by Shannon Hale
“The headmaster told us to stay put till he gets back,” Apple had said.
“When will that be?” Raven asked.
“Morning, maybe?” said Apple. “He seemed pretty spooked by the tremors and the appearance of the”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“the monsters. We’d better just crash here tonight.”
A squeak rouses Raven. She knows by the soft inhale and exhale of their breaths that the other girls are all dead asleep. But Raven is fairy aware of the hard floor under her hip and head, the high ceiling above her, and the blank stares of various creature statues. And somewhere out there is her mother, who, she’d bet every shoe in her closet, is not playing patty-cake-bake or Rock Bard. When her mother plays games, they are far more dangerous.
“What are you up to, Mom?” Raven whispers into the darkness.
And then—crash.
The floor beneath her buckles; the books on the shelves pop off and thump onto the ground. A lifelike troll statue tips and falls face-first right beside Raven.
“Ow!” says the troll statue.
“Wait, you’re alive?” says Raven.
“No,” it says, its plastic lips pressed against the floor. “Never was. Come on, you think Headmaster Grimm went hunting and came back with me? I’m just a decoration, bought from a gift catalog.”
“Then how can you talk?” she says.
The troll statue winks. “It was a fancy gift catalog.”
A second tremor hits, even larger than the first. Raven ducks under a table, her hands over her head, expecting the roof to come down. The stones of the school groan like stomachs full of peas porridge in the pot nine hundred days old.
When the tremor passes, the school is still standing. Raven sends a spark of magic to turn on the lights.
“Everybody okay?” she asks, righting the troll statue.
“Thanks,” the statue says.
“You’re welcome?” Raven says. She isn’t sure what proper etiquette is when dealing with large troll-like figures that are actually just plastic decorations magicked into talking. But it never hurts to be polite.
The girls are all standing, checking themselves over. Frankie is sewing her leg on tighter. Apple is pulling tiny puffs of dust out of her hair.
“Where’s Maddie?” asks Raven.
“Oh!” says Apple, looking around. “I don’t know. She was asleep right next to me.”
“Maybe she wandered off?” says Frankie.
Draculaura smiles. “She does seem the type of person to wander.…”
“Or to stand on a balcony singing to the moon and get snatched by a mob of shambling Things,” says the troll statue.
“What?” says Raven.
“What?” says Apple.
“What?” say Draculaura and Frankie at the same time.
“What?” says the troll statue. “It was just an observation.”
“Do you mean,” says Apple, looking up at the troll statue with her hands on her hips and her best no-nonsense expression, “that you saw some persons of unknown origin abducting Madeline Hatter from that balcony?”
“I don’t mean to say anything,” explains the troll statue. “But somehow I do, all the same.”
“Well, surely we’ll find Maddie soon,” says Apple. “In the meantime, Ever After High’s school rules hexplicitly state that in the event of an earthquake, all students should evacuate the building and meet in a safe location. So we should really get moving!”
Raven, knowing better than to argue, magicks the door unlocked and follows Apple out. Behind her, Draculaura whispers, “School rules. Real high schools have those.”
“Yeah,” says Frankie. “We should totally come up with some great school rules for Monster High when we get back. I mean, if. I mean—”
“When,” says Draculaura.
“Yeah, when,” says Frankie.
But neither sounds certain.
There’s a nice full moon outside, filling the courtyard with a trembling blue light and lining all the gathered students in silver. Raven glances at the two monster girls, half expecting one of them to howl at the moon or turn into a furry creature or something. That’s the sort of stuff that happens in campfire tales. But no, they just huddle together, looking around with wide eyes.
“So foggy,” says Draculaura.
“Yeah,” says Frankie. “I love a foggy night. But something about that fog…”
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” says Raven looking into the dark fog. “It almost looks… solid.”
The full moon lights up a thick wall of fog at the edge of the school grounds. But that’s the thing—the fog stays there around the borders of Ever After High, not rolling in, not diminishing.
Raven walks closer. She feels more than a bit squeamish, her belly flipping and flopping like a fish, as if warning her that she’s about to see something alarming.
She reaches out her hand and touches the fog, trailing her fingers through it. Just air, a little damp, a little chilly. Like your basic fog. But then Raven looks down, screeches, and stumbles away.
“Everyone, stay back!” she yells at the gathered students. “Where the fog starts, the ground ends. It just ends! We’re… like, trapped on an island!”
“What do you mean, ends?” asks Apple, hurrying to her.
Raven grabs Apple’s hand and pulls her back before she can fall into the fog and down, down, down into the nothing or whatever is down there.
Now everyone is screaming and running around. The fog extends around the grounds, completely circling the school. Most run back inside, as far from the fog as they can get.
Raven takes out her MirrorPhone and tries to call her dad in his castle in a nearby kingdom. Nothing. No signal.
“I can’t reach my mom, either,” says Apple. “It won’t even dial.”
“Apple!” says Briar Beauty,51 running toward her friend. She’s wearing pink pajamas and fluffy bunny slippers, and her long brown hair is in braids. Her cheeks, normally several shades darker than Apple’s, are flushed pink from worry. “It’s not just the MirrorPhones that aren’t working. I checked the wishing well, too, and it’s… it’s empty. No water, just fog down in its depths. And when I dropped a pebble into it, I never heard it hit bottom. It’s like we’re trapped.”52
51 Daughter of Sleeping Beauty, Apple’s BFFA, and one seriously stylish chick.
52 In Ever After, wishing wells are, like, the second-most-common form of transportation, right after walking and right before unicorn-breath-powered hybrid carriages.
“Briar, the faculty is gone and Maddie is missing. Can you get everyone back to their rooms and find me if there’s any word?”
Briar nods and runs off, her bunny slippers squeaking cheerfully with each step, as if they don’t know that Ever After High is having the worst crisis in forever after. Which they probably don’t. Since they’re just fluffy footwear. But earlier in this chapter, a decorative troll statue spoke, so you just never know.
Anyway, Raven speed-dials Maddie’s dad, the Mad Hatter. He lives just across the bridge from Ever After High, in the Village of Book End, but even that call won’t go through.
“Is Book End gone?” Apple squints in that direction, but the fog is so thick it’s impossible to tell.
They run toward the bridge. The wall of fog crosses over it, but as they get closer, they see that the bridge itself has been sliced clean in half.53
53 Can you imagine if you woke up and your house was suddenly cut off from the rest of the world? I would completely flip out!
“Apple,” says Raven, “what if Maddie was trying to go home to her dad when…?”
Apple grabs Raven’s hand and squeezes.
“Maddie!” Raven yells into the night, magically projecting her voice louder. “Maddie, if you can hear me, answer please!”
No answer.
“Maddie, this is Apple!” says Apple. “Right now I’m standing on my head and making a pot of noodles with my feet while oinking like a pig!”
“Well, that settles it,” says Apple. “If she didn’t come running to see me stand on my head and make noodles with my feet while oinking, then she’s nowhere nearby. But surely she’s not down… down there, wherever that fog is coming from.”
Raven is whispering under her breath and holding a spark of blue light in her hands. She rolls it like a ball of clay, and with the final words “Go find Maddie!” she lets go of the blue light. It zips up into the air, then zaps back and forth, inside the school, under the nose of a dazed-looking ogre, over Daring Charming so fast it leaves his perfectly coiffed hair in a rat’s nest, and back to Raven.
The ball of light settles into her hand with a sad little sigh, flattens, and disappears.
“Maddie isn’t at Ever After High,” says Raven. “Then where is she?”
“Um, I know we’re new here,” says Draculaura as she and Frankie catch up with Raven, “and I don’t know what fancy-catalog troll statues are like in Ever After, but maybe it was right? About the Things taking her?”
“Come with me,” says Raven.
“Where?” asks Frankie.
“Here,” says Raven, pulling the two girls closer to her and Apple. She mutters some words and grabs their arms, and suddenly, all four are rocketing into the air.
“Uhhhhhh…” says Frankie.
“Aaaaah!” says Drac.
“Wahooo!” cheers Apple. “Raven, you’ve been practicing this spell! It’s so much better than that time you shot us headfirst into the royal horse stables!”
“Horse stables?” says Draculaura. “AAAAHWAAAH!”
They rocket straight toward Maddie’s dorm room window. Her closed window.
Raven mutters another quick spell, and a second before they crash into the window glass, it turns into strawberry gelatin. They smash through the rubbery dessert, cubes of it flying everywhere, and land on Maddie’s bed.
“Sorry about the strawberry gelatin,” says Raven. “I couldn’t think of anything else that fast.” Then she mutters, “Anyway, I always thought crashing through gelatin would be kinda fun.”
Apple straightens her tiara, Frankie jolts with a random spark of electricity, and Draculaura collapses on the floor.
“If people were meant to fly”—she gasps—“they would have been born bats.”
Raven is checking on Maddie’s bed and desk, inside her spare hats and teapots, and under a laundry hamper shaped like a mushroom—all the usual places where Maddie keeps things.
“There’s no note!” says Raven. “Maddie didn’t leave a note!”
Briar rushes in. “No sign of Maddie. And Lizzie Hearts says Kitty has disappeared, too!”
“But, um, isn’t that kind of Kitty’s thing?” says Raven. “Disappearing?”
“You’re right,” says Briar. “I’ll keep looking.” She runs off again, slippers still squeaking.
“Kitty Cheshire, too!” says Apple.
“Fairytale and Wonderland characters running around…” Frankie sits on a hat-shaped chair, her head in her hands. “I’m never going to get used to this place.”
“Um, Frankenstein is your dad,” Apple whispers.
Raven’s head is down, her eyes closed in concentration. Her magic has gotten better with her studies, but Baba Yaga says for a sorceress, casting a spell should be as easy as casting a pebble. And though Raven’s magic rarely backfires now and can look easy, sometimes casting a spell still feels like hauling a bag full of pebbles upstairs while wearing ice skates and singing the alphabet backward.
A blue glow drifts off Raven’s hands like smoke and then darts to Kitty’s bed, which is on one side of her and Maddie’s shared room. The glow outlines an invisible human form curled up on the bed. Green eyes fade into the outline, lavender hair pulls loose from a fat braid, and a chin quivers.
“Kitty!” Apple exclaims. “You’re here!”
“Here and there, I’m neverwhere,” Kitty says.
“What does that even mean?” Draculaura asks.
“Wonderlandians don’t always make sense,” Apple explains.
“Less sense when dense gents from across the fence make hence with friends,” replies Kitty.54
54 Kitty is speaking Riddlish. It’s a Wonderland thing.
“Um,” Frankie says, “is that a poem or something?”
Kitty takes a deep breath and says, “They took Maddie.”
“Who took her?”
“A girl with them… she called them… Zomboyz.”
“I don’t think that’s a word,” Apple says.
“Oh, it’s a word,” Draculaura says. “It’s the first thing Kitty has said that makes sense to me.”
“The Zomboyz are… well, they’re a pack of zombies,” says Frankie.
Apple jumps to her feet. “Zombies are real?”
Everyone blinks at her. Apple sits back down.
“Sorry. Sorry, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this.”
“Tell me about it,” Frankie mumbles.
“The girl must be Moanica, the leader of the Zomboyz pack,” says Draculaura. “Basically, they follow her around and do whatever she says. But why is Moanica in Ever After? And what would she want with Maddie?”
Kitty is still shivering, so Raven takes the blanket from Maddie’s bed and puts it over her.
“I saw them carrying her,” says Kitty. “Right into the fog. Some of them came after me. They didn’t talk, just grunted, but I heard a… a Narrator say that the Zomboyz were looking for Wonderland girls who smell like madness and magic. I went In-Between, so they couldn’t grab me.”55 She sniffs, her chin still quivering. “Usually in the In-Between, I can travel anywhere in Ever After, and a lot faster than I can in the real world. But I couldn’t get to Book End or anywhere off campus. The fog—it’s like there’s nothing out there. The rest of Ever After is just… gone! I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m just going to go curl up in the In-Between till it’s all fixed again. You’ll fix it, right, Apple? Raven? You’ll find Maddie and you’ll fix it?”
55 The In-Between is the place where Cheshires go when they disappear.
Raven’s stomach is doing that impressive fishy-like flipping and flopping, but she nods. Kitty looks relieved as she fades away, her frown the last part of her to disappear.
HOW COULD MOANICA BE HERE?” FRANKIE ASKS. IT doesn’t make any sense to her, but then very little of what has happened since she messed up their history project has made sense.
“Who is Moanica?” Apple asks. She grabs Frankie’s arm and looks up at her with panicked eyes. “Is she a monster, too? Are monsters behind all this? Did you cause the tremors and Maddie’s kidnapping and… and that scary fog?”
“What? No!” says Frankie. “I mean, I don’t think I did. I mean, no! I mean, I don’t think so. But…”
Of course she didn’t kidnap Maddie! But… but did she cause the tremors? When she tried to get the Mapalogue to send them to Shadow High, she didn’t know what she was doing. Apple’s suspicious stare feels like a condemnation.
“But Moanica is a monster. She’s one of our classmates,” Draculaura says. “One of the more… difficult ones.”
“Difficult in what way?” Apple asks. “Our classmate Faybelle once cast a wilted-wings spell on the other fairies trying out for a role in the school play to improve her chance of getting the part. It took days to wear off, and the poor fairies were so depressed that they couldn’t even cheerhex. Difficult like that?”
“That might be the definition of difficult here, but it’s not quite what we meant,” Frankie says.
Apple purses her lips. “What I’m asking is if she’s the kind of person who would trap perfectly nice, innocent people in some kind of evil fog world.”
“I don’t think she’s capable of creating a pocket universe and hiding fairytale characters in it, no,” Frankie says. She knows she’s being more snarky than she should, but something about monsters being blamed for everything irritates her.
“Yeah, I don’t know what a ‘pocket universe’ even is,” Raven says.
“Me neither,” Draculaura says.
“A pocket universe is kind of a quantum bubble of space-time,” says Frankie.
“Yes, it’s where a parallel reality theoretically can unfold,” Apple says.
“Oh thanks, that clears it right up,” Draculaura says, and Raven smiles.
Frankie’s neck bolts sizzle and a twitch of electricity tingles upward, heating the tips of her ears. That happens when she’s angry—specifically, jealous. And she’s ashamed to realize that she is a little jealous of how Draculaura seems to have made an insta-connection with this daughter of the Evil Queen, while Frankie is feeling like Alice lost in Wonderland.
“Okay, then,” Frankie says with a deep breath, trying to defizzle. “I’m just surprised that Apple here has ever met anyone in fairytale-land who is even the slightest bit difficult.”
“Well, surprising as it may seem, I have,” Apple replies, trying hard to keep her voice light.
“If you say so,” Frankie says.
That sounds mean, and Frankie frowns at herself. Apple frowns in response, as if she thinks Frankie is frowning at her.
“Okaaay, ghouls…” Draculaura says, making a “calm down” gesture.
“And frankly, Frankie,” Apple says, “it seems a little petty to assume I haven’t had challenges just because I’m a princess. My mom rules an entire kingdom and often has to deal with difficult situations. It’s part of my story.”
Frankie’s ears are red-hot, and even her eyelashes vibrate with loose electricity.
“Whoa, now,” Raven says. “I think all this fog might be clouding our thinking.”
“Ha,” Draculaura says. “I see what you did there. ‘Cloud our thinking’? Clever.”
“I thought it might have been too subtle,” Raven says with a smile.
Apple is staring at Draculaura and Raven with the same kind of confused, annoyed, and jealous expression that Frankie fears is on her own face.