Eve Hallows and the Book of Shrieks

by Robert Gray

  EVE HALLOWS

  AND THE

  BOOK OF SHRIEKS

  Robert Gray

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 Robert Gray

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art Design by Shaun Lindow

  CONTENTS

  THE ADORABLE NEWS

  GOODBYE, GRAVESVILLE

  THE DEAD LADY

  THE TRIANGLE

  INTO THE NEW WORLD

  FRUIT, CLOWNS, PIZZA, AND OTHER TERRORS

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE HUMAN KIND

  FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

  EVERYONE GETS SICK OVER ME

  MONSTER STROMBOLI

  SOMETHING FOUND AND SOMETHING LOST

  FIGHT IN THE CAFETERIA

  TIME KILLERS

  THE WRATH OF MCDOUGAL

  FIRE!

  INSIDE MY STUDENT FOLDER

  I VISIT THE SOURCE … SORT OF

  CARLY BETH’S SECRET

  A TRIP TO THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE

  REUNIONS AND WRESTLING

  GHOULICIOUS GETS A NEW MANAGER

  VOLUNTEERS WANTED

  CHERRYRIGE SEMATERY

  OLD FRIENDS … AND FIENDS

  WE OPEN A PORTAL

  THE SOURCE SENDS ME A MESSAGE

  OLD SCHOOL NEW STUDENT

  DANCE MACABRE

  THE AUDIENCE GETS A REAL SHOW

  WAR …?

  AN ULTIMATUM

  THE SOURCE’S LAIR

  IT’S NOT OVER UNTIL THE WERE-PIG HOWLS

  THE BOOK’S INVITATION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For Theresa,

  a most horrible daughter

  ONE

  THE ADORABLE NEWS

  Around midnight, the hissing and growling noises began echoing through the halls. I heard whispers, too. Muddled at first, but once they got closer, I realized they were talking about me.

  Do you think she’s still upset?

  Of course she is.

  Maybe I should talk to her?

  No, you’ll just make it worse. I’ll do it.

  Good idea.

  I didn’t want to talk to either of them, because, yes, I was still upset. I sat up on my bed, grabbed my journal off the nightstand, and pretended to act busy. I’d already written my entry for the night, so I began tracing the letters again and managed to fatten the first sentence considerably when the old wooden floor in my bedroom creaked. I sighed. They never could take a hint.

  Even though I had my back to her, I knew she was right behind me. I could hear soft rattling and feel little breaths breaking against the back of my neck.

  When I glanced up, a tangle of shiny black snakes dripped into my face.

  “Mom! Hello! A little privacy please,” I said, pushing the snakes away.

  Mom sat next to me on my bed, her golden eyes examining the words in my journal. “What are you writing about?”

  “Nothing important. Just my life. Or what’s left of it, at least.”

  Mom, still eyeing my private journal, shook her head. “You’re so dramatic, Eve. I don’t think moving to a new town will put you in any danger.”

  I snapped my journal shut and tossed it on the bed. “How do you know? Maybe when we get there the humans will have pitchforks and torches and—”

  “You read too many stories, sweetheart. It’s not like that.”

  “That’s not what Sally says. She says that humans hunt monsters for fun.”

  “You shouldn’t listen to Sally. She’s a werewolf, and humans used to hunt them because they kept eating the farmers’ animals. Humans are a fine species, once you get to know them.”

  “A fine species? You’re kidding, right? What about all those stories you told us about turning humans into stone?”

  “Petrified the humans,” Mom corrected. “Turning to stone sounds so first century. Besides, it wasn’t because I didn’t like the humans. We just didn’t see eye to eye.” She snickered at her own joke, while I rolled my eyes. Like I haven’t heard that one before.

  Nowadays, Mom wore special contacts or sunglasses to protect us from being petrified. Sometimes she’d lose a contact or her glasses would drop from her eyes, which was why our backyard overflowed with statues. But these were only accidents. She never petrified anything out of anger, at least not since she met Dad.

  “Things have changed since those days,” Mom added. “Humans are much more civilized than they used to be. They can be trusted now.”

  Me? Trust a human? Ha!

  Okay, so I am a human. But in my defense, I haven’t seen another one since being dumped off at my family’s doorstep when I was a baby. No way could I ever trust a species that abandons their children.

  “And a new school. With humans! It’s not fair. You’re not making Sam go to school.”

  Mom slipped an arm around me, and some of her snake hair cuddled around my neck, which normally cheered me up the way they dotted my face with kisses, but I wasn’t in the mood today. Today, it was going to take a whole lot more to cheer me up. Like for starters, Mom and Dad saying they made a huge mistake, and that we were staying right here in Gravesville, and that I should unpack my stuff right away and forget they ever came up with this ridiculous idea in the first place.

  “Sweetheart, your brother’s a ghoul. He’s a bit—”

  “Gross?”

  “—Different from the humans. He wouldn’t fit in. I’m going to homeschool him myself.”

  “Why can’t I be homeschooled then?”

  Mom’s golden eyes drifted to the floor, and her snakes drooped. “Because … Well, sweetheart, your father and I decided it would be good for you to learn more about your heritage.”

  “Oh! I am so not one of them! They’re like wild beasts! With pitchforks! And torches!”

  “You know we’re only trying to do what’s best for everyone.”

  “Then let’s stay here. That’s what’s best for everyone.”

  As Mom stood, her snakes curled up around each other and slid back into a ponytail. “You don’t understand, Eve. Things are different now,” she said and left me alone to brood over what that was supposed to mean.

  What was different? And wasn’t there a certain look on Mom’s face, one that said she didn’t want to leave, either?

  My parents were keeping secrets from us. I was sure of it. This whole moving-to-the-human-world nonsense was just too weird.

  I already felt homesick, and we hadn’t left yet. I opened up my curtains and stared out my window, which faced the sprawling graveyard. If it’s one thing Gravesville is known for, it’s the graveyard. It just goes on and on, rolling up a gloomy hill and disappearing in the mist and blackness beyond.

  Most monsters wished for gravefront property, and my parents expected me to leave this all behind? They might as well have ripped out my soul and fed it to the corpse-sucking demons in the Waste Lands. Even that would’ve been an improvement.

  Tonight, the graveyard was packed with tourists. We get a lot of them this time of year—zombies from up north. They were the rudest, most annoying creatures. And that whole brain-eating thing? I don’t care where you live, that’s just poor manners. Not to mention, they were having so much fun out there in the graveyard, which made me dislike them even more. I wanted to be out there, too.

  I liked to fog surf—you know, grab a possessed board, wait for a wave of mist to creep in and ride it out. If I were in the graveyard right now, that’s what I’d be doing.

  But why
bother? I’d have to leave the graveyard behind soon enough. I was better off staying inside and getting used to being miserable, which did have some benefits. For example, misery allowed me to feel sorry for myself, which is a necessity when you’re fourteen, even though my parents didn’t seem to understand that. Mom and Dad thought it was a human problem, something in my blood. They made it sound like the rest of my deformities, if you ask me, like having straight brown hair instead of Mom’s gorgeous black snakes, or not being able to shape shift like Dad, or ooze goo through my skin when I got excited like my brother Sam.

  But I had the heart of a monster. That much I knew. And regardless of what species I belonged to, I belonged here.

  I heard four little feet tap into my room. “Hey, Wolf. How’s my good boy doing tonight?”

  He grunted and then poked my ankle with his snout. I rubbed him in that place behind the ear he loved so much, which caused his little trotter to tap spastically against the wood floor.

  “What do you think about The Move?”

  Another grunt followed by two snorts. I couldn’t agree more.

  Wolf was a were-pig. At least that’s what the goblin who sold him to us had said. He also said it would take a few years before Wolf showed his wolfish side. It was going on three years, and Wolf still hasn’t shown the slightest bit of interest in a full moon, or any other moon. It was okay, though. I liked him better this way, because he was more like me. We were both pink skinned. We were both different.

  But there I go … getting off track again. Back to The Move.

  This whole mess started last week, on one of those horrible stormy nights where it seemed nothing could go wrong. That evening, when Dad got home from work, he looked traumatized—like he’d just seen a human. He rushed Mom upstairs into their bedroom and slammed the door shut. Sam and I knew something was wrong, so we followed them and pressed our ears to their door. We didn’t hear much, mostly because Sam’s husky breathing kept getting in the way, and all we learned from their conversation was that we were moving.

  The next day, Mom and Dad were out shopping for a new house. It happened that fast. But the real shocker was that we were moving to the human world—a place called Poke-A-Nose, Pencil-vania, which sounded weird. And annoying.

  My parents had showed us a picture of the new house. Oh, my Jack, it looked boring! And poor Sam, he must’ve leaked a bucket of goo when Dad told him the closest graveyard was five miles away. A ghoul without a graveyard is like a vamp without a coffin.

  At least my parents agreed not to sell our castle. It had been in the family for over six hundred years, and most of the family—even though they were ghosts—still lived here. They would be devastated if they lost their haunt. So Dad asked Grandma and Grandpa to watch the house while we were gone. That was when I knew The Move was final, because under any other circumstance Dad would never let his parents watch the castle. My grandparents could get a bit wild when not supervised.

  I still had some more stuff to pack, last minute items that had no business being in a box. There was my Book of Spells. (I didn’t know a lick of magic, but the spells were like poetry, and I enjoyed reading them.) And there were my voodoo baby dolls, which I’d been collecting since I was three. Next semester, my school’s going to dedicate two full classes on voodoo—a history course and a practical applications course. I finally would get the chance to use my voodoo baby dolls, but nooo. I get to go to school with humans instead. The excitement!

  And the good news didn’t stop there, because I also learned we were traveling to the Poke-A-Nose by ship. For ten days! Until last week all travel into the human world had been done through portals, but ever since the murders began, URNS—the Undead, Reanimated, and Nocturnal Services—decided to ban all portal travel.

  I needed a drink. This was too upsetting.

  “Hey, freak,” Sam said as I entered the kitchen. He sounded so depressed, and he looked it, too. His ears doubled over, and his scales had almost no sheen, as if he were shedding.

  I grabbed myself a mug of hot pumpkin—my all-time favorite drink—and offered one to Sam. It was his favorite, too, but he said he didn’t want one, and he hunched over more than normal and sighed, which I knew was his pathetic attempt to get me to make him feel better.

  It worked.

  “So I heard the nearest graveyard is like five miles away from our new house.”

  Sam’s ears twitched as if swatting at flies. “Yeah. And did you hear what else?”

  “What?”

  “There’s only dead people at the graveyard.”

  This was so shocking I almost dropped my drink. “Are you kidding me? What kind of sanity is this?”

  Sam looked ready to cry. I was ready to sob myself! But I had to be strong for both of us, me being the older sister and all.

  “Maybe we can reanimate some of the corpses,” I suggested. “I have my spell book.”

  “You promise?”

  “Absolutely.” I felt adorable lying like this, but Sam looked so pathetic before and now he was smiling. Besides, maybe it would work …

  Better yet, maybe he would forget the whole thing.

  The first gray hint of morning peeked through my window as I lay sleepless on my bed, watching the shadows wander across the ceiling. I couldn’t stop thinking about The Move and how it was going to ruin my life.

  Dad growled from somewhere downstairs. Curious, I opened my door and listened. Mom and Dad were arguing about something, but I couldn’t quite hear. As I crept down the hall, I heard Dad’s rumbling snarl again. He must be in his gargoyle form, or maybe a hellhound. I think I mentioned my dad was a shapeshifter. He could turn into almost anything but preferred animals when he was upset. Otherwise, he mostly stayed in his human form, because—he often joked—he wanted to be like me when he grew up. In reality, he did it so I wouldn’t be the only human in Gravesville, and I loved him for it.

  Dad worked for URNS, in the Watchers Division, what I liked to call the Secret Spy Lab. Dad didn’t do much spying these days. He mostly catalogued information brought to him by other spies. Not the most exciting position, if you ask me, but he did come home with a lot of cool stuff, like my spell book, which had to be super rare, because I’d never seen another one like it.

  My parents’ conversation had taken on a secretive hushy tone—which are the ones I liked to eavesdrop on the most—and I hurried down the stairs, fearing I might miss something. I’d forgotten how loud the steps creaked until Mom and Dad shushed each other.

  I crouched below the railing and held my breath. My parents stayed silent for a long time, probably trying to decide if they heard someone listening to them. Fortunately, this place made all sorts of noises at night—one of the benefits of living in a haunted castle. Even better, Uncle Mervin floated by with a book tucked under his arm, complaining to himself about how he couldn’t get any reading done with all that ruckus, and he poofed through the wall in search of a quieter location.

  I eased out the breath that’d been burning up in my chest and waited for my parents to start talking again.

  “Pizza?” Mom whispered. “What do you know about pizza?”

  “Absolutely nothing, but that’s what they gave me. The place is called Ghoulicious Pizza.”

  “You can turn into anything, and they want you to manage a pizza place?”

  “They told me it was low-key, and that every human loves pizza, so chances are they won’t suspect anything.”

  “And the murders?”

  Hold on. Now this was getting interesting. The murders have been all over the news for the last few months. In school, the only thing we talked about more than the murders was the super-cool rock band the Ghastly Brothers—Nick Ghastly is perfectly horrible, by the way, I don’t care what Sally says.

  Did my dad know who had been committing these murders? I stretched so far over the railing to listen that I nearly tipped over the side.

  “Four more this week. A family of vamps. Can you believe it? Th
e youngest was a baby, only 120 years old.”

  “How adorable! And they have no idea who’s behind this?”

  Dad must’ve shaken his head, because I didn’t hear him say anything. They were being even quieter now, which, of course, made me more interested. I didn’t have a choice. You don’t toss a word like murder up in the air and wait for it to hit the ground. I inched my way down the stairs and would’ve made it the whole way, too, if not for that second-to-last step, which creaked so loud under my weight. It sounded like a ten-pound toad!

  I froze. On came the lights and out popped Dad’s heads. He was shifting from a two-headed gargoyle into his human form as he approached me.

  “Eve? What are you doing up so late?”

  I couldn’t say spying, so I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “I guess I—er—was sleepwalking.”

  “Sleepwalking?” That was Mom’s voice, all loaded with sarcasm.

  “Yeah. I was dreaming about the humans again, and they were chasing me with their torches and pitchforks yelling DEMON GIRL! GET HER! And the next thing I know I’m standing on the steps and—”

  “You were spying on us,” Mom said flatly.

  “And I was spying on you,” I agreed.

  Dad sighed. “Oh, for Jack’s sake. How long have you been on the steps?”

  “A couple of minutes. I only heard about pizza. I like the name Ghoulicious, by the way. Oh, and there was that little thing about murder …”

  “That’s nonsense,” Mom said, but her snakes squirmed and snapped, suggesting the opposite.

  “Mom, your snakes are upset. What gives?”

  “There are big problems going on, sweetheart,” she said. “Problems you couldn’t possibly understand. It’s best that we leave, and it’s best that we don’t discuss them.”

  “I heard you two talking about a murdered vamp family. Are we moving because you’re worried we’ll be next?”

  Dad threw up his hands in surrender. “Guess she understands the problem about as well as we do.”

  I was proud of myself for putting two and two together. I could be pretty smart when I wanted to be, even for a human.