“Who sees me? The alger-bruh?”
“No, the postmaster’s boy.”
Rose Red knelt beside Leo, peering through the branches, which caught and snagged on her veil. “And he’s bringin’ the alger-bruh?”
“More likely a letter from my mother telling my nursemaid to get me back to work, and by Lumé’s crown, that’s the last thing we want!”
“Is it a kind o’ snake?”
“What?”
“The alger-bruh.”
Leo gave her a look. “Don’t you know anything?”
Before she could answer, their attention was arrested by a high, tuneless whistling. Leo crouched a little lower. “That’ll be him now. Here’s what we’ll do: I’ll jump down in front and distract his attention; then you sneak down behind and nab his sack. Find the letter from my mother while I keep him busy, then make for the Lake of Endless Blackness as fast as you can!”
“Leo, I—”
“There he is!”
A scruffy boy a size or two smaller than Leo came up the road, whistling like a tone-deaf cicada, a satchel over his shoulder. His face was blissfully ignorant of his impending doom.
“On the count of three,” said Leo.
“I cain’t—”
“One, two . . .”
“Leo, I cain’t—”
“THREE!”
Leo burst from his hollow, tripped on his beanpole, and rolled down into the road with much scraping of hands and knees, but was on his feet in a trice and bolting after the boy . . . who by now was making good time up the hill as fast as his skinny legs could carry him. But Leo had the threat of academics to motivate him, and he overtook the lad and barred his way with Bloodbiter’s Wrath. Leo looked quite the sight with his hair all on end and adorned with sticks and leaves. The boy gave a squawk, froze in place for a moment, then suddenly darted to the left.
“No you don’t!” Leo cried, blocking the path with Bloodbiter’s Wrath. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Oi gots me some mez’ges ter deliver!” the mountain boy declared, his face a mask of outraged dignity. “Oi weres promised a coin fer me troubles.”
“Not until I see them first,” Leo said. “All right, Rose Red! Come on out!”
Nothing happened.
The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Oi’s goin’ ter be late. And Oi ain’t suppose ter let nobody sees ’em save Mistress Redbird.”
“Now’s the time, Rose Red!” Leo didn’t take his eyes from the boy as he kept his beanpole up and ready. They sidled back and forth, but the mountain lad didn’t dare make a break. “Like we planned!”
Rose Red didn’t appear.
“Oi ain’t s’pose ter stop fer bandits nor bears nor nobody,” said the boy, and Leo could see him gathering his bony person together for another burst.
“Rosie!” he called.
The boy broke into a run, and Leo was hard-pressed to catch him, though he still couldn’t wrest away the satchel. The best he could manage was to keep the boy from progressing up the hill, and once more they stood facing each other. Leo panted, his sore head throbbing, and the other boy’s face hardened into something like war.
And still no Rose Red.
Leo puffed, exasperated, and planted his beanpole in the dirt. “I say, look here, let’s come to an agreement. Why don’t you let me just look through your bag and take what I need?”
“Not fer bandits, nor fer bears, nor even fer the mountain monster!”
Leo rubbed a hand down his face, hating himself for what he was about to say next. “Look, boy, don’t you recognize me?” And he smoothed down his hair, straightened his shirt, and struck a profile pose with his beanpole extended.
The mountain boy gasped. “Oi! Oi! Silent Lady save us, Oi dern’t recogg-er-nize yer, Yer High—”
“Yes, yes, I know.” Leo shook his hair back out and extended a hand to the boy. “Pass them over.”
The satchel strap was looped over the boy’s palm, and Leo hastily dug inside. He found the envelope sealed with a panther and starflower, his mother’s emblem. It was addressed to him, so he did not feel quite as guilty as he might when he slipped it from the sack and into his pocket. No other missives with the panther and starflower symbol were inside, and he handed the lot back to the mountain urchin. The boy bowed several times, then scurried on up the hill and out of sight.
Rose Red appeared at Leo’s side. “Why didn’t you ask him for it from the start?”
Leo glared at her. “Some help you are. You wouldn’t mind if I got swallowed by studies the whole rest of this summer, would you?”
She bowed her head. “I cain’t read in no case.”
“Excuses.”
“And I cain’t . . .”
She shivered and went silent for so long that Leo guessed she was done saying her piece and started marching up the hill again. He was too busy anyway, opening the letter from his mother, finding the passages that would certainly have led to trouble had his nursemaid come across them, and carefully tearing the whole into pieces.
He passed the mountain boy already on his way back down, now richer by one bright coin, and Leo did his best to ignore the sniveling reverence the boy made as he went. All Leo’s adventurous spirit was sapped, and he figured he’d spend the rest of the day at chess or something just to show Rose Red what was what and who was whom. Friends didn’t leave other friends in a lurch while ambushing unsuspecting strangers! That sort of thing wasn’t—
A high scream ran up the road to Hill House like a cold chill up a spine. Leo startled and whirled around, brandishing his beanpole and staring down the way he’d just seen the mountain boy go. He told himself to move, to run, but that scream was too terrible, and he remained frozen in place even as Leanbear and old Mousehand barreled past him down the hill, armed with clubs and knives.
They found the mountain boy curled up in a ball in the middle of the road. When at last they could get him to speak, all he would say was, “The monster! The monster!”
S
O THE MONSTER DID EXIST.
There was no denying it now. Leo had seen the messenger boy’s face when Leanbear and Mousehand carried him back up to the kitchen. He had heard his babbling terror, and Leo knew beyond doubt that nobody could invent that kind of fear.
So the monster was real, and much closer than he would have imagined.
Leo was not allowed outside for a week following that event. The weather turned sour in any case, but this did not help Leo’s feelings of pent-up frustration. He worried about Rose Red and her fool goat, somewhere out there in the wilds in the almost constant downpour, with that creature on the loose.
“What did you see?” Mistress Redbird had asked the messenger boy.
“The eyes!” the boy had babbled. “The big, turr-ble eyes! And teeth, so many teeth!”
Leo shivered as he remembered. He’d stood in the kitchen doorway, looking in on the scene as Leanbear and Mousehand stood on either side of the dirty child and Mistress Redbird tried to force something strong down his throat with a spoon. Leanbear knelt before the boy just as he spat out what Redbird had given him, right into the carriage man’s eye. Leanbear backed away, cursing, and Mousehand stepped in to take his place.
“Listen carefully, boy,” said the old gardener. “I need you to answer a few questions. You say you saw big eyes and big teeth. But don’t you think it might have been a fox you saw? Maybe a wolf? They say there’s been somethin’ preyin’ on the flocks these days, and maybe—”
“It were the monster!” The boy’s face went red as he screamed at Mousehand. “Oi knows what Oi seen! It weren’t no wolf, an’ it weren’t no fox neither. It were like nothin’ else ever there was, and it’s goin’ to eat me!” With that, he succumbed to a fit of hysterics that, Leo thought, disgraced the whole race of boys.
But then again, Leo admitted to himself now as he sat in the library and watched the rain beating down on the windowpane, he hadn’t seen the monster for himself. How would he have reacted in the messenger boy’s place?
“Silly, isn’t it?” said Foxbrush from his desk. Leo had done his best to ignore his cousin while cooped up in the house with him these past several days. But Foxbrush, for all his studious ways, was not always one to be ignored. “All this fuss over the monster, I mean. I’ve never seen Leanbear in such a jumpy state, and Mistress Redbird won’t even put the cat out at night.”
Leo leaned his forehead against the window frame, watching droplets chase each other down the far side of the glass. “It’s been raining. That’s why.”
“Huh,” said Foxbrush. “Mistress Redbird would toss that cat out in a cyclone.” He scratched away at the long essay he was composing on how the literary norms of olden days might have affected historical documentation of such infamous figures as the last Queen of Corrilond. Foxbrush found it fascinating, but it was the kind of stuff that gave Leo a strong urge to push his cousin out the window.
Nevertheless, after penning a few more lines, Foxbrush turned to Leo once more, a small smile on his face. “So is it the rain that’s keeping you from your silly games in the woods?”
Leo shrugged.
“A little bad weather has never stopped you before.”
Leo shrugged again. Old Mousehand was out in the garden working away despite the rain, his narrow shoulders covered only with a short cloak, which, as far as Leo could tell from the library window, was not waterproof.
“They’re scared you’ll get eaten by the monster, aren’t they?”
Still Leo made no answer. He watched the gardener moving arthritically about the garden, covering certain blooms with protective sacking, tying back trailing vines, replanting fallen beanpoles.
“Are you scared of being eaten, Leo?”
Leo whirled on his cousin then, his fists clenched. “Dragons eat you, Foxbrush!” he growled and stormed from the room. Foxbrush’s laughter trailed behind him as he went.
He was
not
scared of the monster, Lumé help him! Neither was Leo scared of bad weather, or even of his nursemaid’s wrath. He pounded up a flight of stairs to his bedroom, retrieved Bloodbiter and his rain hat, then galloped all the way back down to the lower floors. Sneaking like a ghost so as not to be caught by the household staff, he slipped out into the wet of the garden. The brim of his hat immediately flopped to his ears under the heavy torrents.
He slogged across the wet garden until he found Mousehand tying up some drooping starflower vines. The gardener did not notice the boy until Leo burst out with, “Is there really a monster?”
Mousehand cast a sideways glance Leo’s way but continued his work. His gnarled fingers didn’t want to twist the twine the way they once had, and he had to be methodical to accomplish his tasks. So he let the boy stand there, breathing hard and getting more drenched by the moment, until Mousehand was quite done. Then he brushed his hands on his trousers and turned his sopping beard to look down into Leo’s pale but determined face.
“What do you think, young master?”
“I think you know,” said Leo, clutching his beanpole with both hands. “I think you’ve always known. I think you know more than anyone else on this mountain.”
Mousehand stuck out his chin, and rainwater dripped heavily from the end of his beard. “I don’t know ’bout that. What I know is just different from what everybody else knows.”
“There is a monster, isn’t there.”
Suddenly the gardener’s face went dark, as though all the storm clouds flowing in from the ocean were gathering just above his face. His eyes flashed like lightning, and he glared down at Leo.
“Boy,” he said, “if you ain’t figured out by now that there ain’t no monster on this mountain save that which you brought yourself, you’re a greater fool than you look.”
Leo took a step back. Mousehand’s face was so dark, so angry, so . . . disappointed. Leo gripped Bloodbiter’s Wrath and backed away, unable to break his gaze from those eyes.
Then Leo turned and pelted across the yard, his boots slurping in the mud. He was through the garden gate and up the beaten path in a matter of minutes, still running. He broke into the forest where the red-scarfed sapling indicated, the ground slick with wet leaves beneath him. But he climbed the deer trail leading up, past the place where he had first met Rose Red and her goat, past the turn that led to the Lake of Endless Blackness (
which must be overflowing by now,
he thought,
with
all this rain
). He climbed through the gloom and the rumble of thunder until at last the trees began to give way and he reached the higher slopes of the mountain.
They’re all lying to me,
he thought.
There is a monster. I know that boy didn’t make it up. There is a monster, and I’m going to find it.
He wondered about Rose Red as he climbed. He hadn’t seen her in a week, had not come across her in the woods all afternoon. Perhaps the monster had taken her, or taken that dragon-eaten goat. All because those who admitted it existed were too afraid! Like Rose Red, always thinking up excuses not to hunt it. And the rest pretended it never was.
Well, Leo was not to be put off any longer. He would find that cave again, and when he did, he knew he would also find that monster.
But the first flush of determination wore off as the rain continued to pour and he continued to get nowhere. Out in the open above the forest, there was no protection from the gales, and he started to shiver. The stones were slippery too, and several times he fell and hit his knees or elbows hard.
“All right,” he muttered as he used Bloodbiter’s Wrath to support himself. “All right, this wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had.
Oof !
” He fell again, and this time he remained where he landed for a long moment. The rain was beginning to lessen, and when he looked up, Leo thought he glimpsed the sun shining through in patches, low on the horizon. The afternoon was wearing out and evening drawing on. The rocks loomed lonely and dark around him, and the forest waited below.
“I’m lost,” Leo whispered. Somehow, it was better to admit it out loud than to sit there pretending otherwise. He’d climbed all over this part of the mountain, and still there was no sign of the cave or even of the impossible rock face up which Rose Red had led him that day so many weeks ago. Nothing, as though it had all been a dream.