by P. J. Night
Jason cleared his throat loudly, but Jenna chose to ignore him. “It’s about the history of the legend of the Marked Monster,” she replied. “And how it affected our town and the early settlers and stuff.”
“Hang on a minute,” Mr. Walker spoke up. “You can’t write up a spooky story and call it a history project.”
“No, I’m going to focus on the historical parts,” Jenna said quickly. “I mean, I’m going to do a lot more research at the library, but I already learned that there was a section of town where nobody was allowed to live because of the Marked Monster. So this legend actually affected how the town was formed.”
“Oh, okay,” her dad said, looking relieved. “That’s fascinating, Jenna. I think your teacher will really like that approach.”
“A-hem!” Jason cleared his throat again, louder.
“You’re not getting sick, are you?” Dr. Walker asked him.
“No,” Jason grumbled. “But just so you know, I gave Jenna the idea for her project.”
“Thank you, Jason,” Dr. Walker said, smiling at him. “It makes me so happy when you two get along and help each other out.”
Across the table, Jenna glared at her brother. It was so like him to insist on getting credit for every little thing! And just when her mom and dad were acting like they were proud of her, instead of disappointed that she’d brought home yet another B-minus.
“Actually, I started researching the Marked Monster last week,” Jenna said, which was true. Her parents didn’t need to know it was in preparation for her sleepover story. “Before Jason said anything about it.”
“Well, let me know if you need any help with your project, honey,” Dr. Walker said. “I can pick up some supplies for your poster on the way home from the hospital tomorrow, if you want.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Jenna replied. “That would be great. Oh, before I forget—is it okay if I have a campout on Friday night? With Maggie and Brittany and Laurel?”
“I don’t see why not,” Dr. Walker replied. “Keep an eye on the weather, though—just in case we get a late cold spell.”
“Thank you!” Jenna exclaimed. Then she paused, straining her ears to hear something outside, a scraping noise so faint that she couldn’t be sure she’d heard it at all. “Do you hear that?”
“What?” asked Dr. Walker.
“It sounds like a … like a scratching sound?” Jenna said with a slight frown. “Coming from outside?”
Her parents shook their heads. “It’s probably that stray cat,” Mr. Walker said. “The one you’ve been feeding.”
“I don’t think so,” Jenna said as she walked over to the window. “It never comes up to the house. I wish it would. I’d love to have a cat!”
She peered out the window, but it was so dark she couldn’t see anything. She turned back to her family. “So what’s for dessert?”
“I bought a pie at the supermarket this morning,” Mr. Walker said.
“Pie again?” Jason complained. “Why don’t you ever get cake?”
“We always have cake,” argued Jenna.
“And that’s why I bought a pie today,” Mr. Walker said. “Would you please serve dessert, Jenna? Jason, you can clear the table tonight.”
In the kitchen, Jenna set out four dessert plates and took the pie out of the box. “Cherry!” she exclaimed. “Thanks, Dad!”
“Hey, I remembered your favorite kind of pie!”
“Do we have ice cream?” she called out to the dining room.
“Hey, I remembered what you like to put on top of your favorite kind of pie!” Mr. Walker joked.
Jenna did a fist pump as she opened the freezer. But even though she searched through every shelf, she couldn’t find the carton of ice cream anywhere.
“Looking for something?” Jason asked with a sly grin as he set a stack of dirty dishes in the sink.
“Yeah, Dad says he bought ice cream, but I can’t find it.”
“Oh. That’s my bad,” Jason said, still grinning. “But it was a delicious afternoon snack.”
“You ate the whole thing?” Jenna asked.
“I was really hungry,” he replied with a shrug. “It was so good—cold and creamy and sweet. French vanilla, mmmm.”
“I hate you so much.”
“Likewise.”
As he passed her, Jason reached out and lightly flicked Jenna on the arm. A searing pain shot through her arm, all the way to her wrist. She gasped and grabbed her arm. The knife she’d been holding to cut the pie clattered to the floor. “Mom!” she yelled.
“What’s going on in there?” Dr. Walker called.
“Nothing,” Jason said quickly—too quickly. He leaned over to Jenna and hissed, “Don’t be such a baby. I barely touched you.”
Jenna opened her mouth to retort, but stopped short. She knew that Jason was telling the truth.
So why did it hurt so much?
Suddenly she remembered—the cut she had received the night before. It hadn’t done much healing, apparently.
Just then Dr. Walker appeared in the kitchen. “Well? What’s going on?”
“Jason ate all the ice cream,” Jenna said.
Dr. Walker sighed. “Jason, was that really necessary?”
“It’s got lots of calcium,” he pointed out.
“So does yogurt! Honestly, you’re old enough to know better than to eat an entire carton of ice cream.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“And also he flicked me,” Jenna said. She couldn’t help herself. “Right in my arm.”
“Unacceptable, Jason,” Dr. Walker said. “I think you can miss your karate lesson on Monday.”
“Mom! No! Come on, I have a match next Saturday! I have to be at the lesson or Sensei will be so mad!”
Dr. Walker shook her head. “Maybe you can use the time to try to understand why you’re still picking on your little sister.”
“Thanks, Jenna,” he snapped. “Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome,” she said sweetly as she took a big bite out of her slice of pie. Jason hardly ever got busted for being so mean to her, so Jenna was going to enjoy it while she could.
After school on Monday, Jenna and Maggie walked to the public library. It was already filling up with students from the high school and the middle school, all working furiously on the big projects that were due before school let out for the summer. The girls went straight to the very back, where the Lewisville Archives were located. After Jenna pulled open the heavy oak door, Maggie flipped on the lights.
Walking into the archives was like stepping through a time machine. Oil paintings of the town’s founder and mayors glared from the walls; in the oldest portraits, the men wore powdered white wigs and formal, old-fashioned suits. Tattered maps and stained surveyor’s charts that chronicled the town’s growth had been framed and mounted on the walls in places of honor. There were bookcases throughout the room, each one crammed with old, leather-bound volumes filled with yellowed pages. One bookcase contained the minutes from every town council meeting since 1812.
The room was steeped in history. Jenna could feel it all around her; she could even smell it in the stuffy, dusty air.
“I’d kill for a computer in here,” she whispered to Maggie, not even realizing that she’d dropped her voice to a hush. “This is going to be impossible. How am I going to find anything about the Marked Monster? Like I really want to sift through all this stuff! There must be, like, a thousand books in here!”
“And who knows if anybody even wrote anything down about the Marked Monster in the town records?” Maggie pointed out. “What if Jason was just messing with you?”
Jenna paused. She hadn’t thought of that.
“It would be so like him!” She groaned as a sudden wave of panic washed over her. “And now it’s Monday and I already handed in my paragraph on this topic. How would I ever think of another topic and find enough info to get the project done now?”
Maggie made a sympathetic face. “No, I’m probably wr
ong. Not even Jason is that evil,” she said. “Besides, didn’t you say he was bragging to your parents about coming up with the idea?”
“Yeah,” Jenna said slowly.
“Well, he wouldn’t do that if the whole point was to set you up. I mean, that would make your mom crazy mad, right?”
“Crazy mad,” Jenna repeated. She was starting to feel a little better. Even Jason was aware of how much her parents were pushing her to do well in school. They would completely freak out if she did poorly on her project because Jason had played a mean prank on her.
But she still faced an enormous stack of books—and no quick way to find the info she needed. “I guess I’d better get to it,” she said, sighing, as she pulled a book with a cranberry-colored cover off the shelf. She blew a thick cloud of dust off it. “‘Town Records, 1844 to 1845.’ Please wake me up if I start snoring.”
“Sorry, Jenna, you’re on your own,” Maggie said with a laugh. “I have to go photocopy a picture of Manfred Lewis for my poster.”
“What, you couldn’t print that off the Internet?” Jenna asked. “I’m sure the town website has a picture of the founder of Lewisville.”
“I could’ve,” Maggie said, smiling slyly. “But then I wouldn’t have had a chance to come to the library and use the computer here. And, you know, chat with anybody who’s online.”
Jenna started laughing. Mrs. Marcuzzi was insanely strict about the Internet. Whenever Maggie was online, Mrs. Marcuzzi always hovered right behind her. Maggie could hardly e-mail or chat with anybody without her mom reading every word.
“Well, if nobody’s online, you have to come back and help me,” Jenna said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Sure, sure, I will,” Maggie said with a little wave as she drifted out the door. Jenna watched her go and knew that Maggie wasn’t going to budge from the library computer until Mrs. Marcuzzi arrived to pick them up in two hours.
Jenna really was on her own.
With a heavy sigh, she sat down at one of the desks. It was made out of shiny dark wood; the top of the desk slanted downward, with a tiny, tarnished keyhole near the edge of the lid. Suddenly filled with curiosity, Jenna tried to open it.
But the desk was locked.
I wonder what’s in here, she thought. Why would this desk be locked, in the barely used archives room?
Jenna had almost completely forgotten about her research. All she wanted to do was open that desk and peek inside. Then she remembered the safety pin holding one of her backpack’s straps together. Maybe I can open the lock without the key, she thought. She’d seen somebody on TV open a lock that way once.
Jenna bit her tongue as she slipped the pin into the keyhole. She jiggled it around, up, down, to the right, to the left. Every few seconds she tried to open the desk, but the lid wouldn’t budge.
Five minutes passed like this, and she was just about to give up, when suddenly she heard it.
Click.
The faint sound had come from the lock.
Holding her breath, Jenna tried again to lift the lid.
This time it opened on hinges so creaky the squeak seemed earsplitting—but the lid opened only a couple of inches, not nearly wide enough for her to see if anything was inside. She leaned closer to the desk and tried to peer in it.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
The voice scared Jenna so much that she jumped up; the lid of the desk banged down, hard, and then she heard a sickening sound—a second thump, as if something inside the desk had come loose, or broken when the lid fell. Oh my God, did I just break some precious town heirloom or something? she wondered frantically as she spun around to see an old man glaring at her from the doorway. I’m going to be in so much trouble! Jenna tried to hide the safety pin in her hand, but only managed to stab herself in the palm.
“Ow! What—Sorry—I was—”
“Can’t you read?” the old man barked. He lifted his cane and banged it on the open door, making Jenna jump again. “Didn’t you see the sign? It says ‘No Admittance without Permission of the Town Archivist’! That’s me. And I don’t remember giving you permission to come in here.”
“I’m sorry,” Jenna said miserably. “I, um, I didn’t—”
“Speak up!” the man bellowed. “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”
This is great, Jenna thought. Now this old deaf guy is going to yell at me—
Then she realized something. If he was hard of hearing, maybe he hadn’t heard the desk lid fall.
And maybe he hadn’t heard whatever had thumped inside it.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, louder this time. “I, um, I didn’t see the sign—”
“You shouldn’t be sitting at that desk. And you shouldn’t be touching that book without gloves!”
Jenna stood up on shaky legs, blinking quickly so she wouldn’t start to cry. She hated being yelled at, especially by adults, and especially by strangers.
“I honestly didn’t see the sign,” she repeated. “I was trying to do some research. For this history project—”
The old man sighed. “For Mrs. Ramirez?”
Jenna nodded without saying anything.
“Every year, a parade of middle schoolers traipses through here,” he grumbled. “Every year. But you’re getting a rather late start, aren’t you, young lady?”
She nodded again.
“Well, what’s your topic?”
“Um,” she replied, starting to blush. “Um. The—the Marked Monster?” She just knew the old man was going to yell at her again—probably for wasting his time.
But she was wrong. To her astonishment, his eyes lit up. “Well!” he exclaimed. “Well! That’s a clever choice! Quite the deviation from the standard Blizzard of 1907 that so many students report on, year after year after year. Where would you like to begin?”
“Wait a second,” Jenna said. “Do you know about the Marked Monster? Like, historical things for my project?”
The man nodded solemnly. “My dear, I know more about the Marked Monster than any person still living.”
Something in his voice—Jenna couldn’t quite put her finger on it—gave her chills.
“My name is Mr. Carson,” he said, tapping his chest. “And you are?”
“Jenna, uh, Jenna Walker.”
“Wait there, Jenna,” Mr. Carson said. “Don’t touch anything. I’ll be right back.”
Jenna stood awkwardly in the middle of the archives room until the man returned with an enormous portfolio and a pair of soft cotton gloves. “Put these on,” he ordered her. “They’ll keep the oils and dirt from your hands off the archival materials.”
My hands are not dirty and oily! Jenna thought—but she put the gloves on without arguing.
“Please, have a seat over here,” Mr. Carson continued as he gestured to a long table in the middle of the room. Jenna sat next to him and snuck a peek at him while she pretended to arrange her notebook and note cards on the table. Clouds of white hair puffed up from his head, and this close, it was hard for her not to notice how yellow his teeth were, or the way that the corners of his mouth were crusted over with dried spit.
Then, to her embarrassment, she realized that Mr. Carson was watching her. He’d probably caught her staring. But he said nothing—just nodded his head over to the desk in the corner. The one where Jenna had picked the lock.
“That desk belonged to Manfred Lewis himself, you know.”
“Really?” Jenna asked in surprise.
“And the story of the Marked Monster—as it concerns Lewisville—is certainly wrapped up in the story of Manfred Lewis. Of course, what we know of the monster predates Lewis.”
“Cool,” Jenna said as she started scribbling down every word he said.
“Who can say from where the monster came?” Mr. Carson said, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “Most people these days just dismiss the story of the Marked Monster as a myth—a tale of a bogeyman—that some kid dreamed up years ago and tha
t gets passed down from generation to generation. What they don’t know, though, is that the legend of the Marked Monster was around long before this country was even founded. According to the Q’ippicut people, the Marked Monster was a curse, a creature whose very existence was a testament to the power of evil.”
Jenna felt cold all over … except for her injured arm, which was uncomfortably hot.
“In order to survive, the Q’ippicut forged an uneasy peace with the monster. It wasn’t marked back then, you know. They called it Keuhkkituh—‘Creature of the Black Blood.’ You see, the Q’ippicut had been forced to live with—or at least near—the creature for centuries. They knew more about its unholy form than anyone. Until a few months ago, you could still see their paintings of it in the caves near Mount Madison if you knew where to look—but then those caves were destroyed.”
Jenna nodded, remembering the construction accident that had caused the caves to collapse. For a while, it had been in the news every day. “What did the cave paintings show?” she asked.
“Diagrams of the monster, mainly,” Mr. Carson said. He opened the portfolio and took out a yellowed piece of parchment. On it was a copy of one of the cave drawings. Jenna held her breath as she looked at it; the creature drawn there was so horrible that it defied description. But Mr. Carson tried anyway. “You see what a hybrid it is—a missing link, as it were; part lizard, part bird. And yet the beak is filled with teeth like a mammal, and fangs like a snake. The arms are short compared to the rest of the physique. The wings and tail are also incongruous.”
“What about the claws?” Jenna asked. “I don’t see the claws.”
Mr. Carson looked at her sharply. “How did you know about the claws?”
“I—I don’t know. I thought I read that somewhere,” she said awkwardly. To be honest, she didn’t really know why she thought the creature would have claws. After all, the claw she found in the woods behind her house was nothing. It certainly wasn’t one of the Marked Monster’s talons. It probably came from a hawk, she had told herself at the time, and it just happened to be the perfect prop for her scary story.
