by Laura Ruby
Bug began to sweat. Maybe Mandelbrot was thinking of his name? “M,” he said.
“Yes!” said Mandelbrot. “Oh, wait a second.” He made a show of counting on his fingers. “No, I thought there was an ‘M’, but there isn’t. Bad news for little Georgie Bloomington.”
The vamp moved Georgie over another foot. She was hanging completely, the cable biting into her fingers.
“Don’t let go,” Mandelbrot told Georgie. “Or you lose the game.”
“Yeah?” said Georgie, kicking her legs. “What happens if we lose?”
To answer her question, Mandelbrot made loud chomping noises. Then he turned back to Bug. “Another guess?”
Maybe they should allow themselves to be bitten, thought Bug. Then they would be as strong as the other vampires. They could take the book from Mandelbrot and bring it to the book club. Then Mrs Vorona could bring them back to life.
But what if they didn’t bite them? What if the vampires did something worse? Bug didn’t think it was wise to take a bunch of vamps and their loopy Punk leader at their word. Maybe he should just tell them the old women had the pen. They might be able to get to them before the vamps did. But maybe not.
Bug’s forehead started to sweat. So much for playing along. There must be something he could do. Something to distract them just long enough for him to get in the air. He knew if he could just get in the air, he could outfly these guys, could get them away.
“Guess!” Mandelbrot bellowed. “Guess! Guess! Guess!”
Guess. He had to guess. OK, not Mandelbrot, but what about Chaos King? “E,” Bug said.
“E! That would be a NO! Move her on up, boys!”
The vamp lifted Georgie’s hands from the cable and moved her even higher on the bridge. Georgie winced as her hands closed around the cable. She was about three metres from the ground.
“Hang on, Georgie,” Bug called.
“Yes, hang on, Georgie!” Mandelbrot mimicked.
Bug nearly growled in frustration.
“Guess again,” Mandelbrot said.
“This is stupid; I don’t want to guess,” said Bug. “Why don’t you—”
“You don’t want to guess? Move her higher. Much higher.” The vamps plucked Georgie off the wire and flew her higher, much higher, much too high, so high that if she fell…
“No!” said Bug. “Just tell me what you want and I’ll—”
Mandelbrot jumped up and down. “I! WANT! YOU! TO! GUESS!”
Bug’s brain raced even harder. He strained against Phinneas. V for vampire? “V!” he said.
Mandelbrot’s up-and-down motion turned into funky disco step. “Noooooope! Higher, boys!”
The vampires moved Georgie yet again. “Bug, I can’t hold on much longer.”
“Yes, you can!” said Bug. Mandelbrot twirled in circles, and Bug’s brain raced just as fast. What if Mandelbrot wasn’t thinking of any word or phrase? What if he wasn’t thinking of anything? What if he was just toying with them?
Phinneas’s grip on his elbows was still tight, but not as tight as it had been. How do you ward off a vampire? Silver bullets? No, that was for werewolves. And it didn’t matter anyway, because he didn’t have any silver bullets or silver rings or silver anything. He had no wooden stakes or garlic, either. All he had was a pocket full of birdseed. And what could you do with a pocket full of birdseed?
He looked up and saw the crows before anyone else did and suddenly he knew what you could do with a pocket full of birdseed.
You could throw it.
Georgie had to bite her lip to keep from screaming at the pain in her fingers and palms and knew she could not hold on. She tried to cheat a little, pulling her feet up to rest them on the cables, but when the vampires saw her, they flew up to kick her feet down.
She looked down at Bug and Mandelbrot. Bug, who had been struggling with Phinneas the whole time he was playing Mandelbrot’s “game”, had stopped struggling. He’s planning something, she thought. He’s going to try something. She hoped he would try it fast, because she was going to fall soon and she really really really didn’t want to fall. She didn’t know how high up she was, but she knew it was too high to drop without breaking bones she didn’t want broken.
She tried to keep images of plummeting on to the ground or into the river out of her head. Georgie thought of her parents and wished she had left them a note that would have let them know what she was doing and why. But then what could she have written? Dear Mum and Dad, There is a Punk who is bringing dead things back to life with a magic book. So Bug and I are going to steal the book and take it to these old ladies who have a book club (they have the magic pen, too, but that’s beside the point). They’ll use the book against the Punk’s army of vampires – oh, wait, did I mention the vampires? – so that they won’t bite you or me or Bug or any of the rest of us and turn us into the walking dead or use the book to unleash some giant sloths or octopi on us. (Wait, did I mention the giant octopus)? And—
Someone below shouted, “Hey! Crows!” Georgie looked up to see a dozen crows circling overhead.
A dozen crows and one bright blue budgie.
“Pinkwater!” Georgie said.
The crows attacked. Each one picked a vamp and went after him with beak and claws while Pinkwater took a dive towards Bug and Phinneas. “Feed me!” he chirped. “Feed me!”
Phinneas took one hand off Bug to swat at the budgie, so he didn’t notice when Bug dug around in his pocket, pulled out a handful of something and tossed it in Phinneas’s face. For a moment, Phinneas appeared stunned. Then he and the rest of the vamps fell to their knees on the wooden walkway. Georgie could hear them counting, “One, two, three, four, five…”
Bug took off, headed for Georgie. Mandelbrot leaped up, quick as a cat, and grabbed Bug around the legs. “Stop counting!” he yelled at the vamps, struggling to hang on to Bug.
“Six, seven, eight, nine, ten…”
“I said STOP THAT!” Mandelbrot yelled. “We’re playing HANGMAN!”
“Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen…”
Bug thrashed in Mandelbrot’s arms.
“Argh!” Mandelbrot grunted. “Help me, you cheeseballs!”
Frantic footsteps echoed on the wooden slats. Roma lurched in her high, jewelled heels, half walking, half-flying with her huge, awkward leathery wings.
“Bethany and London wouldn’t let me bite them!” she shrieked. “I said that we could be friends for ever and ever, but they just ran away. So not fab™. You guys have to be my friends now. And you can’t just LEAVE without me like that. It makes me really really mad and you so don’t want to get me mad. Who here wants a steak? I need a steak. What are you doing with Bug Grabowski? Why is everyone crawling around on the ground? Ooh! Are those seeds?”
Bug kicked away from a distracted Mandelbrot and was at Georgie’s side in a few seconds. As Bug curled his arm around her waist, Georgie saw Mandelbrot pick up the baseball bat. He ran to Roma. “After them!”
“What?”
“Them! If we catch them, you can bite them!”
Roma turned and saw Bug and Georgie. “Oh! Cool!” She grabbed Mandelbrot by the scruff of the neck like a puppy and took off.
“Hurry, Bug!” Georgie said. “They’re coming!”
Bug shot straight up and away from the bridge. Even though they hadn’t escaped yet, even though Roma and Mandelbrot were careening after them, she felt so light flying with Bug. Flying with Phinneas the vampire had hurt. A vamp’s flying power remained his own – a vamp didn’t share. When she flew with Bug, she could feel Bug’s strength flowing into her muscles, understood that she was borrowing his buoyancy, the same way he borrowed her invisibility when she touched him.
She turned and saw Roma and Mandelbrot closing the distance. “Bug,” Georgie yelled. “They’re gaining on us.”
“I know,” he said.
“Fly faster!”
“I know!”
For a newly-formed vampire with newly-formed wings, Roma was speedy.
But she was also clumsy. Her wings pumped the air so hard that she bobbed up and down like a yo-yo. Mandelbrot waved his bat, but every time he got close enough to take a swing, Roma bobbed them out of range again.
“Faster!” Mandelbrot screamed, and Roma drew up alongside Bug.
Bug banked hard towards the bright lights of the city just as Roma bounced left. Mandelbrot swung his bat and…
Georgie was falling, falling, falling. A strange sound filled her ears, a low and mournful howl, but she didn’t know if she was the one howling. The water of the East River gaped like a mouth below her, like a great black hungry mouth, and Georgie crashed right into it.
Chapter 25
The Temple of Dendur
Cold. At first all she felt was cold. And then the pain set in, the ache of bones and flesh and skin that had been hung from a bridge and dropped into a wall of water. Where was Bug? she wondered. Did he fall too? Did he get away? Was he OK? She drifted, her lungs like stones in her chest, her limbs useless as a doll’s. She was going to die here in this black and stinking river. She was going to die and her parents would never know what happened to her. She was going to die and she would never see them again and—
—something grabbed her leg.
Something huge and strong and monstrous. It grabbed her leg – twirled itself around her leg – and then she was moving. Moving so fast that it felt like she was being dragged by a jet. Still, she couldn’t breathe and she was close to blacking out completely when whatever it was pulled her to the surface. She coughed and coughed, sucking back sweet mouthfuls of air. But the monstrous thing still had her by the leg and was towing her so swiftly that she couldn’t see what she was towed by or where she was being towed to. Her back burned where she skidded on the surface of the water.
At last, they slowed down. Another monstrous something twirled itself around her waist and she was lifted high into the air and laid with the utmost gentleness on the rocky shore of the river. It was then that she saw what had towed her to the shore: the biggest octopus that a person had ever seen, the biggest that was ever imagined. Its large eyes peeked up in front of a limp bluish-grey mantle, eyes that seemed old and kind and wise. As she watched, the octopus laid a limp Bug next to her on the rocky shore. With the tip of a single metres-long tentacle, it ruffled Bug’s hair. Then it reeled in its limbs and disappeared in a froth of bubbles.
Georgie rolled to her knees, coughing. “Bug,” she said. She shook his shoulder. “Bug. Wake up.”
She leaned in. Bug’s eyes were closed and his skin was pasty. “Bug!” She shook him harder. He didn’t move. Had he been hit with Mandelbrot’s bat? Had he been hurt by the fall to the water?
“Bug!” she yelled. “Bug!”
Shivering and terrified, she pressed her ear to his chest.
And heard nothing.
She sat back on her heels, staring. No, it couldn’t be. No, no, no. It wasn’t possible. She pressed her ear to his chest again, sure that she was wrong. She had to be wrong.
She listened, her whole body straining to hear a beat.
Still nothing.
“Bug,” she whispered. “You have to wake up, OK? Please? Please, please, please wake up.” She remembered what he said before they went into the gallery, how he wanted to tell her that he liked her in case something should happen. She remembered how she said nothing could happen, how she’d insisted on it, but never told him how she felt, never said, “I like you, too.” And now he would never ever know.
Something thick and awful gathered in her throat and she thought she might choke or explode or crack completely in half. She didn’t know what to do. She was frozen. So when someone came scrambling down the rocky shore, she didn’t even turn. She didn’t care who it was. What did it matter who it was?
“Georgie.” Someone was shaking her shoulder.
“Georgie!”
More shaking.
“Georgie, they’re coming. We have to get out of here.”
Who was shaking her? Who was coming?
“Georgie, listen to me!” Hewitt Elder grabbed both Georgie’s shoulders. “They’re coming! We have to get away from here.” Hewitt pointed into the air where a cloud of vampires blackened the already dark sky. “We need to leave right now.”
“Bug…” Georgie said.
Hewitt shook her head. “He’s gone. You’re not. We have to go.” She hauled Georgie to her feet.
“I can’t leave him,” said Georgie.
“Yes you can. We’ll get some people to come for him later. Come on.”
Georgie shook her head. But her heart wasn’t in it. Her heart wasn’t in anything.
Hewitt scoured the sky frantically. “Georgie, think of your parents! Think of what will happen to them if they lose you!”
This got her feet to move a little. Hewitt did the rest, half dragging her, half flying her up the riverbank towards the highway that raced around the edge of the city. “We’ll have to catch a cab,” said Hewitt.
Georgie nodded dully. Bug, she thought. Bug.
Somehow Hewitt managed to get a taxi to pull over, much to the irritation of the other drivers on the road. She shoved Georgie in the cab and gave the cabbie an address that Georgie didn’t recognise.
“Hey!” said the cabbie. “Don’t let her drip all over my cab.”
“Shut up and drive,” Hewitt said in her customary haughty tone. “As fast as you possibly can.”
He shut up and drove. Horns blared behind them and the cabbie made monkey faces in the rearview mirror. To Georgie it seemed they drove for hours, hours in which she reminded herself how she didn’t tell her parents what she was doing and how she didn’t bring Noodle who might have saved them from the vampires and how she never told Bug how much she cared for him and how she was a useless, worthless, horrible person who got people hurt and got people killed and that there was nothing anyone could do to fix it. She could hardly breathe. She could hardly remember what they went to the gallery for. What was so important that—
Georgie stiffened. “Stop the car!”
“What?” said the cabbie. “Here?”
“No, the next block,” Hewitt told him.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. Muttering to himself: “Crazy people dripping all over my cab. I just cleaned this cab.”
“Hewitt,” Georgie said. “We have to go back. We have to get the book. You have to help me.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll help you,” Hewitt said. “Let’s go.”
Hewitt threw some money at the cabbie and they climbed from the cab. Georgie frowned. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art? What are we doing here?”
“You were all supposed to come, but that’s OK. It doesn’t matter. You’re the most important anyway.”
“What?” said Georgie. She couldn’t understand anything Hewitt was saying. All she knew was that Mandelbrot had a book that could bring things to life. Maybe it could bring Bug back to life. She had to get that book. She didn’t care how. “Hewitt, that book that you gave Mandelbrot. It has the power to bring things to life. It could save Bug. We have to find Mandelbrot.”
Hewitt grabbed Georgie’s arm and led her up the steps towards the doors of the museum, taking the steps two at a time with the peculiar hopping of people who couldn’t fly so well. “Mandelbrot doesn’t have the book,” she said.
Georgie stopped walking. “What?”
“I said, he doesn’t have the book. I have the book.”
“You?” said Georgie. “You?”
“I’ll explain when we’re inside.”
“Wait—”
“You want the book, right?”
“Yes!”
“Well, I smuggled it out of the library and hid it here. It will only take a minute to get it. Come on.” The museum was dark, but the front door opened easily. Georgie gave Hewitt a puzzled look. Hewitt shrugged. “Someone left it open for me.”
Inside the museum, their footsteps echoed in the dim and cavernous entranceway. Hewitt turned right a
nd headed towards the galleries containing the Egyptian Art. It was as quiet as a tomb, which was fitting, as the Egyptian galleries contained so many coffins and mummies and artefacts found buried with kings and queens. Georgie swallowed hard and hurried to keep up with Hewitt. Finally, they entered an enormous room with floor-to-ceiling windows along one side. Directly in front of them was: a dark pool of water guarded by two seated statues. Behind the pool, a stone temple.
“Here we are,” said Hewitt. “The Temple of Dendur.”
“OK,” Georgie said. “Where’s the book?”
“In the Temple,” Hewitt said. “I hid it there because I was afraid someone else would take it from the library.”
“Who?”
“Anybody. Everybody. Don’t you think that everyone in the city would want to get hold of a book that can animate things?”
“I guess.” Georgie’s mind was elsewhere: how quickly they could back to the banks of the East River. “Is there a phone somewhere in here? Maybe we can call my parents to let them know I’m OK. And then we can tell them where Bug is. I don’t want the vampires to get him. I don’t want anyone else to find him.”
“What do you care, anyway?” Hewitt said.
Georgie frowned. “What do you mean?”
Hewitt didn’t answer. She moved past the still waters of the pool and up on to the large platform on which the Temple sat. Dendur, according to the plaques positioned around the buildings, was the only Egyptian temple in the western hemisphere. It was reassembled in the Metropolitan as it had appeared on the banks of the Nile.
Hewitt stepped inside the Temple and Georgie followed. “What did you mean by that?” Georgie said. “Why wouldn’t I care about Bug?”
Again, Hewitt didn’t respond. She felt along the left wall of the interior of the Temple until she hit a loose stone. She was able to shove it to the side just enough to fish her fingers in the gap. From the gap she withdrew a thin leather book so fragile and yellowed that it could have been as old as the Temple itself. “Here it is,” said Hewitt. “Now this is a book of poetry! I bet you want to know how it works.”
“All I need to know is that it does work,” Georgie said. “Let’s get back to the Brooklyn Bridge. You can tell me about it on the way.”