Lair of the Grelgoroth

by Ruth Fox

  Since the pollution made technological gadgets unreliable, why would anyone want to cross the Wall? The mayor had long ago reconsidered his funding for the leading scientists to work on neutralising the smog. The little wisps that crept through the gap weren’t enough to do any serious damage to mobile phones, GPS’s, or hair curling irons on the North Side, and he would rather use the money he’d earmarked for that project for a new leather desk chair and a staff lunch at the Café Aroma.

  Certainly, none of the monsters that lived on the South Side had ever applied for a yellow permit. So the mystery of this one monster was rather perplexing, and no one really knew what to do with him.

  The monster boy had said few words since he had been taken into the North Silvershine Police Station with some slight injuries and a case of concussion. But one of those things was “Please don’t send me back. I’m in trouble.”

  This plea had struck a chord with one police officer, and had been enough to get him transferred to the hospital instead of a jail cell, and then to the Hope Orphanage while the council debated whether or not it was inhumane to just drive him back to the gap and push him through.

  Mr. and Mrs. Morgenstern’s adoption application solved this issue, which made the council happy. The Morgensterns’ adopted child was the first to be granted one of the mayor’s little yellow permit cards, which he had to carry on him at all times.

  Zach watched his parents. They had never looked so happy. He felt guilty that he couldn’t be happy along with them. But as the day of the adoption drew nearer his dread only grew.

  “You have to snap out of this!” said Ryder. “Everyone keeps asking why you’re not hanging out with us. You haven’t even come to the Factory.”

  “I just don’t feel like it,” said Zach, who’d been going straight home after school every day to sit in his room and brood. He’d told Ryder that his parents were adopting a child, but hadn’t yet worked up the courage to say his new brother was going to be a monster.

  “Well, you have to come tonight,” Ryder said. “Right? We’re meeting Vincent and the others for a game of Monster-tag.”

  Zach shrugged. He was distracted by Ida, who was sitting up the front with Lex, talking about the newsletter.

  “. . . someone eating five pies is not news,” Lex was saying loudly. “This is why no one reads the newsletter. We need something with substance.”

  “You need to work with Channel Twelve News, you mean,” said Fiona. She clutched a hand to her chest and pretended to swoon. “Philip Nielson’s soooo dreamy.”

  “This is not a joking matter!” Lex fired back. “Though he is, obviously, dreamy, he’s also a very good journalist, and he doesn’t rest until he gets a good story. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “We could do the Year Nine talent show,” suggested Ida.

  “That’s boring. We need an ongoing story—an exposé—something juicy. We need something that will hook people.”

  “Look around us, Lex,” said Fiona, sweeping her arm over the room of students. Some were throwing paper at a target drawn on the whiteboard. Tania was drawing a fake tattoo of a dagger on Darcy’s arm. Jayden was trying to shove his exercise book into Michael’s mouth.

  Lex put her head on her desk as a stray ball of paper hit the side of her head. She picked it up and unfolded it. Sure enough, it was her latest article on Mr. Hainsworth’s after-school hobbies—collecting the little paint swatch cards from hardware stores and arranging them by shade and tone.

  “The newsletter is doomed,” she said gloomily.

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  After school, Zach walked and Ryder skated down the road from Middleview Hills to the Factory.

  None of the kids who went there now was really sure what the Factory had been before it was abandoned forty years ago. The atrium was big enough to be a hangar for at least two small aeroplanes. The main area was just one big open space that stretched up all the way to the ceiling. Lofty balconies crisscrossed overhead. Sunlight fell in dusty streaks on the cracked concrete floor.

  There was a tall black stone pillar just inside the door, where a logo made out of gold-painted metal was mounted. It looked like an arrow set next to a diamond, and underneath were the etched words Donovan Institute.

  This main room led into hallways that were lined with small rooms. Some still stood intact, full of rubble and broken plaster. Others had collapsed entirely.

  “Hey!” called Vincent. He and Drew had been throwing loose tiles at the wall, where they exploded in blue and green fragments. “Zach, Ryder told us you’re moping.”

  “Moping is totally not cool,” said Drew. “Which means you totally get to be the monster.”

  Zach protested. No one ever wanted to be the monster—except for Jason Taybourne, who could run really fast and usually tagged everyone in about two minutes, which kind of wrecked things. Monster-tag started off with one person as the monster. The others had to hide while the monster searched for them. When the monster found someone, he or she could tag them, making them a monster, too. The monsters joined forces, hunting down new prey.

  The best games were the ones that went on and on, with everyone running here and there like crazy, and panicked scrambles from one hiding place to another, and hurried clambering up into dangerous and rickety places, and lots of yelling. Those games could go on for hours.

  Zach grudgingly went to stand under the arrow logo to begin the count.

  “Ten,” he said, listening to the sounds of feet pattering and whispered snickering. “Nine, eight . . .”

  He didn’t give them the full countdown. No one ever gave the full countdown, except for Jason Taybourne, who could probably give the countdown twice and still catch them all before they found hiding places. Zach turned around on “six,” and started looking on “five.”

  Zach didn’t bother running. He wasn’t in the mood. He kind of liked having some time to himself, and he wasn’t in a hurry to find anyone. He drifted along the back wall, looking up at the balconies. It was possible to get up there by climbing the poles, but he would have to climb up himself to see. He’d check the other places first.

  He wandered through a side door, and found himself looking through the door of one of the rooms. The corridor was lined with rooms like these—small and windowless. This one had a flat iron frame against one wall that could only have been a bed when it was whole.

  He wondered if the Factory had been a prison. And not just for the fact that most of the furniture seemed to have been secured to the walls. There was a strange feeling to the rooms, as if many people had once spent a lot of time there, but hadn’t been very happy about it. Lots of kids said the Factory was haunted, and sometimes it gave Zach chills.

  He jumped when he heard the noise.

  It was a soft noise, like a distant dog barking. Woof. Woofwoof.

  Zach frowned. It sounded very much like the noise he’d heard at the Orphanage.

  He walked back down the corridor towards the atrium, moving quietly, listening intently. The sound continued, very faintly, leading him into a room adjoining the wide open space.

  He walked through the patches of fading sunlight that streamed through the broken roof into a room off the atrium. There were piles of old boxes against the wall. Zach and Ryder had been in here plenty of times looking for treasure—back in the days before they realised anything valuable had been taken long ago.

  Woof. Woofwoof.

  Suddenly, Ryder burst out of nowhere, scattering a pile of boxes.

  “Argh!” Zach yelped.

  Ryder burst out laughing. “You should see your face!”

  “Shut up,” Zach said grouchily. “What are you doing?”

  Ryder shrugged. “I got bored. You’re not looking very hard. Are you playing, or not?”

  “Shhh,” s
aid Zach. He strained his ears, but the sound had stopped again. “I heard something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, that’s why I said something,” said Zach. “If I knew what it was I would have—”

  At that moment, Vincent charged back through the front doors, yelling “Zach, you’re the most hopeless monster ever!”

  Zach sighed. The game was over, and it was time to be going home. As Ryder picked up his skateboard and steered Zach back out onto the street, Zach looked over his shoulder at the room they’d come from. There was no further noise.

  Outside, the streetlights had started to come on.

  Ryder looked sideways at Zach. “What’s up with you, anyway?”

  Zach kicked at a pebble. “Mum and Dad are adopting a monster.”

  “What?” Ryder said, his brow furrowing. “You mean, a real, live, actual monster? That’s the most awesome thing ever!”

  Zach turned away. What hope did he have if even his best friend didn’t get it?

  Chapter Five

  Saturday arrived.

  Mr. Morgenstern took the Putterwagon out to the Hope Orphanage. Zach and his mum stayed behind, since they couldn’t fit all four of them in the Putterwagon, and Zach didn’t want to go anyway. Mrs. Morgenstern was reluctant to leave Zach at home alone, and she’d decided the whole house needed to be cleaned. She gave Zach the task of polishing the picture frames.

  Exactly why the picture frames needed to be polished, Zach wasn’t sure, and he became less and less sure as his hands started to dry out, and his nose started to itch with the fumes, and his boredom grew from mild to overpowering. It didn’t seem to make any difference to the pictures themselves. The same family photos stared out from them—his mum on a boat, smiling and holding onto her hat; his dad riding a horse up at Wild World, half-falling out of the saddle as he tried to do an impression of an Old Western cowboy; Zach himself on Craggy Beach, standing proudly beside a sandcastle as tall as he was, while his cousins Felicity and Jared looked on enviously.

  The house was different. It wasn’t just that it smelled like the lemon deodoriser his mum was spraying everywhere. It wasn’t just that he’d had to put his collection of model fighter jets into boxes in the garage next to Mr. Morgenstern’s box of old tiles, or move his desk so there was room for an extra chair. It wasn’t even that his single bed had been replaced by a bunk his dad had spent the morning assembling (with numerous curses when he banged his thumb with the hammer).

  Everything felt different now.

  “Zach.”

  His mum had come down the stairs. She sat down and patted the step next to her. Zach was grateful for the relief from polishing, and took the seat happily.

  “This is a big change for all of us. I just want you to know that you can tell us anything you’re feeling, at any time, okay?”

  Zach twisted the rag in his hands. “Yeah,” he said. Once again, he felt like he wanted to tell her that he didn’t like the idea of adopting a brother . . . but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Mum, why did you choose the monster?”

  Mrs. Morgenstern turned her head so that Zach could see her face. “I’m actually not sure,” she said with a little laugh. “There was something about him. I felt it, and your dad did, too. We were just sure that he was going to be a Morgenstern.”

  She was quiet for a minute.

  “Do you remember that time when you broke your arm?”

  Zach nodded. He had been riding his bike with Ryder. He’d tried to jump a curb and missed.

  “I deal with patients every day,” she said. “Some of them are very sick, or very badly hurt. But it’s nothing like sitting beside your own son and knowing he’s hurting and doing everything you can to help but knowing it’s not quite enough.”

  Zach nodded again. His mum had been the one to set his arm, to give him the pain medication and check over the x-rays with Dr. Manley. She’d done it all as competently as always, and had even fed him lots of chocolate bars from the vending machines, but it had still hurt for weeks while the bones healed.

  “That was what I felt—what we both felt, your dad and I, looking at the monster child. We just thought he has so much potential. We wanted to help a child in need, and I think he was the one we needed to help most of all.”

  The sound of the Putterwagon’s engine rattling and clunking into the driveway interrupted.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Morgenstern said, standing up. “Zach, they’re here!”

  Zach sighed and hung his rag over the bannister. He wondered if he could run out the back door, grab his bike, and head to Ryder’s place.

  Instead, he joined his mum at the door. She wrapped an arm around Zach’s shoulders and pulled him to her side. Zach felt terribly stupid when the door opened and his dad walked in.

  The monster boy was trailing behind him, looking down at his battered and scuffed shoes.

  This was good, because he didn’t see Zach looking so dorky next to his mother, but it was also annoying, because Zach thought his mum deserved respect, and looking down at the patterned floor-rug wasn’t respectful, it was rude.

  “Hello!” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “Welcome, Morton, to your new home.”

  The monster-boy lifted his head, finally, and looked at his new family. His eyes were bright yellow.

  “Your name is Morton?” said Zach incredulously.

  “Zach!” said Mrs. Morgenstern. But Zach turned around and headed for the kitchen. “I’ll get some biscuits,” he mumbled. He wondered if this was some kind of joke. He hadn’t thought about the monster-boy having an actual name, like humans did. But Morton?

  He pulled a bowl out of the cupboard and the tin of biscuits from another.

  Morton Morgenstern?

  Zach looked at the biscuits, which he’d made himself a few days ago, then sat down on the chair and crammed three into his mouth at once.

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  By the time he’d finished the entire tin, Mr. and Mrs. Morgenstern had shown the monster-boy through the whole house. He could hear their voices as they shuffled around—“Here’s the bathroom—those are your towels—the blue ones” and “This is Dad’s study—you can come in here if you need, but ask permission first, because some of his work is very delicate” and, worst of all, echoing from the top of the stairs—“This will be your bedroom, so treat it as your own space.”

  “Oh, there you are, Zach!” said Mrs. Morgenstern as the tour group made their way through the door. “This is the kitchen, Morton. All the plates and cups are in the cupboards, and that’s the drawer where I keep my odds and ends, and there are snacks in the larder—I see you’ve made a head-start, Zach.”

  Mr. Morgenstern frowned. “Did you eat all those biscuits?”

  “Yup,” said Zach gloomily. “I feel sick.”

  “Zach, that was a greedy thing to do. What a way to welcome your new brother!”

  “It’s okay,” said Morton quietly.

  “No, it certainly is not,” said Mr. Morgenstern. “Zach, you’ve been sulking all morning. This is no way to behave.”

  “Should I go to my room?” Zach said. He really did feel sick and it was making him angry. “Oh, wait, I can’t—it’s not my room anymore!”

  “It certainly is your room, and that’s exactly where you’re going, young man. Right now.”

  “Oh, Joseph,” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “Let’s not be harsh. We’re going to have a nice family lunch—”

  “When Zach shows he can be civil enough to attend a nice family lunch, he can have as many nice family lunches as he pleases. Until then—” Mr. Morgenstern pointed to the staircase.

  Zach heaved himself up from the table. The biscuits sloshed alarmingly in his stomach. “Good thing I already ate, then,” he said, resolving, once more, never to speak to his paren
ts again.

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  Zach looked at the new bunk bed.

  The bedding from his old bed was piled on the floor, and fresh sheets for Morton were piled beside them.

  Zach picked up the new sheets and shoved them out the open window. They sagged over the verandah and caught in the plum tree.

  Then he messaged Ryder. The new kid is such a freak.

  Ryder replied, I can’t beleev ur living with a monster!

  Zach flopped down at his desk and played games on his laptop for two hours. Family lunch had never taken two hours before, Zach was sure, and by the time they were finished, the biscuits had worn off and he was kind of hungry. When he heard them talking and climbing the stairs he tried to look like he was busy deciding his next move in the game and not waiting for them at all.

  “Why don’t you just go in and talk for a bit? I’m sure Zach is dying to know a few things about you,” said Mrs. Morgenstern from outside the door. “We’ll go down and get dinner started.”

  “Oh—” said Morton, as he peered around the edge of the doorway. He didn’t look too keen. As the adults headed back down the stairs, his gaze dropped to his feet once more and he stood just inside the door, shifting from foot to foot.

  “Um,” he said, finally. “I’m Morton.”

  Zach spun his chair to face him. “I know.”

  Why should he make this easy for the monster-boy? He wanted him to be uncomfortable.

  “You’re Zach?” the monster-boy went on, shifting his weight again.

  “Yup,” said Zach, glaring.

  The monster-boy was wearing the same blue jacket and Looks Like Vanessa t-shirt he’d been wearing the day Zach had first seen him. “Where’s all your stuff?”

  “I, um,” said the monster-boy. “I don’t have anything. I mean, I did have a few things, but . . . they went missing. I don’t mind. There was only one thing I really wanted to keep, anyway.”