Nightbooks

by J. A. White

  “Wrong question,” Natacha said.

  She rose from the shadow chair—which dissipated into the air—and pressed her ear against the nearest wall like a safe cracker.

  “What are you doing?” Alex asked.

  “Shh.”

  Natacha listened closely. Finally, she nodded with satisfaction.

  “Good,” she said. “Yes, that will do.”

  “What will do?” Alex asked. “What are you talking about?”

  The witch ignored him and opened the door leading out of the room. Alex caught a glimpse of an ordinary-looking hallway.

  “Sleep well, storyteller,” Natacha said, just before leaving the apartment. “Tomorrow your real work begins.”

  She locked the door behind her.

  4

  A Room of Dark Wonders

  Alex was awoken by the sounds of his mom and dad in the kitchen as they made a big breakfast together, just like they did every Saturday: voices, laughter, the clatter of pots and pans. The moment he opened his eyes, however, the noises vanished. It had only been a cruel bridge between dreaming and waking.

  I’m not home, Alex remembered, orienting himself. I was kidnapped by a witch.

  He closed his eyes, not yet ready to abandon the relative safety of his bed, and thought about his family. Who discovered I was missing? Not his brother, John; he had to catch the early bus on Friday. Not his dad, either. He was never the first to rise, clinging to those final moments of sleep like a life raft.

  It must have been Mom.

  Alex pictured her walking into his room and seeing his empty bed. She wouldn’t panic, not at first. She would just assume that he was already up, probably eating breakfast or using the bathroom. Soon, however, she would notice that Alex’s bag was gone, at which point she would call the school to see if he had taken the early bus for some reason.

  When they tell her I’m not there, Alex thought, that’s when it’ll hit her. That’s when she’ll wake up Dad.

  Alex wondered if they had called the police yet. He imagined his parents holding hands on their couch, talking to a man in a blue uniform dutifully taking notes on a small pad, and felt such pure love for them that he had to fight back tears.

  This is all my fault, he thought. If I hadn’t snuck out in the middle of the night to get rid of my nightbooks, none of this would have happened. Then again, if I wasn’t such a stupid freak who wrote stupid freaky stories in the first place—

  Alex opened his eyes.

  Thinking about the past wasn’t going to help. Right now the most important thing was to remain calm and figure out a way to escape. The greatest apology he could give his parents was to return home safe and sound.

  Thus resolved, Alex sat up . . . and promptly banged his head. Bunk bed! he thought, clasping a hand to his forehead. I forgot!

  The mattress above him squeaked as something shifted its weight.

  “Hello?” Alex asked, frozen. “Someone there?”

  No answer.

  Heart hammering in his chest, Alex backed across the floor until he reached a vantage point that allowed him to see the upper bunk. There was a massive orange lump lying on the mattress. Green eyes watched his every move.

  What is it? Alex wondered. Some kind of monster?

  He grabbed a lamp and raised it over his head, just in case the creature decided to slither down the ladder and attack. While he waited, Alex took a closer look.

  He burst into laughter.

  “You’re just a cat!” he exclaimed.

  It was, in fact, the fattest cat that he had ever seen. Its fur was pumpkin orange with just the slightest hint of dark stripes. Black fur encircled, and accentuated, its piercing green eyes. The cat’s most unusual feature, however, was a long tail that arced straight into the air before spiraling into a neat question mark.

  “You look like a cat that ate a raccoon,” Alex said. “Or a monkey. Or both.”

  The cat, who hadn’t moved from its spot on the top bunk, seemed unamused by this assessment. It gazed down at Alex like a queen from her throne.

  “I didn’t realize Natacha had a pet,” Alex said, putting the lamp back and climbing halfway up the ladder. He reached up and stroked the cat beneath its chin. It did not purr, or show any sign of pleasure whatsoever, but rather bore his touch like some kind of foul-tasting medicine best swallowed as quickly as possible.

  “You’re not the friendliest thing, are you?” Alex asked. “That’s okay. Glad to have any company at all.” He scanned the room, curious how the cat had managed to slip inside, and received his second surprise of the morning: the door with the two keyholes was open wide. Instead of providing passage into an identical room, as before, the doorway now opened into a long hallway.

  “This is crazy,” Alex said, repositioning his glasses on his nose as though that might change what he was seeing. “What happened to the other room?”

  He directed this question toward the cat. It wasn’t that he expected an answer; it was just comforting to talk to another living thing. The cat, however, did not seem eager for companionship. It looked back at him with a condescending expression: Stop talking to me. I’m a cat.

  “Okay,” Alex said, feeling a giddy rumbling in his stomach that was equal parts nervousness, excitement, and good old-fashioned hunger. “Time to explore.”

  He walked down a dimly lit hallway, passing a single door to either side of him. They each had two keyholes: regular and crescent-shaped. They’re probably bedrooms, Alex thought, thinking about the layout of his own apartment. Maybe one of them belongs to the girl whose voice I heard. He considered knocking, but didn’t want to risk waking Natacha. Instead, he stood perfectly still and listened carefully, hearing nothing. After a brief moment of hesitation, he tried turning the knobs.

  Locked.

  At the end of the hallway was a small bathroom. There was no crescent keyhole on this door, and Alex was relieved to find it unlocked.

  He entered the living room.

  The furniture was expensive old, the red wallpaper patterned with black flowers. If Alex had not already met the apartment’s owner, he would have assumed that she was far older than Natacha, for this was a grandmotherly type of room. Not the nice sort of grandma who pinched your cheeks and baked chocolate chip cookies, but the creepy kind who rocked back and forth while knitting sweaters for dead children. Fancy display cases lined the walls, their shelves filled with mysterious objects that looked like they were on loan from some museum of dark magic. Alex saw wands resting upon silver pedestals, black jars with intriguing labels such as “Last Breaths” and “Vampiric Ashes,” horrific masks that seemed to watch him as he passed, tomes whose spines had been embossed with unrecognizable symbols, and an entire display case packed with crystal balls.

  “Cool,” Alex said.

  Most children would have been frightened by such witchy paraphernalia, but Alex, who constructed his own Halloween advent calendar every October first, was fascinated. What does this thing do? he wondered, bending down to look more closely at a mummified hand. He supposed that he should have been more frightened than ever, since Natacha’s impressive collection suggested that she was a powerful witch indeed, and yet Alex couldn’t keep the grin off his face.

  Creepy things were awesome.

  On a nearby shelf, he saw a fancy black chest about the size of a shoe box. Until this point, he had resisted the urge to touch anything; just because he thought the objects were wonderful did not mean he was ignorant of their potential dangers. At the very least, they looked valuable. Natacha would probably turn him into a frog or something if she caught him touching one.

  Still, his curiosity gnawed at him.

  What’s in the chest? Maybe something amazing . . . the most amazing thing of all. . . .

  “Hello?” Alex called out, testing the silence. “Natacha? Anybody home?”

  No one answered. Even the cat was nowhere to be seen.

  “Okay,” he said, stretching his hand toward the chest. �
�I’m just going to take a quick peek. . . .”

  Something hissed behind him.

  Alex froze in place, and then—slowly—looked over his shoulder. The orange cat was glaring up at him. It had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Where did you—” Alex started, and then swallowed the rest of his sentence as he took in the cat’s menacing pose. It had looked harmless enough just a few minutes ago, but not anymore. Its back was arched, its fangs bared: a return to predatory roots.

  Alex, uncertain what had caused this change in the cat’s attitude, was afraid to move, afraid to even breathe.

  Then he noticed that the cat’s eyes were not on him at all. They were on the black chest—or, perhaps, his fingers, just inches from it. He slowly withdrew his hand. The cat relaxed, its face returning to its default expression of bored superiority.

  “Is it because I was going to touch the chest?” Alex asked. “Is it off-limits?”

  He found it hard to believe that a cat could be that intelligent. Of course, up until very recently, he believed that magic and witches could only be found in stories. There was clearly a lot he didn’t know.

  No big deal, he thought, leaving the chest alone for now and reaching instead for a straw doll a few shelves away. There’s plenty of other interesting stuff here.

  The cat hissed even louder than before.

  Alex snapped his hand back. The cat instantly relaxed.

  “You’re like my own personal guard,” Alex said, putting it together. “That’s your job, isn’t it? To make sure I don’t touch anything I’m not supposed to touch?”

  The cat puffed out its chest, acknowledging Alex’s theory.

  “Got it,” he said, raising his hands into the air. “Look. No touching.”

  In a way, he was grateful for the cat’s intervention. The magical objects had been a distraction; he needed to look for a way out of the apartment. Alex decided to start with the most logical point: the front door . . . or, at least, the place where the front door should have been. Right now it was just a wall.

  Must be a spell, he thought. Natacha can come and go through the front door whenever she wants, but no one else can leave the apartment.

  Wondering if he’d be able to hear any residents in the outside hallway, Alex pressed his ear against the wall. There were no voices, but beneath the wall’s paper skin he heard a rushing sound punctuated by rhythmic grinding. It was muffled and faint.

  Maybe it’s the sound of the elevator gears grinding together, Alex thought.

  He remembered how Natacha had listened to the bedroom wall after he read his story last night. Was that the sound that she heard? he wondered. If so, why did she seem so pleased?

  He had no idea.

  In any case, the front door was a dead end for now, so Alex decided to check the nearest window. He expected to see downtown Flushing: signs in Korean and Chinese, parked cars squeezed tightly together, piles of black garbage bags awaiting pickup.

  Instead, he saw a mirror image of the room he was standing in.

  “It’s the same magic as the bedroom door,” Alex said. “If I climb through the window, I’ll just end up back where I started from.”

  How can I escape from a place that has no exits?

  Feeling somewhat dispirited, he explored the rest of the apartment, the cat his second shadow. The floor plan was identical to his own home, so he knew exactly what to expect: a dining area barely large enough to fit table and chairs, a washer and dryer unit tucked into an alcove, and three additional closets (pantry, linens, coats). In the small kitchen two peanut butter sandwiches and a glass of milk waited on the counter. Alex had no idea if they were meant for him or not, but he hadn’t eaten for nearly two days and gobbled them down.

  Compared to the living room, the rest of the apartment was surprisingly ordinary. Two of the closets had crescent-shaped keyholes in addition to the ordinary ones, but other than that Alex didn’t come across anything else with a magical vibe. There was one thing that gave him the creeps, however. In the dining room, an antique china cabinet displayed a collection of brightly painted figurines. They were all children engaged in some manner of play. A girl skipping rope. A boy catching a butterfly with a net. A dozen more: tossing a ball, splashing in a pond, reading on a park bench.

  Alex was staring at the painfully wide smile of a little girl riding a sled when he heard a scratching noise to his left. He spun around and looked through the archway that separated the dining and living rooms.

  Someone was unlocking the coat closet from the inside.

  Impossible! Alex thought. I just checked that closet like five minutes ago. There was no one there! It wasn’t even locked!

  The key scratched again. It wasn’t a metallic sound, like a normal key would make—more like chalk clicking against a blackboard. It seemed to be coming from the crescent-shaped keyhole.

  It’s Natacha, Alex thought, preparing himself. Does she know I’ve been snooping around her apartment? Is she going to punish me?

  The door swung open.

  5

  The Other Prisoner

  The girl who stepped into the living room looked as though she had risen from the grave. Dirt matted her hands and face. Stains splattered her brown apron. Dark goggles concealed her eyes.

  Alex, whose nerves were already at their breaking point, did what anyone else would have done in that situation.

  He screamed.

  “What?” the girl asked, looking behind her for the cause of Alex’s terror, as though something far more horrible had followed her through the closet door. “What is it?”

  She removed her goggles. Instead of the red, demonic orbs that Alex had been expecting, her eyes were big and brown and staring at him with undisguised annoyance.

  Alex suddenly felt very foolish.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you might have been . . . you know.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “A zombie or something.”

  The girl mulled this over.

  “Good news,” she said. “I’m alive. And a vegetarian. I think you’re in the clear.”

  The girl sighed with annoyance and brushed past him. Alex followed her into the kitchen, where she filled a glass with water at the sink and downed the entire thing.

  “I was supposed to show you around this morning,” she finally said, in the bitter tone of a teacher who hated her job. “That’s why Natacha unlocked your door. But you were in a majorly deep slumber and I didn’t feel like dealing with a grumpy new kid, so I let you sleep.” The girl glared at him angrily, as though all of this had been Alex’s fault. “Had to start without you. Last thing I need is for Natacha to come home and see I haven’t gotten all my chores done. You snore, by the way.”

  “I know.”

  “I could hear you through the door. Pretty impressive. That’s not just any door, as you’ve probably noticed. That’s a magic—”

  “Who are you?” Alex asked, with more bite than he intended. The girl’s attitude was starting to grate on his nerves.

  “My name’s Yasmin,” she said. “Not Jasmine. No j, no e. People always screw it up. Drives me crazy.”

  “I’m Alex.”

  “I know. I went through your bag while you were snoring away, saw your name on those notebooks.”

  Alex reddened. Despite everything that had happened, he still didn’t want anyone to read his nightbooks.

  “You read my stories?” he asked.

  “Chill,” Yasmin said, raising her hands in a pacifying gesture. “I didn’t read them. I tried to, but I gave up. You have the worst handwriting I’ve ever seen. Like, seriously, you’re the reason typing was invented. But the books made me think of Scheherazade, from all those stories my sito used to tell me.”

  “Who’s Schehara . . . Scheheri . . . ?”

  “Scheherazade,” Yasmin said. “From The Arabian Nights. She’s the vizier’s daughter, and she ends up getting imprisoned by this king with a habit of beheading his wive
s. In order to stay alive, she tells him a different story each night and stops in the middle, so he has to keep her around to find out how it ends.” She sighed at his look of incomprehension. “You must have at least heard of the stories! ‘Sinbad the Sailor,’ ‘Aladdin,’ ‘Ali Baba and the—’”

  “You’re the one who came to my door yesterday, aren’t you?” Alex asked, finally making the connection. “You told me that Natacha liked stories. That’s probably the only reason I’m still alive. You saved my life.”

  Alex thought Yasmin would be happy to hear these words, but instead she flinched as though he had insulted her. Her expression, which had grown almost friendly while she talked about The Arabian Nights, hardened into its previous look of disdain.

  “I didn’t save anything,” she snapped. “You’re still trapped here, just like me.”

  “So you’re a prisoner, too?”

  Yasmin pulled a battered Mets hat from her back pocket and jammed it on her head.

  “Nah,” she said. “I’m here on vacation.”

  “I thought that since you had your own key to the closet you might be, I don’t know . . .”

  . . . the witch’s apprentice, he was about to add, but then he considered the girl’s gaunt frame and haunted eyes. She’s being kept here against her will, he thought, just like me.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked softly.

  “Long enough,” she said, picking up the empty plate on the counter. “I see you found the sandwiches I made.”

  “Thank you,” Alex said. “I was starving.”

  “Good thing you like peanut butter,” Yasmin said. “I used to, too. There’s a giant jar of it underneath the kitchen sink. Some crackers and instant oatmeal, too. Help yourself, but don’t overdo it. Natacha isn’t great about remembering to restock—our supplies, at least.” Yasmin opened the refrigerator door, revealing shelves that were jam-packed with expensive food. “This—along with anything in the other cabinets—is off-limits. And don’t think, ‘She’ll never know if I eat this one little chocolate.’ She’ll always know. Lenore tells her everything.”