08 - The Girl Who Cried Monster (2 page)

“So you’ll believe me,” I said seriously.

“I don’t
believe
in monsters,” Aaron replied. “You know that, Lucy.
Save your monster stories for Randy. He’s just a kid.”

“Will you believe me if one drops out of that tree?” I asked.

“Nothing is going to drop out of that tree. Except maybe some leaves,” Aaron
said.

“Go get the broom and we’ll see,” I said.

“Okay. Fine.” He went trotting toward the house.

I grabbed the broom out of his hand when he brought it over. “Come on,” I
said, leading the way to the tree. “I hope the monster hasn’t climbed away.”

Aaron rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe I’m going along with this, Lucy. I
must be
really
bored!”

“You won’t be bored in a second,” I promised. “If the tree monster is still
up there.”

We stepped into the shade of the tree. I moved close to the trunk and gazed
up into its leafy green branches. “Whoa. Stay right there.” I put my hand on
Aaron’s chest, holding him back. “It could be dangerous.”

“Give me a break,” he muttered under his breath.

“I’ll try to shake the branch and bring it down,” I said.

“Let me get this straight,” Aaron said. “You expect me to believe that you’re
going to take the broom, shake a tree branch, and a monster is going to come
tumbling down from up there?”

“Uh-huh.” I could see that the broom handle wasn’t quite long enough to
reach. “I’m going to have to climb up a little,” I told Aaron. “Just watch out,
okay?”

“Ooh, I’m shaking. I’m
soooo
scared!” Aaron cried, making fun of me.

I shimmied up the trunk and pulled myself onto the lowest limb. It took me a
while because I had the broom in one hand.

“See any scary monsters up there?” Aaron asked smugly.

“It’s up there,” I called down, fear creeping into my voice. “It’s trapped up
there. It’s… very angry, I think.”

Aaron snickered. “You’re so dumb.”

I pulled myself up to a kneeling position on the limb. Then I raised the
broom in front of me.

I lifted it up to the next branch. Higher. Higher.

Then, holding on tightly to the trunk with my free hand, I raised the broom
as far as it would go—and pushed it against the tree limb.

Success!

I lowered my eyes immediately to watch Aaron.

He let out a deafening shriek of horror as the monster toppled from the tree
and landed right on his chest.

Well, actually it wasn’t a monster that landed with a soft, crackly thud on
Aaron’s chest.

It was a ratty old bird’s nest that some blue jays had built two springs ago.

But Aaron wasn’t expecting it. So it gave him a really good scare.

“Gotcha!” I proclaimed after climbing down from the tree.

He scowled at me. His face was a little purple, which made his freckles look
really weird. “You and your monsters,” he muttered.

That’s exactly what my mom said about ten minutes later. Aaron had gone home,
and I’d come into the kitchen and pulled a box of juice out of the fridge.

Sure enough, Mom appeared in the doorway, her eyes hard and steely, her
expression grim. I could see right away that she was ready to give her “Don’t
Scare Randy” lecture.

I leaned back against the counter and pretended to listen. The basic idea of
the lecture was that my stories were doing permanent harm to my delicate little
brother. That I should be encouraging Randy to be brave instead of making him
terrified that monsters lurked in every corner.

“But, Mom—I saw a
real
monster under the hedge this morning!” I
said.

I don’t really know why I said that. I guess I just wanted to interrupt the
lecture.

Mom got really exasperated. She threw up her hands and sighed. She has
straight, shiny black hair, like Randy and me, and she has green eyes, cat eyes,
and a small, feline nose. Whenever Mom starts in on me with one of her lectures,
I always picture her as a cat about to pounce.

Don’t get me wrong. She’s very pretty. And she’s a good mom, too.

“I’m going to discuss this with your dad tonight,” she said. “Your dad thinks
this monster obsession is just a phase you’re going through. But I’m not so
sure.”

“Life
is just a phase I’m going through,” I said softly.

I thought it was pretty clever. But she just glared at me.

Then she reminded me that if I didn’t hurry, I’d be late for my Reading
Rangers meeting.

I glanced at the clock. She was right. My appointment was for four o’clock.

Reading Rangers is a summer reading program at the town library that Mom and
Dad made me enroll in. They said they didn’t want me to waste the whole summer.
And if I joined this thing at the library, at least I’d read some good books.

The way Reading Rangers works is, I have to go see Mr. Mortman, the
librarian, once a week. And I have to give a short report and answer some
questions about the book I read that week. I get a gold star for every book I
report on.

If I get six gold stars, I get a prize. I think the prize is a book. Big
deal, right? But it’s just a way to make you read.

I thought I’d read some of the scary mystery novels that all my friends are
reading. But no way. Mr. Mortman insists on everyone reading “classics”. He
means
old
books.

“I’m going to skate over,” I told my mom, and hurried to my room to get my
Rollerblades.

“You’d better
fly
over!” my mom called up to me. “Hey,” she added a
few seconds later, “it looks like rain!”

She was always giving me weather reports.

I passed by Randy’s room. He was in there in the dark, no lights, the shades
pulled. Playing Super Nintendo, as usual.

By the time I got my Rollerblades laced and tied, I had only five minutes to
get to the library. Luckily, it was only six or seven blocks away.

I was in big trouble anyway. I had managed to read only four chapters of
Huckleberry Finn,
my book for the week. That meant I was going to have to
fake it with Mr. Mortman.

I picked the book up from my shelf. It was a new paperback. I wrinkled up
some of the pages near the back to make it look as if I’d read that far. I
tucked it into my backpack, along with a pair of sneakers. Then I made my way
down the stairs—not easy in Rollerblades—and headed to the Timberland Falls
town library.

The library was in a ramshackle old house on the edge of the Timberland
woods. The house had belonged to some eccentric old hermit. And when he died, he
had no family, so he donated the house to the town. They turned it into a
library.

Some kids said the house had been haunted. But kids say that about
every
creepy old house. The library
did
look like a perfect haunted house,
though.

It was three stories tall, dark shingled, with a dark, pointy roof between
two stone turrets. The house was set back in the trees, as if hiding there. It
was always in the shade, always dark and cold inside.

Inside, the old floorboards creaked beneath the thin carpet the town had put
down. The high windows let in very little light. And the old wooden bookcases
reached nearly to the ceiling. When I edged my way through the narrow aisles
between the tall, dark shelves, I always felt as if they were about to close in
on me.

I had this frightening feeling that the shelves would lean in on me, cover me
up, and I’d be buried there in the darkness forever. Buried under a thousand
pounds of dusty, mildewy old books.

But of course that’s silly.

It was just a very old house. Very dark and damp. Very creaky. Not as clean
as a library should be. Lots of cobwebs and dust.

Mr. Mortman did his best, I guess. But he was kind of creepy, too.

The thing all of us kids hated the most about him was that his hands always
seemed to be wet. He would smile at you with those beady little black eyes of
his lighting up on his plump, bald head. He would reach out and shake your hand.
And his hand was always
sopping!

When he turned the pages of books, he’d leave wet fingerprints on the
corners. His desktop always had small puddles on the top, moist handprints on
the leather desk protector.

He was short and round. With that shiny, bald head and those tiny black eyes,
he looked a lot like a mole. A wet-pawed mole.

He spoke in a high, scratchy voice. Nearly always whispered. He wasn’t a bad
guy, really. He seemed to like kids. He wasn’t mean or anything. And he
really
liked books.

He was just weird, that’s all. He sat on a tall wooden stool that made him
hover over his enormous desk. He kept a deep aluminum pan on the side of his
desk. Inside the pan were several little turtles, moving around in about an inch
of water. “My timid friends,” I heard him call them once.

Sometimes he’d pick up one of them and hold it in his pudgy fingers, high in
the air, until it tucked itself into its shell. Then he’d gently set it down, a
pleased smile on his pale, flabby face.

He sure loved his turtles. I guess they were okay as pets. But they were kind
of smelly. I always tried to sit on the other side of the desk, as far away from
the turtle pan as I could get.

Well, I skated to the library as fast as I could. I was only a few minutes
late when I skated into the cool shade of the library driveway. The sky was
clouding over. I sat down on the stone steps and pulled off the Rollerblades.
Then I quickly slid into my sneakers and, carrying my Rollerblades, I walked
through the front door.

Making my way through the stacks—the tall, narrow shelves at the back of
the main reading room—I dropped the skates against the wall. Then I walked
quickly through the aisles to Mr. Mortman’s desk against the back wall.

He heard my footsteps and immediately glanced up from the pile of books he
was stamping with a big rubber stamp. The ceiling light made his bald head shine
like a lamp. He smiled. “Hi, Lucy,” he said in his squeaky voice. “Be right with
you.”

I said hi and sat down in the folding chair in front of his desk. I watched
him stamp the books. He was wearing a gray turtleneck sweater, which made him
look a lot like his pet turtles.

Finally, after glancing at the big, loudly ticking clock on the wall, he
turned to me.

“And what did you read for Reading Rangers this week, Lucy?” He leaned over
the desk toward me. I could see wet fingerprints on the dark desktop.

“Uh…
Huckleberry Finn.”
I pulled the book from my backpack and
dropped it into my lap.

“Yes, yes. A wonderful book,” Mr. Mortman said, glancing at the paperback in
my lap. “Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” I said quickly. “I really enjoyed it. I… couldn’t put it down.”

That was sort of true. I never picked it up—so how could I put it down?

“What did you like best about
Huckleberry Finn
?” Mr. Mortman asked,
smiling at me expectantly.

“Uh… the description,” I told him.

I had my Reading Rangers gold star in my T-shirt pocket. And I had a new book
in my backpack—
Frankenstein,
by Mary Shelley.

Maybe I’ll read
Frankenstein
out loud to Randy, I thought evilly.

That would probably make his teeth chatter forever!

The late afternoon sun was hidden behind spreading rain clouds. I had walked
nearly all the way home when I realized I had forgotten my Rollerblades.

So I turned around and went back. I wasn’t sure how late the library stayed
open. Mr. Mortman had seemed to be entirely alone in there. I hoped he hadn’t
decided to close up shop early. I really didn’t want to leave my new
Rollerblades in there overnight.

I stopped and stared up at the old library. Deep in the shade, it seemed to
stare back at me, its dark windows like black, unblinking eyes.

I climbed the stone steps, then hesitated with my hand on the door. I had a
sudden chill.

Was it just from stepping into the deep shade?

No. It was something else.

I had a funny feeling. A bad feeling.

I get those sometimes. A signal. A moment of unease.

Like something bad is about to happen.

Shaking it off, I pushed open the creaking old door and stepped into the
musty darkness of the library.

Shadows danced across the wall as I made my way to the main room. A tree
branch tapped noisily against the dust-covered pane of a high window.

The library was silent except for the creaking floorboards beneath my
sneakers. As I entered the main room, I could hear the steady
tick-tick-tick
of the wall clock.

The lights had all been turned off.

I thought I felt something scamper across my shoe.

A mouse?

I stopped short and glanced down.

Just a dustball clinging to the base of a bookshelf.

Whoa, Lucy, I scolded myself. It’s just a dusty old library. Nothing to get
weird about. Don’t let your wild imagination take off and lead you into trouble.

Trouble?

I still had that strange feeling. A gentle but insistent gnawing at my
stomach. A tug at my chest.

Something isn’t right. Something bad is about to happen.

People call them
premonitions.
It’s a good vocabulary word for what I
was feeling right then.

I found my Rollerblades where I had left them, against the wall back in the
stacks. I grabbed them up, eager to get out of that dark, creepy place.

I headed quickly back toward the entrance, tiptoeing for some reason. But a
sound made me stop.

I held my breath. And listened.

It was just a cough.

Peering down the narrow aisle, I could see Mr. Mortman hovered over his desk.
Well, actually, I could just see part of him—one arm, and some of his face
when he leaned to the left.