Nightbooks

by J. A. White

  There was no time to grieve for what he had lost, however. Without those two nightbooks, Alex no longer had a stockpile of stories from which to draw. His situation had become more perilous than ever.

  How many stories do I have left? How many days before Natacha no longer has any use for me?

  Alex needed to know.

  He sprinted to the library, suddenly convinced that the final nightbook had also been torn to bits, and sighed with relief when he found it safe and sound on the desk. Alex carefully flipped through its pages, taking stock of the stories that he hadn’t yet read to Natacha. He found one that would work, and then a second that he had abandoned midway, thinking it a lost cause. Alex read it again. Sometimes he would revisit a draft after a week or two and find that it was a lot better than he thought. Unfortunately, this particular story had not improved—in fact, it was even worse than he remembered. He continued flipping. There were two more stinkers, and then another story near the back of the book that wasn’t half bad.

  Two stories. That was all he had left.

  “Okay,” Alex said, pacing back and forth. “No big deal. I just have to start writing again. Plenty of time.”

  Alex sat in front of the open nightbook and smoothed down a fresh page. Despite his lack of sleep, he felt energized. He hadn’t written anything in over a week, and he was excited to make up for lost time.

  This is going to be fun, Alex thought.

  He picked up a pencil and started to jot down some ideas.

  Three hours later, Alex was sitting in the exact same position. The gears of his mind, which normally spun like a well-oiled engine, felt clogged with molasses. He couldn’t come up with a single good idea. The harder he tried, the more difficult it became. He remembered another term that Ms. Coral had written on the board: WRITER’S BLOCK. Alex hadn’t liked that one nearly as much as interior logic.

  At last, someone knocked on the door. Alex leaped out of his seat to answer it.

  “Good morning,” Yasmin said.

  She looked different. For one thing, she wasn’t wearing her Mets cap. Her long hair, still wet from a recent shower, fell straight down her back. Gone, too, were the work clothes she normally wore, replaced by jeans and a faded gray T-shirt a size too big for her. The difference in Yasmin was more than just her physical appearance, however. She stood straight and proud, with a relaxed confidence that Alex had never seen before. He felt like he was meeting the real girl for the first time.

  “Hey,” Alex said.

  “Hey,” replied Yasmin. There was a stone mortar filled with gray paste in her hands. She held it out now like a new neighbor delivering a pie. “I made a poultice from some plants in the nursery. I figure you have a ton of bites and scratches from yesterday. This will help with the pain.”

  “Thanks,” Alex said, taking it. “That was really nice of you.”

  “If you hadn’t taken the blame for what happened yesterday, I wouldn’t be standing here right now. It seemed the least I could do.”

  “It was no big deal,” Alex said, fighting a blush and losing. “Any idea what kind of spell she was going to cast on us?”

  Yasmin nodded.

  “We’ll get to that,” she said. “Can you take a break for a few minutes? I know you have a lot of questions, and . . . I figure it’s time someone told you a story for a change.” She nodded toward a nasty gash on his hand. “But get some poultice on that first. It looks pretty bad.”

  Alex did as she suggested. The pain instantly started to fade.

  “Wow,” he said, already smearing a substantial amount across a second wound on his forearm. “How’d you learn to make this stuff? I thought Natacha only sold oils.”

  “This isn’t for sale,” Yasmin said. “It’s for her prisoners. In case someone gets hurt, she wants them up and about as quickly as possible. There are oils to be made, you know. Or in your case, stories to be written.” She took a deep, lingering breath, like a student before a final exam. “You want to sit down before I start? This could take a while.”

  “Hold on,” he said. “I’m dying to hear your whole story, I really am, but first . . .” He raised the mortar. “There’s someone who needs your poultice a lot more than I do.”

  They found Lenore curled up in the corner of the kitchen. Her orange-and-black fur was spotted with blood, but at least her tail looked better. The stone that previously encased it had shattered, littering the floor with pebbles.

  Alex knelt down beside her.

  “Hey, Lenore,” he said softly. “I have medicine. It will make you feel better.”

  The cat managed to raise her head a few inches off the floor and hiss. It was as fearsome as air leaking from a bicycle tire.

  “At least we don’t have to worry about getting scratched,” Yasmin said with reluctant sympathy. “The poor thing can barely move.”

  Alex dabbed a bit of poultice on two fingers and lowered it toward a bite mark on Lenore’s stomach.

  The cat vanished.

  “I can’t help you if I can’t see you,” Alex said in a parental tone. When Lenore didn’t reappear, he added, “Have it your way,” and smeared the poultice in the general vicinity of the bite. At first the cat squirmed feebly, trying to avoid his touch. After just a few seconds, however, she grew suddenly still.

  “See,” Alex said. “It feels better, doesn’t it? Now stop being so stubborn and let me do this the right way.”

  Lenore turned barely visible, like a light at its dimmest setting.

  Fine, her expression seemed to say. But this is all you get.

  Alex gently spread the poultice over the cat’s wounds. Lenore stiffened when he touched some of the nastier spots, but for the most part bore his ministrations without complaint.

  “Can you do that and listen to me at the same time?” Yasmin asked. “I’ve been holding everything inside for so long, and now I feel like I’m going to explode if I wait any longer.”

  Alex nodded in understanding. He had often felt the same way when sitting down to write a story.

  “Maybe we should talk somewhere else,” he suggested, looking meaningfully at Lenore. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “She might be out of it, but she’s still listening. Anything you say—”

  “This is all stuff that Natacha knows anyway,” Yasmin said. “Nothing that will get us in trouble.”

  “Okay.”

  Yasmin started to take a seat, then changed her mind and paced back and forth across the kitchen floor. As she walked, she tucked her hands beneath her chin and wrung them together.

  “My first night in the apartment I cried my eyes out,” Yasmin said. “I had no idea what was happening. All I knew was that some woman had tricked me into coming inside and now I was trapped. It wasn’t until the next morning that I learned I wasn’t alone. There were three others. Eli. Little Hwan. And Claire.” She smiled sadly, remembering. “They taught me what I needed to know. Eli was in charge of the cooking. Hwan did the cleaning. I learned how to tend to the plants in the nursery from Claire. She was a year older than me, with this big smile that could light up an entire room. She had been Natacha’s prisoner the longest, but she hadn’t lost her optimistic attitude. She kept saying that if we stuck together, everything would be all right.”

  Except they’re gone now, Alex thought, so everything didn’t turn out all right. He sat perfectly still, no longer tending to Lenore, just listening. Part of him was riveted, but another part wanted to cover his ears before Yasmin’s tale took its inevitable turn into darkness. For the first time in his life, Alex understood why some people stopped reading a scary story in the middle.

  “At night we took turns reading to Natacha from one of the books in the library. All of us except Hwan, that is. He didn’t really know how to read yet. After Natacha had gone to sleep we huddled together in Claire’s room and tried to come up with an escape plan. Eli, who was kind of a hothead, insisted that if we all charged Natacha at once we could tie her up and then she’d have to let us go. C
laire disagreed. She didn’t think we stood a chance against Natacha’s magic. She said that we just had to be patient and wait for our opportunity. It would come. Hwan didn’t say anything at all. Mostly he just clung to Claire. Sometimes he cried and she rocked him to sleep like a baby.”

  “How about you?” Alex asked.

  “I was team Claire, all the way,” Yasmin said. “In everything. We only knew each other for a few weeks, but it didn’t matter. Living through such a horrible experience pushes you together a lot faster than regular life. She became my sister. Hwan and Eli were my brothers. I’m not saying I was happy. None of us were happy. But at least we had each other.”

  Silence settled. Alex realized that Yasmin had reached the most difficult part of the story. She wouldn’t continue unless he nudged her forward, like a reader turning a page.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  She looked up. Her eyes were wet with memory.

  “I don’t have to tell you,” she said. “I can show you.”

  Alex left a handful of Froot Loops by Lenore’s side and followed Yasmin into the dining room. She stopped in front of the antique china cabinet and studied the porcelain children lining the shelves. Alex followed her gaze. Until this point he hadn’t paid much attention to the figurines, but now he noticed that there was something off about their gleeful expressions.

  The smiles look forced, he thought. Like when a photographer takes too long to snap a picture and you have to keep smiling whether you want to or . . .

  Alex shivered as the truth hit him.

  “These are the kids who lived here before us,” he said, wondering why he hadn’t figured it out earlier. “Natacha turned them into . . . little statues.”

  Yasmin nodded.

  “That’s Hwan,” she said, pointing to a figure of a small Asian boy sitting in a rocking chair. He was holding a stuffed rabbit. “In the end he couldn’t keep up with the work like the rest of us. Natacha finally lost her patience. And there—Eli.” Yasmin pressed her finger against the glass, inches from a rangy boy with a mop of blond hair. He was smiling like all the others—Alex supposed that was a creepy side effect of the spell—but his eyes were shut tight in one final act of defiance. “He went ahead with his plan and tried to jump Natacha when she least expected it,” Yasmin said. “It didn’t work.”

  She knelt down, her eyes level with the bottom shelf of the china cabinet now. Alex identified Claire before Yasmin even pointed to her, a pretty girl drawing water from a well, with eyes that radiated kindness. She looked like someone who would grow up to be a teacher or a nurse.

  “In the end it was just the two of us,” Yasmin said. “Me and Claire. Until one day there was a knock at the door. That happens sometimes. We get visitors. Grocery delivery. Landlord. Neighbors. Even the police, from time to time.”

  “Not since I’ve been here,” Alex said.

  “I’m sure people have come,” Yasmin explained, “only when Natacha’s not in the apartment, we can’t even hear the knocking—and they can’t hear us, either. It’s like there’s a wall between us and the outside world. But that changes when Natacha’s home. Occasionally she has to let people inside. If not, someone might grow suspicious.”

  Alex wondered if his family had ever knocked on the door to apartment 4E. Maybe he had been standing on the other side of the wall at the time, just a few feet away.

  “That day was different than usual,” Yasmin continued, “because we were actually expecting a visitor. The pipes in the kitchen sink had been leaking for a week, and there wasn’t anything that Natacha’s magic could do to fix it—which was a little bit funny—so she had finally called the plumber. Claire and I did as we were told and stayed in the nursery. We could scream and shout all we wanted to down there, but no one would hear a thing in the apartment. While we waited in the dark, Claire took my hands and told me the truth. She had broken the kitchen pipes herself, knowing that a plumber would have to come. There was a note taped to the underside of the sink, explaining everything. It begged whoever found it to send help as quickly as possible.”

  “That was a good idea,” Alex said.

  “It was,” replied Yasmin. “Only Natacha figured it out somehow, and when she unlocked the door to the nursery, the note was in her hands.” Yasmin cleared her throat. “Claire didn’t even try to talk her way out of it. She spent her last minutes making sure Natacha knew that I hadn’t been involved.”

  Yasmin looked drained, like someone recovering from a long illness, but not nearly as sad anymore. By sharing her story, she had shed a portion of her grief.

  “So now you know,” Yasmin said. “That’s why I was so mean to you in the beginning. I didn’t want to risk getting close to someone else and losing them again. I’m sorry.”

  She hugged him, and Alex hugged her back. It should have been weird and awkward—she was a girl, after all—but it wasn’t that way at all. It felt right.

  They were still trapped, but they were no longer alone.

  “Can the spell on your friends be reversed?” Alex asked when they had parted. “You know, like in a fairy tale, when the witch dies and everything goes back to the way it was in the end.”

  “This isn’t a story, Alex. Claire had it right the first time. All we can really do is be patient and hope something changes.” She peeked into the kitchen to make sure Lenore hadn’t moved. “I agree with you about the blue mist,” she whispered. “I think it’s what keeps the witch young. For all we know, Natacha could be hundreds of years old, maybe thousands. We’re just kids. How can we hope to outsmart her?”

  Alex stared at the figurines through his ghostly reflection in the glass. He remembered what Natacha had said his second day in the apartment, when she was on the verge of casting the spell that would have added him to her collection: “Just be a doll and stand still. And whatever you do, don’t close your eyes. Like a photograph.”

  It gave him an idea.

  “Are those the same outfits that your friends were wearing when the spell was cast on them?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “Just go with it.”

  “Um . . . yeah,” Yasmin said. “Those hideous smiles are fake—and I doubt that Claire ever got water from a well in her life—but everything else is right on target. Look, you can even see Hwan’s little watch. He always wore that thing.”

  “Good,” Alex said, scanning the figurines more carefully now. “That means it should definitely be there.”

  “What?” Yasmin asked.

  “I’ll tell you in a second.”

  He traced his finger along the glass, trying not to rush. If I’m right, he thought, this changes everything. He searched the figurines once, and then a second time, just to make sure. There was no question about it.

  No one was wearing a unicorn pendant.

  She promised that she would never take it off, Alex thought with rising excitement. That means she isn’t there! Natacha never turned her into a figurine!

  “There’s a way out of this place,” he said. “I don’t know how yet, but I’m positive it can be done.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  Alex smiled.

  “Because I know someone who escaped,” he said.

  13

  Writer’s Block

  Alex and Yasmin went back to the library and closed the door behind them.

  “I have so much to tell you,” Alex said.

  In his eagerness to finally share everything, Alex inadvertently abandoned all his storytelling skills. He hopped from topic to topic, sometimes in midsentence, and often lost his train of thought. Fortunately, Yasmin asked good questions, forcing him to backtrack when necessary. In the end, she managed to learn everything there was to know about Unicorn Girl, the forest that Alex had glimpsed through the bedroom door, and his sudden shortage of stories.

  Gradually, the resigned look in Yasmin’s eyes was replaced by a glimmer of hope.

  “You really think we can get out of here?�
�� she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  The children smiled at one another.

  “We need to search the rest of these books,” Alex said. “Unicorn Girl might have written about her escape plan. If it worked for her, maybe it will work for us.”

  “And if she didn’t write it down?”

  “Then maybe she said something else that can help us,” Alex said. “You never know. The more we learn about Natacha, the better.”

  Yasmin tilted her head upward in order to take in the thousands of books that still needed to be searched.

  “You can’t do this on your own. Show me where you left off and I’ll start looking.”

  “Don’t you have nursery stuff to do?” Alex asked.

  “I’ll be okay,” Yasmin said. “I’ll just get up earlier tomorrow and take care of my chores first. Right now finding how this girl got out of here is the second most important thing we’ve got to do.”

  “What’s the first most—”

  Yasmin gave him a playful shove toward the desk.

  “You have to write,” she said. “This whole plan falls apart if Natacha decides to make a porcelain Alex out of you.”

  For the rest of the day, he sat at the desk and tried to think of a good idea. Nothing came. Alex knew from experience that forcing an idea to the surface seldom worked; it only scared them away, like screaming at a flock of birds while expecting one to land on your finger. You had to let them come at their own pace. This was all well and good when you were writing stories in your bedroom at night, stories that no one would ever read, but not when your life depended on it.

  His frustration grew. Pencil points snapped. Pages were torn.