The League of Beastly Dreadfuls Book 1, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015 by Holly Grant
Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2015 by Josie Portillo
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grant, Holly.
The league of beastly dreadfuls. book 1 / Holly Grant. — First edition.
pages cm.
Summary: Anastasia, nearly eleven, is snatched from her elementary school and sent to live at a former insane asylum with two great aunts she had never met after being told that her parents died in a tragic vacuum cleaner accident.
ISBN 978-0-385-37007-3 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-385-37008-0 (lib. bdg.) —
ISBN 978-0-385-37009-7 (ebook)
[1. Orphans—Fiction. 2. Aunts—Fiction. 3. Kidnapping—Fiction.
4. Shadows—Fiction. 5. Humorous stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.G766757Le 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2013050800
eBook ISBN 9780385370097
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v4.1
a
for
Muffy
and
Mike
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1. A Splendid Day for a Funeral
2. Premonition of Doom
3. Prim and Prude
4. Fingernails on Glass
5. The Child-Shaped Hollow
6. The Silver Heart
7. Leeches
8. Eyeballs
9. View Through a Keyhole
10. A Peculiar Door
11. The Memories Book
12. Eavesdropping
13. The Ring of Mirrors
14. Pink Footprints
15. Peppermints
16. Shadows in the Parlor
17. Strange Notes
18. The Dark Gauntlet
19. The League of Beastly Dreadfuls
20. The Triumphant Zonk
21. Squeak ’n’ Poo
22. The Mouse Destroyer
23. The Black Envelope
24. The Great Cheese Caper
25. Into the Mercurial Garden
26. The Creature in the Woods
27. Weirder and Weirder
28. Stars
Etiquette Manual for the Prim and Proper Sort
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
A Splendid Day for a Funeral
ANASTASIA’S DAY BEGAN with a funeral, and it went downhill from there.
Shivering beneath an umbrella, she wondered whether polka-dotted pajamas and fuzzy bunny slippers were suitable funeral attire. The bunnies were perhaps a little too cheerful, goggling at the deceased with bright marble eyes. Well, at least the weather was properly miserable. It was drizzly and dour. The ground squelched with mud, and gray clouds curdled the sky. Anastasia regarded the scraggly November trees with satisfaction, counting seven crows hunched in the bare branches.
Yes, it was a splendid day for a funeral.
Anastasia’s father let out a sniffle, and she handed him the tissue box.
“I just can’t believe it,” Mr. McCrumpet snuffled. “It doesn’t make sense. What a tragedy.”
“She’s going to a better place,” Anastasia told him, patting his arm.
“The compost heap?” Mr. McCrumpet cried.
“Well,” Anastasia said, “it’s a very nice compost heap.”
They bowed their heads in respectful silence. Rain gurgled in the drainpipes.
“I suppose we should say a few words,” Mr. McCrumpet sighed.
“Fred, where’s my breakfast?” sounded a nearby bellow. “You know I’m ravenous when I wake up!”
“Coming, dear,” Mr. McCrumpet called, his shoulders drooping.
“Dearly beloved,” Anastasia said in her best funeral voice, “we are gathered here to say goodbye to our friend Betty Lou.”
“Waffles!” screeched the voice from the window. Mr. McCrumpet flinched.
“Betty Lou was a great companion,” Anastasia went on.
“What does a woman have to do to get a simple Belgian waffle around here?” Mrs. McCrumpet hollered.
“Betty Lou, we’ll miss your hairy lips,” Anastasia finished in a rush. “Rest in peace. Is that enough, Dad? I think Mom’s about to explode.” Besides, her bunny slippers were getting soggy. “Sorry about your plant.”
“Another loss.” Mr. McCrumpet blew his nose. “And Betty Lou was such a magnificent Venus flytrap specimen. Really first-rate.”
“Until she stopped eating flies,” Anastasia pointed out.
“Until she stopped eating flies,” Mr. McCrumpet echoed gloomily.
“Do you expect the waffles to cook themselves?” came the demand from the window. “And I want my Happy Forest Maple Syrup heated this time! Yesterday it was like eating cold glue!”
“For crumbs’ sake, can’t a man mourn his Venus flytrap in peace?” Mr. McCrumpet muttered, throwing Betty Lou onto the odiferous jumble of coffee grounds and eggshells before stomping back into the McCrumpet house. Anastasia followed behind, her bunnies squishing with each step.
Mrs. McCrumpet wasn’t the only one getting her breakfast late. Anastasia lathered her toast standing up, reflecting that she wouldn’t have time to brush her teeth or comb her hair. That was just fine with her. She dunked her spoon back into the marmalade jar, and somehow—this sort of thing was always happening to Anastasia—a glob of orange goop catapulted into her eyes.
“Ouch!” She tottered back from the table.
“Careful!” Mr. McCrumpet looked up from the waffle griddle in alarm. “Look out for Muffy! Don’t step on—Uh-oh. Too late.”
Everyone knew two things about Muffy, the McCrumpets’ pet guinea pig. One: Muffy held a grudge. Two: Muffy was a revenge-poop er. Meaning: Anastasia could expect a nasty surprise in one of her shoes (or perhaps on her pillow) within a day or so.
“Is she okay?” Anastasia gasped, blinking through a haze of orange jam. Mr. McCrumpet was kneeling on the floor, patting the ruffled guinea pig.
“She’s offended,” he said. “And rightly so!”
A honk outside signaled the school bus was at the curb.
“I’m not even dressed!” Anastasia groaned. “Sorry, Muffster,” she apologized over her shoulder as she scrambled to grab whatever was rumpled at the top of the laundry hamper. No time for socks. She was still struggling into her hooded sweatshirt as she burst out the front door and lurched down the porch steps. “Wait! Wait for me!”
Fortunately, the bus paused, its engine chugging.
Unfortunately, Anastasia tripped and fell face-first on the ground.
Fortunately, a squidgy mud puddle cushioned her fall.
Actually, that was pretty unfortunate, too. Dirty water gushed from her nostrils as she twisted around and glared into the smiling plaster face of the garden gnome responsible for her fall. The front yard of the McCrumpet house was, you see, a veritable minefield of garden gnomes. Mrs. McCrumpet liked to order them from the shopping channel on TV.
“Curse you, Winkles!” Anastasia peeled herself off the shabby McCrumpet lawn and limped to the bus. The door wheezed open. “Thanks for waiting, Mr. Butterfield,” she panted, pulling her hood over her sopping braids.
The bus driver stared at her for a moment. He stuck his forefinger under the edge of his toupee and scratched his scalp. “Wasn’t Halloween yesterday?”
Anastasia rubbed the last bit of marmalade out of her eyes, peering down at yesterday’s clothes she had scrounged from the hamper. Oh, crumbs! She waved her arms. Fuzzy brown flaps stretched from her sleeves to her side. She felt the seat of her pants and cringed. Yep, the droopy sock she had pinned to her jeans was still there.
It looked like she was going to school as a flying squirrel again.
Slogging to her seat, pretending not to hear the snickers sweeping around the bus, Anastasia reflected that her day couldn’t possibly get any worse.
As it happened, she was wrong.
Within forty-two minutes, calamity was to strike Anastasia McCrumpet.
2
Premonition of Doom
BY THIS POINT, you’re probably shaking your head and thinking, “My gosh, poor Anastasia McCrumpet! Marmalade in her eyes and teetering on the brink of calamity. And revenge-poo in her future, too. This girl is tragic.”
However, Anastasia was not normally prone to calamity or disaster or anything that exciting. She was rather clumsy, I am sorry to say, and often embarrassed herself by falling down or spilling things, but her life was otherwise not marked by mishap. In general, Anastasia’s existence was utterly uneventful.
By all outward appearances, Anastasia was a completely average almost-eleven-year-old girl. She had mousy brown hair, mo usy brown eyes, and exactly 127 freckles. She dinged a triangle in the school band and always played a tree in the school plays. This isn’t a very inspiring description, but it will have to do because it is true. If you want a hero with shiny hair and superb body odor, you’d better close this book and find something else to read. Anastasia was ordinary, and it wasn’t just at Mooselick Elementary. Sometimes she felt like a tree in the school play of life.
Anastasia lived in a shabby little town in a shabby little house with Mr. McCrumpet and Mrs. McCrumpet and Muffy, the guinea pig with anger-management issues whom you have already met. The McCrumpet household also included a variety of plants in various stages of dying. Despite Mr. McCrumpet’s best efforts, most of his flora wound up on the compost heap like Betty Lou, the Venus flytrap who went on a fatal hunger strike and whose funeral you have just attended.
Aside from his failures with plants, Mr. McCrumpet had no hobbies or interests. He went quietly about his business selling vacuum cleaners door to door. In fact, he went quietly about everything he did. He even looked quiet, if you know what I mean. It was easy to forget he was in the room. His face was like wallpaper.
Mrs. McCrumpet, on the other hand, was painfully conspicuous. You couldn’t forget she was around, no matter how much you might have liked to do so. She was a big, bloated sea cucumber of a lady, and she was loud. She spent all her time clutching a hankie to her forehead and groaning and chugging cough syrup straight from the bottle. There is a kind of person who believes they are sick even when they are not, and Mrs. McCrumpet was just this kind of person. Now, some hypochondriacs are delightful, charming people, but Mrs. McCrumpet was neither delightful nor charming. She was bossy and bad-tempered. She stayed in bed all day long, and when she wanted something, she thumped the floor with the wooden handle of a broom. If that didn’t bring Anastasia or her father scurrying upstairs within a couple of seconds, Mrs. McCrumpet started to holler. The longer it took them to come, the louder and pinker she got. By the time Fred McCrumpet hustled upstairs with the waffle tray on the morning calamity befell Anastasia, Mrs. McCrumpet was actually purple.
Of course, at that point, none of them had any inkling of the disaster to come.
Anastasia, certainly, wasn’t anticipating catastrophe. She had already, I am sorry to say, forgotten about Betty Lou’s heartrending funeral. She was scrunched down at her desk, doodling on a sheet of paper crumpled against her knees.
And, if this is to be a thorough account of Anastasia’s activities leading up to the moment her fate changed forevermore, I should also mention that she had recently—not even three seconds earlier—passed gas. In addition to her mousy brown hair, mousy brown eyes, and exactly 127 freckles, Anastasia McCrumpet also had tragic flatulence.
A few nearby children sniffed the air suspiciously.
Miss Jenkins, the fifth-grade teacher, was droning away by the chalkboard. In her hands she held a thick dictionary, but she wasn’t talking about spelling. She was instead telling the students about her pet ferret’s stomach problems.
“That’s an important life lesson for you, children,” she said. “Never feed rice pudding to a lactose-intolerant ferret. Dairy,” she intoned, “is the enemy.”
A loud knock at the classroom door interrupted this important life lesson. The door had a frosted-glass window, and Anastasia looked up from her sketches to see a shadowy figure lurking on the other side. Something about it gave her the creeps.
Miss Jenkins went over to the door and opened it a little bit and stuck her head out. The students leaned forward in their seats, hoping to catch a snippet of juicy adult conversation, but all they could hear was this:
“Mumble, mumble,” muttered the shadow.
“Whisper?” inquired Miss Jenkins.
“Mumble. Mutter, mumble, mumble!” replied the shadow.
“Oh, my goodness. Oh, my gracious! I don’t think I’ve ever heard something so completely appalling in my entire life!” Miss Jenkins cried.
“Mumble, whisper.”
All this time, Anastasia stared at that sinister silhouette. She had a terrible sensation in the pit of her stomach that was, for once, not tragic flatulence. No, dear Reader, it was a premonition of doom. (Or, in simple language, a strong feeling that something nasty was about to happen. And boy, was she right.)
“Yes, I’ll fetch her right now.” Miss Jenkins ducked back into the classroom. “Anastasia? Gather up your things, dear. You’re excused from class.”
Anastasia crammed her drawing into her book satchel.
“Come along, child,” Miss Jenkins prompted.
Anastasia shuffled to the front of the classroom, and then Miss Jenkins hustled her out the door and right into the clutches of the lurking shadow.
“Watch it!” the shadow growled, giving her a shove.
Anastasia stumbled backward, gasping. Then she gazed up into the flaring nostrils of Miss Sneed, the new school secretary. Miss Sneed had only worked at Mooselick Elementary for a few days, but everyone, including the principal, already called her the Monobrow in honor of the long eyebrow bristling across her forehead like a hairy centipede. You will notice I said eyebrow (singular) and not eyebrows (plural). Most people have two distinct eyebrows, but not Miss Sneed. She had one eyebrow only, and this single eyebrow now snarled into an angry V as she stared down at Anastasia. The classroom door clicked shut behind them. It was the last time Anastasia would ever see Miss Jenkins or, indeed, any of her classmates at Mooselick Elementary. Of course, she didn’t know that.
“Follow,” the Monobrow barked, turning to stomp down the hall. “Don’t loiter. Loitering is for worms.”
Anastasia actually liked worms, but she nonetheless hurried after the secretary. The Monobrow had shockingly long legs. Her legs were so long, in fact, and she was striding so briskly, that her boot whomped right into the knee of a kindergartner rounding the corner.
“You clumsy cretin!” the Monobrow bellowed. “What are you doing outside your classroom? It is forbidden to walk these hallways without a pass.”
“I have one right here,” the girl squeaked, holding up a piece of paper.
“Nonsense!” roared the Monobrow, seizing the pass and tearing it in half. She threw the two pieces on the ground. “Pick that up, you filthy litterbug, and get back to your lessons.”
The kindergartner danced a little jig. “But I have to go to the bathroom.”
“What”—the Monobrow was seething—“is the Mooselick Elementary School motto?”
The kindergartner’s mouth hung open. She let out another squeak.
“Squeak?” the Monobrow thundered. “Are you telling me the Mooselick Elementary motto is squeak?”
“It’s Study Hard and Try to Stay Relatively Clean,” Anastasia whispered.
“That’s the old motto,” the Monobrow retorted. “The new motto is Learn to Hold It or Get a Mop. Commit it to memory, kindergartner. Tattoo it on your arm if you must. Now move it, McCrumpet!” she shouted, clumping onward. “Remember what I said about worms!”
“But Miss Sneed,” Anastasia protested, “where are we going?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
Anastasia cast a longing look at the library door as they passed. The library was cramped and dark, but it was still her favorite place in Mooselick Elementary School. It was, in fact, her favorite place in the entire town of Mooselick. The librarian, Miss Apple, often treated the students to mugs of cocoa and homemade cookies. More importantly, she always saved the new Francie Dewdrop mysteries especially for Anastasia. Anastasia admired Francie Dewdrop from the bottom of her heart, and just like Francie, she planned to be a capable detective-veterinarian-artist when she grew up.
Anastasia glimpsed the librarian’s pale little face peering out at them over the edge of an enormous book as they marched by. Anastasia raised her freckled hand to wave, but the Monobrow grabbed her elbow and began dragging her down the hall.
“Ouch!” Anastasia yelped.
“Yelping is for worms, McCrumpet!”
The Monobrow hauled her past the cafeteria, past the drinking fountains, past the gymnasium, and all the way to the front door of the school.
“All right, kid,” the Monobrow muttered. “Listen here.”
Anastasia winced and twisted her face to stare at the enormous hand clinching her arm. The Monobrow’s powerful fingers were raw and beefy, and upon her meaty pinkie gleamed a silver ring inscribed with a glowering eyeball. Anastasia marveled at its incredible ugliness for a moment before blinking back up into the Monobrow’s face.
