by Carrie Jones
He crashed with a thud at her sneakered feet. The moldy smell of foot fungus caused him to skitter backward on his butt until he hit the bottom stair and couldn’t go any farther. He didn’t even think of telling her that his best friend, Kekla, said that “stupid” was a hate word and he agreed. He certainly felt pretty hated when his grandmother called him that.
“Stupid, stupid, worthless boy,” she said, making the word “boy” seem like some sort of insult. “Grab the toothbrush you used to clean the dinner dishes and go clean the toilets till they shine. Don’t let me catch you wasting a good sponge when that toothbrush has plenty of clean left in it! No school today, so you should have plenty of time to do that and clean the shower, too. Use my old underwear, the ones with the gold stars on the back. The toothbrush is too small for the shower.”
Jamie’s hands flattened against the hard, cold floor. His mouth dropped open. “No school?”
If there was no school then he’d be stuck with her for the entire day.
“Nope. Too much snow, they said.” She stretched up to her full height and stared completely away from him. “I ate a lot last night, and something about eating a lot makes me terribly hungry. It’s an endless cycle. Eat. Get hungry. Eat more. Get more hungry. Eat. Eat. Eat! So go about your cleaning right now. You best skedaddle.”
She callowly cackled. Her hands went to her hips, and she leaned over until her face was right in front of Jamie’s small, scared eyes and her large, hungry mouth was just inches away from Jamie’s own quivering lips.
A wicked glint shimmered in her blue eyes.
“Or,” she said, stomach growling like a lion on the hunt, “would you prefer I just eat you?”
She stood up again, cackling even more loudly, turning back upstairs, and Jamie rushed off toward the front door. He was not giving her the chance to eat him. No way. Not that she would, he thought. Right? Right?!? No, never. Grandmothers didn’t eat their grandsons. That was ridiculous.
As he started pulling on his boots, he peeked behind his shoulder. His grandmother was nowhere in sight. The television blared the day’s news from the other room.
“Twenty-five chickens were found without heads in the little town of Mount Desert this morning,” the newscaster said. “Police have no leads.”
Jamie’s stomach flip-flopped. Those poor chickens. Headless. Dead.
“Also, a local townsperson reported the theft of a treasured lawn gnome from her front yard,” the male reporter continued.
The newscast switched to a woman’s voice: “That gnome has been in my family for over one hundred years. My grandmother said it brought us good fortune.”
The speaker sounded kind, older, and intelligent, as if she thought through each word before saying it, sort of like the school nurse.
“And now it’s just gone,” the voice concluded.
“Ha!” his grandmother shouted. “Sissy woman. You had it long enough. Snivelers don’t deserve lawn gnomes—don’t deserve nothing, I say. You hear me, Jamie? Snivelers don’t deserve nothing!”
Jamie knew well enough to respond, and he did. “I hear you.”
“Hurry up and get to work before I eat you!”
Jamie’s grandmother had said things like this his entire life. It always freaked him out, but he never thought she was actually serious. Now? He wasn’t so sure. He didn’t think about it long because he noticed a splotch by the door. There was some sort of feather stuck to the floor and … Yes, there it was. A deep-red splotch like … like …
“Blood,” Jamie whispered, jerking backward and hitting his hip on the umbrella stand.
“Son?” His father, Hercules Alexander, appeared at the door, still in his dark-blue Mount Desert Police Department work shirt. Coffee stained part of it an even darker blue. Mr. Alexander loomed there for a moment, his rugged body taking up the entire frame of the doorway.
The Alexanders, aside from Jamie, were a large kind of pale people that seemed to suck the air out of the room the moment they entered it. They demanded to be noticed. And would be noticed even if they weren’t so large and loud and smelled so much like fried pork products mixed with locker room toilets. And they liked it that way, too. But Jamie? He knew it was safer to be invisible. Nobody could eat you that way.
Jamie stared hard at the floor, deliberately not catching his father’s eye. Sometimes that provoked him.
“What is going on in here?” his father asked in a voice that was both deceptively quiet and calm.
“Grandmother wanted me to go out,” Jamie lied, quickly shoving on his coat. He’d get in trouble for sure, but the toilets and shower would still be there to clean later. And so would the filthy toothbrush and his grandmother’s underwear.
His father rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Did she now?”
Jamie couldn’t remember how to speak. Fear robbed him of his voice.
“Well, you best go do that. Double time, boy. Double time,” he said as Jamie shoved on the paper bag he used for a hat and moved toward the door.
But something caught his eye, something that had never, ever been there before. A miniature ceramic man was perched against the door, dried blood on its red hat and a sad, sad look in its eye. Its blue clothing was smudged with dirt. A little tear smeared its cheek.
“He looks how I feel, poor guy,” Jamie murmured.
A beefy hand whacked him on the back of the head. Jamie stumbled forward from the blow, barely managing to avoid hitting his head against the wall.
His father’s voice roared into his ear so loudly that Jamie was sure his eardrum would tear apart and explode from the force of it. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU HORRIBLE, POINTLESS BOY? GAWKING AT THE DOOR? GET OUT!”
“Oh, um, yes … yes, sir,” Jamie stuttered and hurried out the front door and past the sad-looking lawn ornament.
The snow had given way to blue skies by the time Jamie left the house. It was frigid out, an icy cold that freezes your nose hairs together and makes air feel like shards of broken crystals. Of course, Jamie didn’t have a knitted scarf or gloves.
“Waste of money,” his grandmother would say. “So what if you lose an ear or a nose. It’ll build character. Plus, yarn isn’t good for my digestion.”
His grandmother and his father hated spending money on Jamie. If it wasn’t illegal to go to school naked, he wouldn’t have any clothes at all. It didn’t matter, Jamie decided. Nothing mattered. Just getting out of the house and away from them was good enough.
He stopped at the end of the driveway and stared up and down the road. There weren’t any cars tumbling about. Mount Desert was like that after a storm. Only the snowplows moved, rumbling around like giants, shoving snow onto sidewalks.
He had few options. He could roam around aimlessly, or he could walk to the library and try to figure out what those creatures were last night. Or, more specifically, what his grandmother might be. Libraries kept books about everything, and if he was lucky, maybe Mr. Nate, the librarian, would let him stay there awhile among the dusty volumes and dog-eared newspapers and pet iguana. Jamie often hid out in the library after school, and, though he never really talked to Mr. Nate, he saw how kind and gentle he was with everyone. That’s exactly what I could use today, Jamie thought. Some kindness.
Something howled in the distance, and Jamie’s shudder grew so big that it threatened to take over his entire body.
Jamie chose the library.
The Mount Desert Library perched on top of a hill above town, directly across from Jamie’s school. A former sea captain’s home, its white clapboard walls reached up for three stories. A widow’s walk sat at the top so that people could stare out to sea, hoping for ships to come safely back to the harbor. Nobody was allowed up there anymore, not that Jamie knew of at least. It seems safe there, though, he thought, like a good vantage point in case monsters are coming.
Monsters.
Monsters like his grandmother.
The thought stopped him dead still. A normal kid would be able to
tell his dad what he saw his grandmother do, but Jamie guessed he’d never actually been a normal kid. A normal kid didn’t have a grandmother who became a monster. A normal kid would have a loving dad. Now that he knew how un-normal he was, there was nothing to do but deal with it.
Jamie’s eyes closed for the briefest of seconds, and he wished with all his might that the world could be just the tiniest bit less freaky. He opened his eyes again and bounded the last few yards to the library. Mr. Nate would help him sort this all out. He had to.
Jamie was running so hard that he couldn’t stop quickly enough on the snow-covered porch. He slammed into the white wooden door of the library. With a painful oomph, he fell backward. A piece of fluorescent-orange paper fluttered off the door onto his shirt.
LIBRARY CLOSED TODAY DUE TO STORM.
What? No. It couldn’t be. Desperation sank in. Jamie stood up and pounded his fist against the door.
“Hello?” he called. “Hello!”
Something like panic filled his voice. Thoughts of headless chickens seemed to flood his brain.
“Please!”
The door swung open. Mr. Nate stood, tall and lean, wearing a dark shirt with a wool suit jacket over it and what appeared to be suspenders underneath. There was also a bow tie involved. His face was folded into lines of concern, and Jamie worried that the concern was about having to talk to a child. His grandmother and father hated having to do that. They said it was dull.
“Come in! Come in! Jamie Alexander, is it? Paper-bag hat? No mittens? How horrible.” Mr. Nate ushered Jamie inside the library and out of the cold. “Although, I suspect you’d rather wear gloves than mittens. More manly, right?”
Jamie nodded, too confused to really know how to respond. He cleared his throat, feeling a new sense of urgency. He had to tell someone about last night and who better than a librarian, a person who dealt with stories and facts, who had access to old knowledge as well as new. “Mr. Nate … I have something to tell you. It’s … it’s important.”
“Of course! What is it about? Let me guess … girls? … dogs? … parental relations? … school bullies?” Mr. Nate chattered as he brought Jamie past the stacks of new books by the front door, and then past the children’s room with its reading dinghy and giant papier-mâché giraffe. The lights weren’t on, and the building was lit from the white sun coming in through the windows. “Are you hungry? I expect you’re hungry. I can hear your stomach growling through your clothes. No worries. I have sandwiches in my office, which is in through here.”
There was nobody at the broad, shiny circulation desk. A clock clicked. The windows behind it showed the woods. Nothing seemed to move out there. Nothing at all.
Mr. Nate led Jamie into a small room crowded with books. Tools and mops hung on shelves and in corners. A wooden cuckoo clock was suspended on the wall, ticking loudly. The room smelled of sawdust and pickles. An old-fashioned radio was disassembled. Pieces of electrical equipment were scattered along a wooden table marred by graffiti. In carved letters, BETTY proclaimed her true love always to LEW, and others decided that SCHOOL SUX. The result of it all was a jumbled, homey mess.
With a giant sweeping motion of his arm, Mr. Nate moved most of the electronics off the table to make room. While Jamie watched, the thin man opened up the door to a tiny refrigerator and began pulling out food.
“Deviled eggs … hummus … carrot sticks … Let’s see … grilled cheese, pre-grilled and still warm despite the refrigeration …” He quickly set the items down on the table.
Something seemed to murmur from within the fridge.
“What was that?” Jamie asked as Mr. Nate slammed the refrigerator door shut.
“Oh … that? Just a radio.” Mr. Nate’s eyes opened a little too widely. Jamie could tell he was lying.
“It seemed like it said, ‘Eat me!’ and ‘Nobody likes sprouts.’ ” Jamie blushed. It sounded ridiculous when he said it aloud. He imagined his story about his grandmother might sound even more ridiculous, actually, and he had momentary second thoughts about telling Mr. Nate what had happened. But, no … He had to tell someone.
Mr. Nate handed Jamie a sandwich and plopped into a rickety chair painted bright yellow and covered with glittery sticker stars. He enthusiastically bit into his own sandwich. “Really? How odd.”
Jamie was about to say that it was odd to have a radio in the refrigerator in the first place but realized that would be kind of rude. Plus, he was incredibly hungry and the grilled cheeses smelled so good. He grabbed one. It was warm in his hand. “Thank you.”
“No problem!” Mr. Nate sprang out of his chair, reached into the fridge to pull out a jar, and quickly slammed the door shut again. “Pickles! I forgot the pickles. You can’t have a meal without pickles. Even breakfast. I love pickles and pancakes. How about you?”
“I’ve never had them,” Jamie confessed, biting into his sandwich.
“Which? Pickles or pancakes?”
“Neither.” Jamie had already finished his sandwich. It was so good.
Mr. Nate slammed his hand on the table. It made a huge noise, startling them both. “Why, that is just incalculably wrong!”
Jamie had no idea what to say. He offered, “It’s okay. Do you mind if I have some carrots?”
“It is not okay! No!” He quickly corrected himself as Jamie snatched his hand away from the food. “You can have carrots, of course! It is wrong that you’ve never had pickles! Pickles are the elixir of the gods! And you may have whatever food you like, young Jamie Alexander. Do you like baked goods? My Helena is the best baker in existence. Better than Gramma Doris, but you can’t tell Doris that. Someday you will have to sample her pies.”
Jamie grabbed some carrot sticks and chomped. They tasted fresh, like spring. He couldn’t believe how good they were. He wasn’t 100 percent sure what Mr. Nate was going on about, so he tried to get back on track. “So, um … I was hoping I could maybe tell you about what happened to me last night … Well, not to me … More like what I saw happen.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Nate, making up another plate of carrots, “I would love to hear it.”
“It might sound a bit unbelievable.” His splinter throbbed in his hand.
“Nothing is unbelievable.”
“Well, you haven’t heard this,” Jamie said and then cleared his throat dramatically. The sound startled him, and he coughed in an awkward way before finally beginning. “I woke up in the middle of the night … Well, it wasn’t the exact middle … and there were noises outside …”
Mr. Nate leaned forward, elbows on the table. “What kind of noises?”
“Like giants running,” Jamie said, studying Mr. Nate’s expression. He didn’t seem shocked. “So, I snuck out of bed and to my window. My grandmother was standing in the snow. She had no shoes on.”
He paused as his mouth dried out. What if Mr. Nate didn’t believe him?
“Go on.” Mr. Nate petted Jamie’s hand.
“She was excited … like she was waiting for something to happen, and then these huge things … these …” Jamie coughed. He closed his eyes and said, “… these monster things came out of the woods and they surrounded her and then she was one … She was a monster.”
The room was silent. Jamie peeked open one eye.
Mr. Nate had both hands in his own hair and was scratching it furiously, the same way he did when he was trying to think of the perfect spy book for a fourth-grade book report or when he was trying to find a good early reader that wasn’t about misbehaving pets or dinosaurs on the loose. “I see.”
Jamie gulped, opened both eyes, and blurted out the rest of the story—about his grandmother running off with them, about the chicken feathers and blood, about how she always talked about eating him, and that’s when Mr. Nate stood up, yelled “Aha!” and stopped the story in search of a book.
“Do you believe me?” Jamie whispered as Mr. Nate scavenged through a couple of rolling bookshelves.
“Of course!” Mr. Nate scoffe
d. “What kind of person would I be if I didn’t believe the story of a starving boy in mortal danger? But more importantly, what kind of librarian would I be?”
“Does the book you’re trying to find have something to do with what happened last night?” Jamie asked as Mr. Nate abandoned the bookshelves and moved toward the kitchen area again.
“Yes … yes … You could say that it does …” Mr. Nate pulled a large, ancient-looking book out from underneath a toaster oven. The cover was a cracked leather that seemed maroon. Gold framed the binding. The room suddenly smelled of knowledge and dust and campfires.
Mr. Nate flipped open the book and pointed to a picture. A fairy with a very sneaky face was slipping through the window of a house. She held a baby in her arms. He tapped the drawing. “See this? These are changelings. There are millions of stories about them. Fairies would trade human babies for their own sickly children, abscond with the humans, and nobody would know any better.”
Jamie swallowed carrot bits and processed this information for a moment, trying to figure out what the word “abscond” meant. Steal? Why was Mr. Nate telling him this? “Um …”
Mr. Nate went terribly still and stared him in the eye. “This is about you, Jamie Alexander.”
“Are you saying that I’m a fairy changeling?” Jamie tried to reason this out. It was kind of unbelievable. “No offense, Mr. Nate, but my dad and grandmother don’t really seem like the fairy type.”
“True.” Mr. Nate flipped through the pages of the book, obviously searching for something important. “But there are other creatures that they do resemble, other creatures that have been known to steal human children,” he said while his fingers moved through the thick, yellowing pages.
“Why?” Jamie’s voice shook. His fingers clutched a carrot, but he’d forgotten he was even holding it.
Mr. Nate’s glasses dangled from the tip of his nose. He stopped flipping the pages. The wooden clock on the wall sang out a cuckoo, and a tiny bird appeared from a little hinged door. “Why what?”