A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting

by Joe Ballarini

“You okay?” I whispered.

  “I’m allergic to cats.” She sniffled, eyes red and bloodshot.

  “WHAT?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she mumbled, swallowing hard.

  My mouth hung open as she ducked through the reeking must. Her threshold for pain and fear amazed me, but I was scared for her. She coughed fiercely even though she tried to hold it back. She hawked a loogie, then swallowed it.

  Our only flashlight illuminated tattered chairs and an overturned table with the legs chewed off. BZZT! BZZT! My phone was vibrating. It was a text from a number I had never seen before.

  That was crazy.

  This is Victor, BTW.

  “Oh. My. God!” I gasped.

  “Are you hurt?” Liz whispered, scrambling to my side.

  “He texted me,” I said, showing her the phone.

  Liz’s angry eyes burned into me.

  “Put it away,” Liz hissed.

  “I will,” I said. “Just help me think of what to text back first.”

  Liz made a grab for the phone.

  “Fine. Fine. I’ll text him later! See? It’s going away. Jeez,” I said, making a big show of putting the phone away.

  She snorted and held out the cattle prod, ducking behind stacks of old newspapers that were piled so high they formed a maze within the decrepit house.

  “Boys are useless,” she mumbled to herself as we moved through the newspaper maze and stood at the edge of what I was guessing was the basement door. “Trust me. You’re just a kid.”

  “You’re, like, two years older than me.”

  “I am a lifetime older than you.”

  “So that means I have to be as miserable as you?”

  Liz made a sour face, and I backed off, realizing we were both hungry, frustrated, and terrified. We checked the tracker. The Toadie was here. Right beneath our feet.

  My toe kicked something. I thought it was a rock, but it was too shiny and bright. It was the metallic pet tracker, wet and moist with bile. The Toadie had spit it up.

  That’s not a good sign.

  Liz shivered.

  We started to creep back toward the window we’d come through, but the entire floor was covered with cats. From the shadows, green and yellow eyes appeared. Cats were crawling out of the walls and from the broken floor. We were slowly being surrounded by them.

  “Nice evil kitties,” I whispered, trying to soothe them.

  Flashes of light reflected off their jewel eyes. Their tails brushed against our legs.

  The window was completely blocked by wriggling felines. They were scratching at the door, slicing long grooves. My heart flopped in my chest as I looked for another way out.

  Click-clack. A tapping noise sounded behind us.

  Liz sneezed and coughed. Her allergies were kicking in fierce. She wiped her nose with her shirtsleeve.

  Click-clack. The sweet smell of lavender wafted through the air again. Through a hole clawed out of the wall, I saw into the living room. On a tattered, old couch sat a woman, watching us.

  Click-clack.

  One of her bony hands was stroking a cat in her lap, running her long, curled fingernails through its coat. The other hand was tapping against the gnawed wooden arm of the couch. Liz and I darted toward the window, but piles of cats blocked our path, as if they were furry bricks. Liz tripped and wheezed for breath. I held her hand, both of us shaking.

  Click-clack.

  Peggy Drood cocked her head. Long gray hair hung over her shoulders in brittle clumps. She slunk off the couch and slithered across the floor, blocking our exit.

  The strange, old specter sat on her stumpy legs like a cheerful little kitten. The guide wasn’t lying about Peggy Drood giving herself to her cats as a meal: her legs had been nibbled off.

  She looked up at us with large, dark eyes. That’s when I saw they weren’t dark; they had been clawed out long ago.

  “Yooooou . . . have come to feed my cats?” hissed Peggy Drood. The low, warbling growl of a hundred cats rose around us.

  Liz and I exchanged glances. Liz shrugged.

  “Y-y-yes. We have . . . ,” I managed to whisper.

  This made the Cat Lady smile.

  “Feeeeeeed them . . . ,” she said with a hush.

  The cats were slowly circling us.

  We began throwing Cheerios at the cats. The creatures sniffed our offerings and licked them, then . . .

  Crunch, crunch.

  “We have to keep feeding these cats or they are going to start feeding on us,” I whispered to Liz as I threw down my last Cheerios.

  Tears rimmed Liz’s red eyes. She was squinting painfully as she cleared her throat.

  I unzipped Liz’s pack, removed a baby bottle, and squirted a puddle of milk onto the floor. The hungry cats slurped it up. This drew some of the attention away from us.

  “Jacob . . . ,” Liz rasped to the ghostly Cat Lady.

  Peggy Drood stroked her sickly yellow fingernails through a mangy cat’s fur. “The boy is very special to us. We . . . need him . . . ,” she purred, and gestured her hand across the room. My stomach churned as I realized she was talking about more than just her and her cats. She was talking about the entire world of monsters.

  “He said you’d come looking for the boy.”

  “The—the—Toadie?” I asked.

  The Cat Lady gave a throaty chuckle.

  “No, my dear. The Grand Guignol.”

  “The Grand Goo-who?” I said.

  There was a loud clang. Liz had dropped the cattle prod. Her face turned white.

  “That’s impossible,” Liz whispered.

  Peggy smiled, satisfied with Liz’s terror-stricken reaction. A fly buzzed out of her eye socket.

  “Kevin . . . ,” whispered Liz.

  “You know the Grand Guignol?” she purred again.

  I saw Liz clench her jaw and curl her fist. “He’s dead.”

  The Cat Lady giggled wildly, her shoulders bouncing up and down, like a jack-in-the-box. “He’s very much alive, sweetie.” Liz stumbled, her hands shaking and swollen, cat hair dancing in her nose. Her sneeze threw her backward. “You lie. You lie.”

  “He asked me to do him a favor,” creaked the ghostly woman. She thrust her arms out over her cats and gave a shrieking, chilling command, “EAT! EAT, MY DEARIES! EAT THEM UP!”

  24

  A cat tsunami descended on us. In a roar of hisses and hungry meows, we were buried in fur, fangs, and claws. Ducking under the feline ceiling, I heard a strange voice speak inside of my head.

  Stand up, Kelly, said the voice.

  This wasn’t my voice doing an impression. This was someone else, speaking to me. A woman’s voice. Strong, echoing. It was coming from deep within me. And I know this is going to sound crazy, but she sounded a lot like the poet Maya Angelou. (Mr. Gibbs, my honors English teacher, is a huge fan and is always showing us videos of her reading her poetry.)

  “What?” I said back to the voice.

  You heard me, Kelly, said the powerful voice. Grab your weapon and stand up. You need to get Liz out of here before she chokes to death.

  “That sounds really hard.”

  It is hard, but you can do this, Kelly.

  “Am I going insane?”

  Not at all. There’s no time to explain. Go!

  I reached down, grabbed Liz’s cattle zapper, and felt its powerful hum in my hand.

  I swung. Flashes of bright, blue light crackled. Cats howled.

  MEEEEOOOOW!

  I leveled the zapper at the scrawny black cat chewing on Liz’s jeans. The prod crackled against the cat’s fur. The nasty feline yelped and swiped its jagged claws at me. I lunged like an amateur Musketeer and hit it right in the whiskers.

  ZZZT! MEEOOOOW!

  Here’s the thing: I love cats. Really, I do. I love all animals. I felt bad as electricity sparked from their tails. But their claws were tearing holes in the pockets of my jeans. A fang sank through the top of my sneaker and pierced the side of my big
toe. Liz’s hands were covered in scratches.

  The cats’ tails began interlocking with one another, twisting and curling like barbed wire. They were turning themselves into a wall of claws and teeth. A wall of cats? I screamed, grabbed Liz, and dragged her to the wall. We were trapped. The front door was a million miles away, and Peggy Drood was shrieking and hissing by the window. There was no other way out.

  I screamed and unzipped Liz’s backpack. My hands dashed across the weapons until I found a small tube of finger paint.

  Please don’t be real finger paint.

  I uncapped the tube, and acid-smelling emerald goo splattered out. It struck the floorboards and sizzled, burning a hole clean through the wood.

  YEAH, BABY!

  I smeared the end of the tube on the wall, careful not to get any on me. The chupacabra venom ate through that brick wall like butter melting on pancakes. The fizzing, bubbling acid burned a three-foot hole into the wall.

  “NO!” shrieked Peggy.

  She made a hacking cough, her pointy shoulders shuddering. Something gurgled up from deep inside of her throat and swelled into her mouth. Peggy vomited up a writhing hair ball the size of a peach, full of twisted, gnarled dark hairs.

  THWACK!

  It splattered into the wall by my head, splashing kitty spittle into my eye. I screamed and shoved Liz out the hole and then pulled myself through.

  Panting, I heaved Liz toward the moped as cats flooded into the tall reeds. The pattering of thousands of paws rolled behind us. I flung Liz across the seat and dug around inside her pockets.

  My eyes bulged at the immense tide of a thousand wild, hungry mouths and twisted tails descending on us. I found the keys to the moped and jammed one into the ignition, and the engine came to life. I twisted the throttle, and the moped shot off, taking Liz and me bouncing across rocks and tree roots. The handlebars wobbled, but I held tight, remembering how Liz’s hands looked when she drove. Cats leaped onto the seat.

  Claws swiped my hair. I drove faster. I heard Peggy, trapped in her house for eternity, screaming, “NO! NO! DON’T LEAVE ME, MY BABIES!”

  I sped off down the weedy lane, clutching Liz’s backpack. The cats ran to the very edge of the decayed pathway and stopped in strange obedience. Then the wall of cats untangled themselves, twisted up in the air, and tumbled onto the dirt.

  Hundreds of them, in all colors and shapes, just stood at the edge of the street, licking their paws like nothing strange had ever happened. Slowly, they slithered back to their cursed house with their tails in the air and their nasty butts waving good-bye.

  25

  I smashed into a trash can outside of a 24-Hour Gas ’n’ Guzzle on Warick Road. It was the only bright spot among the dark woods. The back tire kicked up, and Liz fell off. She groaned and rubbed the sweat and patches of cat hair from her face. Her breath crackled, as if hairs were still stuck in her throat. She wheezed like my great Auntie Charlotte, who smoked ten packs of cigarettes a day.

  Rushing through the minimarket, I snatched allergy medicine, a Monster Energy drink, and a water. I threw down five dollars to the zombielike clerk. Liz drained the can, green fizz spilling down her chin. I dabbed her scratches with baby butt–wipes I found in her backpack. She inhaled loudly and belched, spitting up clumps of cat hair.

  “Gross, dude,” I said. “You okay?”

  She grunted, shielding her eyes from the fluorescent lights beaming down on us. Her elbows were leaning on the torn knees of her jeans. The tenth time I asked if she was okay, Liz shoved me and nodded. I was happy she was pushing me around again; it meant her strength was coming back.

  Wind blasted us, knifing through my jacket and jeans. I guzzled my water. It splashed in my empty belly and made me nauseated.

  What was that voice I heard back there?

  I was about to tell Liz about all the strange things that were happening to me when I saw her hands were trembling and blue. I reached out to warm them up, but she pulled away and walked to her moped.

  “What happened back there, Liz?” I asked. “Who is the—”

  Liz knelt down to inspect her twisted front tire. “You banged it up, dork,” she said, jerking the fender into place. Her hands stopped. She took in a big breath while I nervously chewed the cuff on my brown sweater.

  Liz stared up into the bright, buzzing lights and closed her eyes. Her skin was almost bluish in the harsh light, and I could make out small wrinkles around the corners of her mouth and eyes.

  “I had a hunch it was him when you showed me the drawing and the prints at Jacob’s house,” she said. “But I didn’t want to believe it. No way. Not real. But it’s him.”

  I unfolded Jacob’s drawings of the hooved man and turned it over in my shaking hands. Liz looked at it and nodded.

  “The Grand Guignol’s the reason I became a babysitter,” she said.

  NAME: Grand Guignol (grahnd GEE-nyole)

  HEIGHT: 6’3’’

  WEIGHT: 216 lbs

  TYPE: Boogeyman

  ORIGIN: Underworld? Realm of the Unknown and Unmeasured? Alabama?

  DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: Has the torso of a man, but furry legs and black hooves. His skin is very wrinkly (to be fair, he is SUPER old), and he has snakelike yellow eyes. He is always dressed as if he were going to the funeral of someone who has died for the second time: elegant black suit covered in soot and corpse-dust with a ragged, black bow tie, and sparkling black pearls.

  LIKES: Fashion, the smell of fear, kidnapping children

  DISLIKES: Being reminded that he’s balding; humans ESPECIALLY BABYSITTERS

  STRENGTHS: Superpowerful mind that can make you believe something you knew wasn’t true or make you see something that isn’t there. BEWARE: IT’S LIKE MIND CONTROL.

  WEAKNESSES: Angel Fire

  SMELL: A combination of wet mud, a thousand belches, and a pile of rotten eggs

  SIGHTINGS: Notoriously hard to track down. Current haunts uncertain—Western Hemisphere? Eastern Hemisphere?

  ALLIES: Oleg, the Mephistophelean Shadow Monster; the six other Boogeymen

  FROM LIZ’S JOURNAL

  July

  We were at a carnival. It was night. Kev really wanted to go on the Gravitron, but we were too small. I was six, Kev was five. I wanted to get on that ride so bad. I snuck us in behind a group of extra-large people. The ride spun around so fast, I thought I was going to throw up . . . but Kev was laughing. . . .

  That’s when I saw him. He was peering up from under the operator’s booth. He had on a black suit so dusty it looked like he had clawed his way out of a grave. And those hooves. He was watching Kev.

  Next thing I remember, we were back home. There was a knock at our window. There was no reason for anyone to be knocking on our window that late. I drew back the curtains and saw him. That black suit . . . that evil, wicked smile.

  I looked everywhere for Kev. My family and I talked to the police for a whole year. Nothing. They never found him.

  My parents started to fight. It was too much for them to take. I tried to explain it was the Boogeyman, but they refused to listen. Dad stayed at work later and later. I hated myself for losing my brother, and I wanted to take it out on the world.

  I started hanging out with older kids and did dumb stuff that got more and more dangerous. Funny, though—I didn’t get grounded. My mom was too busy getting into her own trouble. I was the most depressed twelve-year-old I knew. I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I would just break things and blast punk in the middle of the night.

  My mom got fed up and called a babysitter named Mama Vee, who was, at the time, something like the cochair of the New England babysitters. So, Mama Vee would hang out with me. I told her about the Boogeyman. And she was the only person to believe me. My folks finally got a divorce. It was the worst time of my life, until Mama Vee told me that she had caught and killed the Boogeyman. And that was when I learned the name of the demon who took everything from me: the Grand Guignol. But we never found Kevin.


  Mom left. Dad was sad and mean about it. I became invisible to him.

  As the years passed, I spent more time with Mama Vee and our chapter president, Madame Leanne Moon, and less time at home. Vee and Moon forced me to go back to school, and I agreed as long as I could stay in the cottage and train to be a babysitter.

  Every day I think about Kev.

  I’ll find what happened to him. I have to.

  He was too young to fight for himself. So I’m fighting for him now.

  “The Grand Guignol tore my family apart.” Liz said, her face buried in her arms. “I lost Kev. I lost Jacob. The Grand Guignol won. Again. It’s over.”

  Tears spilled down the sides of her face.

  “Liz. It’s not over,” I said, slowly walking toward her. “You . . . you have to have hope.”

  “Oh, please,” she spat.

  I dodged her goober and stiffened up. “Edith Cavell helped more than two hundred Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium and was shot to death by a German firing squad for it. If she can do that, we can do this,” I said, pushing my shoulders back.

  Liz screwed up her eyebrows at me, with no clue what I was saying.

  She shook her head and scoffed, “You’re just a kid.”

  I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but . . . I was just a kid. Even so, I had to keep trying.

  “The thing you got from the Toadie,” I said, reaching out my hand.

  “It’s junk,” she groaned.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” I said, trying to show some sense of authority.

  Liz tossed the thick glass lens at me. I fumbled to catch it. It was four inches around with smooth spirals spinning outward from the middle.

  I was holding it up to inspect its thick ridge when it caught a beam of light and magnified it, sending the light glowing onto the black street. Liz and I both cocked our heads to the side, studying the glowing lens.

  BZZT! BZZT! My phone buzzed. I looked at it, and my heart flipped.

  “That Berna?” Liz asked.

  I bit my lip and fought the urge to answer it.

  Then I answered it.

  “Victor?” I said.

  “Hello, Kelly,” said Victor.