The Fabulous Zed Watson!

by Basil Sylvester

  Apparently, camping involves sleeping on the dirt in a flimsy piece of fabric stretched around some metal poles.

  Who knew?

  Sam grunted and hammered in the pegs to anchor the first tent into the ground. “Anyone going to help me?” she asked.

  I sipped my iced tea.

  “Sam,” I said, sticking out my pinky while I held the straw and slurped the refreshing drink, “you’re always talking about how buff you are. Sun’s out, guns out, right?”

  She grunted.

  “So in my view, you should see this as an opportunity to show off your athletic prowess.” I emphasized the last word to sound smart and fancy. Taylor was always writing about the monster’s “athletic prowess,” so I assumed it was a compliment.

  Sam laughed a hollow laugh. “You’re really a pain in the butt, you know that?”

  “It’s all part of my Zedly charm,” I said, and blew bubbles into my tea.

  Gabe reappeared just as Sam finished setting up the second tent.

  “Nice timing,” I said. “Like showing up in the kitchen after the dishes are done.”

  “You have got to be kidding me!” Sam cried.

  “What?” I yelped. “I was here for moral support.”

  Beaming from ear to ear, Gabe was covered in mud, sticks, dirt and who knew what else. Well, he probably did.

  “You wouldn’t believe how much poison ivy is in these woods!” He smiled.

  Now Sam and I shared a look.

  “Dinner,” Sam announced. “And, Zed, you’re doing the dishes.”

  Over dinner, we took a closer look at the photos Gabe and I had taken. But we still couldn’t figure out what the heck the grave was trying to tell us. Even Sam just shrugged and said, “Yep. That’s weird.”

  She did let me borrow her phone, though, to do a quick update on the quest for the fan site. I had to stand on top of the car to get a signal, but I was able to fire off a quick post about the grave. I even added a photo, in case anyone else could help us figure out the clue.

  There were more messages of support, saying things like “MONSTERS UNITE!” And “REVEAL THE TRUTH!”

  And one weird one, from a new member of the site with a handle I didn’t recognize: @Hi_Its_Another. Their message simply said, “How are you sure this is the right path?”

  I was about to answer when Sam yelled, “Don’t use up all my data.”

  I turned off the phone and jumped down from the car.

  The sun set.

  The fire crackled.

  “We don’t have the clue figured out,” I said, “but at least it’s marshmallow-roasting time! Right?”

  Sam nodded, looking even more demented in the reflection of the glowing embers. “You can roast two each. Then bedtime.”

  “Two!” I said. “After all the dishes I washed? This is child labor!”

  “Two or zero,” Sam said.

  “She means it,” Gabe whispered.

  “Fine.” I roasted and ate two marshmallows. Of course, I also ate a ton more unroasted marshmallows. It’s not like Sam told me I couldn’t do that.

  Chapter 14

  Weirdos

  Sam let Gabe and me each take a mug of hot chocolate to bed in our tent.

  “First night of camping, we always get some kind of treat,” Gabe explained. He downed his quickly.

  I, on the other hand, like to savor.

  “Cool. Where do I plug in my mug warmer?” I looked around the tent but couldn’t find an outlet.

  Gabe snorted. “You really aren’t much of a camper, are you?”

  “Camp—that I get. Camp-ING? Don’t see the attraction. So you’re saying there is no outlet?”

  “Good night, Zed.” He flicked off his battery-powered light.

  I sipped my chocolate in the darkness.

  The absolute darkness.

  The darker-than-my-windowless-closet-of-a-room darkness.

  And since there wasn’t an outlet, there was also no way to plug in my night-light. Even with the three pillows I’d brought, plus the extra comforter and slippers, I found it impossible to sleep.

  It wasn’t just the roots and stones and sticks jabbing me in the butt.

  It was the noise. Nature is not quiet. There was a rustle in the trees. It sounded huge.

  I heard a wolf howl. It sounded hungry.

  Was that a snake slithering?

  Then a roar just a foot away from my head!

  “Gabe, wake up! WAKE UP!”

  “I wasn’t asleep, Zed. We’ve only been here, like, two minutes.”

  “I hear a bear,” I said.

  Gabe chuckled. “That’s Sam snoring.”

  “Seriously? I might need to borrow your earphones.”

  Gabe chuckled again.

  “I’m not kidding,” I said. “They help you block stuff out, don’t they?” I hadn’t meant it to be mean or anything, but Gabe stopped chuckling.

  I heard him turn over. “Good night, Zed.”

  “Sorry, Gabe,” I said quietly.

  He didn’t say anything.

  I tried to settle myself down. I focused on the cool ground and pretended I was a vampire sleeping in an open grave. Of course, that got my mind working on the actual grave we’d found. So sleep? Not happening.

  I was about to ask Gabe if he was still awake when I heard him whisper, “Zed? Are you still awake?”

  “I don’t know how I could be asleep with all these rocks in my backside,” I whispered back.

  It was dark, but I could hear the rustle of fabric while Gabe readjusted himself.

  “You get used to it eventually,” he said.

  “Do you camp often?”

  “Yeah, Sam, Dad and I go camping a lot in the summer. Sometimes even in winter.”

  “Well, without a mug warmer, you can count me out for that. I can’t imagine intentionally doing this more than once a decade.”

  His voice seemed to get quieter. “It’s one of the few things my dad and I both like.”

  There was a short silence, then a click. Gabe had switched on the camping lantern, and it flickered for a second before coming on fully with a low humming noise. He was propped up on one elbow, staring into the light.

  I sat up, rearranging my pillows to support my new position. Gabe reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

  He unfurled it in front of us. It was a copy of our map.

  Man, this guy and pockets.

  “I didn’t know you made a copy,” I said. I admired his neat handwriting and the notes around each place name, as well as the question marks he’d added for some of the other possible destinations.

  He ran his hand over the paper to smooth its creases. “Are you worried we aren’t doing this right? What if we’re completely wrong or can’t figure out all the clues?”

  “Nah, we’ll figure it out, Gabe. We’ve already got this far. The grave exists! We were right about that, and we’ll be right about the rest. We’re smart cookies,” I said, borrowing a phrase from my dad.

  I didn’t mention the question from @Hi_Its_Another. They hadn’t said we were on the wrong path. It nagged at me a bit, but I wasn’t sure why.

  Gabe smiled at me. “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?” I’d been having a Zed moment.

  “Stay so positive all the time. Like nothing bothers you.”

  I thought about what he was saying. But I knew it wasn’t true. I remembered the times today—and the many times before—when I had been misgendered, called a little girl or boy. I’d felt awful.

  “But I am bothered,” I said. “All the time.”

  “You never show it.” Gabe looked down at the map. His hair completely covered his eyes, so I couldn’t see his expression.

  “I mean, c’mon, Gabe, you have to admit I did kinda lose it about Rusty Raccoon’s A/C breaking down this morning.”

  “Rusty Raccoon?”

  “That’s my secret nickname for Sam’s car.”

  He
smiled. “I saw the end of you losing it, but how did that all start?”

  “Oh, you had your headphones on, so maybe you didn’t hear that?” I thought back to what I’d said earlier about Gabe blocking things out. He wore his headphones almost constantly. And he was so quiet.

  I thought he might turn off the light, but he surprised me by carrying on the conversation.

  “It’s kind of like a superpower, being positive like you.”

  “Um . . . maybe. I do try. I told you I sometimes pretend I’m in disguise.”

  “Like Cassandra pretending to be human.”

  “Yeah. It’s one of the reasons I’m so into The Monster’s Castle. It helps me try to stay positive, because the monsters are so positive. They help me accept my inner monster.”

  Gabe thought about this. “Maybe me too, in a way.”

  “Inner monster? You?” I thought of how careful he was to step around weeds and bugs every time we stopped the car.

  “Well, how do you mean it?” Gabe asked.

  “I just mean that reading the book, or what we have of it, helps me accept that I’m never going to be ‘normal,’ or un-weird.”

  “Like how the monsters in the book refuse to change when the humans want them to be un-weird.”

  “Exactly. Taylor clearly makes the monsters the heroes. And that means being weird is okay. Better than okay, actually.”

  “But what if, when we find the rest of the book, we find out the monsters do give in?”

  “No way. Think about how awesome they are in the chapters we have. They’re only going to get more awesome.”

  Gabe sat thinking.

  I did too.

  He broke the silence. “So for me, being weird is being really into plants. Which is, I guess, a little weird.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And for me, it’s understanding that I’m not cis.”

  “Cis?”

  “Cisgender. It means you are the gender you were born with.”

  “Got it. But you’re not cis?”

  “Right. I knew that my assigned gender wasn’t me.”

  “You said you’re nonbinary.”

  “Yes. Which, for me, means I don’t actually identify with a gender. He, she, girl, boy—neither feels like me.”

  “So they/them,” Gabe said.

  “And even with a great family like mine, there are challenges in coming out as nonbinary. People can think it’s weird. And they don’t always understand me.”

  “Like ice cream sellers constantly calling you ‘little boy’ or ‘little girl.’”

  “You noticed that?”

  “Yeah. The last one kept saying ‘she’ even after Sam called you ‘they’ twice.”

  “Yeah, that happens all the time. But reading The Monster’s Castle helps me realize that it’s not my problem—it’s theirs. That’s why I’m so drawn to the monsters. The monsters don’t let how people see them affect how they see themselves.”

  Gabe smiled. “And that lets the monsters stay positive. So they never give up on their weird quests. Lysander and Yves, and Marion and Cassandra, don’t stop trying to be together and don’t stop searching for each other. Well, at least in the chapters we have.”

  “Positively correct,” I said. “Taylor got that accepting your inner monster is amazing.” I held up my cold mug of cocoa. “To Taylor.”

  Gabe held up the lamp. “To Taylor.”

  We clinked.

  “TO BED!” Sam called from the other tent.

  Gabe smirked and shut off the lamp. “We resume our quest tomorrow!” he said in a whisper.

  “Confident in who we are,” I said. “A couple of weirdos.”

  “Good night, Zed.”

  “Gabe? Thanks for noticing the ice cream thing.”

  “No problem. I even noticed that it’s 3–2 for boy versus girl.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yup.”

  “That is hilarious. You should write down the tally in one of your notepads. Ooh, we could even make a game out of it.”

  “Game?”

  “Yeah. We’ll predict what we think each server will call me. If we disagree, it’s a bet. Loser buys the ice cream.”

  “Sure. That sounds like fun.”

  And in just seconds, he was snoring.

  I lay back on my pillows and tried to fall asleep by repeating the mantra in my head.

  “Lysander St. Clair.”

  “Aged 33.”

  “Lysander St. Clair.”

  “Aged 33.”

  “Lysander . . .”

  Chapter 15

  Arcadia

  Of course, my saying the mantra all night didn’t get us closer to solving what it actually meant.

  But that didn’t stop our momentum.

  “Okay, monster hunters,” Sam called from the front seat of the car. “Almost in Arcadia. It’s time for our daily recap. Why are we heading here?”

  I cleared my throat and began. “The third stanza in Taylor’s poem is from the point of view of a bat.”

  Gabe chimed in. “And the bat talks about a memento mori.”

  “I thought it was someone’s name. But of course it’s Latin.”

  “It means ‘a reminder of death.’”

  “That’s creepy,” Sam said. “So why aren’t we looking for someplace called Memento or Mori?”

  “If I may continue,” I continued. “The poem links to the chapter called ‘The Witch’s Familiar.’”

  “Let me guess,” Sam said. “The familiar is a bat?”

  “I knew you were a secret fan of the book!” I said. “The witch is named Cassandra Gray, and she is awesome. She flies around at night kicking butt and casting spells on people who have wronged her and her monster friends.” I started making “piew piew piew” noises, so Gabe picked up the story.

  “Cassandra wears a charm that her zombie friend made for her, and it has the words ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ carved on it.”

  I pulled out my notebook and read a selection, doing my best to sound like an awesome-cool English witch.

  As Cassandra flew over New York, she spied Marion running through the rain-soaked alleyways. His own battalion was in hot pursuit, guns at the ready. He was unarmed, having denounced the tools of violence that had made him a soldier. A soldier for a cause he no longer believed in.

  “Marion, run!” Cassandra called. But her voice was swallowed up by the fog and gloom.

  “Traitor,” they had called him.

  “Hero” and “friend” were the words she chose.

  There was a shot, and Marion fell.

  Cassandra’s rage knew no bounds.

  Marion had once saved Cassandra on the battlefield.

  Now she had to save him.

  Another shot rang out as the witch hurtled toward earth, her broom nearly breaking apart with the speed.

  As she reached the rooftops, the soldiers looked up, their eyes wide with horror.

  In a flash she was upon them, kicking, slashing, casting spells.

  In seconds, she had defeated them all. They lay unconscious at her feet.

  BEEP! BEEP! BEEEP!

  All of a sudden, Sam’s phone beeped loudly.

  “Uh, you wanna answer that?” I said.

  “Finish the story!”

  Ooh! She was gripped.

  I resumed the narration.

  “Cassandra,” said a weak voice.

  A mere glance at Marion showed Cassandra that she was too late. Life was leaving him.

  “I will save you,” she said.

  “No. I know what that will do to you. My life is not worth that.”

  “It’s my choice.” She closed her eyes and laid her hands on his wound.

  Lightning flashed as Cassandra spoke the words that would transfer the last of her sun magic to him. The magic flowed from her fingertips.

  Was the cost too great?

  Cassandra saved Marion, knowing that doing so sentenced them to never-ending separation.

  Marion now ris
es at dawn to wander the world alone. Each night, he must die again.

  With only her moon magic remaining, Cassandra must escape the sun’s rays or she too will die.

  For only a fleeting moment, at dawn and sunset, can they dare to exchange a greeting before each must flee to safety.

  Now Cassandra has only her beloved familiar to ease her loneliness.

  She holds up the memento mori Marion left for her one day in her belfry home.

  She gazes at it when she misses him and reads the words: “Et in Arcadia ego.”

  “It’s all so creepily Gothic I could just die!” I said.

  “Et in Arcadia ego means ‘There I also dwell,’” Gabe said. “When you jam the Latin and the translation together, you get ‘I live in Arcadia.’”

  BEEP! BEEP! BEEEP!

  Sam still ignored the phone.

  I cut in. “Anyway, to make a short story long, Taylor is telling us to look for a church in the town of Arcadia, Indiana, because the bat and Cassandra ‘dwell’ in the tower of an abandoned church during the daylight hours.”

  “We think the clue must be hidden somewhere up in the belfry,” Gabe said.

  BEEP! BEEP! BEEEP!

  Sam tossed her phone back to me. “Figure out why it’s making that noise.”

  I picked up the beeping phone off the seat next to me and read the screen.

  “There’s a text. It says, ‘Alert. Tornado warning. Morgan County. 9 a.m. to noon.’” I looked outside. Dark clouds were gathering around us. “OMG!!! That’s here!” I yelled.

  “That’s now!” Gabe said.

  At that precise moment, the skies opened up.

  The wind howled.

  A bolt of lightning struck a telephone pole just as we drove past it. The thunder shook the car.

  Gabe and I hugged and prepared for the worst.

  “I think I hear a tornado!” Gabe yelled.

  “We’re all going to diiiiiiiiie!” I yelled.

  “If you two don’t calm down right now, a tornado will be the least of your worries,” Sam said.

  Rain began to pour down like someone had turned a hose on our windshield.

  Sam cursed under her breath as the storm intensified. She hit the hazard lights and clutched the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles turned white.