Rabbit-headed Myeliel joined the game as well and Vita was surprised to find he held the cards with human hands just like her own. What was all that she’d overhead Brunhilda saying about how Myeliel didn’t have hands, then? Peebles perched on the table beside Eerla, his little frog legs bent to the side so he could better see the stout monster’s cards. Vita looked around for Dotted-Line Jack, who surely would have held the tiny green monster’s cards for him so Peebles could join the game, but the pale ghost boy was absent. So, Vita was sad to notice, was the music that usually filled the Mess Hall.
She thought of asking the tentacle monster behind the order window to put a record on but resisted the temptation. Fidoreekio had to spend much more time in this Mess Hall than Vita, after all, and she supposed she understood if he wanted silence every once in a while.
She was pleased to find Rosie and Grover at one of the front tables. Jasmine hovered in the air above them, tossing ever-so-slightly see-through strawberries down into Rosie, Grover, and Rafe’s waiting mouths. Vita didn’t even bother with getting a bowl of brown or white—she just walked straight over to the table and took a seat across from Rafe.
Rosie grinned and it didn’t fade even when one of Jasmine’s strawberries bounced off the side of her head and onto the dusty floor. “Well hey there, Tink. Haven’t seen you around much lately.”
Between her lessons and constant visits to the headmonsters’ office, Vita hadn’t had much time for hanging out in her classmates’ Dream Chambers or the Mess Hall. “I’ve been slammed with lessons,” she said quickly. “Listen, I have a favor to ask you both.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I’m trying to get into the headmonsters’ office, and I need help getting Mazkin out of there around this time tomorrow night. But I also need to be able to get in the door, and Fironella and Mazkin always keep it locked, so—”
Rosie waved a hand to let her know she needn’t say any more. “Sure thing. Just ring each of our doorbells three times in a row ten minutes before you need us.”
“Probably fifteen for Rosie,” Grover pitched in.
Vita looked between them. She’d expected suspicion from them, or at least a few questions. She could have been sneaking into the office to steal the Crossing Cloak for all they knew. “Are you sure you don’t mind?” she asked.
“Sure,” Grover replied. “Jeff and Wile used to pull this kind of thing all the time—eventually we learned it was better just not to ask.”
Rosie didn’t react to Grover’s words with anything but a small nod of agreement.
Vita looked at the bespectacled boy sharply. “Wait, what did you just say?”
“That Wile pulls this kind of—” he began.
“No,” Vita cut in. “No, you said Jeff and Wile.”
The younger boy blinked his watery blue eyes a few times, then gave Rosie a worried glance. “No, I didn’t. Did I?”
“No,” Rosie confirmed. “You just heard him wrong, Tink.” Her eyes were large and full of pity. Vita recognized the expression as the one the little girl often wore around Wile.
Wile, who had accused Vita of stealing his ideas, who had asked her where he was.
Vita looked between her two friends again, a crawling feeling in the pit of her stomach. She hadn’t heard Grover wrong; she knew she hadn’t.
She noticed the gang of monsters had abandoned their card game at the back of the Mess Hall and was headed straight for the students’ table. Tiny though he was, Peebles could leap high and far and reached the table ahead of the others. He hopped right up onto the tabletop between Rosie and Vita. “Hello, Miss Vita Lawrence! I be afraid I must take Miss Rosie Gerald away for her lessons.”
“That’s okay, Peebs,” Vita replied. Her few run-ins with Fironella and her lackeys had made her even more grateful for the little tennis-shoe-sporting monster’s friendly manner.
“Where’s Jackie?” Rosie asked Peebles.
If the four-legged monster had possessed shoulders they would have slumped. “I’m afraid it’s just me today. Miss Fironella needs Jack for a thing.” Vita had never seen Peebles as melancholy as he seemed in that moment—not even when he’d described the horror of Rotten Drozlin to her on that very first day.
“It’s time for you to hit the Base too, baby,” Eerla told Grover when she and Faylonique reached the table.
Myeliel waved goodbye to the other monsters and left the Mess Hall. On his way out, Vita noted he wasn’t walking on two feet as she’d seen him do in the past. Instead the rabbit-headed monster floated in the air just an inch or two above the floor, his feet conspicuously absent. Bug-haired Brunhilda hadn’t said Myeliel didn’t have hands period—she’d said the rabbit-headed boy hadn’t had hands that day. It seemed some days he had feet and no hands, and others he had hands but no feet.
Grover and Rosie both gathered their trays to leave. “Just remember, three times,” Grover told Vita with three fingers held up for emphasis.
Vita sat alone in the Mess Hall for a few minutes after the other children had left. After a silence, Melina curled farther around the girl’s shoulders so she could look her in the eyes. “I’m not sure I agreed with this plan of yours before…” the caterpillar began. “But now I think you’re right. We need answers.”
• • •
I am writing in a notebook. Lalala. I am writing words, oh yes I am. Ugh, how has Grover done enough of this to bury his entire desk in notes?
What does he write? Lalala I am writing in a notebook…
Vita looked up with a sigh and tapped the end of her pen against the desktop. The noise awoke Melina from the nap she’d been taking on the far edge of the desktop, her head and tail hanging far over the edges. The pen and notebook had appeared inside Vita’s desk drawer as soon as she’d asked bug-haired Brunhilda for them, just as Mazkin had said they would. She had figured writing in her notebook would be a good cover for hanging out in the hallway, but she hadn’t expected how difficult it would be to think of nonsense to write.
For what felt like the millionth time since the girl had arrived at Moorhouse, she wished the compass around her neck were a clock. She felt sure it had been at least fifteen minutes since she had pressed Rosie’s doorbell.
Ten minutes since she had crossed the Mess Hall to the boys’ hall. Wile had been working at his desk when Vita had emerged from the Mess Hall, had looked up from his work as she pressed Grover’s doorbell. Vita had seen that the sheets of paper Wile wrote on were sheets of staff paper, the kind she’d used to learn to read music in class at school. He had slipped the papers into his folder and she’d run back across the Mess Hall to her desk. She’d noticed that a glowing red brick was propping one of the doors to Rosie’s Dream Chamber open.
She wasn’t even pretending to write in her notebook when Grover finally rushed out of the Mess Hall, holding a piece of folded notebook paper. He threw Vita a quick smile, and then he raced to the other end of the hallway and rapped hard on the door to the headmonsters’ office. Vita breathed a sigh of relief when Mazkin opened the door. Her heaps of questions hadn’t been in vain.
Grover braced his hands on either side of the office doorway and leaned forward to catch his breath. “Mazkin, you have to come quick,” he said loud enough for Vita to hear at the other end of the hall. “Rosie climbed up the shelves in her Supply Closet and I can’t figure out a way to get her down.”
“Again?” Mazkin asked. “That girl needs to be more careful.”
Grover put his back to the left side of the doorway to make room for Mazkin to pass and let the headmonster lead the way to Rosie’s Dream Chamber. Grover bent to remove the brick from the doorway to Rosie’s Dream Chamber and the door clicked shut behind them.
Vita stood, slung Melina around her shoulders, and rushed to the other end of the hall. The door looked shut and she worried Grover hadn’t held up his end of the plan. But the doorknob turned easily under her hand. When she opened the door the folded piece of paper fell from where it had bee
n wedged in between the doorway and door to keep it from locking.
She said a silent thank you to Grover and Rosie and ran into the office. She bounded up the spiral staircase, constantly looking backward to make sure Fironella or Ruckles or Skrillus hadn’t shown up behind her. It wasn’t long before Vita and Melina reached the school’s second floor. The first thing the girl noticed was the cold.
The second was the screaming.
She stepped off the stairs onto ink black carpet. This room had the same gray-scale rose-patterned wallpaper as the office below, but this wallpaper was in far worse condition. It was peeling off the wall in places and several jagged holes in the walls let in the howling wind from outside. The wind carried the screams of the gargoyles. The stone creatures writhed this way and that and sometimes their horns cracked one of the many windows or poked yet another hole in the walls. Unlike in the office, no velvet hangings hung over the windows that lined both the room’s southern walls.
The gargoyles’ howls pierced Vita’s ears while the cold bit down through her skin, blood, and into her bones. Suddenly her family’ absence began to weigh much more heavily on her. They’d probably forgotten all about her, she thought bitterly. They practically had before she’d ever even come to Moorhouse.
“Come on, Vita, we’ve got to keep going,” Melina said into her ear.
The girl didn’t even remember doing it, but she found she’d drifted closer to the windows. From here she could see the colorless, fog-covered plains of Drozlin. She felt sure the bald spindly trees below had noticed her looking and were reaching their branch arms out to her. The girl put her hand to the window and was startled by how cold it was, though she’d had no reason to expect anything else.
“VITA!” exploded in a loud, growling yell in the girl’s ear and she sprang away from the window.
She tugged at her ear and glared over at Melina. “Was that really necessary?”
“Let’s keep going,” Melina replied, her yellow-green eyes imploring.
The girl gave the caterpillar a quick nod and reached both arms up to cuddle her closer. She turned away from the windows and found doors in each of the diamond’s remaining two walls. Vita chose the right-hand door and was relieved when the knob turned under her hand.
The hall they entered was very like the boys’ hall below. But where doors to the Mess Hall and washroom should have been was just a long blank wall. The entrances to the Dream Chambers had been replaced by a row of windows just like the ones in the diamond-shaped room Vita and Melina had just left. As they walked down the hallway there kept being more and more of it to go. She and Melina moved along the windowless wall, trying to ignore the gargoyles’ howls, until they finally hit a wide wall with a single wooden door at its center. This doorknob turned easily and with a quick glance at Melina for courage, Vita opened the door a crack.
The girl could see yet another hallway, this one just as disconcerting as the last but in a completely different way. The long, narrow hallway looked so normal. It could have been lifted from any apartment building in New York, Vita’s own included. Numbered doors lined each side of the linoleum-tiled hall.
Vita’s eyes widened when she spied a hulking green-eyed, purple-skinned monster—his name was something like Riardo, he usually worked with Rosie—unlocking a door in the center of the hall. Once the monster was gone, Vita opened the door all the way, darted through it, and shut it as softly as she could behind her.
As soon as her feet hit the linoleum, she could no longer feel Melina on her shoulders. The girl whipped her head to the side and met the caterpillar’s ghostly eyes. Melina was even more transparent here than she became in the other children’s Chambers.
“We must be in the North Wing, then,” Melina observed.
Which meant they needed to be extra careful. The North Wing was, as Fironella had pointed out, for faculty only. Vita figured running would be too noisy so she just walked as quickly as she could across the tiles toward the identical door at the other end of the hallway. With one hand on the doorknob she prayed she wouldn’t run into a lock, monster, or yet another hallway.
What she found was darkness. She reached a toe out and touched the floor beyond the doorway, like she was testing the temperature of the water at the pool. Once she was satisfied with the floor’s solidity, she stepped into the room and groped along the walls. She felt silky velvet under her fingertips and grinned. It was a curtain, it had to be.
She yanked the velvet this way and that until it slid aside. Light poured into the room and the girl had to blink flashing red dots out of her eyes. She’d thought Whirlyton’s sunlight was bright, but it was such a pale imitation of the real thing. For a few moments she couldn’t focus on anything but adjusting her eyes. Soon enough she could make out the hospital across the street, and a bodega, and the spire of a church in the distance. It was tough to see the church very well from here, though. All the snow made it difficult to see.
Vita gasped and put a hand to her mouth. It was snowing.
No wonder the sun was so bright—it was reflecting off all the gray-white snow on the ground. Snow that had not been there in late spring when Vita had first arrived at Moorhouse. Snow that would not have had time to fall in the short time Vita thought she had been at the school.
How long had she really been here, then? Weeks? Months?
Then Vita’s heart began to pound harder in her chest. How could she be sure this winter was the same winter as the year she’d left? She obviously hadn’t been gone only a few weeks—who was to say she hadn’t been at Moorhouse for a year? For ten?
Vita touched the glass, her voice full of tears. “Mom,” she whispered. “Dad…”
Her mind filled with images of her father’s kind eyes crinkling in the rearview mirror of the clunker, of her mother laughing the almost-ugly laugh that always managed to sound so much more genuine than everyone else’s. They’d already been dealing with Michelle and Bryan getting into trouble all the time, and with her mother being in the hospital, and with her father trying to pick up an amount of slack that no one person should ever have to handle, and then Vita had gone and disappeared on them. And she didn’t even know how long she’d been gone.
“You just need to keep calm, Vita,” Melina began. “We don’t know—”
They heard a creak behind them.
Melina fell silent and Vita froze. She should have been keeping a better watch for monsters—the North Wing was probably crawling with them. The next sound she heard was the turning of the doorknob on the door that stood adjacent to the one Vita had entered through. She looked to the open doorway, expecting Ruckles or Fironella, or perhaps a whole army of monsters angry Vita had invaded their private space.
But it wasn’t a monster; it was Wile. The boy watched tears stream down Vita’s face just as the melting snow slid down the window when it hit the glass. “I take it you didn’t get here in winter?” he asked.
“N—no,” the girl said between sniffles. Melina cuddled closer around her and Vita wished she could feel her friend better here in the North Wing.
“Neither did I,” he replied. He stepped forward to stand beside her at the window and gazed out at the street as he spoke. “The one time I convinced Rosie-Rose to sneak over here with me, it was snowing. And it was snowing when she got to Moorhouse, and I couldn’t convince her it was a different winter than the one she remembered.” He glanced over at Vita after a moment of silence. His dark brown eyes weren’t cold any longer, but they weren’t warm either. They were just so, so sad. “There’s no point asking Rosie about it, though—she won’t remember,” he went on. “With Rosie and even Grover, it’s like, nothing sticks. They forget everything.”
“Like Jeff?” she asked lightly.
Wile eyebrows rose then hunched over his eyes. “What do you know about Jeff?”
Vita explained about Grover mentioning Jeff in the Mess Hall and the ice in Wile’s eyes chipped away as she spoke. “But then Rosie and Grover both denied it
a second later, and acted like I was the crazy one,” she finished.
He met her gaze for a long moment then gave a quick nod, as if he’d just made up his mind about something. “We should probably get out of here before someone catches us.”
Vita wandered away from the window, across the scratched hardwood floors to the spiral staircase in the corner. It led down to the front hall—to a way back home. “Couldn’t we just make a break for it?” she asked.
“No,” he replied quickly. “Promise me you’ll never try going down those steps, V.”
“But why?” she asked.
“Just promise me.” He looked out the window once more, at the icicles hanging from the bodega’s awning and the snow piled on the flimsy branches of the lone tree below. “I’m not coming back here again, and neither should you. I can’t imagine how long I’ve been here, how long Rosie and Grover were here before me. You know the monsters will never tell us. So it doesn’t do much good to try and guess.”
Vita glanced once more at the staircase in longing. Her parents were out there somewhere in that snow. Perhaps they were older than before, but they had to still be there, didn’t they?
“That boy’s made more sense than anything else at this school,” Melina whispered. “Might be best to listen to him.”
The caterpillar made a good point, and her voice reminded Vita of what she was doing at Moorhouse in the first place. She couldn’t go home, not without Melina.
The girl nodded and with one last wistful sigh she returned to the room’s one unshaded window. Because it felt like the thing to do, Vita reached forward and grabbed Wile’s hand. Then they turned away from the human world and made their way back to the South Wing.
Nothing on the way back—not the never-ending hallway nor the freezing, gargoyle-scream-coated diamond hall—seemed as frightening with Wile there. Vita was grateful for Melina’s presence as well, of course. But nothing helped her to keep her eyes away from those cold, seductive windows more than Wile’s hand pulling her along and his calm, dark gaze urging her forward. Every so often she thought she heard soothing tones on the air, like the gentle twangs of a guitar’s strings, and those helped her to ignore the howls of the writhing stone beasts outside.
Vita and the Monsters of Moorhouse Page 14