by Susan Vaught
“Monster!” Jonas screamed. He got to his feet. His knees almost buckled, but he took a step toward the tape. Another. And another. Then he started to run, shouting, “Monster! Monster! Monster!”
The roots slithered across my throat. They poked at my ears and scraped my eyes. They clawed my arms and my legs and slipped in and out of my jeans pockets.
From way down in the hell of a basement, I heard my grandfather laughing.
Then I heard voices, a lot of them. Flashlight beams stabbed into the darkness. The roots flinched away from the lights and turned me loose, sizzling as they curled away down the tunnel.
I tried to suck in a breath, but my ribs hurt so bad I couldn’t. The world got fuzzy. When hands grabbed me and turned me over, I swore.
Captain James’s skull-face loomed over me, frowning. A couple of other guys in black hats and yellow shirts stared down at me.
“You were right,” one of them said to the captain. “He had the kid all along.”
That didn’t compute. Not at all.
“Blood will out,” Captain James said. “People like him need to be shot at dawn. Why waste money on a trial?”
I stared up at him, trying to make sense of what was happening as new faces came into view. Bigger flashlights. Police uniforms. One of the policemen called for an ambulance on his radio. Another knelt beside me. He looked into my eyes and frowned as he took in the blood on my shirt. He pulled on latex gloves and cut off a piece of the fabric, slipping it into a plastic bag.
Wait, I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t talk. My breath whistled in and out, in and out, but it didn’t feel like enough. I started seeing spots. I needed to explain. I needed to tell him—
What?
How I heard Jonas crying and ran down the tunnel and found a rotten basement with my zombie mass-murdering grandfather and an insane giant tree?
A tree with an eye. A tree with a mouth.
A tree that was hungry.
“Tree,” I choked out. “The tree did it.”
The officer checked my pockets. I had a little change in there, my keys, and my phone, but that’s not what he pulled out first.
His frown got bigger as he shined his flashlight on his palm, and he tilted his hand to show me.
Two little white teeth, pointy on the ends.
Chapter Sixteen
Wake him up.
Levi. Be nice.
I don’t do nice, Forest.
But it makes me happy.
...
...
Fine. I’ll be nice for you.
That girl could be Trina. That guy could be me. For Trina, I’d try anything. If she were here, I’d pull her close. She’d smell like flowers, and she’d tell me I hadn’t seen my dead grandfather or a tree with a bloody eyeball and a gaping mouth.
She’d tell me I hadn’t hurt a child.
I imagined Trina’s head on my shoulder and lifted my arm to hug her. Metal clanked against plastic. I jerked my hand but couldn’t move it any farther. Handcuffed. I was shackled to a hospital bed—both wrists and both ankles, too. My body throbbed from a dozen cuts and busted ribs and the place where the doctor had stuck in a tube to reinflate my lung. My chest hurt because my life was over.
My family crazy had mugged me just when I thought I was safe. I didn’t even want to open my eyes. If I did, I might see my mama crying. I’d definitely see the two policemen outside my room, standing guard over Never’s newest monster.
From the far right corner of the room came soft snores and snorts, and I knew Mama was sleeping in her wheelchair.
When I finally did open my eyes, I stared at the day and date on the dry-erase board in front of me, and then at the ceiling. How could it be Tuesday when I went down in that tunnel Friday afternoon? Friday night, all of Saturday, all of Sunday, and Monday until around midnight when I popped out with Jonas—gone.
Was Jonas okay?
Had he tried to tell anybody about what was haunting the tunnels of Lincoln Psychiatric?
I counted the dots in the hospital ceiling tiles.
It wouldn’t matter what Jonas said. He was just a little kid. If he told stories about evil freaks trying to kill him, the police would figure he was talking about me.
And what was the truth?
I had no idea what I had been doing down in that tunnel for three days, when it felt like only three minutes. Okay, half an hour, tops—
Three days.
And I had the kid’s teeth in my pocket.
Somebody pulled them right out of his head.
I shut my eyes. Images of ceiling dots played on my lids. The police had searched all up in that tunnel. If they had found biting, snaky roots or a nasty basement with my undead grandfather and a man-eating tree, they would have taken the chains off my wrists and ankles.
I didn’t pull that kid’s teeth.
My grandfather must have done it—but was he even real? Maybe I was playing games in my own head so I wouldn’t know I was crazy and doing awful things to a kid.
There in the hospital, in the dark of my own mind and chained like an animal, I searched my heart. I didn’t feel any meanness inside it. It thumped along, powered by the blood of a serial killer.
You got what it takes.
That’s what Eff Leer had told me.
“When you open your eyes again,” a girl’s voice said, “don’t yell.”
My lids flew up and my head turned toward the sound. There was a girl in my room! She was my age, but kinda small, wearing jeans and a yellow blouse. She had tan-looking skin and dark curls dropping over both shoulders. Her eyes tilted toward her nose, making them look bigger and brighter than they already were.
The police outside my room didn’t seem to notice her. My snoring mama didn’t even twitch when the girl spoke.
Great.
I was getting crazier by the second.
“You’re not imagining me,” the girl said. “I’m really here. My name is Forest.”
Forest? Like from my dream before I woke up in this night-mare? But if Forest was real, then Levi—
“We should go,” said a guy.
My head whipped to the left.
Okay.
Yeah.
I jerked my arms against the bedrails, hating the handcuffs twice as bad. I was trapped and completely helpless. The guy had on black jeans and a black T-shirt. Red tattoos marked the pale skin under one eye. His eyes were blacker than a midnight with no moon, and when I stared into them, I knew he wasn’t right in the head.
My breathing got fast. I yanked against the cuffs one more time.
Dogs howled in the distance, like the kind people hunt with, and even the close-shaved hairs on my head stuck straight up in the air. I ground my teeth, and somewhere far away, bells started to ring.
Jesus.
Those were the Lincoln bells.
I had to get out of the damned bed—but all I could do was thrash and rattle and clink.
“Knock it off, Levi.” The girl, Forest, sounded ticked. “We didn’t come here to upset him.”
“You’re right,” said Dracula’s brother. He had a Southern accent, but not a strong one. “We came here to fetch him, so let’s go. Now.”
Forest sighed. “You can’t just barge into hospital rooms and snatch folks out of bed. He’s hurt, and you’ll upset his mother.”
Levi stretched his hand toward my shoulder. I tried to get away from him, but the cuffs held firm. Something like black fog came out of his fingertips and shocked my entire body. My mouth came open and I shouted, but no sound came out at all. Sweat beaded on my face and arms and legs, and the blazing agony in my chest made my eyes water. I was burning. I knew I was on fire. My mouth opened wider and my eyes bugged. Needed to breathe and the heat had to stop and—
And it did.
Just like that.
Gone.
I sucked air so loud both officers at my door turned to glance inside, and Mama let out some extra snorts as she shifted in her wheel
chair. The policemen gazed at me, then turned back to the hall, oblivious to Forest and the guy who had just tried to kill me. But I was breathing a lot better now. I didn’t have pain anywhere. No cuts or bruises, either, and my ribs felt pretty normal.
Levi looked like he was hurting, but only for a second. He let out a slow breath, then brushed his fingertips across the shackles.
More black fog came from nowhere, and the handcuffs made hissing noises, then fell off. Levi caught the one on his side before it hit the floor and laid it on the bed. The sight of all that metal falling off me, the sudden freedom after being tied to the bed—it made me light inside. My nerves settled in spite of the situation. I flexed my legs and arms before sitting up. Then I pulled the sheet over the broken cuffs so the guards wouldn’t be able to see that I wasn’t chained.
“There,” Levi said to the girl. “He’s not hurt anymore. Now can we go?”
Forest frowned at him, but I could tell she wasn’t that unhappy. Trina looked at me like that sometimes. She usually kissed me right after. Or slapped me. Depended on the situation.
As for Levi, when he looked at Forest, I could see right through his big bad act. He was our age, or close to it, and something about him seemed jumpy. This girl Forest, she was his kryptonite or garlic or whatever controls freaky dudes with vampire skin and bloody teardrop tattoos.
“Please excuse him,” Forest said to me, gesturing to Levi. “He had a hard life, and some bad stuff happened to him. He’s a little low on the social skills, but I’m working on it.”
I was trying to pull myself up in the bed, and he reached down to grab my arm. I thought he meant to help me, but a frigid wind knocked him sideways before he got hold of me.
Don’t you touch him!
Women’s voices—two of them, and I knew them both. My grandmother Betty, and my grandmother Leslie, too. The sounds came from my head and from the air, from nowhere and everywhere all at once. Mama woke with a grunt and sat up straight in her wheelchair.
I jumped when I heard the whispers. So did Forest and Levi, but out in the hall, the policemen didn’t twitch. Whatever this new crazy was, it was only happening in my room.
“Grandma Betty?” I whispered as a misty shape formed between my bed and Levi, and he and Forest and Mama could only gape at the foggy image. A second image flickered beside the first one, and this one was even more clear. “Grandma Leslie—” I started, but Forest cut me off with a little cry.
“Leslie Hyatt,” Forest whispered, shocking me almost as much as what I was seeing. Her eyes had gone wide. She walked around the mist like she was taking in all the details. “Leslie,” she said again, as if she were talking to her best friend, even though there was no way she could know a woman who had died when I was just a little kid.
“I thought you said only people with Madoc blood could turn into spooks and haunts,” Forest said to Levi, never taking her eyes off the cloud that was Grandma Leslie. “Like Decker and Miss Sally.”
“I thought—well.” Levi edged closer to my grandma Betty. “Maybe these two have a touch of it.”
“She didn’t,” Forest said, reaching her fingers toward the image of Grandma Leslie.
As Forest’s fingertips passed through the edge of the woman-shaped cloud, Grandma Leslie smiled.
You look good, girl, Grandma Leslie told Forest in a voice like a summer breeze.
Forest lowered her head and covered her mouth.
I felt my grandmothers like a force in my heart, angry and determined and scared. I glanced at Mama, who was shifting focus from the ghosts to the girl to the guy, her eyebrows lifted so high I couldn’t see them under her messed-up hair. The lines on her face got deeper by the second, and I knew she was probably scared—but she was seeing everything that I did. Maybe I hadn’t lost my mind. Maybe I didn’t pull some kid’s teeth out of his head and hold him hostage in the tunnels under Lincoln Psychiatric for three days.
Relief hit me so hard I almost put my face in my hands and sobbed.
Forest got hold of herself, straightened up, and smiled at Levi. “Leslie Hyatt didn’t have Madoc blood, and she’s right here in front of me, clear and strong as a haunt. I guess you don’t know everything, do you, Levi?”
“Imogene’s gonna have to fix her books,” Levi muttered. His expression got all worried for a second, then he covered it. He made a grab for me, but my grandmothers hissed at him. Mama gripped the arms of her wheelchair like she meant to get up and beat on Levi, too, but her eyes darted to the police in the hall and she kept still.
Grandma Betty raised her hand. Light flashed around her palm, and suddenly she was holding a see-through ax. She brought it down hard. Levi leaped away from her so fast I didn’t see him move. The ax hit the floor with no sound. It didn’t do anything—not even a chink showed in the tile. Yet I had a hunch that if that ax had hit Levi, there would have been damage.
He must have thought the same thing, because his black eyes had gone huge, and he gave Grandma Betty some space.
Grandma Leslie stood beside Forest, and I could have sworn she had a comb in her hand. Don’t touch my grandson, she warned Levi, shaking the comb.
Don’t touch him, Grandma Betty echoed.
When my grandmothers spoke, it made my soul ache. I didn’t remember much about Grandma Leslie except for stories about how hard she worked, and of her long years helping folks at Lincoln Psychiatric. She sounded proud and strong, and the force in her voice reminded me of my father. As for Grandma Betty, I missed her fierceness. I missed her love. I missed everything about her so much, and she was here, but I knew I couldn’t hug her. I couldn’t hug either one of them. If I tried to put my hands on them, they’d be nothing but cold air, and that would hurt more than anything.
“Promise them you won’t harm Darius,” Forest told Levi. “Give his grandmothers your word.” Her gaze shifted to Mama. “And tell his mother what she needs to hear.”
Levi sighed.
Forest waited.
I wondered if all strong, smart girls studied the same play-book, because she and Trina had a whole lot in common when they wanted something.
Levi caved so fast it would have been funny, if funny was allowed in nightmares. “I promise I won’t put my hands on your grandson,” he told my grandmothers. To my mother, he said, “I promise I don’t mean Darius any harm, and I’ll do my best to protect him.”
Forest smiled, covering over Levi’s coldness with soft warmth. “He can’t break his promises. If he even thought about it, Imogene would kick his butt.”
Grandma Betty nodded. The healer woman, she murmured. She helped my mama have me.
“We need to find Darius’s grandfather—” Levi started, but Grandma Betty muttered a few sentences to me, then vanished.
Grandma Leslie waved her comb at Forest. You be good, girl. I’m watching.
Then she vanished, too.
Levi and Forest surged to the spot where they had been standing, both of them sweeping their arms around as if they might snatch my grandmothers back from wherever it is ghosts go.
Forest turned to me. “Can you get them to appear again?”
I shook my head, glanced at the police officers, and whispered, “Grandma Leslie and Grandma Betty did what they wanted, how they wanted when they were alive. I imagine it’s the same now that they’re dead.”
My mother still had a stern expression on her face, but she nodded and added a soft “Mm-hmm.” When she blinked fast like that, I knew she was trying not to cry, trying to keep it together because I was watching, and because I needed her, and because there was nothing she could do to pretend she wasn’t like me now, seeing stuff other people couldn’t see. You can’t stop truth any more than you can stop death.
Levi narrowed his eyes at me. “What did your grandmother Betty say before she vanished? I couldn’t hear her.”
I thought about blowing him off or shrugging, or just saying nothing, but that didn’t feel right. He had come here and healed me and taken off my h
andcuffs. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he and his girl, Forest, were trying to save me. So I respected the truth in the room and said, “She told me not to trust you. She said, ‘Imogene’s a good woman, but she screwed this up once already.’”
Levi’s black eyes flashed. His tattoos surged like fresh blood on his face as his lips pulled back from his teeth. Energy played off him in black clouds, and shadows formed on the hospital-room walls, birds and dogs and other things I couldn’t figure, sliding in circles like some crazy merry-go-round. Mama rolled her wheelchair a few feet away from the things.
One of them reached for her.
It was a big black dog’s paw with long claws, dripping shadows that fell on the floor around her wheelchair and wriggled away. Then the rest of the giant black dog popped out of nowhere, padding into the room like it belonged with normal living things.
How Mama didn’t scream, I don’t know. I almost hollered, but Forest touched my arm and glared at Levi as the monster-dog came to sit beside him.
Levi was shaking and getting ... darker, somehow. The dogs in the distance seemed a lot closer, and now I heard birds, too—honks and squawks and rushing air from powerful flapping. I saw Levi grow taller. I saw him with light and darkness inside, and he radiated fire and ice at the same time.
His dog opened its mouth and snarled.
“Stop it,” Forest said to Levi. “Right now. I mean it.”
He managed to shut her out, for about five seconds. Then his head drooped, and the shadows on the walls and ceiling slowed to a crawl. He rested his hand on the big black dog’s head, and the thing quit growling. A second or two later, the shadows vanished, and the sounds of the dogs and birds faded away until I didn’t hear anything but my heart racing and Mama’s breathing and the soft clang-clang of the crazy bells at Lincoln, ringing to scare everybody to death.
“My grandmother Imogene sent Efnisien Leer to the other side fifty-two years ago,” Levi said without looking up from where he was petting the black dog’s head. “I can show you in her record books. We thought he was gone.”