The League of Beastly Dreadfuls Book 1, page 5
“Yes,” Prim replied. “All our poodles do. Their breed is plagued with rotten gums. All their teeth fell out back when they were puppies, I’m sorry to say.”
“Can I come out now?” Anastasia pleaded. “I can hardly feel my legs anymore.”
“It is getting dark,” Prim conceded. “All right. I suppose that will do for now.” She slugged down the rest of her tea in one gulp and plunked the teacup into her purse.
Anastasia lumbered out of the bog, and Prim clasped her hands together in delight. “A fine harvest!”
Anastasia stared down at her legs. Dozens of leeches dangled from her shins and kneecaps. She reached to pluck one off.
“Ah ah ah!” Prim scolded. “Let them fall off when they’ve drunk their fill. Don’t worry, they won’t suck too much of your blood. Only about a teaspoon or so apiece.”
“That’s a lot of teaspoons!”
“You should be thanking me,” Prim said. “You’re getting a free bloodletting. Dr. Lipwig charges his patients good money for this.”
Anastasia was too cold to argue. She struggled into her fur coat and waited for the leeches to finish their dinner. As each leech plopped from her leg with a satisfied sigh, Prim snatched it up and dropped it into her chilly teapot. Finally, when the last one had finished snacking, Anastasia pulled on her galoshes, and they began the uphill trudge to the asylum.
The final smidgens of sunlight fizzled away, steeping the gardens in shadow. Anastasia quickened her pace. Thup! Pbbbt! Her too-big galoshes made rude squashy noises in the thick mud. Blaaat!
“Was that you?” Prim gasped. “Did you make those dreadful sounds? Nice Little Girls don’t do that.”
“I didn’t,” Anastasia protested. “My boots did.”
“What if you made one of those nasty noises in the middle of tea with a duchess?” Prim said. “What then?”
“I never drink tea with duchesses,” Anastasia pointed out.
“Perhaps you will one day,” Prim said. “One day, when you’re a Nice Little Lady.”
Anastasia shuddered, picturing herself as her aunties’ idea of a Nice Little Lady. Sipping tea in a dusty parlor. Clutching a purse full of stale peppermint candies. Awful! Besides, she had other aspirations. As you already know, Anastasia planned to be a capable detective-veterinarian-artist when she grew up.
“That is, if you ever grow up at all,” Prim was saying softly, almost to her herself.
“What?” Anastasia asked. “What did you just say?”
“Oh,” Prim said, fumbling as her glasses fell off her nose and disappeared into the bristles of her fur collar. “Nothing, dear.” She picked them up and put them back on her face, then blinked at Anastasia. Her eyes were cloudier than ever, like water into which one has spat toothpaste.
“What did you mean, if I ever grow up?” Anastasia persisted.
“It’s just,” said her auntie, “that life is very uncertain, isn’t it?”
She smiled at Anastasia, and they went back into the asylum.
8
Eyeballs
A UNTIE PRIM IS right, good Reader: life is uncertain indeed. For example, you may be a perfectly average (if tragically flatulent) fifth grader at Mooselick Elementary School on Tuesday morning, and by Thursday afternoon you could find yourself scouring chamber pots at an authentically creepy Victorian mansion in the middle of nowhere, much like the most wretched of fairy-tale orphans.
Because her aunties were ancient prunes with fragile hearts, Anastasia was stuck with the struggles of maintaining a dilapidated mansion. And St. Agony’s Asylum was in the throes of dilapidation, from its creaking towers to the dusty glass eyeballs staring from the animal trophies lining the walls. These marble eyeballs, in fact, were constantly coming unglued from their respective faces and plummeting to the floor. Every time Anastasia heard the telltale plunk of a kamikaze marble, she chased it down and dropped it into her satchel. She acquired her seventh marble the morning of the Incident at the Breakfast Table, which occurred shortly before she surprised herself with a Strange and Impulsive Act, all on the very same day she made a Most Mysterious Discovery.
It began like any other a.m. at the asylum: the aunties were yattering about bird-watching (“Two yellow-bellied sapsuckers? You don’t say!”), and Anastasia was silently munching her Mystery Lumps, missing her father and his waffles from the bottom of her almost-eleven-year-old heart.
“Anastasia.” Prim broke into her thoughts. “There’s a nasty colony of spiderwebs in the Great Hall. Won’t you be a dear?” Which was Auntie Code for Clean it up and don’t complain, because after all it’s better than the orphanage!
Anastasia groaned. “Is the Gardener still sick? Couldn’t he do it?”
“As a matter of fact,” Prim said, “our resident lunatic biter is up and about, but he has his own to-do list.”
“And you really mustn’t go near him,” Prude said. “The cage helps with the biting, but he still scratches.”
“Teenagers.” Prude shuddered. “Beastly.” She plunked a handful of sugar cubes into her tea.
Perhaps it was the dampness creeping through the asylum that loosened the glue. Or perhaps taxidermy paste only lasts a century or so. Whatever the reason, one marble eyeball leapt from Beauregard’s furry brow at the very moment that Prude lifted her teacup to her lips.
Zing! PLUNK! Sploosh!
“Gllrg!” Prude spluttered.
“Pardon me, Prudence?” Prim asked. She had not observed the marble’s great nosedive. “I didn’t quite hear you. It sounded like you said gllrg. And gllrg is not, I am quite certain, a word.”
Prude wiped the lenses of her spectacles and peered down into her cup.
“WOLF!”
The teacup went flying across the dining room and smashed into smithereens against the wall. The green marble rolled away.
“What’s come over you, Prudence?” Prim cried. “Are you having some kind of fit?”
“There was,” Prude wheezed, “an eyeball…in my teacup.”
“Impossible,” Prim declared. “I strained that tea myself. I would have noticed an—er—errant eyeball.”
“Green, it was, and staring right at me!” Prude insisted. “Green, like the eyes of a wolf!”
“You must be imagining things,” Prim said. “Your mind is playing tricks on you. It’s the worry of caring for an orphan. Speaking of orphans—Anastasia, dear?”
“The cobwebs,” Anastasia muttered. “I know.”
Leaving her Mystery Lumps uneaten, she scurried into the Great Hall and tracked down Beauregard’s glass peeper. She plucked it up between her thumb and forefinger.
EeeeeeeOOooooooooo.
Hark!
Could it be the wind shrilling in St. Agony’s flues, doing a splendid imitation of whale song?
Eeeeoooooowwwwwoo.
The wuthering was rather like a song. Anastasia felt there was some sort of melody to it, and she now knew it by heart.
Eeeeeeoooeeeeee.
Did the chimneys pipe music through the asylum like some kind of inside-out church organ? Anastasia’s eyes slid toward the window. The trees of the Dread Woods were still, fog petticoating their dark trunks. There was no wind.
She plunked the marble into her satchel and crept between the sheeted whatnots to the parlor adjoining the Great Hall. The fireplace mantel sagged beneath a pair of cobweb-swaddled candelabra. Anastasia leapfrogged the grate and ducked into the hearth, peering up. Something was jamming the flue. She grasped the edges, grimacing as soot cascaded onto her head, and pried the blockage loose. As the smoggy cloud puffed itself out, pale light traced a row of iron rungs leading up the chimney’s gullet to a square of gray sky high above.
You might wonder whether the builders of St. Agony’s Asylum thoughtfully fitted their chimney with this peculiar ladder on Santa Claus’s behalf. However, the rungs in the flue served a purpose far less jolly. They were installed for the chimney sweeps that mucked out the flues of Victorian homes. And, you will be shocked to learn, Victorians often employed children younger than you for this dangerous and filthy task.
Why children? Because, dear Reader, children are small. Children can fit into tight places where adults dare not venture.
Eeeeeooooooooooeeee.
Anastasia hurdled back over the grate, shaking her braids. The ghostly noise wasn’t coming from the chimneys. And, she reasoned, it wasn’t the poodles yodeling for a snack, either. The sound was coming from inside the asylum; she was sure of it. She studied the sooty doodad plundered from the chimney’s throat. Why in crumbs would anyone shove a mirror inside a chimney?
“Anastasia,” Prim warbled. “Where are you, moppet?”
Anastasia crammed the looking glass behind a curtain and hustled back to the Great Hall.
“Here you are!” Prim rounded the corner. “Why didn’t you answer me?”
“Sorry, Auntie.” Anastasia tweaked a dust bunny from a statuette’s snoot. “Were you calling me?”
“I just wanted to make sure that you were at your chores,” Prim twittered.
“Yep,” Anastasia said. “Hard at work.”
“Goody,” Prim said. “Such a Nice Little Girl. Now give Auntie a kiss before I go up to my knitting.”
Anastasia reluctantly pressed her lips to Prim’s crinkled cheek. As she pulled away, the old woman shuddered. Her auntie must be cold. Prim’s eyes slithered over her.
She patted Anastasia’s braid, and then tugged on the chain of Great-Granny McCrumpet’s necklace. “You’re being careful with this, I hope? Is that a rash I see on your neck?”
“No,” Anastasia said. “Those are freckles.”
“And quite a bit of dirt, too,” Prim clucked. “Perhaps you should take another dunk in the bog?”
“I don’t mind a little dirt,” Anastasia said hastily.
“That’s very fortunate,” Prim said, “because there’s ever so much work to do around this place. Don’t forget about those horrid cobwebs.” She disappeared into the asylum.
Anastasia eyed the webs festooning the Great Hall. Where to begin? She contemplated the paintings above the stairs. Perhaps she would discover a priceless masterpiece beneath the grime, and her aunties could auction it off and hire a lunatic maid to tackle the gruesome asylum chores.
She yanked a ratty sock from her coat pocket and clumped up to the first artwork. “Waffle crumbs and coffee cake crumbs!” she groused, swiping at the cobwebs drooping from the picture frame. “Oh, hello. Poor you,” she greeted a moth struggling in one of the silken snares. “Let me help you.”
Now, I’m sure you have seen nature films in which, for example, a chameleon unfurls its magnificent long tongue to lasso a fly, or a bat swoops upon a whizzing insect, or a nimble tree frog leaps upon its prey and chomps it faster than you can wink. It all happens with astonishing speed. The producers of the nature show may even slow the film down, in order for our slow human eyes to catch the lightning-quick movements of other species.
As Anastasia reached for the insect trapped in the spiderweb, time went all funny, and she saw her hands move as though she were watching one of those fascinating nature films. She watched one fur-sleeved arm shoot out. She watched the freckled hand on the end of this arm close its fingers around the moth. The hand then swooped up to her mouth in a swift arc, her lips opened, and in went the moth. Anastasia’s teeth were already crunching her fuzzy victim before her brain realized what she had done.
“Paaah!” She spat the moth onto the palm of her hand. The creature fluttered its tattered wings once or twice, gave a “goodbye, cruel world” sort of sigh, and lay still.
The poor fellow was dead as a dormouse.
Horror flooded through Anastasia. What had possessed her to eat an innocent moth? Was constant hunger driving her to desperate deeds of moth munching? For Anastasia was constantly hungry. Two bowls of Mystery Lumps per day were certainly not enough to nourish a growing, almost-eleven-year-old girl. She did not even get dinner. Anastasia’s tummy grumbled its discontent as regularly as a grumpy grandfather clock. But what could she do about it? Prim and Prude kept the kitchen door locked.
“There are all kinds of dangerous things in the kitchen,” Prim had explained. “Knives and forks and sporks. Children come to bad ends with sporks!”
“And the oven,” Prude fretted. “Ooooh, the oven. What if you were to fall inside? That, my child, would be very painful indeed.”
“We know that you’re hungry, but we can hardly afford to feed you as it is,” Prude told her mournfully. “We had no idea that orphans ate so much!”
Anastasia looked around, just to see whether anyone had observed her Strange and Impulsive Act. She was quite alone.
The moth lolled on her palm.
Without even thinking ready-steady-go! she gulped the bug down. Then she returned her attention to cleaning, trying very hard not to think about the bizarre (and rather un-veterinarian-like) thing she had just done.
Anastasia whisked the old sock (formerly her flying-squirrel tail) across the canvas. Swish. The years of dust swirled away. Swish. Swish. The painted frump materialized. A black hat puffed like an enormous meringue atop her head; a swath of lace drooping from the brim cloaked her face down to her scowl. Leaning forward, Anastasia could just detect a fierce blond monobrow beneath the pattern of dark rosettes.
Swish. The dust avalanched from the background, revealing carefully daubed-in wallpaper. It was, she noticed, the same dreary floral design that splotched the asylum walls from floor to ceiling. Had, once upon a time, this monobrowed damsel lived in St. Agony’s? Anastasia brandished her sock. Swish. A ribbon cinched the woman’s waist, and affixed to this ribbon was an ornate clasp dangling with delicate chains. A thin metal box hung from one chain; a tiny pocket watch swung from another; a little bottle glittered at the end of a third chain; and finally, suspended from the last sterling strand, there was a fancy key, all silver curls and loops.
Anastasia licked the tip of her finger and scrubbed at the painted key. As the grime dissolved beneath her potent drool, she could distinguish a number squeezed amidst the filigree.
“Thirteen!” she said. “Bad luck!” She scrutinized the dour maiden. “Is that why you look so crusty? Were you unlucky?”
Miss Crusty, of course, remained silent.
Anastasia smeared her sock across the portrait once more. She froze.
A ring inscribed with the glowering eyeball symbol gleamed, in silver paint, on the damsel’s pinkie. Anastasia boggled. It was the same ring Miss Sneed had been wearing. It was the same ring glinting on the pinkies of both her ancient aunties.
Peculiar, to say the least! Goose bumps prickled Anastasia’s neck as she beheld the glaring eye. She swallowed and galoshed up to the next painting. Her heart thumped as she attacked the dust gloving the portrait-sitter’s hand. “Son of a biscuit!”
She raced up the stairs, peeling back the cobwebs from the next five paintings. Five silver rings on five pinkies!
Panting, she scaled the top step to the last portrait, exclaiming under her breath at her final pinkie-ring sighting. Anastasia studied the meaty hand with a feeling like ice creeping through her veins.
Standing on tippy-toes, she stretched the sock up. With one swift motion, Anastasia exposed the woman’s forehead and confirmed her suspicions.
“The Monobrow,” she whispered.
Locked into her room that night, Anastasia lay in the child-shaped hollow and pondered her Most Mysterious Discovery. What was the meaning of the sinister eyeball symbol? And why did all the women in the portraits have monobrows? For, after smearing the dust from the horrible forehead of Miss Sneed’s likeness, Anastasia had inspected the other paintings. Each canvas featured a woman upon whose forehead bristled a sinister monobrow.
Was the eyeball ring a hideous family heirloom passed down through the monobrowed generations?
But that couldn’t be right, because Anastasia distinctly remembered her aunties saying that they had ordered their rings from the shopping channel on television. Besides, Miss Sneed had one of the rings, too. And why on earth was there a portrait of Miss Sneed hanging in St. Agony’s Asylum?
Eeeeeeeeoooooooooooo.
And what was making those ghostly wailing sounds? Anastasia hugged Mr. Bunster, foreboding pickling her thoughts. Something suspicious was festering within St. Agony’s walls. Something rank and rotten. Anastasia could practically smell it. “Mr. Bunster,” she muttered, “something stinks.”
EeeeeeEEEeeeeoooeeeeee.
She knew from experience that questioning her aunties did not produce satisfactory results. For example, if she were to say the next morning at breakfast, “Aunties, why is there a painting of the Mooselick Elementary School secretary in your stairwell?” she would receive one or more of the following maddening responses:
1. “Whatever do you mean, moppet? Your school secretary, you say? You must be imagining things.”
2. “Goodness me, is that a ruby-throated cuckoo? Oh, this is thrilling! Anastasia, dear, we’re a bit busy.”
3. “Nice Little Girls don’t talk with their mouths full.”
And so forth.
It would be the same if she asked about the rings or the peculiar music. She would get answers that weren’t really answers at all. If Anastasia wanted the nitty-gritty on the mysteries stinking up the Asylum, she would have to whiff it out herself. That, she told herself firmly, was what Francie Dewdrop would do.
“Tomorrow, Mr. Bunster,” she vowed, “I will launch my first great detective investigation.”
9
View Through a Keyhole
LAUNCHING A GREAT detective investigation in a rickety Victorian mansion is not a task upon which to embark lightly, dear Reader. Prim and Prude were not whistling Dixie, Anastasia knew, when they pointed out that many of the asylum’s clammy pockets were neither safe nor healthy places in which to roam. Some of the rooms were so damp that Moose-Spattered Toadstools sprouted in the soggy corners, and Perpetual Ooze Moss crept across the tattered wallpaper like algae on the sides of a neglected aquarium. The pink carpet squished underfoot like sponge cake, and black widow spiders bungee jumped from the cobwebbed chandeliers. The lunatic Gardener was on the loose, too.
