The League of Beastly Dreadfuls Book 1, page 16
“Never mind that,” Anastasia said. “We have to go. Remember, escape or die trying. That’s the credo of the Beastly Dreadfuls.”
“Right!” Ollie said. “Escape or die! Goody!”
They zigzagged through the asylum to Room Thirty-Eight.
“Knock, knock,” Ollie whispered.
Quentin pulled off his head cage and threw it on the carpet. “Anastasia, did you drug Prim and Prude?”
“No,” Anastasia said. “We drugged the poodles instead.”
“We?” the Shadowboys echoed.
“The Baron and I,” Anastasia said.
“The Baron?”
“He came to help us—I mean, me—escape. We smeared Dr. Bluster’s sleeping stuff on some cheese, and the Baron threw it to the poodles while Prim and Prude were locking me in my room.”
“Can we trust him?” Quentin demanded. “What if he’s another kidnapper? What if he’s…Uncle Snodgrass?”
“He isn’t,” Anastasia assured him. “He’s friends with Miss Apple, the librarian at my elementary school. And we can trust him completely.”
“Did you tell him about Ollie and me?”
“No,” Anastasia said, fumbling in her pocket for her quarter. “He doesn’t know. And right now he’s busy distracting Prude, so we have to leave. Lefty loosey. Lefty loosey. Lefty loosey.” She heaved the mirror away from the doorway. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Quentin said. Then his ragged frocks crumpled to a heap, and his skinny shadow rippled across the rug. Anastasia couldn’t even see Ollie and Quentin as they slinked together down the gloomy stairwell, but she could hear Ollie humming “Ballad of the Lovelorn Beluga.”
“Ollie, be quiet. We’re escaping. Crumbs!” Anastasia squelched a yelp as her toe nudged against something. She looked down.
It was one of the Baron’s mice, lying on his back with his toes pointing in the air. Her heart sank.
“Is it dead?” Ollie whispered.
“I don’t know.”
Had the mouse stumbled into one of Prim and Prude’s murderous traps? She hunched down and carefully picked the mouse up. His body was warm. She could feel his tiny mouse heart thrumming inside his furry chest. But his eyes were squinched closed.
“He’s alive,” she said. “Maybe he fainted.”
“Perhaps he suffers from low blood pressure,” Quentin said. “I know a tuba player who always passes out during his solo in ‘Dance of the Flatulent Fairy.’ Very awkward.”
“He should switch to the triangle,” Ollie suggested.
Anastasia put the mouse into her coat pocket, and they continued down the hallway.
Was that…another mouse?
Anastasia frowned and stooped down. She poked the mouse with her finger. Its hind paws twitched, and it let out a sputtery squeak.
“Was that a snore?” Ollie asked.
Anastasia nodded grimly. “A cheesy snore.”
And now that her eyeballs had fully adjusted to the murky asylum, she could see dozens of furry little blobs dotting the rose-colored carpet. She pocketed the snoring mouse and picked up the next one, and the next, examining them.
Sure enough, every single mouse was sound asleep.
It didn’t take a brilliant detective-veterinarian-artist to deduce that the mice had gotten into the crumbs of cheese left behind by the poodles.
“We can’t just leave them lying around,” Anastasia said. “What if the kidnappers find them?”
She hopscotched from mouse to mouse, carefully pocketing each one. A chorus of faint snores rustled from her coat as the Beastly Dreadfuls headed down the staircase to the Great Hall. Anastasia cast one last glance at the monobrowed ladies glaring from their portraits. “Goodbye, Viola Snodgrass.” She shivered, thinking about returning to Mooselick Elementary, where the evil eyeball glinted from Miss Sneed’s meaty pinkie. She would have to tell Miss Apple about Miss Sneed when she saw her. She thought back to the librarian’s letter—When we next see each other (soon!)—and mentally hugged the words.
Thud. Thud.
“It’s Prude!” Quentin said.
Anastasia snatched one last mouse from the bottom stair as the League invaded the Great Hall. She scrooched behind the sheet-shrouded harpsichord. She was just congratulating herself on her Francie Dewdroppy stealth when she banged her arm against the harpsichord’s flank. Zzzzznnng!
The twin silver moons of Prude’s eyeglasses swerved toward the harpsichord. Anastasia held her breath. She felt a chilly rustle and swiveled her eyeballs down to her body. The Shadowboys pressed against her, camouflaging her in the gloom. She hadn’t expected them to be so cold. A mouse kicked in her satchel, squeaking in its sleep.
“Stupid vermin,” Prude muttered. “You’ll all be dead soon.”
“Miss Prudence!” the Baron called, dashing into the Great Hall. “Oh, there you are. Did you find your book? It sounds so”—he flinched—“enticing.”
“Here it is,” Prude twittered, plucking a paperback off a sheeted whatnot. “I’m always leaving things scattered around. Silly me!”
“Will you read it aloud to me?” the Baron asked. “Your voice is so soothing. You should narrate audiobooks. They’d sell like hotcakes.”
Prude giggled. “We’ll skip ahead to chapter seven. That’s a particularly sizzling section.”
“I adore sizzling literature,” the Baron said.
As soon as Prude and the Baron had retreated, the Beastly Dreadfuls skirted between the credenzas and divans and davenports. All the way, Anastasia stooped and reached and crawled to pick up conked-out mice. It was like a fuzzy Easter egg hunt. When her bag was bursting with the Baron’s whiskered comrades, she tiptoed into the small parlor off the Great Hall.
“All right.” Anastasia stopped in front of the cobwebbed hearth. “Up we go. You first, Ollie.”
“Pah!” Ollie’s complaints echoed from inside the chimney. “It’s filthy!”
Anastasia took a deep breath, then ducked into the fireplace’s moonlit maw and grasped the first rung of the chimney sweep’s ladder. It was rusty and cold, but it held her weight. She squeezed up, her fur coat rattling soot from the sides of the flue. Up, up, up, she went.
She popped her head out of the chimney.
“It’s snowing,” Ollie said, his boy-shape outlined against a moon-rimed gable.
Snowflakes wandered from the sky and tingled on Anastasia’s pink face. She clambered up the final rungs and heaved herself out of the flue. Hugging the chimney, she gazed over the asylum grounds. Silver snow clouds snuffed out the stars, but the moon frosted the world with its phantasmagorical glow. It was the first time she had seen the asylum gardens at night, and they looked mercurial and magical in the dark and the moonlight and the snow. The scruffy topiaries seemed to shift and breathe as shadows fluttered over their leaves.
“That chimney is filthy.” Quentin coughed, joining them on the roof. “Oh, the moon! The beautiful, wonderful, luminous, and lovely moon!”
Anastasia unwound Ollie’s silky shadow legging from her neck and looped it around the chimney, cinching a sturdy knot. Clutching the end with both hands, she sat down and slowly tobogganed to the edge of the roof.
“Hold tight and don’t let go,” Quentin encouraged her. “We’re right here beside you.”
“Yes, but gravity isn’t a problem for you,” Anastasia said.
“Pretend you’re the prince in Rapunzel,” Ollie said.
“Ollie, you really need to brush up on your fairy tales,” Anastasia said, eyeing the topiaries hulked below. “The prince falls onto rosebushes and goes blind.”
“But everything worked out in the end,” Quentin said. “Come on, Anastasia. You’ve got to jump!”
Anastasia swallowed. She stared at her green galoshes, swinging above the ground some twenty feet below. Then she swiveled her hips and shifted her weight so that she was dangling halfway off the gingerbreaded eave.
“If you die,” Ollie reassured her, “we’ll tell everyone that you were very brave.”
Anastasia pumped her legs once, twice, three times, and then pushed off with her elbows and rappelled backward. Zinnnnnnng! For a split second she was in free fall. Her stomach zoomed into her throat, and she clamped her teeth tight over a scream. Then the Shadowsilk stretched to its limit, and like a bungee jumper at the end of a gutsy leap, Anastasia rebounded slightly. She yo-yoed for several nauseating moments a few feet above the ground, and then she unclenched her hands and flopped back into the snow. The Shadowsilk snapped up the roof, shrinking back into a sock.
“You made it!” Ollie said beside her.
She staggered to her feet, and the Beastly Dreadfuls beelined to the back gardens. Anastasia’s mouse-full pockets swung against her legs, and her mouse-stuffed satchel hung from her shoulder like lead. Her breath sparkled from her mouth and nostrils in icy little clouds as she huffed and puffed along the width of the asylum, until they came to the end of the stony wall.
“Do you see the poodles?” Quentin asked.
“No,” Anastasia said. “They must be sleeping somewhere.”
This was, quite possibly, the most dangerous part of the entire escape. They would have to venture out into the garden, exposed. Even the Shadowboys would show up against the moonlit snow. If Prude happened to spy them from a window, they would lose any chance of a head start. Anastasia crouched like a racer waiting for the gunshot, her fingertips pressed against the cold ground.
Ready! Set! Go! To the nearest topiary, a blob that might have once been a lemur (or perhaps a raccoon)! Then to the wallaby (or enormous mouse)! To the monkey (or opossum)! She raced from bush to bush. Ollie and Quentin flitted along the frost beside her like dark snow angels until clouds blotted out the moon, and they disappeared into the gloom.
Anastasia squinted at a cluster of topiaries ahead. She again marveled at how different the garden looked at night, as though the bushes had shifted around in a game of musical chairs. It was easy, in that alchemical darkness, to imagine that the shrubberies yanked their roots from the cold earth and roamed the garden after sunset, playing their secret games until daybreak.
She bolted toward the grove and hunkered down by the closest bush.
The clouds peeled away from the moon.
The sound of her own panting filled Anastasia’s ears. She glanced back at the asylum, its windows silvered by the moonlight and glinting like hundreds of unblinking peepers.
“It’s like it’s watching us,” Ollie whispered.
Wheezing, Anastasia closed her eyes and slumped against the bush. It was surprisingly warm and soft.
One might even say cuddly.
And then she heard the noise.
She could even feel it. It buzzed inside her body. It was a low, low growl, and it was very near. Her eyelids snapped open. The growl swelled. Very, very slowly, she swiveled her eyeballs toward the rumble.
The topiary bush loomed over her. But it wasn’t a bush, Anastasia saw with a shock. Not a bush at all! It was one of the poodles. Its eyes shone like nefarious fireflies. Its collar was thick as a man’s belt and studded with long silver spikes. Its name tag flashed: SNOOKUMS. Snookums’s purple lip curled up toward his nose, revealing a row of metal teeth.
“Oh, no,” Ollie yipped beside her.
Anastasia stumbled backward. Too late, she realized that the nearest topiary bushes were, in fact, the well-trained and meticulously groomed attack poodles. Poodles are very intelligent animals, and these poodles were quite possibly criminal geniuses. They had pretended to be lawn shrubs. Their fluffy forms had blended into the garden of moonlight and shadow. Now each shadowy bush gleamed with eyes. The poodles inched nearer, champing their glittering jaws.
Anastasia was surrounded.
26
The Creature in the Woods
THE MICE, ANASTASIA concluded with an awful sinking feeling, hadn’t just nibbled the crumbs of cheese left behind by the dogs. They had eaten it all! They had devoured the cheese before any of the fearsome guard poodles could take a single bite, and now those poodles were wide-awake and very disgruntled.
Snookums snarled.
“Nice doggy,” Anastasia whispered.
He sprang.
Anastasia braced herself for the cataclysmic impact of claws and jaws and metal spikes against her tender almost-eleven-year-old skeleton. She closed her eyes. She gritted her teeth. She waited. In films, people on the verge of dying often glimpse a mishmash of memories. This is called seeing your life flashing before your eyes, and it’s supposed to be like a little movie of important personal moments. Anastasia hoped she’d get to relive the day she won the Mooselick Elementary Bookworm Contest. Or it might be nice, she thought, to peep Muffy’s grumpy little face one last time, or Mr. McCrumpet frowning at one of his dead plants, or Miss Apple smiling at a particularly thrilling article about lice or mold or some other scientific thing, or to hear Quentin’s wobbly saw music, or Ollie laughing at silly limericks. And even though she had just met the dashing Baron von Bilgeworth, Anastasia would have liked to see him again, too. But Anastasia didn’t see anything at all.
“Oooof!” Cold jozzled her bones, sending her sprawling to the ground. Her eyelashes stuttered open in time to see Snookums skidding across the ice a few feet away, silver chops crunching down onto thin air.
She peered at the chilly gloom plastering her coat. “Quentin?”
The Shadowboy unspooled from her, panting. “That was close! He missed us by a whisker!”
“First-rate belly flop!” Ollie applauded. “Ten out of ten!”
Anastasia wheeled her gaze back to Snookums. The villain was scooting in reverse on his haunches, toenails skittering, a frightened whine rattling his metal teeth. The other poodles were also backing away from the Beastly Dreadfuls, chorusing with whimpers.
“They’re scared of you!” Anastasia exclaimed.
“No,” Ollie said in a tiny voice. “They’re scared of that.”
Anastasia crooked her chin over her shoulder. A wolf—a huge, brown wolf—crouched amidst the topiaries, its muzzle tight around its fangs. Anastasia squeaked as the wolf let out a bellow. Her mind reeled. It must be the Creature!
She scrambled to a topiary shaped like a giraffe (or brachiosaur) and shrank against its leaves. Ollie and Quentin furled their shadowy forms over her.
AWOOOOOOOO! The wolf lunged toward the pack of poodles. AWOOOOOOOO! The becurled canines turned tail and galloped into the night, barking like mad. The wolf dashed after them, hot on their fluffy heels.
Anastasia tore her gaze away from the chase and strained her eyes into the darkness. Where was the Baron? Had he been devoured by the wolf? Mauled by the poodles?
“Oh, no!” Quentin swore. “Look!”
Prim and Prude’s silhouettes loomed on the crest of the hill.
“They must have heard the dogs barking,” Ollie whispered.
The old ladies just stood there for a minute, completely black except for the silver moonlight pooling in the lenses of their glasses. Then they began down the hill. They didn’t run, but they were moving quickly—so quickly that it looked like they were gliding down the hill on ice skates. They weren’t hobbling at all. There was something horrible about those two old women advancing smoothly down the hill, faster and faster. Prim wasn’t even thumping her umbrella for balance. She was holding it out in front of her.
And then, as the kidnappers neared, Anastasia saw that Prim wasn’t carrying the umbrella.
She was holding a shotgun. And Prude had one, too.
“Anastasia!” Prim called. “My dear, you’ll catch a cold out here.” She smiled. She was close enough now for Anastasia to see each and every metal tooth gleaming in the ancient crone’s mouth. The Shadowboys cemented against her in terror.
“You mustn’t wander after dark,” Prude coaxed. “The night air is very bad for little moppets. Come inside, like a Nice Little Girl.”
“This is all your fault, Prude,” Prim hissed. “Leaving your post to yammer nonsense at the Mouse Destroyer!”
“He seemed very interested in The Handsome Rogue Who Fell in Love with the Older Lady,” Prude said.
“Man-mad,” Prim snapped. Then she crooned, “Anastasia, come home, dear. We’ll make you a nice cup of warm milk.” Her head swiveled toward the topiary where the Beastly Dreadfuls crouched. She raised her shotgun and cocked it.
“Awoooooooo!”
The sisters spun around.
“Primrose!” Prude shrilled. “It’s one of them!”
The wolf vaulted a hedge, green eyes blazing. “Awoooooooo!”
Buckshot thundered from the guns. “Smite the wolf! Smite the wolf!”
The wolf crashed from bush to bush, dodging the glittering silver slugs.
“Kill it! Kill it! KILL IT!” Prude screamed.
The wolf let out an AWOOOOOOOO of pain.
Anger sizzled Anastasia from her hair follicles all the way to her toenails. She couldn’t just stand there and watch as the murderous sisters whacked another trophy to bolt to their dining room wall! The wolf had, after all, saved her from the poodles. Besides, she was an aspiring detective-veterinarian-artist, and the welfare of animals—whether stripy cat or slimy worm—was her concern, even in the midst of a Daring Escape from dastardly kidnappers.
She plunged her hand into her satchel and fumbled through the mice until her fingers closed over her collection of marbles, and then she flung them toward the child-snatchers. Dozens of glass eyeballs twirled across the frosted ground and beneath the old ladies’ sensible shoes.
“Eeeeek!” cried Prim.
“Oooooooh!” hollered Prude.
They slipped and slid on those marbles, their arms flailing in a crazy kidnapper tap dance. They fox-trotted and hula-hustled and do-si-doed and then executed two wild grands jetés (that is, sprawl-legged leaps) right into the hole Quentin had been digging for the past week. Their caterwauls rang from the bottom.
“Give me a boost, Prudence!”
