by Laura Ruby
He rolled his eyes even harder when she told him and wouldn’t agree to stop on the side of the highway near the Brooklyn Bridge until she showed him two more wet and crumpled bills. Large bills.
“I know I should ask you where you got all this money, kid,” he said. “But I ain’t gonna ask you. You’ll probably tell me that your rich daddy gave it to you.”
“Something like that,” Georgie said. She climbed out of the cab, her arm and shoulder screaming where the Sakhmet’s ankh had hit her. She wondered vaguely if something was broken. But she didn’t care. She scrambled down the rocks of the shore, nimble as a mountain goat (not that she noticed this). She kept thinking: What if someone moved him? What if Bug is gone? How would she ever find him?
But Bug was just where she’d left him.
Except he wasn’t alone.
“Give me one good reason why I can’t bite him,” said Roma.
“OK,” Phinneas replied. “He’s dead.”
“Yeah, so are you!” Roma said. Crows circled her and she swatted at them.
Phinneas tossed his hair from his brow. “There is a difference, you know.”
Roma stomped her foot. “I don’t care! I want to bite him!”
It was then that Phinneas saw Georgie. “Hey, look who’s here.” Georgie wasn’t sure if she was imagining things or not, but Phinneas seemed to be thrilled to see Georgie standing there. (As thrilled as a vampire could be, anyway.) “You made it,” he said.
Roma smiled at Georgie in triumph. “If I can’t bite him, I’m going to bite her.” She charged at Georgie. But before she could reach her, a bluish-grey tentacle popped from the water, grabbed Roma’s ankle, and tripped her.
Roma kicked and screamed. “Will you stop doing that?!”
“Every time we try to get near the body, the octopus smacks us with a tentacle,” Phinneas explained to Georgie. “Mandelbrot got bored, so he left us to guard the body just in case you survived the fall. And here you are. We’re supposed to bite you. But I don’t think the octopus is going to let us do that, either. Haven’t seen anything like that before. Kind of interesting.”
“Interesting!” shrieked Roma, getting to her feet. “That’s not interesting! It’s horrible! It’s a slimy, awful, disgusting, totally gross—”
Another tentacle reared up and smacked Roma upside the head, removing her long red wig in the process. Roma shrieked and tried to grab it, but the octopus held it just out of her reach. Her short dishwater-blond hair was so thin her scalp showed through.
Phinneas ignored Roma. “What do you have there?” he said, gesturing to the book that Georgie held.
Georgie thought fast. “A schoolbook.”
Phinneas frowned. “That’s not a schoolbook. I’ve seen that book before, that’s…” He trailed off, an astonished expression dropping over his perennially bored countenance.
“What?” said Roma. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Phinneas said. “Stupid mortal stuff, that’s all.”
Georgie watched Phinneas carefully. “So you don’t mind if I read it to Bug?”
Phinneas’s eyes seemed to glow with some vampirish semblance of excitement. “No, I don’t think I’d mind that at all. I think I’d like to see that. I think that would be very interesting.”
“Very interesting,” said Roma. “You don’t think anything is very interesting. You didn’t even think I was very interesting, though I’m the most interesting person in the universe. I have my own line of deodorants!”
“Of course you do,” said Phinneas.
He followed Georgie as she sat next to Bug. She hated to see Bug like this, smeared with dirt and weird East River slime, pale and…
Quickly, she opened the yellowed pages of the book and started to read:
“Every day is like a flower
Waiting for the rain
Needing life’s sustaining force
To bloom and bloom again.
And you are like the water
That falls upon the earth
That nourishes this garden
And gives each day its worth.”
She frowned. What the heck was this? She kept reading. “‘May your dreams come true, today and every day, and your wishes, too, as you go along life’s way.’”
Another page: “‘Roses are red, violets are blue….’”
“This is like a bunch of bad greeting cards!” Georgie said.
“Well,” said Phinneas. “Seems you’ve been tricked.”
“Georgie’s been tricked!” Roma sang. “That’s so fab™!”
Georgie frantically flipped the pages of the book looking for the incantations, but all she found were reams of bad poetry. No, she thought. No, no, no! It couldn’t be! “This has to work,” she said. “It just has to. Maybe you have to read these stupid things in a special order or something. Maybe there’s a pattern.”
All of a sudden, she thought of what Agnes had written in her last note, the thing that Georgie didn’t understand. “The world only seems crazy. There is pattern. You find it if you look hard enough.”
“Connections. Patterns,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean!” Georgie wailed. “Just something somebody told me.”
“Oh,” said Phinneas, his voice tinged with disappointment. “I hope you can figure it out. Otherwise, your friend will stay dead.”
“Ead-day,” said Roma.
Ead-day. Georgie stared at Roma. “What did you just say?”
“Pig Latin,” Phinneas said. “She picked that up from Mandelbrot. He’s always going on in pig Latin.”
Georgie flashed on what Hewitt had said in the museum: “I wouldn’t have known how to use The Book of the Undead to reanimate things if I hadn’t got the idea from Mandelbrot.”
“That’s it!” said Georgie.
“What’s it?” Phinneas asked.
“I know what to do,” she said. She laid one hand on Bug’s chest.
To her surprise, Phinneas laid his own cold hand on top of hers. When she glanced at him questioningly, he flicked his eyes towards Roma, who was throwing rocks at the giant octopus (which the octopus casually batted away). He said: “Let’s just say that this death thing is not so fab.”
Georgie began to read, the pig Latin tripping off her tongue like the most ancient of chants: “Very-ey a-day s-iay ike-lay a lower-fay, aiting-way or-fay he-tay, ain-ray, eeding-nay, ife’s-lay, ustaining-say, orce-fay, o-tay, loom-bay nd-ay loom-bay gain-ay.”
After she read the first two poems, Bug’s fingers began to twitch. After five, his legs began to jerk. Phinneas covered Georgie’s hand with his own as Bug suddenly gasped, his lungs filling with air. When she reached the last word of the very last poem, Bug’s enormous blue eyes fluttered and opened. He blinked at Georgie, opening his mouth to speak. His first words could have been anything: Where am I? What happened? What’s going on?
Instead, he said, “It’s you,” in a tone close to wonder.
Georgie closed the book and smiled. “Who else would it be?”
Chapter 27
Chaos
Bug and Georgie only had a few moments to enjoy Bug’s rebirth before the arrival of the police helicopters, the squad cars, the fire trucks, the ambulances, the federal agents, the news reporters, the camera crews, the paparazzi, Solomon and Bunny Bloomington, Harvey “Juju” Fink, and a bunch of old ladies who claimed they were a book club. They all converged on that scrubby, rocky scrap of the East River shore, everyone talking at once. Questions were asked, answers demanded, photos snapped, clues investigated, rivers dredged, news stories filmed, threats levelled, tears shed. But even with all of this activity, nobody seemed to know exactly what had happened to Bug Grabowski and Georgetta Bloomington.
And most of them never would.
What was clear was that something terrible had happened to them and that something had involved vicious and shadowy characters filled with dangerous ideas. With that in mind, Bug an
d Georgie were whisked off to a private hospital to be checked out by medical professionals. The oddly pale young man who had been found with them was also taken to a hospital. This young man claimed to remember nothing about his life except for his name, which he claimed was Phinneas. He told reporters that he wished Georgie and Bug the best and hoped to get a job working with children one day, perhaps as a history teacher.
Another cause of speculation: the mysterious disappearance of Roma Radisson. In the weeks following the East River Incident, as the press was calling it, Roma was often spotted frequenting the hottest late-night clubs, but no one – not her parents, not the police – could confirm this, and no one could actually find her. When questioned about Roma, her friends London England and Bethany Tiffany spouted a story so outrageous that their parents sent them to boarding schools in Switzerland to cure them of their obvious delinquency.
Mandelbrot, however, was found and charged with the kidnapping and assault of Georgetta Rose Aster Bloomington and Sylvester “Bug” Grabowski. After his arrest, the value of his artwork skyrocketed, a piece called Anarchy Rocks commanding a quarter of a million dollars at auction.
Also interesting was the appearance of former child prodigy Hewitt Elder at One Police Plaza. In her possession was a Giacometti sculpture that had been stolen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art some weeks before, a statue called Dog. She claimed to have been brought to the station by half a dozen “Goddesses of Chaos” commanded by a small grey cat, but the police could not locate said goddesses or said cat. Though Hewitt was charged with the theft of the statue, she was declared mentally unfit for trial and sent to a facility in Idaho for treatment. “Tragically,” said the newspapers, “the prognosis isn’t good.”
As for Bug and Georgie, Georgie was treated for a cracked shoulder bone and Bug was treated for a concussion from a blow to the head. Bug and Georgie had told them enough about what happened that the Bloomingtons could have Mandelbrot arrested, but they suspected that more sinister forces were at work. Even more disturbing: they had tried to visit The Professor for some answers, but his apartment was empty.
So, all three Bloomingtons gathered around Bug’s bed in the private hospital. With them were Noodle and Pinkwater, both of whom had played their parts in this strange story. But the whole story had yet to be put together, and the Bloomingtons wanted every detail.
“You have to tell us again what happened,” Bunny said.
“And that means everything that happened,” said Sol. “From the very beginning. And don’t leave anything out. We promise we won’t be angry. Or at least, we’ll try not to be.”
“First, though, I brought you these.” Bunny set a vase full of freesia plucked fresh from Solomon’s desk drawer and carpeting on Bug’s bedside table. Bug inhaled deeply of the now-fragrant air as if the mere act of breathing was a gift. Which, Georgie supposed, it was.
“And then there’s this,” said Georgie, handing Bug a copy of the newspaper. She pointed to the lead article.
GIANT OCTOPUS GOES ON RESTAURANT RAMPAGE; EVADES CAPTURE IN EAST RIVER
Diners in a South Street Seaport eatery got the shock of a lifetime yesterday evening when a giant octopus pulled itself out of the East River and went on a rampage.
“It stole my lobster!” a distraught female diner told reporters.
“It ate my clams casino. And my scampi!” another said.
A man reported that the monster “tickled” him under the chin, though there were no witnesses to this particular incident.
Before animal control units and scientists from area aquariums could be dispatched, the octopus escaped back into the East River. This morning, a squad of police divers and local fisherman went into the river to see if the monster could be photographed. The police released the following statement:
“At 6 a. m., city police divers and several scientists dived into the waters next to South Street Seaport. We did locate the creature and attempted to photograph it, immobilise it, and bring it to the surface for further study. The octopus grabbed one of our officers, flipped him over a tentacle, and spanked him. Then it spat clouds of ink at us before disappearing. Needless to say, we didn’t capture the animal. But we did get some cool photos.”
Experts at the American Museum of Natural History say that cephalopods are bright and playful, and antics such as these are not out of the ordinary. What is out of the ordinary is the immense size of the animal, which had limbs reported to be seven metres in length, making it more than thirteen metres from tip to tip. The existence of the monster smashes all previous theories of the bulk of giant octopi as well as their habitat.
The sighting of this spectacular creature also calls to mind the assertions of Bug “Sylvester” Grabowski, who had claimed to have been pulled off a dock by a sea monster at the very same port a month ago.
“Maybe,” said the chief of police, “that boy was telling the truth after all.”
“Maybe I was telling the truth,” said Bug. “I guess that’s a start.”
“Speaking of starting,” Solomon said, “this whole thing started with the octopus. What happened then?”
Bug and Georgie took turns telling the story. The octopus, the vampires, the statue, the sloth, Mandelbrot, the book club ladies and how all of them connected in a seemingly random but nonetheless powerful pattern. When Bug reached the part about Georgie hanging from the Brooklyn Bridge, Bunny Bloomington cried out and hugged her daughter. When Georgie told of Bug’s death on the shores of the East River, Bunny just cried. Both Solomon and Bunny held their breath as Georgie related the details of the chase through the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the blank horror of the Sakhmets.
“Noodle saved me,” said Georgie. “She found me just like she found me in the alley that first time back when I lived in the orphanage, didn’t you, Noodle?”
Noodle meowed in agreement, looking very satisfied with herself, the way any cat would.
“And Pinkwater found us,” said Bunny Bloomington. “He rang the doorbell! I have no idea how he figured out how to do that. And then he zoomed around the apartment chirping ‘Mayday!’ and ‘Danger!’ We had no idea what he was talking about.”
Solomon said, “But Agnes did. She told us to follow the bird and save ‘good Polish boy with good Polish name’.”
“Good boy!” chirped Pinkwater. He bonked Bug in the cheek.
“Dad, Agnes knows things,” said Georgie. “She really does. She’s been like some kind of fairy godmother. You know, if fairy godmothers really existed.” Georgie cleared her throat. “I think she’s been watching out for me.”
“Yes,” Solomon replied. “For which I am very thankful.” He leaned forwards. “Georgie, I know we haven’t been your parents for very long. And maybe we didn’t think about how hard it might be for you to adjust to having us around. Maybe we’ve been a little too overprotective. But you understand now why we’re overprotective.”
Georgie said, “I was afraid that the vampires would get you. I wanted to save you.”
“It’s not your job to keep us safe,” said Solomon. “It’s our job to keep you safe. But we can only do that if you’re honest with us.” He looked at Bug. “You are special. And because of that, people are going to notice you and not always for the right reasons. You have to talk to us. You have to keep telling us what is going on with you, even if we annoy you sometimes, even if you’d rather not. Do you promise to try?”
“Yes,” said Georgie. “I promise.”
“And that goes for you too, Bug. As a matter of fact, I think that it might be a good idea for you to move into our building. There’s a vacancy now that Mrs Hingis has moved out.”
“Mrs Hingis?” Bug said. “Imogen Hingis?”
“Yes,” said Solomon. “How did you know?”
Bug looked at Georgie. “She was one of the book club ladies. She was there with Mrs Vorona. The women who asked me to steal the book for them.”
“Old crow!” chirped Pinkwater.
“Oh!�
�� said Mrs Bloomington, flushing angrily. “If I ever see that dotty Mrs Hingis again, I will give her a piece of my mind. What was she thinking, putting the two of you in such danger. Why, I ought to call the police right now!”
Pinkwater helpfully made siren noises. Noodle joined in with some strangled meowing.
Solomon put his arm around his wife. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s all over now. It’s all over.”
“Almost over,” said a voice.
They all turned. And stared. In the doorway stood The Professor. He was soaking wet, his coat dripping on the floor, his grassy hair sparkling with droplets. The Answer Hand had a ribbon of seaweed wound around its fingers that it was struggling to remove.
“Professor!” said Georgie. “What happened to you?”
“Same thing that happened to you, I think,” The Professor said gruffly, pulling the seaweed from the wriggling hand. “I fell into the East River. I managed to find a piece of driftwood to cling to for a while. I imagine you didn’t know there was a tiny island the size of a studio apartment off the coast of the city? Neither did I. Anyway, after a while I was eventually rescued by a rather large—”
“Octopus,” Bug finished. “But did you fall into the East River in the first place? Did the octopus pull you in?”
“No,” The Professor said. “It’s a long story. Let’s just say a rather unsavoury character chased me into the storm drain right before high tide. I preferred drowning in the East River to having a conversation with Mr Fuss. He’s a little too accident-prone for my taste. Who knows what he would have done?”
“Wait!” said Georgie. “Did you say Mr Fuss?”
“Yes. Why?”
“We met him! At your apartment! He was packing up all your stuff.”
“Really?” said The Professor. “Interesting. I’ll have to talk to him about that.”
“I thought you didn’t want to have a conversation with him,” said Bug.
“Well, sometimes we all have to do things we’d rather not. Besides, I’ll be meeting him at a safe place. No storm drains this time.”
“Where?” Georgie asked.