Here There Are Monsters

by Amelinda Bérubé

  I had no explanation. There wasn’t one. “I thought—I don’t know, I just thought—”

  “Some champion you are,” she sniffed, and soldiered past me.

  “Deirdre, I’m sorry,” I panted, finally coming unstuck to catch up to her. “I don’t know what happened. I just—”

  “Whatever,” she said bitterly. Not looking at me. We slogged the rest of the way home in silence.

  “Wow, that’s quite a haul,” Dad said when we pushed through the door. “But, Deir, where’s yours?”

  “Hers ripped,” I said, before she could speak. “So I put it in here. This is both of ours.”

  Halloween tradition demanded that we sit at the kitchen table afterward and eat as much candy as we could stomach. Deirdre took a listless bite of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup as I fielded questions from our parents, hoping my cheerfulness sounded natural, that they wouldn’t notice her silence.

  “Mom,” I said abruptly, “I want to take karate or something. Some sort of martial arts. Can I do that?”

  She blinked, looked up from the computer.

  “Uh, sure, I guess, if you want. What brought that on?”

  “So I can be the Queen of Swords,” I said. “The Queen of Swords knows how to fight.”

  “We don’t have to worry about you getting into fights or anything, do we?” Dad said it like it was a joke, but it was a real question underneath.

  “No.” I looked at Deirdre. She met my eyes steadily, grave and regal. “I’ll only fight monsters.”

  Mom and Dad exchanged a glance, and Mom shrugged and pulled up a browser window. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  “Here,” Deirdre said, pushing a Mars Bar across the table to me. They were my favorite. “Spoils of war.”

  * * *

  Some champion you are. After that Halloween, I was the perfect champion, thank you very much. Mom’s digging unearthed a little club that trained at the university, run by a grave-faced biochemistry professor, semiretired—Sensei Matt, to me—and his lieutenants, Sensei Ayesha and Sensei Alex. I loved it from the second Sensei Ayesha greeted me at the door to show me how to bow my respect every time I came in. Warm-ups, katas, sparring—all of it was magical.

  That was my kingdom.

  And the next time—when Deirdre stood red-faced, her hands balled in useless fists, outside a laughing circle with some girl in the middle, holding her sparkly pink notebook aloft to read it aloud—I didn’t hesitate. I plunged through the line, seized the ringleader’s hand in both of mine, twisted down and away until she squawked and dropped Deirdre’s notebook in the snow.

  It happened so fast. It was so easy. I held her there, staring into her wide frightened eyes, and stood transfigured, draped in righteous calm. It was a whole different world.

  “You’d better leave her alone,” I said.

  I let her scuttle off to join her friends, who had scattered away from me to regroup across the yard, and turned my back on them.

  “That was amazing,” Deirdre breathed, the notebook clutched to her chest.

  “I’m the Queen of Swords,” I told her, and let my grin escape. “Just don’t tell Mom and Dad.”

  It worked so well for a while. It was like keeping lily beetles in check, picking them off before they multiplied. But last year Deirdre hit seventh grade—like it was a brick wall—and suddenly she was too tempting a target to ignore. They’d found their champion too; with Tyler egging them on, laughing, fearless, the goblin hordes weren’t scared of me anymore. And there was only one of me.

  But I don’t think about Tyler. I won’t follow the path down into the valley, not even in my mind.

  I’m thousands of miles away, and I will never walk there again.

  Four

  As twilight comes creeping into the afternoon, leaving the golden light thin and wintery, Mom stands staring into the fridge at all the foil-wrapped offerings with the door hanging open, the cold pouring out onto the floor.

  “We’ll never eat all this,” she says.

  I fish out the lasagna William brought earlier—its casserole dish is the one sticking out the farthest—and push the door closed, interrupting Mom’s trance.

  “We can freeze some of it.” I stick the tray in the oven. “Right?”

  Mom shrugs listlessly. “I guess.” Her lips twist down at the corners. “I’m not really hungry.”

  Me neither, but I poke at the oven to start it heating anyway. Mom sinks into a chair.

  “Shit,” she says to the tabletop, “it’s Halloween. I was going to get candy today.”

  “Nobody’s coming down here, anyway,” I point out, which is the wrong thing to say, because she goes bright-eyed and quiet, looking out at the porch light gleaming through the gathering dark. It’s true, though. Even if there’s anyone around who’s still young enough for trick-or-treating, nobody’s coming down the street with one lonely house and a pile of cop cars.

  “Anything on the computer?”

  Social media has remained mostly my job, though she insisted on dictating some of the posts. “All the news places are sharing it,” I report. “And the radio stations.”

  Dad finally shuffles into the kitchen a tense and silent half hour later as I’m pulling the lasagna from the oven. I’ve barely seen him all afternoon, not since he retreated to the bedroom, where the sound of newscaster voices has been a faint, constant soundtrack. I cut us all gooey squares, set them on plates on the table. Look at me, holding us together.

  “Nothing new,” Dad sighs, before Mom can speak. He lowers his head into his hands, his elbows propped on the table. I set a plate in front of him, and he blinks up at me, bleary-eyed.

  “Oh,” he says. “Thanks, honey. I’m just…I’m not really…”

  Mom clears her throat, picks up her fork.

  “You need to eat,” she says sternly. “We all do. You can’t just go for twenty-four hours straight without…without eating.”

  She seems to hear herself, stumbles over the words, and looks at her plate, poking at the lasagna half-heartedly with the fork. Without the constant throb of helicopter blades, the quiet crouches over us, a living thing perched in Deirdre’s empty chair. The clock is as loud as rocks falling. Mom’s fork scrapes against her plate. Dad takes a bite, chews dutifully.

  “She can’t have gone far, Sarah,” he continues. “Half of it’s underwater. She’d have had to come out at—”

  Mom lets her fork fall with a clatter, rests her head on her hand.

  “Can we not?” she says, her voice high. Dad stares at her.

  “Well—okay, I was only trying to—”

  “Let’s just eat.” The words tremble. “Okay? Please?”

  A heavy thump echoes down from over our heads, making us all jump. It’s followed by a scrape, a rattle. It falls silent for a moment as we stare at each other, then resumes. An uneven scuffing sound—as if someone’s staggering drunkenly across the roof—punctuated by occasional scrabbling noises.

  “Is that…” Mom begins. Dad frowns. Their eyes meet across the table, and suddenly they’re both lurching to their feet, shoving the chairs out of the way, dropping cutlery on the floor. Dad throws the patio door open and backs up against the railing, craning his neck to scan the roof.

  “Brent?” Mom’s voice is high.

  There’s a long, faint scratching sound, like the point of a stick dragging over the shingles.

  “We need flashlights,” Dad says, and he practically runs back through the kitchen, down the stairs.

  “I’ve got my phone,” I offer, but with shaking hands, it takes me longer than it should to fumble for the button that turns on the flashlight. Over our heads, whatever it is taps and shuffles. Mom takes the phone from me and hurries after Dad, out the front door.

  “Go around the back,” Dad calls. He’s in the middle of the lawn, casting
his flashlight back and forth across the face of the house. Mom’s footsteps crunch on the gravel of the driveway, then in the frost-rimed grass as she disappears around the garage.

  The beam of the flashlight spills over pinkish brick, the sea of gray shingles glittering and empty, stretching upward into shadow. Nothing moves. Dad stalks a few feet farther into the yard to splash the light across the roof of the garage. The backwash of it makes his face pale and tight, shadows stretching up from his cheeks. Mom’s voice echoes from the far side of the house, shrill with desperate hope, calling Deirdre’s name.

  “I can’t see anything,” Dad shouts to her. The wind stirs, a breath against my face. In the bush, something creaks and snaps, falls silent.

  “It can’t be her,” I manage. “Dad, it can’t be. They’ve had a helicopter out here all day.” They would have seen her on the roof. There’s nowhere to hide. How would she even get up there?

  He doesn’t answer, just puts an arm around my shoulders, hugs me close. He doesn’t look away from the roof.

  “Maybe it was squirrels,” Dad ventures, breaking a long silence, as Mom reappears around the corner of the garage, shoulders slumped in defeat. “Or raccoons. I hope they’re not in the attic or something. They could cause an awful lot of damage up there.”

  Mom doesn’t answer. Dad doesn’t voice the possibility that maybe it’s Deirdre hiding up there, but he declares that he’s going to go check, hurries into the house.

  “Go on in, Skye,” Mom whispers as the door falls closed behind him. “I’ll just go around the house one more time. Okay? Go in and tell me when you hear it.”

  The scratching, tapping noises are still there. I yell down to Mom in the backyard from the window, and she flicks the flashlight beam from my phone back and forth while Dad hauls a ladder upstairs, pushes the attic hatch aside. By the time he climbs back down, the sounds are growing fainter, like someone drumming on the roof with their fingers. That’s almost worse. It makes me think of spiders. By then, even Mom has to admit that if there is something on the roof, it can’t be Deirdre.

  “I thought I heard—” Mom shakes her head as she kicks her shoes off. “It doesn’t seem possible, but I could have sworn I heard a bell.”

  “Do you think it was Mog?” I ask.

  “On the roof? After all this time?” She makes a doubtful face, but sighs. “Maybe we should put some kibble out. Just in case.”

  We go back to the table, to our cold abandoned plates, and silence falls again. Mom scans the ceiling anxiously. Dad takes two reluctant bites and then sits back with a sigh. His head droops, and for a second, I’m sure he’s going to cry, and I don’t know how any of us are going to keep it together if he cries. But he sits up with a jerk; he was falling asleep. Mom’s eyes are the ones filled with tears.

  “Dad,” I say. He blinks at me. “Dad, you should go to bed.”

  “Yeah,” he mumbles, pushing his chair back. “Yeah. Fair enough. Wake me up later, okay, Sarah? I’ll take a turn waiting up.”

  Mom doesn’t answer, and eventually he sighs and shuffles from the room. That leaves me and Mom facing each other. She forces herself through half her lasagna before she pushes it aside, her eyes still dangerously bright.

  “You can go to bed too, if you want,” Mom says. But the words have a brittle edge that tells me there’s only one right answer.

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll stay up.”

  “We have to leave the lights on. All of them. So she’ll see them. That’s what they told us to do. And leave the windows open. In case we might hear something.”

  I was there when Officer Leduc explained this before leaving for the night. But I nod anyway. She drums her fingers against the table, then gets up. Sets a dish of cat food outside the patio door, closes the screen.

  “I may as well try to get some work done,” she says, and for once, it’s a relief. Something to take her attention off me.

  When she’s about to pass my chair, she stops suddenly and leans over to gather me into a hug. I freeze for a startled second before managing to return it—Mom’s not usually a huggy person. Her voice breaks as she speaks into my shoulder. “Oh my God, Skye, what are we going to do? I can’t stand it.”

  “It’s okay, Mom.” It’s not. Of course it’s not. “They’ll find her.”

  She straightens up, shaking her head, lips pressed tight together, and disappears into the living room. After a moment, the clatter of her keyboard rattles into the silence. Icy air from the patio door spills over my feet. Outside, night is deepening across the yard, imperceptibly as a flower opening, full of whispers and shifting leaves.

  * * *

  I get my own laptop from my room and try to disappear into the internet, but none of my friends are online; they’re busy getting drunk up the hill, forgetting about me. Refresh and scroll, refresh and scroll. Eventually the couch creaks as Mom gets up with a long, shaky sigh. I guess her distraction is working about as well as mine. Her footsteps disappear down the hall, leaving me alone with my thoughts. They chase one another in free-falling circles, fizzling into blank, ashy anxiety.

  My head hurts. My eyes feel hollow. But sleep is impossible. I’ll never sleep again. I should have been awake. I keep remembering Mom’s accusing words: You didn’t go looking for her? We left you in charge! Or Deirdre’s sniffle on another Halloween night in the snow: Some champion you are. The should-have-dones swoop around me, diving at me, digging in.

  It’s not my job to protect her. I repeat it like a mantra. It never was, not really. It should never have been my job in the first place.

  It was too big a job for me. I went overboard trying to fill those shoes before. And I won’t think about that. That wasn’t my fault. I had to. I had no choice.

  It’s not long before I abandon the computer too, desperate to move, to do something. Anything. The training exercises I learned in karate have lost their calming magic since the spring. I should go for a run. Not one of Dad’s leisurely jogs, but one of the grueling, never-ending runs that my sensei used to put us through. You can’t think about anything else when your legs are made of burning rubber and sweat is running into your eyes.

  My pacing carries me down the hall, following the thump and creak of whatever Mom’s doing. I haven’t been in Deirdre’s room since she trashed all her artwork. With the overhead light on, it looks bare and disheveled: the empty shelves, the tape clinging to the walls here and there with a corner of torn paper, the rumpled bed still full of leaves. Mom is picking up clothes from where they got scattered during the search, folding them and putting them back in the closet.

  Speaking up is probably dangerous, but guilt prods me into it.

  “Can I help?”

  Mom clears her throat. Doesn’t look at me.

  “You could clean up her bed, I guess. They took their pictures and everything.” She pauses to study the heap of leaves, puts a fretful hand to her temple. “I just can’t figure out… You don’t know what that’s about, do you?”

  I hug my elbows. “Why would I?”

  She shakes her head, goes back to the clothes on the floor. “Just asking.”

  I set my jaw and grab the trash can from the corner. Mom is silent as I sweep leaves from the mattress into the garbage. A few spill from my hands, and I pick them up carefully, one by one.

  When I go to scoop up a double handful, my fingers connect with something solid at the bottom of the pile, heavier than any of the sticks. Frowning, I close my hand around it—flat, blunt-edged—and pull it free of the leaves, into the light.

  It’s a sword. My sword. The one Dad made for me, years ago, from a leftover strip of hardwood flooring. I’d badgered him for it nonstop, pleaded, offered to help, offered to do dishes for a million years—whatever it took. He wouldn’t let me near most of the power tools, but he did let me run his little sander back and forth over its rough-cut planes until they
took on a smooth sheen, showed me how to brush on the finish. By now, the grip is an ugly patchwork of colors, layers of electrical tape worn through and covered up again. It’s warm and heavy in my hand, the golden grain of the beveled oak blade a familiar, irregular tracery.

  “Isn’t that yours?” Mom says.

  I nod without looking at her. Deirdre must have found it in the garage where I dumped it. And she left it here, before she went out into the woods yesterday. She never played with it. Did she leave it here for me to find? To…what, to send some sort of message?

  It feels like a rebuke. I’m supposed to be doing something. I’m supposed to go find her.

  And that’s stupid, obviously. I don’t have a helicopter or infrared cameras.

  Rage sweeps over me, leaving my eyes blurry and my hands cold. I grip the sword so tight my fingers go numb. Did she start this whole thing just as some sort of trick to drag me back into the kingdoms? No. I will not be responsible for this. I refuse. Why is she so impossible?

  I will not let her make this my fault.

  I clench my teeth and put the sword aside for long enough to finish cleaning the leaves out of the bed. And then I march with the sword across the house, through the balcony doors, out to the railing. Nothing stirs beyond the porch light. There’s only the faint murmur of the wind, the tiny noises of little things nosing invisibly through the brush. No human sound at all.

  I heft the sword and throw it, as hard as I can, end over end into the darkness. I want to scream. Instead, I let only a little huff of sound escape. The sword cartwheels out into the garden to land with a snap and crash in the tall grass under the apple tree.

  I stand there panting, my heart thudding behind my eyes. What was I expecting, that it would bring her running? That I’d hear her shriek of outrage? Maybe I’m trying to throw off the weight in my chest, trying to evict the hollow screaming feeling that I was the one who ran away, who turned her back. That I was the one who left her behind.

  I turn blindly back to the house, into the comfortless light, and pull the door closed behind me.