The League of Beastly Dreadfuls Book 1, page 6
However, while murk and moss and a tooth-gnashing Gardener were horrifying prospects indeed, Anastasia was an aspiring detective-veterinarian-artist. Aspiring detective-veterinarian-artists thrived in dilapidated mansions.
Having read every single Francie Dewdrop mystery, from The Conundrum at Mildew Manor to The Riddle of the Whispering Tree, Anastasia knew all sorts of detective tricks. She knew that a good sleuth noticed everything, even teensy little details like a button lying on the floor or mud spattered on a trouser cuff. She knew about sneaking and tiptoeing, listening at doorways, and hiding in cupboards. She had learned in chapters seven through eleven of The Mystery of the Mercurial Garden that locked rooms and forbidden drawers yielded clues as dark and delicious as triple-chocolate cake.
Anastasia reckoned she could sniff out these delicious clue crumbs during the hours she normally spent cleaning the asylum—after breakfast each morning, when the aunties trotted up to their glass tower to knit lumpy shawls and spy on twee-tufted bog warblers, and then after lunch until bedtime. Good old-fashioned exercise, the aunties called their never-ending list of asylum drudgery. You’ll have to get your frolics from chores, Prim had told her. Well, unbeknownst to her aunties, Anastasia would henceforth get her frolics from detective work.
She spent the first days of her great investigation creeping around the rooms of the West Wing. What exactly, you may ask, was our intrepid sleuth seeking? Anastasia suspected that Miss Crusty had lived in the asylum, and wondered whether she had left behind some sort of hint to the meaning behind the uncanny eyeball rings. Perchance the silver clasp and its curious charms were slumbering on a pillow of mold in one of the madhouse’s neglected chambers. Anastasia wanted to find the fancy key engraved with number thirteen, and she hoped she would find the door it unlocked.
She tripped over tarnished mirrors bolted to the floors in the doorways. She plundered a credenza in Room Eight, finding a marvelous old magnifying glass. In Room Nineteen, she discovered a curio cabinet jam-packed with seashells. Hefting a pink-lipped conch from its ledge, she held it to her ear and closed her eyes.
Shhhhhhh…
…shhhh…shhhhh…
Anastasia knew the shushing was really the murmurations and sighs and other hundreds of tiny noises that fill up a quiet house, amplified and ricocheting inside the shell. But she could almost imagine the sea was mumbling to her. She even fancied she could hear the faraway sound of a whale singing…eeeeeOOOOOOeeee…
The wobbly wailing music! She thunked the shell back on its shelf and dashed into the hallway. EEEEEEOOOOOooo. She cocked her head, then darted down a twisting side passage. Ooooooowwwwww. Left! Eeeeeeooooo. Right! Left again! OOOOOeeeeeeeee…eee. She strained her eardrums.
But the weird melody had faded.
The itty-bitty hairs along her nape prickling like a spooked hedgehog’s quills, Anastasia gazed down the hall. Might the source of the haunted music be lurking behind one of the dark corridor’s dozens of closed doors?
Nibbling her lower lip, she bore her candle and its tiny beacon through the nearest doorway.
Dust-cloaked furniture swelled around her like snow-mantled hills, and cobwebs billowed over the walls like cirrus clouds. Anastasia slunk deeper into this peculiar hinterland, her pupils drinking the gloom. She didn’t detect anything that could have produced the whale sounds, but she did spot a mammoth rolltop desk. Might Miss Crusty have cached the key to Room Thirteen in one of the bureau’s pigeonholes?
Anastasia hoisted the wooden lip.
The bureau spat out a dark, fluttering, buzzing, mumbling whirlwind. Moths! She pirouetted, tailing one fuzzy colossus into the far depths of the lightless room, where the critter bumbled into the pale froth of a cobweb drooping from a shelf.
“I’m sorry,” Anastasia told it, her heart panging. “But I’m so hungry. Back in Mooselick, I would never have eaten you. I much prefer waffles.”
As she reached forth to nab her fuzzy prey, her candlelight tickled the edges of a shadow lurking behind the rotten spider silk. Her hand froze.
It was a disembodied head.
Anastasia’s candle clattered to the floor. She plowed backward into a warped grandfather clock, startling it into a rusty coughing fit. BONG! BONG! BONG! Panicked, she flung open the clock’s glass breast and stilled its long golden tongue. BONNNNG!
She reeled back to the shelf. The head was motionless.
She inched forward and, fingers a-tremble, drew back the cobwebs.
It was just a porcelain bust.
“Whew!” Standing on tippy-toes, she pulled the ceramic head down from the ledge and brushed the grime from its pate. Blue lines crisscrossed the man’s scalp, dividing it into sections, and each section bore a label: REASON. ENVY. INCLINATION TOWARD LITTERING AND/OR MURDER.
Holding the bust by his ears, Anastasia tipped him to read the inscription on the base:
PHRENOLOGY BUST FOR THE MODERN DOCTOR
Each Section on This Marvelous Noggin
Corresponds to a Personality Trait
* * * Bumps Indicate Abnormality * * *
A TRIUMPH OF MODERN MEDICINE
Anastasia’s fingers twitched under her hair, searching out any questionable lumps. Had the triumphs of phrenology, she wondered, inspired the Victorian fashion for big hats? Did Victorians hide their craggy scalps and innermost secrets beneath their kooky headgear?
If so, Miss Crusty was hiding a lot of secrets. Her hat was enormous.
As she stretched to replace the phrenology head in its niche, Anastasia glimpsed the gold-stamped spines of books lining the shelf. Scattering the cobweb clouds with a swipe of her sleeve, she saw that the wall was crammed with old books, floor to ceiling and side to side, and her heart pitter-pattered with sudden anticipation.
If you have followed Francie Dewdrop’s thrilling adventures, you will know that she regularly discovers bookshelves that pivot into hidden passageways. During her escapades, Francie had, by tugging loose heavy dictionaries and pressing cunning switches, activated no less than twenty clockwork bookcases that slid aside to reveal secret vestibules chock-full of dandy clues.
Anastasia, who had carefully studied each and every one of Francie’s fantastic finds, reasoned that a vast mysterious mansion like St. Agony’s Asylum should, by all rights, possess at least one such magical bookcase.
She combed the walls for concealed buttons.
She nudged tomes from their ledges.
Nothing happened.
Anastasia hopped down to the floor, eyeing the embossed book spines. They all bore gruesome titles such as Mushy, Pink, and Putrid: The National Society of Nutcase Study’s Findings on Criminal Brains and Dr. Vagueworth’s Monograph on New Fashions in Straitjacketry (The Curvy Silhouette). Shuddering, she pulled from the shelf The Barber-Surgeon’s Guide to the Latest Muttonchop and Self-Lobotomy Techniques.
The pages were so warped from the mist that the letters inside had blurred into nonsense words like grimwhiskerly and uneedledodo. Anastasia let the dismal tome wheeze shut, yearning from the bottom of every freckle on her body to be back in the cheery library of Mooselick Elementary School, a Francie Dewdrop mystery on her lap and five (or six) of Miss Apple’s scrumptious snickerdoodle cookies in her belly.
Tingalingaling!
Clutching the dreary volume, she cracked the library door and peeked out. The Gardener was pancaked against the corridor wall, creeping through the gloom, eyes shifting behind the bars of his birdcage. He edged into Room Twenty-Four, scanning the hallway before pulling the door shut behind him.
It was Most Mysterious Behavior. And Anastasia found herself Incurably Curious. Her feet pattered of their own accord up the musty pink carpeting, and quick as you please, she knelt and squinted at the strange scene beyond the keyhole.
It was her first good look at the lunatic Gardener. She marveled at his raggedy, old-fashioned clothes—a velveteen jacket with tattered lapels, a waistcoat missing half its brass buttons, and too-short trousers that ended halfway between his knees and ankles, exposing green-and-white-striped socks. Did his employment contract with Prim and Prude include a clause requiring authentically shabby Victorian garb?
The boy prowled the room. “Hello,” he whispered. “Hellooooo.”
Anastasia’s pulse juddered. Was he talking to himself?
The Gardener paused by a bell jar frosted with dust. “Are you in here?” He lifted the dome, revealing a somber stuffed owl. “Sorry, old boy. Didn’t mean to disturb you.” He replaced the lid. “Where are you?”
Had the Gardener, perhaps, lost a pet hamster?
He stalked to a fanciful glass terrarium shaped like a house and rapped one of its mossy walls. “Hello? Are you in here?” He raised the tiny roof and shook his head. “Nothing but toadstools.”
Maybe, Anastasia thought, he befriended one of the asylum’s spiders.
Suddenly the keyhole went dark. The door flew open, and the Gardener loomed over her. The bars of his birdcage prickled in her candlelight, and the bell rattled madly, screaming Tingalingalingaling!
“You!” he whispered. “I’ve been looking for you!”
10
A Peculiar Door
“FOR ME?” ANASTASIA squeaked, goggling up at the Gardener. He was so tall. A padlock dangled from the base of his silver coop, fastening his neck with a metal collar. As he crept forth, this padlock swung to and fro. Anastasia stared at it, nearly hypnotized with fear.
“We need to talk,” the Gardener hissed.
“I—I have laryngitis.” Anastasia mustered a cough worthy of her hypochondriac mom. “Maybe some other time.”
“There might not be another time,” he muttered.
“Don’t come any closer!” Anastasia yelped. “Don’t you dare bite me!”
“Bite you?” the Gardener echoed, seizing Anastasia’s shoulders and sending her heart lolloping into her throat. “What did those old women tell you about me?”
“W-well,” Anastasia stammered, “they might have mentioned something about a—um—a lunatic.”
His fingers clenched tighter.
“But I’m sure they were talking about someone else,” Anastasia gasped.
The Gardener leaned so close that the bars of his birdcage pressed painfully against her nose. “You and I are going to have a little chitchat,” he whispered. “But don’t you dare tell them I spoke to you, or we’ll both be in trouble.”
“Let me go!” Anastasia cried, wriggling her shoulders. The Barber-Surgeon’s Guide plunged from her sweaty palms and crashed down to mash the tips of the Gardener’s authentically scuffed Victorian shoes.
“Owwww!” he hollered. “My innocent toes!”
Anastasia wrenched out of his grasp and scrambled away into the labyrinth of corridors, galloping heck-for-leather until her lungs burned and her side panged and her legs joggled like jelly. Not even daring the teensiest backward glance, she vaulted a mirror bolted in the doorway to Room Nine and ducked inside.
Anastasia flopped onto a fainting couch, breathless and woozy. She was perilously close to crying, but she blinked her tears back. Francie Dewdrop didn’t boohoo when threatened by goons. She touched the tip of her nose and winced. What revenge, she wondered, would the Gardener exact if she blabbed about the frightening exchange?
Well, she wasn’t going to tell, anyway. Anastasia couldn’t tell Prim and Prude about bumping into the Gardener, and not just because he had promised trouble. If her aunties reprimanded him, the barmcakes boy might tattle that Anastasia was snooping around the asylum’s forbidden wings. And that, she knew, would bring her brilliant detective work to a screeching halt.
And Anastasia did not intend to stop investigating.
The cushions of the fainting couch were moldy and curled up at the corners like a cheese sandwich that has been toasted too long. Anastasia spied a glimmer between them and plunged her hand into the crevice.
She pulled out a petite silver bottle attached to a slender chain. Tiny script on the bottle read DR. MERRYMOOD’S SMELLING SALTS. Anastasia shook it and listened closely to the pebbly little rattle within, but she didn’t pull out the fancy stopper.
Because would-be sickie Mrs. McCrumpet had consulted every expert medic and smooth-talking quack in Mooselick, Anastasia was familiar with many pills and syrups and cure-alls. For example, she knew that waving a bottle of smelling salts beneath someone’s snoot is supposed to jozzle them awake. She even remembered that Victorian ladies, whose fanciful underwear squished their lungs and left them wobbly from oxygen deprivation, bought fainting couches upon which to swoon, and dangled little bottles of smelling salts from chains they wore at their waists.
Anastasia knew something else about the small silver flask. It was Miss Crusty’s bottle. Victory zinged through her veins, sweet and bubbly as sarsaparilla, as she gazed upon her first major find as an aspiring detective-veterinarian-artist. But where were the silver clasp and the rest of its odd charms? She leapt up and flung the cushions off the sofa, then pushed her fingers into all the folds and creases. Nothing.
Crawling on her hands and knees, Anastasia inspected beneath the sofa. There, nestled among the dust bunnies, she found not the clasp but a block of Dr. Whistlewind’s Miracle Choco-Laxative. Laxatives, in case you don’t know, help you poop. She brushed the grime off the elegant paper wrapper. The Miracle Choco-Laxative had lain under the couch for a very long time. Probably a hundred years.
Anastasia sighed. No matter how her stomach growled, and no matter how her sweet tooth ached, she wasn’t quite desperate enough to munch chocolate laxatives. She thrust the bar back beneath the fainting couch. Then, spying a flutter out of the corner of her eye, she snatched a moth from a cobweb and snarfed it down.
“I’m shocked, too,” she informed the spider whose lunch she had just stolen. “Under normal circumstances, I would never eat a moth. It’s creepy and weird. No offense.”
Turning away from the spider’s eight-eyed glare, Anastasia noticed a curious door in the wall. The door was square and small—perhaps just large enough for an almost-eleven-year-old girl to climb through—and, unlike most doors, it was smack-dab in the middle of the wall, right where one would normally hang a painting.
It was an intriguing door. It was the type of door a troll might use in a fairy tale. Anastasia stared at the door and wondered where it led.
Threading the chain of the smelling-salt bottle through one of her belt loops, she tromped across the parlor, opened the little door, and looked inside.
Her breath whistled against her front teeth.
“Dumbwaiter,” she whispered.
Dumbwaiters are similar to miniature elevators. A dumbwaiter is a box built between the walls, and one can move it up and down by pulling on a rope. In grand old houses of bygone eras, dumbwaiters were used to hoist food from the kitchen to other stories. A servant in a ruffled cap would place, for example, a figgy pudding into the dumbwaiter, and then heave the snack up to a hungry lord or lady or duke or duchess (or, in this case, criminally insane inmate) playing charades in a third-story parlor.
Anastasia had read about dumbwaiters in The Conundrum at Mildew Manor, so she had already considered the exciting potential of such a device. Staring into the cobwebby interior of the wooden dumbwaiter before her, ideas began to sprout in her mind like Moose-Spattered Toadstools. She could zip from floor to floor without meeting her aunties—or the Gardener—on the stairwells.
And perhaps she could even haul herself into some of the sealed wings of the asylum. Anastasia suspected that, in those hidden and abandoned places, she would find some sort of explanation to the asylum mysteries. Maybe the dumbwaiter would even take her to Room Thirteen.
She took a deep breath and splayed her hands on the base of the rickety wooden box. What if the ancient rope snapped and sent her plummeting to the bottom of the shaft? Nudging this unpleasant thought to the back of her mind, she hoisted herself inside and closed the little fairy door behind her.
Her arms were strong from weeks of scrubbing chamber pots and wrestling weeds from the ground and doing other nasty chores, but she still struggled and panted as she hauled the dumbwaiter slowly upward. The rope prickled against her hands. Finally she saw the outline of a door, faintly traced in pale—and strangely greenish—light. To her astonishment, smoke began to seep through this peculiar green seam.
Was the asylum on fire? Anastasia rammed the door with her shoulder, panic swelling her tonsils. The wood moaned but refused to budge. Crumbs! Twisting herself like a Bavarian pretzel, she placed the soles of her galoshes against the door and kicked with all her might. The door burst open and out tumbled Anastasia, hurdy-gurdy-head-over-heels-nose-over-toes-bum-over-teakettle, right into another of the asylum’s mysterious armpits.
11
The Memories Book
ANASTASIA’S GAZE SEESAWED around the strange chamber into which she had somersaulted. Tall panes of green glass windowed the pointed walls.
She was in one of the asylum’s many towers.
Green light seeped through the tinted windows, turning Anastasia’s skin the color of an amphibious critter. A warped four-poster bed, cloaked in a mildewed canopy, loomed like a shipwreck amidst furniture swollen with a century of damp. And fog—not smoke—leaked into the tower room from a broken windowpane. The fog swirled across the floor, knee-deep, so that when Anastasia wobbled to her feet she could see neither her galoshes nor the squishy carpet into which they sank.
