The League of Beastly Dreadfuls Book 1, page 9
Still munching the cake, she ambled over to a cluster of pictures on a dinky desk and picked one up.
It was a boy with bright blue eyes, about eleven years old, his glum face a bit blurry. Anastasia thought it was not a photograph worth displaying. She set it back down on the davenport, swallowed the last morsel of cake, and moseyed over to examine the pictures on the wall.
More photographs of children. Some of the pictures were in color, some were in black-and-white, and some were tinged brown. Some of them were obviously taken quite recently, and others looked about a hundred years old. However, all the pictures were similar in one aspect: every child was about ten or eleven or twelve years old. And Anastasia thought every child looked ill at ease, as though he or she were wearing wet socks or underpants that didn’t quite fit, or had just had a tooth pulled.
Not a single one was smiling.
Anastasia frowned, too, wondering why her aunties collected photographs of unhappy children. What a peculiar and unpleasant hobby. It reminded her of the grisly newspaper clippings in Miss Viola’s Memories book.
She paused by a credenza glistening with polish. A large jar sat on the credenza, and in the jar was a jumble of peppermint candies. Anastasia wrinkled her nose, remembering the linty taste of the peppermint dredged from Auntie Prude’s purse, so very many rainy weeks ago. The day, in fact, of her premonition of doom.
Next to the jar lay a tiny blue bottle and a little paintbrush, and one peppermint rested on the edge of a saucer. Anastasia picked up the bottle and read the label: DR. BLUSTER’S PATENTED SLEEP PREPARATION OF MOST SLEEPFUL SLEEP. “JUST ONE DROP WOULD KNOCK A RHINOCEROS ON ITS RUMP!”
Sleep preparation? She unstopped the bottle and snuffled its rim. No smell. Her eyes twitched from the sleep preparation to the paintbrush to the peppermint. Sleep preparation…paintbrush…peppermint.
She thought again of the peppermint lump in Auntie Prude’s purse.
A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
Sleep preparation…paintbrush…peppermint.
“JUST ONE DROP WOULD KNOCK A RHINOCEROS ON ITS RUMP!”
How quickly had she conked out in the backseat of the pink station wagon? They hadn’t been very far out of Mooselick.
Anastasia scrunched her eyebrows together. In fact, they had only been on the highway for about half an hour before she fell fast asleep. Why had she dozed off at nine o’clock in the morning? And now that she really thought about it, she had snoozed all day; when she awoke, it had been dark.
An unpleasant idea tugged at the edges of Anastasia’s mind. She crossed the room again slowly, the somber faces of children blurring the sides of her vision until her gaze fixed on a photograph of a boy in a sailor suit.
Linus Shoetree.
All the pleasure of discovering Room Thirteen and being warm and gobbling sugared goodies evaporated. She bounded to the photograph and seized it off the whatnot. Her breath puffed out in an anxious gust, riming the glass with swirls and whorls. A silvery form crystallized beside Linus: the silhouette of a woman wearing an enormous veiled hat.
Anastasia gawped at the photograph in mute terror. The ice crystals twinkled beneath her gaze, then dissolved. She twisted to look at the picture displayed beside Linus’s. She froze.
“Mr. Bunster?”
But this picture was from a day when Mr. Bunster still had both his eyes. His coat was clean and white; his ears, perky and pink. He was clutched in the hands of a pigtailed girl with rheumy eyes.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
She stiffened.
Footsteps.
Of course—the silver tray had been set out with the teapot still steaming, the cakes still fresh and warm. It was teatime in the secret parlor, and Anastasia had company.
16
Shadows in the Parlor
QUICKETY QUICK, ANASTASIA grabbed her candlestick off the table, snuffing out the flame with a gasp, and slipped behind one of the thick curtains draping the window. She hoped that the teatimers would not notice the lump of her fur-swaddled form beneath the green velvet. She pressed against the pane, trying to make herself as small as possible.
“Not only did you lose the key, you left the door unlocked!” complained a high, thin voice. Auntie Primrose! Anastasia shrank even farther into her coat.
“You’re so careless, Prude,” Prim sniped.
“Oh, poo,” Prude replied. “Nobody would ever find that door.”
“Perhaps not,” Prim said, “but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Particularly when the cure,” she added, “is so very, very nasty.”
“Don’t these cakes smell good!” cried Prude. “I’m famished!”
Mean old bags! Anastasia brooded. They’d been saving all the teensy tea sandwiches and muffins and sweets for themselves, while she suffered through bowl after bowl of Mystery Lumps!
“I do wish we could have a proper tea more often,” Prude said.
“Economy, my sister,” Prim chided. “We’ve sunk a small fortune into silver, you know.”
“This house is practically a silver mine,” Prude replied. “Silver everywhere.”
“Your mouth is a silver mine.” Prim chuckled. “Besides, we must be cautious. It wouldn’t do to neglect our watching, and the view from this room isn’t as good as the one from our tower.”
Anastasia held her breath on the other side of the curtain, not exactly sure why she was hiding but feeling quite positive that she should remain hidden. Obviously her aunties didn’t want anyone else coming into their special Room Thirteen. They’d even hidden the keyhole.
Did the aunties lock themselves in this secret room so they could devour their lovely tea delicacies without sharing a single bite? Or might the aunties’ secrecy have something to do with the dreary photographs of children?
Knitting needles began to click.
“Like I said, we must be more cautious,” Prim said. “We must beware of it.” The word it hissed a little between her metal teeth.
“It simply makes my skin crawl,” Prude said. “I can barely stand being so close to it.”
“Neither can I,” Prim murmured. “Why, my skin is crawling right now just thinking about it.”
“Knowing it’s nearby, even when we can’t see it,” Prude went on. “Knowing that beastly creature could come for us at any minute.”
Creature? Anastasia’s eyes widened. What creature? Were they talking about the ghost in the basement? She shifted behind the drape. There was a little rip in the velvet, the perfect size for a peephole, and Anastasia peeped into Room Thirteen. Long shadows crawled across the room. Her aunties were sitting in the squishy chairs, their knitting needles flashing, their chins bearded with teatime jam.
“You must put on a brave face, Prudence,” Prim said. “It can smell fear, you know. It thrives on it! You must never show your fear.”
“It’s the waiting that vexes me,” Prude quavered.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Prim said. She sighed and shook her curly pink head. “Still, that’s our duty—watch and wait.”
“Watch and wait,” Prude repeated darkly. “Watch and wait.”
Prim muttered, “By the pricking of my thumbs…”
“Something wicked this way comes,” Prude chorused.
“That’s always been my favorite line of poetry,” Prim said. “So sad and so true. There’s so much wickedness in this world. Why, it’s all around us.”
Her cloudy eyes lifted from her knitting to a window with its curtains drawn. Her gaze lingered on the trees in the distance before shifting back into the parlor, across the silver-framed photographs twinkling in the firelight. “So much evil,” she murmured.
Anastasia’s forehead tingled. For what wicked creature were they watching and waiting, exactly? It certainly wasn’t a red-speckled twit. And it didn’t seem like her aunties were talking about a ghost bolted into a basement room.
She thought of Prim’s hands trembling as she stared through the bars of the iron fence and declared that they mustn’t stay out after dark. She thought of her aunties stationed in the Watchtower, gazing through their binoculars as the poodles patrolled the gardens.
She thought of the way her aunties always locked her door at night.
“Primmy, dear,” Prude said, “pass me another one of those scrumptious lychees.”
Prim set her knitting in her lap, then took the lid off one of the little china bowls and pulled out something long and black and twitching. Whatever it was, it was certainly not a lychee fruit.
“Mmm.” Prude plucked it from her sister’s fingers and popped it into her mouth. Her metal teeth gnashed. Crimson dribbled down her chin. “Delicious!”
Prim also helped herself to one of the squirmy black delicacies. “And packed with all sorts of vitamins.”
Prude stretched her arm toward the china bowl again. “Leeches are like potato chips,” she sighed. “You can never have just one.”
Anastasia had to bite her lips to keep the screams from pouring out. Leeches! Not lychees! And the red stuff oozing down her aunties’ jowls wasn’t jam! It was—
“The sun is setting,” Prim said. “We should go find the girl soon.”
Trapped between the curtain and the window, Anastasia turned her head and watched the sun sink behind the thorny Dread Woods. She wondered whether, deep in the forest, the fearful creature was beginning to stir. Her heart thumped.
“Do you suppose,” Prude asked, “that she suspects anything?”
Anastasia suppressed a yelp.
“Suspect anything?” Prim paused. “Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Most children are rather stupid, you know. Beastly little dreadfuls.”
“The last one started getting skittish toward the end,” Prude said. “It seems there are never enough moppets to satisfy—”
“Hush,” Prim chided. “Don’t start talking that way. What would Auntie Vy think? Why, she’d spin in her grave to hear you carrying on so!”
Auntie Vy! Was she talking about Viola Snodgrass?
“But, Primmy,” Prude bleated, “sometimes I feel so tired. Think of all the little hearts we’ve handed over. Not that I feel bad for those brats, of course, but I hate touching their slippery tickers.”
“We’ll have another one soon enough, I think,” Prim said. Then she recited, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?”
“With silver bells and cockleshells and little bones all in a row!” Prude replied in a singsong.
The breath Anastasia had been holding all this time whooshed out of her lungs and onto the windowpane. Tiny ice crystals swirled and swooped into an R, then a U, and an N, until the frost had curled across the glass to spell out an entire message in perfect birthday-cake cursive:
There are many ways to cope with nerves.
You can nibble your fingernails.
You can crawl beneath your quilts.
When Anastasia was nervous or worried, she itched to crawl into someplace cozy and quiet and have a think. Back in the McCrumpet house, this place had been her closet, cushy with mangy stuffed animals and outgrown sweaters and her rolled-up sleeping bag. It wasn’t that she was an unusually fretful child. She wasn’t. However, everyone has problems and needs to go away to think from time to time.
At St. Agony’s Asylum, Anastasia had plenty to worry about. (Leech-gobbling aunties! The hideous creature lurking in the woods! A ghost in the basement! And so forth!) But she didn’t have a closet in which to worry about them. She did, however, have a creepy wardrobe stuffed full of musty coats, and you would perhaps be surprised by just how snug a creepy wardrobe can be. It was into this wardrobe that Anastasia scrambled after fleeing Room Thirteen.
She scrunched into the fur coats. Tears drizzled down her dirty cheeks.
“Mr. Bunster,” she whispered, “what is the thing in the woods? And why are Prim and Prude feeding it children’s hearts? Are their gardens really full of bones?”
Mr. Bunster remained mum.
“And what did they mean, the last one?” She peered out of the wardrobe at the child-sized dust angel squashed into the mattress of her cot. Then she slid the picture of Mr. Bunster’s rightful owner from the inside of her coat. She turned the frame over and pried out the photograph.
Something was written on the back in squiggly old lady script, the letters squished together like smashed spiders. She squinted.
Lucy Jane Pinkerton
To The Dreadful: September 23
What in the name of holy hopscotch did that mean? “Was Lucy the last one?” Anastasia whispered to Mr. Bunster. “The last one to go…to go to the DREADFUL? What’s the Dreadful? The Dread Woods?”
She chewed on the end of one of her braids, wondering about the creature in the black thorny wilderness beyond the iron bars. He munched the hearts of children. Could he be a bear? A wolf? Prude was always worried about wolves. Was it the ghost in the basement? Did the ghost go wandering from its mirrored room into the dark and dismal forest? Anastasia frowned. The ghost had giggled and then, in a high little voice, begged her not to leave. The high little cry of a child, she mused. Was it the ghost of one of the children? The basement phantom was not, she thought, the Creature.
“Oh, Mr. Bunster,” she mumbled. “Who was Lucy P—”
Her breath rasped against her tonsils, and she dug in her satchel for the Francie Dewdrop book pilfered from the Treatment Room. She peeled back the cover so fast that it nearly tore clean from the binding.
Property of Lucy P.
Lucy Pinkerton!
Had Lucy Pinkerton been in the Treatment Room?
And what about all the other toys stashed in the hideous cellar room? Had the whirligigs and whatnot belonged to all the children whose portraits adorned the secret parlor?
“Linus Shoetree,” she muttered. Viola Snodgrass’s silhouette had crystallized on the glass beside him. It was just like the photograph at the fair. “It was right before she snatched him,” Anastasia deduced. “That’s why she was hovering nearby. She waited until he ran off to buy cotton candy and she kidnapped him.” A terrible shiver coursed down her spine. The Watchers wasn’t an organization that hunted for missing children. The Watchers was an organization that snatched them!
And her aunties were members. The evil Watcher eyeball winked from their pinkies. They were watching and waiting, and they certainly weren’t talking about looking at birds. And were they even her aunties? Did the Watcher women work together to feed little hearts to the Creature in the Woods, whatever it was? Had Prim and Prude swooped in to kidnap her when they heard about the McCrumpets’ freak vacuum accident? Perhaps the nefarious Miss Sneed had telephoned to inform them about the wonderful opportunity to snatch a valuable orphan.
“Anastasia?”
It was Prude. The door to Room Eleven creaked as the old woman pulled it open a crack.
Anastasia’s throat closed like a fist.
“Anastasia?”
“I—I’m in here,” Anastasia stammered. “I’m sleepy.”
“All right, moppet. Good night.”
The key clunked in the lock and the chain scraped across the door.
Anastasia burrowed deeper into the wardrobe. The fur coats were warm around her. Finally she drowsed off, cheeks still damp with tears, half dreaming that she could feel heartbeats thudding in the fur coats that cuddled her.
Suddenly her own heartbeat jozzled her awake, walloping her ribs and jiggling her tonsils. What if her parents had never had an accident?
Perhaps it had all been a lie to trick her into the pink station wagon!
Could Mr. and Mrs. McCrumpet be alive?
17
Strange Notes
IT IS AT exactly this point in our story that Anastasia’s number one priority switched from cultivating her detective skills to plotting her escape from St. Agony’s Asylum. That is, she was going to RUN FOR HER LIFE. It wouldn’t be easy. Even if she somehow managed to successfully sneak past her aunties’ watchful eyes, and evade the fearsome pack of guard poodles, and scale the spiky electric fence—where would she go? St. Agony’s sat atop a hill in the middle of the Dread Woods. And somewhere in those woods lurked…the Creature.
Even as the impossibility of escape loomed before her, Anastasia knew that she had to try. She would not just sit back and wait to be crunched like a potato chip.
As you launch a daunting and complicated task, some well-intentioned person may advise you that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. It isn’t a particularly nice saying (elephants are such lovely creatures, and it breaks my heart to imagine one coming to harm!), but there is, nonetheless, wisdom embedded in these rather unpleasant words. If you have a big job ahead of you, the best way to set to work is by breaking it into smaller, more manageable chores. Anastasia decided that, before she worried about the endless hurdles awaiting her outside St. Agony’s Asylum, she would solve the first problem within it—the chained and locked door to Room Eleven.
Now, Anastasia had journeyed to St. Agony’s on short notice. She had not had an opportunity to pack a toothbrush or an extra pair of underwear or to hover over her suitcase, pondering, “Should I take my swimming suit? The light or heavy sweater? Will I wind up trapped in an authentic Victorian insane asylum? Shall I pack an ax, just in case I need to chop my way out of my room?”
Nope. She was unprepared. She would have to make do with what she had.
Unfortunately, Reader, this is the way lots of things in life go.
Early the next morning, Anastasia examined the safety pin that had fastened her Halloween flying squirrel tail to the seat of her jeans. She pinched it open. In Mystery #66: The Ghostly Bell Tower, Francie Dewdrop jimmied a lock with nothing but a hairpin and brainpower. Anastasia crouched by the keyhole to Room Eleven. She bent the sharp end of the safety pin back and poked it about in the lock. The pin wrestled against metal. A brassy crunch belched from the keyhole.
