Sandy caught her breath. “What are you doing here?”
“Now that the storm’s over, I’m leaving, like you guys said. I’m here to get my VW. Guess I’ll have to leave my busted rig behind.”
Sandy saw it now. The great shadowy body and head were not part of a creature at all, and she realized she’d nearly wet her pants over Lilli’s broken-down tour bus, which had been towed to the curb in front of Neebor’s house. The VW Bug was parked in front of it. The Demoneater, whatever it was, hadn’t come after all. Sandy was annoyed with herself for getting so scared.
Sandy and Lilli stood at Nat’s gate, eyeing each other. It was awkward. They had not been alone together before, Sandy realized, and she found it much harder to dislike the girl with nobody else around. She looked Lilli up and down. Her clothes were soaked, and her previously wild and free-flowing hair was wet and matted, pasted to her head so that she looked like a sad, droopy homeless dog.
“Where will you go?” Sandy asked.
“Somewhere. Anywhere. Nowhere. I don’t know. I’ve never really found a place to be. When I met Nat I thought, ‘At least there’s someone like me out there.’ But he’s your boyfriend, isn’t he?”
Sandy nodded. “You didn’t know that?”
“I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to. I should have. I’m sorry.” Lilli regarded Sandy with a curious look. “But it makes sense. Your auras are massively different, but they’re complementary.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Now that I think about it, even though they’re opposite, they go together well. The way purple goes with yellow. And at certain moments, they do align.”
“What does that mean?”
“Smoochy time.” Lilli grinned and winked at Sandy. “Listen, I didn’t know you two were together. I mean, okay, I should have, but I was so excited to meet someone like me that I didn’t even think about him being with someone like you.”
Sandy made a decision. She didn’t hate Lilli. The impulsive wandering girl wasn’t calculating or conniving—she simply blew with the wind, letting fate take her where it chose. Unfortunately, fate sometimes blew you toward someone else’s boyfriend or picked you up and dropped you on your head. Lilli was also the opposite of her. Sandy planned her days in great detail and made careful choices at every turn. In fact, she was more calculating than the girl on the other side of the wrought-iron fence, and she hadn’t tried being nice to her.
“You know, I can’t blame you for being interested in Nat,” Sandy said. “Heck, he’s interesting.”
Lilli looked relieved. “Thanks. I’ve been on my own for so long. I just wanted the connection. I needed it. See, I’m not like other girls. I’m different. I’m . . . ”
“Special?” suggested Sandy.
“Weird.”
“Unique.”
Lilli began to sense that she wasn’t going to win a battle of vocabulary with Sandy. “Freaky?” she tried.
“Freaky-cool,” Sandy shot back.
“You think so?” Lilli’s frown turned into a soft, hopeful smile.
“Yeah,” Sandy said. “I’d like to be as laid-back as you sometimes.”
“No worries. You can be pretty smooth in the clutch.”
“And I’ll bet you wish you had a little more structure in your life at times,” Sandy said.
“Not really,” Lilli said.
Just then, a dark figure came hobbling up the street.
“Nat!” Sandy said. Sandy opened the gate and started toward him. But it wasn’t Nat. The figure was a blunt, misshapen person with a tubular body, round head, and thin limbs jutting out. In silhouette, it almost didn’t look human at all. It was Calamitous.
“Ah, here is the flowered vehicle,” he said. “Calamitous has found it again.” He sniffed the air. “It remains empty, yet there are many more of them somewhere nearby, aren’t there?” He turned slowly toward Nat’s front door, following his nose.
Lilli peeked out from behind Sandy. “I swear that guy’s a stalker,” she whispered to Sandy.
“Oh-ho!” Calamitous wrung his twitchy hands. “The other female, the one who kept them,” Calamitous said, and he stepped completely out of the shadows. The girls gasped. His face was mangled, and he walked with one hand clutching his side, hiding a long object under his coat. “Are you going to invite me into the house? Yes? No? Does it really matter whether Calamitous has your permission?”
“What’s wrong with you,” Sandy said. “Do you need a doctor?”
“Nuh-nuh-nuh-no,” Calamitous tittered. “I just missed my last meal, and I’m a bit . . . ravenous.” He staggered forward and extended a sticklike arm, drawing it smoothly across Lilli’s head as though tasting her.
Sandy grabbed Lilli’s hand, turned, and hustled the hippy girl up Nat’s porch and into the house, slamming the door after them.
Wham!
Minutes later, Nat and Richie trudged up onto the porch, wet and spent. Pernicious and Nik hopped alongside them, kicking each other in the butt.
“Dude, I’m sorry it was Flappy,” Richie said, patting Nat on the back. “I’m totally sure he doesn’t know what he’s doing when he gets that big.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Nat mumbled.
Nat stepped to the door and tried the knob. It was locked. “Open, door,” he said. One of the many bolts slid, but the door didn’t open. Instead, it locked itself.
Wham-wham! Nat pounded on the wood. “Open up, door!”
Suddenly, the door flew open, and Lilli blasted Nat with a fire extinguisher. The white foam struck him square in the face, and he tumbled across the porch.
“Wait!” Sandy cried.
“Oh no!” Lilli dropped the extinguisher. Zoot, who had been perched on her head like a plump pink hat, leaped back into the pattern of her blouse and disappeared.
Sandy ran to help Nat up. “We thought you were Calamitous.”
“Calamitous?” Nat spluttered, spitting out foam.
“He was here,” Lilli said, “and acting weird.”
“All beat up and talking in third person,” Sandy added. “He was sniffing around, and we locked him out.”
“Oh no,” Nat said. “We can’t let him discover what we do here! Where did you last see him?”
Whump!
Suddenly, Calamitous dropped from the porch ceiling right in front of them, landing on his four skinny limbs.
Richie leaped backward. “Dude, what the . . . ?!”
“Whoa!” Lilli gasped.
Calamitous squared off with the group, snuffling about madly and drooling. His eyes locked on Nik and Pernicious.
“How did you cling to the ceiling like that?” Nat said. He glared at Calamitous. There was definitely something wrong about the man. There always had been. Nat just couldn’t quite place it.
“They’re here!” Calamitous cackled. “Hundreds—maybe thousands. You just don’t know what to do with them.”
“See?” Lilli said. “Weird.”
“What do you want?” Nat said carefully, suddenly wishing the bizarre investigator was not between him and the open door, through which lay all his secrets.
Calamitous grinned. “To eat them,” he croaked.
He lashed out with an insectile arm, knocking Richie off the porch. Calamitous’s body began to bloat, contort, and shake. His coat fell away, revealing a harpoon jutting from his side, its barbed head anchored in his torso.
“Gross!” Lilli yelped.
“Get back!” Nat shouted to the others.
Calamitous changed before their eyes, his human form giving way to the writhing shape of a giant worm. More spindly insect legs popped through his suit, ripping it to shreds.
“It’s him!” Lilli cried.
“The Demoneater!” yelled Richie.
They evacuated the porch, leaping onto the grass or diving into the living shrubs, but Nik was too slow. Calamitous snatched up the muscle-bound little demon with a pincer. Nik turned on the pincer, grabbed it, and snapped it
in half with his great strength, but Calamitous simply produced another from the same slimy arm socket and secured the little demon by the ankle again. He dangled Nik upside down over his open mouth, which was lined with multiple rows of spiny teeth. For all his strength, Nik was helpless.
Pernicious grabbed the fire extinguisher and bounded back onto the porch, shoving the nozzle into Calamitous’s gaping maw and filling it with foam.
Nat yelled to his minions. “Nik! Pernicious! Run!”
The monster that had been the man Calamitous whirled, surprised and confused, snapping and flinging flame retardant foam from its mouth like a rabid firehouse dog. Nik squirmed free and dove off the porch with Pernicious right behind him.
A cherub sculpture beside the door also turned to flee. It was a mistake, for it caught the creature’s bulbous eye. Calamitous scooped the cherub into its open mouth and crunched the sculpture into a million pieces. Then he whirled around and took a bite out of the demonic shrubbery along the porch as though it were a salad bar.
Lilli, Sandy, and Richie scattered to safety across the lawn, but Nat stood transfixed.
“The door!” he cried.
The others stopped and stared. The door stood open, terrified and shaking on its hinges. Even in the frenzy of his transformation, Calamitous was still human enough to understand the word “door.” The gigantic worm whipped around and snapped it in half, gobbling down a mouthful of the centuries-old wood, and then lunged into the house full of demons.
“Nooooo!” Nat screamed.
An equally distressed cacophony of shrieks, screams, and roars erupted inside.
Nat rushed back onto the porch as ferocious gobbling sounds poured out of the house.
“Nat, don’t go in there!” It was Sandy, the voice of reason.
“Listen to them!” Nat said. “They’re dying in there!”
“It’s my fault,” Lilli wailed. “You were right. I led it here.”
Nat leaped to his smashed front door. The entire upper half was gone. Nat grabbed the knob, and it came off in his hand. The demon door was dead.
“You can’t stop it!” Sandy shouted.
“I can’t just stand out here and do nothing!” Nat yelled back.
“But I’ve read the Journal,” Sandy argued. “It’s not a demon. You’ve got no power over it.”
“I’m not going in there to fight it, but I have to try to save my demons. Lilli, you understand, don’t you?”
But she was already rushing past him into the house.
“Wait!” Nat yelled. She was already gone. He heard a tremendous crash. “Everyone else stay out!” he said, and he ran after her.
“No way,” Richie said, watching his mentor throw himself into battle without him, and he rushed after Nat.
CHAPTER 24
RESCUE MISSION
Devastation. Wood splintered. Walls smashed. Richie came skidding into the foyer to find Nat frozen in horror in the middle of it all, staring.
“The living trim,” Richie gasped, seeing that the demonic decorative woodwork had been ripped from the walls of the foyer.
“Eaten,” Nat said.
“The walking entry table?”
“Dead.” Nat motioned toward its chewed remains, which still littered the floor.
“The tripping rug?”
“Devoured.”
“That fast?”
Nat pointed to the dining room’s double doors. The jamb was smashed on both sides. “It’s growing,” he said. “With each demon it eats—Charr, the Troll— . . . you saw how huge it was out in the water. And it’s only getting bigger now.”
“What about Lilli?” Richie asked, looking around. There was no movement in the foyer. Nothing in sight lived.
Nat shook his head. “She’s gone,” he said grimly, biting his lip. “Get yourself out of here.”
“No,” Richie said defiantly.
Nat didn’t have time to argue. “Then go to the rooms it hasn’t ravaged yet.”
“And do what?”
“Open the windows.”
“No other choices?” Richie asked.
“No! Get going.”
Richie nodded and ran down the hall, ripping the wooden and iron masks from the wall.
“Hey!” Woody complained.
“Oww! Put me down!” Irony cried.
“Put a sock in it for once,” Richie snapped, “unless you wanna die.”
“Are you threatening me?” Irony huffed. “Because if you are, I assure you that . . . ”
“Shut up!” Richie skidded to a stop, yanked open the window at the end of the hall, and threw the iron mask out.
“Look ouuuuuuuut beloooooooow!” it cried, tumbling toward the ground.
Richie cocked back the wooden mask.
“Aim for the bushes!” Woody groaned. Then it flew through the window after its partner.
Nat charged into the dining room and saw that there had already been a sudden fierce battle. The walls were streaked with huge gashes from massive talons. The clawfoot dining room table lay in the middle of the room, splintered, cracked, upside down, and heaving like a felled lion.
Nat knelt. “I’m sorry, old boy,” he whispered. “So sorry.”
The table creaked. There was green blood on one of its claws.
“You got in a good lick, didn’t you?” Nat said.
The table was a proud, regal piece of animated furniture from Europe that was centuries old. It had seen kings come and go. It rolled over, its ancient wood emitting a satisfied groan, pleased to have struck a blow, even in defeat. Nat held its outstretched paw as it stiffened, the last of its chaos draining away, and then the table was dead.
Nat stood, fighting tears that had begun to well up when he’d found no trace of Lilli, and he crept to the kitchen door.
In the foyer, a stretch of striped wallpaper above the splintered baseboard shifted, bulged, and then snapped into a pink pear-shaped blob. Zoot’s clown feet, skinny arms, and oversized horns popped free, and he shook himself of powdered plaster from the ravaged walls that had settled on him during the explosive fray.
He’d entered the room riding Lilli’s pant leg, and they’d been met by the massive abdomen of the Demoneater as it whipped around to snatch the flopping rug from beneath its six legs with its huge mouth.
Lilli had taken the full brunt of the blow. She slammed against the wall, her body going limp on impact. Fortunately, the Demoneater had been preoccupied with sucking in the rug and stuffing it down its gullet with its forelimbs. Zoot was able to quickly mimic the pattern of the wallpaper and the grain of the floor, covering her immediately with an improvised urban camouflage.
When it had finished off the rug, the Demoneater’s bulbous eyes had quickly swept the room. The air in the house was saturated with the smell of demons, and so it did not pinpoint their scent, and, seeing nothing, it charged off into the dining room, leaving Zoot quivering with fear and anger atop his injured human soul mate.
It had all happened in seconds. She’d been unprepared for its fury. She didn’t know violence or how suddenly it could erupt. Zoot didn’t either, but he was learning. He frowned deeply—he would not be surprised the next time. He couldn’t move her, as he was primarily a visual manifestation and had limited physical composition. He needed help. The other Keepers had thrown themselves into the bowels of the house, where the danger was even greater. Relief for his companion lay outside. He would try to enlist the aid of the strong blue demon, he thought, and then remembered that he’d turned the thing entirely polka dotted. He’d plead for its forgiveness, he decided, but if it bore a grudge, he’d seek help from the other teenage girl waiting on the lawn.
Richie heaved open windows as he ran down the second-floor hall. He’d gathered a ragtag mob of demons—all the first-floor survivors. They trailed him in a line like children, ignoring the exits he provided for them.
“Go! Go, you morons!”
The animated furniture, living dust bunnies, and wriggling knickk
nacks all just stared, grinning, confused, and generally moronic.
“Get out!” Richie groaned. “Geeeeeet ouuuuuuut!”
They milled about in the crowded hall, murmuring at the young apprentice’s strange behavior, some imitating him with ghostly groans of their own and others simply bumping into each other. Armchairs pushed and table legs kicked, but though they fought for space, none left the safety of the group.
“Gawd,” Richie exclaimed, exasperated, “you’re like a bunch of sheep waiting to be slaughtered!” Richie frowned, thinking hard, and then ran off.
Moments later he returned with the snake staff in his hand, driving the entire flock of demons through the window by waving the slithering serpent like an evil shepherd.
Downstairs, Nat crept into the kitchen. The Demoneater was there. It was eating the large demon stove. Nat cringed. It was an awful sight. The demon hung from its huge round mouth, shaking and rattling with a deep, metallic death cough and belching smoke as though throwing up blood. The Demoneater enjoyed its final throes, sucking the large thing in slowly, like a snake unhinging its jaw to swallow oversized prey. The stove’s struggles weakened, its chaos dimming to feeble shudders and, finally, dead stillness.
The Demoneater glanced in Nat’s direction and issued a steamy belch. Then it heaved itself up onto its insect legs, bloated.
Nat realized that he had no plan and wished he had the snake staff with him. He turned and ran, slamming the kitchen door behind him. But the door leaped off its hinges and fled too, undulating away like a six-foot-long manta ray. The Demoneater burst through the opening after Nat, scooping up a rancid smell, a leaky mug, and several other small demons in its path.
Nat hurdled up the stairs, and the Demoneater climbed straight up the wall after him, clinging to it like a spindly—legged caterpillar. It would catch him before he reached the end of the hallway, Nat realized. Desperate, he knocked over a watering can as he ran past, spilling it onto the yellowed ever-dying houseplant in the hall. The plant sprang to life, filling the hallway instantly with an impassable green thicket.
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