The League of Beastly Dreadfuls Book 1, page 7
An arched doorway yawned into a dark stairwell. Anastasia leaned to peek down the iron spiral and saw that, seven treads from the top, the metal coil had broken off completely. The only way to or from the tower was now the dumbwaiter.
She turned and waded deeper into the fog. Her green reflection quivering in the mirror above a vanity, she ransacked its drawers for a key or an errant eyeball ring or something else of interest. Finding only mildewed gloves, she moved to the wardrobe. She rustled through moth-eaten crinolines. She plunged her hands into pockets soggy with mold. Her eyebrows furrowed. According to Francie Dewdrop novels, deserted towers bore whiz-bang clues! She threw aside a moldy pair of bloomers, then snatched a moth from a cobweb and popped it into her mouth. It may astonish you, gentle Reader, to know that Anastasia was beginning to like moths. They were rather like fuzzy potato chips.
Glimpsing a brassbound trunk peeking from beneath the four-poster’s dust ruffle, she twitched the bed skirt aside. She gazed in admiration at the rotting coffer for a moment before heaving the lid up a couple of inches.
Hundreds of teeny glass vials glinted in the green light. She plucked one up. Clear fluid swished inside. Anastasia frowned and replaced it, then carefully snaked her arm into the chest and rummaged until her fingers closed around a paper carton.
Miss Eelheart’s Superior-Grade Tear Catchers
For the Demure Lady in Mourning
(Veil Not Included)
Anastasia opened the box. One empty vial rolled at the base. She held it between her thumb and forefinger, and then gazed down at the chest. How many prim and proper Victorian tears were bottled up and sealed away in this odd room? She slipped the tiny flask into her pocket, adding to her growing collection of Victorian oddities.
The tear catchers tinkled as Anastasia let the trunk’s lid fall shut.
Then she spied it—on top of the wardrobe, hidden behind a bizarre collection of bell jars crammed with sticks, sat a pale pink hatbox.
She dragged the ruffled vanity stool across the room and climbed up on it, stretching her hands for the hatbox. Her fingertips brushed something else—a big book—and she heave-hoed until both tome and hatbox plummeted into her arms, knocking her off the stool and down into the fog. The hatbox rolled away.
“Crumb of a biscuit!” Clutching the book, Anastasia peeled herself from the floor and sank onto the vanity stool.
Her femurs groaned beneath the enormous album. It was bound in dark velveteen, with the word MEMORIES embroidered across the front.
The pages warped beneath her fingers. There were purple flowers squished flat beneath soggy tissue paper. There were locks of pale hair tied with ribbons gone black. Anastasia handled the pages with great delicacy, fearful they would dissolve if she even breathed on them. She thought of Miss Apple’s frequent reminders to the students of Mooselick Elementary: “Turn these pages carefully, children, for you’re holding someone’s dreams!”
One hot, homesick tear crawled down Anastasia’s cheek.
She wiped it away, blinking. There were several photographs of a weak-chinned man with muttonchops and a monocle, mooning over a twig perched on his palm. How curious. “To my darling Caterpillar Face,” he had penned in green ink in the corner of one of these portraits. Caterpillar Face? Who would nickname their sweetheart Caterpillar Face?
She continued leafing through Caterpillar Face’s album, passing over a section of pages gummy with pasted-in prints from old advertisements. Bustles! Girdles! A review for Miss Drusilla Jellymonk’s Etiquette Manual for the Prim and Proper Sort: “A Practical Guide to Correct Behavior for Every Situation Imaginable, from Suitable Mourning Attire to the Polite Polishing of One’s Glass Eye; from Selection of Superior Teatime Puddings to the Manifold Appropriate Uses for Orphans (e.g., Doorstops and Chimney Sweeps).”
Anastasia shivered, envisioning herself climbing up a rusted ladder like the one in the chimney downstairs. Thank goodness she wasn’t a Victorian orphan! She quickly flipped past the ads to an obituary for Cornelius Clodfelter, of Withering Springs.
CELEBRATED ENTOMOLOGIST (BUG SCIENTIST, THAT IS) PERISHES FROM FATAL BLACK WIDOW BITE
“His passion,” the obituary reported, “was the rare Withering Springs Walking Stick, a clever insect known for impersonating twigs. He also had a thing for caterpillars.”
Anastasia swiveled her gaze to the glass jars of sticks. So they were specimens of stick insects and not, in fact, bundles of twigs. Had Caterpillar Face shed the trunkful of tears for Mr. Clodfelter? How very tragic.
She sighed and turned one of the last pages, then blinked with refreshed interest at the pasted-in newspaper articles. Tall, livid letters, their sides bleeding black into the yellowed paper, screamed: SCHOOLGIRL SNATCHED FROM SWEETSHOP STILL MISSING!
Another one, dated 1895: HEARTBROKEN MOTHER DESPAIRS AS SEARCH FOR SON PLODS ON!
1899: POLICE BAFFLED BY DISAPPEARANCE OF TEN-YEAR-OLD “GOLDILOCKS” TWINS!
Why would anyone collect such gloomy articles? Was the Victorian lady who clipped these headlines an aspiring detective, perhaps?
LINUS SHOETREE VANISHES FROM COUNTY FAIR!
GLUTTONOUS BOY SCAMPERS OFF TO BUY CANDY FLOSS; NEVER RETURNS!
A photograph of Linus’s last moments with his family had been printed beneath the shocking headline. Anastasia took out her magnifying glass and held it over the picture. It was a marvel, she thought, how photos captured a split second in time. Eyelids crinkled, nostrils flaring, Linus would forevermore be petrified in the middle of sneezing on his old-timey sailor collar. The balloon man would, regrettably, always have one finger jammed up his nostril. The veiled woman in the background would be eternally tearing a fluff of cotton candy from the bag she clutched in her left hand—
The magnifying glass trembled over the face. Anastasia knew that scowl! But how? The clipping was more than a hundred years old! How could Anastasia have possibly seen this glowering fairgoer before?
She peered even closer.
A silver eyeball glared on the woman’s pinkie.
Anastasia set the MEMORIES book atop the vanity with a dreadful feeling swimming in her tummy. Hands shaking, she fumbled in the fog for the hatbox and yanked off its round lid. Her stomach flip-flopped as she lifted the edges of a wide black brim drooping with lace.
It was the monstrous hat on the woman in the Great Hall portrait.
Miss Crusty was Caterpillar Face. So Cornelius Clodfelter, celebrated bug scientist, had fallen for her monobrow! Her bristly blond monobrow probably reminded him of yellow woolly bear caterpillars, Anastasia mused. And her bristly blond monobrow reminded Anastasia of something, too.
The fairgoer in the newspaper photograph.
Anastasia only needed one more glance through the magnifying glass to confirm her suspicions. Caterpillar Face from the asylum portrait was the woman hovering near Linus Shoetree just seconds before he vanished.
The hatbox rolled onto its side and gagged a froth of tissue paper into the fog. Something gleamed in its cardboard curve. Anastasia’s pupils swelled and grasped the gleam. If you were staring into Anastasia’s eyes at that moment, dear Reader, you would have seen mirrored in their black centers a silver clasp. You would have seen the tiny reflections of Anastasia’s hands stretching toward the clasp and lifting it up, and you would have seen, swinging upon silver chains, a pocket watch and a little box.
The key was gone.
Crumbs! Crumbs to the nth power!
Anastasia’s fingers tightened around the oversized brooch, and she gave it an angry shake. Then she set the clasp in her lap and examined the clock. She twisted the little pin at its top and cranked its gears, sending the dainty arrows twirling. After its century-long nap in the tower room, the silver timepiece woke up. Tick tick tick tick tick.
Anastasia squinted at the silver case. Fancy letters scrolling across its front spelled out Calling Cards. She shoved her thumbnail in the seam and prized it open.
There was still one card clipped inside:
12
Eavesdropping
BACK IN HER room, Anastasia copied the glowering eyeball symbol into her sketch pad. The pages were scribbled full of little drawings of St. Agony’s Asylum. After her aunties twisted the key in the lock to Room Eleven each night at sundown, Anastasia had lots of time to sit and doodle. She had drawn careful homesick portraits of Muffy and Miss Apple. And, of course, she had drawn her father. Every evening before she curled into the child-shaped hollow in her cot, she opened her pad and stared at her pencil drawing of Fred McCrumpet. His mustache and right ear were blotchy from teardrops.
She had also sketched a few unflattering caricatures of her aunties.
Perhaps you have a relative whom you don’t really like. An uncle who screeches with laughter at his own unfunny jokes, or a cousin who tattles the second she finds firecrackers stashed under your bed. Or maybe a grandma who insists on kissing you even though her chin is bristlier than a cactus on steroids.
If anyone had asked Anastasia whether she actually liked her aunties, she would have politely answered that yes, of course she did. But deep down, in the deepest corner of Anastasia’s almost-eleven-year-old heart, she didn’t like them at all. Not one bit.
Anastasia shoved Viola Snodgrass’s calling card into her pocket. Why did Miss Viola collect newspaper articles about missing children? She had been at the fair near Linus Shoetree right before he went missing. In the photograph, it looked like she was staring straight at him.
Perhaps she was some kind of Victorian private eye. That would explain the eyeball symbol. Viola Snodgrass: Watcher Extraordinaire. Were the Watchers a detective agency? Did they search for missing children?
But why would her aunties have the same silver ring? Had they been private eyes once upon a time? Was Miss Sneed an undercover Watcher, masking her concern for the students at Mooselick Elementary School behind a frightening monobrow?
If so, she was a terrific actress.
Perhaps all correct Victorian ladies documented their interest in the welfare of missing children. Perhaps the clippings had nothing to do with the Watchers. It was possible that the Watchers were simply a club of folks dedicated to, for example, bird-watching. Her aunties certainly loved bird-watching. Was it possible that Miss Sneed went in pursuit of blue-tootsied screech owls on her days off from terrorizing children?
But that brought Anastasia back to the mystery of Miss Sneed’s portrait in the asylum. No, she thought, there was something more to the eyeball rings than an association of bird enthusiasts.
Anastasia jammed her sketch pad back into her satchel. Then she crawled up on her cot, her arms still rubbery from pulling the dumbwaiter.
Eeeeeeeeooooooooo.
She shifted, trying to get comfortable on the lumpy mattress.
OooooOoooooooooo.
Anastasia had Viola Snodgrass’s calling card, but she still wasn’t any closer to finding the source of the eerie yowling.
“It sounds,” she informed Mr. Bunster, “like a ghost singing a lullaby.”
Eeeooooo.
“A lullaby to its ghost children.”
Mr. Bunster regarded her blankly.
Anastasia sighed. “Maybe I just have missing children on the brain.” She wriggled deeper into the child-shaped hollow and shivered herself to sleep.
Anastasia’s hunch that one of the portrait-sitters had lived in the asylum proved, as you have seen, correct. What other clues might she find in the sealed-off wings of the mansion? And where, oh where was Room Thirteen? The following day, she crawled through the little fairy door of Room Nine and let the asylum swallow her down into its secret innards, down to the story below. She pushed the door open a crack and peered out into a large room with huge wooden tables and a monstrous old stove. Long silver knives dangled from the ceiling like stalactites in a cave.
The kitchen. Anastasia’s tummy let out a wail.
She looked left. She looked right. And then, like a brave mouse scurrying from its hole in the baseboard to forage for crumbs, Anastasia crept from the dumbwaiter, tiptoed across the floor, and started flinging the cupboards open.
Reader, perhaps your nanny or your mother or your father or a kind elementary school librarian like Miss Apple has recited for you the following beloved nursery rhyme:
Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to fetch her poor dog a bone.
But when she got there, the cupboard was bare—and so the poor dog had none.
Why is this rhyme beloved, you might ask? What sort of sadist enjoys hearing about a Labradoodle deprived of its well-deserved snack? I can’t answer your excellent questions, but I can confirm that Anastasia knew this little ditty by heart, and it trickled into her mind as she peered into the cabinets of the kitchen at St. Agony’s Asylum.
To be accurate, the cupboards weren’t completely bare. They were jumbled with copper jelly molds shaped like fish and roosters and enormous seashells. There was even a mold shaped like the asylum. There were canisters of flour and sugar and tea, but these were of little help to an almost-eleven-year-old girl who could barely toast bread without starting a fire. Anastasia consoled herself by sticking her finger into a pot of Happy Forest Maple Syrup and licking it clean, thinking of happier times munching Fred McCrumpet’s signature waffles.
Tingalingaling! A bell chimed from afar, and Anastasia’s eyes flicked to the kitchen window. The Gardener! Digging away by a shaggy topiary that had perhaps been a splendid elephant but now looked more like a beatnik mammoth. Anastasia pressed her nose against the glass and watched as he shoveled more and more mud out of the ground. Why would anyone choose such a miserable day to dig a hole? What about his delicate lungs?
Anastasia’s lungs were not delicate. They were young and robust, and her breath puffed onto the window and silvered the glass. She leaned back, raising her arm to wipe the fog with her sleeve, but froze midair.
Her breath was crystallizing on the glass, forming whorls and swoops and arabesques of frost until a patch of ice rimed one corner of the pane.
Could the asylum really be that cold? She traced one of the spirals with her forefinger, and then scratched at the frost with her thumbnail. Little icy bits chipped from the glass.
She leaned forward and huffed onto the window again, and again the glittering cloud of her breath swirled into fine silvery lace. But this wasn’t just the feathery curlicues Mother Nature inscribes upon our car windshields on wintry mornings.
Right before Anastasia’s eyes, the frost was swirling into a picture.
So fine it might have been traced by the hand of a fairy silversmith, the image of an arrow crystallized on the glass. And it was pointing down.
Anastasia’s gaze followed the arrow’s point. The kitchen sink? She frowned for a moment at the dirty dishes piled there, and then jerked her eyes back to the window. All that remained were a few icy twinkles, and these melted before she could blink. Had the arrow been some trick of her overwrought imagination?
A magical arrow pointing to the kitchen sink, indeed. She mustered a chuckle. And then the chuckle dissolved behind her tonsils.
Could the arrow have been pointing to something lower than the kitchen sink, even lower than the grimy floor?
Had it been pointing to the Forbidden Basement?
Anastasia whirled toward the dumbwaiter and saw for the first time the peculiarities dangling from the wall by its door. It was a row of rubber tubes, and at the end of each of these tubes flared a silver funnel similar to the bell of a trumpet. Anastasia stood on her tippy-toes to read the little plates screwed to the wall above each hose.
MAIN PARLOR
BILLIARDS ROOM
WATCHTOWER
CONSERVATORY
Anastasia scrunched her eyebrows.
The tiniest of whispers—like a snake confessing its deepest secrets to its wise and pricey psychiatrist—hissed from the funnel attached to the Watchtower tube. With all the caution of a veteran herpetologist, Anastasia stretched out her hand and grasped the tube and lifted its tarnished bell to her ear.
Gentle Reader, have you ever created your own telephone with two tin cans connected by a length of string? If not, I advise you to do so. The sound of your friend’s voice humming up the cord and jangling the tin can pressed to your ear will delight and amaze you!
Certain homes of yore were equipped with an in-house speaking system that operated on the same principles of the tin-can phone. A rubber hose snaking through the walls of the house connected two metal bells in separate rooms. With these speaking tubes, people in enormous houses (or lunatic asylums) could communicate without running themselves silly. The lady of the manor could call from her parlor down to the kitchen and request a figgy pudding, or a chocolate laxative bar, or whatever her heart desired.
The device to which Anastasia now pressed her ear, and through which whispered a voice from high above in one of the asylum’s towers, was one of these speaking tubes.
“What do you think about her?” The voice was far, far away, but Anastasia recognized it at once. Auntie Prim! Her aunties’ favorite birding post, Anastasia pondered, must have been used as a watchtower back in St. Agony’s loony-bin days.
“She doesn’t show much potential,” replied Prude. “We’ve had her here for over a month, and I haven’t seen anything to indicate she’s different from any of the millions of brats that clog this earth. No potential there, I think.”
“You never know how children will turn out,” Prim said. “But she does seem rather a dreary little thing, doesn’t she? Always moping about, telling boring stories about that ridiculous vacuum peddler. I’ve caught her crying once or twice.” A high little giggle snaked its way through the tube and licked Anastasia’s eardrum.
Her jaw dropped. They were talking about her!
“The necklace doesn’t seem to be having any effect on her,” Prude said. “I checked yesterday. Nothing.”
