Charlie Sullivan and the Monster Hunters: The Varcolac's Diary

by D. C. McGannon

  “How’s the hand?” asked Charlie, looking at Liev’s bandaged thumb.

  “It’s fine,” said Liev. “Lisa thinks it’s infected, but she’s usually paranoid.”

  Lisa scowled at her brother, pushing him aside so she could fit into the backseat.

  That left Darcy. Charlie was a little worried that she would not show, but just as he had thought it, she came around the corner with her arms crossed and her chin up. Apparently she still was less than happy about being muted the night before.

  Showing off her new gift, Darcy slid into the back passenger seat of the car without opening the door.

  “Hey!” cried Lisa as Darcy slipped through her as well. Lisa quickly pushed her brother over, squishing both Liev and Nash into the other door, and moved over to make space for Darcy, clearly unnerved about having someone phasing through her.

  “Don’t. Do. That!”

  For once Darcy said nothing, but just smiled.

  “Alright,” said Loch gruffly. “All in? Good. Hold on to something.”

  They did. They held onto the door handles, the backs of the seats, each other, anything they could find as the car took off like a rocket over the rough terrain.

  Several yards behind the car, a certain bully had been hiding behind a tree. Donnie Wickles had been very curious after watching Charlie Sullivan and his new acquaintances over the past two days. He could tell something was going on between the five.

  As such, he had followed them after school to find them getting into a black car in the woods of Hunter’s Point, of all places. He wondered what on earth was really going on.

  Of course, when Darcy got into the backseat of the car‌—‌without opening the door‌—‌Donnie fell to his butt. Now, he sat panting in fear as the car pulled itself up the hill, up to Hunter’s Key.

  Shakily, Donnie stood up. Pieces of his own past clicked into place and suddenly made sense. His uncle, Hunter’s Key, people going missing. Suddenly he regretted everything he had said over the years about the missing people in Hunter’s Grove.

  And then, to think of Darcy Witherington slipping through the back door like that. Maybe Donnie’s uncle had not been a crazy man after all. And if Donnie’s uncle hadn’t been completely crazy‌—‌if his tales about monsters and superhuman powers were true‌—‌how could Donnie get his hands on a power of his own?

  In that moment, Donnie Wickles made a decision.

  “I think I prefer walking,” Liev commented from the back seat.

  The car came to an abrupt stop. The four backseat passengers flew forward, only to be choked backwards by the seatbelts.

  Loch got out of the car and walked to the gate while the group looked on. It was just as foreboding in the daylight.

  Loch unchained the gate and went through the process of shoving it open, driving the car through, closing and locking it, and going back to the car.

  “You do that every time?” asked Charlie as Loch buckled himself in.

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Just looks tedious.”

  “That gate, when locked, could keep out a werewolf, and not just because of the silver chain used to lock it. The original Hunters of this area put protective wards all over that gate and the Key that help keep things out. Though, some of those wards have grown weaker over the years.”

  By now the black car drove past the trees and entered into the courtyard, revealing the Gothic grandeur of Hunter’s Key. It looked a little less sinister in the daylight, but it was still overwhelming. Little did they know the Key had become more accepting of their presence, since Loch had invited them.

  “That reminds me,” Loch continued. “Have any of you wondered why it’s called Hunter’s Key?”

  “No. Why?” asked Nash.

  “Right. Take a good look at the place.”

  They did. From the castle-like Head Wing to the awkward tower of the Teeth Wing. Whatever Loch was getting at, though, it was beyond them. He waved away their questions, pulling up to the unusual garages.

  “Cool gargoyles,” said Liev, looking at the stone grotesqueries sitting atop the three towers.

  “Don’t look at them,” said Loch.

  “Why not?”

  “You, Nash,” said Loch, clearly ignoring the question. “You look like a strong lad. Do me a favor and go open that garage. See the chain? Just pull it.”

  Nash did, despite himself. Loch pulled the car in after he had heaved the door open. Once inside, Loch took over closing it.

  The garage looked like a renovated stable. It had old saddles and buckets hanging along the walls, along with some mechanical tools.

  “This is the West Garage,” stated Loch, getting out of the car. “Follow me now.”

  He took them to a door at the very back of the garage, which was deceivingly far back. When he let them through, they came into a hallway that looked very much like the hallway they had traveled through from the Library to the kitchen. Doors were placed here and there along its walls.

  “This,” said Loch, “is the Teeth Wing Hallway. We’re on the bottom floor‌—‌”

  “Teeth Wing?” Liev asked with a smile.

  “Yes. Teeth Wing. Also known as the East Wing, but we will call it the Teeth Wing. As I was saying‌—‌”

  Liev couldn’t help himself.

  “Thennn, what do we call the West Wing?”

  “The Head Wing! Now! This is the East Garage!”

  They looked at the dark East Garage. The garages had definitely been stables, since this one still had horse stalls in it. Just no horses.

  Charlie noticed a spear lying on the ground. It looked lonely to him.

  “What’s that?” he asked, reaching out for it.

  “Oh. That old thing? It was a good weapon, a long time ago,” Loch said, shutting the door in their faces. “Now, directly above us is the Teeth Wing Tower. But you don’t need to see all of the towers today.”

  There was a chorus of sad moaning as Loch started to walk to the end of the hallway. He stopped and looked at them.

  “What?” he said in disbelief. “You want to walk up twelve flights of stairs?”

  “Twelve?” asked Charlie. “Is that all?”

  Loch huffed and growled, “Fine! Follow me.”

  He took them to a stairwell, hidden in the back corner of the hallway, and up, up, up they went. They passed three different landings, each coming after a long flight of stairs, before they ran into a sloped trapdoor.

  Beyond the trapdoor they walked onto the roof of Hunter’s Key. It was higher up than Charlie had realized.

  The roof was really a straight battlement walkway, with palisade walls coming up to their knees on either side. The five teens looked down the walkway, to where the Three Towers of the Key stretched to the sky. Eventually, Loch yelled at them, jerking them into action.

  “Are you just going to dally there all day?” he yelled, standing on the steps of the awkward Teeth Wing Tower.

  But for several moments of vertigo, they quickly began to climb the stone steps that spiraled around the tower.

  Loch was waiting for one of them to look down and to point out the shape of the Key, but no one ever did. He couldn’t blame them. The stairs of the Teeth Wing Tower were crooked, uneven, and high in altitude. No one wanted to look down, period.

  When they reached the top it was through another trap door. This one opened onto a balcony that ran circular, all the way around the tower. The view was amazing. They could see the mountains all around Hunter’s Grove, with the little town lying nestled below. Behind the Key was a garden that had long run wild, with a white, decrepit bridge leading over a small channel of the lake beyond.

  But they had not begged to come up here for the view. They quickly looked around the balcony, then the rest of the Teeth Wing Tower. A single stone archway led into the tower’s only room, and there was little inside. To everyone’s dismay, there were just some chairs, oil lamps, and a desk with writing utensils. The only interesti
ng things were some dusty old crossbows hanging on the wall and strange white stones with leather straps lying on the desk. The stones were circular and smooth with holes in the middle, like tiny doughnuts.

  “There, are you happy now?” asked Loch.

  Darcy frowned. “This is it?”

  “I’m not sure what you were expecting, but yes. This is a watchtower, you see. Watchtower guards are supposed to be watching out below, not inside playing videogames or staring at the TV. See? Now, if it’s something interesting you were expecting to see, why don’t you all go pick up those oculi.”

  “What’s an oculi?” Nash asked.

  “Those white stones with the headbands. It’s what the watchtower guards would use. No, not you,” he said, holding Charlie back as the others rushed to grab the strange devices. “You need to learn how to use your gift.”

  Charlie frowned, but stood next to Loch patiently. He felt a little left out. More than that, he was scared of the Sight.

  “Alright, all of you come out to the balcony, and be careful not to drop those oculi with any butterfingers!”

  They stood warily away from the edge of the stone path as Loch instructed them on how to strap the oculi on their heads. Then he told them to look down. There were several excited gasps, and Nash, Darcy, Lisa and Liev began pointing things out to one another, making comments here and there.

  “What do I do?” Charlie asked.

  “Look down, boy, but don’t just look down with your eye. Imagine yourself seeing magic.”

  Confused, Charlie frowned and thought this over. But he stepped to the edge and did like Loch had said.

  At first, all he saw was the roof, which made him quite dizzy. Charlie gripped the balcony, afraid he would fall over it and plummet to the ground below. A rough section of stone scraped the palm of his hand.

  “Don’t look at what’s there, boy. Look at what’s unseen. Look at the magic flowing around the Key.”

  Again, Charlie frowned. How could he see what was unseen?

  That thought did it. Suddenly, Charlie could see a sheen all over the world, an explosion of colors in all shades. He didn’t know how, but Charlie understood the colors. Some of them were the protective wards around the Key. They sat heavily, stagnant and frowning, ready to attack anything unwelcome to the mansion.

  There were other colors, less hostile, but just as dangerous. They flowed freely, without care or constraint. Behind the Key, Charlie saw the little white bridge again, his attention attracted to a dim, black light that hung over the air there.

  It was encased in a pink, shimmering ball of energy, but it looked as if the pink energy was in the process of disintegrating, the black light seeping out in places.

  He heard the others talking excitedly and looked to where they were pointing. It was easy for him to see the sheen over the roof of the Teeth Wing, and he pushed, looking through the sheen. It was some sort of magic, he realized. If he used his Sight, he could see through the sheen like a window into the Key.

  It must have allowed those in the watchtower to see inside the Teeth Wing, and Charlie soon realized why. Looking into the mansion, he saw that the bottom floor of the Teeth Wing held hundreds of holding cells, probably for monsters in centuries past. The Chief of Assistants, Dräng, sat now in one cell with a pail of what looked to be milk. The rest of the cells were empty and dirty from years of disuse.

  “Charlie!” said Nash with excitement. “Charlie, where’s your oculi? Here, take mine, you’ve got to see this!”

  “Thanks, but I’m good. I can see it.”

  “Really? How can you‌—‌oh‌—‌”

  Nash broke off as he saw that Charlie’s eyes were unnervingly red again. Hastily he went back to looking through the roof of Hunter’s Key.

  “What you’re all looking at,” said Loch, “is a sort of magic screen that the builders of Hunter’s Key put over the roof. These stone oculi were made to see that particular magic screen. That way, the watchers here could look down inside the Key and keep guard over everything. Of course, any watcher who happened to have the Sight, like Charlie here, would not have needed a stone. That’s because people with the Sight can see magic.”

  Everyone except Nash, who had already seen, turned to stare at Charlie. They saw his eyes, vaguely understood what Loch was getting at, and decided to stop staring.

  Loch started pacing.

  “You can probably see that the Teeth Wing also served as sleeping quarters and a sort of attic for the Key. All the old junk Monster Hunter’s have kept in the storerooms is still there. I haven’t had time to properly go through it all, but you can bet there are valuable Hunter artifacts down there.”

  They all perked up considerably.

  “More importantly, the larger barracks are in this wing. Should any problems occur inside the Key with breakout monsters or such, the guards would have quick access to their weapons and armor.”

  “Breakout monsters?” echoed Liev, most interested.

  “Oh, yes, the one who like to interrupt. Monsters are not always easily held, and we cannot always be prepared for every type of boggle and goblin that finds its way into our world. Sometimes they broke out of the cells as soon as the Hunters turned their backs.”

  Charlie found the tiny figure of the Chief of Assistants again and noticed a hole in the monster’s cell floor. Then he noticed that there was a hole in every cell floor.

  In most of the holes, lights pulsed.

  Curious, Charlie pushed a little harder with his mind and saw past the Key, deep into the earth, where the strange lights came from. There were hundreds of them, glowing streams of color, running off in every direction. Charlie looked at where all of the lines seemed to come together. It took a moment for his Sight to adjust, but Charlie saw they intersected right under the white bridge‌—‌right under the black, smoky light.

  “Loch, what are those lines running under the ground?”

  Loch hesitated. “What‌…‌what lines, Charlie?”

  “There are bright lines under the ground… It looks like the cells were built over them. And they all come together at‌—‌”

  “Hold on.” Loch stared at the boy in amazement. Most people with the Sight would not have been able to use it so easily, so naturally, without proper teaching.

  “I’ll tell you, Charlie. But not now. All in good time, m’boy.”

  Nash was looking all over the place with his oculi. “What lines are you two talking about?”

  “Right, so now that you’ve seen the Teeth Wing, we should move onto the Main Body.” Loch flung open the trap door and ushered them all through it, beginning the dreaded descent down the Teeth Wing Tower.

  It was dreaded because instead of looking up the stairs, the five teens were forced to look down the stairs. And down was just not a good place to be looking, if you were sixteen stories in the air.

  The roof of Hunter’s Key could not have come fast enough.

  Loch, not in the mood to traverse more stairs, took them straight across the battlements to the Main Body. It rose unevenly from the middle of the castle-like mansion. Jutting from the top were the Three Towers.

  He led them inside a dusty room very much like an attic. The ceiling had three A-shaped peaks, the middle peak being tallest. Holding the roofs up were a mess of dark beams, some of which shot from floor to ceiling. Dark red and blue light filtered through a single stained glass window to their left. It was a huge, circular thing, depicting the image, appropriately, of an old fashioned keyhole.

  If there was one thing the group concluded, it was that much of Hunter’s Key seemed like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. The architecture was mismatched, drawing from equal parts Gothic cathedrals, Roman palaces, and early European manor-houses. It was crooked and disproportionate, as if the place had been built in a rush.

  Standing in the dusty attic, Loch pointed out three large stairwells to their right, which undoubtedly led up into the Three Towers. The middle stairwell also led down into the Mai
n Body of Hunter’s Key.

  “Right,” said Loch. “This is the Main Attic. Think of it as the crossroads of Hunter’s Key, where you can go left, right, up, or down. From this room you can get to the battlements along the Head Wing or the Teeth Wing of the Key. Those three stairwells lead up to the Towers from this room, and also down into the main foyer. Seeing as you all were in the foyer last night, and as I’m not letting you into the Towers yet, we’ll be moving onto the Head Wing now.”

  Again, there was a chorus of groans from the teenagers. They had wanted to see the insides of the Towers, which were always spookily lit at night. But this time Loch ignored them.

  He led them back outside and onto the Head Wing’s battlement walk. It was more or less identical to the walk along the Teeth Wing. The only difference was that on this side of the Key, there was no tower, but a huge castle turret that was both shorter and wider than most of the Key’s architectural features. It looked as if the Roman Coliseum had been stuck on the end of the Head Wing.

  Loch reached the door leading into the massive turret and opened it, smiling with pride.

  “This,” he said, “is the Library.”

  They entered, recognizing immediately the same Library they passed through the night before, only this time they were on the fourth floor.

  Loch came up behind the Vadiknovs.

  “I see you two like this room, at least. It has, well, a lot of books. But there’s something else the Head Wing is home to.”

  He crossed over to a certain book shelf and pulled on a decorative bookend, shaped like a beast with a human’s head, a lion’s body, and wings‌—‌a sphinx. The circular shelf slid to the left, revealing a hidden staircase cloaked in red carpet.

  Loch turned proudly to face them.

  “What lies beyond used to be the War Room. I’ve converted it to use as my study.”

  He disappeared behind the wall, climbing the staircase, the group following only a second behind.

  The old war room was every bit as big and circular as the Library, albeit shorter. A set of long tables was pushed to the edge of the room, along with their chairs. Loch was sitting on an old desk‌—‌like an overgrown child with bad manners‌—‌his feet resting on a chair. Next to him sat a black journal, an oil lamp, and a gold fountain pen. Almost absentmindedly, he shoved a thin black box into a desk drawer, locking the drawer with an old key.