftWorlds isn’t breaking your computer.”

  “My dad will kill me.” Peyton pokes at the laptop screen. “Did you download a new skin?”

  “No. It’s the same one.” Skins are layers you can add to make different characters. For example, you can download a skin to give your character scales, and then another to give him a mustache. I haven’t downloaded a new one in ages.

  My game should look the same as it always does, minus Bob, my missing character. But when I look at the screen, I see something totally different. A warrior in samurai gear swings his sword. His pixelly blue eyes almost jump out at me. “Wow,” I say. “I’m an even better coder than I thought. Must be some kind of glitch. Are you sure you didn’t log in from your house and do this?” I point.

  Peyton snorts. “I don’t even know your password.” He peers at the screen. “Dude, check you out. You’re playing in Hardcore Mode.”

  “What?” I look. There are a few different modes that the game lets you play in, but all of them let you regenerate or start over except one. This one.

  Hardcore Mode means that it’s life or death. You die, and your whole world gets destroyed.

  I never play in Hardcore Mode. I tried it once and lost. Miserably. It was brutal. I’m not going to lie, I shed a tear that day.

  I swore I’d never play in Hardcore Mode again. “No, no, no!” I press ESCAPE, but nothing happens. CONTROL Q to quit, nothing. MENU, nothing. “Abort mission! Peyton, what do I do?”

  “I don’t know!” Peyton’s looking over my shoulder. “Turn it off?”

  I press the POWER button. Nothing.

  The samurai man walks around, his head moving back and forth like he’s looking for something. He stops by my barn. The animals run away, squealing and flapping wings. Huh.

  The sun goes down in my game. That means all the bad creatures will be coming out to get him.

  He gets into battle stance, knees bent, one foot in front of another, sword held high over his head.

  “Zombie attack!” I yell, and get my fingers ready over the buttons.

  But it’s not a zombie that pops out of the building.

  It’s the beast-ape-man that I drew earlier today, before the whole Lovey incident. The monster’s dinosaur tail whips around, his tongue lashing out.

  He doesn’t move like the other figures, like a block puppet with hinged joints. No. He moves like he’s real, all sinuous and muscular. The scales on his body glisten. Those black-hole eyes are still there, sucking all the life out of everything around him. I shiver.

  His head whips around. He looks at me and smiles. At me.

  Hissssss.

  I gape at the screen. The pixels seem to move closer. It’s like I’m staring at one of those hidden picture things until suddenly the jumble of colors pops into 3-D. Like my eyeballs are sucking me headfirst into CraftWorlds. I see multicolored pixels all around, close enough to touch.

  I feel the three snakes’ tongues flit across my lashes. Smell garbage-pail breath.

  “Ahhhh!” I shut the laptop and leap backward, falling off the bed. My pulse thumps in my mouth, and I realize my eyes are
squished closed. I open them and see tufts of Inu fur rolling around under my bed. I was supposed to vacuum here last weekend. I’ve never been so glad to see dust bunnies. For a second I thought I was inside the game.

  “Xander?” Peyton looks at me over the edge of the bed. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” I stay down on the floor for a second. I’m such an idiot. What the heck is wrong with me? It’s just a game. The greatest game ever created, yeah, but still a game. I must need some sleep or food. School’s getting to me. Mr. Stedman harping about my nonexistent “condition.” This is what adults call “burnout.”

  “I’m fine.” I scramble up, my nose itching from the dust. I push the laptop away and sit down on the bed. “I’ve just never seen that skin before, is all. That samurai character. Or that beast-man. Did you see that thing? It looked so real. It didn’t look like it belonged in CraftWorlds at all.”

  “You must have downloaded it. Maybe you don’t remember. Maybe it came with another skin.” Peyton leafs through the comic with a shrug. “Who knows? Computers do weird stuff all the time.”

  Peyton’s right. In fact, that’s probably why I drew the monster in school. I must have seen it while I was playing CraftWorlds and I just forgot. Or maybe they stuck him into an ad, as a subliminal message, the way a hamburger chain might stick a picture of a burger in an ad for toys to make kids hungry. My heart calms down.

  I open the laptop again. The black screen pops into full color.

  My world’s deleted. All of it. A year of building, gone. Poof. “Gosh dang it! What the heck?” If my obāchan wasn’t in the house, I’d definitely be using stronger language. I restart the game. Still nothing appears.

  I shut the cover. I should reboot the whole computer. Maybe that’ll help.

  “This is some good stuff.” Peyton flops the comic book down on top of the laptop. “I swear, one day you’re going to be working for Marvel.”

  “What do you mean?” I pick up the comic. Now I see it’s stapled together, a homemade photocopy.

  Peyton’s finger points to three words on the cover: By Xander Miyamoto.